Germinal - Emile Zola [155]
At the same moment Étienne had reached Réquillart. The previous evening La Mouquette had begged him to come back and see her again, which he was now rather ashamedly doing, for though he refused to admit it to himself, he had taken a fancy to this girl who worshipped him like the Lord and Saviour. Anyway he was coming to break things off. He would see her and explain that she was to stop chasing after him, because of the comrades. Times were hard, and it didn’t do to indulge oneself when people were dying of hunger. But not finding her at home, he had decided to wait, and now he was keeping a watchful eye over every passing shadow.
Beneath the ruined headgear yawned the entrance to the old mine, which was half blocked up. A beam stuck up into the air with a piece of roof attached to it, looking like a gibbet suspended over the black hole; and two trees were growing out of the crumbling masonry that encircled the lip of the shaft, a plane and a rowan, which looked as if they had sprung from the very depths of the earth. Nature had been allowed to run wild here, with thick tangles of grass surrounding the entrance to the chasm, which was full of old timbers and overgrown with sloe and hawthorn where warblers nested in the spring. Reluctant to incur heavy expenditure on its upkeep, the Company had been planning for the past ten years to fill in the disused mine; but it was waiting until it had installed a ventilator at Le Voreux, because the furnace that drove the ventilation system for the two interconnecting pits was located at the bottom of Réquillart, where what was formerly a ventilation shaft now served as a flue. In the meantime they had simply reinforced the shaft’s lining by installing cross-stays, which prevented coal from being extracted; they had abandoned the upper roadways and now maintained only the bottom one where the hellish furnace blazed, an enormous brazier of coal, which created such a powerful draught that the air blew like a tempest from one end of the neighbouring mine to the other. As a precaution there had been an order to maintain the ladders in the escape shaft so that people could still go up and down, but nobody had bothered; the ladders were rotting, and some of the staging platforms had already collapsed. At the top an enormous bramble blocked the entrance to the shaft; and because the first ladder had lost some of its rungs, in order to reach it you had to dangle from a root of the rowan tree and let yourself down into the blackness below, hoping for the best.
Étienne was waiting patiently behind a bush when he heard a prolonged slithering through the branches. He thought he might have disturbed an adder. But the sudden flaring of a match startled him, and he was astonished to see Jeanlin lighting a candle and disappearing below ground. Full of curiosity he approached the hole: the child had vanished, but a faint gleam of light could be seen coming from the second platform down. After a moment’s hesitation Étienne grabbed some roots and lowered himself, wondering if he would fall the full five hundred and twenty-four metres of the shaft’s depth, but eventually feeling a rung beneath his foot. And then gently he descended. Jeanlin could not have heard him because the light continued to recede beneath him, and the huge menacing shadow cast by the small boy flickered on the walls of the shaft as his hips swayed wildly on account of his damaged legs. He was swinging downwards like a monkey, using hands or feet or chin to hold on whenever rungs were missing. Ladder followed ladder, each seven metres long, some still solid, others loose or cracking and ready to break; and platform followed narrow platform, each one rotting and green with mould, which made it like stepping