Germinal - Emile Zola [39]
‘Yes, but look,’ replied Zacharie, ‘it’s sagging. There’s a crack there. I’m worried it’s going to fall in.’
But his father merely shrugged. Let it fall in, then! Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time. They’d survive all right. Eventually he grew angry and ordered his son back to the coal-face.
In fact they were all taking a breather now. Levaque was lying on his back cursing as he examined his left thumb where the skin had been taken off by a piece of falling sandstone. Chaval was furiously removing his shirt, stripping to the waist to try and get cool. They were already black with coal, covered in a layer of fine dust that dissolved in their sweat and trickled down them and collected in pools. Maheu was the first to set to again, tapping away at the coal lower down so that his head was flush with the rock. The dripping water now landed on his forehead and with such stubborn regularity that he felt as though it were boring a hole through the bone in his skull.
‘Don’t mind them,’ Catherine said to Étienne by way of explanation. ‘They’re always arguing about something.’
And, in her usual helpful way, she went on with the lesson.
Each full tub reached the surface just as it had left the coal-face, marked with a special token2 so that the checkweighman could credit it to the appropriate team of miners. It was important to make sure, therefore, that it was properly full, and with clean coal, otherwise the checkweighman would not record it.
Étienne’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, and he looked at her, with her white, anaemic skin. He could not have said how old she was: perhaps twelve, he thought, so slight of build was she. Yet he sensed that she was older than that, noting her boyish lack of inhibition and her directness, which made him feel a little awkward. He didn’t find her attractive – the pale, Pierrot face framed in its tight-fitting cap made her look too much like a young urchin – but he was amazed by the child’s strength, which seemed to derive from a mixture of wiry sinews and considerable dexterity. She could fill the tub quicker than he could, in a fast, regular succession of small shovelfuls; and then, slowly and steadily, she would push it along to the top of the incline in such a way that it never got stuck and that both she and it passed easily under the low rocks. He, on the other hand, suffered all manner of cuts and bruises and kept coming off the rails and needing assistance.
It was not, in fact, the easiest of haulage roads. It was sixty metres from the coal-face to the incline; and the road itself, which had not yet been widened by the stonemen, was no more than a narrow tube. The roof was very uneven, with large bumps all along it, and at certain points a full tub could only just pass underneath, with the putters having to get down on their knees and push so as not to crack their skulls open. Moreover the timber supports were already sagging and beginning to crack. Long, pale gashes could be seen in some of them where they had already split through the middle, like crutches unequal to the task. They had to be careful not to get caught on the jagged edges; and as this slow collapse proceeded overhead, crushing the round oak props that were as thick as a man’s thigh, they had to crawl forward on their bellies while all the time wondering anxiously if they were suddenly going to hear their own spines snap in two.
‘Not again!’ laughed Catherine.
Étienne’s tub had just come off the rails at the most awkward spot. He couldn’t manage to get the tubs to go straight because the rails were warped by the dampness in the ground; and he was in a rage, swearing and cursing as he wrestled furiously with the wheels, which refused, despite his extravagant efforts, to go back into place.
‘Wait, wait,’ said Catherine. ‘If you get cross, you’ll never get it to move.’
Nimbly she slid down and backed her bottom in under the tub; and then she lifted it with her hips back on to the rails. It weighed seven hundred kilograms. Étienne was astonished, and shamefully stammered his apologies.