Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/36

GERMINAL carry a little warmth in their skins, so that they could face the dampness of the pit. But this morning there was much amusement: they were joking Mouquette, a putter girl of eighteen, whose enormous breasts and flanks were bursting through her jacket and breeches. She lived at Réquillart with her father, old Mouque, a groom, and Mouquet, her brother, a lander; but their hours of work were not the same, and in the middle of the wheat fields in summer, or against a wall in winter, she took her pleasure with her lover of the week. All in the mine had their turn; it was a perpetual round of comrades without further consequences. One day, when reproached about a Marchiennes nail-maker, she was furiously angry, exclaiming that she respected herself far too much, that she would cut her arm off if anyone could boast that he had seen her with anyone but a collier.

"It isn't that big Chaval now?" said a miner, grinning, "that little fellow must have needed a ladder. I saw you behind Réquillart, a token that he got on to a milestone."

"Well," replied Mouquette, in a good humour, "what's that to do with you? You were not asked to push."

And this gross good-natured joke increased the laughter of the men, who expanded their shoulders, half cooked by the stove, while she herself, shaken by laughter, was displaying in the midst of them the indecency of her costume, embarrassingly comical, with her masses of flesh exaggerated almost to disease.

But the gaiety ceased; Mouquette told Maheu that Fleurance, big Fleurance, would never come again; she had been found the night before stiff in her bed; some said it was her heart, others that it was a pint of gin she had drunk too quickly. And Maheu was in despair; another piece of ill-luck; one of the best of his putters gone without any chance of replacing her at once. He was working in a set; there were four pikemen associated in his cutting, himself, Zacharie, Levaque, and Chaval. If they had Catherine alone to wheel, the work would suffer.

Suddenly he called out:

"I have it! there was that man looking for work!"

At that moment Dansaert passed before the shed. Maheu told him the story, and asked for his authority to engage the [24]