Free The Beast Within by Émile Zola

involuntary shudder that ran through him whenever he came close to a woman. She found it very strange, and it saddened her. Jacques asked her if his mother was indoors, although he knew perfectly well that she was ill and unable to leave the house. In an attempt to cover her embarrassment, she simply nodded and stepped aside, so that he could enter without touching her. She returned to the well, not deigning to speak, her head held high in a show of unconcern.
    Jacques walked quickly across the little garden and went into the house. The first room he entered was the large kitchen, where the family lived and had their meals. In the middle of the room, Aunt Phasie, 3 as he had called her since he was a child, sat on her own by the table on a wicker chair with an old shawl wrapped round her legs. She was a cousin of his father, a Lantier. 4 She had stood as godmother to him, and when he was six she had taken him in to live with her, his mother and father having disappeared and run off to Paris. Jacques remained at Plassans and later attended classes at the local Technical College. He had always been especially grateful to Aunt Phasie. If he had managed to get on in life, he said, it was entirely thanks to her. He had spent two years with the Paris-Orléans company, 5 before becoming a top-link driver for the Western Railway, which was when he discovered that his godmother was remarried, to a level-crossing keeper by the name of Misard, and was now living in the middle of nowhere at La Croix-de-Maufras, along with her two daughters by her first marriage. Although she was barely forty-five, Aunt Phasie, once such a fine-looking woman, tall and strong, now looked sixty. She had grown pitifully thin, there was no colour in her face and she shook continuously.
    She was overjoyed to see him.
    ‘Jacques,’ she cried. ‘My own, dear Jacques! What a lovely surprise!’
    He kissed her on both cheeks and told her that he had just been given two days’ unexpected holiday; the engine that he drove, La Lison, 6 had broken a coupling-rod as the train was coming into Le Havre that morning. It was going to take at least twenty-four hours to repair, and he wouldn’t be able to start work again until the following evening, when he was due to drive the 6.40 express. He had thought it would be nice to come and see her. He was able to stay the night, as the train back didn’t leave Barentin until seven twenty-six the next morning. He held her poor, shrunken hands in his and told her how worried he had been by her last letter.
    ‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘I’m not well. I’m not well at all. How good of you to realize I wanted to see you! I know how busy you must be and I didn’t dare ask you to come. But here you are! I’m frightened, Jacques. I’m really frightened.’
    She paused and looked anxiously out of the window. In the fading light they could see her husband, Misard, standing inside a section box 7 on the other side of the railway track, one of those little wooden cabins situated every four or five kilometres along the line and connected by telegraph to make sure it is safe to receive the next train. When his wife, and later Flore, had been given the job of looking after the level-crossing, he had been appointed as section operator.
    She shuddered and lowered her voice, as if she thought he might hear her.
    ‘Jacques,’ she whispered, ‘he’s trying to poison me!’
    Jacques started in surprise. He turned towards the window. As he did so, the lustre once again went from his eyes; once again they became misty, pale and strangely disturbed.
    ‘Oh, Aunt Phasie, how can you think that?’ he murmured. ‘He looks so frail and harmless.’
    A train for Le Havre had just gone by, and Misard had emerged from his cabin to close the section behind it. Jacques watched him as he pulled back the lever and set the signal at red. He was a puny little man, with very little hair and a small straggly beard that was going grey; his face