Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/277

GERMINAL "A fine idea! I tell you that it is nothing. Just be so good as to get back into your beds again, and dress yourselves for nine o'clock, as was arranged.

He kissed them and hastened to leave. They heard the noise of his boots vanishing over the frozen earth in the garden.

Jeanne carefully placed the stopper in the rum bottle, while Lucie locked up the biscuits. The room had the cold neatness of dining-rooms where the table is but meagrely supplied. And both of them took advantage of this early descent to see if anything had been left uncared for the evening before. A serviette lay about, the servant should be scolded. At last they were upstairs again.

While he was taking the shortest cut through the narrow paths of his kitchen garden, Deneulin was thinking of his compromised fortune, this Montsou denier, this million which he had realised, dreaming to multiply it tenfold, and which was to-day running such great risks. It was an uninterrupted course of ill-luck, enormous and unforseen repairs, ruinous conditions of exploitation, then the disaster of this industrial crisis, just when the profits were beginning to come in. If the strike broke out here, he would be overthrown. He pushed a little door: the buildings of the pit could be divined in the black night, by the deepening of the shadow, starred by a few lanterns.

Jean-Bart was not so important as the VoruexVoreux [sic], but its renewed installation made it a pretty pit, as the engineers say. They had not been contented by enlarging the shaft one mètre and a-half, and deepening it to seven hundred and eight mètres, they had equipped it afresh with a new engine, new cages, entirely new material, all set up according to the latest scientific improvements; and even a certain seeking for elegance was visible in the constructions, a screening shed with carved scallops, a steeple adorned with a clock, a receiving room and an engine room both rounded into an apse like a Renaissance chapel, and surmounted by a chimney with a mosaic spiral made of black bricks and red bricks. The pump was placed on the other shaft of the concession, the old Gaston-Marie pit, reserved solely for this purpose. Jean-Bart, to right and left of the winding shaft, only had two conduits, that for the steam ventilator and that for the ladders.

In the morning, ever since three o'clock, Chaval, who had [265]