Germinal - Emile Zola [174]
‘God help us! Are you asleep?’ Chaval shouted angrily again as soon as he heard Catherine stop. ‘How did I get stuck with such a bloody hopeless bitch, would you tell me? Will you for God’s sake fill your tub and take it away!’
She was standing at the foot of the coal-face, leaning on her shovel; and she began to feel faint, staring at everyone with a blank expression and ignoring Chaval’s order. She could barely see them in the reddish glow from the lamps; and though they were stark naked, like animals, they were so black with the grime of sweat and coal-dust that their nakedness did not trouble her. They seemed bent upon some indeterminate labour, an array of monkeys’ backs straining with effort, an infernal vision of ruddy limbs caught up in a great thudding and grunting. But they must have been able to see her better because the picks stopped tapping and the men started teasing her about having taken off her trousers.
‘Mind you don’t catch cold now!’
‘What a pair of legs! Hey, Chaval, how about one each?’
‘Give us a peep, then! Come on, lift your shirt! Higher! Higher!’
Not at all put out by this ribaldry, Chaval laid into her again:
‘For Christ’s sake, get a move on!…Oh, she doesn’t mind that kind of talk. She’d stand there listening to it till the cows come home.’
With great effort Catherine had made herself fill the tub, and now she began to push it. The roadway was too wide for her to be able to gain purchase by arching her back against the timbering on either side, and she kept twisting her ankles as she tried to get a grip on the rails with her bare feet; and so progress was slow as she strained forward with her arms stretched out taut in front of her and her body bent in half. As soon as she reached the break, the torture by fire began again, and enormous beads of sweat started falling from every part of her body like heavy raindrops in a storm. By the time she was scarcely a third of the way along, it was pouring off her, and she could see nothing. She, too, was covered in black grime. Her tight shirt looked as though it had been soaked in ink; and as it clung to her skin, the movement of her thighs made it ride up over her hips, restricting her movements so painfully that once more she was forced to stop.
What was wrong with her today? Never before had her legs felt so much as though they were made of jelly. It must be the bad air. The ventilation did not reach the end of this remote road, and the atmosphere was full of all manner of gases which gently fizzed from the coal with the sound of spring-water, and sometimes in such quantity that the lamps refused to burn; to say nothing of the firedamp, which everyone had ceased to care about since the seam blew so much of the stuff into the miners’ faces from one week’s end to the next. She knew all about this bad air – ‘dead air’1 the miners called it – which consisted of a lower layer of heavy gases that caused asphyxiation and an upper layer of light gases that spontaneously combusted and could blow up every coal-face in a pit, killing hundreds of men in one single thunderous blast. She had breathed in so much of it since she was a child that she was surprised not to be able to tolerate it better, but her ears were buzzing and her throat was on fire.
Unable to bear the heat any longer, she felt a desperate need to remove her shirt. The cloth was torturing her, and the merest crease seemed to cut into her and burn her flesh. She resisted the urge and made another attempt to push the tub, but she had to straighten up again. Then, all of a sudden, telling herself that she would cover up at the relay-point, she stripped completely, untying the string and removing her shirt in such feverish haste that she would have torn her skin off, too, had she been able. Now completely