Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/54

GERMINAL “You believe in those stupid things? Then you don’t know anything.”

“Yes, I do. I can read and write. That is going on 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 to 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 further 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 his 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 [42]