Germinal - Emile Zola [42]
‘But now,’ he went on slowly, ‘there’ll be nothing left to give her out of thirty sous…She’ll die of poverty, for sure.’
He shrugged in resigned despair and took another bite of his piece.
‘Do you want a drink?’ Catherine asked, uncorking her flask. ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s coffee, it won’t do you any harm…You need something to wash that down.’
But he refused: it was bad enough depriving her of half her piece. However, she insisted in a good-natured way and eventually said:
‘All right, I’ll go first, seeing as you’re so polite…But now you can’t refuse. It’d be rude.’
And she held out her flask. She had hoisted herself on to her knees, and he could see her up close to him in the light of the two lamps. Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm. Surrounded by the encroaching darkness of this grime, her teeth shone with dazzling whiteness in a mouth that was too large, and her eyes dilated and gleamed with a greenish tinge, like those of a cat. A wisp of reddish hair had escaped from under her cap and was tickling her ear, making her laugh. She no longer looked quite so young, she might even be fourteen.
‘Since you insist,’ he said, taking a swig and handing her back the flask.
She downed a second mouthful and made him have one too: she wanted them to share, she said. They found it amusing to pass the thin spout of the flask from mouth to mouth. Suddenly he wondered if he shouldn’t grab her in his arms and kiss her on the lips. She had thick, pale-pink lips, their colour heightened by the coal-dust, and they tortured him with a growing desire. But he didn’t dare, he felt intimidated. In Lille he had only ever been with prostitutes, and of the cheapest kind at that, which meant that he had no idea how one went about things with a young working girl who had not yet left her family.
‘You must be about fourteen?’ he inquired, taking another bite of his bread.
She was taken aback, almost cross.
‘What do you mean ‘‘fourteen’’? Fifteen, if you please!…I know I’m not very big for my age. But girls round here don’t grow very fast.’
He continued to question her, and she told him everything, neither brazen nor embarrassed. There was evidently nothing she did not know about the ways of men and women, even though he could sense that she was still physically a virgin, a virgin child who had been prevented from maturing into full womanhood by the poor air and state of exhaustion in which she habitually lived. When he returned to the subject of La Mouquette, to try and embarrass her, she told him the most horrendous stories in a perfectly even voice and with considerable relish. Oh, that Mouquette was a one, all right! The things she got up to! And when Étienne asked her if she didn’t perhaps have a boyfriend herself, she replied jokingly that while she didn’t want to upset her mother, she no doubt one day would. She sat with her shoulders hunched, her teeth chattering a little from the cold on account of her sweat-drenched clothes, and wearing the gentle, resigned expression of one who is ready to submit to all things and all men.
‘With everyone living so close together, there’s never any shortage of boyfriends, is there?’ Étienne continued.
‘That’s true.’
‘And anyway, it doesn’t do anyone any harm…Just best not to tell the priest, that’s all.’
‘Oh, the priest!