Germinal | Page 2

wit. In this way I was able to gain a more minute insight into
the details of Zola's work, and a more impressive vision of the massive
structure he here raised, than can easily be acquired by the mere reader.

That joint task has remained an abidingly pleasant memory. It is,
moreover, a satisfaction to me to know that I have been responsible,
however inadequately, for the only complete English version of this
wonderful book, 'a great fresco,' as Zola himself called it, a great prose
epic, as it has seemed to some, worthy to compare with the great verse
epics of old. HAVELOCK ELLIS. Part 1 Chapter 1 OVER the open
plain, beneath a starless sky as dark and thick as ink, a man walked
alone along the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou, a straight
paved road ten kilometres in length, intersecting the beetroot-fields. He
could not even see the black soil before him, and only felt the immense
flat horizon by the gusts of March wind, squalls as strong as on the sea,
and frozen from sweeping leagues of marsh and naked earth. No tree
could be seen against the sky, and the road unrolled as straight as a pier
in the midst of the blinding spray of darkness. The man had set out
from Marchiennes about two o'clock. He walked with long strides,
shivering beneath his worn cotton jacket and corduroy breeches. A
small parcel tied in a check handkerchief troubled him much, and he
pressed it against his side, sometimes with one elbow, sometimes with
the other, so that he could slip to the bottom of his pockets both the
benumbed hands that bled beneath the lashes of the wind. A single idea
occupied his head--the empty head of a workman without work and
without lodging--the hope that the cold would be less keen after sunrise.
For an hour he went on thus, when on the left, two kilometres from
Montsou, he saw red flames, three fires burning in the open air and
apparently suspended. At first he hesitated, half afraid. Then he could
not resist the painful need to warm his hands for a moment. The steep
road led downwards, and everything disappeared. The man saw on his
right a paling, a wall of coarse planks shutting in a line of rails, while a
grassy slope rose on the left surmounted by confused gables, a vision of
a village with low uniform roofs. He went on some two hundred paces.
Suddenly, at a bend in the road, the fires reappeared close to him,
though he could not understand how they burnt so high in the dead sky,
like smoky moons. But on the level soil another sight had struck him. It
was a heavy mass, a low pile of buildings from which rose the
silhouette of a factory chimney; occasional gleams appeared from dirty
windows, five or six melancholy lanterns were hung outside to frames
of blackened wood, which vaguely outlined the profiles of gigantic

stages; and from this fantastic apparition, drowned in night and smoke,
a single voice arose, the thick, long breathing of a steam escapement
that could not be seen. Then the man recognized a pit. His despair
returned. What was the good? There would be no work. Instead of
turning towards the buildings he decided at last to ascend the pit bank,
on which burnt in iron baskets the three coal fires which gave light and
warmth for work. The labourers in the cutting must have been working
late; they were still throwing out the useless rubbish. Now he heard the
landers push the wagons on the stages. He could distinguish living
shadows tipping over the trains or tubs near each fire. "Good day," he
said, approaching one of the baskets. Turning his back to the fire, the
carman stood upright. He was an old man, dressed in knitted violet
wool with a rabbit-skin cap on his head; while his horse, a great yellow
horse, waited with the immobility of stone while they emptied the six
trains he drew. The workman employed at the tipping-cradle, a
red-haired lean fellow, did not hurry himself; he pressed on the lever
with a sleepy hand. And above, the wind grew stronger--an icy north
wind--and its great, regular breaths passed by like the strokes of a
scythe. "Good day," replied the old man. There was silence. The man,
who felt that he was being looked at suspiciously, at once told his name.
"I am called Étienne Lantier. I am an engine-man. Any work here?"
The flames lit him up. He might be about twenty-one years of age, a
very dark, handsome man, who looked strong in spite of his thin limbs.
The carman, thus reassured, shook his head. "Work for an engine-man?
No, no! There were two