GERMINAL
Étienne waited.
"Get up! if you want another, we'll begin again."
Without replying, Chaval, after a few minutes' stupefaction, moved on the ground and stretched his limbs. He gathered himself up with difficulty, resting for a moment on his knees in a ball, doing something with his hand in the bottom of his pocket which could not be observed. Then, when he was up, he rushed forward again, his chest swelling with a savage yell.
But Catherine had seen; and in spite of herself a loud cry came from her heart, like the avowal of a preference she had herself been ignorant of.
"Take care! he's got his knife!"
Étienne had only time to parry the first blow with his arm. His woollen jacket was cut by the thick blade, one of those blades fastened by a copper ferrule into a boxwood handle. He had already seized Chaval's wrist, and a terrible struggle began; for he felt that he would be lost if he let go, while the other shook his arm in the effort to free it and strike. The weapon was gradually lowered as their stiffened limbs grew fatigued. Étienne twice felt the cold sensation of the steel against his skin; and he had to make a supreme effort, so crushing the wrist that the knife slipped from the open hand. Both of them had fallen to the earth, and it was Étienne who snatched it up, brandishing it in his turn. He held Chaval down beneath his knee and threatened to slit his throat open.
"Ah, traitor! by God! you've come to it now!"
He felt an awful voice within, deafening him. It arose from his bowels and was beating in his head like a hammer, a sudden mania of murder, a need to taste blood. Never before had the crisis so shaken him. He was not drunk, however, and he struggled against the hereditary disease with the despairing shudder of a man who is mad with lust and struggles on the verge of rape. At last he conquered himself; he threw the knife behind him, stammering in a hoarse voice:
"Get up—off you go!"
This time Rasseneur had rushed forward, but without quite daring to venture between them, for fear of catching a nasty blow. He did not want anyone to be murdered in his house, and was so angry that his wife, sitting erect at the counter, remarked to him that he always cried out too soon. Souvarine, who had
[364]
