Germinal - Emile Zola [44]
V
Without looking at his watch, which was still in his jacket, Maheu stopped and said:
‘Nearly one o’clock…Have you finished, Zacharie?’
Zacharie had been timbering for a while, but then he had stopped in the middle of the job and lain back gazing into space and remembering the games of crosse1 he had played the previous day. He roused himself and replied:
‘Yes, that’ll do for now. We can check again tomorrow.’
He returned to his place at the coal-face, where Levaque and Chaval also downed tools. It was time for a break. They wiped their faces on their bare arms and looked up at the rock above them and the crazed surface of the shale. Work was almost all they ever talked about.
‘Typical,’ muttered Chaval. ‘Just our luck to hit loose earth…They don’t take account of that, do they, when they fix the rates?’
‘Bastards,’ grumbled Levaque. ‘They want to bloody bury us alive.’
Zacharie began to laugh. He didn’t give a damn about their work or anything else for that matter, but he liked to hear people having a go at the Company. Maheu pointed out in his quiet way that the nature of the terrain changed every twenty metres and that, to be fair, it was impossible to say in advance what sort they might find. Then, as the other two men continued to sound off about the bosses, he began to glance round uneasily:
‘Shh! That’s enough of that!’
‘You’re right,’ said Levaque, also lowering his voice. ‘Walls have ears.’
Even at this depth they were obsessed about the possibility of informers, almost as if the coal in the seam might actually hear them and tell the shareholders.
‘All the same,’ Chaval added defiantly at the top of his voice, ‘if that pig Dansaert speaks to me again the way he did the other day, I’ll bloody throw a brick at him…I mean, it’s not as if I was trying to keep him from all those luscious blondes of his.’
This had Zacharie in fits. The overman’s affair with Pierron’s wife was a standing joke throughout the pit. Even Catherine, leaning on her shovel at the foot of the coal-face, was shaking with laughter as she briefly put Étienne in the picture. Maheu, meanwhile, was getting angry and no longer sought to conceal his anxieties:
‘Hold your damned tongue, will you?…If it’s trouble you’re after, then wait till you’re on your own.’
He was still talking when they heard the sound of footsteps in the roadway above them. Almost immediately young Négrel – as the miners called him among themselves – appeared at the top of the coal-face accompanied by Dansaert, the overman.
‘What did I tell you!’ Maheu muttered under his breath. ‘There’s always one of them about the place, appearing out of nowhere.’
Paul Négrel, the nephew of M. Hennebeau, was a young man of twenty-six, slim and good-looking, with curly hair and a brown moustache. His pointed nose and sharp eyes gave him the look of an amiable ferret, an intelligent, sceptical air which became one of curt authority when he was dealing with the workers. He dressed like them and was, as they were, smeared with coal; and in order to command their respect he demonstrated an almost foolhardy courage, negotiating the most awkward spots in the mine, always the first on the scene when there was a rock-fall or a firedamp explosion.
‘Here we are at last. Am I right, Dansaert?’ he asked.
The overman, a Belgian