‘Catherine! Bring me the candle!’ shouted Maheu.
She was just finishing buttoning up her jacket, and she carried the candle into her parents’ room, leaving her brothers to hunt for their clothes in the modicum of light coming through the door. Her father jumped out of bed. Catherine did not wait but groped her way downstairs in her thick woollen stockings and lit another candle in the parlour, in order to make the coffee. The family’s clogs were lined up under the dresser.
‘Will you be quiet, you little brat!’ Maheu shouted again, infuriated by Estelle’s continual screaming.
He was short like Grandpa Bonnemort, of whom he offered a stouter version, with the same large head and flat, pallid face, topped by close-cropped yellow hair. The baby was wailing even more loudly now, terrified by the big, gnarled arms swinging about above her.
‘Leave her be! You know she won’t be quiet,’ said La Maheude, stretching out in the middle of the bed.
She, too, had just woken up, and she began to complain about how ridiculous it was that she never seemed to get a proper night’s sleep. Why couldn’t they all leave quietly? Buried beneath the blanket, all that could be seen of her was her long face with its broad features, which had a certain heavy beauty but which, at the age of thirty-nine, had already been disfigured by her life of poverty and the seven children she had borne. With her eyes fixed on the ceiling she spoke slowly as her husband got dressed. Neither of them heeded the little girl who was crying so hard that she was nearly choking.
‘Look, I’m down to my last sou, you know, and it’s still only Monday. There are another six days to go till the fortnight’s up4…We just can’t go on like this. You bring in nine francs5 between you, all told. Well, how am I supposed to manage on that, I ask you? There are ten of us living here.’
‘What d’you mean, nine francs?’ Maheu objected. ‘Me and Zacharie get three, which makes six…Catherine and Father get two, which makes four; four and six make ten…And Jeanlin, he gets one, which makes eleven.’
‘Eleven, yes, but then there are the Sundays and the days when there’s no work…It’s never more than nine, believe me.’
Busy searching for his leather belt on the floor, he made no reply. Then, as he stood up, he said:
‘You can’t grumble, though. At least I’m still fit. There’s a few of them at forty-two who get transferred to doing maintenance work.’
‘That’s as may be, love, but it doesn’t earn us any more, does it?…So what on earth am I going to do? You haven’t got anything, have you?’
‘Two sous.’
‘Oh, keep them, buy yourself a beer…But my God, seriously, what am I going to do? Six days? That’s ages. We owe Maigrat sixty francs. He threw me out of his shop the other day…which won’t stop me going back there, but if he insists that no means no…’
And La Maheude went on in the same gloomy tone, never moving her head but closing her eyes from time to time to blot out the sorry light of the candle. She told him how there was no food in the cupboard, and how the little ones kept asking for bread and butter, how there was no coffee left, and how the water gave you colic, and about the long days spent trying to cheat their hunger with boiled cabbage leaves. Bit by bit she had been obliged to raise her voice to make herself heard above Estelle’s wailing, which was becoming intolerable. Maheu seemed suddenly to hear her again and, quite beside himself, he grabbed the little girl out of her cradle and threw her down on her mother’s bed, spluttering with rage:
‘Here, take her, before I throttle the living daylights out of her!…Bloody child! It has all it wants, it’s got a breast to feed it, and then it complains louder than all the rest!’
Estelle had indeed begun to feed. Having vanished beneath the blanket, she was soothed by the warmth of the bed, and all that could be heard of her now was the faint sound of greedy sucking.
‘Didn’t the bourgeois at La Piolaine tell you to go and see them?’ Maheu continued after a while.
His wife pulled a face as if to say she didn’t hold out much hope there.
‘Yes, they know me. They give clothes to the children of the poor…All right, I’ll take Lénore and Henri round to see them this morning. If only they’d just give me five francs6 instead.’
Silence fell once more. Maheu was now dressed and ready. He stood there motionless for a moment, and then finally he muttered:
‘Well, what can we do? It’s how things are. See what you can manage for the soup…Standing here talking about it isn’t going to do any good. I’d do better to get to work.’
‘You’re right,’ La Maheude replied. ‘Blow the candle out, will you? I’d rather not see things too clearly just now!’
He blew out the candle. Zacharie and Jeanlin were already on their way down, and he followed them; the wooden staircase creaked beneath their heavy, wool-clad feet. Behind him, the landing and the bedroom were once more sunk in darkness. The little ones slept on, and even Alzire’s eyelids were shut. But their mother lay there in the dark with her eyes open, and Estelle purred away like a kitten as she continued to suck on the exhausted woman’s sagging breast.
Down below Catherine had begun by seeing to the fire. The cooking range, of cast-iron, had a grate in the middle, with ovens to either side, and a coal fire was kept burning in it day and night. Every month the Company gave each family eight hectolitres of escaillage, a type of hard coal collected off the roadway floors. It was difficult to light but, having damped down the fire the night before, the girl had only to rake it in the morning and add a few carefully chosen pieces of softer coal. Then she placed a kettle on the grate and crouched in front of the kitchen dresser.
The room, which was quite large and occupied the whole of the ground floor, was painted apple green and had the spick-and-span look of a Flemish kitchen, with flagstones that were sluiced regularly and strewn with white sand. Apart from the varnished pine dresser, the furniture consisted of a table and chairs, also in pine. Stuck to the walls were a number of garish prints, portraits of the Emperor and Empress7 as provided by the Company, as well as various soldiers and saints, heavily daubed with gold, which all looked crude and out of place in the bright bareness of the room. The only other forms of decoration were a pink box made of cardboard that sat on the dresser and the cuckoo clock with its multicoloured dial, whose loud ticking seemed to fill the empty reaches of the ceiling. Beside the door to the staircase another door led down to the cellar. Despite the cleanliness, an aroma of fried onion left over from the night before hung in the stuffy, fetid air that was already heavy with the acrid smell of coal.
In front of the open dresser Catherine was pondering. All that was left was the remains of a loaf, plenty of cottage cheese and a mere sliver of butter; and it was her job to produce sandwiches for all four of them. Having eventually made up her mind, she sliced the bread, covered one slice with cheese and smeared another with butter and then pressed them together: this was their ‘piece’,8 the double slice of bread and butter that they took with them to the mine each morning. Soon the four ‘pieces’ were lined up on the table, the size of each having been gradated with rigorous fairness, from the thick one for Maheu down to the small one for Jeanlin.
Though she seemed completely absorbed in her domestic tasks, Catherine must nevertheless have been mulling over what Zacharie had said about the overman and La Pierronne because she opened the front door slightly and peeped out. It was still windy. Up and down the streets, along the low façades, lights were constantly appearing and disappearing, as candles were lit in one house or blown out in another; and one could hear the faint stir of people waking to a new day. Already there was the sound of doors being shut, and the shadowy outlines of workers could be seen filing off into the night. But what was she thinking of standing here getting cold like this? Pierron was bound to be asleep still, he wasn’t due to start his shift till six o’clock! And yet she waited, watching the house on the other side of the gardens. The door opened, and her interest quickened. But it mus
t have been the Pierrons’ daughter, Lydie, leaving for the pit.
The whistle of steam made her turn round. She shut the door and rushed across the room: the kettle was boiling over and putting out the fire. There was no coffee left, so she had to make do with pouring the water over last night’s grounds; then she added some brown sugar to the pot. At that moment her father and two brothers came downstairs.
‘God!’ said Zacharie, having sniffed his bowl of coffee. ‘That’s hardly going to put hairs on our chest, is it!’
Maheu shrugged resignedly.
‘Pah! It’s hot, it’ll do fine.’
Jeanlin had gathered up the crumbs from the bread and put them in his bowl, where they made a kind of sop. Having drunk some coffee, Catherine emptied the remainder of the pot into their tin flasks. The four of them stood there in the dim light of the smoking candle and hurried to finish.
‘Come on, then. Are we all ready?’ said her father. ‘Anyone would think we were the idle rich, standing about like this.’
But a voice could be heard coming from the staircase, where they’d left the door open. It was La Maheude, shouting:
‘Take all the bread. I’ve still got a bit of vermicelli left for the children.’
‘Yes, all right!’ Catherine answered.
She had damped down the fire again and left the remains of some soup in a pan wedged up against the corner of the grate: it would be warm for her grandfather to eat when he came home at six. They each grabbed their clogs from under the dresser, slung the cord of their flask over their shoulder, and tucked their ‘piece’ down their back, between shirt and jacket. And off they set, the menfolk first, the girl behind, blowing out the candle and locking the door behind them. The house fell into darkness once more.
‘Hallo there!’ said a man who was just leaving the house next door. ‘We can go together.’
It was Levaque, with his son Bébert, a lad of twelve who was a great friend of Jeanlin’s. Catherine was astonished and stifled a giggle as she whispered in Zacharie’s ear: How about that, eh? Didn’t Bouteloup even wait for the husband to leave any more!
Throughout the village the lights were going out. A last door slammed shut, and the whole place went back to sleep as the women and small children resumed their rest in beds where there was now more room. Meanwhile, from the dark, silent village to the puffing steam of Le Voreux, a long line of shadows moved slowly forward in the gusting wind, the miners on their way to work, shoulders hunched and superfluous arms folded across their chests. On their backs the ‘pieces’ bulged like humps. Shivering with cold in their thin clothes they made no effort to hurry but quietly tramped along, strung out like a straggling herd of animals.
III
Étienne, having finally come down from the spoil-heap, had just walked into Le Voreux; and whenever he asked if there was work, everyone just shook their head and told him to wait for the overman. He was left to wander about the dimly lit buildings that were full of black, empty spaces and a disturbingly complex array of different rooms and levels. Having climbed a dark, half-derelict staircase he had found himself on a rickety overhead gangway and then made his way across the screening-shed where it was so completely dark that he had to stretch out his arms in order to avoid bumping into anything. Suddenly, right in front of him, two enormous yellow eyes appeared, like holes in the blackness. He was now standing under the headgear, at the very mouth of the mine-shaft, where the coal was unloaded after it had been brought up.
One of the older deputies, called Richomme, a large fellow with the face of a friendly policeman and a wide grey moustache, happened to be passing on his way to the checkweighman’s office.
‘Don’t suppose you could do with another pair of hands round here, could you? I’ll take whatever there is,’ Étienne asked once more.
Richomme was about to say ‘no’; but then he paused and gave the same answer as the others, before walking on:
‘Wait for Monsieur Dansaert. He’s the overman.’
Four lanterns had been installed here, and the reflectors, which were designed to throw all the light back down towards the shaft, shone brightly on the iron railings, on the levers, which operated the signals and the cage keeps, and on the wooden guides between which the two cages moved up and down. Everything else in the vast, nave-like hall was lost in darkness, and huge shadows seemed to float back and forth. Only the lamp-room at the far end was ablaze with light, while a lamp in the checkweighman’s office glowed weakly, like a star on the verge of extinction. Production had just resumed. The flooring of cast-iron plates rumbled like permanent thunder beneath the unceasing passage of the coal-tubs; and as the banksmen rolled them across, the human outline of their long, curved spines stood out amid the ceaseless commotion of these black and noisy things.
Étienne stood for a moment, deafened and blinded, and chilled to the bone by the draughts coming from every direction. Then he moved forward a few paces, drawn by the gleaming steel and brass of the winding-engine, which had now become visible. It was set back some twenty-five metres from the shaft and housed at a higher level; and there it sat so securely fixed on its base of solid brick that even when it was working at full steam and producing every one of its four hundred horse-power, the walls did not so much as quiver with the action of its huge crank rod as it rose and plunged in gentle, well-oiled motion. The engineman standing by the operating lever was listening out for the signal bells while his eyes were fixed on the indicator panel where the different levels of the mineshaft were marked on a vertical groove. Beside this groove, lead weights attached to strings moved up and down representing the cages. The engine would start up each time a cage departed, and the spools – two enormous wheels measuring ten metres in diameter, around the hubs of which two steel cables wound and unwound in opposite directions – would begin to spin so fast that they faded into a grey blur.
‘Mind out!’ shouted three banksmen who were dragging a gigantic ladder.
Étienne had almost been crushed. His eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness, and he watched the cables as they vanished upwards, more than thirty metres of steel ribbon rising straight up into the headgear and over the winding-pulleys before plunging back down into the mine-shaft to connect with the cages. A cast-iron frame, like the beams in the roof of a bell-tower, supported the pulleys. With the noiseless, unimpeded swoop of a bird, the cable – which was enormously heavy and could lift up to one thousand two hundred kilograms at a speed of ten metres per second – pursued its rapid, ceaseless course, up and down, up and down.
‘Mind out, for Christ’s sake!’ the banksmen shouted again, as they raised the ladder on the other side of the engine to inspect the left-hand pulley.
Slowly Étienne turned back towards the pit-head. The spectacle of this giant swooping above his head made him feel dizzy; and, still shivering in the draughts, he watched the cages come and go, deafened by the rumble of the coal-tubs. Next to the shaft was the signal, a heavy hammer on a lever attached to a rope which, when pulled from below, caused the hammer to fall on a block. Once to stop, twice to descend, three times to come up: it never stopped, great cudgel-blows that could be heard above the din, accompanied by the bright ring of a bell. Meanwhile the banksman in charge added to the general racket by shouting orders to the engineman through a loudhailer. Amid all this commotion the cages rose and vanished, emptied and filled, leaving Étienne none the wiser as to the whys and wherefores of these complex manœuvres.
One thing he did grasp: the pit could swallow people in mouthfuls of twenty or thirty at a time, and with such ease that it seemed not even to notice the moment of their consumption. The miners began descending at four. They arrived barefoot from the changing-room, each carrying a lamp, and waited in small groups until there was a sufficient number. Without a sound, springing gently up from below like some creature of the night, the cage would emerge from the darkness and lock into its keeps, each of its four decks containing two tubs full of coal. Banksmen on each deck w
ould drag the tubs out and replace them with others, which were either empty or already loaded with timber props. And the workers would pile into the empty tubs, five at a time, up to a maximum of forty. An order would issue from the loudhailer in the form of a muffled, unintelligible bellow, while the signal-rope was pulled four times to indicate a ‘meat load’, warning those below that a cargo of human flesh was on its way down. Then, after a slight jolt, the cage would plummet silently below, falling like a stone and leaving only the quivering trail of its cable.
‘Is it a long way down?’ Étienne asked a sleepy-looking miner who was waiting beside him.
‘Five hundred and fifty-four metres,’ the man replied. ‘But there are four loading-bays on the way down. The first one’s at three hundred and twenty metres.’
They both fell silent, gazing at the cable which was now coming back up.
‘And what if that breaks?’
‘Ah well, if that breaks…’
The miner gestured by way of an answer. It was his turn now, the cage having reappeared with its usual, tireless ease. He squatted in a tub with some of his comrades, down the cage went, and up it came again scarcely four minutes later, ready to devour a further load of humans. For half an hour the shaft continued to gorge itself in this way, with greater or lesser voracity depending on the level to which the men were descending, but without cease, ever famished, its giant bowels capable of digesting an entire people. It filled and it filled, and yet the darkness gave no sign of life, and the cage continued to rise up, noiselessly, greedily, out of the void.
At length Étienne was overtaken by a renewed sense of the misgivings he had felt up on the spoil-heap. Why bother anyway? This overman would send him away just like all the others. A sudden feeling of panic decided the matter and he rushed out, stopping only when he had reached the building that housed the steam-generators. Through the wide-open door seven boilers could be seen, each with a double fire-grate. Surrounded by white steam and whistling valves, a stoker was busy stoking one of these grates, whose burning coals could be felt from the doorway; and Étienne, grateful for the warmth, was just walking towards them when he bumped into a new group of colliers arriving at the mine. It was the Maheus and the Levaques. When he caught sight of Catherine, at the front of the group, with her gentle, boyish demeanour, some impulse or other made him try his luck one last time.