Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/366

GERMINAL old man strangle the Piolaine girl. Hunger may strangle my little ones for all they care!"

Her words fell like the blows of an axe in the night. The closed horizon would not open, and the impossible idea was turning to poison in the depths of this skull which had been crushed by grief.

"You have misunderstood," Étienne was able to say at last, beating a retreat. "We ought to come to an understanding with the Company. I know that the pits are suffering much, so that it would probably consent to an arrangement."

"No, never!" she shouted.

Just then Lénore and Henri came back with their hands empty. A gentleman had certainly given them two sous, but the girl kept kicking her little brother, and the two sous fell into the snow, and as Jeanlin had joined in the search they had not been able to find them.

"Where is Jeanlin?"

"He's gone away, mother; he said he had business."

Étienne was listening with an aching heart. Once she had threatened to kill them if they ever held out their hands to beg. Now she sent them herself on to the roads, and proposed that all of them—the ten thousand colliers of Montsou—should take the sticks and wallets of the aged poor and scour the terrified country.

The anguish continued to increase in the black room. The little urchins came back hungry, they wanted to eat; why could they not have something to eat? And they grumbled, flung themselves about, and at last crushed the feet of their dying sister, who groaned. The mother furiously boxed their ears in the darkness at random. Then, as they cried still louder, asking for bread, she burst into tears, and dropped on to the floor, seizing them all in one embrace with the little invalid; then, for a long time, her tears fell in a nervous outbreak which left her limp and worn out, stammering over and over again the same phrase, calling for death:

"Oh! God! why do you not take us? Oh! God! in pity take us, to have done with it!"

The grandfather preserved his immobility, like an old tree twisted by the rain and wind; while the father continued [354]