Germinal - Emile Zola [115]
‘Gently does it!’ said Richomme eventually. ‘We’re nearly there…We don’t want to finish them off.’
It was true: the groaning was becoming more and more audible. Indeed it was this continuous groaning that was guiding the men, and now it seemed to be coming from directly beneath their picks. Suddenly it stopped.
Everyone looked at each other in silence, shivering as the chill of death passed over them in the darkness. They kept digging, bathed in sweat, with every sinew in their bodies stretched to breaking-point. They came on a foot and then started removing the rubble with their bare hands, uncovering the limbs one by one. The head was unscathed. Lamps were lowered, and the name of Chicot began to circulate. He was still warm, his spine broken by a rock.
‘Wrap him in a blanket and put him in a tub,’ Richomme ordered. ‘Now for the young lad. Quickly!’
Maheu gave one last blow with his pick, and a gap opened up; they were through to the men digging from the other side. They called out: they’d just found Jeanlin, unconscious, with both legs broken but still breathing. His father took him in his arms; and even now all he could think to mutter through clenched teeth, by way of expressing his pain, was ‘Christ! Christ! Christ!’ Catherine and the rest of the women had begun to wail again.
They quickly formed themselves into a procession. Bébert had fetched Battle, who was harnessed to the two tubs: in the first lay the body of Chicot, with Étienne watching over it; in the second was Maheu, seated, with Jeanlin lying unconscious across his knees, covered with a piece of woollen cloth ripped from a ventilation door. And off they set, at the walk. Over each tub a lamp shone like a red star. Then behind came the long line of miners, some fifty shadowy figures in single file. By now completely exhausted, they were dragging their feet and slipping on the mud, like some grim herd of animals struck down by a fatal disease. It took nearly half an hour to reach pit-bottom as this seemingly endless subterranean cortège made its way through the thick darkness along the roadways, which forked and twisted and unravelled before them.
At pit-bottom Richomme, who had gone on ahead, had given orders for a cage to be kept empty. Pierron loaded the two tubs immediately. In the one, Maheu sat with his injured child on his knees, while in the other Étienne had to cradle Chicot’s body in his arms so as to hold it steady. Once the other miners had piled into its other levels, the cage began its ascent. This took two minutes. The water falling from the lining of the shaft felt very cold, and the men gazed upwards, impatient for daylight.
Fortunately a pit-boy who had been sent to fetch Dr Vanderhaghen had found him and was bringing him to the pit. Jeanlin and the dead man were taken into the deputies’ room where there was always a roaring fire burning from one year’s end to the next. The buckets of hot water lined up ready for the men to wash their feet were moved to one side; and having spread two mattresses on the flagstone floor, they laid the man and the boy down on them. Only Maheu and Étienne were allowed in. Outside, various putters, hewers and young lads who’d come to see stood around in a group talking quietly.
The doctor took one look at Chicot and muttered:
‘He’s had it!…You can wash him now.’
Two supervisors undressed him and then sponged