Germinal - Emile Zola [32]
At length Étienne was overtaken by a renewed sense of the misgivings he had felt up on the spoil-heap. Why bother anyway? This overman would send him away just like all the others. A sudden feeling of panic decided the matter and he rushed out, stopping only when he had reached the building that housed the steam-generators. Through the wide-open door seven boilers could be seen, each with a double fire-grate. Surrounded by white steam and whistling valves, a stoker was busy stoking one of these grates, whose burning coals could be felt from the doorway; and Étienne, grateful for the warmth, was just walking towards them when he bumped into a new group of colliers arriving at the mine. It was the Maheus and the Levaques. When he caught sight of Catherine, at the front of the group, with her gentle, boyish demeanour, some impulse or other made him try his luck one last time.
‘Er, comrade, I don’t suppose they’re looking for another pair of hands round here, are they? I’ll do whatever’s required.’
She looked at him in surprise, startled by this sudden voice coming from the shadows. But, behind her, Maheu had heard and stopped to respond with a brief word. No, they didn’t need anyone. But the thought of this poor devil of a worker being left to roam the countryside stayed with him; and as he walked away, he said to the others:
‘There you are! That could be us, you see…So we mustn’t grumble. It’s not everyone who gets the chance to do an honest day’s work.’
The group walked in and made straight for the changing-area, a huge room with roughly plastered walls and padlocked cupboards along each side. In the middle stood an iron stove, a kind of doorless oven ablaze with red embers and so fully stoked that lumps of coal kept splitting and tumbling out on to the earthen floor. The only light in the room came from this grate, and blood-red reflections played along the grimy woodwork and up on to a ceiling that was coated with black dust.
As the Maheus came in, peals of laughter could be heard amid the stifling heat. Some thirty workers were standing with their backs to the flames, roasting themselves with an air of profound contentment. Everyone came here like this before going down and got themselves a good skinful of warmth so that they could face the dampness of the mine. But that morning there was even more merriment than usual because they were teasing La Mouquette, one of the putters, a good-natured girl of eighteen with huge breasts and buttocks that were almost bursting out of her clothes. She lived at Réquillart with her father, old Mouque, who looked after the horses, and her brother Mouquet, who was a banksman, except that since they didn’t all work the same hours she would go to the mine on her own; and, whether in the cornfields during summer or up against a wall in wintertime, she would take her pleasure with the lover of the moment. The whole pit had taken its turn; it was simply a case of ‘after you, comrade, and no harm done’. When somebody once suggested she’d been with a nailer from Marchiennes, she had almost exploded with anger, screaming about how she was a respectable girl and how she’d sooner cut off her own arm than for anybody to be able to say they’d ever seen her with anyone but a colliery worker.
‘So what about that tall fellow, Chaval, then? He’s had his day, has he?’ one of the miners said with a snigger. ‘Helped yourself to that other little chap instead, have you? But he’d need a ladder, he would!…I’ve seen the pair of you round the back of Réquillart, and sure enough, there he was standing on a milestone.’
‘So?’ La Mouquette answered cheerfully. ‘What’s that to you? At least nobody asked you to come and give him a push.’
The men laughed even louder at this good-natured coarseness as they stood there flexing their shoulders, already half roasted by the fire; and meanwhile La Mouquette, also roaring with laughter, continued to move among them, flaunting the indecency of her dress