Germinal - Emile Zola [22]
‘I know, I know,’ said the young man as each place was identified. ‘I’ve just been there.’
‘The rest of us are all right so far,’ the driver added. ‘But the pits have cut their production. And look at La Victoire over there. Only two batteries of coke-ovens still going.’
He spat and departed once more behind his sleepy horse, having harnessed it to the empty tubs.
Étienne now looked out over the whole region. It was still pitch black, but the driver’s hand seemed to have imbued the darkness with misery and suffering, and the young man intuitively felt its presence all around him in the limitless expanse. Was that not the cry of famine he could hear being borne along on the March wind as it swept across this featureless countryside? The gale was blowing even more furiously now, and it was as though it were bringing the death of labour in its wake, a time of want that would take the lives of many men. And Étienne scanned the horizon trying to pierce the gloom, at once desperate to see and yet fearful of what he might find.
Everything remained sunk in darkness, concealed by the obliterating night; all he could make out, in the far distance, were the blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens. These last, batteries of a hundred slanting chimneys, stood all in a line like ramps of red flame; while the two towering furnaces, further over to the left, blazed with a blue light like giant torches in the middle of the sky. It was a melancholy sight, like watching a building on fire; and the only suns to rise on this menacing horizon were these, the fires that burn at night in a land of iron and coal.
‘Are you from Belgium, then?’ Étienne heard the driver asking behind him when he next returned.
This time he had brought up only three tubs. They might as well be emptied: there was a problem with the extraction cage, where a nut had broken off a bolt, and work would be held up for a quarter of an hour or more. At the foot of the spoil-heap silence had fallen, and the trestles no longer shook with the constant rumble of the banksmen’s tubs. All that could be heard was the distant sound of metal being hammered somewhere down in the pit.
‘No, I’m from the south,’ the young man replied.
Having emptied the tubs, the man in charge of the tippler had sat down on the ground, delighted by the hold-up; but he remained fiercely taciturn and simply looked up at the driver with wide, expressionless eyes as though somehow put out by so much talking. For indeed the driver was not usually given to such expansiveness. He must have liked the look of this stranger and felt one of those sudden urges to confide that sometimes make old people talk to themselves out loud.
‘I’m from Montsou,’ he said. ‘The name’s Bonnemort.’
‘Is that some kind of nickname?’ asked Étienne in surprise.
The old man chuckled contentedly and gestured towards Le Voreux:
‘Yes, it is…They’ve dragged me out of there three times now, barely in one piece. Once with my hair all singed, once full to the gills with earth, and once with my belly full of water, all swollen like a frog’s…So when they saw that I just refused to pop my clogs, they called me Bonnemort, for a laugh.’5
His mirth came louder still, like the screech of a pulley in need of oil, and eventually degenerated into a terrible fit of coughing. The light from the brazier was now shining fully on his large head, with its few remaining white hairs and a flat, ghostly pale face that was stained with bluish blotches. He was a short man, with an enormous neck; his legs bulged outwards, and he had long arms with square hands that hung down to his knees. Otherwise, just like his horse standing there motionless and apparently untroubled by the wind, he seemed to be made of stone and appeared oblivious to the cold and the howling gale that was whistling round his ears. When finally, with one deep rasping scrape of the throat, he had finished coughing, he spat