Meanwhile Chaval had gone to find out how many tokens had been marked up for them on the board in the checkweigh-man’s little glass-fronted office, and he came back furious. He had seen that two of their tubs had been refused, one because it hadn’t contained the regulation amount of coal, the other because some of the coal had been dirty.
‘The perfect end to a perfect day!’ he fumed. ‘Another twenty sous docked!…But of course we have to take on bloody layabouts who don’t know their arse from their elbow.’
He shot a meaningful glance at Étienne, who was tempted to reply with his fists. But why bother, he thought, if he was leaving? In fact this decided the matter for him.
‘The first day’s always difficult,’ Maheu said diplomatically. ‘He’ll manage it better tomorrow.’
No one was placated, and in their bitterness they were all still spoiling for a fight. As they were leaving their lamps in the lamp-room, Levaque had an altercation with the lamp-man, accusing him of not having cleaned his lamp properly for him. They only began to calm down a little when they reached the changing-room, where the fire was still burning. In fact somebody must have stoked it too much because the stove was red hot and casting blood-red reflections on to the wall, which made it seem as though the vast windowless room were ablaze. There were grunts of pleasure as backs were toasted from a distance, steaming like bowls of soup. Once the back was done, it was time for the front. La Mouquette had calmly pulled her breeches down to dry her shirt. Some boys were making fun of her, and there was a burst of laughter when she suddenly showed them her bottom, which for her was the ultimate expression of contempt.
‘I’m off,’ said Chaval, who had put his tools away in his locker.
Nobody moved. Only La Mouquette hurried after him, on the pretext that they were both heading in the direction of Montsou. But the joking continued, for everyone knew he didn’t fancy her any more.
Meanwhile Catherine’s thoughts had been elsewhere, and she had just whispered something to her father. He looked surprised, and then nodded with approval. He called Étienne over to give him back his bundle and muttered softly:
‘Look, if you haven’t got any money, you’ll not last the fortnight…So if you want, I could try and get someone to sell you things on credit?’
For a moment Étienne was not sure how to respond. He had simply been going to ask for his thirty sous and then leave. But he felt ashamed to do so in front of the girl. She was staring at him, she might think he was work-shy.
‘I’m not promising, mind,’ Maheu went on. ‘But there’s no harm in asking.’
So Étienne offered no objection. People would refuse. Anyway, it didn’t put him under any obligation, he could always leave after he’d had something to eat. But then he was cross with himself for not saying no when he saw how delighted Catherine was, with her pretty laugh and that look of friendship and happiness at having been able to come to his assistance. For where was the future in it?
Once they had collected their clogs and shut their lockers, the Maheus left the changing-room and followed their comrades, who were departing one by one after they had warmed themselves. Étienne went with them, while Levaque and his young lad also joined the group. But as they were passing through the screening-shed, a violent scene stopped them in their tracks.
They were in a vast shed, with beams blackened by flying coal-dust and large shutters that let in a constant draught. The tubs of coal came here directly from the pit-head and were then emptied out by tipplers on to the screens, which were long chutes made of sheet-metal. To the right and left of these chutes, the women and girls who did the screening stood on tiered steps equipped with a rake and shovel; they would rake in the stones and push the clean coal along so that it fell through funnels down into the railway wagons standing on the line beneath the shed.
Philoméne Levaque was one of them, a thin, pale-looking girl with the sheeplike face of a consumptive. Her head was covered by a scrap of blue woollen scarf, and her hands and arms were black up to her elbows. She was working on the next step down from La Pierronne’s mother, whom everyone called La Brûlé, an old witch of a woman who was terrifying to look at, with screech-owl eyes and a mouth as pinched as a miser’s purse. The pair of them were at each other’s throats, with the younger of the two accusing the older of raking away her stones so that it was taking her more than ten minutes to fill one basket. They were paid by the basket, so there were endless fights of this kind. Pins would fly, buns would tumble and red faces would bear the mark of black hands.
‘Go on, give her one!’ Zacharie shouted down to his girlfriend.
All the screeners burst out laughing.
But La Brûlé rounded on him and snarled:
‘As for you, you dirty bastard! You’d do better to own up to those two kids you gave her!…Did you ever hear the like! And her a poor slip of a thing, just eighteen and barely able to stand on her own two feet!’
Maheu had to stop his son from going down there and then and, as Zacharie put it, seeing what the old bag was made of. But a supervisor was coming, and rakes began rummaging in the coal again. All that could be seen now, down the whole length of the chute, were the women’s rounded backs as they competed desperately for each other’s stones.
Outside the wind had suddenly dropped, and damp, cold air was falling from a grey sky. The colliers hunched their shoulders, folded their arms across their chests and departed, in ones and twos, walking along with a roll of the hips that made their thick bones stick out under their thin clothing. As they passed by in the broad daylight they looked like a band of negroes who had been knocked flat in the mud. A few had not finished their piece, and as they brought the remains of it home wedged between shirt and jacket, they had the air of hunchbacks.
‘Look, there’s Bouteloup,’ Zacharie said with a snigger.
Without stopping, Levaque exchanged a few words with his lodger, a big, dark-haired fellow of thirty-five with a placid, honest expression.
‘Soup ready, Louis?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘So the wife’s in a good mood today?’
‘Yes, I’d say so.’
Other stonemen were arriving, and successive groups of them gradually disappeared into the pit one by one. This was the three o’clock shift, yet more men for the mine to devour as new teams went down to replace the hewers at their coal-faces at the end of each roadway. The mine never lay idle: night and day human insects were always down there burrowing into the rock six hundred metres beneath the fields of beet.
Meanwhile the youngsters walked on ahead. Jeanlin was letting Bébert into the secret of a complicated scheme for obtaining four sous’ worth of tobacco on credit, while Lydie followed respectfully at a distance. Then came Catherine with Zacharie and Étienne. Nobody spoke. It was only when they got to the public house called the Advantage that Maheu and Levaque finally caught up with them.
‘Here we are,’ Maheu said to Étienne. ‘Are you coming in?’
They split up. Catherine had paused for a moment and took one last look at the young man, her big eyes as limpidly green as a mountain spring and of a crystal clarity made all the deeper by the surrounding blackness of her face. She smiled and then departed with the others along the road that led up to the miners’ village.
The public house stood at the crossroads midway between the village and the pit. It was a two-storey house of whitewashed brick, and each of its windows was framed by a gaily painted border of sky blue. On a square sign nailed above the front door it read in yellow lettering: The Advantage – Licensee: M. Rasseneur. Behind the house was a skittle-alley enclosed by a hedge. For the Company, which had done everything in its power to buy up this tiny enclave at the heart of its own vast domains, it was a matter of much regret that a public house should have sprung up in the middle of the beetfields right next to the entrance to Le Voreux.
‘Come on in,’ Maheu insisted.
The room was small, bare and bright: its walls were white,
and it contained three tables, twelve chairs and a pinewood counter no bigger than a kitchen dresser. There were some ten beer glasses on it at most, as well as three bottles of liqueurs, a jug and a small zinc chest with a tin tap, which contained the beer; and that was all, no pictures, no shelves, no games. In a gleaming, highly polished fireplace of cast-iron a mound of coal-slack was burning gently. On the flagstone floor a thin layer of white sand absorbed the dampness that was a constant feature of this rain-soaked region.
‘Give us a beer,’1 Maheu called to a plump, blonde-haired girl, a neighbour’s daughter who sometimes minded the bar. ‘Is Rasseneur about?’
The girl turned the tap and replied that the landlord would be back shortly. Slowly Maheu drained half the glass in one go to remove the dust clogging his throat. He did not offer his companion a drink. One other customer, a wet, dirty miner like himself, was sitting at a table and drinking his beer in silence, deep in thought. A third man came in, beckoned to be served, paid and left, all without saying a word.
But then a large man of thirty-eight appeared, with a round, clean-shaven face and an easy smile. This was Rasseneur, a one-time hewer who had been dismissed by the Company three years previously following a strike. He had been an excellent worker, and he was articulate, always taking the lead when it came to protesting and eventually ending up as the leader of the malcontents. His wife already ran a beer-shop, as did many miners’ wives; and when he found himself out on his ear, he became a full-time landlord, scraped together some money, and set up in business directly opposite Le Voreux as an act of provocation towards the Company. The business was prospering now: his bar had become something of a meeting-place, and this allowed him to cash in on the anger he had been gradually inciting in the hearts of his erstwhile comrades.
‘This is the lad I took on this morning,’ Maheu explained at once. ‘Is either of your rooms free? And could you let him have things on tick for the first fortnight?’
A sudden look of deep distrust passed over Rasseneur’s broad features. He glanced at Étienne and replied, without even bothering to look sorry:
‘Both my rooms are taken. I can’t help you.’
Étienne was expecting this refusal, but it hurt him all the same, and he was surprised suddenly to feel disappointed at the prospect of leaving. No matter. Leave he would, as soon as he had his thirty sous. The miner who had been drinking at another table had now departed. Others came in, one by one, to clear the grime from their throats before setting off once more with the same rolling gait. It was like a mere ablution, bringing neither joy nor stimulus, only the mute satisfaction of a need.
‘So. Nothing to report, then?’ Rasseneur inquired in a meaningful way as Maheu sipped what was left of his beer.
Maheu looked around him and, seeing only Étienne, said:
‘Only that there’s been another bloody row…Yeah, about the timbering.’
He related what had happened. The blood had rushed to Rasseneur’s face, which seemed to swell as burning excitement blazed in his eyes and cheeks.
‘Well, now! The minute they decide to cut the rate, they’re sunk.’
The presence of Étienne made him uneasy. Nevertheless he continued, watching him out of the corner of his eye as he did so. He spoke obliquely, leaving certain things unsaid. Without naming them he talked about the manager, Monsieur Hennebeau, and his wife, and his nephew, young Négrel, and he said how things could not go on like this, how one fine morning the lid would blow off. The poverty and suffering had spread too far, and he alluded to all the factories that were closing down and all the workers that were being laid off. He’d been giving away over six pounds of bread a day for the past month. Only yesterday he’d heard that Monsieur Deneulin, a local mine-owner, doubted whether he could survive. What’s more he’d just received a letter from Lille full of worrying news.
‘You know,’ he muttered under his breath, ‘from that person you met here one evening.’
But he was interrupted. His wife now appeared, a tall, thin, intense woman with a long nose and purple cheeks. When it came to politics, she was much more radical than her husband.
‘You mean the letter from Pluchart,’ she said. ‘Ah now, if he were in charge, we’d soon see some improvements round the place.’
Étienne had been listening for some time. He understood fully what was being said, and he was becoming increasingly excited by all this talk of poverty and revenge.
Hearing this name suddenly blurted out like that gave him a start.
‘I know Pluchart,’ he said out loud, as though having not quite meant to.
All eyes were upon him, and so he was obliged to add:
‘Yes, I’m a mechanic, and he was my foreman at Lille…A very capable man. I often used to have chats with him.’
Rasseneur studied him again; his expression rapidly changed, and at once he became friendly. Eventually he said to his wife:
‘Maheu’s brought along Monsieur here, who’s one of his putters. He wondered if we had a room for him and could give him a fortnight’s credit.’
The matter was then settled in a moment. One room was in fact free, the occupant had left that morning. Now thoroughly roused, Rasseneur warmed to his theme and kept saying that he was only asking the bosses for what was possible,2 that he wasn’t like all the others who demanded things that were too difficult to achieve. His wife shrugged: they should insist on their rights, no more, no less.
‘Good night. I’m off,’ Maheu broke in. ‘None of that’s going to stop people working down the pit, and as long as they do there’ll be those that die of it…Look at you, for example. You’ve been as fit as a fiddle ever since you left three years ago.’
‘It’s true. I do feel a lot better,’ declared Rasseneur complacently.
Étienne walked to the door to thank Maheu as he left; but the latter simply nodded silently, and the young man watched him trudge back up the road to the village. Mme Rasseneur was serving customers and asked him to wait a moment so that she could take him to his room where he could get cleaned up. Should he stay? He was having doubts again, a sinking feeling that made him look back fondly on the freedom and fresh air of the open road where the pain of hunger was mixed with the joy of being one’s own boss. He felt as though he had already been living there for years, from the moment of his arrival on the spoil-heap in the middle of a howling gale to the hours spent underground lying flat on his belly in those black roads. He was loath to go down again: it was unjust and the work was too hard, and his pride as a human being revolted at the thought of being treated like some animal that can be blinded and crushed.
As Étienne was debating what to do, his eyes wandered over the immense plain and gradually began to take in what they saw. He was surprised, he hadn’t pictured a panorama like this when old Bonnemort had gestured towards it in the darkness. In front of him, certainly, he again saw Le Voreux, tucked away in a hollow with its buildings of brick and timber, its pitch-covered screening-shed, the headgear with its slate roof, the winding-house and the tall, pale-red chimney, all squatting there with a malevolent air. But the pit-yard spread out much further around the buildings than he had imagined, seemingly transformed into a pool of ink by the lapping waves of stockpiled coal. It was bristling with the tall trestles that carried the overhead rails, and at one end it was completely taken over by piles of timber, which lay there like the harvest from a forest newly razed to the ground. Over to the right, the view was obstructed by the spoil-heap, which looked like some colossal barricade placed there by giants. The oldest part of it was already covered in grass, while at the other end it was being eaten away by an internal fire, which had been smouldering for a year now and gave off a thick pall of smoke. Long rust-red streaks oozed like blood from its ghost-grey surface of sandstone and shale. Beyond it stretched the fields, endless fields of corn and beet, which were bare at this time of the year, and marshes covered in rough vegetation and punctuated with a few stunted willows, and then the distant meadows d
ivided by thin rows of poplar. In the far distance, tiny patches of white indicated towns, Marchiennes to the north, Montsou to the south; while over to the east the forest of Vandame marked the edge of the horizon with the purple line of its denuded trees. And beneath the wan sky, in the dull light of a winter’s afternoon, it seemed as if all the blackness of Le Voreux and its swirling coal-dust had settled on the plain, like powder on the trees, like sand on the roads, like seed upon the earth.
As Étienne continued to gaze, what surprised him most was a canal, which he had not seen during the night. Constructed out of the river Scarpe, this canal ran in a straight line from Le Voreux to Marchiennes, a ribbon of matt silver some two leagues long. Like an avenue raised above the low-lying ground and lined with trees, it stretched away into the distance in an endless vista of green banks and pale water, of gliding barges and vermilion sterns. Next to the pit was a landing-stage where boats were moored ready to be filled directly from the tubs that ran along the overhead rails. There the canal took a sharp turn before cutting diagonally across the marshes; and this geometrically precise stretch of water seemed to represent the very soul of the empty plain, cutting across it like a major highway and bearing away its iron and coal.
Étienne’s gaze travelled from the canal back up to the village, which had been built on a plateau, but he could make out only the red tiles of the roofs. Then it moved back down towards Le Voreux and came to rest at the bottom of the muddy slope, lingering on two enormous piles of bricks which had been cast and baked on site. Here a branch of the Company’s railway line passed behind a fence and led into the pit. By now the last batch of stonemen would be going down. A solitary wagon being pushed by some workmen gave a piercing screech. But the darkness and the mystery had gone, and with them the inexplicable rumblings and the sudden flaring of unfamiliar stars. In the distance the tall blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens had been pale since dawn. All that remained from before was the ceaseless panting of the drainage-pump; but as he listened to the long, deep gasps of the ogre whose hunger could never be satisfied, this time he could see the grey steam rising.