Germinal - Emile Zola [136]
‘He’s a pig,’ she said finally. ‘Only a filthy pig could think such disgusting things…Not that I bloody care! It wasn’t worth wasting my breath on him.’
Then she looked Étienne in the eye and said frankly:
‘I have my faults all right, but that’s not one of them…Only two men have ever laid a finger on me, a putter long ago, when I was fifteen, and then Maheu. If he’d left me like the first one, God knows what might have happened to me. Not that I’m boasting about being faithful either. If people behave themselves, it’s often because they haven’t had a chance not to…But I’m just saying how it is, and there are some women round here who couldn’t say the same, could they?’
‘That’s true enough,’ replied Étienne, getting to his feet.
And off he went, while La Maheude decided to relight the fire and pulled two chairs together to set the sleeping Estelle down on them. If Maheu had managed to catch a fish and sell it, they might have some soup after all.
Outside night was already falling, and Étienne walked along in the freezing cold, his bowed head full of black thoughts. He no longer felt anger against Chaval nor pity for the poor girl he was treating so badly. The brutal scene was gradually fading to a blur as his mind was recalled to the prospect of everyone else’s suffering and the terrible reality of their poverty. What he saw was a village without bread, a village of women and children who would go to bed hungry that night, a whole community straining to keep up the struggle on an empty stomach. And the doubt that sometimes overcame him now returned amid the awful melancholy of the dusk and tortured him with misgivings that were stronger than any he had known. What a terrifying responsibility he was taking on! Was he going to drive them still further, make them pursue their stubborn resistance despite the fact that the money and credit were all gone? And how would it all end if no help came, if hunger were to get the better of their courage? Suddenly he could see how it would be, the full calamity: children dying, mothers sobbing, while the men, starved and gaunt, went back down the pits. And on he walked, stumbling over the stones in his path, consumed with unbearable anguish at the thought that the Company would win and that he would have brought disaster upon his comrades.
When he looked up, he found himself outside Le Voreux. The dark, hulking mass of its buildings seemed to be settling lower in the gathering darkness. In the middle of the deserted yard, large, motionless shadows crowded the space, lending it the air of an abandoned fortress. When the winding-engine stopped, the place seemed to give up its soul. At this hour of the night there was not a sign of life anywhere, no lantern shining, not even a voice; and within the vast nothingness that the pit had become, even the sound of the drainage-pump seemed to issue from some mysterious, far-away place, like the gasps of a dying man.
As Étienne gazed at the scene, his pulse began to quicken. The workers might be starving, but the Company was eating into its millions. Why should it necessarily prove the stronger in this war between labour and money? Whatever happened, victory would cost it dear. They would see afterwards who counted the greater number of casualties. Once more he felt a lust for battle, a fierce desire to put an end to their wretched poverty once and for all, even at the price of death. The whole village might just as well perish straight away if the only alternative was to die one by one of famine and injustice. He recalled things from his ill-digested reading,