Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/217

GERMINAL Catherine, standing beside the table, listened with lowered head. A quiver shook her thin 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, arn'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 bitch 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 vexed; 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 immplacable Maheude. "If you've 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 realised, 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 [205]