‘We have to climb,’ Maheu continued. ‘Hang your lamp from your buttonhole and grab hold of the timbering.’
He, too, vanished, and Étienne was obliged to follow. A kind of chimney had been left in the seam so that the miners could reach all the subsidiary roads. It was the same width as the coal-seam itself, scarcely sixty centimetres. Fortunately the young man was slim, for being as yet unpractised it took him an excessive amount of muscular effort to hoist himself aloft, which he did by squeezing his shoulders and hips in tight, then clinging to the timbers and dragging himself up by his wrists. Fifteen metres up they came on the first of the secondary roads; but they had to keep going because the face worked by Maheu and his team was the sixth road in ‘Hell’, as they called it. At intervals of fifteen metres came further roads, each one running exactly above the last; and the climb seemed never-ending as they scrambled up through this crack in the rock and felt the skin being scraped off their backs and their chests. Étienne was gasping for breath, as if the weight of the rock had crushed his limbs; his legs were bruised, his hands felt as though they had been torn from his arms, but above all he was desperate for air, to such an extent that his blood felt as though it were ready to burst from his veins. Dimly, in one of the roads, he made out the hunched shapes of two animals, one small and one large, pushing coal-tubs: it was Lydie and La Mouquette, already at work. And still he had the height of two coal-faces to climb! He was blinded by sweat and despaired of keeping pace with the others as he heard their supple limbs slithering smoothly up the surface of the rock.
‘Keep going, we’re there!’ he heard Catherine say.
But as indeed he reached the spot, another voice shouted from the coal-face:
‘What the hell’s this, then? Some kind of joke or what? I have to come a whole two kilometres from Montsou, and I’m bloody here first!’
This was Chaval, a tall, thin, bony man of twenty-five with strong features. He was cross at having had to wait. When he caught sight of Étienne, he asked in scornful surprise:
‘And what have we got here, then?’
When Maheu had told him what had happened, he added through clenched teeth:
‘So now the boys are stealing the girls’ bread out of their mouths.’1
The two men exchanged a look, their eyes blazing with the kind of instinctive hatred that flares in an instant. Étienne had sensed the insult, but without yet fully understanding its meaning. There was a silence, and everyone set to work. All the seams had gradually filled up, and all the faces were being worked, on each level, at the end of each road. The gluttonous pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, nearly seven hundred miners who were now at work inside this giant anthill, all burrowing into the earth and riddling it with holes, like an old piece of wood being eaten away by woodworm. And in the heavy silence created by the crushing mass of earth it was possible to put an ear to the rock and hear the teeming activity of human insects on the march, from the whirr of the cables rising and falling as the cages took the coal to the surface to the grinding of tools as they bit into the seam deep within each working.
As he turned, Étienne once more found himself pressed up close against Catherine. But this time he could discern the nascent curves of her breasts, and at once he understood the nature of the warmth he had felt:
‘So you’re a girl, then?’ he murmured in amazement.
Unabashed, she replied with her usual cheerfulness:
‘Of course I am…Dear me! That took you some time!’
IV
The four hewers had just taken up position, stretched out at different levels one above the other and covering the entire height of the coal-face. Wooden planks, secured by hooks, stopped the coal from falling after they had cut it, and between these planks each man occupied a space of about four metres along the seam. This particular seam was so thin,1 barely fifty centimetres at this point, that they found themselves virtually crushed between roof and wall; they had to drag themselves forward on their elbows and knees and were quite unable to turn round without banging their shoulders. In order to get at the coal they had to lie on one side, twist their necks, and use both arms in order to raise their rivelaine, a short-handled pick, which they wielded at an angle.
Zacharie was at the bottom; then came Levaque and Chaval above him, and finally Maheu at the very top. Each man hacked into the shale bedrock, digging it out with his pick. Then he would make two vertical cuts in the coal, insert an iron wedge into the space above, and prise out a lump. The coal was soft, and the lump would break into pieces which then rolled down over his stomach and legs. Once these pieces had piled up against the boards put there to retain them, the hewers disappeared from view, immured in their narrow cleft.
Maheu had the worst of it. Up at the top the temperature reached thirty-five degrees; there was no circulation of air, and the suffocating atmosphere was potentially fatal. In order to see what he was doing he had to hang his lamp from a nail, just by his head; and the continued heat of the lamp on his skull eventually raised his body temperature to fever level. But it was the wetness that made life particularly difficult. The rock above him, just a few centimetres from his face, was streaming with water, and large drops of it would keep falling in regular, rapid succession, always landing with stubborn insistence on exactly the same spot. Try as he might to twist his neck or bend his head back, they splattered remorselessly against his face and burst. After a quarter of an hour he would be soaked through, and with his body also bathed in sweat he steamed like a wash-tub. That particular morning a drop of water was continually hitting him in the eye, and it made him curse. He didn’t want to stop hewing, and as he continued to hack fiercely at the rock, his body shook violently in the narrow space, like a greenfly caught between the leaves of a book and about to be squashed completely flat.
Not a word was exchanged. Everyone was tapping away, and all that could be heard was the irregular clunk-clunk of the picks, which seemed to come from far away. There were no echoes in this airless place, and sounds were more like a dull rasping. The darkness itself seemed to consist of an unfamiliar blackness that was thick with flying coal-dust and filled with gases that made the eyelids heavy. The wicks in the lamps were no more than reddish pinpricks of light beneath their gauze mantles. One could see almost nothing, and the coal-face simply rose into a pitch-black void, like a broad, flat, sloping chimney piled high with the soot of a dozen winters. Ghostly shapes moved about in it, and chance gleams of light picked out the curve of a hip, or a sinewy arm, or a wild-looking face blackened as though in readiness for a crime. From time to time, lumps of coal would gleam in the darkness as they came away, suddenly illuminated – a flat surface here, a sharp edge there – by the glint of light on crystal. Then it would all be dark again, and apart from the loud thudding of the picks all that could be heard were gasping lungs and the occasional groan of discomfort and fatigue caused by the thick air and the water raining down from the underground springs.
Zacharie was not feeling strong – the consequence of a heavy night – and he soon stopped hewing on the pretext that some timbering needed to be done, which meant he could take it easy for a while and whistle softly to himself as he stared absently into space. Behind the hewers nearly three metres of the seam had been dug out and still they had not taken the precaution of shoring up the rock, being at once careless of the danger and jealous of their time.
‘Hey, you there, with your nose in the air!’ Zacharie called to Étienne. ‘Pass me some props.’
Étienne, who was being taught by Catherine how best to use his shovel, had to carry the props to the coal-face. There was a small amount left over from the day before, the usual practice being to bring down each morning some that had been cut exactly to the dimensions of the seam.
‘Come on, hurry up, you lazy bastard!’ Zacharie continued, as he watched the new putter hoist himself awkwardly up through the loose coal with his arms full of four lengths of oak.
With his pick he cut a not
ch in the roof and another in the wall, and then wedged the two ends of the beam in place so that they served as a support. Each afternoon the shifters came and fetched the rubble left at the end of each tunnel by the hewers and then disposed of it in the cavities where the seam had already been mined. They made no effort to remove the timbering, and simply kept the uppermost and lowermost roads free for haulage.
Maheu stopped grunting. He had finally managed to prise out his block of coal. He wiped his streaming face on his sleeve and began to concern himself with what Zacharie had climbed up behind him to do.
‘No, leave that for now,’ he said. ‘We’ll see about it after lunch…Better we keep hewing if we want to fill our usual number of tubs.’
‘Yes, but look,’ replied Zacharie, ‘it’s sagging. There’s a crack there. I’m worried it’s going to fall in.’
But his father merely shrugged. Let it fall in, then! Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time. They’d survive all right. Eventually he grew angry and ordered his son back to the coal-face.
In fact they were all taking a breather now. Levaque was lying on his back cursing as he examined his left thumb where the skin had been taken off by a piece of falling sandstone. Chaval was furiously removing his shirt, stripping to the waist to try and get cool. They were already black with coal, covered in a layer of fine dust that dissolved in their sweat and trickled down them and collected in pools. Maheu was the first to set to again, tapping away at the coal lower down so that his head was flush with the rock. The dripping water now landed on his forehead and with such stubborn regularity that he felt as though it were boring a hole through the bone in his skull.
‘Don’t mind them,’ Catherine said to Étienne by way of explanation. ‘They’re always arguing about something.’
And, in her usual helpful way, she went on with the lesson.
Each full tub reached the surface just as it had left the coal-face, marked with a special token2 so that the checkweighman could credit it to the appropriate team of miners. It was important to make sure, therefore, that it was properly full, and with clean coal, otherwise the checkweighman would not record it.
Étienne’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark, and he looked at her, with her white, anaemic skin. He could not have said how old she was: perhaps twelve, he thought, so slight of build was she. Yet he sensed that she was older than that, noting her boyish lack of inhibition and her directness, which made him feel a little awkward. He didn’t find her attractive – the pale, Pierrot face framed in its tight-fitting cap made her look too much like a young urchin – but he was amazed by the child’s strength, which seemed to derive from a mixture of wiry sinews and considerable dexterity. She could fill the tub quicker than he could, in a fast, regular succession of small shovelfuls; and then, slowly and steadily, she would push it along to the top of the incline in such a way that it never got stuck and that both she and it passed easily under the low rocks. He, on the other hand, suffered all manner of cuts and bruises and kept coming off the rails and needing assistance.
It was not, in fact, the easiest of haulage roads. It was sixty metres from the coal-face to the incline; and the road itself, which had not yet been widened by the stonemen, was no more than a narrow tube. The roof was very uneven, with large bumps all along it, and at certain points a full tub could only just pass underneath, with the putters having to get down on their knees and push so as not to crack their skulls open. Moreover the timber supports were already sagging and beginning to crack. Long, pale gashes could be seen in some of them where they had already split through the middle, like crutches unequal to the task. They had to be careful not to get caught on the jagged edges; and as this slow collapse proceeded overhead, crushing the round oak props that were as thick as a man’s thigh, they had to crawl forward on their bellies while all the time wondering anxiously if they were suddenly going to hear their own spines snap in two.
‘Not again!’ laughed Catherine.
Étienne’s tub had just come off the rails at the most awkward spot. He couldn’t manage to get the tubs to go straight because the rails were warped by the dampness in the ground; and he was in a rage, swearing and cursing as he wrestled furiously with the wheels, which refused, despite his extravagant efforts, to go back into place.
‘Wait, wait,’ said Catherine. ‘If you get cross, you’ll never get it to move.’
Nimbly she slid down and backed her bottom in under the tub; and then she lifted it with her hips back on to the rails. It weighed seven hundred kilograms. Étienne was astonished, and shamefully stammered his apologies.
She had to show him how to spread his legs in an arch and wedge his feet against the timbers, on both sides of the roadway, so as to give himself points of purchase. The trick was to lean forward, with your arms out straight, so as to be able to use all the muscles in your shoulders and hips simultaneously. He followed her for one trip and watched her as she moved forward with her bottom in the air and her fists so low down that she seemed to be trotting on all fours like one of those dwarf animals that work in circuses. She was sweating and panting, and her joints cracked, but she worked without complaint, with the indifference of habit, as if it was everyone’s wretched lot to live like this beneath the yoke. But he simply could not manage to do the same; his shoes were an encumbrance, and his body ached as he tried to move forward like that with his head down. After a few minutes the position was agony, and he felt such intolerable pain and discomfort that he had to kneel down for a moment to straighten his back and catch his breath.
When they got to the incline, a further ordeal lay in store, and she taught him how to dispatch his tub quickly. At the top and bottom of an incline, which served all the coal-faces between any two levels in the mine, a pit-boy was posted, with the one above acting as brakeman and the one below as seizer. These scallywags, aged anywhere between twelve and fifteen, were in the habit of shouting to one another in foul language, and if anyone wanted to attract their attention they had to shout even louder and use even coarser language. Then, as soon as there was an empty tub ready to be sent up, the one at the bottom would give the signal, the putter would load her full tub on to the incline, and the weight of it would pull the other tub up once the pit-boy at the top had released the brake. Down in the roadway below, trains of tubs were gradually assembled and then hauled off to the main shaft by horses.
‘Hey there, you filthy bastards!’ Catherine shouted down the incline, which was entirely enclosed in wood along its hundred-metre length and boomed like a gigantic loudhailer.
The pit-boys must have been having a rest because neither of them replied. On each level the tubs stopped rolling. Eventually the shrill voice of a girl said:
‘I expect one of ’em’s having it off with La Mouquette!’
Loud rumbles of mirth could be heard, and every putter in the seam was in fits of laughter:
‘Who was that?’ asked Étienne.
Catherine told him it was young Lydie, a slip of a girl who knew more than she ought and who could put a tub as well as any grown woman, despite her doll-like arms. As for La Mouquette, she was quite capable of having both pit-boys at once.
But then the one at the bottom could be heard shouting up to them to load their tubs. A deputy must have been passing. The tubs began to roll again on all nine levels, and soon all that could be heard were the regular cries of the pit-boys and the snorting breaths of the putters as they reached the incline, steaming like overburdened mares. And whenever a miner encountered one of these girls down on all fours, with her backside in the air and her hips bulging from her boy’s breeches, there would be a sudden whiff of animal lust in the air, the scent of male arousal.
After each trip Étienne returned to the stifling atmosphere of the coal-face, to the dull, irregular clunk of the picks and the strained grunts of the hewers as they stubbornly stuck to their task. All four of them had stripped to the waist, and since they were now covered in black grime right up to their caps they were
indistinguishable from the loose coal surrounding them. At one point they had to dig Maheu out when he started choking for breath, and they lifted the planks to let the coal roll down on to the roadway floor. Zacharie and Levaque were complaining furiously about the seam and said it was getting hard to work, which meant it would be difficult to make it pay. Chaval turned over and lay on his back for a moment, insulting Étienne, whose presence he now found decidedly irritating.
‘Little worm! Hasn’t even got the strength of a girl!…And make sure you fill that tub! What’s the matter with you, then? Don’t want to hurt your arms or what?…I bloody warn you, I’ll have that ten sous off you if you get one of ours rejected!’
Étienne was careful not to reply, being so far only too happy to have found this forced labour and quite ready to acquiesce in the brutal hierarchy of the skilled and the unskilled worker. But he was at the end of his tether: his feet were bleeding, his arms and legs were contorted with horrible cramps, and his upper body seemed to be wrapped in a tight band of iron. Fortunately it was ten o’clock, and the team decided to stop for lunch.
Maheu had a watch with him, though he never bothered to look at it. Down in this starless night he could tell the time to the nearest five minutes. Everyone put their shirts and jackets back on and came down from the coal-face. Now they squatted on their heels, elbows tight against their sides, in the position that is so habitual for miners that they adopt it even when outside the mine, which means they never feel the need of a stone or a beam to sit on. Having each taken out their piece, they solemnly bit into the thick slice of bread and exchanged a desultory word about that morning’s work. Catherine, who had remained standing, at length went over to Étienne, who was stretched out across the rails a short distance away from them, leaning his back against the timbering. There was a spot there which was almost dry.
‘Aren’t you eating?’ she asked with her mouth full, her piece in her hand.