Germinal - Emile Zola [28]
‘What d’you mean, nine francs?’ Maheu objected. ‘Me and Zacharie get three, which makes six…Catherine and Father get two, which makes four; four and six make ten…And Jeanlin, he gets one, which makes eleven.’
‘Eleven, yes, but then there are the Sundays and the days when there’s no work…It’s never more than nine, believe me.’
Busy searching for his leather belt on the floor, he made no reply. Then, as he stood up, he said:
‘You can’t grumble, though. At least I’m still fit. There’s a few of them at forty-two who get transferred to doing maintenance work.’
‘That’s as may be, love, but it doesn’t earn us any more, does it?…So what on earth am I going to do? You haven’t got anything, have you?’
‘Two sous.’
‘Oh, keep them, buy yourself a beer…But my God, seriously, what am I going to do? Six days? That’s ages. We owe Maigrat sixty francs. He threw me out of his shop the other day…which won’t stop me going back there, but if he insists that no means no…’
And La Maheude went on in the same gloomy tone, never moving her head but closing her eyes from time to time to blot out the sorry light of the candle. She told him how there was no food in the cupboard, and how the little ones kept asking for bread and butter, how there was no coffee left, and how the water gave you colic, and about the long days spent trying to cheat their hunger with boiled cabbage leaves. Bit by bit she had been obliged to raise her voice to make herself heard above Estelle’s wailing, which was becoming intolerable. Maheu seemed suddenly to hear her again and, quite beside himself, he grabbed the little girl out of her cradle and threw her down on her mother’s bed, spluttering with rage:
‘Here, take her, before I throttle the living daylights out of her!…Bloody child! It has all it wants, it’s got a breast to feed it, and then it complains louder than all the rest!’
Estelle had indeed begun to feed. Having vanished beneath the blanket, she was soothed by the warmth of the bed, and all that could be heard of her now was the faint sound of greedy sucking.
‘Didn’t the bourgeois at La Piolaine tell you to go and see them?’ Maheu continued after a while.
His wife pulled a face as if to say she didn’t hold out much hope there.
‘Yes, they know me. They give clothes to the children of the poor…All right, I’ll take Lénore and Henri round to see them this morning. If only they’d just give me five francs6 instead.’
Silence fell once more. Maheu was now dressed and ready. He stood there motionless for a moment, and then finally he muttered:
‘Well, what can we do? It’s how things are. See what you can manage for the soup…Standing here talking about it isn’t going to do any good. I’d do better to get to work.’
‘You’re right,’ La Maheude replied. ‘Blow the candle out, will you? I’d rather not see things too clearly just now!’
He blew out the candle. Zacharie and Jeanlin were already on their way down, and he followed them; the wooden staircase creaked beneath their heavy, wool-clad feet. Behind him, the landing and the bedroom were once more sunk in darkness. The little ones slept on, and even Alzire’s eyelids were shut. But their mother lay there in the dark with her eyes open, and Estelle purred away like a kitten as she continued to suck on the exhausted woman’s sagging breast.
Down below Catherine had begun by seeing to the fire. The cooking range, of cast-iron, had a grate in the middle, with ovens to either side, and a coal fire was kept burning in it day and night. Every month the Company gave each family eight hectolitres of escaillage, a type of hard coal collected off the roadway floors. It was difficult to light but, having damped down the fire the night before, the girl had only to rake it in the morning and add a few carefully chosen pieces of softer coal. Then she placed a kettle on the grate and crouched in front of the kitchen dresser.
The room, which was quite large and occupied the whole of the ground floor, was painted apple green and had the spick-and-span look of a Flemish kitchen, with flagstones that were sluiced regularly