Germinal - Emile Zola [27]
Jeanlin sniggered, and even Alzire’s eyes shone. Each morning they shared the same joke about the threesome next door, where a hewer was renting a room out to one of the stonemen, which meant that the wife could have two men, one for the night and one for the day.
‘Philomène’s coughing,’ Catherine went on, after listening for a moment.
She was talking about the Levaques’ eldest daughter, a tall girl of nineteen, who was Zacharie’s girlfriend and had already had two children by him. As if that was not enough, she had such a weak chest that she had never been able to work down the mine and worked instead in the screening-shed.
‘Pah! Philomène!’ Zacharie retorted. ‘Fat lot she cares, she’s asleep!…It’s disgusting, it really is, lying in like that till six in the morning.’
He was in the middle of pulling on his trousers when suddenly an idea occurred to him and he opened the window. Outside in the darkness the village was waking, and lights were going on one by one, visible between the slats of the shutters. There was another argument: as Zacharie leaned out to see if he could spot the overman from Le Voreux emerging from the Pierrons’ house opposite, where people said he was sleeping with Pierron’s wife, his sister shouted at him that Pierron had been working on the day shift at pit-bottom since yesterday and that therefore Dansaert would obviously not have been able to spend the night there. Gusts of icy-cold air were blowing into the room, and the two of them were angrily insisting on the accuracy of their information when there was a sudden wailing and screaming. It was Estelle in her cot, who had been disturbed by the cold.
Maheu woke up at once. What on earth was the matter with him? Here he was going back to sleep like some good-for-nothing layabout. And he swore so savagely that the children in the next room did not breathe another word. Zacharie and Jeanlin finished washing, slowly, for both of them were already weary. Alzire kept staring, wide-eyed. The two little ones, Lénore and Henri, still lay wrapped in each other’s arms, both of them breathing in the same short breaths; neither had stirred an inch, despite the racket.
‘Catherine! Bring me the candle!’ shouted Maheu.
She was just finishing buttoning up her jacket, and she carried the candle into her parents’ room, leaving her brothers to hunt for their clothes in the modicum of light coming through the door. Her father jumped out of bed. Catherine did not wait but groped her way downstairs in her thick woollen stockings and lit another candle in the parlour, in order to make the coffee. The family’s clogs were lined up under the dresser.
‘Will you be quiet, you little brat!’ Maheu shouted again, infuriated by Estelle’s continual screaming.
He was short like Grandpa Bonnemort, of whom he offered a stouter version, with the same large head and flat, pallid face, topped by close-cropped yellow hair. The baby was wailing even more loudly now, terrified by the big, gnarled arms swinging about above her.
‘Leave her be! You know she won’t be quiet,’ said La Maheude, stretching out in the middle of the bed.
She, too, had just woken up, and she began to complain about how ridiculous it was that she never seemed to get a proper night’s sleep. Why couldn’t they all leave quietly? Buried beneath the blanket, all that could be seen of her was her long face with its broad features, which had a certain heavy beauty but which, at the age of thirty-nine, had already been disfigured by her life of poverty and the seven children she had borne. With her eyes fixed on the ceiling she spoke slowly as her husband got dressed. Neither of them heeded the little girl who was crying so hard that she was nearly choking.
‘Look, I’m down to my last sou, you know, and it’s still only Monday. There are another six days to go till the fortnight’s up4…We just can’t go on like this. You bring in nine francs5 between you, all told. Well, how am I supposed to manage on that, I ask you? There are ten of us