Germinal - Emile Zola [51]
‘Look, if you haven’t got any money, you’ll not last the fortnight…So if you want, I could try and get someone to sell you things on credit?’
For a moment Étienne was not sure how to respond. He had simply been going to ask for his thirty sous and then leave. But he felt ashamed to do so in front of the girl. She was staring at him, she might think he was work-shy.
‘I’m not promising, mind,’ Maheu went on. ‘But there’s no harm in asking.’
So Étienne offered no objection. People would refuse. Anyway, it didn’t put him under any obligation, he could always leave after he’d had something to eat. But then he was cross with himself for not saying no when he saw how delighted Catherine was, with her pretty laugh and that look of friendship and happiness at having been able to come to his assistance. For where was the future in it?
Once they had collected their clogs and shut their lockers, the Maheus left the changing-room and followed their comrades, who were departing one by one after they had warmed themselves. Étienne went with them, while Levaque and his young lad also joined the group. But as they were passing through the screening-shed, a violent scene stopped them in their tracks.
They were in a vast shed, with beams blackened by flying coal-dust and large shutters that let in a constant draught. The tubs of coal came here directly from the pit-head and were then emptied out by tipplers on to the screens, which were long chutes made of sheet-metal. To the right and left of these chutes, the women and girls who did the screening stood on tiered steps equipped with a rake and shovel; they would rake in the stones and push the clean coal along so that it fell through funnels down into the railway wagons standing on the line beneath the shed.
Philoméne Levaque was one of them, a thin, pale-looking girl with the sheeplike face of a consumptive. Her head was covered by a scrap of blue woollen scarf, and her hands and arms were black up to her elbows. She was working on the next step down from La Pierronne’s mother, whom everyone called La Brûlé, an old witch of a woman who was terrifying to look at, with screech-owl eyes and a mouth as pinched as a miser’s purse. The pair of them were at each other’s throats, with the younger of the two accusing the older of raking away her stones so that it was taking her more than ten minutes to fill one basket. They were paid by the basket, so there were endless fights of this kind. Pins would fly, buns would tumble and red faces would bear the mark of black hands.
‘Go on, give her one!’ Zacharie shouted down to his girlfriend.
All the screeners burst out laughing.
But La Brûlé rounded on him and snarled:
‘As for you, you dirty bastard! You’d do better to own up to those two kids you gave her!…Did you ever hear the like! And her a poor slip of a thing, just eighteen and barely able to stand on her own two feet!’
Maheu had to stop his son from going down there and then and, as Zacharie put it, seeing what the old bag was made of. But a supervisor was coming, and rakes began rummaging in the coal again. All that could be seen now, down the whole length of the chute, were the women’s rounded backs as they competed desperately for each other’s stones.
Outside the wind had suddenly dropped, and damp, cold air was falling from a grey sky. The colliers hunched their shoulders, folded their arms across their chests and departed, in ones and twos, walking along with a roll of the hips that made their thick bones stick out under their thin clothing. As they passed by in the broad daylight they looked like a band of negroes who had been knocked flat in the mud. A few had not finished their piece, and as they brought the remains of it home wedged between shirt and jacket, they had the air of hunchbacks.
‘Look, there’s Bouteloup,’ Zacharie said with a snigger.
Without stopping, Levaque exchanged a few words with his lodger, a big, dark-haired fellow of thirty-five with a placid, honest expression.