Germinal - Emile Zola [109]
Almost at once Maheu walked in. He didn’t want a drink, despite some polite insistence from Mme Rasseneur, who sold her beer as if she were making a present of it. Étienne had already stood up, and the two men left for Montsou.
On pay-days at the Company yards Montsou wore an air of celebration, as though it were a fine Sunday on the day of the ducasse. A horde of miners converged from the surrounding villages. Since the cashier’s office was very small, they preferred to wait outside, standing about in groups on the road and causing an obstruction with their continuous queue. Hawkers made the most of the opportunity, setting up their mobile stalls and displaying everything from crockery to cooked meats. But it was the taverns and bars that did a particularly brisk trade, since the miners would go and stand at the counter to pass the time till they were paid, and then return there to celebrate once the money was in their pockets. And they were always very well behaved about it, presuming they didn’t go and blow the lot at the Volcano.
As Maheu and Étienne moved along in the queue, they could sense the underlying mood of discontent. This wasn’t the usual carefree atmosphere of men collecting their pay and then leaving half of it on the counter of some bar. Fists were clenched, and fighting words were exchanged.
‘So it’s true, then?’ Maheu asked Chaval when he met him outside Piquette’s. ‘They’ve gone and done the dirty on us?’
But Chaval merely snarled in fury and threw a sideways glance at Étienne. When the concessions were renewed, he had signed on with a different team, increasingly consumed with envy of his comrade, this Johnny-come-lately who’d set himself up as a leader, and whose boots, he said, the whole village now seemed ready to lick. Nor were the lovers’ tiffs helping: each time he took Catherine to Réquillart or behind the spoil-heap, he would accuse her in the foulest terms of sleeping with her mother’s lodger, after which, in a frenzy of renewed desire, he would almost kill her with his love-making.
Maheu inquired again:
‘Is it Le Voreux’s turn yet?’
And when Chaval nodded and turned away, Maheu and Étienne decided it was time to enter the yard.
The cashier’s office was a small rectangular room, divided in two by a grille. Five or six miners were waiting on the benches along the wall, while the cashier, assisted by a clerk, was paying another miner, who was standing, cap in hand, at his window. Above the bench on the left a yellow notice had recently been posted, fresh and clean against the grey, smoke-stained plaster; and all day long the men had been filing past it. They would arrive in their twos and threes, stand looking at it for a while, and then silently leave with a sudden sag of the shoulders, as though this was the final straw.
At that moment two colliers were standing in front of the notice, one of them young with a square, brutish head, and the other old and very thin, with a face rendered expressionless by age. Neither could read; the younger man’s lips were spelling out the words while the older was content to stare blankly. Many of them came in like this, wanting to have a look but unable to understand.
‘Tell us what it says,’ Maheu asked Étienne, reading not being his strong suit either.
So Étienne began to read the notice. It was an announcement from the Company addressed to all miners in its pits and informing them that, in view of the continuing negligence in the matter of timbering, and having wearied of imposing fines which had no effect, it had resolved to introduce a new method of payment for the extraction of coal. Henceforth timbering would be paid for separately, by the cubic metre of wood taken below and used, having due regard to the amount appropriate for a satisfactory performance of the task. The price payable per tub of extracted coal would naturally be reduced from fifty to forty centimes, depending on the type and location of the seam. There followed a rather