Up above, La Maheude lay slumped by the side of Catherine’s body uttering one long, wailing scream after another in unceasing lament. Several other bodies had already been brought up and placed in a row on the ground; Chaval, who was presumed to have been crushed by a rock-fall, one pit-boy and two hewers whose bodies had been similarly smashed, their skulls now emptied of brains and their bellies swollen with water. Some women in the crowd were going out of their minds, tearing at their skirts and scratching themselves in the face. When they finally brought Étienne out, having accustomed him to the light of the lamps and fed him a little, he was no more than a skeleton, and his hair had turned completely white. People moved away, shuddering at the sight of this old man. La Maheude stopped screaming and gazed at him blankly with huge, staring eyes.
VI
It was four o’clock in the morning. The cool April night was warming with the coming of day. Up in the clear sky the stars were beginning to flicker and fade as the first light of dawn tinged the eastern horizon with purple. And the black countryside lay slumbering, as yet barely touched by the faint stirring that precedes the world’s awakening.
Étienne was striding along the Vandame road. He had just spent six weeks in hospital in Montsou. Still sallow-skinned and very thin, he had felt strong enough to leave, and leaving he was. The Company, still nervous about the safety of its pits and in the process of carrying out a series of dismissals, had told him that they could not keep him on and offered him a grant of a hundred francs together with some fatherly advice about quitting the mines, where the work would now be too hard for him. But he had refused the hundred francs. Having written to Pluchart, he had already received a reply inviting him to Paris and enclosing the cost of the fare. His old dream was coming true. After leaving hospital the previous day, he had stayed with Widow Desire at the Jolly Fellow. And when he got up early that morning, his one remaining wish had been to say goodbye to the comrades before catching the eight o’clock train from Marchiennes.
Étienne paused for a moment in the middle of the road, which was now flushed with pink. It was so good to breathe in this fresh, pure air of early spring. It was going to be a beautiful day. Slowly the dawn was breaking, and the sap was rising with the sun. He set off again, striking the ground firmly with his dog-wood stick and watching the distant plain emerge from the early-morning mists. He had not seen anybody since the disaster; La Maheude had visited the hospital once but had presumably been prevented from coming again. But he knew that the whole of Village Two Hundred and Forty was now employed at Jean-Bart, and that she herself had gone back to work.
The deserted roads were slowly filling up, and silent, pale-faced miners were constantly passing Étienne. The Company, so he’d heard, had been taking unfair advantage of its victory. When the miners had returned to the pits, vanquished by hunger after two and a half months out on strike, they had been forced to accept the separate rate for the timbering, this disguised pay-cut that was even more odious to them now that it was stained with the blood of their comrades. They were being robbed of an hour’s pay and made to break their oath that they would never give in; and this enforced perjury stuck in their throats with the bitterness of gall. Work was resuming everywhere, at Mirou, at Madeleine, at Crèvecœur, at La Victoire. All over the region, along roads still plunged in darkness, the herd was tramping through the mists of dawn, long lines of men plodding along with their noses to the ground like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse. Shivering under their thin cotton clothes, they walked with their arms folded, rolling their hips and hunching their backs, to which their pieces, wedged between shirt and coat, added its hump. But behind this mass return to work, among these black, wordless shadows who neither laughed nor even looked about them, one could sense the teeth gritted in anger, the hearts brimming with hatred, and the reluctant acceptance of one master and one master only: the need to eat.
The closer Étienne came to the pit, the more he saw their number increase. Almost all were walking on their own; even those who had come in groups followed each other in single file, worn out already, sick of other people and sick of themselves. He noticed one very old man with eyes that blazed like coals beneath his white forehead. Another man, young this time, was breathing heavily like a storm about to break. Many held their clogs in their hands, and it was hardly possible to hear them as they padded softly over the ground in their thick woollen socks. They streamed past endlessly, like the forced march of some conquered army retreating after a terrible defeat, heads bowed in sullen fury, desperate to join battle once more and take their revenge.
When Étienne arrived, Jean-Bart was just emerging from the darkness, and the lanterns hanging from the railway trestles were still burning in the growing light of dawn. Above the dark buildings a white plume of steam rose from the drainage-pump, delicately tinged with carmine. He took the screening-shed stairway and made his way to the unloading area.
The miners were beginning to go down, and men were coming up from the changing-room. For a moment he just stood there, amid all the noise and the bustle. The cast-iron flooring shook as tubs rumbled across; the pulleys were turning and paying out cable as the loudhailer blared and bells rang and the hammer fell on the signal-block; and then he found himself face to face once more with the monster, gulping down its ration of human flesh as the cages rose to the surface, took on their batch of men and plunged back again, ceaselessly, like some voracious giant bolting his food in easy mouthfuls. Ever since the disaster Étienne had had a nervous dread of the mine. These vanishing cages turned his stomach, and he had to look away. The sight of the shaft was simply too much for him.
But in the vast hall still cloaked in shadow, where the guttering lamps cast an eerie light, he could not make out a single face he knew. The miners who were waiting there, barefoot and clutching their lamps, would stare at him nervously and then look down and guiltily move away. No doubt they recognized him but, far from feeling any resentment towards him, they seemed to be afraid of him and embarrassed at the thought that he might be blaming them for being cowards. This reaction made him feel proud. He forgot how the miserable brutes had stoned him, and began to dream once more about how he would make heroes of them all, how he would lead the people and direct this force of nature which all too often devoured its own.
A cage filled up with men and disappeared with its latest consignment; and as others came forward, he at last recognized a miner who had been one of his assistants during the strike, a good man who’d always sworn he would rather die than surrender.
‘You too?’ he muttered sadly.
The man turned pale, and his lips began to quiver. Then he gestured apologetically:
‘What can I do? I’ve got a wife to feed.’
He recognized everyone now among this latest group of miners coming up from the changing-room.
‘So you too! And you! And you!’
They were all shaking nervously, stammering out their replies in a strangled voice:
‘It’s my mother…I’ve got children…A person’s got to eat.’
The cage had still not reappeared, and they waited there gloomily, so pained by their defeat that they stared obstinately at the shaft rather than look one another in the eye.
‘And La Maheude?’ asked Étienne.
They didn’t answer. One of them made a sign that she was just coming. Others raised their trembling arms to show how sorry they felt for her: oh, that poor woman! What a terrible business! The silence continued, and when their comrade held out his hand to say goodbye, they all shook it firmly, putting into this silent handshake all their fury at having given in and all their fervent hopes of revenge. The cage had arrived: they got in and vanished, swallowed up by the abyss.
Pierron had appeared, with the open lamp of a deputy attached to his leather cap. It was now a week since he had been put in charge of the onsetters at pit-bottom, and the men moved aside to let him pass, for this great honour had made him stand on his dignity. He was annoyed to se
e Étienne there, but he came across and was eventually reassured when Étienne told him he was leaving. Pierron’s wife, it seemed, was now running the Progress, thanks to the support of the kind gentlemen who had all been very good to her. But then Pierron broke off to reprimand old Mouque angrily for not having brought up the horse-dung at the regulation hour. The old man listened to him with hunched shoulders. Then, before going down, speechless with anger at being told off like this, he too shook Étienne’s hand, and his handshake was like the others’, long, warm with the heat of his suppressed anger, and quivering with the anticipation of future rebellions. And Étienne was so moved to feel this old man’s trembling hand in his, forgiving him for the death of his children, that he watched him go without saying a word.
‘Isn’t La Maheude coming this morning?’ he asked Pierron after a while.
At first Pierron pretended not to understand, for sometimes it was bad luck just to talk about bad luck. Then, as he was moving away on the pretext of giving someone an order, he said finally:
‘What’s that? La Maheude?…Here she is.’
And indeed La Maheude was just coming up from the changing-room, lamp in hand, wearing a miner’s jacket and trousers, with the regulation cap pulled down over her ears. The Company, out of compassion for the plight of this poor woman who had suffered so cruelly, had quite exceptionally, and as an act of charity, permitted her to work underground at the age of forty; and since they could hardly have her pushing tubs, she had been given the job of operating a small ventilating machine which had recently been installed in the northern roadway, in that hell-fire part of the mine beneath the Tartaret where the air never circulated. And there, for ten back-breaking hours, down at the end of a suffocatingly hot and narrow road, she would turn the wheel while her body roasted in a temperature of forty degrees. She earned thirty sous.
When Étienne saw her, a pitiful sight in her men’s clothes, with her breasts and stomach looking as though they were distended with dropsy on account of the dampness in the mine, he was so shocked that he started stammering, unable to find the words to explain to her that he was leaving and that he had wanted to come and say goodbye.
She looked at him, oblivious to what he was saying, and then eventually spoke as though to a member of her own family:
‘Surprised to see me here, eh?…Yes, I know, I was going to strangle the first person in our house that went back down, and now here’s me going back. I ought to strangle myself really, oughtn’t I?…Oh, I’d have done so before now, I can tell you, if it weren’t for the old man and the little ones at home!’
And on she went, in her quiet, weary voice. She was not trying to make excuses for herself, it was just how it was. They’d all nearly starved to death, and then she’d made the decision, to stop them being thrown out of the village.
‘How is the old man?’ Étienne inquired.
‘He’s still as gentle as ever, and he keeps himself clean…But he’s completely cracked in the head…He was never found guilty of that business, you know? There was talk of putting him in the madhouse, but I wouldn’t have it. They’d have slipped something in his soup…But it’s done us a lot of harm all the same, because he’ll never get his pension. One of the gentlemen told me it would be immoral to give him one now.’
‘Is Jeanlin working?’
‘Yes, the gentlemen have found a job for him, above ground. He gets twenty sous…Oh, I can’t complain. The bosses have been very good to us, as they pointed out indeed…The boy’s twenty sous, plus my thirty, makes fifty altogether. If there weren’t six of us, we’d have enough to live on. But Estelle’s eating everything now, and the worst of it is that it’s going to be another four or five years before Lénore and Henri are old enough to go down the pit.’
Étienne could not help groaning:
‘Them too!’
La Maheude’s white cheeks flushed, and her eyes blazed. But then her shoulders sagged, as though under the weight of destiny.
‘What can I do? They’re next…The job’s killed everyone else, so now it’s their turn.’
She stopped as they were interrupted by men pushing tubs past. Daylight was beginning to filter through the tall, grimy windows, dulling the lanterns in its greyish blur; and the winding-engine continued to shudder into life every three minutes, the cables unwound, and the cages went on swallowing the men.
‘Come on, you idle lot, get a move on!’ shouted Pierron. ‘Get in, or we’ll never be finished today.’
He looked at La Maheude, but she did not move. She had already let three cages go without her, and now, as though she had just woken up and remembered what Étienne had told her at the beginning, she said:
‘So you’re leaving?’
‘Yes, this morning.’
‘You’re right. Probably better to go somewhere else, if you can…But I’m glad to have seen you, because at least you’ll know now that I don’t bear you any grudge. There was a time I could have smashed your head in, when everyone was getting killed. But then you think things over, don’t you, and you realize in the end that it’s nobody’s fault in particular…No, no, it’s not your fault, it’s everybody’s fault.’
She now talked quite easily about those she had lost, about Maheu and Zacharie and Catherine; and tears came into her eyes only when she mentioned the name of Alzire. She was once again the calm, reasonable woman she used to be, always able to take a sensible view of things. It wouldn’t do the bourgeois any good to have killed so many poor people. Of course they would pay for it one day, the day of reckoning always came. There wouldn’t even be the need to do anything about it, the whole bloody lot would just blow up in their faces, and the soldiers would shoot the bosses the same way they’d shot the workers. Underneath the blind acceptance inherited from previous generations and the inborn sense of discipline that was again bending her neck to the yoke, a shift had thus taken place, for now she was certain that the injustice could not go on, and that just because the gates of heaven hadn’t opened this time, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t open one day and offer vengeance to the poor.
She spoke quietly, looking about her furtively as she did so. When Pierron approached, she added in a loud voice:
‘Well, if you’re leaving, you’d better come and collect your things from the house…There are still a couple of shirts, three neckerchiefs and an old pair of trousers.’
With a wave of his hand Étienne refused this offer of the few clothes of his which had not been sold off.
‘No, don’t bother about them. They’ll do for the children…I’ll sort myself out something when I get to Paris.’
Two more cages had gone down, and Pierron decided to summon La Maheude directly.
‘Hey, you over there. We’re waiting for you. Haven’t you finished your little chat yet?’
But she turned her back on him. What was he being all zealous about, the bloody toady? It wasn’t his job to supervise the descent, and anyway the men at pit-bottom hated him enough as it was. So she stayed where she was, clutching her lamp and freezing in the icy draughts despite the mild weather.
Neither of them could think of anything more to say. But as they stood there facing each other, their hearts were so full that they wanted to talk on.
Eventually, for the sake of something to say, La Maheude added:
‘La Levaque’s pregnant. Levaque’s still in prison, and Boute-loup’s been taking his place in the meanwhile.’
‘Ah, yes, Bouteloup.’
‘Oh, and did I tell you?…Philomène’s gone.’
‘What do you mean ‘‘gone’’?’
‘Yes, she’s gone off with a miner from the Pas-de-Calais. I was worried she might leave her two kids with me, but no, she’s taken them with her…Not bad for a woman who spits blood and looks as though she were about to breathe her last the whole time!’
She thought for a moment, and then continued in an unhurried way:
‘And the things they’ve said about me!…Do you remember how they us
ed to claim I was sleeping with you. Well, my God! After Maheu died, it could very easily have happened. Had I been younger, that is. But I’m glad it didn’t, because we’d be sure to regret it now.’
‘Yes, we’d be sure to,’ Étienne simply repeated after her.
And that was all. They said no more. There was a cage waiting, and she was angrily being told to get in or face a fine. So she decided she’d better go, and shook him by the hand. He felt very sad as he watched her leave, so aged and worn out, with her bloodless face, and the mousy hair poking out under her blue cap, and the body of a fine specimen of a woman who’d had too many children, a stout body that now looked misshapen in its trousers and its cotton jacket. And in this final handshake he recognized once again the long, silent grip that promised support for the day when they would all try again. He understood perfectly, he had seen the calm faith in her eyes. See you again soon, and next time we’ll really show ’em.
‘Bloody idle woman!’ shouted Pierron.
Having been pushed and jostled, La Maheude crammed into a tub with four other miners. The signal-rope was pulled to indicate that the ‘meat’ was on its way, and the cage swung from its keep and fell into the night. All that was left was the whirr of unwinding cable.