Germinal - Emile Zola [228]
Étienne and Catherine had automatically headed in the direction of Montsou, and as they drew nearer, their silences grew longer and longer. Already it was as if they had never been together. Étienne could think of nothing that might make her change her mind, even though it pained him deeply to see her go back to Chaval. His heart was breaking, but he had little better to offer her himself: a life of poverty, a life on the run, perhaps even no future at all if a soldier’s bullet should blow his brains out. Perhaps it was wiser after all to endure the suffering one was used to rather than swap it for another kind. And so, with his eyes fixed on the ground, he escorted her home to her man; and he offered no protest when she stopped on the main road at the corner by the Company yards, twenty metres short of Piquette’s bar, and said:
‘Don’t come any further. If he sees you, it’ll just mean another row.’
The church clock was striking eleven. The bar was closed, but light could be seen through chinks in the shutters.
‘Goodbye,’ she murmured.
She had given him her hand but he refused to let go of it, and it was only by slow, determined effort that she managed to retrieve it and depart. Without a backward glance she unlatched the little sidedoor and let herself in. He did not leave, however, but continued to stand there, on the very same spot, staring at the house and anxiously wondering what was happening inside. He listened intently, dreading that he might hear the howling screams of a woman being beaten. But the house remained dark and silent, and all he saw was a light appearing at a firstfloor window; and when this window opened and he recognized the slender shadow leaning out into the road, he stepped forward.
Then Catherine whispered very softly:
‘He’s not back yet. I’m going to bed…Please go away, please.’
Étienne left. The thaw was gathering pace: water was streaming from the roofs, and a damp sweat seemed to be running off every wall and fence throughout the jumble of industrial buildings that stretched away into the darkness on this side of the town. His first thought was to make for Réquillart; ill with exhaustion and sick at heart, he wanted nothing more than to disappear into the void below ground. But then he remembered Le Voreux and thought about the Belgian workers who were about to go down, and the comrades in the village who were fed up with the continual presence of the soldiers and determined not to have outsiders working in their pit. And so once more he walked along the canal, through the puddles of melted snow.
As he reached the spoil-heap, the moon was riding high. He looked up at the sky and saw the clouds scudding past, whipped along by the great wind that was blowing up there; but now they were whiter, unravelling in thin streaks and passing over the face of the moon with the blurred transparency of troubled water; and they followed so fast one upon the other that the moon was veiled only for a moment and kept reappearing again in all its clarity.
His eyes filled with this brilliance, Étienne was just lowering his gaze when he caught sight of something on top of the spoil-heap. The sentry, frozen stiff by the cold, was now walking up and down, twenty-five paces towards Marchiennes and then back in the direction of Montsou. The white flash of the bayonet could be seen above his dark silhouette, itself sharply etched against the pallor of the sky. But what had attracted Étienne’s attention, over behind the hut where Bonnemort used to shelter on stormy nights, was a moving shadow, an animal crawling stealthily forward, which he at once recognized as Jeanlin, with his long, supple back like a ferret’s. Unable to be seen by the sentry, the little devil was no doubt about to play some trick on him, for he was always going on about the soldiers and asking when they would ever be rid of these murderers who had been sent here to shoot the people.
For a moment Étienne wondered if he should call out to him, to stop him doing anything silly. Just as the moon went behind a cloud,