Germinal (29 page)

It was eight o'clock by the time La Maheude finally arrived with Estelle at her breast and her brood of Alzire, Henri and Lénore trailing behind her. She had come straight to the Jolly Fellow, knowing that that was where she would find Maheu. Supper could wait; no one was hungry, their stomachs were either full of coffee or bloated with beer. Other women arrived, and people began to whisper when they saw La Levaque walk in behind La Maheude and accompanied by Bouteloup, who was leading Philomène's children, Achille and Désirée, by the hand. The two neighbours seemed to be on perfectly friendly terms as the one turned and chatted with the other. On their way over the women had had things out once and for all. La Maheude was now resigned to Zacharie's marriage, and while she was wretched at the thought of losing her eldest child's earnings, she had finally been won over by the realization that she couldn't in all fairness hang on to him any longer. So she had tried to put a brave face on the matter, despite the anxiety she felt as a housewife wondering how on earth she was going to make ends meet now that such an important source of her housekeeping was leaving.

‘Sit yourself down, love,' she said, pointing to a table near where Maheu was having a drink with Étienne and Pierron.

‘Isn't my husband with you?' asked La Levaque.

His comrades told her he'd be back soon. Everyone squeezed in, Bouteloup, the little ones, all so tightly packed amid the pressing throng of drinkers that the two tables merged into one. They ordered some beer. Seeing her mother and children,
Philomène had finally decided to come and join them. She accepted the offer of a seat and seemed happy at the news that she was at last to be married. When they asked where Zacharie was, she replied in her usual flat tone:

‘I'm expecting him any moment. He's not far away.'

Maheu had exchanged a look with his wife. So she had agreed, then? He became pensive and smoked in silence. He, too, was thinking anxiously about what tomorrow would bring, and about the ingratitude of these children who, one by one, were going to get married and leave their parents destitute.

People continued to dance, and the final steps of a quadrille filled the hall with a reddish dust. The place was bursting at the seams now, and a cornet was sounding a series of high-pitched whistles, like a locomotive in distress. When the dancers came to a stop, they were steaming like horses.

‘Do you remember,' La Levaque asked, leaning towards La Maheude's ear, ‘how you said you'd strangle Catherine if she did anything silly!'

Chaval had escorted Catherine back to the family table, and the two of them were now standing behind Maheu finishing their beer.

‘Oh, well,' La Maheude answered softly in a resigned tone. ‘One says these things but…Anyway, my one consolation is that she can't have children yet. I know that for a fact!…Just imagine if she were to have one, too, and I had to find her a husband. What would we live on then?'

The whistling cornet was now playing a polka; and as the deafening noise began again, Maheu whispered to his wife what he had in mind. Why didn't they take a lodger? Étienne, for example. He was looking to board somewhere. With Zacharie leaving they'd have enough room, and they could make back some of the money they were losing. La Maheude's face lit up: of course, what a good idea, they must do it. It seemed to her as though she had been saved from starvation once again, and her good humour returned so promptly that she proceeded to order another round of beer.

Étienne, meanwhile, was trying to indoctrinate Pierron and explaining his plans for a provident fund. He had already
persuaded him to join when he made the mistake of revealing his real purpose.

‘And if we came out on strike, you can see how useful the fund would be. We could tell the Company to go to hell because we'd have the beginnings of a fighting fund…So it's a deal then? You'll join?'

Pierron had lowered his eyes and turned pale.

‘I'll think about it,' he stammered. ‘Good behaviour, though, that's the best provident fund.'

Maheu interrupted Étienne and offered there and then, in his blunt, friendly way, to take him in as a lodger. The young man accepted in the same spirit, keen as he was to live in the miners' village and share more in the life of his comrades. The matter was quickly settled, though La Maheude said they'd have to wait till the two children were married.

At that very moment Zacharie finally turned up, with Mouquet and Levaque. The three of them reeked of the Volcano, of gin and the sharp, musky scent of loose women. They were very drunk and looked extremely pleased with themselves, nudging each other and sniggering. When he learned they were finally marrying him off, Zacharie began to laugh so loudly he nearly choked. Unfazed, Philomène declared that she'd rather see him laugh than cry. Since there were no more chairs, Bouteloup had squeezed along to let Levaque share half of his; whereupon the latter, suddenly overcome at seeing everyone together like this in one big happy family, ordered yet another round of beer.

‘God! This is the life, eh?' he roared.

They sat on till ten o'clock. Women were still arriving, trailing hordes of children and having come to collect their menfolk and take them home. The mothers among them, past caring, pulled out long, pale breasts like so many sacks of oats and splattered chubby babies with milk, while toddlers full of beer crawled on all fours beneath the tables and relieved themselves unconcernedly. And all around them rose a tide of beer from Widow Desire's emptying barrels, turning bellies round and taut, flowing out of every orifice, from noses, eyes and elsewhere. There was such a general swelling among this mass of people that by now each of them had an elbow or a knee digging into their
neighbour, and everyone beamed away merrily at being packed in so tight. In the continuous laughter mouths gaped fixedly, like cracks running from ear to ear. It was baking hot, and as they took their ease and bared their flesh, they all gently cooked, golden brown amid the thick pall of pipe smoke. The only disturbance came when they had to let someone past, for every so often a girl got up, went out to the place by the pump at the far end of the hall, hitched her skirts and then returned. Beneath the paper garlands the dancers were sweating so much they couldn't see each other, which encouraged the pit-boys to try knocking the putters flying with a casual collision of backsides. But whenever a girl fell over with a man on top of her, the cornet's furious tooting covered the sound of their fall, and they would be buried under a whirl of feet as though the whole dance-hall had rolled over them like a landslide.

Someone alerted Pierron as they passed that his daughter Lydie was asleep at the door and lying across the pavement. Having had her share of the stolen bottle, she was drunk, and he had to sling her over his shoulder and carry her home, while Jeanlin and Bébert, who could take their drink better, followed him at a distance, finding the whole thing very funny. This was the cue that it was time to go home. Families began to leave the Jolly Fellow, and the Maheus and the Levaques eventually decided to return to the village. At the same moment Bonnemort and old Mouque were also leaving Montsou, still walking as though in their sleep and stubbornly absorbed in the silence of their memories. And they all went home together, taking one last walk through the fair, past the frying-pans and their congealing fat, past all the bars where the last beers were streaming out to the tables in the middle of the road. The storm was still brewing, and the sound of laughter rang in the air as they left the lights of Montsou behind and vanished into the blackness of the countryside. From the fields of ripe corn rose warm, urgent breath: many a child must have been fathered that night. They straggled limply into the village. Neither the Levaques nor the Maheus had much of an appetite for their supper, and the latter fell asleep as they tried to finish their leftover beef.

Étienne had taken Chaval off for another drink at Rasseneur's.

‘Count me in!' Chaval had said when his comrade explained to him about the provident fund. ‘Shake on it. Ah, you're a good'un all right.'

Étienne's shining eyes were beginning to show the effects of his drinking, and he cried:

‘Yes, let's shake on it…I could go without everything, you know, the beer, the women, all of it, if we could just have justice. It's the only thing I really care about, the thought that one day we'll get rid of these bourgeois once and for all.'

Towards the middle of August Étienne moved in with the Maheus, once Zacharie had married and was able to obtain a vacant house in the village for Philomène and her two children; and at first the young man felt awkward in Catherine's presence.

They lived in ceaseless and intimate proximity, for he was taking the elder brother's place in all things and shared a bed with Jeanlin, just beside his big sister's. In the mornings, and at night, he had to dress and undress next to her, and he could see her too as she removed her clothes or put them on again. When the last underskirt fell to the floor, there she would be in all her pale whiteness, with that snowy transparency of skin characteristic of the fair-haired anaemic; and he never failed to be shocked at seeing her so white (when her hands and face were already stained), as if she had been dipped in milk from her heels right up to her neck, where the hauling-rope had left its mark like an amber necklace. He pretended to look away, but gradually he came to know her: first the feet, visible to his lowered gaze; then a knee, glimpsed as she slid beneath the blanket; and later her firm little breasts as she bent over the wash-basin in the mornings. While she seemed to pay him no heed, she would nevertheless undress as quickly as possible and in no time was lying next to Alzire, having slithered into bed so fast, like a snake, that he had hardly got his shoes off before she was vanishing from view, with her back towards him and only her thick bun now to be seen.

Moreover, she never had call to complain. Though a kind of obsession drove him, in spite of himself, to watch out for the moment when she got into bed, he never made smutty remarks, and he kept his hands to himself. Her parents were near by, and anyway the mixture of friendship and resentment he felt on her account prevented him from treating her as a girl to be desired, surrounded as they were by the unreserve of their newly shared existence, washing and eating and working side by side, with nothing left to hide, not even their most intimate personal needs. The last bastion of the family's modesty was the daily bath, which Catherine now took alone upstairs while the men bathed in turn down below.

And so by the end of the first month it was as though Étienne and Catherine had ceased to notice each other, as they wandered about at bedtime in a state of undress before putting out the candle. She no longer hurried as she took off her clothes, and she had resumed her old practice of sitting on the edge of the bed while she put her hair up, causing her nightdress to ride up her thighs as she stretched her arms above her head; and sometimes, even with no trousers on, he would help her look for lost hairpins. Habit overcame the shame of their nakedness; it felt quite natural to them, for after all they meant no harm by it, and it wasn't their fault if there was only one room for so many people. Yet there were moments when they would suddenly find it disturbing, and this when they were not even thinking improper thoughts. Having taken no notice of her pale skin for several nights, he would suddenly see her again in all her whiteness, that whiteness which made him tremble and turn away, for fear he might yield to his desire to take her. On other occasions, and for no apparent reason, she would suddenly feel coy and start avoiding him, sliding quickly under the sheets as if she had felt the young man's hands take hold of her. Then, when the candle was out, they would know that neither of them was able to sleep and that they were thinking of each other, despite their exhaustion. And that left them feeling irritable and out of sorts the next day, because they much preferred the quiet evenings when they could relax together and be just good friends.

Étienne's only cause for complaint was Jeanlin, who slept curled up like a gun dog. Alzire breathed gently as she slept, while in the mornings Lénore and Henri would still be lying in each other's arms exactly as they had been put to bed the night before. Amid the darkness the only other sound in the house was of Maheu and La Maheude snoring, rumbling at regular intervals like bellows in a forge. All in all Étienne was more comfortable here than he had been at Rasseneur's; the bed wasn't bad, and they changed the sheets once a month. The soup was better, too, and his only regret was the lack of meat for dinner. But everyone was in the same straits, and he could hardly expect rabbit at every meal when he was paying forty-five francs for his board and lodging. Those forty-five francs helped the family to make ends meet more or less, while leaving various small debts to accumulate. And the Maheus showed their gratitude towards their lodger; his laundry was washed and mended, his buttons were sewn back on and his things tidied. In short, he could feel the benefits of a woman's touch.

This was the point at which Étienne acquired a firmer grasp of the ideas that had been floating around in his head for some time. Until then he had experienced only an instinctive sense of resistance amid the silent, festering resentment of his comrades. All sorts of confusing issues puzzled him. Why were some men poor and other men rich? Why were some men under the heel of other men, and with no hope of ever taking their place? And the first forward step was the realization of his own ignorance. But then a deep sense of shame, a secret sorrow, began to gnaw away at him: he knew nothing, and he didn't dare discuss with others these things he cared so passionately about, like equality among men, or the fairness and justice which demanded that the fruits of the earth be shared among all. So he acquired a taste for study, but of the unmethodical kind characteristic of people taken with a craze for knowledge. He was now in regular correspondence with Pluchart, who was better educated and already very involved in the socialist movement. He had books sent to him, whose poorly digested contents finally turned his head: especially a book on medicine,
The Hygiene of Miners
,
¹
in which a Belgian doctor had summarized the various illnesses
that people working in the coal industry were dying of; not to mention a number of arid and impenetrably technical treatises on political economy, some anarchist pamphlets, which made his head spin, and old newspaper articles, which he kept for use as irrefutable ammunition in any future discussion. On top of which, Souvarine also lent him books, and the one about co-operative societies had set him dreaming for a whole month about a universal exchange system which abolished money and based the whole of social life on the value of labour. The shame he felt at his own ignorance receded, to be replaced by a new sense of pride now that he was aware of himself starting to think.