‘Gently does it!’ said Richomme eventually. ‘We’re nearly there…We don’t want to finish them off.’
It was true: the groaning was becoming more and more audible. Indeed it was this continuous groaning that was guiding the men, and now it seemed to be coming from directly beneath their picks. Suddenly it stopped.
Everyone looked at each other in silence, shivering as the chill of death passed over them in the darkness. They kept digging, bathed in sweat, with every sinew in their bodies stretched to breaking-point. They came on a foot and then started removing the rubble with their bare hands, uncovering the limbs one by one. The head was unscathed. Lamps were lowered, and the name of Chicot began to circulate. He was still warm, his spine broken by a rock.
‘Wrap him in a blanket and put him in a tub,’ Richomme ordered. ‘Now for the young lad. Quickly!’
Maheu gave one last blow with his pick, and a gap opened up; they were through to the men digging from the other side. They called out: they’d just found Jeanlin, unconscious, with both legs broken but still breathing. His father took him in his arms; and even now all he could think to mutter through clenched teeth, by way of expressing his pain, was ‘Christ! Christ! Christ!’ Catherine and the rest of the women had begun to wail again.
They quickly formed themselves into a procession. Bébert had fetched Battle, who was harnessed to the two tubs: in the first lay the body of Chicot, with Étienne watching over it; in the second was Maheu, seated, with Jeanlin lying unconscious across his knees, covered with a piece of woollen cloth ripped from a ventilation door. And off they set, at the walk. Over each tub a lamp shone like a red star. Then behind came the long line of miners, some fifty shadowy figures in single file. By now completely exhausted, they were dragging their feet and slipping on the mud, like some grim herd of animals struck down by a fatal disease. It took nearly half an hour to reach pit-bottom as this seemingly endless subterranean cortège made its way through the thick darkness along the roadways, which forked and twisted and unravelled before them.
At pit-bottom Richomme, who had gone on ahead, had given orders for a cage to be kept empty. Pierron loaded the two tubs immediately. In the one, Maheu sat with his injured child on his knees, while in the other Étienne had to cradle Chicot’s body in his arms so as to hold it steady. Once the other miners had piled into its other levels, the cage began its ascent. This took two minutes. The water falling from the lining of the shaft felt very cold, and the men gazed upwards, impatient for daylight.
Fortunately a pit-boy who had been sent to fetch Dr Vanderhaghen had found him and was bringing him to the pit. Jeanlin and the dead man were taken into the deputies’ room where there was always a roaring fire burning from one year’s end to the next. The buckets of hot water lined up ready for the men to wash their feet were moved to one side; and having spread two mattresses on the flagstone floor, they laid the man and the boy down on them. Only Maheu and Étienne were allowed in. Outside, various putters, hewers and young lads who’d come to see stood around in a group talking quietly.
The doctor took one look at Chicot and muttered:
‘He’s had it!…You can wash him now.’
Two supervisors undressed him and then sponged down his body, which was black with coal-dust and still covered in the sweat of his day’s work.
‘The head’s all right,’ the doctor continued, kneeling on Jeanlin’s mattress. ‘So’s his chest…Ah! it’s the legs that took the brunt of it.’
As deftly as a nurse he undressed the child himself, loosening his cap, removing his jacket and pulling his trousers and shirt off. And his poor little body emerged, as thin as an insect’s, filthy with black dust and yellowish earth and mottled with patches of blood. He couldn’t be examined properly in this state, and so they had to wash him too. The sponging then seemed to make him even thinner, and his flesh was so pallid and transparent that one could see his bones. He was a pitiable sight, the last, degenerate offspring of a destitute breed, a suffering scrap of a thing half crushed to death by rock. Once he was clean, they could see the bruises on his thighs, two red blotches against the whiteness of his skin.
Jeanlin recovered consciousness and groaned. At the foot of the mattress, arms dangling by his side, Maheu stood gazing at him; and huge tears rolled down his cheeks.
‘So you’re his father?’ asked the doctor, looking up. ‘There’s no call for tears. You can see he’s not dead…Here, give me a hand instead.’
He diagnosed two simple fractures. But he was worried about the right leg; it would probably have to be amputated.
At that point Négrel and Dansaert, having eventually been notified, arrived with Richomme. Négrel listened to the deputy’s report with growing exasperation. He exploded: it was always the damned timbering! If he’d said it once, he’d said it a hundred times: men would die! And now the brutes were talking about going on strike if anyone forced them to timber properly! The worst of it was that this time the Company would have to pay for the damage itself. Monsieur Hennebeau would be pleased!
‘Who is it?’ he asked Dansaert, who was standing silently by the body as it was being wrapped in a sheet.
‘Chicot, one of our best,’ the overman replied. ‘He’s got three children…Poor bugger!’
Dr Vanderhaghen asked for Jeanlin to be transported immediately to his parents’ house. It was six o’clock and already getting dark, so it would be best to move the body as well; and the engineer gave orders for the horses to be harnessed to a wagon and for a stretcher to be fetched. The injured boy was placed on the stretcher, and the dead man was loaded into the wagon on his mattress.
Putters were still standing outside the door, chatting with some miners who had remained behind to see what was happening. When the door of the deputies’ room opened again, the group fell silent. A new funeral cortège formed up, with the wagon in front, then the stretcher, and finally the line of people following. They moved out of the pit-yard and slowly climbed the road towards the village. The first frosts of November had stripped the vast plain bare, and night was slowly burying it in a shroud of livid white as though a pall had detached itself from the paling sky.
Then Étienne whispered to Maheu that he should send Catherine on ahead to warn La Maheude and soften the blow. Her father, looking dazed as he followed the stretcher, nodded his agreement; and the girl ran on, since they were nearly there now. But the familiar dark outline of the box-shaped wagon had already been spotted. Women were careering out on to the pavements, and three or four were tearing along in a panic, not a bonnet on their heads. Soon there were thirty, fifty of them, all gripped by the same terror. Had someone been killed? Who was it? Levaque’s story had earlier set their minds at rest, but now the tale assumed the dimensions of a nightmare: it wasn’t just one man who had perished but ten, and the funeral-wagon was going to bring each one of them back like this, body by body.
Catherine had found her mother in a lather of foreboding; and before she could blurt out a few words, La Maheude screamed:
‘It’s your father!’
The girl tried in vain to say it wasn’t and to tell her about Jeanlin. But La Maheude wasn’t listening, she had already rushed out of the house. When she saw the wagon emerge opposite the church, she faltered and turned deathly pale. From every doorway women stared in silent shock, craning their necks to see, while others followed, fearful to discover which house the procession would stop at.
The wagon went past; and behind it La Maheude caught sight of her husband accompanying the stretcher. When they had set it down at her door and she saw that Jeanlin was alive and that his legs were broken, she felt such sudden relief that instead of crying she began to choke and splutter with anger:
‘Now we’ve seen everything! Now they’re going to cripple our children for us! Both legs, for God’s sake. And just what am I supposed to do with him?’
‘Be quiet!’ said Dr Vanderhaghen, who had come to bandage Jeanlin. ‘Would you rather he were still lying at
the bottom of the pit?’
Alzire, Lénore and Henri were all in tears, but La Maheude was growing more and more angry. As she helped them take the injured child upstairs and supplied the doctor with what he needed, she kept cursing fate and asking where in God’s name she was supposed to find the money to feed the sick. Wasn’t it enough for the old man to lose the use of his legs? No, now it was the lad’s turn! And on she went, while all the time other, heart-rending screams of lament could be heard coming from a nearby house: Chicot’s wife and children were grieving over his dead body. It was pitch dark now, and the exhausted miners were finally able to have their soup. And a grim silence fell upon the village, punctuated only by these cries of anguish.
Three weeks went by. Amputation had been avoided; Jeanlin would keep both his legs, but he would always have a limp. Following an inquiry the Company had resigned itself to making the family a grant of fifty francs. It also undertook to find the young cripple a surface job as soon as he had recovered. Nevertheless it all meant that they had even less money now, especially as Maheu had experienced such a shock that he fell ill with a high temperature.
He had been back at work since Thursday, and it was now Sunday. That evening Étienne mentioned the imminence of 1 December and wondered anxiously whether the Company would carry out its threat. They stayed up till ten waiting for Catherine, who must have been with Chaval. But she did not return. La Maheude was furious and without a word locked the door. Disturbed by her empty bed – for Alzire hardly took up any room at all – Étienne found it hard to get to sleep.
Next day, still no Catherine; and it was only in the afternoon, at the end of the shift, that the Maheus learned that Chaval was going to keep Catherine. He made such awful scenes all the time that she had decided to live with him. To avoid the inevitable recriminations he had immediately quit Le Voreux and signed on at Jean-Bart, M. Deneulin’s pit, where Catherine followed him as a putter. The new couple continued none the less to live in Montsou, at Piquette’s.
At first Maheu talked about going off to punch the fellow and to fetch his daughter home if he had to kick her up the backside all the way. Then he gestured resignedly: what was the use? It always turned out this way, you couldn’t stop girls pairing up with someone when they took a notion to it. Better to wait patiently for them to marry. But La Maheude was not for taking the matter so calmly.
‘Now tell me. Did I ever hit her when she took up with this Chaval?’ she shouted at Étienne, who looked vey pale and listened to her in silence. ‘Come on, answer me, you’re a reasonable man…We left her to her own devices, didn’t we? Because, God help us, they all do it in the end. Like me, for example. I was expecting when Father married me. But I didn’t run away from home, did I? I wasn’t the sort to play a dirty trick like that and go handing my pay over to a man who didn’t need it, and before I was even of age…It just sickens you, really it does!…I mean in the end people will simply stop having children.’
And as Étienne would still only nod by way of reply, she persisted.
‘A girl who could go out every night of the week, wherever she wanted. What on earth’s got into her? She couldn’t even help us out of our trouble and then let me find her a husband, I suppose! Eh? I mean daughters are supposed to work, it’s what’s normal…But no, we were just too good to her, we simply shouldn’t have let her go out with a man like that. Give them an inch and they take a mile.’
Alzire was nodding. Lénore and Henri, terrified by this raging, cried softly as their mother proceeded to list their various misfortunes: first, there was having to let Zacharie get married; then there was old Bonnemort, stuck on his chair with his gammy legs; and then there was Jeanlin, who’d be in bed for another ten days yet, with his bones that didn’t stick together right; and finally the last straw was this trollop Catherine going off with some man! The whole family was falling apart. There was only Father left now at the pit. How on earth were the seven of them, not counting Estelle, supposed to live on the three francs Father earned? They might as well all throw themselves in the canal and be done with it.
‘Moaning never helped anyone,’ Maheu said in a hollow voice. ‘And anyway, we might not have seen the end of it yet.’
Étienne, who was staring at the floor, looked up; and, with his eyes fixed on a vision of the future, he murmured quietly:
‘The time has come! The time has come!’
PART IV
I
That Monday the Hennebeaus were having the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile to lunch. And quite an occasion it was to be. When they had eaten, Paul Négrel was to show the ladies round a mine, the Saint-Thomas mine, which was in the process of being lavishly refitted. But this was by way of being a delightful pretext: the visit was Mme Hennebeau’s device for hastening the marriage between Cécile and Paul.
And then out of the blue, that very Monday, at four o’clock in the morning, the strike had started. When the Company had begun to operate its new wages system on 1 December, the miners had remained calm. Come pay-day a fortnight later, not one of them had raised any objection. The whole staff, from the manager down to the most junior supervisor, thought that the new rates had been accepted; and so since early morning there had been widespread surprise at this declaration of war, and at the tactics and concerted action which seemed to point to strong leadership.
At five o’clock Dansaert woke M. Hennebeau with the news that not a single man had gone down the pit at Le Voreux. He had just come through Village Two Hundred and Forty and found all the windows and doors shut and everyone fast asleep. And from the moment the manager leaped bleary-eyed out of bed, he was swamped: messengers had been rushing in every quarter of an hour, and his desk had disappeared beneath a hail of telegrams. At first he hoped that the unrest was confined to Le Voreux; but the news grew worse with every minute that passed. Next it was Mirou, and then Crèvecœur, and Madeleine, where only the stablemen had turned up; then it was La Victoire and Feutry-Cantel, the two pits with the tightest discipline, yet where only a third of the men had reported for work. Saint-Thomas alone had its full complement and seemed unaffected by the action. It took him till nine o’clock dictating telegrams to be sent in all directions, to the Prefect1 in Lille, to the Company’s directors, warning the authorities and asking for instructions. He had sent Négrel off on a tour of the neighbouring pits to gather accurate information.
Suddenly M. Hennebeau remembered the lunch; and he was about to send the coachman to let the Grégoires know that the party had been postponed when he had a moment’s hesitation and his resolve faltered – he who had just prepared for battle in a few brief, military sentences. He went upstairs to speak to Mme Hennebeau in her dressing-room, where the maid was just finishing attending to her hair.
‘So they’re on strike,’ she said calmly, after he had asked her what they should do. ‘Well, what’s that to us?…We’ve still got to eat, haven’t we?’
She would not yield. Try as he might to tell her that the lunch was likely to be interrupted and that the visit to Saint-Thomas could not go ahead, she had an answer for everything. Why forgo a lunch that was already half prepared? And as for visiting the mine, they could cancel that later if it really did seem unwise.
‘What’s more,’ she continued when her maid had left the room, ‘you know perfectly well why I am so anxious to have these people to lunch. And you ought to care more about this marriage yourself than about all this nonsense with your workmen…So there we are. I want them to come, and I shall not have you stand in my way.’
He looked at her, trembling slightly, and the hard, closed face of this man of discipline registered the secret pain of a heart that was used to being bruised. She had continued to sit there with her shoulders bare, a woman already past her prime and yet still dazzling and desirable, and with the bust of an earth goddess turned golden brown by autumn. For a moment, no doubt, he felt the animal urge to take her, to roll his head from side to side between those two breasts thus presented for di
splay, here in this warm room with its luxurious, intimate aura of female sensuality and its provocative scent of musk; but he drew back. For ten years now they had slept apart.
‘Very well,’ he said as he left her. ‘We’ll leave things as they are.’
M. Hennebeau was a native of the Ardennes. He came from a poor background and had been abandoned as an orphan on the streets of Paris. After several years of arduous study at the École des Mines2 he had left at the age of twenty-four for La Grand ’Combe,3 where he had been appointed engineer at the Sainte-Barbe pit. Three years later he became divisional engineer at the Marles collieries in the Pas-de-Calais; and there, by one of those strokes of good fortune which seem to be the rule for graduates of the École des Mines, he married the daughter of a rich spinning-mill owner from Arras. For fifteen years the couple lived in the same small provincial town, and not a single noteworthy event broke the monotony of their lives, not even the birth of a child. A growing irritation began to distance Mme Hennebeau from her husband, for she had been brought up to respect money and she looked down on this man who worked hard to earn a paltry salary and who had brought her none of the vain gratifications she had dreamed of as a schoolgirl. He, a man of strict integrity, never took financial risks and merely did his job, sticking to his post like a soldier. The gulf between them had quite simply grown wider and wider, exacerbated by one of those curious instances of physical incompatibility that can cool even the warmest ardour: he adored his wife, and she had the sensuality of the voluptuous blonde, and yet already they had ceased to share a bed, both of them ill at ease with the other and quick to take offence. Unbeknownst to him, she then took a lover. Eventually he left the Pas-de-Calais for a desk job in Paris, hoping that this would make her grateful to him. But Paris drove them apart completely, for this was the Paris she had dreamed of ever since she had played with her first doll and where she now sloughed off her provincial existence in the space of a single week, becoming all at once the woman of fashion in pursuit of every latest foolish luxury. The ten years she spent there were filled by one great passion, a public liaison with a man whose abandonment of her nearly destroyed her. This time her husband had been unable to remain in ignorance of the facts, and after many terrible scenes he resigned himself to the situation, powerless in the face of the total lack of remorse shown by this woman who took her pleasure where she found it. It was following the end of this affair, when he saw how ill her unhappiness was making her, that he had accepted the job as manager of the Montsou mines, hoping that up there in that black wilderness he might yet manage to make her mend her ways.