Germinal - Emile Zola [103]
‘Obviously,’ Maheu would reply, ‘if we had a bit more money, things would be easier…All the same, you’re quite right, it doesn’t do anybody any good living on top of each other like this. And it’s always the same old story in the end: the men get drunk and the girls have a baby.’
This started everyone off, and each member of the family said their piece, as the fumes from the paraffin lamp mingled with the reek of fried onion and turned the air fouler still. No, certainly, life was hardly a bed of roses. You worked like an animal doing what used to be done by convicts as a punishment, more often than not it killed you, and still you didn’t have meat on the table come dinner-time. All right, so you did get your daily plate of mash, you did eat, but so little, just enough so you could suffer without actually dying, up to your eyes in debt and chased after as though you’d stolen the bread you ate. Come Sunday you just slept from the exhaustion of it all. The only pleasures were getting drunk or giving your wife a baby, and even then, the beer gave you a paunch, and the child wouldn’t give a damn about you when it was older. No, it was not what you’d call a bed of roses.
Then La Maheude would join in:
‘The worst of it, you know, is when you start telling yourself that things can never change…When you’re young, you think happiness is just round the corner, you hope for things; but then the poverty grinds on and on, and you find you can never escape it…Me, I don’t wish harm to anyone, but there are times when the injustice of it all just sickens me.’
There would be a silence, and everyone would draw breath for a moment, full of vague unease at the prospect of this closed horizon. Only old Bonnemort, if he was there, would stare in surprise, for in his day they didn’t use to torment themselves like this: you were a miner, you worked your seam, and you didn’t ask for more; whereas nowadays a new wind was blowing, and the miners were getting some fancy ideas.
‘You should take what you’re given,’ he muttered. ‘A glass of beer is a glass of beer…Yeah, the bosses are often bastards all right, but there will always be bosses, won’t there? So there’s no point worrying about it.’
At once Étienne was roused. What! A worker shouldn’t think for himself! Ah, but that’s precisely why things were soon going to change, because now the worker had started thinking! In the old man’s day the miner lived down the pit like an animal, like a machine for extracting coal, always underground, his eyes and ears closed to what was going on outside. Which meant that the rich and powerful could suit themselves, buying and selling the miner as they pleased, living off his flesh while he himself didn’t even realize what was going on. But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored. Were all citizens not equal since the Revolution? Why should the worker remain the slave of the boss who paid him when both of them now voted? The big companies with all their machines crushed everything in their path, and people didn’t even have the safeguards to protect them like they used to in the old days when men of the same trade banded together and knew how to defend themselves. And that was the reason, God help us! among many others, why everything would blow up in their faces one day, and all thanks to education. You only had to look around you: the grandfathers couldn’t even have signed their own names but the fathers could, and the sons were able to read and write as well as any teacher. Oh yes, they were growing and growing,