Germinal (7 page)

The driver, reassured, shook his head.

‘No, no work for a mechanic…We had two of them come by yesterday. There's nothing to be had.'

A sudden squall interrupted the two men. Then, pointing down
at the dark huddle of buildings at the foot of the spoil-heap, Étienne asked:

‘It is a coal-pit, isn't it?'

This time the old man was unable to reply, choked by a violent fit of coughing. At length he spat, and his spittle left a black stain on the crimson ground.

‘Yes, it's a pit all right. Le Voreux
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…Look, the miners' village is just over there.'

It was his turn to point, and he gestured through the darkness to the village whose roof-tops Étienne had glimpsed earlier. But the six tubs were empty now, and so the old man followed after them on his stiff rheumatic legs, not even needing to crack the whip: his big yellow horse had set off automatically and was plodding forward between the rails, hauling the tubs behind it. A fresh gust of wind ruffled its coat.

Le Voreux was now emerging as though from a landscape of dream, and while he lingered at the brazier warming his sore, chapped hands, Étienne took in the scene. He was able to locate each part of the pit: the screening-shed with its asphalt roof; the headgear over the pit-shaft; the huge engine-house; and the square tower containing the drainage-pump. Hunkered in a hollow in the ground, with its squat brick buildings and a chimney that poked up like a menacing horn, the pit looked to him like some monstrous and voracious beast crouching there ready to gobble everyone up. As he stared at it, he began thinking about himself and the vagrant life he had been living for the past week in search of work: he saw himself back in Lille, in his railway workshop, hitting his boss and being fired and then getting turned away wherever he went. On Saturday he had arrived in Marchiennes. He had heard there was work at Les Forges, the ironworks; but there'd been nothing, neither at Les Forges nor at Sonneville's, and he'd had to spend the Sunday hidden under a woodpile in a cartwright's yard, from where the watchman had just evicted him at two o'clock that morning. He had nothing, not a penny to his name, not even a crust of bread. So what was he supposed to do now, wandering the highways and byways like this with nowhere to go and not even the slightest idea where to find shelter from the wind? Yes, it was a
pit all right: he could see the paved yard in the light of the few lanterns hanging there, and the sudden opening of a door had allowed him a glimpse of the boiler fires blazing with light. Gradually he worked out what everything was, even that noise of the pump letting off steam, a slow, deep, insistent puffing that sounded as though the monster were congested and fighting for breath.

Hunched over his machine, the tippler-operator had not even looked up at Étienne, who was just going over to pick up his small bundle where he had dropped it when a fit of coughing signalled the return of the driver. He and his yellow horse could be seen slowly emerging from the darkness, having hauled up six more tub-loads.

‘Are there any factories in Montsou?' Étienne asked.

The old man spat black phlegm and shouted back above the wind:

‘Oh, we've got the factories all right. You should have seen them three or four years ago. Things were humming then. You couldn't find enough men to work in them, and folk had never earned as much in their lives…And here we all are having to tighten our belts again. Things are in a bad way round these parts now, what with people being laid off and workshops closing down all over the place…Well, maybe it isn't the Emperor's fault, but what does he want to go off fighting in America
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for? Not to mention the animals that are dying of cholera,
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and the people too for that matter.'

Both men continued to share their grievances in short, breathless bursts of speech. Étienne described his week of fruitless searching. What was he supposed to do? Starve to death? The roads would soon be full of beggars. Yes, the old man agreed, things weren't looking good at all. In God's name, it just wasn't right turning so many Christian souls out on to the streets like that.

‘There's no meat some days.'

‘Even bread would do!'

‘That's true. If only we had some bread!'

Their voices were lost in the bleak howl of the wind as squalling gusts snatched their words away.

‘It's like this,' the driver continued at the top of his voice, turning to face south. ‘In Montsou over there…'

Stretching out his hand once more, he indicated various invisible points in the darkness, naming each one as he did so. Over in Montsou the Fauvelle sugar-refinery was still working, but the Hoton refinery had just laid off some of its men, and of the remainder only the Dutilleul flour-mill and the factory at Bleuze that made cables for the mines were managing to keep going. Then, with a broad sweep towards the north, his arm took in a whole half of the horizon: the Sonneville construction works had received only a third of its usual number of orders; of the three blast-furnaces at the ironworks in Marchiennes only two were lit; and at the Gagebois glass factory there was the threat of a strike because there'd been talk of reducing the men's wages.

‘I know, I know,' said the young man as each place was identified. ‘I've just been there.'

‘The rest of us are all right so far,' the driver added. ‘But the pits have cut their production. And look at La Victoire over there. Only two batteries of coke-ovens still going.'

He spat and departed once more behind his sleepy horse, having harnessed it to the empty tubs.

Étienne now looked out over the whole region. It was still pitch black, but the driver's hand seemed to have imbued the darkness with misery and suffering, and the young man intuitively felt its presence all around him in the limitless expanse. Was that not the cry of famine he could hear being borne along on the March wind as it swept across this featureless countryside? The gale was blowing even more furiously now, and it was as though it were bringing the death of labour in its wake, a time of want that would take the lives of many men. And Étienne scanned the horizon trying to pierce the gloom, at once desperate to see and yet fearful of what he might find.

Everything remained sunk in darkness, concealed by the obliterating night; all he could make out, in the far distance, were the blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens. These last, batteries of a hundred slanting chimneys, stood all in a line like ramps of red flame; while the two towering furnaces, further over to the left, blazed with a blue light like giant torches in the middle of the
sky. It was a melancholy sight, like watching a building on fire; and the only suns to rise on this menacing horizon were these, the fires that burn at night in a land of iron and coal.

‘Are you from Belgium, then?' Étienne heard the driver asking behind him when he next returned.

This time he had brought up only three tubs. They might as well be emptied: there was a problem with the extraction cage, where a nut had broken off a bolt, and work would be held up for a quarter of an hour or more. At the foot of the spoil-heap silence had fallen, and the trestles no longer shook with the constant rumble of the banksmen's tubs. All that could be heard was the distant sound of metal being hammered somewhere down in the pit.

‘No, I'm from the south,' the young man replied.

Having emptied the tubs, the man in charge of the tippler had sat down on the ground, delighted by the hold-up; but he remained fiercely taciturn and simply looked up at the driver with wide, expressionless eyes as though somehow put out by so much talking. For indeed the driver was not usually given to such expansiveness. He must have liked the look of this stranger and felt one of those sudden urges to confide that sometimes make old people talk to themselves out loud.

‘I'm from Montsou,' he said. ‘The name's Bonnemort.'

‘Is that some kind of nickname?' asked Étienne in surprise.

The old man chuckled contentedly and gestured towards Le Voreux:

‘Yes, it is…They've dragged me out of there three times now, barely in one piece. Once with my hair all singed, once full to the gills with earth, and once with my belly full of water, all swollen like a frog's…So when they saw that I just refused to pop my clogs, they called me Bonnemort, for a laugh.'
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His mirth came louder still, like the screech of a pulley in need of oil, and eventually degenerated into a terrible fit of coughing. The light from the brazier was now shining fully on his large head, with its few remaining white hairs and a flat, ghostly pale face that was stained with bluish blotches. He was a short man, with an enormous neck; his legs bulged outwards, and he had long arms with square hands that hung down to his knees.
Otherwise, just like his horse standing there motionless and apparently untroubled by the wind, he seemed to be made of stone and appeared oblivious to the cold and the howling gale that was whistling round his ears. When finally, with one deep rasping scrape of the throat, he had finished coughing, he spat by the foot of the brazier, and the earth turned black.

Étienne looked at him and then at the stain he had just made on the ground.

‘So,' he went on, ‘have you been working at the pit for long?'

Bonnemort spread his arms wide.

‘Long? I should say!…I wasn't even eight years old the first time I went down a mine. It was Le Voreux, as it happens. And today I'm fifty-eight. You work it out…I've done every job there is down there. Simple pit-boy to start with, then putter once I was strong enough to push the tubs, and then hewer for eighteen years. After that, because of my damned legs, they put me on maintenance work, filling in seams, repairing the roads, that sort of thing, until the day they had to bring me up and give me a surface job because the doctor said otherwise I'd 'ave stayed down there for good. So five years ago they made me a driver…Not bad, eh? Fifty years working at the pit, and forty-five of them underground!'

As he spoke, flaming coals would now and again fall from the brazier and cast a gleam of blood-red light across his pallid face.

‘And then they tell me to call it a day,' he went on. ‘Not likely. They must think I'm daft!…I can manage another two years all right, till I'm sixty, so I get the pension of a hundred and eighty francs. If I was to pack it in now, they'd turn round and give me the one at a hundred and fifty. Cunning buggers!…Anyway, I'm as fit as a fiddle, apart from my legs. It's the water that's got under my skin, you see, what with getting soaked all the time down at the coal-face. Some days I can't even put one foot in front of the other without screaming the place down.'

He was interrupted by another fit of coughing.

‘And that's what makes you cough as well?' asked Étienne.

But he shook his head fiercely. When he could speak, he continued:

‘No, no, I caught a cold, last month. I never used to cough, but now I just can't get rid of it…And the funny part is I keep coughing this stuff up. More and more of it.'

A rasp rose in his throat, and he spat black phlegm.

‘Is it blood?' Étienne asked, eventually daring to put the question.

Slowly Bonnemort wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘It's coal…I've got enough coal inside this carcass of mine to keep me warm for the rest of my days. And it's five whole years since I was last down the mine. Seems I was storing it up without even knowing. Ah well, it's a good preservative!'

There was silence; the distant, rhythmic sound of hammering could be heard coming from the pit, and the moan of the wind continued to sweep past, like a cry of hunger and exhaustion rising from the depths of the night. Standing beside the startled flickering of the flames, the old man went on, lowering his voice as he revisited his memories. Oh yes indeed! He and his family were old hands at cutting the coal! They'd been working for the Montsou Mining Company ever since the beginning, and that was a long time ago, one hundred and six years to be precise. It was his grandfather, Guillaume Maheu, then a lad of fifteen, who had discovered soft coal at Réquillart, which had become the Company's first pit but was now just an old disused shaft, over near the Fauvelle sugar-refinery. That much was common knowledge, and proof was that the new seam had been called the Guillaume seam, after his grandfather's Christian name. He hadn't known him himself, but he'd been a big man by all accounts, and very strong. Died in his bed at the age of sixty. Then there was his father, Nicolas Maheu, known as Maheu the Red. He'd died when he was barely forty, at Le Voreux, back when they were still sinking the shaft; a rock-fall it was, completely flattened him, swallowed him whole, bones, flesh, blood, the lot. Two of his uncles and then, later on, his own three brothers had all lost their lives down there. As for him, Vincent Maheu, he'd managed to escape more or less unscathed, apart from his gammy legs, that is, and everyone thought him a clever bastard for doing so. But what else could you do? You had to work, and this was simply what they did, from father to
son, the same as they'd have done any other job. And now here was his own son, Toussaint Maheu, working himself to death down the pit, and his grandsons too, and everybody else who lived over there in the village. A hundred and six years of cutting coal, first the old men, then the kids, and all for the same boss. There weren't many bourgeois, were there, who could trace their ancestry for you quite so neatly?

‘So long as we've got something to eat!' Étienne muttered again.

‘That's just what I say. As long as there's bread to eat, we'll survive.'

Bonnemort fell silent, his gaze directed towards the village where gleams of light were beginning to appear one after the other.

Four o'clock was chiming on the Montsou clock-tower. The cold was getting even sharper.

‘So it's rich then, is it, this Company of yours?' Étienne went on.