Germinal (15 page)

‘Come and look at Battle!' the workers called to each other, entertained by the antics of their old favourite. ‘He's having a chat with his new comrade!'

Now untied, Trumpet still did not move. He continued to lie on his side, garrotted by fear, as if he could still feel the net tightening round him. Eventually they got him to his feet with the flick of a whip, and he stood there dazed, his legs quivering. And as old Mouque led them away, the two horses pursued their fraternal acquaintance.

‘Well? Now can we go up?' Maheu inquired.

The cages had to be emptied first, and in any case there were still ten minutes to go before it was time for the ascent. Gradually the coal-faces were emptying, and all the miners were making their way back along the roadways. Some fifty men had already gathered, soaked to the skin and shivering, their lungs a prey to the pneumonia that threatened from every side with every draught of air. Pierron, for all his smooth exterior, slapped his daughter Lydie for leaving the coal-face early. Zacharie slyly pinched La Mouquette – for the warmth, he said. But unrest was growing as Chaval and Levaque spread word of the engineer's threat to lower the rate per tub and pay them separately
for timbering; noisy protests greeted the proposal, and the spirit of rebellion began to germinate here in this tiny space some six hundred metres below the surface of the earth. Soon they could contain themselves no longer, and these men who were filthy with coal and frozen stiff from waiting now accused the Company of killing half its workers underground while they let the other half die of starvation. Étienne listened to them, trembling with outrage.

‘Hurry up! Hurry up!' the deputy called Richomme kept shouting at the onsetters.

He was trying to hasten preparations for the ascent, not wanting to have to reprimand the men and pretending not to hear them. However, the protests became so loud that he was obliged to intervene. Behind him people were shouting that things couldn't go on like this for ever and that one fine day the whole bloody lot would go up with a bang.

‘You're a sensible fellow,' he told Maheu. ‘Tell them to be quiet. When you haven't got the fire-power, it's always best to hold your peace.'

But Maheu, who had calmed down and was beginning to grow nervous, was spared having to intervene, for all at once everyone fell silent. Négrel and Dansaert were emerging from one of the roadways on their way back from their inspection, and both were covered in sweat like everyone else. Habit and discipline meant that the men stood back as the engineer walked through the group without a word. He climbed into one tub, the overman into another, and five pulls on the signal-rope followed – for a ‘special meat load', as they called it when it was the bosses themselves. And amid the sullen silence the cage vanished upwards into thin air.

In the cage taking him to the surface, squashed into a tub with four other people, Étienne made up his mind to take to the open road once more and continue his hungry search for work. He
might as well die straight away as go back down that hell-hole and not even earn enough to live on. Catherine was in a tub higher up, so he could not now feel that lovely, soothing warmth against his body. Anyway he would rather not start getting any silly ideas. It was much better he left. He'd had more of an education than the rest of them, which meant he didn't share their herd-like sense of resignation, and he'd only end up strangling the life out of one boss or another.

Suddenly he was blinded. The ascent had been so swift that he was left stunned by the daylight, and his eyelids quivered in the brightness to which he had already grown so unaccustomed. But it was a relief all the same to feel the cage lock into its keeps. A banksman opened the gate, and a stream of workmen poured out of the tubs.

‘Hey, Mouquet,' Zacharie whispered in the banksman's ear. ‘Are we off to the Volcano tonight?'

The Volcano was a café in Montsou which offered musical entertainments. Mouquet winked with his left eye, and a broad grin spread across his face. Short and stocky like his father, he had the cheeky look of a fun-loving lad who grabs what's going without a thought for the morrow. La Mouquette was just then coming out of the cage, and he gave her an enormous whack across the bottom as a mark of brotherly affection.

Étienne hardly recognized the tall nave of the pit-head, which had previously seemed so sinister in the eerie, flickering light of the lanterns. Now it just looked bare and dirty. A grubby light filtered through the dusty windows. The one exception, at the far end, was the winding-engine with all its gleaming brasswork; otherwise the greasy steel cables flew up and down like ribbons that had been steeped in ink, while the pulleys up above in their enormous iron framework, the cages and the tubs, the whole prodigal array of metal, made the place seem dingy by lending it the harsh grey tones of old scrap. The sheets of cast-iron flooring shook beneath the ceaseless rumble of the wheels, and from the coal in the tubs rose a fine dust which turned everything black, the floor, the walls, even the beams high up in the headgear.

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.