Part 16

Fortunately, a young trammer, sent to fetch Doctor Vanderhaghen, had found him and was bringing him back. Jeanlin and the dead man were carried into the overlookers' room, where a large fire burned from one end of the year to the other. The buckets of hot water, all ready for washing feet, were set aside; and, after spreading two mattresses on the flagstones, the man and the child were laid upon them. Only Maheu and Étienne went in. Outside, hurriers, miners, and young trammers who had come running formed a group, talking in low voices.

As soon as the doctor had cast a glance at Chicot, he murmured:

"Done for!... You can wash him."

Two overseers undressed, then sponged this black, coal-stained corpse, still dirty with the sweat of labour.

"The head's all right," the doctor went on, kneeling on Jeanlin's mattress. "The chest neither... Ah! it's the legs that caught it."

He himself was undressing the child, untying the hood, removing the jacket, pulling off the breeches and shirt, with the deftness of a nurse. And the poor little body appeared, thin as an insect, soiled with black dust, yellow earth, marbled with bloody patches. Nothing could be made out, and he had to be washed too. Then, he seemed to grow even thinner under the sponge, the flesh so pale, so transparent, that the bones showed. It was a pity, this final degeneracy of a race of wretches, this suffering nothingness, half crushed by the collapse of the rocks. When he was clean, the bruises on the thighs could be seen, two red spots on the white skin.

Jeanlin, coming out of his faint, gave a moan. Standing at the foot of the mattress, his hands hanging, Maheu looked at him; and big tears rolled from his eyes.

"Eh? are you the father?" said the doctor, raising his head. "Don't cry, you can see he's not dead... Rather help me."

He found two simple fractures. But the right leg worried him: no doubt it would have to be amputated.

At that moment, the engineer Négrel and Dansaert, at last informed, arrived with Richomme. The former was listening to the overlooker's account, with an exasperated air. He burst out: always those damned timberings! had he not repeated a hundred times that men would be left by them! and those brutes who talked of striking, if they were forced to timber more solidly! The worst was that the Company, now, would pay for the broken pots. Mr. Hennebeau would be pleased!

"Who is it?" he asked Dansaert, who was silent before the corpse, then being wrapped in a sheet.

"Chicot, one of our good workers," answered the head overlooker. "He has three children... Poor devil!"

Doctor Vanderhaghen asked for Jeanlin to be taken at once to his parents. Six o'clock was striking, dusk was already falling, they had better transport the corpse too; and the engineer gave orders to harness the van and bring a stretcher. The injured child was put on the stretcher, while the mattress and the dead man were packed into the van.

At the door, hurriers were still standing about, talking with miners who lingered, to see. When the overlookers' room opened again, a silence reigned in the group. And a new procession formed, the van in front, the stretcher behind, then the tail of people. They left the pit yard, slowly climbed the sloping road to the settlement. The first colds of November had stripped the immense plain, a slow night was burying it, like a shroud fallen from the livid sky.

Then Étienne quietly advised Maheu to send Catherine to warn La Maheude, to soften the blow. The father, who was following the stretcher, looking stunned, consented with a nod; and the young girl set off running, for they were arriving. But already the van, that well-known dark box, had been sighted. Women were coming wildly onto the pavements, three or four ran in anguish, bareheaded. Soon, they were thirty, then fifty, all strangled by the same terror. So there was a dead man? who was it? The story told by Levaque, after reassuring them all, was now throwing them into a nightmare exaggeration: it was no longer one man, it was ten who had perished, and that the van was bringing back thus, one by one.

Catherine had found her mother agitated by a presentiment; and, at the first stammered words, the latter cried:

"The father is dead!"

In vain the young girl protested, spoke of Jeanlin. Without hearing, La Maheude had rushed out. And, seeing the van appear before the church, she had fainted, all pale. On the doorsteps, women, mute with shock, craned their necks, while others followed, trembling at the thought of learning before which house the procession would stop.

The vehicle passed; and, behind, La Maheude caught sight of Maheu accompanying the stretcher. Then, when the stretcher was set down at her door, when she saw Jeanlin alive, with his broken legs, there was such a sudden reaction in her, that she choked with anger, stammering without tears:

"Is that all! They're maiming the little ones now!... Both legs, my God! What do they expect me to do with him?"

"Hold your tongue!" said Doctor Vanderhaghen, who had followed to dress Jeanlin's wounds. "Would you rather he had stayed down there?"

But La Maheude grew more furious, amid the tears of Alzire, Lénore, and Henri. While helping to carry the injured boy up and giving the doctor what he needed, she cursed her fate, she asked where she was to find money to feed cripples. The old man was not enough, and now the lad, he too, was losing his feet! And she did not stop, while other cries, heart-rending lamentations, came from a neighbouring house: it was Chicot's wife and children weeping over the body. Night was pitch black, the exhausted miners were finally eating their soup, in the settlement fallen to a dreary silence, crossed only by those loud cries.

Three weeks passed. They had been able to avoid amputation, Jeanlin would keep his two legs, but he would remain lame. After an inquiry, the Company had resigned itself to giving relief of fifty francs. Besides, it had promised to find for the little invalid, as soon as he was recovered, a day job. This was nevertheless an aggravation of misery, for the father had received such a shock, that he fell ill with a high fever.

Since Thursday, Maheu had returned to the pit, and it was now Sunday. In the evening, Étienne talked of the approaching date of the 1st of December, worried to know if the Company would carry out its threat. They sat up until ten o'clock, waiting for Catherine, who was to linger with Chaval. But she did not come home. La Maheude furiously bolted the door, without a word. Étienne was long in falling asleep, uneasy at that empty bed, where Alzire took so little room.

The next day, still no one; and only in the afternoon, on returning from the pit, the Maheus learned that Chaval was keeping Catherine. He made such abominable scenes with her, that she had decided to set up with him. To avoid reproaches, he had abruptly left the Voreux, he had just been hired at Jean-Bart, Mr. Deneulin's pit, where she followed him as a hurrier. Moreover, the new household continued to live at Montsou, at Piquette's.

Maheu, at first, spoke of going to slap the man and bring his daughter back with kicks in the behind. Then, he made a resigned gesture: what was the use? it always turned out like that, you couldn't stop girls from sticking together, when they had a mind to. It was better to quietly await the marriage. But La Maheude did not take it so well.

"Did I beat her, when she took up with that Chaval?" she cried at Étienne, who listened to her, silent, very pale. "Come, answer! you who are a reasonable man... We left her free, didn't we? because, my God! they all go through that. Me, for instance, I was pregnant, when the father married me. But I didn't run away from my parents, never would I have done the dirty thing of carrying, before the time, the money of my day's work to a man who didn't need it... Ah! it's disgusting, you see! We'll come to making no more children."

And, as Étienne still answered only with nods, she insisted.

"A girl who went every evening where she pleased! What has she got in her skin? Not to be able to wait until I married her off, after she would have helped us out of the mess! Eh? it was natural, you have a girl so that she works... But there, we were too good, we shouldn't have allowed her to amuse herself with a man. You grant them a bit, and they take a length like that."

Alzire nodded approval. Lénore and Henri, seized by this storm, wept softly, while the mother, now, enumerated their misfortunes: first, Zacharie who had had to be married; then, old Bonnemort who was there, on his chair, with his twisted feet; then, Jeanlin who could not leave the room before ten days, the bones badly rejoined; and, finally, the last blow, that slut of a Catherine gone off with a man! The whole family was breaking up. Only the father remained at the pit. How to live, seven persons, not counting Estelle, on the father's three francs? Might as well throw themselves in chorus into the canal.

"It gets you nowhere to gnaw at it," said Maheu in a hollow voice. "We may not be at the end yet."

Étienne, who was staring fixedly at the flagstones, raised his head and murmured, his eyes lost in a vision of the future:

"Ah! it is time, it is time!"

Fourth Part

I

That Monday, the Hennebeaus were to have the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile to lunch. It was a whole planned outing: on leaving the table, Paul Négrel was to show the ladies a pit, Saint-Thomas, which was being reinstalled with luxury. But there was only an amiable pretext, this outing was an invention of Madame Hennebeau, to hasten the marriage of Cécile and Paul.

And, suddenly, that very Monday, at four in the morning, the strike had just broken out. When, on the 1st of December, the Company had applied its new wage system, the miners had remained calm. At the end of the fortnight, on pay day, not one had made the least complaint. All the personnel, from the director to the last of the overseers, believed the tariff accepted; and the surprise was great, since the morning, before this declaration of war, of a tactics and a unity which seemed to indicate an energetic direction.

At five o'clock, Dansaert woke Mr. Hennebeau to warn him that not a man had gone down at the Voreux. The settlement of the Two-Hundred-and-Forty, which he had crossed, was sleeping deeply, windows and doors shut. And, as soon as the director had jumped out of bed, his eyes still heavy with sleep, he was overwhelmed: from quarter hour to quarter hour, messengers came running, telegrams fell on his desk, thick as hail. At first, he hoped the revolt was limited to the Voreux; but the news grew graver each minute: it was Mirou, it was Crèvecoeur, it was Madeleine, where only the stablemen had appeared; it was the Victoire and Feutry-Cantel, the two best disciplined pits, in which the descent was reduced by a third; Saint-Thomas alone had its full complement and seemed to remain outside the movement. Until nine o'clock, he dictated telegrams, telegraphing in all directions, to the prefect of Lille, to the Company's managers, warning the authorities, asking for orders. He had sent Négrel to make the round of the neighbouring pits, for precise information.

Suddenly, Mr. Hennebeau thought of the lunch; and he was going to send the coachman to warn the Grégoires that the outing was postponed, when a hesitation, a lack of will stopped him, he who had just, in a few brief phrases, militarily prepared his field of battle. He went up to Madame Hennebeau, whom a chambermaid was finishing dressing, in her toilet cabinet.

"Ah! they are on strike," she said tranquilly, when he had consulted her. "Well, what does that matter to us?... We are not going to stop eating, are we?"

And she persisted, he might as well tell her the lunch would be disturbed, that the visit to Saint-Thomas could not take place: she found an answer to everything, why lose a lunch already on the fire? and as for visiting the pit, they could give it up afterwards, if this walk was really imprudent.

"Besides," she resumed, when the chambermaid had gone out, "you know why I care to receive these good people. This marriage should touch you more than the foolishness of your workers... In short, I want it, don't cross me."

He looked at her, agitated by a slight trembling, and his hard, closed face of a man of discipline expressed the secret pain of a wounded heart. She had remained bare-shouldered, already too ripe, but still radiant and desirable, with her build of a Ceres gilded by autumn. For an instant, he must have had the brutal desire to take her, to roll her head between the two breasts she displayed, in this warm room, of an intimate luxury of a sensual woman, and where trailed an irritating perfume of musk; but he drew back, for ten years the household had slept apart.

"Very well," he said, leaving her. "Let us cancel nothing."

Mr. Hennebeau was born in the Ardennes. He had had the difficult beginnings of a poor boy, thrown orphan onto the pavements of Paris. After painfully following the courses of the School of Mines, he had, at twenty-four, left for the Grand-Combe, as engineer of the Sainte-Barbe pit. Three years later, he became divisional engineer, in the Pas-de-Calais, at the Marles pits; and it was there that he married, wedding, by one of those strokes of fortune which are the rule for the mining corps, the daughter of a rich Arras spinner. For fifteen years, the household lived in the same small provincial town, without an event breaking the monotony of its existence, not even the birth of a child. A growing irritation detached Madame Hennebeau, raised in respect for money, disdainful of this husband who hardly earned mediocre pay, and from whom she drew none of the vain satisfactions, dreamed in boarding school. He, of a strict honesty, did not speculate, kept to his post, like a soldier. The disagreement had only grown, aggravated by one of those singular misunderstandings of the flesh which chill the most ardent: he adored his wife, she was of a sensuality of a greedy blonde, and already they slept apart, ill at ease, soon wounded. She then had a lover, whom he ignored. Finally, he left the Pas-de-Calais, to come occupy a desk position in Paris, in the idea that she would be grateful to him for it. But Paris was to complete the separation, that Paris she had wished for since her first doll, and where she washed herself in eight days of her province, elegant at a stroke, thrown into all the luxurious follies of the epoch. The ten years she spent there were filled by a great passion, a public liaison with a man, whose abandonment nearly killed her. This time, the husband could not keep his ignorance, and he resigned himself, after abominable scenes, disarmed before the tranquil unconcern of this woman, who took her happiness where she found it. It was after the break, when he had seen her sick with grief, that he had accepted the direction of the Montsou mines, still hoping to correct her there, in that desert of the black countries.

The Hennebeaus, since they lived at Montsou, returned to the irritated boredom of the first times of their marriage. At first, she seemed relieved by this great calm, tasting an appeasement in the flat monotony of the immense plain; and she buried herself as a finished woman, she affected to have a dead heart, so detached from the world, that she no longer even suffered from growing fat. Then, under this indifference, a last fever declared itself, a need to still live, which she deceived for six months by organising and furnishing to her taste the small Directorate hotel. She called it frightful, she filled it with tapestries, knick-knacks, a whole art luxury, of which they spoke as far as Lille. Now, the country exasperated her, those beasts of fields spread to infinity, those eternal black roads, without a tree, where crawled a frightful population which disgusted and frightened her. The complaints of exile began, she accused her husband of having sacrificed her to the forty thousand francs of salary he drew, a misery barely enough to run the house. Had he not should have imitated the others, demanded a share, obtained shares, succeeded at something finally? and she insisted with a cruelty of an heiress who had brought the fortune. He, always correct, taking refuge in his lying coldness of an administrative man, was ravaged by the desire for this creature, one of those late desires, so violent, which grow with age. He had never possessed her as a lover, he was haunted by a continual image, to have her once for himself as she had given herself to another. Each morning, he dreamed of conquering her in the evening; then, when she looked at him with her cold eyes, when he felt that all in her refused, he even avoided brushing her hand. It was a suffering without possible cure, hidden under the stiffness of his attitude, the suffering of a tender nature agonising in secret at not having found happiness in his household. At the end of the six months, when the hotel, definitively furnished, no longer occupied Madame Hennebeau, she fell into a languor of boredom, a victim that exile would kill and who said she was happy to die of it.

Just then, Paul Négrel landed at Montsou. His mother, widow of a Provençal captain, living at Avignon on a meagre income, had had to content herself with bread and water to push him through the Polytechnic School. He came out of it in a bad rank, and his uncle, Mr. Hennebeau, had just had his resignation accepted, offering to take him as engineer, at the Voreux. Thenceforth, treated as a child of the house, he even had his room, ate there, lived there, which allowed him to send his mother half his three thousand francs pay. To disguise this benefaction, Mr. Hennebeau spoke of the embarrassment of a young man, obliged to set up a household, in one of the small chalets reserved for the pit engineers. Madame Hennebeau, at once, had taken a role of good aunt, familiar with her nephew, watching over his well-being. The first months especially, she showed a overflowing maternity of advice, on the slightest subjects. But she remained a woman however, she slipped into personal confidences. This boy so young and so practical, of an intelligence without scruple, professing on love theories of a philosopher, amused her, thanks to the vivacity of his pessimism, which sharpened his thin face, with the pointed nose. Naturally, one evening, he found himself in her arms; and she seemed to give herself through kindness, while telling him she no longer had a heart and wanted to be uniquely his friend. Indeed, she was not jealous, she teased him about the hurriers he declared abominable, almost sulked, because he had not young-man pranks to tell her. Then, the idea of marrying him passionated her, she dreamed of devoting herself, of giving him herself to a rich girl. Their relations continued, a toy of recreation, where she put her last tendernesses of an idle and finished woman.

Two years had gone by. One night, Mr. Hennebeau, hearing bare feet brush his door, had a suspicion. But this new adventure revolted him, at home, in his dwelling, between this mother and this son! And, besides, the next day, his wife precisely spoke to him of the choice she had made of Cécile Grégoire for their nephew. She employed herself at this marriage with such ardour, that he blushed at his monstrous imagination. He simply kept for the young man a gratitude that the house, since his arrival, was less sad.

As he came down from the toilet cabinet, Mr. Hennebeau found precisely, in the vestibule, Paul who was coming in. The latter seemed quite amused by this strike story.

"Well?" his uncle asked him.

"Well, I made the round of the settlements. They seem very wise, in there... I only think they're going to send you delegates."

But, at that moment, Madame Hennebeau's voice called, from the first floor.

"Is that you, Paul?... Come up and give me news. Are they funny to play the wicked, those people who are so happy!"

And the director had to renounce knowing more, since his wife was taking his messenger. He went back to sit before his desk, on which had amassed a new packet of telegrams.

At eleven o'clock, when the Grégoires arrived, they were surprised that Hippolyte, the valet, posted as sentinel, jostled them to introduce them, after having cast anxious looks to the two ends of the road. The salon curtains were closed, they were taken directly into the study, where Mr. Hennebeau excused himself for receiving them thus; but the salon faced the pavement, and it was useless to seem to provoke people.

"What! you don't know?" he continued, seeing their surprise.

Mr. Grégoire, when he learned that the strike had finally broken out, shrugged his placid air. Bah! it would be nothing, the population was honest. With a nod of the chin, Madame Grégoire approved his confidence in the secular resignation of the colliers; while Cécile, very gay that day, beautiful with health in a cloth dress of capuchin brown, smiled at this word of strike, which reminded her of visits and distributions of alms in the settlements.

But Madame Hennebeau, followed by Négrel, appeared, all in black silk.

"Eh! is it annoying!" she cried from the door. "As if those men couldn't have waited!... You know Paul refuses to take us to Saint-Thomas."

"We'll stay here," said Mr. Grégoire obligingly. "It will be all pleasure."

Paul had only bowed to Cécile and her mother. Annoyed at this little eagerness, his aunt launched him a glance at the young girl; and, when she heard them laugh together, she enveloped them with a maternal look.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hennebeau finished reading the telegrams and drafted some replies. They chatted near him, his wife explained that she had not concerned herself with this study, which had indeed kept its old faded red paper, its heavy mahogany furniture, its card files scratched by use. Three quarters of an hour passed, they were about to sit at table, when the valet announced Mr. Deneulin. The latter, looking excited, entered and bowed before Madame Hennebeau.

"Why! there you are?" he said, spotting the Grégoires.

And, briskly, he addressed the director.

"So it's on? I just learned it from my engineer... At my place, all the men went down, this morning. But it may spread. I'm not easy... Come, where are you at?"

He had come on horseback, and his unease betrayed itself in his high talk and broken gesture, which made him resemble a cavalry officer in retirement.

Mr. Hennebeau was beginning to inform him of the exact situation, when Hippolyte opened the dining room door. Then, he interrupted himself to say:

"Lunch with us. I'll continue that for you at dessert."

"Yes, as you please," answered Deneulin, so full of his idea, that he accepted without further ado.

He yet had consciousness of his impoliteness, he turned to Madame Hennebeau, excusing himself. She was charming however. When she had a seventh cover laid, she installed her guests: Madame Grégoire and Cécile at her husband's sides, then, Mr. Grégoire and Deneulin at her right and left; finally, Paul, whom she placed between the young girl and her father. As they attacked the hors-d'oeuvres, she resumed with a smile:

"You'll excuse me, I wanted to give you oysters... On Mondays, you know there's a delivery of Ostend ones at Marchiennes, and I had planned to send the cook with the carriage... But she was afraid of receiving stones..."

All interrupted her with a great burst of gaiety. They found the story funny.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”