GERMINAL
another we should get together. It only wanted an opportunity—some lucky chance. Wasn't it so?"
A shudder froze him. He tried to shake off this dream; then he repeated slowly:
"Nothing is ever done with; a little happiness is enough to make everything begin again."
"Then you'll keep me, and it will be all right this time?"
And she slipped down fainting. She was so weak that her low voice died out. In terror he kept her against his heart.
"Do you ache?"
She sat up surprised.
"No, not at all. Why?"
But this question aroused her from her dream. She gazed at the darkness with distraction, wringing her hands in another fit of sobbing.
"My God, my God, how black it is!"
It was no longer the meadows, the odour of the grass, the song of larks, the great yellow sun; it was the fallen, inundated mine, the sinking night, the melancholy dripping of this cellar where they had been groaning for so many days. Her perverted senses now increased the horror of it; her childish superstitions came back to her; she saw the Black Man, the old dead miner who returns to the pit to twist naughty girls' necks.
"Listen! did you hear?"
"No, nothing; I heard nothing."
"Yes, the Man—you know? Look! he is there. The earth has let all the blood out of the vein to revenge itself for being cut into; and he is there—you can see him—look! blacker than night. Oh, I'm so afraid, I'm so afraid!"
She became silent, shivering. Then in a very low voice she whispered:
"No, it's always the other one."
"What other one?"
"Him who is with us; who is not alive."
The image of Chaval haunted her, she talked of him confusedly, she described the dog's life she led with him, the only day when he had been kind to her at Jean-Bart, the other days of follies and blows, when he would kill her with caresses after having covered her with kicks.
"I tell you that he's coming, that he will still keep us from
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