Part 11

She blushed, feeling that she would do well to refuse again, tormented at bottom by a strong desire to have her ribbon. The idea of a loan came back to her; she ended by accepting, on condition that she would return what he spent on her. This made them joke again: it was agreed that, if she did not sleep with him, she would give him back the money. But there was another difficulty, when he spoke of going to Maigrat's.

"No, not to Maigrat's, Mama has forbidden me."

"Come now, does anyone need to say where they're going!... He's the one who keeps the prettiest ribbons in Montsou."

When Maigrat saw the tall Chaval and Catherine enter his shop, like two sweethearts buying their wedding gift, he turned very red, and showed his pieces of blue ribbon with the rage of a man being made fun of. Then, once the young people were served, he planted himself in the doorway to watch them walk away into the dusk; and, as his wife came with a timid voice to ask him a question, he fell upon her, insulted her, shouted that he would one day make the dirty world, which lacked gratitude, repent, when all should be on the ground licking his feet.

On the road, the tall Chaval walked alongside Catherine. He marched near her, arms swinging; only, he pushed her with his hip, he guided her, without seeming to. She suddenly noticed that he had made her leave the pavement and that they were turning together into the narrow path to Réquillart. But she had no time to get angry: already he held her by the waist, he dazzled her with a continuous caress of words. Was she silly, to be afraid! did he wish any harm to a little darling like her, as soft as silk, so tender he could have eaten her? And he breathed behind her ear, in her neck, he made a shiver pass over all the skin of her body. She, stifled, found nothing to answer. It was true, he seemed to love her. On Saturday evening, after blowing out the candle, she had exactly wondered what would happen, if he took her like that; then, falling asleep, she had dreamed that she no longer said no, all weak with pleasure. Why then, at the same thought, today, did she feel a repugnance and like a regret? While he tickled the nape of her neck with his mustache, so gently, that she closed her eyes, the shadow of another man, of the boy glimpsed that morning, passed in the black of her closed eyelids.

Suddenly, Catherine looked around her. Chaval had led her into the ruins of Réquillart, and she gave a shuddering recoil before the darkness of the collapsed shed.

"Oh! no, oh! no," she murmured, "I beg you, let me go!"

The fear of the male maddened her, that fear which stiffens the muscles in a instinct of defense, even when the girls are willing, and feel the conquering approach of the man. Her virginity, which had nothing to learn however, was terrified, as at the threat of a blow, of a wound whose still unknown pain she dreaded.

"No, no, I don't want to! I tell you I'm too young... Truly! later, when I'm at least grown."

He growled low:

"Silly! nothing to fear then... What does it matter to you?"

But he said no more. He had seized her firmly, he threw her under the shed. And she fell backward onto the old ropes, she ceased to defend herself, submitting to the male before her time, with that hereditary submission, which, from childhood, tumbled the girls of her race in the open air. Her frightened stammerings died out, only the ardent breath of the man was heard.

Étienne, meanwhile, had listened, without moving. Another one taking the leap! And, now that he had seen the comedy, he got up, invaded by a discomfort, by a sort of jealous excitement in which anger rose. He no longer minded himself, he stepped over the beams, for those two were much too busy at that hour, to stir. Also was he surprised, when he had taken a hundred steps on the road, to see, on turning, that they were already on their feet and that they seemed, like him, to be coming back toward the settlement. The man had taken the girl again by the waist, holding her with an air of gratitude, speaking always in her neck; and it was she who seemed in a hurry, who wanted to get back quickly, looking especially angry at the delay.

Then Étienne was tormented by a desire, that of seeing their faces. It was idiotic, he quickened his pace so as not to yield to it. But his feet slowed of themselves, he ended, at the first streetlamp, by hiding in the shadow. A stupor nailed him, when he recognized in passing Catherine and the tall Chaval. He hesitated at first: was it really her, this young girl in a coarse blue dress, with that bonnet? was it the rascal he had seen in trousers, the head bound in the linen cap? That is why she could have brushed against him, without his guessing her. But he no longer doubted, he had just found her eyes again, the greenish clarity of that spring water, so clear and so deep. What a slut! and he felt a furious need to revenge himself on her, without reason, by despising her. Besides, she did not look right as a girl: she was hideous.

Slowly, Catherine and Chaval had passed. They did not know they were being watched thus, he held her back to kiss her behind the ear, while she began again to linger under the caresses, which made her laugh. Left behind, Étienne was well obliged to follow them, irritated that they blocked the way, witnessing anyway these things whose sight exasperated him. It was then true, what she had sworn to him that morning: she was still no one's mistress; and he who had not believed her, who had deprived himself of her so as not to do like the other! and he who had just let her be taken under his nose, who had pushed stupidity to the point of foully amusing himself at seeing them! It drove him mad, he clenched his fists, he could have eaten that man, in one of those needs to kill where he saw red.

For half an hour, the walk lasted. When Chaval and Catherine approached the Voreux, they slowed their pace again, they stopped twice at the edge of the canal, three times along the slag heap, very gay now, amusing themselves with little tender games. Étienne had to stop too, make the same halts, for fear of being seen. He strove to feel nothing but a brutal regret: that would teach him to spare girls, out of good breeding. Then, after the Voreux, free at last to go dine at Rasseneur's, he continued to follow them, he accompanied them to the settlement, remained there, standing in the shadow, for a quarter of an hour, waiting for Chaval to let Catherine go home. And, when he was quite sure they were no longer together, he walked again, he went very far along the Marchiennes road, tramping, thinking of nothing, too stifled and too sad to shut himself in a room.

Only an hour later, toward nine o'clock, Étienne crossed the settlement again, saying to himself that he must eat and go to bed, if he wanted to be up in the morning at four o'clock. The village already slept, all black in the night. Not a gleam slipped from the closed shutters, the long facades lined up, with the heavy sleep of barracks that snore. Alone, a cat fled across the empty gardens. It was the end of the day, the crushing of the workers falling from the table to the bed, stunned with fatigue and food.

At Rasseneur's, in the lit room, an engine-man and two day workers drank mugs. But, before going in, Étienne stopped, cast a last look at the darkness. He found the same black immensity as in the morning, when he had arrived on the great wind. Before him, the Voreux crouched with its air of a wicked beast, vague, pricked with a few lantern gleams. The three fires of the slag heap burned in the air, like bloody moons, detaching at intervals the oversized silhouettes of old Bonnemort and his yellow horse. And, beyond, in the flat plain, shadow had submerged everything, Montsou, Marchiennes, the Vandame forest, the vast sea of beets and wheat, where no longer shone, like distant lighthouses, but the blue fires of the blast furnaces and the red fires of the coke ovens. Little by little, the night drowned, the rain fell now, slow, continuous, sinking that nothingness into the depths of its monotonous trickling; while a single voice was still heard, the thick and slow breathing of the pumping engine, which breathed day and night.

Third Part

I

The next day, the following days, Étienne resumed his work at the pit. He grew accustomed, his existence regulated itself on this toil and these new habits, which had seemed to him so hard at first. A single adventure broke the monotony of the first fortnight, a fleeting fever which kept him in bed forty-eight hours, limbs broken, head burning, dreaming, in a half-delirium, that he pushed his tub to the end of a too narrow way, where his body could not pass. It was simply the stiffness of apprenticeship, an excess of fatigue from which he recovered at once.

And days succeeded days, weeks, months flowed by. Now, like the comrades, he got up at three o'clock, drank the coffee, carried the double slice of bread that Madame Rasseneur prepared for him the evening before. Regularly, on going to the pit in the morning, he met old Bonnemort who was going to bed, and on coming out in the afternoon, he crossed Bouteloup who arrived to take his task. He had the cap, the trousers, the linen jacket, he shivered and warmed his back at the hut, before the great fire. Then came the wait, barefoot, at the pithead, crossed by furious drafts. But the engine, whose big steel limbs, starred with copper, shone up there, in the shadow, no longer preoccupied him, nor the cables which flew like the black and silent wing of a night bird, nor the cages emerging and plunging ceaselessly, amid the uproar of signals, of cried orders, of tubs shaking the cast-iron flags. His lamp burned badly, that damned lampman must not have cleaned it; and he only loosened up when Mouquet bundled them all off, with clownish slaps that rang on the backsides of the girls. The cage unhooked, fell like a stone to the bottom of a hole, without his even turning his head to see the day flee. Never did he think of a possible fall, he found himself at home as he descended into the darkness, under the beating rain. Below, at the landing, when Pierron had unpacked them, with his air of pious sweetness, it was always the same tramping of a herd, the gangs each going to its seam, with a dragging step. He, henceforth, knew the galleries of the mine better than the streets of Montsou, knew that one must turn here, stoop farther on, avoid elsewhere a pool of water. He had taken such a habit of those two kilometers underground, that he would have done them without a lamp, hands in pockets. And, every time, the same meetings occurred, a deputy overlooking the faces of the workers as he passed, old Mouque leading a horse, Bébert driving Bataille who shook himself, Jeanlin running behind the train to close the ventilation doors, and the fat Mouquette, and the thin Lydie pushing their tubs.

In the long run, Étienne also suffered much less from the dampness and the suffocation of the seam. The chimney seemed very convenient to him for climbing, as if he had melted and could pass through cracks, where he would not have risked a hand formerly. He breathed without discomfort the coal dusts, saw clear in the night, sweated calmly, used to the sensation of having from morning to evening his clothes soaked on his body. Besides, he no longer spent his strength awkwardly, a skill had come to him, so quick, that it astonished the gang. At the end of three weeks, he was cited among the good tub-pushers of the pit: not one rolled his tub to the incline, with a livelier run, nor then packed it, with as much correctness. His small size allowed him to slip everywhere, and his arms, though fine and white as a woman's, seemed of iron under the delicate skin, so roughly did they lead the work. Never did he complain, from pride no doubt, even when he gasped with fatigue. He was only reproached for not understanding the joke, angry at once, as soon as one wanted to tap him. For the rest, he was accepted, regarded as a true miner, in that crushing of habit which reduced him a little each day to the function of a machine.

Maheu especially took a friendship for Étienne, for he had respect for work well done. Then, like the others, he felt that this lad had an education superior to his own: he saw him read, write, draw bits of plan, he heard him talk of things of which, he, ignored even the existence. That did not astonish him, the colliers are rough men who have a harder head than the engine-men; but he was surprised at the courage of this little one, at the gallant way in which he had bitten into the coal, so as not to die of hunger. He was the first casual worker who acclimatized so promptly. Also, when the cutting pressed and he did not want to disturb a hewer, he charged the young man with the timbering, certain of the neatness and solidity of the work. The bosses still harassed him on that cursed question of timber, he feared each hour to see appear the engineer Négrel, followed by Dansaert, crying, discussing, making everything begin again; and he had noticed that the timbering of his tub-pusher satisfied these gentlemen more, despite their airs of never being content and of repeating that the Company, one day or another, would take a radical measure. Things dragged, a dull discontent fermented in the pit, Maheu himself, so calm, ended by closing his fists.

There had first been a rivalry between Zacharie and Étienne. One evening, they had threatened each other with a pair of slaps. But the first, a good fellow and laughing at what was not his pleasure, soon appeased by the friendly offer of a mug, had had to bow before the superiority of the newcomer. Levaque, too, now made a good face, talked politics with the tub-pusher, who had, he said, his ideas. And, among the pieceworkers, the latter no longer felt a sullen hostility but in the tall Chaval, not that they seemed to sulk, for they had become comrades on the contrary; only, their looks devoured each other, when they joked together. Catherine, between them, had resumed her air of a tired and resigned girl, bending her back, pushing her tub, always nice to her hauling companion who helped her in turn, subjected otherwise to the wills of her lover whose caresses she openly endured. It was an accepted situation, a recognized household on which the family itself closed its eyes, to such a point that Chaval led the tub-pusher each evening behind the slag heap, then brought her back to the door of her parents, where he kissed her one last time, before all the settlement. Étienne, who believed himself resigned to it, often teased her with these walks, letting fly for a joke crude words, as one lets fly between boys and girls, in the depths of the seams; and she answered on the same tone, said from bravado what her lover had done to her, troubled however and pale, when the young man's eyes met hers. Both turned away the head, remained sometimes an hour without speaking, with the air of hating each other for things buried in them, and on which they did not explain themselves.

Spring had come. Étienne, one day, on leaving the shaft, had received in the face that warm breath of April, a good smell of young earth, of tender green, of pure open air; and, now, at each exit, the spring smelled better and warmed him more, after his ten hours of work in the eternal winter of the depths, amid these damp darknesses that no summer ever dissipated. The days still lengthened, he had ended, in May, by descending at the rising sun, when the vermilion sky lit the Voreux with an aurora dust, where the white steam of the exhausts rose all pink. One no longer shivered, a warm breath blew from the distances of the plain, while the larks, very high, sang. Then, at three o'clock, he had the dazzlement of the sun become burning, setting the horizon on fire, reddening the bricks under the grime of coal. In June, the wheat was already tall, of a blue green which cut against the black green of the beets. It was an endless sea, undulating at the least wind, which he saw spread and grow day by day, surprised sometimes as if he found it in the evening more swollen with green than in the morning. The poplars of the canal plumed themselves with leaves. Grasses invaded the slag heap, flowers covered the meadows, all a life germinated, sprang from this earth, while he groaned under it, there below, of misery and fatigue.

Now, when Étienne walked, in the evening, it was no longer behind the slag heap that he startled lovers. He followed their wakes in the wheat, he guessed their lewd bird's-nests, at the eddies of the yellowing ears and the great red poppies. Zacharie and Philomène went back there by a habit of old household; Mother Brûlé, always at Lydie's heels, unearthed her each instant with Jeanlin, so deeply buried together, that one had to put the foot on them to decide them to fly off; and, as for Mouquette, she nested everywhere, one could not cross a field, without seeing her head plunge, while only her feet floated, in full-back somersaults. But all those were quite free, the young man found that only culpable the evenings when he met Catherine and Chaval. Twice, he saw them, at his approach, fall in the middle of a field, whose motionless stalks remained dead afterward. Another time, as he followed a narrow path, the clear eyes of Catherine appeared to him at the level of the wheat, then drowned. Then, the immense plain seemed to him too small, he preferred to spend the evening at Rasseneur's, at the Avantage.

"Madame Rasseneur, give me a mug... No, I won't go out this evening, my legs are broken."

And he turned to a comrade, who usually sat at the table in the back, head against the wall.

"Souvarine, won't you have one?"

"Thank you, nothing at all."

Étienne had made the acquaintance of Souvarine, living there, side by side. He was an engine-man of the Voreux, who occupied upstairs the furnished room, next to his. He must have been about thirty years old, slim, blond, with a fine face, framed by great hair and a light beard. His white and pointed teeth, his thin mouth and nose, the pink of his complexion, gave him an air of a girl, an air of stubborn sweetness, which the grey reflection of his steel eyes ensavaged by flashes. In his poor worker's room, he had only a case of papers and books. He was Russian, never spoke of himself, let legends run about his account. The colliers, very distrustful before foreigners, scenting another class in his small bourgeois hands, had first imagined an adventure, an assassination whose punishment he fled. Then, he had shown himself so brotherly to them, without pride, distributing to the brats of the settlement all the coins of his pockets, that they accepted him at this hour, reassured by the word of political refugee which circulated, vague word where they saw an excuse, even to crime, and like a comradeship of suffering.

The first weeks, Étienne had found him of a fierce reserve. Also did he know his history only later. Souvarine was the last-born of a noble family of the government of Toula. At Saint-Petersburg, where he did his medicine, the social passion which then carried away all Russian youth had decided him to learn a manual trade, that of mechanic, to mix with the people, to know it and help it as a brother. And it was of this trade that he lived now, after having fled following a failed attempt on the life of the emperor: for a month, he had lived in the cellar of a fruiterer, digging a mine through the street, charging bombs, under the continual threat of blowing up with the house. Renounced by his family, without money, put as foreigner on the index of French workshops which saw in him a spy, he was dying of hunger, when the Company of Montsou had finally hired him, in an hour of pressure. For a year, he worked there as a good worker, sober, silent, doing one week the day service and one week the night service, so exact, that the bosses cited him as example.

"You never get thirsty then?" Étienne asked him laughing.

And he answered in his soft voice, almost without accent:

"I get thirsty when I eat."

His companion also teased him about the girls, swore to have seen him with a tub-pusher in the wheat, on the side of the Bas-de-Soie. Then, he shrugged, full of a tranquil indifference. A tub-pusher, what for? Woman was for him a boy, a comrade, when she had the brotherhood and the courage of a man. Otherwise, what use to put in one's heart a possible cowardice? Neither woman, nor friend, he wanted no tie, he was free of his blood and of the blood of others.

Every evening, toward nine o'clock, when the cabaret emptied, Étienne remained thus to talk with Souvarine. He drank his beer in little sips, the engine-man smoked continual cigarettes, whose tobacco had, in the long run, reddened his thin fingers. His vague eyes of mystic followed the smoke through a dream; his left hand, to occupy itself, fumbling and nervous, sought in the void; and he ended, usually, by installing on his knees a familiar rabbit, a big mother always pregnant, who lived loose in freedom, in the house. This rabbit, which he himself had called Poland, had come to adore him, came to sniff his trousers, stood up, scratched him with her paws, until he had taken her like a child. Then, huddled against him, ears flattened, she closed her eyes; while, without tiring, with a gesture of unconscious caress, he passed his hand over the grey silk of her fur, the air calmed by this warm and living softness.

"You know," said Étienne one evening, "I received a letter from Pluchart."

There was no longer there but Rasseneur. The last client had left, going back to the settlement which was going to bed.

"Ah!" cried the innkeeper, standing before his two lodgers. "Where is he at, Pluchart?"

Étienne, for two months, had maintained a steady correspondence with the mechanic of Lille, to whom he had had the idea of telling his hiring at Montsou, and who now indoctrinated him, struck by the propaganda he could make amid the miners.

"He is at, that the association in question goes very well. One adheres from all sides, it seems."

"What do you say of it, you, of their society?" asked Rasseneur of Souvarine.

That one, who tenderly scratched the head of Poland, blew a jet of smoke, murmuring in his tranquil air:

"More foolishness!"}

“Stories of the world, in your language.”