Germinal - Emile Zola [134]
And it was true. She was given to blaming him for the vehemence of his language, and she accused him of being aggressive. If people wanted to get paid a fair wage, all well and good; but why bother with all these other things, all this stuff about the bourgeoisie and the government? Why get involved in other people’s business when it would only end in tears? And yet she continued to respect him for the fact that he never got drunk and that he continued to pay her regularly his forty-five francs for board and lodging. When a man was honest in his dealings, you could forgive him the rest.
Étienne then talked about the Republic and how it would provide bread for all. But La Maheude shook her head, for she could remember 18482 and what a miserable year that had been, when she and Maheu had been left without a penny to their name in the first days of their marriage. In a sad, absent voice she began to reminisce about all the problems they had had, her eyes gazing into space and her breast still exposed as her daughter Estelle fell asleep in her lap without letting go. Similarly engrossed, Étienne stared at this enormous breast and its soft whiteness that was so different from the ravaged, yellowing skin of her face.
‘Not a penny,’ she whispered. ‘Not a crumb to eat, and every pit out on strike. The old, old story, in fact, of the poor starving to death. Just like now!’
But at that moment the door opened, and they stared in speechless astonishment as Catherine walked in. She had not been seen in the village since the day she ran off with Chaval. She was in such a state that she just stood there, mute and trembling, leaving the door open behind her. She had been counting on finding her mother alone, and the sight of Étienne robbed her of the speech she had been mentally preparing on the way over.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ La Maheude shouted from where she sat. ‘I don’t want anything more to do with you. Just go away.’
Catherine struggled for her lines:
‘I’ve brought some coffee and sugar, Mum…I have, for the children…I’ve been working extra hours, and I thought they…’
From her pockets she produced a pound of coffee and a pound of sugar, which she ventured to place on the table. She had been tormented by the thought of everyone being on strike at Le Voreux while she continued to work at Jean-Bart, and this was all she had been able to think of as a way of helping her parents out, on the pretext of being concerned for the children. But her kindness failed to disarm her mother, who retorted:
‘You’d have done better to stay and earn something here, instead of bringing us treats.’
She now poured out all her pent-up abuse, throwing in Catherine’s face all the things that she had been saying about her for the past month. Getting involved with a man and her only sixteen, and running off like that when her family hadn’t a penny! You’d have to be the most unnatural of daughters to do such a thing. One could forgive a stupid mistake, but no mother could ever forget a dirty trick like that. And it wasn’t as if they’d kept her on a tight leash either! No, not at all, she’d been as free as the air to come and go as she pleased. All they’d asked was that she came home at night.
‘Eh? What’s got into you? At your age?’
Catherine stood motionless beside the table, hanging her head and listening. Her thin, girlish body quivered from head to toe, and she tried to blurt out a reply:
‘Oh, if the decision was left to me…As if I enjoyed any of it…It’s him. What he wants I have to want too, don’t I? Because he’s stronger than me. It’s as simple as that…Who knows why things turn out like they do? Anyway, what’s done is done, there’s no going back. As soon him as another now. He’ll just have to marry me.’
She was defending herself but in an unrebellious sort of way, with the meek resignation of the young girl who has to submit to the male from an early age. Wasn’t that the way of things? She’d never imagined anything else: raped behind the spoil-heap, a mother at sixteen, and then a life of wretched poverty together – if her lover