Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/97

 CHAPTER III

LEVEN o'clock struck at the little church in the Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement, a brick chapel in which Abbé Joire came to say mass on Sundays. In the school beside it, also of brick, one heard the faltering voices of the children, in spite of windows closed against the outside cold. The wide passages, divided into little gardens, back to back, between the four large blocks of uniform houses, were deserted; and these gardens, devastated by the winter, exhibited the destitution of their marly soil, lumped and spotted by the last vegetables. They were making soup, chimneys were smoking, a woman appeared at distant intervals along the fronts, opened a door and disappeared. From one end to the other, over the pavement, the pipes dripped into tubs, although it was no longer raining, so charged was this grey sky with moistness. And the village, built altogether in the midst of the vast plain, and edged by its black roads as by a mourning border, had no touch of joyousness about it save the regular bands of its red tiles, constantly washed by showers.

When Maheude returned, she went out of her way to buy potatoes from an overseer's wife whose crop was not yet exhausted. Behind a curtain of sickly poplars, the only trees in these flat regions, was a group of isolated buildings, houses placed four together, and surrounded by their gardens. As the Company reserved this new experiment for the captains, the work-people called this corner of the hamlet the settlement of the Bas-de-Soie, just as they called their own settlement Pai-tes-Dettes, in good-humoured irony of their wretchedness.

"Eh! Here we are," said Maheude, laden with parcels, pushing in Lénore and Henri, covered with mud, and with faltering steps.

In front of the fire Estelle was screaming, cradled in Alzire's arms. The latter, having no more sugar and not knowing how [85]