Germinal - Emile Zola [62]
‘Come down this instant,’ she shouted crossly. ‘I should be gone by now.’
Once Alzire and the children had come down, she shared the vermicelli out on to three small plates. She wasn’t hungry, she said. Although Catherine had already used yesterday’s coffee grounds a second time, she poured more water on to them and downed two large mugfuls of coffee that was so thin that it looked like rusty water. Still, it would keep her going.
‘Now remember,’ she told Alzire once more. ‘You’re to let your grandfather sleep, and you’re to keep an eye on Estelle and see she doesn’t come to any harm. If she wakes up and starts screaming the place down, here’s a sugar lump. Dissolve it in water and give her little spoonfuls…I know you’re a sensible girl and you won’t eat it yourself.’
‘But what about school, Mum?’
‘School? Well, that’ll have to wait for another day…I need you here.’
‘And the soup? Do you want me to make it if you’re not back in time?’
‘Ah, the soup, the soup. No, better wait till I come back.’
Alzire had the precocious intelligence of a sickly child, and she knew exactly how to make soup. But she must have understood the situation, for she did not insist. The whole village was awake now and groups of children could be heard leaving for school, dragging their clogs as they walked. Eight o’clock struck, and the sound of people chatting next door in La Levaque’s house was steadily getting louder. The women’s day had begun, as they gathered round their coffee-pots, hands on hips, tongues wagging, like millstones grinding away in circles. A wizened face with thick lips and a squashed nose suddenly pressed itself against the window-pane and shouted:
‘You’ll never guess what I’ve heard.’
‘No, no, later!’ La Maheude answered. ‘I’ve got to go out.’
And just in case she succumbed to the offer of a glass of hot coffee, she shovelled the food into Lénore and Henri and left. Upstairs old Bonnemort was still snoring away, with a rhythmic snore that seemed to rock the house itself to sleep.
Once outside La Maheude was surprised to see that the wind had dropped. A sudden thaw was under way: beneath a dun-coloured sky all the walls looked clammy and green with damp and the roads were coated in mud, the thick, glutinous mud of coal-mining regions that looks as black as liquid soot and can so easily remove a shoe. She immediately had to smack Lénore because the little girl was having fun trying to collect the mud on her clogs as though she were digging it out with a shovel. On leaving the village they skirted the spoil-heap and followed the path along the canal, taking short cuts along pot-holed streets and across stretches of waste ground enclosed by rotting fences. There followed a succession of large sheds and long factory buildings with tall chimneys that belched out soot and filthied what remained of the countryside amid these sprawling industrial outskirts. Behind a clump of poplars stood the old Réquillart pit and its crumbling headgear: only its thick beams remained standing. Then, having turned right, La Maheude came out on to the main highway.
‘Just you wait, you dirty little scamp. I’ll teach you to make mud-pies indeed!’
This time it was Henri, who had grabbed a handful of mud and was busy moulding it in his hands. Having both been smacked without fear or favour, the two children stopped misbehaving and began peering sideways at the small holes their feet were making in the lumps of earth. Along they squelched, already exhausted by the effort of prising their feet out of the sticky mud with each step they took.
In one direction the road ran dead straight towards Marchiennes, two leagues of paved cobblestone road unravelling across