Germinal - Emile Zola [147]
And when he hesitated:
‘So you’re still afraid of me, are you?’
Won over by her laughter, he followed her in. He was touched by how readily she had given the old woman her bread. She didn’t want to receive him in her father’s room and so she led him into her own, where she immediately poured out two small glasses of gin. Her room was very clean and tidy, and he complimented her on it. In fact the family seemed well provided for: her father was still working as a stableman at Le Voreux; and she herself, not being the sort to stand idly by, had started taking in laundry, which earned her thirty sous a day. Just because you enjoy a laugh with the lads doesn’t mean you’re lazy.
‘What is it?’ she said softly, as she came and put her arms round his waist. ‘Don’t you like me, then?’
She had said this so appealingly that he, too, couldn’t help laughing.
‘But I do like you,’ he replied.
‘No, you don’t, not the way I mean…You know how much I want to. Please? It would make me so happy!’
She meant it all right; she’d been asking him for the past six months. He gazed at her as she clung to him tightly with trembling arms, her face raised towards him in such amorous entreaty that he was deeply affected. There was nothing pretty about her big round face, with its yellowish, coal-stained complexion; but a flame glowed in her eyes, and a magical quivering of desire turned her skin as pink as a child’s. And so, being presented with such a humble, eager offer of her person, he simply could not refuse any longer.
‘Yes! You do want to!’ she stammered in delight, ‘You really do!’
And she gave herself clumsily, in a kind of virginal swoon, as though this were her first time and she had never known any other man. Later, when he was leaving, she was the one who was full of gratitude, and she kept thanking him and kissing his hands.
Étienne was a little ashamed of this piece of good fortune. Men did not brag about having La Mouquette. As he made his way home he promised himself that there would be no repeat. And yet he remembered her fondly, she was a fine girl.
In any case, when he reached the village, news of a serious kind soon drove all thought of the episode from his head. It was rumoured that the Company would perhaps agree to a further concession if the members of the deputation would make a new approach to the manager. At least this was the word from the deputies. The truth was that the mines were suffering even more than the miners as a result of the stand-off. The stubbornness of both parties was wreaking increasing damage: while labour was dying of hunger, capital was bleeding to death. Each day’s stoppage meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of francs. The machine that lies idle is a machine that is dying. The plant and equipment were deteriorating, and the money invested in them was draining away like water into the sand. Since the meagre stockpiles of coal had started disappearing from the pit-yards, customers had been talking of obtaining their supplies from Belgium; and that posed a threat for the future. But what worried the Company most, and what it was most careful to conceal, was the growing damage to the roadways and coal-faces. There weren’t enough deputies to keep up with the repairs; timbering was giving way all over the place, and there were rock-falls almost by the hour. The damage was soon so extensive that it would require long months of repair work before they could start hewing coal again. Stories were already going round: at Crèvecœur three hundred metres of road had subsided in one piece, blocking access to the Cinq-Paumes seam; at Madeleine, the Maugrétout seam was breaking up and filling with water. Management was refusing to confirm the stories when two disasters happened in quick succession which forced them to come clean. One morning, near La Piolaine, they found that a crevasse had opened above Mirou’s northern roadway, where there had been a rock-fall the day before. The next day part of Le Voreux subsided and sent such a tremor under