Germinal - Emile Zola [282]
Étienne paused for a moment in the middle of the road, which was now flushed with pink. It was so good to breathe in this fresh, pure air of early spring. It was going to be a beautiful day. Slowly the dawn was breaking, and the sap was rising with the sun. He set off again, striking the ground firmly with his dog-wood stick and watching the distant plain emerge from the early-morning mists. He had not seen anybody since the disaster; La Maheude had visited the hospital once but had presumably been prevented from coming again. But he knew that the whole of Village Two Hundred and Forty was now employed at Jean-Bart, and that she herself had gone back to work.
The deserted roads were slowly filling up, and silent, pale-faced miners were constantly passing Étienne. The Company, so he’d heard, had been taking unfair advantage of its victory. When the miners had returned to the pits, vanquished by hunger after two and a half months out on strike, they had been forced to accept the separate rate for the timbering, this disguised pay-cut that was even more odious to them now that it was stained with the blood of their comrades. They were being robbed of an hour’s pay and made to break their oath that they would never give in; and this enforced perjury stuck in their throats with the bitterness of gall. Work was resuming everywhere, at Mirou, at Madeleine, at Crèvecœur, at La Victoire. All over the region, along roads still plunged in darkness, the herd was tramping through the mists of dawn, long lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse. Shivering under their thin cotton clothes, they walked with their arms folded, rolling their hips and hunching their backs, to which their pieces, wedged between shirt and coat, added its hump. But behind this mass return to work, among these black, wordless shadows who neither laughed nor even looked about them, one could sense the teeth gritted in anger, the hearts brimming with hatred, and the reluctant acceptance of one master and one master only: the need to eat.
The closer Étienne came to the pit, the more he saw their number increase. Almost all were walking on their own; even those who had come in groups followed each other in single file, worn out already, sick of other people and sick of themselves. He noticed one very old man with eyes that blazed like coals beneath his white forehead. Another man, young this time, was breathing heavily like a storm about to break. Many held their clogs in their hands, and it was hardly possible to hear them as they padded softly over the ground in their thick woollen socks. They streamed past endlessly, like the forced march of some conquered army retreating after a terrible defeat, heads bowed in sullen fury, desperate to join battle once more and take their revenge.
When Étienne arrived, Jean-Bart was just emerging from the darkness, and the lanterns hanging from the railway trestles were still burning in the growing light of dawn. Above the dark buildings a white plume of steam rose from the drainage-pump, delicately tinged with carmine. He took the screening-shed stairway and made his way to the unloading area.
The miners were beginning to go down, and men were coming up from the changing-room. For a moment he just stood there, amid all the noise and the bustle. The cast-iron flooring shook as tubs rumbled across; the pulleys were turning and paying out