Moreover, she never had call to complain. Though a kind of obsession drove him, in spite of himself, to watch out for the moment when she got into bed, he never made smutty remarks, and he kept his hands to himself. Her parents were near by, and anyway the mixture of friendship and resentment he felt on her account prevented him from treating her as a girl to be desired, surrounded as they were by the unreserve of their newly shared existence, washing and eating and working side by side, with nothing left to hide, not even their most intimate personal needs. The last bastion of the family’s modesty was the daily bath, which Catherine now took alone upstairs while the men bathed in turn down below.
And so by the end of the first month it was as though Étienne and Catherine had ceased to notice each other, as they wandered about at bedtime in a state of undress before putting out the candle. She no longer hurried as she took off her clothes, and she had resumed her old practice of sitting on the edge of the bed while she put her hair up, causing her nightdress to ride up her thighs as she stretched her arms above her head; and sometimes, even with no trousers on, he would help her look for lost hairpins. Habit overcame the shame of their nakedness; it felt quite natural to them, for after all they meant no harm by it, and it wasn’t their fault if there was only one room for so many people. Yet there were moments when they would suddenly find it disturbing, and this when they were not even thinking improper thoughts. Having taken no notice of her pale skin for several nights, he would suddenly see her again in all her whiteness, that whiteness which made him tremble and turn away, for fear he might yield to his desire to take her. On other occasions, and for no apparent reason, she would suddenly feel coy and start avoiding him, sliding quickly under the sheets as if she had felt the young man’s hands take hold of her. Then, when the candle was out, they would know that neither of them was able to sleep and that they were thinking of each other, despite their exhaustion. And that left them feeling irritable and out of sorts the next day, because they much preferred the quiet evenings when they could relax together and be just good friends.
Étienne’s only cause for complaint was Jeanlin, who slept curled up like a gun dog. Alzire breathed gently as she slept, while in the mornings Lénore and Henri would still be lying in each other’s arms exactly as they had been put to bed the night before. Amid the darkness the only other sound in the house was of Maheu and La Maheude snoring, rumbling at regular intervals like bellows in a forge. All in all Étienne was more comfortable here than he had been at Rasseneur’s; the bed wasn’t bad, and they changed the sheets once a month. The soup was better, too, and his only regret was the lack of meat for dinner. But everyone was in the same straits, and he could hardly expect rabbit at every meal when he was paying forty-five francs for his board and lodging. Those forty-five francs helped the family to make ends meet more or less, while leaving various small debts to accumulate. And the Maheus showed their gratitude towards their lodger; his laundry was washed and mended, his buttons were sewn back on and his things tidied. In short, he could feel the benefits of a woman’s touch.
This was the point at which Étienne acquired a firmer grasp of the ideas that had been floating around in his head for some time. Until then he had experienced only an instinctive sense of resistance amid the silent, festering resentment of his comrades. All sorts of confusing issues puzzled him. Why were some men poor and other men rich? Why were some men under the heel of other men, and with no hope of ever taking their place? And the first forward step was the realization of his own ignorance. But then a deep sense of shame, a secret sorrow, began to gnaw away at him: he knew nothing, and he didn’t dare discuss with others these things he cared so passionately about, like equality among men, or the fairness and justice which demanded that the fruits of the earth be shared among all. So he acquired a taste for study, but of the unmethodical kind characteristic of people taken with a craze for knowledge. He was now in regular correspondence with Pluchart, who was better educated and already very involved in the socialist movement. He had books sent to him, whose poorly digested contents finally turned his head: especially a book on medicine, The Hygiene of Miners,1 in which a Belgian doctor had summarized the various illnesses that people working in the coal industry were dying of; not to mention a number of arid and impenetrably technical treatises on political economy, some anarchist pamphlets, which made his head spin, and old newspaper articles, which he kept for use as irrefutable ammunition in any future discussion. On top of which, Souvarine also lent him books, and the one about co-operative societies had set him dreaming for a whole month about a universal exchange system which abolished money and based the whole of social life on the value of labour. The shame he felt at his own ignorance receded, to be replaced by a new sense of pride now that he was aware of himself starting to think.
During these first few months Étienne remained at the level of the enthusiastic beginner, his heart bursting with generous indignation against the oppressor and eagerly espousing the prospect of imminent triumph for the oppressed. He had not yet put together a system of his own from all his sundry reading. The practical measures demanded by Rasseneur were all mixed up in his mind with the violence and destruction advocated by Souvarine; and when he came out of the Advantage, where the three of them spent time almost every day ranting and railing against the Company, he would walk along in a kind of dream in which he was witness to the radical regeneration of all the peoples of the world with not a window broken or a drop of blood shed. Admittedly the means to this end remained obscure, and he preferred simply to believe that everything would turn out fine, for he soon got lost when he tried to formulate a specific programme of reform. Indeed he was full of moderation and illogicality, insisting from time to time that politics had to be kept out of the ‘social question’,2 an opinion he had read somewhere and which seemed like the right thing to say among the apathetic colliers he worked with.
In the Maheu household they had taken to sitting up half an hour longer every evening before going to bed, and Étienne kept returning to the same subject. Now that he was becoming more refined, he was increasingly offended by the cheek-by-jowl nature of life in the village. Were they animals to be herded together like this in the middle of the fields, and all penned in so tightly, one on top of the other, that you couldn’t so much as change your clothes without showing your backside to the neighbours! It was so good for your health, of course! And no wonder girls and boys went to the bad, being thrown together like that!
‘Obviously,’ Maheu would reply, ‘if we had a bit more money, things would be easier…All the same, you’re quite right, it doesn’t do anybody any good living on top of each other like this. And it’s always the same old story in the end: the men get drunk and the girls have a baby.’
This started everyone off, and each member of the family said their piece, as the fumes from the paraffin lamp mingled with the reek of fried onion and turned the air fouler still. No, certainly, life was hardly a bed of roses. You worked like an animal doing what used to be done by convicts as a punishment, more often than not it killed you, and still you didn’t have meat on the table come dinner-time. All right, so you did get your daily plate of mash, you did eat, but so little, just enough so you could suffer without actually dying, up to your eyes in debt and chased after as though you’d stolen the bread you ate. Come Sunday you just slept from the exhaustion of it all. The only pleasures were getting drunk or giving your wife a baby, and even then, the beer gave you a paunch, and the child wouldn’t give a damn about you when it was older. No, it was not what you’d call a bed of roses.
Then La Maheude would join in:
‘The worst of it, you know, is when you start telling yourself that things can never change…When you’re young, you think happiness is just round the corner, you hope for things; but then the poverty grinds on and on, and you find you can never escape it…Me, I don’t wish harm to anyone, but there are times when the injustice of it all just sickens me.’
There wo
uld be a silence, and everyone would draw breath for a moment, full of vague unease at the prospect of this closed horizon. Only old Bonnemort, if he was there, would stare in surprise, for in his day they didn’t use to torment themselves like this: you were a miner, you worked your seam, and you didn’t ask for more; whereas nowadays a new wind was blowing, and the miners were getting some fancy ideas.
‘You should take what you’re given,’ he muttered. ‘A glass of beer is a glass of beer…Yeah, the bosses are often bastards all right, but there will always be bosses, won’t there? So there’s no point worrying about it.’
At once Étienne was roused. What! A worker shouldn’t think for himself! Ah, but that’s precisely why things were soon going to change, because now the worker had started thinking! In the old man’s day the miner lived down the pit like an animal, like a machine for extracting coal, always underground, his eyes and ears closed to what was going on outside. Which meant that the rich and powerful could suit themselves, buying and selling the miner as they pleased, living off his flesh while he himself didn’t even realize what was going on. But now, deep in the earth, the miner was waking from his slumber and germinating in the soil like a real seed; and one fine day people would see what was growing in the middle of these fields: yes, men, a whole army of men, would spring up from the earth, and justice would be restored. Were all citizens not equal since the Revolution? Why should the worker remain the slave of the boss who paid him when both of them now voted? The big companies with all their machines crushed everything in their path, and people didn’t even have the safeguards to protect them like they used to in the old days when men of the same trade banded together and knew how to defend themselves. And that was the reason, God help us! among many others, why everything would blow up in their faces one day, and all thanks to education. You only had to look around you: the grandfathers couldn’t even have signed their own names but the fathers could, and the sons were able to read and write as well as any teacher. Oh yes, they were growing and growing, one big harvest of men ripening in the sun! Now that they weren’t all stuck in one particular job for life and you could look to take the place of the next man, why wouldn’t you use your fists and show who’s strongest?
This had its effect on Maheu, though he remained very sceptical:
‘As soon as you try anything, they hand you your cards,’3 he said. ‘The old man’s right. It’ll always be the miner’s lot to suffer, and without even the prospect of a nice joint of meat once in a while to keep him going.’
Having been silent for some time, La Maheude spoke as though in a dream:
‘If only it were true what the priests tell you, about the poor in this world being rich in the next!’
She was interrupted by howls of laughter, and even the children gestured in disbelief. For the harsh wind of reality had left them all unbelievers, secretly fearful of the ghosts in the pit but full of mockery at the emptiness of heaven.
‘Oh, don’t give me priests!’ Maheu exclaimed. ‘If they really believed it, they’d eat less and work harder, so they could book a nice spot for themselves up above…No, when you’re dead, you’re dead.’
La Maheude sighed deeply.
‘Dear God, dear God.’
Then, with her hands on her knees and an expression of profound weariness, she said:
‘Well, that’s it, we’re done for, the lot of us.’
They all looked at each other. Old Bonnemort spat into his handkerchief. Maheu’s pipe had gone out, but he just sat there with it in his mouth. Alzire listened, flanked by Lénore and Henri, who had both fallen asleep at the table. But Catherine in particular, her chin in her hands, stared intently at Étienne with her big, bright eyes as he disagreed and began to proclaim his faith, opening up the prospect of a magical future and expounding his dream of a new social order. Around them the village was retiring to bed, and all that could be heard were the distant wailings of a child or the angry reception of a drunk returning home late. Inside the room the cuckoo clock ticked away slowly, and a cool dampness rose from the sanded flag-stones, despite the stuffiness.
‘And there’s another load of nonsense!’ said the young man. ‘Why do you need a God and a paradise to be happy? Can’t you make your own happiness in this world?’
And he would begin to talk, urgently, on and on. All of a sudden the closed horizon had burst asunder, and a shaft of light was breaking through into the grim lives of these poverty-stricken people. The endless round of deprivation, the brutish labour, living like animals to be shorn and slaughtered, all this wretchedness vanished, as though swept away by a great blaze of sunshine; and justice, as if by some dazzling enchantment, came down from above. Now that God was dead, justice would be the means of human happiness, ushering in the age of equality and the brotherhood of man. A new society would emerge in a single day, as in a dream, a great city shining like a vision, in which each citizen would be paid the rate for the job and have his share of the common joy. The old world, already rotten, had crumbled to dust; and humankind, newly young and purged of its crimes, would be one nation of workers, with the motto: ‘To each according to his deserts, and to his deserts according to his works.’ And the dream would grow ever grander and more wonderful, and the higher it reached towards the impossible, the more beguiling it became.
At first La Maheude would refuse to listen, seized with silent apprehension. No, no, it was too wonderful, it didn’t do to go having ideas like that, it just made life awful afterwards when you felt as though you couldn’t care who or what you destroyed just so long as you could be happy. When she saw the troubled look in Maheu’s eyes replaced by a gleam of conviction, she became anxious and interrupted Étienne loudly:
‘Don’t you listen to him, my love! You know it’s all pie in the sky…Do you think the bourgeois will ever agree to work the way we do?’
But gradually she, too, fell under the spell. Her imagination had been caught, and with a smile on her face she entered the fairyland of hope. How good it was to be able to forget their grim reality for a time! When you live like an animal, with your nose to the ground, you need a little corner somewhere, a place of make-believe where you can go and play at imagining delights that will never be yours. And what really excited her, what made her of one mind with this young man, was the idea of justice.
‘You’re right there!’ she would cry. ‘If the cause is just, they can cut off my right arm if they want…And it would be a just cause, I can tell you, if it was our turn to enjoy life for once.’
Then Maheu risked a show of enthusiasm:
‘God Almighty! I may not be rich but I’d give a fair bit to be able to see all that before I die…Then we’d see the fur fly! Eh? How long will it take, do you think? And how are we to go about it?’
Étienne would begin talking again. The old society was falling apart, it couldn’t last more than a few months now, he roundly declared. As to how they were to go about it, he was less specific and quoted various things he had read, undaunted by these ignorant people and launching himself into explanations before losing the thread himself. He drew on every political system there was, each one sweetened by the certainty of easy victory and the prospect of a universal embrace that would put an end to class division – apart from a few awkward types among the factory-owners and the bourgeois, who might have to be brought to their senses. The Maheus listened with the air of people who understood, nodding their approval and accepting these miraculous solutions with the blind faith of new converts, like members of the early Christian Church calmly awaiting the emergence of the perfect society from the dunghill of the ancient world. Little Alzire caught a word here and there and pictured happiness as a lovely warm house where children played and ate as much as they liked. Catherine, her head propped on her hand, just sat staring at Étienne, and when he stopped, she shivered slightly and looked pale, as though she had suddenly caught a chill.
But then La Maheude would catch sight of the clock:
‘It’
s gone nine. Really to goodness! We’ll never get up in the morning.’
And the Maheus left the table, feeling sick at heart, despairing. It was as though they had momentarily been rich and had now suddenly fallen once more into the mire. Old Bonnemort, leaving for the pit, would mutter crossly that such talk never made a man’s soup taste any better; while the rest of them went up to bed, one by one, now noticing the damp walls and the foul, stale air. Upstairs Catherine was the last to get into bed, and after she had blown out the candle, with the rest of the village in silent slumber, Étienne could hear her tossing and turning before she finally fell asleep.
Often neighbours would join them during these talking sessions – Levaque, who got excited at the thought of sharing wealth, or Pierron, whom caution sent home again the moment they started attacking the Company. Occasionally Zacharie would drop by for a while; but politics bored him, and he preferred to go down to the Advantage for a beer. As for Chaval, he would up the stakes and start baying for blood. He spent an hour at the Maheus’ almost every evening, and his keen attendance bespoke a secret jealousy, the fear of losing Catherine. Though he was already tiring of her, the girl had become dear to him ever since there had been a man sleeping next to her each night, a man who could have her.