Germinal - Emile Zola [37]
‘Keep going, we’re there!’ he heard Catherine say.
But as indeed he reached the spot, another voice shouted from the coal-face:
‘What the hell’s this, then? Some kind of joke or what? I have to come a whole two kilometres from Montsou, and I’m bloody here first!’
This was Chaval, a tall, thin, bony man of twenty-five with strong features. He was cross at having had to wait. When he caught sight of Étienne, he asked in scornful surprise:
‘And what have we got here, then?’
When Maheu had told him what had happened, he added through clenched teeth:
‘So now the boys are stealing the girls’ bread out of their mouths.’1
The two men exchanged a look, their eyes blazing with the kind of instinctive hatred that flares in an instant. Étienne had sensed the insult, but without yet fully understanding its meaning. There was a silence, and everyone set to work. All the seams had gradually filled up, and all the faces were being worked, on each level, at the end of each road. The gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, nearly seven hundred miners who were now at work inside this giant anthill, all burrowing into the earth and riddling it with holes, like an old piece of wood being eaten away by woodworm. And in the heavy silence created by the crushing mass of earth it was possible to put an ear to the rock and hear the teeming activity of human insects on the march, from the whirr of the cables rising and falling as the cages took the coal to the surface to the grinding of tools as they bit into the seam deep within each working.
As he turned, Étienne once more found himself pressed up close against Catherine. But this time he could discern the nascent curves of her breasts, and at once he understood the nature of the warmth he had felt:
‘So you’re a girl, then?’ he murmured in amazement.
Unabashed, she replied with her usual cheerfulness:
‘Of course I am…Dear me! That took you some time!’
IV
The four hewers had just taken up position, stretched out at different levels one above the other and covering the entire height of the coal-face. Wooden planks, secured by hooks, stopped the coal from falling after they had cut it, and between these planks each man occupied a space of about four metres along the seam. This particular seam was so thin,1 barely fifty centimetres at this point, that they found themselves virtually crushed between roof and wall; they had to drag themselves forward on their elbows and knees and were quite unable to turn round without banging their shoulders. In order to get at the coal they had to lie on one side, twist their necks, and use both arms in order to raise their rivelaine, a short-handled pick, which they wielded at an angle.
Zacharie was at the bottom; then came Levaque and Chaval above him, and finally Maheu at the very top. Each man hacked into the shale bedrock, digging it out with his pick. Then he would make two vertical cuts in the coal, insert an iron wedge into the space above, and prise out a lump. The coal was soft, and the lump would break into pieces which then rolled down over his stomach and legs. Once these pieces had piled up against the boards put there to retain them, the hewers disappeared from view, immured in their narrow cleft.
Maheu had the worst of it. Up at the top the temperature reached thirty-five degrees; there was no circulation of air, and the suffocating atmosphere was potentially fatal.