Then I am ill for two days.”
“You mustn’t drink,” she said, seriously.
“Ah, don’t be afraid. I know myself.”
And he shook his head. He hated brandy with the hatred of the last child of a race of drunkards, who suffered in his flesh from all those ancestors, soaked and driven mad by alcohol to such a point that the least drop had become poison to him.
“It is because of mother that I didn’t like being turned into the street,” he said, after having swallowed a mouthful. “Mother is not happy, and I used to send her a five-franc piece now and then.”
“Where is she, then, your mother?”
“At Paris. Laundress, Rue de la Goutte-d’or.”
There was silence. When he thought of these things a tremor dimmed his dark eyes, the sudden anguish of the injury he brooded over in his fine youthful strength. For a moment he remained with his looks buried in the darkness of the mine; and at that depth, beneath the weight and suffocation of the earth, he saw his childhood again, his mother still beautiful and strong, forsaken by his father, then taken up again after having married another man, living with the two men who ruined her, rolling with them in the gutter in drink and ordure. It was down there, he recalled the street, the details came back to him; the dirty linen in the middle of the shop, the drunken carousals that made the house stink, and the jaw-breaking blows.
“Now,” he began again, in a slow voice, “I haven’t even thirty sous to make her presents with. She will die of misery, sure enough.”
He shrugged his shoulders with despair, and again bit at his bread and butter.
“Will you drink?” asked Catherine, uncorking her tin. “Oh, it’s coffee, it won’t hurt you. One gets dry when one eats like that.”
But he refused; it was quite enough to have taken half her bread. However, she insisted good-naturedly, and said at last:
“Well, I will drink before you since you are so polite. Only you can’t refuse now, it would be rude.”
She held out her tin to him. She had got on to her knees and he saw her quite close to him, lit up by the two lamps. Why had he found her ugly? Now that she was black, her face powdered with fine charcoal, she seemed to him singularly charming. In this face surrounded by shadow, the teeth in the broad mouth shone with whiteness, while the eyes looked large and gleamed with a greenish reflection, like a cat’s eyes. A lock of red hair which had escaped from her cap tickled her ear and made her laugh. She no longer seemed so young, she might be quite fourteen.
“To please you,” he said, drinking and giving her back the tin.
She swallowed a second mouthful and forced him to take one too, wishing to share, she said; and that little tin that went from one mouth to the other amused them. He suddenly asked himself if he should not take her in his arms and kiss her lips. She had large lips of a pale rose colour, made vivid by the coal, which tormented him with increasing desire. But he did not dare, intimidated before her, only having known girls on the streets at Lille of the lowest order, and not realizing how one ought to behave with a work-girl still living with her family.
“You must be about fourteen then?” he asked, after having gone back to his bread. She was astonished, almost angry.
“What? fourteen! But I am fifteen! It’s true I’m not big. Girls don’t grow quick with us.”
He went on questioning her and she told everything without boldness or shame. For the rest she was not ignorant concerning man and woman, although he felt that her body was virginal, with the virginity of a child delayed in her sexual maturity by the environment of bad air and weariness in which she lived. When he spoke of Mouquette, in order to embarrass her, she told some horrible stories in a quiet voice, with much amusement. Ah! she did some fine things! And as he asked if she herself had no lovers, she replied jokingly that she did not wish to vex her mother, but that it must happen some day. Her shoulders were bent. She shivered a little from the coldness of her garments soaked in sweat, with a gentle resigned air, ready to submit to things and men.
“People can find lovers when they all live together, can’t they?”
“Sure enough!”
“And then it doesn’t hurt any one. One doesn’t tell the priest.”
“Oh! the priest! I don’t care for him! But there is the Black Man?”
“What do you mean, the Black Man?”
“The old miner who comes back into the pit and wrings naughty girls’ necks.”
He looked at her, afraid that she was making fun of him.
“You believe in those stupid things? Then you don’t know anything.”
“Yes, I do. I can read and write. That is useful among us; in father and mother’s time they learnt nothing.”
She was certainly very charming. When she had finished her bread and butter, he would take her and kiss her on her large rosy lips. It was the resolution of timidity, a thought of violence which choked his voice. These boy’s clothes — this jacket and these breeches — on the girl’s flesh excited and troubled him. He had swallowed his last mouthful. He drank from the tin and gave it back for her to empty. Now the moment for action had come, and he cast a restless glance at the miners farther on. But a shadow blocked the gallery.
For a moment Chaval stood and looked at them from afar. He came forward, having assured himself that Maheu could not see him; and as Catherine was seated on the earth he seized her by the shoulders, drew her head back, and tranquilly crushed her mouth beneath a brutal kiss, affecting not to notice Étienne. There was in that kiss an act of possession, a sort of jealous resolution.
However, the young girl was offended.
“Let me go, do you hear?”
He kept hold of her head and looked into her eyes. His moustache and small red beard flamed in his black face with its large eagle nose. He let her go at last, and went away without speaking a word.
A shudder had frozen Étienne. It was stupid to have waited. He could certainly not kiss her now, for she would, perhaps, think that he wished to behave like the other. In his wounded vanity he experienced real despair.
“Why did you lie?” he said, in a low voice. “He’s your lover.”
“But no, I swear,” she cried. “There is not that between us. Sometimes he likes a joke; he doesn’t even belong here; it’s six months since he came from the Pas-de-Calais.”
Both rose; work was about to be resumed. When she saw him so cold she seemed annoyed. Doubtless she found him handsomer than the other; she would have preferred him perhaps. The idea of some amiable, consoling relationship disturbed her; and when the young man saw with surprise that his lamp was burning blue with a large pale ring, she tried at least to amuse him.
“Come, I will show you something,” she said, in a friendly way.
When she had led him to the bottom of the cutting, she pointed out to him a crevice in the coal. A slight bubbling escaped from it, a little noise like the warbling of a bird.
“Put
