GERMINAL
the street,” he said, after having swallowed a mouthful. Mother is not happy, and I used to send her a five-franc piece now and then.”
“Where is she, then, your mother?”
“At Paris. Laundress, Rue de la Goutte-d’or.”
There was silence. When he thought of these things a tremor dimmed his dark eyes, the sudden anguish of the injury he brooded over in his fine youthful strength. For a moment he remained with his looks buried in the darkness of the mine; and at that depth, beneath the weight and suffocation of the earth, he saw his childhood again, his mother still beautiful and strong, forsaken by his father, then taken up again after having married another man, living with the two men who ruined her, rolling with them in the gutter in drink and ordure. It was down there, he recalled the street, the details came back to him; the dirty linen in the middle of the shop, the drunken carousals that made the house stink, and the jaw-breaking blows.
“Now,” he began again, in a slow voice, “I haven’t even thirty sous to make her presents with. She will die of misery, sure enough.”
He shrugged his shoulders with despair, and again bit at his bread and butter.
“Will you drink?” asked Catherine, uncorking her tin. “Oh, it’s coffee, it won’t hurt you. One gets stupid when one drinks like that.”
But he refused; it was quite enough to have taken half her bread. However, she insisted good-naturedly, and said at last:
“Well, I will drink before you since you are so polite. Only you can’t refuse now, it would be rude.”
And she held out her tin to him. She had got on to her knees and he saw her quite close to him, lit up by the two lamps. Why had he found her ugly? Now that she was black, her face powdered with fine charcoal, she seemed to him singularly charming. In this face surrounded by shadow, the teeth in the broad mouth shone with whiteness, while the eyes looked large and gleamed with a greenish reflection, like cat’s eyes. A lock of red hair which had escaped from her cap tickled her ear and made her laugh. She no longer seemed so young, she might be quite fourteen.
[40]
