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

“Good gracious!” muttered Maheude, after having touched her cheeks, “how she burns! I don’t expect that damned beast now, the brigands must have stopped him from coming.”

She meant the doctor and the Company. She uttered a joyous exclamation, however, when the door once more opened. But her arms fell back and she remained standing still with gloomy face.

“Good evening,” whispered Étienne, when he had carefully closed the door.

He often came thus at night-time. The Maheus learnt his retreat after the second day. But they kept the secret and no one in the settlement knew exactly what had become of the young man. A legend had grown up around him. People still believed in him and mysterious rumours circulated: he would reappear with an army and chests full of gold; and there was always the religious expectation of a miracle, the realized ideal, a sudden entry into that city of justice which he had promised them. Some said they had seen him lying back in a carriage, with three other gentlemen, on the Marchiennes road; others affirmed that he was in England for a few days. At length, however, suspicions began to arise and jokers accused him of hiding in a cellar, where Mouquette kept him warm; for this relationship, when known, had done him harm. There was a growing disaffection in the midst of his popularity, a gradual increase of the despairing among the faithful, and their number was certain, little by little, to grow.

“What brutal weather!” he added. “And you—nothing new, always from bad to worse? They tell me that little Négrel has been to Belgium to get Borains. Good God! we are done for if that is true!”

He shuddered as he entered this dark icy room, where it was some time before his eyes were able to see the unfortunate people whose presence he guessed by the deepening of the shade. He was experiencing the repugnance and discomfort of the workman who has risen above his class, refined by study and stimulated by ambition. What wretchedness! and odours! and the bodies in a heap! And a terrible pity caught him by the throat. The spectacle of this agony so overcame him that he tried to find words to advise submission.

But Maheu came violently up to him, shouting:

“Borains! They won’t dare, the bloody fools! Let the Borains go down, then, if they want us to destroy the pits!”

With an air of constraint, Étienne explained that it was not possible to move, that the soldiers who guarded the pits would protect the descent of the Belgian workmen. And Maheu clenched his fists, irritated especially, as he said, by having bayonets in his back. Then the colliers were no longer masters in their own place? They were treated, then, like convicts, forced to work by a loaded musket! He loved his pit, it was a great grief to him not to have been down for two months. He was driven wild, therefore, at the idea of this insult, these strangers whom they threatened to introduce. Then the recollection that his certificate had been given back to him struck him to the heart.

“I don’t know why I’m angry,” he muttered. “I don’t belong to their shop any longer. When they have hunted me away from here, I may as well die on the road.”

“As to that,” said Étienne, “if you like, they’ll take your certificate back tomorrow. People don’t send away good workmen.”

He interrupted himself, surprised to hear Alzire, who was laughing softly in the delirium of her fever. So far he had only made out Father Bonnemort’s stiff shadow, and this gaiety of the sick child frightened him. It was indeed too much if the little ones were going to die of it. With trembling voice he made up his mind.

“Look here! this can’t go on, we are done for. We must give it up.”

Maheude, who had been motionless and silent up to now, suddenly broke out, and treating him familiarly and swearing like a man, she shouted in his face:

“What’s that you say? It’s you who say that, by God!” He was about to give reasons, but she would not let him speak.

“Don’t repeat that, by God! or, woman as I am, I’ll put my fist into your face. Then we have been dying for two months, and I have sold my household, and my little ones have fallen ill of it, and there is to be nothing done, and the injustice is to begin again! Ah! do you know! when I think of that my blood stands still. No, no, I would burn everything, I would kill everything, rather than give up.”

She pointed at Maheu in the darkness, with a vague, threatening gesture.

“Listen to this! If any man goes back to the pit, he’ll find me waiting for him on the road to spit in his face and cry coward!

Étienne could not see her, but he felt a heat like the breath of a barking animal. He had drawn back, astonished at this fury which was his work. She was so changed that he could no longer recognize the woman who was once so sensible, reproving his violent schemes, saying that we ought not to wish any one dead, and who was now refusing to listen to reason and talking of killing people. It was not he now, it was she, who talked politics, who dreamed of sweeping away the bourgeois at a stroke, who demanded the republic and the guillotine to free the earth of these rich robbers who fattened on the labour of starvelings.

“Yes, I could flay them with my fingers. We’ve had enough of them! Our turn is come now; you used to say so yourself. When I think of the father, the grandfather, the grandfather’s father, what all of them who went before have suffered, what we are suffering, and that our sons and our sons’ sons will suffer it over again, it makes me mad—I could take a knife. The other day we didn’t do enough at Montsou; we ought to have pulled the bloody place to the ground, down to the last brick. And do you know I’ve only one regret, that we didn’t let the old man strangle the Piolaine girl. Hunger may strangle my little ones for all they care!”

Her words fell like the blows of an axe in the night. The closed horizon would not open, and the impossible ideal was turning to poison in the depths of this skull which had been crushed by grief.

“You have misunderstood,” Étienne was able to say at last, beating a retreat. “We ought to come to an understanding with the Company. I know that the pits are suffering much, so that it would probably consent to an arrangement.”

“No, never!” she shouted.

Just then Lénore and Henri came back with their hands empty. A gentleman had certainly given them two sous, but the girl kept kicking her little brother, and the two sous fell into the snow, and as Jeanlin had joined in the search they had not been able to find them.

“Where is Jeanlin?”

“He’s gone away, mother; he said he had business.”

Étienne was listening with an aching heart. Once she had threatened to kill them if they ever held out their hands to beg. Now she sent them herself on to the roads, and proposed that all of them—the ten thousand colliers of Montsou—should take stick and wallet, like beggars of old, and scour the terrified country.

The anguish continued to increase in the black room. The little urchins came back hungry, they wanted to eat; why could they not have something to eat? And they grumbled, flung themselves about, and at last trod on the feet of their dying sister, who groaned. The mother furiously boxed their ears in the darkness at random. Then, as they cried still louder, asking for bread, she burst into tears, and dropped on to the floor, seizing them in one embrace with the little invalid; then, for a long time, her tears fell in a nervous outbreak which left her limp and worn out, stammering over and over again the same phrase, calling for death:

“O God! why do You not take us? O God! in pity take us, to have done with it!”

The grandfather preserved his immobility, like an old tree twisted by the rain and wind; while the father continued walking between the fireplace and the cupboard, without turning his head.

But the door opened, and this time it was Doctor Vanderhaghen.

“The devil!” he said. “This light won’t spoil your eyes. Look sharp! I’m in a hurry.”

As usual, he scolded, knocked up by work. Fortunately, he had matches with him, and the father had to strike six, one by one, and to hold them while he examined the invalid. Unwound from her coverlet, she shivered beneath this flickering light, as lean as a bird dying in the snow, so small that one only saw her hump. But she smiled with the wandering smile of the dying, and her eyes were very large; while her poor hands contracted over her hollow breast. And as the half-choked mother asked if it was right to take away from her the only child who helped in the household, so intelligent and gentle, the doctor grew vexed.

“Ah! she is going. Dead of hunger, your blessed child. And not the only one, either; I’ve just seen another one over there. You all send for me, but I can’t do anything; it’s meat that you want to cure you.”

Maheu, with burnt fingers, had dropped the match, and the darkness closed over the little corpse, which was still warm. The doctor had gone away in a hurry. Étienne heard nothing more in the black room but Maheude’s sobs, repeating her cry for death, that melancholy and endless lamentation:

“O God! it is my turn, take me! O God! take my man, take the others, out of pity, to have done with it!”