Germinal - Emile Zola [112]
‘To think,’ she said loudly, without mentioning the Hennebeaus by name, ‘that I saw their maid go past this morning in a carriage!…Yes, the cook in a carriage and pair. Off to Marchiennes to buy some fish, I shouldn’t wonder!’
There was uproar at this, and renewed abuse. They were indignant at the thought of that maid in her white apron being driven to market in the neighbouring town in her master’s carriage. The workers might be dying of hunger, but of course they still had to have their fish, didn’t they? Well, they just might not be eating fish for much longer: one day it would be the turn of the poor. The ideas that Étienne had sown were beginning to take root and grow, burgeoning in this cry of revolt. People were impatient for the promised land, in a hurry for their share of happiness and to reach beyond the horizon of poverty that enclosed them like a tomb. The injustice of it all was becoming too great, and if the bread was now to be snatched from their mouths, they would finally demand their rights. The women especially would like to have launched an immediate assault upon the city on a hill, upon that terminus of Progress where people were poor no longer. Though night had almost fallen and the rain was coming down hard, they continued to fill the village with their tears, surrounded by the shrieking of their unruly children.
That evening, in the Advantage ,the decision was taken to strike. Rasseneur had ceased to oppose it, and Souvarine accepted it as a first step. Étienne summed the matter up: if it was a strike the Company wanted, then a strike they could have.
V
A week passed, and work continued in an atmosphere of sullen wariness as people awaited the coming battle.
In the Maheu household the fortnight in prospect promised to be even more difficult than the last, which made La Maheude increasingly sour despite her good sense and even temper. And then hadn’t Catherine taken it into her head to spend the night away from home! She’d come back the next morning so exhausted and ill after this escapade that she hadn’t been able to go to the pit; she cried and said it wasn’t her fault, that Chaval had prevented her from coming home by threatening to beat her up if she tried to run away from him. He was becoming violently jealous now and wanted to stop her returning to Étienne’s bed, which, he said, he knew full well her family made her share. La Maheude was furious and, having forbidden her daughter to see such a brute again, she threatened to go to Montsou and slap his face for him. None of which stopped it being one day’s pay less. As for Catherine, now that she had got herself a man she preferred not to swap him.
Two days later there was another drama. On Monday and Tuesday Jeanlin did a bunk, and all the time everyone thought he was quietly working away at Le Voreux he was actually out on the loose with Bébert and Lydie, roaming the marshes and the Vandame forest. He was the ringleader, and nobody ever discovered quite what manner of precocious and larcenous games the three of them got up to. He himself received a heavy punishment, a thrashing from his mother, which she conducted out in the street and in front of the terrified child population of the village. Had anyone ever seen the like? A child of hers! Who’d cost her money since the day it was born, who should now be earning its keep! And her outrage carried the memory of her own harsh childhood, the heritage of destitution which made her see every child in the brood as a future breadwinner.
That morning, when Catherine and the men left for the pit, La Maheude raised herself up in bed and shouted to Jeanlin:
‘And if you try it again, you little brat, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you.’
It was hard going at Maheu’s new coal-face.