Germinal - Emile Zola [190]
‘Right, you go first!’ Étienne insisted, as he thrust a hammer into Chaval’s hand. ‘Come on, you took the oath like the rest of us!’
Chaval was shaking and backing away. In the general scrimmage the hammer fell to the ground, and the comrades, who could wait no longer, began to smash the pump with their crowbars or bricks or whatever came to hand. Some of them even broke their sticks over it. The screws worked loose, and the steel and brass plating began to come apart, as though the pump were being torn limb from limb. One mighty blow with a pickaxe shattered the cast-iron casing, the water spurted out, and the chamber emptied out completely, giving one last gurgle like a death rattle.
That was that. The mob found itself outside once again, still in a state of demented fury, and pushing and shoving behind Étienne, who was refusing to let go of Chaval.
‘Death to the scab! Throw him down the shaft!’
The wretched man was white in the face and, with the obsessive stubbornness of an imbecile, kept repeating absently that he needed a wash.
‘Well if that’s your problem,’ said La Levaque, ‘here’s your sink!’
There was a pool where water had previously leaked from the pump. It was white with a thick coat of ice; and having pushed him towards it, they broke the ice and forced him to plunge his head into the extremely cold water.
‘In you go!’ La Brûlé urged. ‘God damn it! If you won’t do it yourself, we’ll soon bloody make you…And now you can have a drink too. Yes, that’s right, just like the animals! With your snout in the trough!’
He was forced to drink, crouching on all fours. Everybody joined in the cruel laughter. One woman pulled his ears, while another threw a pile of dung in his face, having gathered it fresh from the road. His old jersey hung off him in shreds. And with a wild look in his eye he kept jerking forward, trying to break loose and run away.
Maheu had helped to push him forward, and La Maheude was among the women attacking him, both of them eager to satisfy their long-standing sense of grievance against him; and La Mouquette herself, who usually remained on good terms with her former lovers, was furious with this one, shouting at him that he was a useless bastard and threatening to remove his trousers to see if he could still call himself a man.
Étienne told her to be quiet.
‘Enough! There’s no need for everyone to join in…Come on, you. What do you say we sort this out once and for all?’
His fists were clenched, and his eyes blazed with murderous fury as his drunkenness turned into an urge to kill.
‘Are you ready? One of us has got to die. Give him a knife someone. I’ve got mine here.’
Catherine, on the point of collapse, stared at him in horror. She remembered what he had told her about wanting to kill someone whenever he drank, and how the third glass was enough to make him turn nasty, thanks to all the poison his drunkard parents had already deposited in his system. At once she leaped forward and slapped him with both her girlish hands, choking with indignation and screaming in his face:
‘Coward! Coward! Coward!…Haven’t you done enough? First you treat him in this revolting way and now you’re going to kill him when he can’t even stand up!’
She turned to her father and mother and to everyone else standing there.
‘You’re all cowards! Cowards!…Go on, you can kill me too! I’ll scratch your eyes out if you try and lay a finger on him. You cowards!’
She had taken up position in front of her man, ready to defend him, forgetting how he hit her, forgetting their life of misery together, mindful only that since he had taken her she belonged to him and that it brought shame on her that he should be abused like this.
Étienne had turned white when the girl slapped him. At first he had almost struck her back. Then, running a hand over his face with the gesture of somebody sobering up, he broke the deep silence and said to Chaval:
‘She’s right, that’s enough…Bugger off!’
At once Chaval took to his heels, and Catherine raced off after him. The crowd stood rooted to the spot and