GERMINAL
felt an unbearable tearing sensation in his chest. He made no complaint, but mechanically took his tin from time to time and swallowed a gulp of gin, shaking so much that he thought he needed it to carry him to the end. His cheeks were heated and his eyes inflamed. He kept his head, however, and still wished to avoid needless destruction.
As they arrived at the Joiselle road a Vandame pikeman, who had joined the band for revenge on his master, impelled the men towards the right, shouting:
"To Gaston-Marie! Must stop the pump! Let the water ruin Jean-Bart!"
The mob was already turning, in spite of the protests of Étienne, who begged them to let the water be drawn up. What was the good of destroying the galleries? It offended his workman's heart, in spite of his resentment. Maheu also thought it unjust to take revenge on a machine. But the pikeman still shouted his cry of vengeance, and Étienne had to cry still louder:
"To Mirou! There are traitors down there! To Mirou! to Mirou!"
With a gesture, he had turned the crowd towards the left road; while Jeanlin, going ahead, was blowing louder than ever. An eddy was produced in the crowd; this time Gaston-Marie was saved.
And the four kilomètres which separated them from Mirou were traversed in half-an-hour, almost at running pace, across the interminable plain. The canal on this side cut it with a long icy ribbon. The leafless trees on the banks, changed by the frost into giant candelabra, alone broke this pale uniformity, prolonged and lost in the sky at the horizon as in a sea. An undulation of the ground hid Montsou and Marchiennes; there was nothing but bare immensity.
They reached the pit, and found a captain standing on a foot-bridge at the screening shed to receive them. They all well knew Father Quandieu, the dean of the Montsou captains, an old man whose skin and hair were quite white, and who was in his seventies, a miracle of fine health in the mines.
"What have you come after here, you pack of meddlers?" he shouted.
The band stopped. It was no longer a master, it was a mate; and a certain respect held them back before this old workman.
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