Germinal - Emile Zola [80]
‘Stop right there!…I saw Mouquet. You’re off to the Volcano again, and those filthy women that sing there.’
He protested his innocence, hand on heart, word of honour. When she merely shrugged, he said abruptly:
‘Why not come with us, if you like…It wouldn’t worry me. What would I be doing with any singers anyway?…How about it?’
‘And the little one?’ she replied. ‘How can I go anywhere with a kid screaming all the time?…It’s time I went home. I expect they can’t hear themselves think by now.’
But he stopped her, begged her. Please, he’d promised Mouquet and he’d only look a fool if he didn’t go. A man can’t just go home every evening like some roosting hen. Admitting defeat, she lifted the flap of her jacket, broke a thread with her nail and took some fifty-centimes coins from a corner of the hem. She was afraid of being robbed by her mother, and so this was where she hid the money she earned by doing overtime at the pit.
‘Look, I’ve got five,’ she said. ‘You can have three if you want…Only you’ve got to promise me that you’ll try and persuade your mother to let us get married. I’ve had enough of this outdoor life! And what’s more, Mum keeps blaming me for having so many mouths to feed…So come on, promise me first. Promise.’
She spoke in the listless voice of a gangling, sickly girl who felt no passion and was simply weary of living. He for his part promised faithfully, loudly giving her his word as God was his witness. Once he had the three coins in his hand, he kissed her and tickled her and made her laugh, and he would have gone the whole way, here in this little corner of the spoil-heap which served as the winter bedroom of their domestic bliss, but she said no, it would give her no pleasure. And she returned to the village alone while he took a short cut across the fields to rejoin his comrade.
Étienne had followed them absent-mindedly at a distance, not realizing at first and thinking that this was an innocent meeting. They grew up quickly, these mining girls; and he remembered the ones back in Lille and how he used to wait for them behind the factories, whole gangs of them, already corrupted at the age of fourteen by living in the kind of destitution that makes people simply let themselves go.
But another encounter surprised him even more, and he stopped in his tracks. There at the bottom of the spoil-heap, in a space between some large rocks that had rolled down, was little Jeanlin giving a furious telling-off to Lydie and Bébert seated either side of him.
‘What have you got to say for yourselves, eh?…You can each have your share of this fist if you think you can start demanding things…Whose idea was it in the first place, eh?’
It had indeed been Jeanlin’s idea. After spending an hour roaming about the fields beside the canal picking dandelions with the two others, it had occurred to him as he gazed at the amount they had collected that they would never eat all that at home; and instead of going back to the village he’d gone to Montsou, taking Bébert along to keep watch and making Lydie ring the doorbells of the bourgeois and offer to sell them some dandelion salad. Already versed in the ways of the world, he said that girls could sell whatever they had a mind to. In the heat of the commercial moment they’d sold the whole lot, but Lydie had made eleven sous. And now, bereft of salad, the three of them were sharing out the proceeds.
‘It’s not fair!’ Bébert protested. ‘You should divide by three…If you keep seven, that’ll only leave us two each.’
‘What do you mean ‘‘not fair’’?’ Jeanlin retorted furiously. ‘I picked more of them than you did, for a start.’
Bébert usually conceded out of timorous respect, forever the gullible victim. Though older and stronger he even allowed himself to be punched. But this time the prospect of so much money stirred him to resistance.
‘He’s diddling us, isn’t he, Lydie?…If he doesn’t share properly, we’ll tell his mother on him.’
At once Jeanlin stuck a fist under his nose.
‘You just say that once more and I’ll go and tell yours how