“You believe in those stupid things? Then you don’t know anything.”
“Yes, I do. I can read and write. That is useful 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 of 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 farther 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 its 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 lamp was burning blue with a large pale ring, she tried at least to amuse him.
“Come, I will show you something,” she said, in a friendly way.
When she had led him to the bottom of the cutting, she pointed out to him a crevice in the coal. A slight bubbling escaped from it, a little noise like the warbling of a bird.
“Put your hand there; you’ll feel the wind. It’s firedamp.”
He was surprised. Was that all? Was that the terrible thing which blew everything up? She laughed, she said there was a good deal of it today to make the flame of the lamps so blue.
“Now, if you’ve done chattering, lazy louts!” cried Maheu’s rough voice.
Catherine and Étienne hastened to fill their trams, and pushed them to the upbrow with stiffened back, crawling beneath the bossy roof of the passage. Even after the second journey, the sweat ran off them and their joints began to crack.
The pikemen had resumed work in the cutting. The men often shortened their breakfast to avoid getting cold; and their bricks, eaten in this way, far from the sun, with silent voracity, loaded their stomachs with lead. Stretched on their sides they hammered more loudly, with the one fixed idea of filling a large number of trams. Every thought disappeared in this rage for gain which was so hard to earn. They no longer felt the water which streamed on them and swelled their limbs, the cramps of forced attitudes, the suffocation of the darkness in which they grew pale, like plants put in a cellar. Yet, as the day advanced, the air became more poisoned and heated with the smoke of the lamps, with the pestilence of their breaths, with the asphyxia of the firedamp—blinding to the eyes like spiders’ webs—which only the aeration of the night could sweep away. At the bottom of their molehill, beneath the weight of the earth, with no more breath in their inflamed lungs, they went on hammering.
V
Maheu, without looking at his watch which he had left in his jacket, stopped and said:
“One o’clock directly. Zacharie, is it done?”
The young man had just been at the planking. In the midst of his labour he had been lying on his back, with dreamy eyes, thinking over a game of hockey of the night before. He woke up and replied:
“Yes, it will do; we shall see tomorrow.”
And he came back to take his place at the cutting. Levaque and Chaval had also dropped their picks. They were all resting. They wiped their faces on their naked arms and looked at the roof, in which slatey masses were cracking. They only spoke about their work.
“Another chance,” murmured Chaval, “of getting into loose earth. They didn’t take account of that in the bargain.”
“Rascals!” growled Levaque. “They only want to bury us in it.”
Zacharie began to laugh. He cared little for the work and the rest, but it amused him to hear the Company abused. In his placid way Maheu explained that the nature of the soil changed every twenty metres. One must be just; they could not foresee everything. Then, when the two others went on talking against the masters, he became restless, and looked around him.
“Hush! that’s enough.”
“You’re right,” said Levaque, also lowering his voice; “it isn’t wholesome.”
A morbid dread of spies haunted them, even at this depth, as if the shareholders’ coal, while still in the seam, might have ears.
“That won’t prevent me,” added Chaval loudly, in a defiant manner, “from lodging a brick in the belly of that damned Dansaert, if he talks to me as he did the other day. I won’t prevent him, I won’t, from buying pretty girls with a white skin.”
This time Zacharie burst out laughing. The head captain’s
