Germinal - Emile Zola [220]
‘Yes indeed, I’d skin them alive with my own bare hands…No, we’ve had quite enough, thank you very much! Our time has come, you said so yourself…When I think that our fathers and grandfathers and grandfathers’ fathers and everyone before them have all suffered as we’re suffering now, and that our sons and their sons will all suffer the same, it makes me absolutely wild. Just give me the knife…We didn’t do the half of what we should have done the other day. We should have demolished the whole of Montsou, down to the last sodding brick! And do you know what? My one big regret is that I didn’t let Grandpa choke the life out of that girl from La Piolaine…After all, they’re happy enough to choke the life out of my kids, aren’t they?’
Her words cut through the darkness like the blows of an axe. The closed horizon had refused to open and, deep inside her head, riven by suffering, the unattainable ideal was now turning to poison.
‘You’ve misunderstood me,’ Étienne managed to say finally, beating a retreat. ‘I meant we ought to try and reach an agreement with the Company. I know for a fact that the pits are deteriorating badly, and it would most likely consent to some form of compromise.’
‘No, not one inch!’ she screamed.
At that moment Lénore and Henri came home, empty-handed. A gentleman had given them two sous right enough, but as Lénore was always kicking her little brother, the money had fallen into the snow. Jeanlin had helped them look, but they had not been able to find the coins.
‘Where is Jeanlin, then?’
‘He went off somewhere, Mum. He said there were things he had to do.’
Étienne listened, sick at heart. Previously she used to threaten to kill them if they went begging. Now she sent them out on to the roads herself, and she even talked of them all going, all ten thousand miners from Montsou, each with stick and bundle like the paupers of old, roaming the region and terrifying its inhabitants.
The anguish in that dark room grew deeper still. The children had come home, hungry and wanting food, and now they wondered why no one was eating; they grumbled and mooched about, eventually treading on the feet of their dying sister, who uttered a groan. Furious, La Maheude tried to slap them and lashed out at random in the dark. When they started howling and demanding bread, she burst out crying and slumped down on to the floor, hugging the pair of them as well as the sick Alzire in one single embrace; and the tears poured out of her, copiously, in a form of nervous reaction which left her feeling completely limp and exhausted, as she repeated the same phrase over and over, calling on death to come: ‘Dear God, why will You not take us all now? For pity’s sake, take us and be done with it!’ The grandfather continued to sit motionless like a gnarled old tree battered by the wind and the rain, while the father paced up and down from fireplace to dresser, his eyes firmly fixed in front of him.
But then the door opened, and this time it was Dr Vander-haghen.
‘What the devil!’ he exclaimed. ‘A candle won’t harm your eyesight, you know…Come on, quick, I’m in a hurry.’
As usual he kept on grumbling, worn out by work. Fortunately he had some matches, and Maheu had to light six of these, one after the other, and hold them up so that the doctor could examine the sick girl. Stripped of her blanket, she lay shivering in the flickering light, like a thin, starving bird in the snow,