Germinal (25 page)

Chaval accompanied Catherine along the road. He walked close beside her, arms by his side but pushing her with his hip, guiding her while all the time pretending not to. Suddenly she realized that he had made her leave the road and that they were now on the narrow path that led to Réquillart. But she had no time to get cross; already his arm was round her waist and he was turning her head with his smooth patter. Silly girl, being afraid like that! How could anyone want to harm a pretty little thing like her? She was as soft and gentle as silk, so tender he could almost eat her. As Catherine felt his warm breath behind her ear and on her neck, her whole body began to quiver. She could hardly breathe and found no reply. He really did seem to love her. The previous Saturday night, when she had blown out the candle, she had lain there in bed wondering what would happen if he were to make his move like this; and when she fell asleep she had dreamed that she stopped saying no, that the prospect of pleasure had weakened her resolve. So why now did the same prospect fill her with revulsion and even somehow with a sense of regret? As he stroked the back of her neck with his moustache, so gently that she began to close her eyes, the shadow of another man, of the person she had glimpsed so briefly that morning, passed across the darkness of her unseeing pupils.

Catherine suddenly looked about her. Chaval had led her to the ruins of Réquillart, and she recoiled with a shudder at the sight of the dark, dilapidated shed.

‘Oh no, oh no,' she muttered. ‘Please, let me go.'

She was beginning to panic out of some instinctive fear of the male, the kind of fear that makes muscles tauten in self-defence even when girls are perfectly willing but sense that nothing will halt the man's all-conquering advance. Though not ignorant of life she felt threatened in her virginity as though by a terrifying blow, by a wound whose pain, as yet unknown, she feared.

‘No, no, I don't want to! I've told you, I'm too young…Really I am! Later on, maybe, when I'm ready for it at least.'

‘That just means it's safe, you idiot!' he growled in a low voice. ‘Anyway, what difference does it make?'

But he said no more. He grabbed her firmly and shoved her under what remained of the shed. She fell back on to the coils of old rope and ceased to resist, submitting herself to the male even though she was not yet ready for him and doing so out of that inborn passivity which, from childhood onwards, soon had mining girls like her flat on their backs in the open air. Her terrified protestations died away, and all that could be heard was the man, panting hotly.

Étienne, meanwhile, had stayed where he was and listened. One more girl taking the plunge! Having now witnessed the whole performance, he stood up to leave, feeling a disturbing mixture of jealous excitement and mounting anger. He stopped trying to be tactful and stepped smartly over the beams: that particular couple would be far too busy by now to worry about him. So he was surprised, having gone a hundred paces along the road, when he turned round and saw that they were already on their feet and apparently on their way back to the village like him. The man had his arm round the girl's waist once more, holding her to him with an air of gratitude and continually whispering in her ear, whereas she was the one who seemed to be annoyed by the delay and in a hurry to get home.

Étienne was then seized with a sudden, overriding desire: to see their faces. It was silly, and he quickened his step in order to stop himself. But his feet slowed despite himself and, eventually, at the first street-lamp, he hid in the shadows. He was thoroughly astonished to recognize Chaval and Catherine as they went past. At first he wasn't sure: was this girl in a dark-blue dress and a bonnet really her? Was this the young scamp he'd seen wearing trousers, with a cotton cap pulled down over her ears? That's why she'd been able to walk right past him at Réquillart without his realizing who she was. But now he was in no doubt, for he had just seen those limpid green eyes again, like deep, clear springs. What a slut! And for no reason at all he suddenly felt a terrible urge to get his own back on her by despising her. Girl's clothes didn't suit her either, what's more: she looked dreadful!

Slowly Catherine and Chaval had gone past, quite unaware
of being watched like this. He was busy trying to make her stop so that he could kiss her behind the ear, while she had begun to linger under his caresses, which were making her laugh. Étienne, now behind them and obliged to follow, was irritated to find them blocking his path and to be forced to witness this exasperating spectacle. So it was true what she'd promised him that morning, that she hadn't yet been with a man; and to think that he hadn't believed her, that he'd held back so as not to be like the other fellow! And now he'd let her be taken from under his very nose! He'd even been stupid enough to sit there enjoying the thrill of watching them at it! It was infuriating, and he clenched his fists; he could readily have killed that man in one of those terrible moments of his when he saw red and felt the desperate urge to slaughter.

They continued on for another half-hour. When Chaval and Catherine came to Le Voreux, they slowed down even more, stopping twice by the canal and three times beside the spoil-heap, for by now they were both in high spirits and absorbed in their amorous little games. Étienne had to stop too when they did, in case they saw him. He tried to persuade himself that he had but one, cynical, regret: that this would teach him to be polite and easy on the girls! Once they were past Le Voreux and he could have gone back to have dinner at Rasseneur's, he continued instead to follow them. He accompanied them all the way back to the village and stood there waiting in the shadows for a quarter of an hour before Chaval finally let Catherine go home. Now that he had made sure they were no longer together, he went on walking, far along the road to Marchiennes, simply trudging along with his mind a blank, too miserable and upset to go and shut himself away in a room.

It was not until one hour later, towards nine, that Étienne made his way back through the village, having told himself that he really ought to have something to eat and go to bed if he was to be up at four the next morning. The village was already asleep, plunged in darkness beneath the blackness of the night. Not a single gleam of light filtered through the closed shutters, and row after row of houses lay deep in slumber like so many barracks filled with snoring soldiers. A solitary cat made off
across the deserted gardens. It was day's end, the final stupor of workers who had slumped from their tables into bed, stunned by food and sheer exhaustion.

Back at Rasseneur's a light was still burning in the bar, where a mechanic and two other miners from the day shift were drinking their beer. But before going in Étienne paused and took one last look out into the darkness. He found the same black immensity that he had seen that morning when he had arrived in the middle of a gale. In front of him Le Voreux squatted like some evil beast, barely visible, dotted here and there with a few pinpricks of light from the lanterns. The three braziers up on the spoil-heap blazed away in mid-air like bloodshot moons, and from time to time the shadows of old Bonnemort and his yellow horse could be seen passing across them in enormous silhouette. Out on the bare and empty plain beyond, everything lay submerged in darkness: Montsou, Marchiennes, the forest of Vandame and the vast sea of beetfields and cornfields where, like distant lighthouses, the blast-furnaces with their flames of blue and the coke-ovens with their flames of red alone provided the last vestiges of light. Little by little the night crept in like a black flood. Rain had begun to fall now, slow, steady rain that blotted out the yawning darkness with its relentless streaming; and only one voice could still be heard, the long, slow gasps of the drainage-pump, panting, panting, night and day.

The next day, and on the days that followed, Étienne returned to work at the pit. He gradually became accustomed to it, and his life began to shape itself round this new form of labour and the novel routines which he had found so hard at the beginning. Only one episode of note interrupted the monotony of the first fortnight, a brief fever that kept him in bed for forty-eight hours with aching limbs and a throbbing head, during which time he kept having semi-delirious visions of pushing his tub along a road that was too narrow for his body to pass through. But this was simply the debilitating result of his apprenticeship, an excess of fatigue from which he soon recovered.

Days followed days; weeks and months went by. Now, like his comrades, he would get up at three in the morning, drink his coffee, and set off with the bread-and-butter sandwich that Mme Rasseneur had prepared the night before. As he walked to the pit he would regularly bump into old Bonnemort on his way home to bed, and in the afternoon he would pass Bouteloup coming in the opposite direction to begin his shift. Étienne had acquired his own cap, trousers and cotton jacket, and he too would shiver and warm his back at the roaring fire in the changing-room. Then there was the wait, barefoot, at the pit-head, with its howling draughts. He no longer noticed the winding-engine or its thick, brass-studded limbs of steel gleaming above him in the shadows, nor the cables that flitted up and down with the silent, black swoop of some nocturnal bird, nor the cages that rose and vanished in ceaseless succession amid the din of clanking signals, barked commands and tubs rumbling across the iron floor. His lamp wasn't burning properly, the damned lamp-man must have forgotten to clean it; and he began to thaw only once Mouquet had got them all into the cages with a few laddish whacks on the bottom for the girls. The cage left its keeps and fell like a stone into a well without his so much as raising his head to catch a last glimpse of the light above. The thought of a possible crash never occurred to him now, and he felt at home as he descended into the darkness with the water
raining down on top of him. After Pierron had unloaded them all at the bottom with his usual canting servility, the daily tramp of the herd began as each team of miners wearily headed off to its own coal-face. He could now find his way round the mine's roads better than he could the streets of Montsou, and he knew where to turn, where to duck, where to step over a puddle. He was so familiar with these two kilometres underground that he could have walked them without a lamp and with his hands in his pockets. And each time there were the same encounters: a deputy shining his lamp in their faces, old Mouque fetching a horse, Bébert leading a snorting Battle, Jeanlin running along behind the train to shut the ventilation doors, a plump Mouquette or a skinny Lydie pushing their tubs.

In due course Étienne also began to suffer less from the humidity and airlessness at the coal-face. The chimney now seemed an ideal way up, as though he himself had somehow become molten and could pass through chinks in the rock where once he wouldn't even have ventured his hand. He could breathe in the coal-dust without discomfort, he could see perfectly well in the dark, and he sweated normally, having got used to feeling wet clothes against his skin all day long. Moreover, he no longer squandered his energy in clumsy movements, and his comrades were amazed at the speed and skill with which he now did things. After three weeks he was spoken of as one of the best putters in the pit: no one rolled his tub up the slope more smartly than he did, nor then dispatched it more neatly. His slim figure allowed him to squeeze past everything, and for all that his arms were as white and slender as a woman's, there seemed to be iron beneath that delicate skin so stoutly did they do their work. He never complained, as a matter of pride no doubt, not even when he was gasping with exhaustion. His only failing was that he couldn't take a joke, and he would flare up the moment anyone criticized him. Otherwise he was accepted and looked on as a real miner even as the crushing mould of daily routine gradually reduced him to the level of a machine.

Maheu in particular took a liking to Étienne, because he always respected good workmanship. Moreover, like the rest of them, he could sense that Étienne was better educated: he saw
him reading, writing, sketching little plans, and he heard him talking about things that he, Maheu, had never even heard of. That didn't surprise him: colliers are a tough bunch with thicker skulls than mechanics. But he was surprised by the young fellow's courage, by the way he'd put a brave face on things and just got on with it, knowing that otherwise he'd starve. He was the first casual labourer to have adapted so quickly. And so whenever they were under pressure to produce coal and he couldn't spare one of his hewers, he'd ask Étienne to do the timbering, knowing he'd make a good solid job of it. The bosses were continuing to badger him about this damnable business of the timbering, and he went in constant fear of Négrel, the engineer, turning up with Dansaert and shouting and arguing and making them do it all over again. But he had noticed that Étienne's timbering seemed more likely to pass muster with these particular gentlemen, despite the fact that they never looked happy and kept saying that one day the Company would have to sort the matter out once and for all. The issue was still dragging on, and sullen resentment was brewing in the pit. Even Maheu, normally so peaceable, seemed to be spoiling for a fight.

At the beginning there had been some rivalry between Zacharie and Étienne, and one evening they had almost come to blows. But Zacharie was a good-natured lad who didn't give a damn about anything other than his own pleasures, and so he was quickly pacified by the friendly offer of a beer. Soon he was obliged to recognize the newcomer's superiority. Levaque, too, was now well disposed to Étienne and talked politics with this putter who, he said, had some interesting ideas. And so among the men in the team the only mute hostility that Étienne now encountered came from Chaval. Not that there was apparently any coldness between them; on the contrary, they seemed to be on friendly terms. It was just that when they laughed and joked together their eyes betrayed a mutual animosity. Now caught between them, Catherine carried on as before, the weary, submissive young girl forever arching her back and putting her shoulder to her tub. She was always kind towards her fellow-putter, who in his turn did what he could to assist her; but otherwise she was subject to the wishes of her lover, whose
caresses she now publicly submitted to. It was an accepted situation, an acknowledged relationship to which her family turned a blind eye, so that each evening Chaval took Catherine off behind the spoil-heap and then brought her back to her parents' front door, where they gave each other one last kiss in full view of the village. Étienne, who thought he'd come to terms with the situation, often teased her about these walks of hers, talking dirty with her for a laugh the way the lads and girls did down the mine; while she would give as good as she got and brag about what her lover had done to her. And yet when their eyes met, she would turn pale and feel uncomfortable. Then they would both look away again, and sometimes they went an hour without exchanging a word, as though they hated each other for some deep-seated reason that they never talked about.