Germinal - Emile Zola [219]
‘What filthy weather!’ he added. ‘How about you? Any news? Things still getting worse?…I heard that young Négrel had gone off to Belgium to fetch men from the Borinage coal-field. Christ, we’re done for if it’s true!’
He had given an involuntary shudder on entering this dark, icy-cold room, where he had to wait for his eyes to get used to the gloom before he could make out these poor, wretched people inside, and whom even then he discerned only as a thickening of shadow. He felt the repugnance and unease of the working man who has been lifted out of his class by the refinement of study and the thrust of ambition. The poverty and the smell and all these people living on top of one another! And the desperate pity of it all that was bringing a lump to his throat! Their last hour had come, and he found the spectacle so upsetting that he searched for some way to advise them to give up the struggle.
But suddenly there was Maheu standing foursquare in front of him and shouting:
‘Belgians! They wouldn’t dare, the useless bastards!…Well, just let them send their Belgians down, and then watch us destroy their pits for them!’
Looking embarrassed, Étienne explained that it was impossible to move an inch round the place: the soldiers guarding the pits would protect the Belgian workers as they went down. And Maheu clenched his fists, infuriated above all at having a bayonet in his back, as he put it. So the miners were no longer masters in their own backyard? Were they to be treated like galley-slaves and forced to work at rifle-point? He loved his pit, and it had hurt him greatly not to go down it for the last two months. So he saw red at the thought of being insulted like this, by these foreigners they were talking of bringing in. Then he remembered that he had been sacked, and it broke his heart.
‘I don’t know why I’m getting worked up about it,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t belong in the bloody place any more…And once they’ve kicked me out of this house, I may as well go and die along the road somewhere.’
‘Enough!’ said Étienne. ‘They’d take you back tomorrow if you wanted. Nobody sacks good workers.’
He broke off in astonishment on hearing Alzire, who was still laughing away quietly in the delirium of her fever. So far he had been able to identify only the stiff outline of old Bonnemort, and this gaiety on the part of a sick child disturbed him. This time things had gone too far, if the children were now starting to die. In a trembling voice, he took the plunge:
‘Look here, this can’t go on. We’re done for…We’ll have to give in.’
La Maheude, who had remained motionless and silent until then, now let fly, screaming in his face as though he were one of her own, swearing like a man:
‘What did you say? You? Of all bloody people!’
He tried to explain, but she wouldn’t let him speak.
‘Don’t you bloody well dare say that again, or God help me! I may be a woman but you’ll soon feel the back of my hand across your face…We’d have spent the last two months dying of starvation, I’d have sold every object I possess, and my children would have been ill, but all for no purpose, all to keep on with the same old injustice…Oh, I tell you, the very thought of it makes my blood boil. No! No! I’d sooner set fire to the whole bloody lot and kill every single one of them rather than give up now.’
She gestured towards Maheu through the darkness with a grand, menacing wave of her hand:
‘I tell you here and now. If that man returns to work, I’ll be there waiting for him on the road, and I’ll spit in his face and tell him he’s one filthy coward!’
Étienne could not see her, but he could feel the heat coming from her, like the breath