Germinal - Emile Zola [280]
‘Oh, it’s so hot today!…Come, take me, and let’s be together for ever and ever.’
As he held her, she rubbed herself slowly against his body, chattering away in a happy girlish fashion:
‘We’ve been so silly to wait all this time! I’d have gone with you from the start, but you didn’t realize and just sulked…And then, do you remember, those nights at home when we couldn’t sleep, lying there listening to each other breathing and desperately wanting to do it?’
Her gaiety was infectious, and he joked as he recalled their unspoken affection for each other:
‘Remember that time you hit me! Oh yes, you did! You slapped me on both cheeks!’
‘It was because I loved you,’ she murmured. ‘You see, I’d forbidden myself to think about you. I kept telling myself it was all over between us. But deep down I knew that one day sooner or later we’d be together…We just needed the opportunity, some lucky moment, didn’t we?’
A cold shiver ran down his back, as though he wanted to banish such fond thoughts, but then he said slowly:
‘It’s never all over. People just need a bit of luck, and then they can start over again.’
‘So you’ll have me, then? Is this the moment at last?’
With that she went limp in his arms, barely conscious. She was so weak that her already faint voice trailed away altogether. Fearing the worst, he pressed her to his heart:
‘Are you all right?’
She sat up in astonishment.
‘Yes, of course!…Why not?’
But his question had roused her from her dream. She stared wildly at the darkness and wrung her hands as a fresh wave of sobbing overtook her.
‘My God, my God! It’s so dark!’
Gone were the cornfields and the smell of grass, the skylarks singing and the big yellow sun. She was back in the mine with its rock-falls and floods, back in the stench-filled darkness and listening to the lugubrious sound of dripping water, down in this cave where they had lain dying for so many days. The tricks played by her senses now made it all seem even more horrific. Once again she fell prey to the superstitions of her childhood and saw the Black Man, the old miner whose ghost haunted the pit and strangled the life out of naughty girls.
‘Listen, did you hear that?’
‘No, I can’t hear anything.’
‘Yes, you can. It’s the Man…You know?…There, that’s him…The earth has bled itself to death out of revenge because somebody cut its vein, and now he has come. Look, there he is! You can see him! Blacker than the darkness…Oh, I’m so afraid, so afraid!’
She shivered and fell silent. Then, very quietly, she went on:
‘No, it isn’t. It’s still the other one.’
‘Which other one?’
‘The one who’s with us. The one who’s dead.’
She couldn’t get the thought of Chaval out of her head, and she began to talk about him in a rambling way, about the miserable life they’d had together, about the one time he’d been nice to her, at Jean-Bart, and about all the other days of cuddles and bruises when he’d smother her with kisses having just beaten the daylights out of her.
‘Honestly, he’s after us! He’s going to have another go, he wants to stop us ever being alone together!…It’s his same old jealousy!…Oh, send him away! Please! Keep me with you, keep me all to yourself!’
She had thrown her arms round Étienne’s neck and was clinging to him, seeking out his mouth and pressing her lips passionately against his. The darkness parted, the sun returned, and she began once more to laugh the happy laugh of a girl in love. And he, trembling as his skin felt the touch of her body, half naked under her jacket and tattered trousers, pulled her towards him, roused in his manhood. Now at last they had their wedding night, down in this tomb