Germinal (32 page)

At that moment two colliers were standing in front of the notice, one of them young with a square, brutish head, and the other old and very thin, with a face rendered expressionless by age. Neither could read; the younger man's lips were spelling out the words while the older was content to stare blankly. Many of them came in like this, wanting to have a look but unable to understand.

‘Tell us what it says,' Maheu asked Étienne, reading not being his strong suit either.

So Étienne began to read the notice. It was an announcement from the Company addressed to all miners in its pits and informing them that, in view of the continuing negligence in the matter of timbering, and having wearied of imposing fines which had no effect, it had resolved to introduce a new method of payment for the extraction of coal. Henceforth timbering would be paid for separately, by the cubic metre of wood taken below and used, having due regard to the amount appropriate for a satisfactory performance of the task. The price payable per tub of extracted coal would naturally be reduced from fifty to forty centimes, depending on the type and location of the seam. There followed a rather opaque calculation designed to show that this reduction of ten centimes would be exactly offset by the rate payable for timbering. The Company noted in addition that, in its wish to allow each miner sufficient time to be persuaded of the advantages of this new method of payment, it intended to defer its introduction until Monday, 1 December.

‘Must you read so loud?' the cashier shouted across. ‘We can't hear ourselves think.'

Étienne ignored the remark and went on reading. His voice was shaking, and when he had finished they all continued to stare at the notice. The old miner and his younger companion both seemed to be waiting for something, but then they left, with the air of broken men.

‘God Almighty!' Maheu muttered.

He and Étienne had sat down. Gazing at the floor, deep in thought, they did the sums in their heads, as people continued to file past the yellow notice. What did the Company take them for? The timbering would never allow them to recoup the ten centimes lost on each tub. They'd make eight at most, so the Company was robbing them of two centimes, not to mention the time it would take them to make a proper job of the timbering. So that's what they were up to, a disguised reduction in pay. The Company was saving money by taking it from the miners' pockets.

‘God Al-bloody-mighty!' Maheu repeated, looking up again. ‘We'd be bloody daft to accept!'

But by now the cashier's window was free, so he stepped up to get his pay. Only the team leaders collected pay, which they then distributed among their team, to save time.

‘Maheu and associates,' said the clerk, ‘the Filonnière seam, coal-face number seven.'

He checked his lists, which were compiled from the notebooks in which the deputies recorded the number of tubs per team per day. Then he said again:

‘Maheu and associates, the Filonnière seam, coal-face number seven…One hundred and thirty-five francs.'

The cashier paid him.

‘Excuse me, sir,' Maheu stammered in disbelief. ‘Are you sure there hasn't been some mistake?'

He looked at the paltry sum where it lay, and his blood ran cold. Yes, he had expected his pay to be low, but it couldn't be that low, or else he hadn't counted right. Once Zacharie, Étienne and Chaval's replacement had each had their share, he'd be left with no more than fifty francs for himself, his father, Catherine and Jeanlin.

‘No, no, there's no mistake,' the official replied. ‘Two Sundays and four days' lay-off have to be deducted, which leaves you nine days' work.'

Maheu made the calculation, totting up the figures under his breath: nine days meant roughly thirty francs for himself, eighteen for Catherine and nine for Jeanlin. Old Bonnemort was due pay for only three days. Even so, if you added on the ninety francs for Zacharie and the other two, it surely all came to more.

‘And don't forget the fines,' the clerk concluded. ‘Twenty francs off for defective timbering.'

Maheu gestured in despair. Twenty francs' worth of fines, and four days laid off! So it was right. To think that he'd once collected up to a hundred and fifty for a fortnight's work, when old Bonnemort was still working and before Zacharie had left home.

‘Do you want it or not?' the clerk shouted impatiently. ‘You can see there are people waiting…If you don't want it, you've only got to say.'

As Maheu's large, trembling hand reached out for the money, the official stopped him.

‘Wait, your name's down here. Toussaint Maheu, isn't it?…The Company Secretary wants to see you. You can go in now, he's free.'

Bewildered, Maheu found himself in an office full of old mahogany furniture and drapes of faded green cord. For five minutes he listened to the Company Secretary, a tall, pale man, who remained seated and spoke to him over the piles of papers on his desk. But the pounding in Maheu's ears prevented him from hearing properly. He vaguely grasped that it was about his father, whose retirement pension of a hundred and fifty francs – due to anyone over fifty with forty years' service – was coming up for assessment. Then the Company Secretary's voice seemed to harden. He was being reprimanded, accused of meddling in politics, and there were references to his lodger and the provident fund; in short, he was being advised not to get mixed up in all this foolishness, especially as he was one of the best workers in the pit. He wanted to protest but he couldn't get the words out, and he stood there nervously twisting his cap in his hands before mumbling on his way out:

‘Certainly, sir…I can assure the Company Secretary that…'

Outside, where Étienne was waiting for him, Maheu exploded.

‘I'm a bloody hopeless fool, I should have answered him back!…Not even enough to buy bread, and then I have to listen to all that nonsense! But you're right, it's you he's got it in for. He says people's minds have been poisoned. But what the hell can we do? He's quite right. Knuckle down and be grateful, it's the only sensible thing.'

Maheu fell silent, torn between anger and apprehension. Étienne brooded darkly. Once again they found themselves among the groups of men blocking the roadway, and the discontent was growing, a muttering of otherwise peaceable men, without violence of gesture but rumbling like a terrible, gathering storm over the dense throng. The few who could count had done the sums, and word was spreading about the two centimes the Company would gain on the timbering, causing even the most level-headed among them to warm with outrage. But more than anything it was a feeling of fury at the disastrously low pay, the
fury of hungry people rebelling against lay-offs sand fines. Already they lacked enough to eat, so what was to become of them if their pay was cut even further? In the bars people voiced their anger openly, which left their throats so dry that what little money they had received remained where it lay on the counter.

Neither Étienne nor Maheu said a word on the way home from Montsou. When her husband walked in, La Maheude, alone with the children, could see at once that he was empty-handed.

‘Well, that's nice!' she said. ‘What about my coffee and the sugar and the meat? A piece of veal wouldn't have broken the bank, would it?'

He remained silent, desperately trying to choke back his feelings. Then the heavy features of a man toughened by years of working down the mines began to swell with despair, and large tears sprang from his eyes, falling like warm rain. He slumped on a chair, crying like a child, and threw the fifty francs on to the table.

‘There,' he stammered, ‘see what I've brought you…And that's for the work all of us did.'

La Maheude looked at Étienne and noted his silent air of defeat. Then she, too, wept. How was she to feed nine people for a fortnight on fifty francs? Her eldest had left home, the old man could scarcely move his legs any more: soon they'd all be dead. Alzire threw her arms round her mother's neck, appalled by her tears. Estelle was wailing, Lénore and Henri sobbed.

And soon, from all over the village, the same cry of anguish went up. The men were back now, and every household was grieving over the catastrophe of their depleted pay. Doors opened, women appeared, screaming into the open air as though their laments could not be contained beneath the ceilings of their cramped homes. A fine drizzle was falling, but they didn't feel it as they called out to each other from the pavements and held out the palms of their hands to show how little money they had received.

‘Look what they've given him. It's a bloody joke, isn't it?'

‘What about me? I've not even got enough to buy the fortnight's bread.'

‘And me! You can count it if you like. I'm just going to have to sell my blouses again.'

La Maheude had gone outside like the others. A group formed round La Levaque, who was shouting the loudest; for her drunkard of a husband hadn't even come home yet, and she could guess that whether the pay was large or small, it would simply melt away at the Volcano. Philomène was keeping an eye out for Maheu, so Zacharie wouldn't get his hands on the money first. La Pierronne was the only one who seemed fairly calm, since that mealy-mouthed informer Pierron had managed as always, God knows how, to have more hours recorded in the deputy's notebook than his fellow-miners. But La Brûlé thought her son-in-law a gutless coward for it, and she was among the women raising hell, standing there in the middle of the group, thin and erect, brandishing her fist in the direction of Montsou.

‘To think,' she said loudly, without mentioning the Hennebeaus by name, ‘that I saw their maid go past this morning in a carriage!…Yes, the cook in a carriage and pair. Off to Marchiennes to buy some fish, I shouldn't wonder!'

There was uproar at this, and renewed abuse. They were indignant at the thought of that maid in her white apron being driven to market in the neighbouring town in her master's carriage. The workers might be dying of hunger, but of course they still had to have their fish, didn't they? Well, they just might not be eating fish for much longer: one day it would be the turn of the poor. The ideas that Étienne had sown were beginning to take root and grow, burgeoning in this cry of revolt. People were impatient for the promised land, in a hurry for their share of happiness and to reach beyond the horizon of poverty that enclosed them like a tomb. The injustice of it all was becoming too great, and if the bread was now to be snatched from their mouths, they would finally demand their rights. The women especially would like to have launched an immediate assault upon the city on a hill, upon that terminus of Progress where people were poor no longer. Though night had almost fallen and the rain was coming down hard, they continued to fill the village with their tears, surrounded by the shrieking of their unruly children.

That evening, in the Advantage ,the decision was taken to strike. Rasseneur had ceased to oppose it, and Souvarine accepted it as a first step. Étienne summed the matter up: if it was a strike the Company wanted, then a strike they could have.

A week passed, and work continued in an atmosphere of sullen wariness as people awaited the coming battle.

In the Maheu household the fortnight in prospect promised to be even more difficult than the last, which made La Maheude increasingly sour despite her good sense and even temper. And then hadn't Catherine taken it into her head to spend the night away from home! She'd come back the next morning so exhausted and ill after this escapade that she hadn't been able to go to the pit; she cried and said it wasn't her fault, that Chaval had prevented her from coming home by threatening to beat her up if she tried to run away from him. He was becoming violently jealous now and wanted to stop her returning to Étienne's bed, which, he said, he knew full well her family made her share. La Maheude was furious and, having forbidden her daughter to see such a brute again, she threatened to go to Montsou and slap his face for him. None of which stopped it being one day's pay less. As for Catherine, now that she had got herself a man she preferred not to swap him.

Two days later there was another drama. On Monday and Tuesday Jeanlin did a bunk, and all the time everyone thought he was quietly working away at Le Voreux he was actually out on the loose with Bébert and Lydie, roaming the marshes and the Vandame forest. He was the ringleader, and nobody ever discovered quite what manner of precocious and larcenous games the three of them got up to. He himself received a heavy punishment, a thrashing from his mother, which she conducted out in the street and in front of the terrified child population of the village. Had anyone ever seen the like? A child of hers! Who'd cost her money since the day it was born, who should
now be earning its keep! And her outrage carried the memory of her own harsh childhood, the heritage of destitution which made her see every child in the brood as a future breadwinner.

That morning, when Catherine and the men left for the pit, La Maheude raised herself up in bed and shouted to Jeanlin:

‘And if you try it again, you little brat, I'll thrash the living daylights out of you.'

It was hard going at Maheu's new coal-face. The Filonnière seam narrowed so much at this point that the hewers were wedged between the face itself and the ceiling and kept grazing their elbows as they extracted the coal. Also it was becoming very wet, and with every hour that passed they became more and more anxious about being flooded by one of those sudden torrents that can burst through the rock and sweep a man away. The previous day, when Étienne was pulling his pick out of the rock, having driven it in hard, water suddenly spurted out from a spring and hit him in the face; but this was no more than an early warning, and it simply left the coal-face wetter and muckier than before. Anyway he hardly ever thought about the possibility of an accident now and simply worked away down there with his comrades, oblivious to the danger. They lived in firedamp, not even noticing how it weighed on their eyelids and veiled their eyelashes like a cobweb. Sometimes, when the flame in their lamps turned paler and bluer, they did think about it, and one of the miners would put his ear to the seam and listen to the faint hiss of the gas, which sounded as though air bubbles were fizzing from each crack in the rock. But rock-falls were the one real and constant threat since, apart from the fact that the timbering was botched from being done in a hurry, the earth itself was unstable on account of the water running through it.