Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/324

GERMINAL door for carts, for it was also used as a barn for hay. The young girls, who had put out their heads, were astonished to see on the left a black flood, a shouting band which was moving along the Vandame road.

"The deuce!" muttered Négrel, who had also gone out. "Are our brawlers getting angry at last?"

"It is perhaps the colliers again," said the peasant woman. "This is twice they've passed. Seems things are not going well; they're masters of the country."

She uttered every word prudently, watching the effect on their faces; and when she noticed the fright of all of them, and their deep anxiety at this encounter, she hastened to conclude:

"Oh, the rascals! the rascals!"

Négrel, seeing that it was too late to get into their carriage and reach Montsou, ordered the coachman to bring the vehicle into the farmyard, where it would remain hidden behind a shed. He himself fastened his horse, which a lad had been holding, beneath the shed. When he came back he found his aunt and the young girls distracted, and ready to follow the peasant-woman, who proposed that they should take refuge in her house. But he was of opinion that they would be safer where they were, for certainly no one would come and look for them in the hay. The door, however, shut very badly, and had such large cracks in it, that the road could be seen between the worm-eaten wood.

"Come, courage!" he said. "We will sell our lives dearly."

This joke increased their fear. The noise grew louder, but nothing could yet be seen; along the vacant road the wind of a tempest seemed to be blowing, like those sudden gusts which precede great storms.

"No, no! I don't want to look," said Cécile, going to hide herself in the hay.

Madame Hennebeau, who was very pale and felt angry with these people who had spoilt her pleasure, stood in the background with a side long look of repugnance; while Lucie and Jeanne, though trembling, had placed their eyes at a crack, anxious to lose nothing of the spectacle.

A sound of thunder came near, the earth was shaken, and Jeanlin galloped up first, blowing into his horn.

"Take out your scent-bottles, the sweat of the people is pass- [312]