Germinal - Emile Zola [232]
‘Good-morning, my friend,’ he called loudly, having given Étienne a long hard stare with his blazing eyes.
But Étienne made no reply. In the distance he had caught sight of a woman passing between the supports of the overhead railway at Le Voreux, and he had rushed off anxiously, thinking it was Catherine.
Since midnight Catherine had been wandering the streets in the slush. When Chaval had returned home to find her in bed, he had soon got her up again with a slap in the face. He had screamed at her to leave at once, by the door if she didn’t want to leave by the window; and so, in tears, with barely any clothes on, and badly bruised where he had kicked her in the legs, she had been forced downstairs and then dispatched into the street with one last blow. Dazed and bewildered by this brutal separation, she had sat down on a milestone, watching the house and waiting for him to call her back. For he was bound to; he would be waiting to see what she did, and when he saw her shivering in the cold like this, abandoned, with nobody in the world to put a roof over her head, he would surely call her back upstairs.
Two hours later, having sat there motionless like a dog turned out into the street, and now freezing to death, she made up her mind and left Montsou. But back she came, though she still didn’t dare to call up from the pavement or knock at the door. In the end she departed down the long straight road out of Montsou, meaning to return to her parents’ house in the village. But when she got there, she suddenly felt so ashamed that she began to run the length of the gardens, afraid she might be recognized despite the fact that behind all the closed shutters everyone was fast asleep. After that she just wandered about. The slightest sound made her jump, and she was terrified of being picked up as a vagrant and marched off to the brothel at Marchiennes, a prospect that had been giving her nightmares for several months. Twice she ended up at Le Voreux, took fright at the loud voices coming from the guardroom, and scurried away in breathless panic, glancing behind her to make sure that no one was following her. Réquillart was always full of drunks, but she went back there nevertheless in the vague hope of meeting the man she had rejected a few hours earlier.
Chaval was due to go down that morning, and knowledge of the fact drew Catherine to the pit even though she realized the futility of trying to speak to him: it was all over between them. Work had now stopped completely at Jeanbart, and he had threatened to throttle her if she went back to her old job at Le Voreux, where he was afraid her presence might make things awkward for him. But what could she do? Go somewhere else, die of starvation, yield to every passing man who beat her up? She struggled on, stumbling over the ruts in the road, her legs almost giving way beneath her, and covered up to the waist in dirt. The thaw had turned the roads into rivers of mud, but she floundered on, not even daring to find a stone to sit on.
Daylight came. Catherine had just recognized Chaval’s back as he cautiously turned the corner of the spoil-heap, and then she caught sight of Lydie and Bébert peeping out of their den beneath the timberstack. They had been keeping watch there all night, refusing to give in and go home on account of Jeanlin’s order to wait for him; and while the latter was sleeping off his murderous