Germinal, Émile Zola [readict .txt] 📗

“Be still, then,” said Dr. Vanderhaghen, who had followed to attend to Jeanlin. “Would you rather he had remained below?”

But Maheude grew more furious, while Alzire, Lénore, and Henri were crying around her. As she helped to carry up the wounded boy and to give the doctor what he needed, she cursed fate, and asked where she was to find money to feed invalids. The old man was not then enough, now this rascal too had lost his legs! And she never ceased; while other cries, more heartbreaking lamentations, were heard from a neighbouring house: Chicot’s wife and children were weeping over the body. It was now quite night, the exhausted miners were at last eating their soup, and the settlement had fallen into a melancholy silence, only disturbed by these loud outcries.

Three weeks passed. It was found possible to avoid amputation; Jeanlin kept both his legs, but he remained lame. On investigation the Company had resigned itself to giving a donation of fifty francs. It had also promised to find employment for the little cripple at the surface as soon as he was well. All the same their misery was aggravated, for the father had received such a shock that he was seriously ill with fever.

Since Thursday Maheu had been back at the pit and it was now Sunday. In the evening Étienne talked of the approaching date of the first of December, preoccupied in wondering if the Company would execute its threat. They sat up till ten o’clock waiting for Catherine, who must have been delaying with Chaval. But she did not return. Maheude furiously bolted the door without a word. Étienne was long in going to sleep, restless at the thought of that empty bed in which Alzire occupied so little room.

Next morning she was still absent; and it was only in the afternoon, on returning from the pit, that the Maheus learnt that Chaval was keeping Catherine. He created such abominable scenes with her that she had decided to stay with him. To avoid reproaches he had suddenly left the Voreux and had been taken on at Jean-Bart, M. Deneulin’s mine, and she had followed him as a putter. The new household still lived at Montsou, at Piquette’s.

Maheu at first talked of going to fight the man and of bringing his daughter back with a kick in the backside. Then he made a gesture of resignation: what was the good? It always turned out like that; one could not prevent a girl from sticking to a man when she wanted to. It was much better to wait quietly for the marriage. But Maheude did not take things so easily.

“Did I beat her when she took this Chaval?” she cried to Étienne, who listened in silence, very pale. “See now, tell me! you, who are a sensible man. We have left her free, haven’t we? because, my God! they all come to it. Now, I was in the family way when the father married me. But I didn’t run away from my parents, and I should never have done so dirty a trick as to carry the money I earned to a man who had no want of it before the proper age. Ah! it’s disgusting, you know. People will leave off getting children!”

And as Étienne still replied only by nodding his head, she insisted:

“A girl who went out every evening where she wanted to! What has she got in her skin, then, not to be able to wait till I married her after she had helped to get us out of difficulties? Eh? it’s natural, one has a daughter to work. But there! we have been too good, we ought not to let her go and amuse herself with a man. Give them an inch and they take an ell.”

Alzire nodded approvingly. Lénore and Henri, overcome by this storm, cried quietly, while the mother now enumerated their misfortunes: first Zacharie who had had to get married; then old Bonnemort who was there on his chair with his twisted feet; then Jeanlin who could not leave the room for ten days with his badly-united bones; and now, as a last blow, this jade Catherine, who had gone away with a man! The whole family was breaking up. There was only the father left at the pit. How were they to live, seven persons without counting Estelle, on his three francs? They might as well jump into the canal in a band.

“It won’t do any good to worry yourself,” said Maheu in a low voice, “perhaps we have not got to the end.”

Étienne, who was looking fixedly at the flags on the floor, raised his head, and murmured with eyes lost in a vision of the future:

“Ah! it is time! it is time!”

On that Monday the Hennebeaus had invited the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile to lunch. They had formed their plans: on rising from table, Paul Négrel was to take the ladies to a mine, Saint-Thomas, which had been luxuriously reinstalled. But this was only an amiable pretext; this party was an invention of Madame Hennebeau’s to hasten the marriage of Cécile and Paul.

Suddenly, on this very Monday, at four o’clock in the morning, the strike broke out. When, on the first of December, the Company had adopted the new wage system, the miners remained calm. At the end of the fortnight not one made the least protest on payday. Everybody, from the manager down to the last overseer, considered the tariff as accepted; and great was their surprise in the morning at this declaration of war, made with a tactical unity which seemed to indicate energetic leadership.

At five o’clock Dansaert woke M. Hennebeau to inform him that not a single man had gone down at the Voreux. The settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante, which he had passed through, was sleeping deeply, with closed windows and