Germinal - Emile Zola [40]
She had to show him how to spread his legs in an arch and wedge his feet against the timbers, on both sides of the roadway, so as to give himself points of purchase. The trick was to lean forward, with your arms out straight, so as to be able to use all the muscles in your shoulders and hips simultaneously. He followed her for one trip and watched her as she moved forward with her bottom in the air and her fists so low down that she seemed to be trotting on all fours like one of those dwarf animals that work in circuses. She was sweating and panting, and her joints cracked, but she worked without complaint, with the indifference of habit, as if it was everyone’s wretched lot to live like this beneath the yoke. But he simply could not manage to do the same; his shoes were an encumbrance, and his body ached as he tried to move forward like that with his head down. After a few minutes the position was agony, and he felt such intolerable pain and discomfort that he had to kneel down for a moment to straighten his back and catch his breath.
When they got to the incline, a further ordeal lay in store, and she taught him how to dispatch his tub quickly. At the top and bottom of an incline, which served all the coal-faces between any two levels in the mine, a pit-boy was posted, with the one above acting as brakeman and the one below as seizer. These scallywags, aged anywhere between twelve and fifteen, were in the habit of shouting to one another in foul language, and if anyone wanted to attract their attention they had to shout even louder and use even coarser language. Then, as soon as there was an empty tub ready to be sent up, the one at the bottom would give the signal, the putter would load her full tub on to the incline, and the weight of it would pull the other tub up once the pit-boy at the top had released the brake. Down in the roadway below, trains of tubs were gradually assembled and then hauled off to the main shaft by horses.
‘Hey there, you filthy bastards!’ Catherine shouted down the incline, which was entirely enclosed in wood along its hundred-metre length and boomed like a gigantic loudhailer.
The pit-boys must have been having a rest because neither of them replied. On each level the tubs stopped rolling. Eventually the shrill voice of a girl said:
‘I expect one of ’em’s having it off with La Mouquette!’
Loud rumbles of mirth could be heard, and every putter in the seam was in fits of laughter:
‘Who was that?’ asked Étienne.
Catherine told him it was young Lydie, a slip of a girl who knew more than she ought and who could put a tub as well as any grown woman, despite her doll-like arms. As for La Mouquette, she was quite capable of having both pit-boys at once.
But then the one at the bottom could be heard shouting up to them to load their tubs. A deputy must have been passing. The tubs began to roll again on all nine levels, and soon all that could be heard were the regular cries of the pit-boys and the snorting breaths of the putters as they reached the incline, steaming like overburdened mares. And whenever a miner encountered one of these girls down on all fours, with her backside in the air and her hips bulging from her boy’s breeches, there would be a sudden whiff of animal lust in the air, the scent of male arousal.
After each trip Étienne returned to the stifling atmosphere of the coal-face, to the dull, irregular clunk of the picks and the strained grunts of the hewers as they stubbornly stuck to their task. All four of them had stripped to the waist, and since they were now covered in black grime right up to their caps they were indistinguishable from the loose coal surrounding them. At one point they had to dig Maheu out when he started choking for breath, and they lifted the planks to let the coal roll down on to the roadway floor. Zacharie and Levaque were complaining furiously about the seam and said it was getting hard to work, which meant it would be difficult to make it pay. Chaval turned over and lay on his back for a moment, insulting Étienne, whose presence he now found decidedly