Germinal - Emile Zola [43]
‘What do you mean, the ‘‘Black Man’’?’
‘The old miner who haunts the pit and strangles girls who’ve been bad.’
He looked at her, fearing that she might be having him on.
‘You don’t believe that rubbish, do you? Didn’t they teach you anything?’
‘Of course they did. I can read and write, I’ll have you know…Which is useful in our house, cos in Mother and Father’s day you didn’t learn such things.’
She really was very nice: once she had finished eating, he would take her in his arms and kiss those plump, pink lips. It was the resolve of a shy man, and the prospect of this direct approach prevented him from being able to speak further. These boyish clothes, this jacket and trousers on a young girl’s flesh, excited and disturbed him. He had by now swallowed the last of his bread. He drank from the flask and handed it back for her to finish it. The moment for decisive action had arrived, and he was just casting a nervous glance in the direction of the other miners further along the tunnel when a large shadow blocked his view.
For some moments Chaval had been standing watching them from a distance. He came forward and, making sure that Maheu couldn’t see him, grabbed Catherine by the shoulders where she sat, pulled her head back and pressed a brutal kiss down on to her lips, matter-of-factly and seemingly unaware of Étienne’s presence. This kiss constituted an act of taking possession, and a decision born of jealousy.
Catherine, meanwhile, had sought to resist.
‘Leave me alone, do you hear?’
He was holding her head and staring into her eyes. His red moustache and small pointed beard were like blazing fires in the blackness of his face, and his large nose had the look of an eagle’s beak. Finally he let go of her and departed without a word.
Étienne’s blood ran cold. How stupid to have waited. And now, of course, he simply couldn’t kiss her, in case she thought he was simply trying to imitate Chaval. His pride was wounded, and he felt even a sense of despair.
‘Why did you lie to me?’ he whispered to her. ‘So he’s your boyfriend.’
‘No, he’s not, I swear to you!’ she cried. ‘There’s nothing like that between us. Sometimes he fools around but…And anyway he doesn’t even come from round here. He arrived from the Pas-de-Calais5 six months ago.’
They had both got to their feet: work was about to resume. When she saw how distant Étienne had become, it seemed to upset her. She must have found him more attractive than the other man, might even have preferred him. She cast about desperately for some means of showing him kindness, in order to make it up to him; and while Étienne stared in astonishment at his lamp, in which the flame was now blue and encircled by a broad ring of pale light, she tried at least to take his mind off what had happened.
‘Come, let me show you something,’ she murmured in a friendly way.
She led him to the end of the coal-face where she pointed to a crevice. A gentle bubbling noise could be heard coming from it, the tiniest of sounds, like the peep of a bird.
‘Put your hand there. Can you feel the draught…? That’s firedamp.’
He was surprised. So that’s all it was? This was the terrible thing that could blow them all up? She laughed and said there must be a lot of it in the air that day since the lamps were burning so blue.
‘When you two layabouts have quite finished your chat!’ Maheu shouted roughly.
Catherine and Étienne hurried to fill their tubs and push them towards the incline, their backs braced as they crawled along the road beneath the bumpy roof. By the second trip they were already bathed in sweat and their bones were cracking once more.
At the coal-face the men had returned to work. They often cut their break-time short like this, so as not to get cold; but their meal, devoured with mute voracity far from the sunlight, sat like lead on their stomachs. Stretched out on their sides, they were now tapping away harder than ever in their single-minded determination to fill a decent number of tubs. They became oblivious to all else as they