Germinal by Émile Zola (essential books to read txt) 📕

The return to the settlement was melancholy. When the women came back with empty hands, the men looked at them and then lowered their heads. There was nothing more to be done, the day would end without a spoonful of soup; and the other days extended in an icy shadow, without a ray of hope. They had made up their minds to it, and no one spoke of surrender. This excess of misery made them still more obstinate, mute as tracked beasts, resolved to die at the bottom of their hole rather than come out. Who would dare to be first to speak of submission? They had sworn with their mates to hold together, and hold together they would, as they held together at the pit when one of them was beneath a landslip. It was as it ought to be; it was a good school for resignation down there. They might well tighten their belts for a week, when they had been swallowing fire and water ever since they were twelve years of age; and their devotion was thus augmented by the pride of soldiers, of men proud of their profession, who in their daily struggle with death had gained a pride in sacrifice.

With the Maheus it was a terrible evening. They were all silent, seated before the dying fire in which the last cinders were smoking. After having emptied the mattresses, handful by handful, they had decided the day before to sell the clock for three francs and the room seemed bare and dead now that the familiar tick-tack no longer filled it with sound. The only object of luxury now, in the middle of the sideboard, was the rose cardboard box, an old present from Maheu, which Maheude treasured like a jewel. The two good chairs had gone; Father Bonnemort and the children were squeezed together on an old mossy bench brought in from the garden. And the livid twilight now coming on seemed to increase the cold.

“What’s to be done?” repeated Maheude, crouching down in the corner by the oven.

Étienne stood up, looking at the portraits of the emperor and empress stuck against the wall. He would have torn them down long since if the family had not preserved them for ornament. So he murmured, with clenched teeth:

“And to think that we can’t get two sous out of these damned idiots, who are watching us starve!”

“If I were to take the box?” said the woman, very pale, after some hesitation.

Maheu, seated on the edge of the table, with his legs dangling and his head on his chest, sat up.

“No! I won’t have it!”

Maheude painfully rose and walked round the room. Good God! was it possible that they were reduced to such misery? The cupboard without a crumb, nothing more to sell, no notion where to get a loaf! And the fire, which was nearly out! She became angry with Alzire, whom she had sent in the morning to glean on the pit-bank, and who had come back with empty hands, saying that the Company would not allow gleaning. Did it matter a hang what the Company wanted? As if they were robbing any one by picking up the bits of lost coal! The little girl, in despair, told how a man had threatened to hit her; then she promised to go back next day, even if she was beaten.

“And that imp, Jeanlin,” cried the mother; “where is he now, I should like to know? He ought to have brought the salad; we can browse on that like beasts, at all events! You will see, he won’t come back. Yesterday, too, he slept out. I don’t know what he’s up to; the rascal always looks as though his belly were full.”

“Perhaps,” said Étienne, “he picks up sous on the road.”

She suddenly lifted both fists furiously.

“If I knew that! My children beg! I’d rather kill them and myself too.”

Maheu had again sunk down on the edge of the table. Lénore and Henri, astonished that they had nothing to eat, began to moan; while old Bonnemort, in silence, philosophically rolled his tongue in his mouth to deceive his hunger. No one spoke any more; all were becoming benumbed beneath this aggravation of their evils; the grandfather, coughing and spitting out the black phlegm, taken again by rheumatism which was turning to dropsy; the father asthmatic, and with knees swollen with water; the mother and the little ones scarred by scrofula and hereditary anaemia. No doubt their work made this inevitable; they only complained when the lack of food killed them off; and already they were falling like flies in the settlement. But something must be found for supper. My God! where was it to be found, what was to be done?

Then, in the twilight, which made the room more and more gloomy with its dark melancholy, Étienne, who had been hesitating for a moment, at last decided with aching heart.

“Wait for me,” he said. “I’ll go and see somewhere.” And he went out. The idea of Mouquette had occurred to him. She would certainly have a loaf, and would give it willingly. It annoyed him to be thus forced to return to Réquillart; this girl would kiss his hands with her air of an amorous servant; but one did not leave one’s friends in trouble; he would still be kind with her if need be.

“I will go and look round, too,” said Maheude, in her turn. “It’s too stupid.”

She reopened the door after the young man and closed it violently, leaving the others motionless and mute in the faint light of a candle-end which Alzire had just lighted. Outside she stopped and thought for a moment. Then she entered the Levaque’s house.

“Tell me: I lent you a loaf the other day. Could you give it me back?”

But she stopped herself. What she saw was far from encouraging; the house spoke of misery even more than her own.

The Levaque woman, with fixed eyes, was gazing into her burnt-out fire, while Levaque, made drunk on his empty stomach by some nail-makers, was sleeping on the table. With his back to the wall, Bouteloup was mechanically rubbing his shoulders with the amazement of a good-natured fellow who has eaten up his savings, and is astonished at having to tighten his belt.

“A loaf! ah! my dear,” replied the Levaque woman, “I wanted to borrow another from you!”

Then, as her husband groaned with pain in his sleep, she pushed his face against the table.

“Hold your row, bloody beast! So much the better if it burns your guts! Instead of getting people to pay for your drinks, you ought to have asked twenty sous from a friend.”

She went on relieving herself by swearing, in the midst of this dirty household, already abandoned so long that an unbearable smell was exhaling from the floor. Everything might smash up, she didn’t care a hang! Her son, that rascal Bébert, had also disappeared since morning, and she shouted that it would be a good riddance if he never came back. Then she said that she would go to bed. At least she could get warm. She hustled Bouteloup.

“Come along, up we go. The fire’s out. No need to light the candle to see the empty plates. Well, are you coming, Louis? tell you that we must go to bed. We can cuddle up together there, that’s a comfort. And let this damned drunkard die here of cold by himself!”

When she found herself outside again, Maheude struck resolutely across the gardens towards Pierron’s house. She heard laughter. As she knocked there was sudden silence. It was a full minute before the door was opened.

“What! is it you?” exclaimed Pierronne with affected surprise. “I thought it was the doctor.”

Without allowing her to speak, she went on, pointing to Pierron, who was seated before a large coal fire:

“Ah! he makes no progress, he makes no progress at all. His face looks all right; it’s in his belly that it takes him. Then he must have warmth. We burn all that we’ve got.”

Pierron, in fact, looked very well; his complexion was good and his flesh fat. It was in vain that he breathed hard in order to play the sick man. Besides, as Maheude came in she perceived a strong smell of rabbit; they had certainly put the dish out of the way. There were crumbs strewed over the table, and in the very midst she saw a forgotten bottle of wine.

“Mother has gone to Montsou to try and get a loaf,” said Pierronne again. “We are cooling our heels waiting for her.”

But her voice choked; she had followed her neighbour’s glance, and her eyes also fell on the bottle. Immediately she began again, and narrated the story. Yes, it was wine; the Piolaine people had brought her that bottle for her man, who had been ordered by the doctor to take claret. And her thankfulness poured forth in a stream. What good people they were! The young lady especially; she was not proud, going into workpeople’s houses and distributing her charities herself.

“I see,” said Maheude; “I know them.”

Her heart ached at the idea that the good things always go to the least poor. It was always so, and these Piolaine people had carried water to the river. Why had she not seen them in the settlement? Perhaps, all the same, she might have got something out of them.

“I came,” she confessed at last, “to know if there was more going with you than with us. Have you just a little vermicelli by way of loan?”

Pierronne expressed her grief noisily.

“Nothing at all, my dear. Not what you can call a grain of semolina. If mother hasn’t come back, it’s because she hasn’t succeeded. We must go to bed supperless.”

At this moment crying was heard from the cellar, and she grew angry and struck her fist against the door. It was that gadabout Lydie, whom she had shut up, she said, to punish her for not having returned until five o’clock, after having been roaming about the whole day. One could no longer keep her in order; she was constantly disappearing.

Maheude, however, remained standing; she could not make up her mind to leave. This large fire filled her with a painful sensation of comfort; the thought that they were eating there enlarged the void in her stomach. Evidently they had sent away the old woman and shut up the child, to blow themselves out with their rabbit. Ah! whatever people might say, when a woman behaved ill, that brought luck to her house.

“Good night,” she said, suddenly.

Outside night had come on, and the moon behind the clouds was lighting up the earth with a dubious glow. Instead of traversing the gardens again, Maheude went round, despairing, afraid to go home again. But along the dead frontages all the doors smelled of famine and sounded hollow. What was the good of knocking? There was wretchedness everywhere. For weeks since they had had nothing to eat. Even the odour of onion had gone, that strong odour which revealed the settlement from