Germinal - Emile Zola [116]
‘The head’s all right,’ the doctor continued, kneeling on Jeanlin’s mattress. ‘So’s his chest…Ah! it’s the legs that took the brunt of it.’
As deftly as a nurse he undressed the child himself, loosening his cap, removing his jacket and pulling his trousers and shirt off. And his poor little body emerged, as thin as an insect’s, filthy with black dust and yellowish earth and mottled with patches of blood. He couldn’t be examined properly in this state, and so they had to wash him too. The sponging then seemed to make him even thinner, and his flesh was so pallid and transparent that one could see his bones. He was a pitiable sight, the last, degenerate offspring of a destitute breed, a suffering scrap of a thing half crushed to death by rock. Once he was clean, they could see the bruises on his thighs, two red blotches against the whiteness of his skin.
Jeanlin recovered consciousness and groaned. At the foot of the mattress, arms dangling by his side, Maheu stood gazing at him; and huge tears rolled down his cheeks.
‘So you’re his father?’ asked the doctor, looking up. ‘There’s no call for tears. You can see he’s not dead…Here, give me a hand instead.’
He diagnosed two simple fractures. But he was worried about the right leg; it would probably have to be amputated.
At that point Négrel and Dansaert, having eventually been notified, arrived with Richomme. Négrel listened to the deputy’s report with growing exasperation. He exploded: it was always the damned timbering! If he’d said it once, he’d said it a hundred times: men would die! And now the brutes were talking about going on strike if anyone forced them to timber properly! The worst of it was that this time the Company would have to pay for the damage itself. Monsieur Hennebeau would be pleased!
‘Who is it?’ he asked Dansaert, who was standing silently by the body as it was being wrapped in a sheet.
‘Chicot, one of our best,’ the overman replied. ‘He’s got three children…Poor bugger!’
Dr Vanderhaghen asked for Jeanlin to be transported immediately to his parents’ house. It was six o’clock and already getting dark, so it would be best to move the body as well; and the engineer gave orders for the horses to be harnessed to a wagon and for a stretcher to be fetched. The injured boy was placed on the stretcher, and the dead man was loaded into the wagon on his mattress.
Putters were still standing outside the door, chatting with some miners who had remained behind to see what was happening. When the door of the deputies’ room opened again, the group fell silent. A new funeral cortège formed up, with the wagon in front, then the stretcher, and finally the line of people following. They moved out of the pit-yard and slowly climbed the road towards the village. The first frosts of November had stripped the vast plain bare, and night was slowly burying it in a shroud of livid white as though a pall had detached itself from the paling sky.
Then Étienne whispered to Maheu that he should send Catherine on ahead to warn La Maheude and soften the blow. Her father, looking dazed as he followed the stretcher, nodded his agreement; and the girl ran on, since they were nearly there now. But the familiar dark outline of the box-shaped wagon had already been spotted. Women were careering out on to the pavements, and three or four were tearing along in a panic, not a bonnet on their heads. Soon there were thirty, fifty of them, all gripped by the same terror. Had someone been killed? Who was it? Levaque’s story had earlier set their minds at rest, but now the tale assumed the dimensions of a nightmare: it wasn’t just one man who had perished but ten, and the funeral-wagon was going to bring each one of them back like this, body by body.
Catherine had found her mother in a lather of foreboding; and before she could blurt out a few words, La Maheude screamed:
‘It’s your father!’
The girl tried in vain to say it wasn’t and to tell her about Jeanlin. But La Maheude wasn’t listening,