GERMINAL
But as they crossed the screening place a scene of violence stopped them.
It was in a vast shed, with beams blackened by the powder, and large shutters, through which blew a constant current of air. The coal trams arrived straight from the receiving-room, and were then overturned, by the tipping-cradles, on to hoppers, long iron slides; and to right and to left of these the screeners, mounted on steps and armed with shovels and rakes, swept together the clean coal, which afterwards fell through funnels into the railway waggons beneath the shed.
Philomène Levaque was there, thin and pale, with the sheep-like face of a girl who spat blood. With head protected by a fragment of blue wool, and hands and arms black to the elbows, she was screening beneath an old witch, the mother of Pierronne, the Brûlé, as she was called, with terrible owl’s eyes, and a mouth drawn in like a miser’s purse. They were abusing each other, the young one accusing the elder of raking her stones so that she could not get a basketful in ten minutes. They were paid by the basket, and these quarrels were constantly arising. Hair was flying, and hands were making black marks on red faces.
“Give it her bloody well!” cried Zacharie, from above, to his mistress.
All the screeners laughed. But the Brûlé turned snappishly on the young man.
“Now, then, dirty beast! You'd do better to own the two kids you, have filled her with. If it’s possible, a slip of eighteen, who can’t stand straight!”
Maheu had to prevent his son from descending to see, as he said, the colour of this carcass’s skin.
A foreman came up and the rakes again began to move the coal. One could only see, all along the hoppers, the round backs of women eagerly disputing the stones.
Outside, the wind had suddenly quieted; a moist cold was falling from a grey sky. The colliers thrust out their shoulders, crossed their arms and set forth irregularly, with a rolling gait which made their large bones stand out beneath their thin garments. In the daylight they looked like a band of negroes thrown into the mud. Some of them had not finished
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