‘Maybe not, but the Montsou comrades are right all the same. They’re rejecting the timbering rate and demanding an increase of five centimes because it’s just not possible to do the job properly under the present terms…We want an increase of five centimes. Isn’t that right, comrades?’
Various voices expressed their support, and the noise level rose again, accompanied by violent gestures. Gradually everyone gathered round in a tight semicircle.
Deneulin’s eyes blazed, and this man who had a taste for firm government had to clench his fists for fear that he might yield to temptation and grab somebody by the scruff of the neck. He preferred to discuss things, to talk things through sensibly.
‘You want five centimes more, and I agree with you that the job is worth it. But I can’t give it to you. If I were to pay you that, I would simply be ruined…You’ve got to understand that for you to make a living I’ve got to make a living first. And I’ve reached my limit. The slightest increase in operating costs would bankrupt me…Two years ago, if you remember, at the time of the last strike, I conceded. I could still afford to then. But that increase has been ruinous for me all the same, and I’ve been struggling ever since…Today I would rather give the whole thing up at once than not know from one month to the next where I was going to find the money to pay you.’
Faced with this master who was ready to give them such a frank account of his business affairs, Chaval gave an ugly laugh. The others looked at the floor in disbelief, stubbornly refusing to get it into their heads that a boss didn’t automatically make millions off the back of his workers.
Deneulin persisted. He told them about his ongoing battle with Montsou, who were always on the lookout for some way to gobble him up if he should ever fall on hard times. The competition with them was fierce, forcing him to make savings wherever he could, and all the more so because the considerable depth of Jean-Bart added to the cost of extraction, a disadvantage only barely offset by the greater thickness of its seams. He would never have increased their pay at the time of the last strike if it hadn’t been for the need to match Montsou, so as not to lose his workforce. Then he threatened them with the consequences: what a fine outcome it would be for them if they forced him to sell and they ended up under the heel of Montsou! He didn’t rule them like some god in a far-away temple, he wasn’t one of those invisible shareholders who pays managers to fleece the miners for them; he was their employer, and it wasn’t just his own money he was risking, it was his peace of mind, his health, his whole life. Any stoppage would mean the end of him, it was as simple as that, for he had no stock in reserve and yet he had to meet his orders. At the same time he couldn’t let the money invested in equipment stand idle. How was he to meet his commitments? Who was going to pay the interest on the money his friends had entrusted to him? It would mean bankruptcy.
‘So there you have it, my friends!’ he concluded. ‘I wish I could convince you…You really can’t ask a man to sign his own death warrant, can you? And whether I give you the five centimes or I let you go ahead and strike, either way I’ll be slitting my own throat.’
He stopped. People started muttering. Some of the miners seemed to be having second thoughts, and several moved back towards the shaft.
‘At least let everyone decide for themselves,’ said one deputy. ‘Which of you wants to work?’
Catherine was one of the first to step forward. But Chaval was furious and shoved her back, shouting:
‘We’re all of one mind here. Only lousy bastards leave their comrades in the lurch!’
Thereafter all hope of compromise seemed out of the question. People started shouting again, and men were shouldered away from the shaft and nearly crushed against the wall. For a moment Deneulin tried desperately to fight the battle single-handedly and to bring the mob smartly to heel; but it was pointless folly, and he was forced to withdraw. So he went and sat for a few minutes at the far end of the checkweighman’s office. The stuffing had been knocked out of him, and he was so dazed by his powerlessness that he could not think what to do next. At length he calmed down and told a supervisor to go and fetch Chaval. Then, when the latter had agreed to the meeting, he dismissed everyone else with a wave of his hand.
– Leave us.
Deneulin’s intention was to get the measure of this character. The moment he spoke, he could sense his vanity and the desperate envy that drove him. So he tried flattery and pretended to be surprised that a worker of his calibre should jeopardize his future in this way. From the way he talked he made it sound as though he had for some time now been marking him out for rapid promotion, and eventually he ended by offering there and then to make him a deputy, when circumstances allowed. Chaval listened to him in silence and gradually unclenched his fists. He was thinking hard: if he persisted with the strike, he would always be playing second fiddle to Étienne, whereas he now began to harbour a different ambition, that of becoming one of the bosses. His face flushed with pride, and his excitement grew. Anyway, the group of strikers he’d been waiting for since early morning would not come now; they must have been held up, by the gendarmes perhaps. So it was time to yield. But this did not stop him from shaking his head and indignantly beating his breast, every inch the unbiddable man of integrity. Eventually, while omitting to mention the meeting he had arranged with the Montsou miners, he undertook to calm his comrades and persuade them to go back to work.
Deneulin kept away, and even the deputies stayed in the background. For the next hour they listened to Chaval holding forth and arguing with the miners from the top of a coal-tub. One section of men booed him, and a hundred and twenty left in disgust, determined to stick to the decision he had made them take in the first place. It had already gone seven, and the dawn was breaking on a bright and cheerful frosty day. Suddenly the pit jolted back into action, and work resumed its course. First there was the plunging of the crank-rod as it began to wind the cables on and off the drums. Then, amid a clanking of signals, came the first descent, with cages filling and vanishing and reappearing as the shaft swallowed its portion of pit-boys, hewers and putters. Meanwhile the banksmen wheeled the tubs across the iron floor with a great rumble of thunder.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing standing there?’ Chaval shouted at Catherine, who was waiting her turn. ‘Stop hanging about and get yourself down below!’
At nine o’clock, when Mme Hennebeau arrived in her carriage with Cécile, she found Lucie and Jeanne dressed and ready, a picture of elegance despite the fact that their clothes had been mended twenty times over. But Deneulin was surprised to see Négrel accompanying the carriage on horseback. Was this to be a mixed party? So Mme Hennebeau explained in her motherly way that people had been frightening her with tales about the roads being full of villainous creatures and that she had preferred to bring along a protector. Négrel laughed and sought to reassure them: there was nothing to be worried about, just the usual threats from the loudmouths, but not one of them would dare throw a stone through a window. Still full of his success, Deneulin told them about how he had crushed the revolt at Jean-Bart. Things would be fine now, he said. And as the young ladies climbed into the carriage on the Vandame road, everyone was in high spirits because of the fine weather, little realizing that far off in the countryside there was a stirring and that it was slowly gathering pace. The people were on the march; and if they had placed their ears to the ground, they would have heard the sound coming towards them.
‘So that’s agreed, then,’ Mme Hennebeau said once more. ‘You’ll come and fetch these young ladies this evening, and you’ll stay and have dinner with us…Madame Grégoire has promised to collect Cécile also.’
‘You may count on me,’ replied Deneulin.
The carriage set off towards Vandame. Jeanne and Lucie had leaned out of the carriage to wave a cheerful goodbye to their father standing by the roadside, while the gallant Négrel trotted along behind the whirring wheels.
They drove through the forest and at Vandame took the road to Marchiennes. A
s they were approaching Le Tartaret, Jeanne asked Mme Hennebeau if she knew of La Côte Verte, and she admitted that, despite having lived there for five years, she had never been this way before. So they made a detour. Situated at the edge of the wood, Le Tartaret was a stretch of barren, volcanic moorland, beneath which a coal-seam had been burning permanently for centuries past. The origins of the place were lost in the mists of time, and the local miners told a story about how the fire of heaven had fallen upon this underground Sodom where putters defiled themselves in all manner of abomination; and it had struck so suddenly that they had not even had time to return to the surface and continued to roast in its hell-fires to this very day. The rock had burned to a dark red and was covered in a leprous bloom of potash. Sulphur grew along the fissures like yellow flowers. After dark those brave enough to put an eye to these cracks in the earth swore that they could see flames and the souls of the damned frying in the hot coals beneath. Gleams of light flickered along the ground, and hot vapours rose continually, like a foul and poisonous stench from the devil’s kitchen. And in the middle of this accursed moor of Le Tartaret, La Côte Verte rose as though miraculously blessed by an eternal spring, with grass that was forever green, beech trees that were continually producing new leaves, and fields that yielded as many as three crops a year. It was a natural hothouse, warmed by the combustion taking place in the deep strata beneath. Snow never settled there. And on this December day its enormous bouquet of greenery rose beside the bare trees of the forest, and the frost had not even blackened the edges of the leaves.
Soon the carriage sped off across the plain. Négrel made fun of the legend and explained how a fire like that at the bottom of a mine was generally caused by coal-dust fermenting. Once it got out of control, it burned for ever; and he quoted the example of a pit in Belgium which they had flooded by diverting a river into its shaft. But then he stopped talking, for they had begun to meet group after group of miners coming the other way. The miners went past in silence, casting hard sideways glances at all this luxury that was forcing them off the road. Their number kept increasing, and on the little bridge over La Scarpe the horses had to slow to a walk. What was bringing all these people out on to the roads? The young ladies were becoming anxious, and Négrel could sense trouble brewing in the countryside. And so it was with some relief that they finally arrived at Marchiennes. In the sunlight, which seemed to dim their fires, the batteries of coke-ovens and the tall chimneys of the blast-furnaces stood belching forth clouds of smoke, which fell through the air in an endless rain of soot.
II
At Jean-Bart Catherine had already been rolling tubs for an hour, delivering them as far as the relay-point; and she was drenched in such a lather of sweat that she stopped for a moment to wipe her face.
From the depths of the seam where he was digging out coal with the rest of his group, Chaval was surprised not to hear the usual rumble of wheels. The lamps were not burning well, and the dust made it impossible to see.
‘What’s up?’ he shouted.
When she replied that she thought she was surely going to melt and that her heart was fit to burst, he called back angrily:
‘Bloody fool! Why don’t you take off your shirt like the rest of us?’
They were at a depth of seven hundred and eight metres, in the first road of the Désirée seam, about three kilometres away from pit-bottom. Whenever this part of the mine was mentioned, the local miners would turn pale and lower their voices, as if they were talking about hell itself; and more often than not they merely shook their heads in the way of people who didn’t want to discuss this deep, remote place where the coal burned red and fierce. As they extended northwards, the roadways drew closer to Le Tartaret and entered the area of the underground fire that had turned the rock overhead a dark red. At the point to which they had now dug, the average temperature at the coal-face was some forty-five degrees. They were right in the middle of the accursed city of the plain and in among those flames that passers-by up on the surface could see through the cracks, spitting out sulphur and foul-smelling gases.
Catherine, who had already taken off her jacket, hesitated for a moment and then removed her trousers also; and with her arms and legs bare, and her shirt tied round her hips like a smock with a piece of string, she began once more to roll her tubs.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she shouted.
If the heat stifled her, it also made her dimly afraid. For the past five days since they had started working there, she had been remembering the stories she had heard in her childhood about the putters of the past who were still being roasted alive under Le Tartaret as a punishment for unmentionable deeds. Of course she was too old now to believe such nonsense; but what would she have done nevertheless if she’d seen a girl come through the wall looking as red as a hot stove and with eyes like burning coals? The very idea of it made her sweat even more.
At the relay-point another putter would come and take the tub and roll it a further eighty metres along the track to the edge of the incline, where the seizer would dispatch it along with all the others that were coming down from the roads above.
‘Blimey! Make yourself at home, why not?’ said the woman, a thin-looking widow of thirty, when she saw Catherine dressed only in her shirt. ‘I can’t do that. The lads on my stretch never give me a minute’s peace with all their dirty nonsense.’
‘Oh, to hell with the men!’ replied Catherine. ‘It’s this heat I can’t stand.’
And off she went, pushing her empty tub. The worst of it was that down in this remote part of the mine the proximity of Le Tartaret was not the only cause of the unbearable heat. The road ran parallel with some old workings, deep in Gaston-Marie, next to an abandoned roadway where a firedamp explosion ten years earlier had set fire to the seam; and the fire was still raging behind the break, a wall of clay which had been built alongside it and which was kept in constant repair in order to contain the disaster. Starved of oxygen the fire ought to have gone out; but draughts from unknown sources must have continued to feed it, and so it was still burning ten years later, warming the clay in the break like the bricks in a kiln, with the result that the heat could be felt through it along the whole length of the wall. And it was beside this break, over a distance of a hundred metres, that the tubs had to be rolled, in a temperature of sixty degrees.
After two more trips Catherine was again overcome with the heat. Fortunately the road was broad and easy to move around in, the Désirée vein being one of the thickest in the region. The band of coal was one metre ninety high, which meant that the miners could work standing up. But they would have preferred cramped conditions if it meant they could have had some cooler air.
‘God help us! Are you asleep?’ Chaval shouted angrily again as soon as he heard Catherine stop. ‘How did I get stuck with such a bloody hopeless bitch, would you tell me? Will you for God’s sake fill your tub and take it away!’
She was standing at the foot of the coal-face, leaning on her shovel; and she began to feel faint, staring at everyone with a blank expression and ignoring Chaval’s order. She could barely see them in the reddish glow from the lamps; and though they were stark naked, like animals, they were so black with the grime of sweat and coal-dust that their nakedness did not trouble her. They seemed bent upon some indeterminate labour, an array of monkeys’ backs straining with effort, an infernal vision of ruddy limbs caught up in a great thudding and grunting. But they must have been able to see her better because the picks stopped tapping and the men started teasing her about having taken off her trousers.
‘Mind you don’t catch cold now!’
‘What a pair of legs! Hey, Chaval, how about one each?’
‘Give us a peep, then! Come on, lift your shirt! Higher! Higher!’
Not at all put out by this ribaldry, Chaval laid into her again:
‘For Christ’s sake, get a move on!…Oh, she doesn’t mind that kind of talk. She’d stand there listening to it till the cows come home.’
&nbs
p; With great effort Catherine had made herself fill the tub, and now she began to push it. The roadway was too wide for her to be able to gain purchase by arching her back against the timbering on either side, and she kept twisting her ankles as she tried to get a grip on the rails with her bare feet; and so progress was slow as she strained forward with her arms stretched out taut in front of her and her body bent in half. As soon as she reached the break, the torture by fire began again, and enormous beads of sweat started falling from every part of her body like heavy raindrops in a storm. By the time she was scarcely a third of the way along, it was pouring off her, and she could see nothing. She, too, was covered in black grime. Her tight shirt looked as though it had been soaked in ink; and as it clung to her skin, the movement of her thighs made it ride up over her hips, restricting her movements so painfully that once more she was forced to stop.
What was wrong with her today? Never before had her legs felt so much as though they were made of jelly. It must be the bad air. The ventilation did not reach the end of this remote road, and the atmosphere was full of all manner of gases which gently fizzed from the coal with the sound of spring-water, and sometimes in such quantity that the lamps refused to burn; to say nothing of the firedamp, which everyone had ceased to care about since the seam blew so much of the stuff into the miners’ faces from one week’s end to the next. She knew all about this bad air – ‘dead air’1 the miners called it – which consisted of a lower layer of heavy gases that caused asphyxiation and an upper layer of light gases that spontaneously combusted and could blow up every coal-face in a pit, killing hundreds of men in one single thunderous blast. She had breathed in so much of it since she was a child that she was surprised not to be able to tolerate it better, but her ears were buzzing and her throat was on fire.
Unable to bear the heat any longer, she felt a desperate need to remove her shirt. The cloth was torturing her, and the merest crease seemed to cut into her and burn her flesh. She resisted the urge and made another attempt to push the tub, but she had to straighten up again. Then, all of a sudden, telling herself that she would cover up at the relay-point, she stripped completely, untying the string and removing her shirt in such feverish haste that she would have torn her skin off, too, had she been able. Now completely naked and pitifully reduced to the level of an animal padding along a muddy path in search of food, she went about her work, her buttocks splattered in soot and her front covered in grime up to her belly, like a filth-covered mare between the shafts of a hansom cab. She was pushing the tub on all fours.