Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/342

GERMINAL laughter, abusing his fractured head, the dirty chops, hurling in the dead man's face the long venom of their life without bread.

"I owed you sixty francs, now you're paid, thief!" said Maheude, enraged with the others. "You won't refuse me credit any more. Wait! wait! I must fatten you once more!"

With her fingers she scratched up some earth, took two handfuls and stuffed it violently into his mouth.

"There! eat that! There! eat! eat! you used to eat us!"

The abuse increased, while the dead man, stretched on his back, gazed motionless with his large fixed eyes at the immense sky from which the night was falling. This earth heaped in his mouth was the bread which he had refused to give. And henceforth he would eat of no other bread. It had not brought him luck to starve poor people.

But the women had another revenge to wreak on him. They moved round, smelling him like she-wolves. They were all seeking for some outrage, some savagery that would relieve them.

Mother Brûlé's shrill voice was heard:

"Cut him like a tom-cat! Yes, yes, after the cat! after the cat! He's done too much, the dirty beast!"

Mouquette was already unfastening and drawing off the trousers, while the Levaque woman raised the legs. And Mother Brûlé, with her dry old hands, separated the naked thighs and seized this dead virility. She took hold of everything, tearing with an effort which bent her lean spine and made her long arms crack. The soft skin resisted; she had to try again, and at last carried away the fragment, a lump of hairy and bleeding flesh, which she brandished with a laugh of triumph.

"I've got it! I've got it!"

Shrill voices saluted with curses the abominable trophy.

"Ah! swine! you won't fill our daughters any more!"

"Yes! we've done with paying on your beastly body; we shan't any more have to offer a backside in return for a loaf."

"Here, I owe you six francs; would you like to settle it? I'm quite willing, if you can do it still!"

This joke shook them all with terrible gaiety. They showed each other the bleeding fragment as an evil beast from which each of them had suffered, and which they had at last crushed, and saw before them there, inert, in their power. They spat [330]