Germinal - Emile Zola [284]
When Étienne saw her, a pitiful sight in her men’s clothes, with her breasts and stomach looking as though they were distended with dropsy on account of the dampness in the mine, he was so shocked that he started stammering, unable to find the words to explain to her that he was leaving and that he had wanted to come and say goodbye.
She looked at him, oblivious to what he was saying, and then eventually spoke as though to a member of her own family:
‘Surprised to see me here, eh?…Yes, I know, I was going to strangle the first person in our house that went back down, and now here’s me going back. I ought to strangle myself really, oughtn’t I?…Oh, I’d have done so before now, I can tell you, if it weren’t for the old man and the little ones at home!’
And on she went, in her quiet, weary voice. She was not trying to make excuses for herself, it was just how it was. They’d all nearly starved to death, and then she’d made the decision, to stop them being thrown out of the village.
‘How is the old man?’ Étienne inquired.
‘He’s still as gentle as ever, and he keeps himself clean…But he’s completely cracked in the head…He was never found guilty of that business, you know? There was talk of putting him in the madhouse, but I wouldn’t have it. They’d have slipped something in his soup…But it’s done us a lot of harm all the same, because he’ll never get his pension. One of the gentlemen told me it would be immoral to give him one now.’
‘Is Jeanlin working?’
‘Yes, the gentlemen have found a job for him, above ground. He gets twenty sous…Oh, I can’t complain. The bosses have been very good to us, as they pointed out indeed…The boy’s twenty sous, plus my thirty, makes fifty altogether. If there weren’t six of us, we’d have enough to live on. But Estelle’s eating everything now, and the worst of it is that it’s going to be another four or five years before Lénore and Henri are old enough to go down the pit.’
Étienne could not help groaning:
‘Them too!’
La Maheude’s white cheeks flushed, and her eyes blazed. But then her shoulders sagged, as though under the weight of destiny.
‘What can I do? They’re next…The job’s killed everyone else, so now it’s their turn.’
She stopped as they were interrupted by men pushing tubs past. Daylight was beginning to filter through the tall, grimy windows, dulling the lanterns in its greyish blur; and the winding-engine continued to shudder into life every three minutes, the cables unwound, and the cages went on swallowing the men.
‘Come on, you idle lot, get a move on!’ shouted Pierron. ‘Get in, or we’ll never be finished today.’
He looked at La Maheude, but she did not move. She had already let three cages go without her, and now, as though she had just woken up and remembered what Étienne had told her at the beginning, she said:
‘So you’re leaving?’
‘Yes, this morning.’
‘You’re right. Probably better to go somewhere else, if you can…But I’m glad to have seen you, because at least you’ll know now that I don’t bear you any grudge. There was a time I could have smashed your head in, when everyone was getting killed. But then you think things over, don’t you, and you realize in the end that it’s nobody’s fault in particular…No, no, it’s not your fault, it’s everybody’s fault.’
She now talked quite