‘You see, Léon,’ he went on in a hesitant voice, ‘you were wrong not to sell when I did. Now everything’s on the slide and your chance has gone…Whereas if you’d entrusted your money to me, you’d soon have seen what we could have achieved at Vandame, and in our very own mine!’
M. Grégoire calmly finished his chocolate. He replied evenly:
‘Never!…You know perfectly well that I don’t wish to speculate. I live a peaceful life, it would be just too silly to go bothering my head over business matters. And as far as Montsou is concerned, the shares can keep on going down, we’ll still always have enough to meet our needs. You mustn’t be so greedy, for goodness sake! Anyway, mark my words, you’re the one who’ll be feeling the pinch some day, because Montsou will start going up again and the children of Cécile’s children will still be getting their daily bread from it.’
Deneulin listened to him with an awkward smile.
‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘if I asked you to put a hundred thousand francs into my business, you would refuse?’
But at the sight of the Grégoires’ worried faces he immediately regretted having gone so far. He decided to save the possibility of a loan for later, in case he was ever desperate.
‘Oh, things aren’t that bad! I’m just joking…Heavens above, you’re probably right. The easiest way to make money is to let other people make it for you.’
They changed the subject. Cécile returned to the matter of her cousins, whose interests she found as fascinating as she found them shocking. Mme Grégoire promised to take her daughter to see the two dear girls on the first fine day that presented itself. M. Grégoire, meanwhile, wore an absent expression, his thoughts elsewhere. He added loudly:
‘You know, if I were you, I wouldn’t persevere. I’d negotiate with Montsou…They’re extremely keen, and you’d get your money back.’
He was referring to the long-running feud that existed between the concessions at Montsou and Vandame. Despite the latter’s small size, it exasperated its powerful neighbour to have this square league of territory that didn’t belong to it stuck bang in the middle of its own sixty-seven area divisions. Having tried in vain to put it out of business, the Montsou Mining Company was now plotting to buy it on the cheap as soon as it showed any signs of going under. The battle continued to rage unabated, with each mine’s tunnels ending a mere two hundred metres short of the other’s. Though the managers and the engineers might behave perfectly civilly to one another, it was a fight to the death.
Deneulin’s eyes had blazed.
‘Never!’ he shouted in his turn. ‘Montsou shall never get its hands on Vandame so long as I live…I had dinner at Hennebeau’s on Thursday, and I could see him sniffing around me. Indeed last autumn, when the big guns on the Board of Directors had their meeting, they were already falling over themselves to be nice to me…Oh, I know their sort all right! The dukes and the marquises, the generals and ministers! Highway robbers, the lot of them, just lurking round the corner ready to have the shirt off your back!’
And so he went on. Not that M. Grégoire was going to defend the Board. Its six directors, whose posts had been created under the terms of the settlement in 1760, ran the Company like despots, and when one of them died, the five remaining directors chose the new member of the Board from among the shareholders who were rich and powerful. In the view of the owner of La Piolaine, as a man careful in his ways, these gentlemen sometimes lacked a certain moderation in their excessive desire for money.
Mélanie had come to clear the table. Outside the dogs began to bark again, and Honorine was just on her way to the front door when Cécile, needing air after all this warmth and food, left the table.
‘No, let me. It must be for my lesson.’
Deneulin, too, had risen to his feet. He watched the girl leave the room and then asked with a smile:
‘Well, and what about this marriage with young Négrel?’
‘Nothing’s been decided,’ said Mme Grégoire. ‘It’s just an idea at this stage…It needs some proper thought.’
‘I have no doubt,’ he replied, with a knowing laugh. ‘I understand that the nephew and the aunt…But what I can’t get over is the way Madame Hennebeau makes such a fuss of Cécile all the time.’
M. Grégoire was indignant. Such a distinguished lady, and fully fourteen years older than the young man! It was monstrous, such things were beyond a joke. Deneulin, still laughing, shook him by the hand and took his leave.
‘It’s still not her!’ said Cécile, who came back into the room. ‘It’s that woman with her two children. You know, Mummy, the miner’s wife we met…Do they have to be shown in here?’
They hesitated. Were they very dirty? No, not too dirty, and they would leave their clogs on the front steps. Father and mother were already settled in their two large armchairs and digesting their breakfast. The unwelcome prospect of having to move decided the matter.
‘Show them in, Honorine.’
And so in came La Maheude and her little ones, frozen, starving, and filled with nervous apprehension at the sight of this room which was so warm and smelled so deliciously of brioche.
II
Up in the bedroom, where the shutters were still closed, grey bars of daylight had filtered through and spread like a fan across the ceiling. The close atmosphere had grown even stuffier as everyone continued with their night’s sleep: Lénore and Henri in each other’s arms, Alzire lying on her hump with her head lolling back; while old Bonnemort, who now had Zacharie and Jeanlin’s bed all to himself, was snoring away with his mouth open. Not a sound was to be heard from the recess on the landing where La Maheude had dropped off again in the middle of feeding Estelle, with her breast hanging to one side and her daughter lying across her stomach, replete with milk and likewise fast asleep, half suffocating amid the soft flesh of her mother’s breasts.
Downstairs the cuckoo clock struck six. From along the village streets came the sound of doors slamming and then the clatter of clogs along the pavement: it was the women who worked in the screening-shed setting off for the pit. And silence fell once more until seven. Then shutters were thrown back, and the sound of yawning and coughing could be heard through partition walls. For a long time a coffee-mill could be heard grinding away, but still no one stirred in the bedroom.
But suddenly a distant sound of slapping and screaming made Alzire sit up in bed. Realizing what the time was, she ran barefoot to rouse her mother.
‘Mummy, Mummy, it’s late. Remember, you’ve got to go out…Careful! You’ll crush Estelle.’
And she retrieved the child, who was nearly smothered beneath a huge molten mass of breast.
‘Heaven help us!’ La Maheude spluttered, rubbing her eyes. ‘We’re all so exhausted we could sleep the whole day long…Dress Lénore and Henri for me, will you? I’ll take them with me. And you’d better look after Estelle. I don’t want to drag her out in this dreadful weather, in case she catches something.’
She washed in a hurry and then pulled on an old blue skirt, the cleanest she had, and a loose-fitting jacket of grey wool, which she had put two patches in the day before.
‘And then there’s the soup, for heaven’s sake!’ she muttered again.
While her mother rushed downstairs, Alzire went back to the bedroom with Estelle, who had begun to scream. But she was used to the little girl’s tantrums, and although only eight she already had a woman’s knowledge of the tender wiles that would soothe and distract her. Gently she laid her down in her own bed, which was still warm, and lulled her back to sleep by giving her a finger to suck. Not before time, moreover, because another racket broke out: and she had at once to go and make the peace between Lénore and Henri, who had finally woken up. These two children did not get on, and the only time they would gently put their arms round each other was when they were asleep. The moment she woke, Lénore, aged six, fell on Henri, who was two years younger and let himself be hit without hitting back. Both of them had the same oversized head, whi
ch looked as though it had been inflated and was covered in yellow hair that stuck up. Alzire had to drag her sister off him by the legs and threaten to give her a good hiding. Then there was much stamping of feet as she washed them and at each item of clothing she tried to put on them. They left the shutters closed so as not to disturb old Bonnemort while he slept. He was still snoring, despite the terrible hullabaloo the children were making.
‘It’s ready! Are you nearly all done up there?’ shouted La Maheude.
She had pulled back the shutters, raked the fire and put on some more coal. Her one hope was that the old man had not finished off all the soup, but she found the saucepan wiped clean, and so she cooked a handful of vermicelli she’d been saving for the last three days. They could eat it plain, without butter, since the small piece that was left the day before would now be gone; but she was surprised to see that Catherine had somehow managed miraculously to leave a small knob of it after making their pieces. This time, however, the kitchen dresser was well and truly bare: there was nothing, not a crust or a leftover or even a bone to gnaw. What would become of them if Maigrat was still determined to stop their credit, and if the bourgeois at La Piolaine didn’t give her a hundred sous. And yet when her menfolk and her daughter came back from the pit they would have to eat, for, sad to relate, no one had yet invented a way of living without eating.
‘Come down this instant,’ she shouted crossly. ‘I should be gone by now.’
Once Alzire and the children had come down, she shared the vermicelli out on to three small plates. She wasn’t hungry, she said. Although Catherine had already used yesterday’s coffee grounds a second time, she poured more water on to them and downed two large mugfuls of coffee that was so thin that it looked like rusty water. Still, it would keep her going.
‘Now remember,’ she told Alzire once more. ‘You’re to let your grandfather sleep, and you’re to keep an eye on Estelle and see she doesn’t come to any harm. If she wakes up and starts screaming the place down, here’s a sugar lump. Dissolve it in water and give her little spoonfuls…I know you’re a sensible girl and you won’t eat it yourself.’
‘But what about school, Mum?’
‘School? Well, that’ll have to wait for another day…I need you here.’
‘And the soup? Do you want me to make it if you’re not back in time?’
‘Ah, the soup, the soup. No, better wait till I come back.’
Alzire had the precocious intelligence of a sickly child, and she knew exactly how to make soup. But she must have understood the situation, for she did not insist. The whole village was awake now and groups of children could be heard leaving for school, dragging their clogs as they walked. Eight o’clock struck, and the sound of people chatting next door in La Levaque’s house was steadily getting louder. The women’s day had begun, as they gathered round their coffee-pots, hands on hips, tongues wagging, like millstones grinding away in circles. A wizened face with thick lips and a squashed nose suddenly pressed itself against the window-pane and shouted:
‘You’ll never guess what I’ve heard.’
‘No, no, later!’ La Maheude answered. ‘I’ve got to go out.’
And just in case she succumbed to the offer of a glass of hot coffee, she shovelled the food into Lénore and Henri and left. Upstairs old Bonnemort was still snoring away, with a rhythmic snore that seemed to rock the house itself to sleep.
Once outside La Maheude was surprised to see that the wind had dropped. A sudden thaw was under way: beneath a dun-coloured sky all the walls looked clammy and green with damp and the roads were coated in mud, the thick, glutinous mud of coal-mining regions that looks as black as liquid soot and can so easily remove a shoe. She immediately had to smack Lénore because the little girl was having fun trying to collect the mud on her clogs as though she were digging it out with a shovel. On leaving the village they skirted the spoil-heap and followed the path along the canal, taking short cuts along pot-holed streets and across stretches of waste ground enclosed by rotting fences. There followed a succession of large sheds and long factory buildings with tall chimneys that belched out soot and filthied what remained of the countryside amid these sprawling industrial outskirts. Behind a clump of poplars stood the old Réquillart pit and its crumbling headgear: only its thick beams remained standing. Then, having turned right, La Maheude came out on to the main highway.
‘Just you wait, you dirty little scamp. I’ll teach you to make mud-pies indeed!’
This time it was Henri, who had grabbed a handful of mud and was busy moulding it in his hands. Having both been smacked without fear or favour, the two children stopped misbehaving and began peering sideways at the small holes their feet were making in the lumps of earth. Along they squelched, already exhausted by the effort of prising their feet out of the sticky mud with each step they took.
In one direction the road ran dead straight towards Marchiennes, two leagues of paved cobblestone road unravelling across the reddish earth like a ribbon dipped in engine-grease. But in the opposite direction it zigzagged its way down through Montsou, which had been built on the side of a broad slope in the plain. In the Département du Nord there has been a steady proliferation of roads of this kind, which are designed to proceed directly from one manufacturing town to the next, pushing forward in smooth curves and gentle gradients, and all the while turning the entire Département into one big industrial city. To the right and left of the road as it wound its way down to the bottom stood little brick houses that had been painted in bright colours to make up for the dreary climate; some were yellow, some blue, others black, these latter no doubt by way of immediate anticipation of their eventual and inevitable hue. One or two large detached two-storey houses, occupied by factory managers, interrupted the serried rows of narrow house-fronts. A church, also built in brick, looked like the latest design for a blast-furnace, and its square tower was already filthy from the soot that flew about. But among all the sugar-refineries and the rope-works and the flour-mills what really caught the eye was the number of dance-halls, taverns and beer-shops, which were so plentiful that there were over five hundred of them to every thousand houses.
As she reached the Company’s yards, with its vast array of workshops and warehouses, La Maheude thought it best to take Henri and Lénore each by the hand, one on her left and one on her right. Ahead lay the large house where M. Hennebeau, the manager, lived, a sort of vast chalet set back from the road behind an iron gate and a garden with some scraggy-looking trees. At that moment a carriage had drawn up outside the front door bearing a lady in a fur coat and a gentleman who wore a medal ribbon in his buttonhole. They were evidently visitors from Paris who had just arrived at Marchiennes station, for Mme Hennebeau, who had now appeared in the half-light of the hallway, gave a cry of joyful surprise.
‘Come on, you two lazybones, keep going!’ La Maheude scolded, dragging the two children forward as they floundered in the mud.
She was nearing Maigrat’s shop and beginning to feel very apprehensive. Maigrat lived right next to M. Hennebeau, with just a wall separating his small house from the manager’s residence; and he ran a wholesale store, a long building which opened on to the road like a shop but without the shop-front. He stocked everything, groceries, cold meats, fruit, and sold anything from bread and beer to pots and pans. Having previously worked as a supervisor at Le Voreux, he had started out with a modest little shop; then, with some assistance from his former bosses, his turnover had grown and gradually driven the retailers of Montsou out of business. He was able to bring a whole range of goods under one roof, and the substantial customer base in the mining villages allowed him to cut prices and extend more generous credit. But he remained in the Company’s pocket, for they had built his little house and shop for him.
‘It’s me again, Monsieur Maigrat,’ La Maheude said humbly, for he happened at that moment to be standing at his door.
He looked at her and made no reply. He was a fat man, with a cold, polite manner, a
nd he prided himself on never going back on a decision.
‘Please, you can’t send me away again like you did yesterday. We’ve simply got to have bread to eat between now and Saturday…Yes, I know, we’ve owed you sixty francs for the past two years.’
She explained the situation in short, halting sentences. The debt was a long-standing one, which they had incurred during the last strike. Twenty times or more they had promised to pay it off, but it was impossible, they simply could not manage to spare the forty sous to give him every fortnight. Added to which she’d had a spot of bad luck the day before yesterday; she’d had to pay a cobbler twenty francs because he’d threatened to call the bailiffs in. And that was why they hadn’t a penny to their name at the minute. Otherwise they could have managed till Saturday just the same as everyone else.
Maigrat stood there, arms crossed above his bulging paunch, and shook his head each time she pleaded:
‘Just two loaves, Monsieur Maigrat. I’m a reasonable woman, I’m not asking for coffee or anything…Just two three-pound loaves a day.’
‘No!’ he shouted finally, at the top of his voice.
His wife had appeared on the scene, a scrawny creature who spent her days bent over the ledger not so much as daring to lift her head. She darted away, alarmed by the sight of this unfortunate woman turning towards her with a desperate, beseeching look in her eyes. People said that she regularly vacated the marital bed when the putters came shopping. Indeed it was common knowledge: when a miner needed more credit, he had only to send round his daughter or his wife, no matter whether they were pretty or plain, just as long as they were obliging.
La Maheude, who was still staring imploringly at Maigrat, felt embarrassed to be subjected to the pale gleam of his little eyes as they undressed her. It made her angry. Fair enough, perhaps, when she was still young, before she’d had seven children, but now…And she left, dragging Lénore and Henri away from the walnut shells they were collecting from the gutter where they’d been thrown.