Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/287

GERMINAL devil did I come to get such a jade? Will you just fill your tram and push?"

She was at the bottom of the cutting, leaning on her shovel; she was feeling ill, and she looked at them all with a foolish air without obeying. She scarcely saw them by the reddish gleam of the lamps, entirely naked like animals, so black, so encrusted in sweat and coal, that their nakedness did not frighten her. It was a confused task, the bending of ape-like backs, an infernal vision of reddish limbs, spending their strength amid deep blows and groans. But they could see her better, no doubt, for the axes left off hammering, and they joked her about taking off her trousers.

"Eh! you'll catch cold; look out!"

"It's because she's got such fine legs! I say, Chaval, there are enough for two."

"Oh! we must see. Lift up! Higher! higher!" Then Chaval without growing angry at these jokes, turned on to her.

"That's it, by God! Ah! she likes dirty jokes. She'd stay there to listen till to-morrow."

Catherine had painfully decided to fill her tram, then she pushed it. The gallery was too wide for her to buttress herself to the timber on both sides; her naked feet were twisted in the rails where she sought a point of support, while she slowly moved on, her arms stiffened in front, and her back breaking. As soon as she came up to the clay wall, the fiery torture again began, and the sweat fell from her whole body in enormous drops, as from a storm cloud. She had scarcely got a third of the way before she streamed, blinded, soiled also by the black mud. Her narrow chemise, as though dipped in ink, was sticking to her skin, and rising up to her waist with the movement of her thighs; it bridled her so painfully that she had once more to stop her task.

What was the matter with her, then, to-day? Never before had she felt as if there were wool in her bones. It must be the bad air. The ventilation did not reach to the bottom of this distant passage. One breathed there all sorts of vapours, which came out of the coal with the low bubbling sound of a spring, so abundantly sometimes that the lamps would not burn; to say nothing of fire-damp, which nobody noticed, for from one week's end to the other the men were always breathing it [275]