Germinal, Émile Zola [readict .txt] 📗

at what it was worth, but why occupy oneself with such things as the bourgeois and Government? Why mix oneself up with other people’s affairs, when one would get nothing out of it but hard knocks? And she kept her esteem for him because he did not get drunk, and regularly paid his forty-five francs for board and lodging. When a man behaves well one can forgive him the rest.

Étienne then talked about the Republic, which would give bread to everybody. But Maheude shook her head, for she remembered 1848, an awful year, which had left them as bare as worms, her and her man, in their early housekeeping years. She forgot herself in describing its horrors, in a mournful voice, her eyes lost in space, her breast open; while her infant, Estelle, without letting it go, had fallen asleep on her knees. And Étienne, also absorbed in thought, had his eyes fixed on this enormous breast, of which the soft whiteness contrasted with the muddy yellowish complexion of her face.

“Not a farthing,” she murmured, “nothing to put between one’s teeth, and all the pits stopped. Just the same destruction of poor people as today.”

But at that moment the door opened, and they remained mute with surprise before Catherine, who then came in. Since her flight with Chaval she had not reappeared at the settlement. Her emotion was so great that, trembling and silent, she forgot to shut the door. She expected to find her mother alone, and the sight of the young man put out of her head the phrases she had prepared on the way.

“What on earth have you come here for?” cried Maheude, without even moving from her chair. “I don’t want to have anything more to do with you; get along.”

Then Catherine tried to find words:

“Mother, it’s some coffee and sugar; yes, for the children. I’ve been thinking of them and done overtime.”

She drew out of her pockets a pound of coffee and a pound of sugar, and took courage to place them on the table. The strike at the Voreux troubled her while she was working at Jean-Bart, and she had only been able to think of this way of helping her parents a little, under the pretext of caring for the little ones. But her good nature did not disarm her mother, who replied:

“Instead of bringing us sweets, you would have done better to stay and earn bread for us.”

She overwhelmed her with abuse, relieving herself by throwing in her daughter’s face all that she had been saying against her for the past month. To go off with a man, to hang on to him at sixteen, when the family was in want! Only the most degraded of unnatural children could do it. One could forgive a folly, but a mother never forgot a trick like that. There might have been some excuse if they had been strict with her. Not at all; she was as free as air, and they only asked her to come in to sleep.

“Tell me, what have you got in your skin, at your age?”

Catherine, standing beside the table, listened with lowered head. A quiver shook her thin underdeveloped girlish body, and she tried to reply in broken words:

“Oh! if it was only me, and the amusement that I get! It’s him. What he wants I’m obliged to want too, aren’t I? because, you see, he’s the strongest. How can one tell how things are going to turn out? Anyhow it’s done and can’t be undone; it may as well be him as another now. He’ll have to marry me.”

She defended herself without a struggle, with the passive resignation of a girl who has submitted to the male at an early age. Was it not the common lot? She had never dreamed of anything else; violence behind the pit-bank, a child at sixteen, and then a wretched household if her lover married her. And she did not blush with shame; she only quivered like this at being treated like a slut before this lad, whose presence oppressed her to despair.

Étienne had risen, however, and was pretending to stir up the nearly extinct fire in order not to interrupt the explanation. But their looks met; he found her pale and exhausted; pretty, indeed, with her clear eyes in the face which had grown tanned, and he experienced a singular feeling; his spite had vanished; he simply desired that she should be happy with this man whom she had preferred to him. He felt the need to occupy himself with her still, a longing to go to Montsou and force the other man to his duty. But she only saw pity in his constant tenderness; he must feel contempt for her to gaze at her like that. Then her heart contracted so that she choked, without being able to stammer any more words of excuse.

“That’s it, you’d best hold your tongue,” began the implacable Maheude. “If you come back to stay, come in; else get along with you at once, and think yourself lucky that I’m not free just now, or I should have put my foot into you somewhere before now.”

As if this threat had suddenly been realized, Catherine received a vigorous kick right behind, so violent that she was stupefied with surprise and pain. It was Chaval who had leapt in through the open door to give her this lunge of a vicious beast. For a moment he had watched her from outside.

“Ah! slut,” he yelled, “I’ve followed you. I knew well enough you were coming back here to get him to fill you. And it’s you that pay him, eh? You pour coffee down him with my money!”

Maheude and Étienne were stupefied, and did not stir. With a furious movement Chaval chased Catherine towards the door.

“Out you go, by God!”

And as she took refuge in a corner he turned on her mother.

“A nice business, keeping watch while your whore of a daughter is kicking her legs upstairs!”

At last