Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/170

GERMINAL imploring and scratching for him to take her up. When he had placed her on his knees, he sheltered her with both hands, and fell into that kind of dreamy somnolence into which the caress of this soft warm fur always plunged him.

Almost at the same time Maheu came in. He would drink nothing, in spite of the polite insistance of Madame Rasseneur, who sold her beer as though she made a present of it. Étienne had risen, and both of them set out for Montsou.

On pay-day at the Company's Yards, Montsou seemed to be in the midst of a fête as on fine Sunday Feast-days. Bands of miners arrived from all the settlements. The cashier's office being very small, they preferred to wait at the door, stationed in groups on the pavement, barring the way in a crowd that was constantly renewed. Hucksters profited by the occasion and installed themselves with their movable shops exhibiting even pottery and pork. But it was especially the estaminets and the bars which did a good trade, for the miners before being paid went to the counters to get patience, and returned to them to wet their pay as soon as they had it in their pockets. But they were very sensible, except when they finished it at the Volcan. As Maheu and Étienne advanced among the groups they felt that on that day a deep exasperation was rising up. It was not the ordinary indifference with which the money was taken and curtailed at the publics. Fists were clenched and violent words were passing from mouth to mouth.

"Is it true, then," asked Maheu of Chaval, whom he met before the Estaminet Picquette, "that they've played the dirty trick?"

But Chaval contented himself by replying with a furious growl, throwing a side-long look on Étienne. Since the working had been renewed he had hired himself on with others, more and more bitten by envy against this comrade, the new-comer who posed as a boss and whose boots, as he said, were licked by the whole settlement. This was complicated by a lover's jealousy. He never took Catherine to Réquillart now or behind the pit-bank without accusing her in abominable language of sleeping with her mother's lodger; then, seized by savage desire he would stifle her with caresses.

Maheu asked him another question.

"Is it the Voreux's turn now?" [158]