Part 2

--Good Lord! it's time... Are you lighting the fire, Catherine?

--Yes, father... It just struck, down below.

--Hurry up then, you lazy thing! If you hadn't danced so much yesterday Sunday, you'd have woken us earlier... What a life of idleness!

And he went on scolding, but sleep overtook him in turn; his reproaches grew muddled, died away in a fresh bout of snoring.

The young girl, in her shift, bare feet on the tiles, moved to and fro across the room. As she passed the bed of Henri and Lénore, she pulled the blanket back over them, for it had slipped; and they did not wake, crushed by the heavy sleep of childhood. Alzire, eyes open, had turned over to take her big sister's warm place, without uttering a word.

--Say, Zacharie! and you, Jeanlin, say! repeated Catherine, standing before the two brothers, who lay sprawled, noses in the pillow.

She had to seize the elder by the shoulder and shake him; then, while he chewed out curses, she took it upon herself to uncover them, tearing off the sheet. This struck her as funny, and she began to laugh, when she saw the two boys struggling, their bare legs flailing.

--That's stupid, let me go! grumbled Zacharie in a foul mood, once he had sat up. I don't like jokes... Damn it, having to get up!

He was thin, gangly, long-faced, smudged with a few sparse beard hairs, with yellow hair and the anaemic pallor of the whole family. His shirt had ridden up to his belly, and he pulled it down, not out of modesty, but because he was not warm.

--It struck down below, Catherine repeated. Come on, hop! father's getting angry.

Jeanlin, who had curled into a ball, closed his eyes again, saying:

--Go to hell, I'm sleeping!

She gave a fresh laugh, the laugh of a good-natured girl. He was so small, his limbs spindly, with enormous joints swollen by scrofula, that she gathered him up in both arms. But he wriggled, his sallow, frizzy monkey face, pierced by green eyes, widened by big ears, paling with rage at his own weakness. He said nothing, he bit her on the right breast.

--You little bastard! she murmured, stifling a cry and setting him on the floor.

Alzire, silent, the sheet at her chin, had not gone back to sleep. With her intelligent cripple's eyes she followed her sister and her two brothers, who were now dressing. Another quarrel broke out around the basin, the boys jostled the girl because she was washing too long. Shirts flew, while, still bloated with sleep, they relieved themselves without shame, with the calm ease of a litter of young dogs grown up together. Besides, Catherine was ready first. She pulled on her miner's trousers, put on the linen jacket, tied the blue hood around her bun; and, in these clean Monday clothes, she looked like a little man, nothing of her sex remained but the slight sway of her hips.

--When the old man comes home, said Zacharie maliciously, he'll be pleased to find the bed unmade... You know, I'll tell him it was you.

The old man was the grandfather, Bonnemort, who, working at night, went to bed by day; so the bed never cooled, there was always someone in it snoring.

Without answering, Catherine had begun to pull the blanket up and tuck it in. But, for a moment now, noises had been heard behind the wall, in the neighbouring house. These brick buildings, put up cheaply by the Company, were so thin that the slightest breath passed through them. People lived elbow to elbow, from one end to the other; and nothing of intimate life stayed hidden there, not even from the kids. A heavy step had shaken a staircase, then there was a sort of soft fall, followed by a sigh of relief.

--Good! said Catherine, Levaque's going down, and there's Bouteloup going back to Mrs Levaque.

Jeanlin sniggered, and even Alzire's eyes brightened. Every morning they amused themselves thus at the neighbours' three-way household, a hewer lodging a surface worker, which gave the woman two men, one by night, one by day.

--Philomène's coughing, Catherine went on, after straining her ear.

She spoke of the eldest of the Levaques, a big girl of nineteen, Zacharie's mistress, by whom he already had two children, so delicate in the chest moreover that she was a screen-girl at the pit, never having been able to work below.

--Ah, nonsense! Philomène! answered Zacharie, she doesn't care, she's asleep!... It's filthy to sleep till six o'clock!

He was pulling on his trousers when he opened a window, seized by a sudden thought. Outside, in the darkness, the settlement was waking, lights pricked out one by one between the slats of the shutters. And here was another dispute: he leaned out to watch whether he might see the Voreux's head porter leave the Pierrons' across the way, he whom they accused of sleeping with Mrs Pierron; while his sister shouted that the husband had, since the day before, taken his day shift at the pithead, and that surely Dansaert could not have slept there that night. The air came in gusts of cold; both grew heated, each insisting on the accuracy of his information, when cries and tears burst out. It was Estelle in her cradle, fretful at the cold.

Thereupon Maheu woke. What was the matter with his bones? here he was falling asleep like a good-for-nothing! And he swore so hard that the children beside him dared not breathe. Zacharie and Jeanlin finished washing, with a weariness already sluggish. Alzire, eyes wide, still watched. The two little ones, Lénore and Henri, arms around each other, had not stirred, breathing the same small breath, despite the racket.

--Catherine, give me the candle! cried Maheu.

She was finishing buttoning her jacket; she carried the candle into the closet, leaving her brothers to find their clothes in the faint light from the door. Her father jumped out of bed. But she did not stop; she went down in thick woollen stockings, feeling her way, and lit another candle in the kitchen, to make the coffee. All the family's clogs were under the sideboard.

--Will you be quiet, you vermin! Maheu went on, exasperated by Estelle's continuing cries.

He was small like old Bonnemort, and like him stout, with a big head, flat livid face under the yellow hair cut very short. The child screamed louder, frightened by the big knotty arms swinging above her.

--Leave her be, you know well she won't be quiet, said the Maheude, stretching out in the middle of the bed.

She too had just woken, and she complained, it was stupid never to get a full night's sleep. Couldn't they leave gently? Buried in the blanket, she showed only her long face, with its large features, of a heavy beauty already deformed at thirty-nine by her life of misery and the seven children she had borne. Eyes on the ceiling, she spoke slowly, while her man dressed. Neither heard any longer the little one who was choking with screams.

--Eh? you know, I'm without a sou, and here we are only at Monday: six more days till the fortnight's pay... There's no way that'll hold out. Between you all, you bring home nine francs. How do you expect me to manage? there are ten of us in the house.

--Oh, nine francs! exclaimed Maheu. Me and Zacharie, three: that's six... Catherine and the old man, two: that's four; four and six, ten... And Jeanlin, one, that's eleven.

--Yes, eleven, but there are Sundays and stoppage days... Never more than nine, d'you hear?

He did not answer, busy looking on the floor for his leather belt. Then, rising, he said:

--No use complaining, I'm solid all the same. There's more than one, at forty-two, who's on the repair list.

--Maybe, old man, but that doesn't give us bread... What am I going to do, tell me? You haven't anything, you?

--I've got two sous.

--Keep them for a mug of beer... My God! what am I going to do? Six days, it never ends. We owe Maigrat sixty francs, who showed me the door the day before yesterday. That won't stop me going back to see him. But if he digs his heels in and refuses...

And the Maheude went on in a dull voice, head motionless, closing her eyes now and then under the sad light of the candle. She told of the empty sideboard, the little ones asking for bread, the coffee itself lacking, and the water that gave colics, and the long days spent cheating hunger with boiled cabbage leaves. Little by little she had to raise her voice, for Estelle's howling drowned her words. The cries became unbearable. Maheu suddenly seemed to hear them, beside himself, and he snatched the child from the cradle, threw her on the mother's bed, stammering with fury:

--Here! take her, I'd crush her... God-damned child! wants for nothing, sucks, and complains louder than the rest!

Estelle had in fact begun to suck. Vanished under the blanket, calmed by the bed's warmth, she made only a small greedy noise of lips.

--Didn't the bourgeois at the Piolaine tell you to go see them? the father resumed after a silence.

The mother pursed her lips, with a look of discouraged doubt.

--Yes, they met me, they give clothes to poor children... Well, I'll take Lénore and Henri to them this morning. If they'd give me a hundred sous at least.

Silence fell again. Maheu was ready. He stayed a moment motionless, then concluded in his muffled voice:

--What d'you want? that's how it is, manage for the soup... No use talking of it, better be at work.

--Sure, answered the Maheude. Blow out the candle, I don't need to see the colour of my thoughts.

He blew out the candle. Already Zacharie and Jeanlin were going down; he followed them; and the wooden stair creaked under their heavy, wool-shod feet. Behind them, the closet and the room had fallen back into darkness. The children slept, even Alzire's eyelids had closed. But the mother now lay with open eyes in the blackness, while Estelle, tugging at her pendulous breast of an exhausted woman, purred like a little cat.

Below, Catherine had first seen to the fire, the cast-iron hearth, with central grate flanked by two ovens, where a coal fire always burned. The Company distributed each month to every family eight hectolitres of small slack, hard coal gathered from the roadways. It lit with difficulty, and the girl, who covered the fire each evening, had only to shake it in the morning, adding small pieces of soft coal, carefully sorted. Then, having set a kettle on the grate, she squatted before the sideboard.

It was a fairly large room, taking up the whole ground floor, painted apple-green, with a Flemish cleanliness, its flagstones scoured with much water and strewn with white sand. Besides the varnished fir sideboard, the furniture consisted of a table and chairs of the same wood. Stuck on the walls, garish prints, portraits of the Emperor and Empress given by the Company, soldiers and saints, daubed with gold, struck crudely against the bare brightness of the room; and there were no other ornaments than a pink cardboard box on the sideboard, and the cuckoo clock with painted dial, whose loud tick-tock seemed to fill the emptiness of the ceiling. Near the stair door, another door led to the cellar. Despite the cleanliness, a smell of cooked onion, shut in since the day before, poisoned the hot air, that heavy air always charged with a sharpness of coal.

Before the open sideboard, Catherine reflected. There remained only a heel of bread, plenty of cottage cheese, but barely a scrape of butter; and it was a matter of making the sandwiches for the four of them. At last she decided, cut the slices, took one she covered with cheese, rubbed another with butter, then stuck them together: it was 'the briquet', the double sandwich carried each morning to the pit. Soon the four briquets were in a row on the table, shared with strict justice, from the father's big one to Jeanlin's small.

Catherine, who seemed all taken up with her housekeeping, must nevertheless have been dreaming of the tales Zacharie told of the head porter and Mrs Pierron, for she opened the entrance door a crack and threw a glance outside. The wind still blew, more numerous lights ran across the low façades of the settlement, from which rose a vague tremor of waking. Already doors were closing, black files of workers moved off into the night. How silly she was, to catch cold, since the loader at the pithead was surely asleep, waiting to go on shift at six! And she stayed, she looked at the house across the gardens. The door opened, her curiosity flared. But it could only be the little Pierron girl, Lydie, leaving for the pit.

A hissing noise of steam made her turn. She closed up, hurried to run: the water was boiling over and spilling, putting out the fire. There was no coffee left, she had to content herself with pouring water on the previous day's grounds; then, she sweetened in the pot with brown sugar. Just then her father and two brothers came down.

--Blast! declared Zacharie, when he put his nose in his bowl, there's one that won't break our heads!

Maheu shrugged with a resigned air.

--Bah! it's hot, it's good all the same.

Jeanlin had gathered the sandwich crumbs and was soaking a sop. After drinking, Catherine finished emptying the pot into the tin flasks. All four, standing, poorly lit by the smoky candle, swallowed in haste.

--Are we off at last! said the father. You'd think we had an income!

But a voice came from the stair, whose door they had left open. It was the Maheude calling:

--Take all the bread, I've a bit of vermicelli for the children!

--Yes, yes! answered Catherine.

She had covered the fire, propping on a corner of the grate a leftover of soup, which the grandfather would find hot when he came in at six. Each took his pair of clogs from under the sideboard, slung the string of his flask over his shoulder, and stuck his briquet in his back, between shirt and jacket. And they went out, the men ahead, the girl behind, blowing out the candle, turning the key. The house turned black again.

--Look! we're off together, said a man who was closing the door of the neighbouring house.

It was Levaque, with his son Bébert, a lad of twelve, a great friend of Jeanlin's. Catherine, surprised, stifled a laugh at Zacharie's ear: what now? Bouteloup didn't even wait for the husband to be gone!

Now, in the settlement, the lights were going out. A last door slammed, all slept again, the women and little ones took up their doze, deep in the broader beds. And, from the dark village to the Voreux that puffed, it was under the gusts a slow procession of shadows, the departure of the colliers for work, rolling their shoulders, encumbered by their arms, which they crossed on their chests; while, behind, the briquet made a bump on each back. Clad in thin linen, they shivered with cold, without hurrying further, straggling along the road, with the tramp of a herd.

III

Étienne, come down at last from the spoil-heap, had just entered the Voreux; and the men he spoke to, asking if there was work, shook their heads, all told him to wait for the head porter. He was left free, amid the poorly lit buildings, full of black holes, unsettling with the complication of their halls and storeys. After climbing a half-ruined dark stair, he found himself on a wobbling footbridge, then crossed the screening shed, plunged in so deep a night that he walked hands forward, not to bump into anything. Before him, suddenly, two yellow eyes, enormous, pierced the darkness. He was under the headframe, in the receiving hall, at the very mouth of the shaft.

A porter, old Richomme, a big fellow with the face of a good policeman, barred by grey moustaches, was just heading to the receiver's office.

--Is there no need of a worker here, for any sort of work? Étienne asked again.

Richomme was about to say no; but he checked himself and answered like the others, moving off:

--Wait for Monsieur Dansaert, the head porter.

Four lanterns stood there, and the reflectors, throwing all the light on the shaft, lit brightly the iron rails, the levers of signals and bolts, the guide planks where the two cages slid. The rest, the vast hall, like a church nave, drowned, peopled with great floating shadows. Only the lamp room blazed at the back, while, in the receiver's office, a thin lamp made a near-extinguished star. The winding had just resumed; and, on the cast-iron flags, it was a continuous thunder, the coal tubs rolled ceaselessly, the scurry of the pit-bottom men, whose long bent backs one made out, in the movement of all those black and noisy things astir.

For a moment Étienne stood motionless, deafened, blinded. He was frozen, draughts entered from everywhere. Then he took a few steps, drawn by the engine, whose steels and brasses he now saw gleam. It stood behind the shaft, twenty-five metres off, in a higher hall, and seated so squarely on its brick mass that it ran at full steam, with all its four-hundred-horsepower force, without the movement of its enormous connecting-rod, emerging and plunging with oiled gentleness, giving a shiver to the walls. The engine-man, standing at the starting bar, listened to the signal bells, never left the indicator board, where the shaft was figured, with its different levels, by a vertical groove traversed by leads hung on strings, representing the cages. And, at each departure, when the engine set going again, the drums, the two immense wheels of five metres' radius, at whose hubs the two steel cables wound and unwound in opposite directions, turned with such speed that they were no more than a grey dust.

--Mind there! cried three pit-bottom men, dragging a gigantic ladder.

Étienne had nearly been crushed. His eyes were growing used, he looked up at the cables flying, more than thirty metres of steel ribbon, that rose in one flight into the headframe, where they passed over the sheaves, to drop sheer into the shaft and fasten to the winding cages. An iron frame, like the tall frame of a bell-tower, carried the sheaves. It was a bird's glide, without a sound, without a knock, the swift flight, the continual coming and going of a thread of enormous weight, that could lift up to twelve thousand kilogrammes, at a speed of ten metres a second.

--Mind there, for God's sake! cried again the pit-bottom men, who were pushing the ladder to the other side, to inspect the left sheave.

Slowly Étienne came back to the receiving hall. This giant flight above his head bewildered him. And, shivering in the draughts, he watched the manoeuvre of the cages, his ears cracked by the rolling of the tubs. Near the shaft, the signal worked, a heavy lever-hammer, which a rope pulled from below let fall on a block. One blow to stop, two to descend, three to ascend: it was without respite like blows of a mallet dominating the tumult, accompanied by a clear ringing of a bell; while the pit-bottom man, directing the manoeuvre, added to the noise, crying orders to the engine-man through a speaking-trumpet. The cages, amid this commotion, appeared and sank, emptied and filled, without Étienne understanding anything of these complicated tasks.

He understood clearly but one thing: the shaft swallowed men in mouthfuls of twenty and thirty, and with so easy a gulp that it seemed not to feel them pass. From four o'clock the descent of the workers began. They arrived from the cabin, barefoot, lamp in hand, waiting in small groups to be enough in number. Without a sound, with the soft spring of a night beast, the iron cage rose from the black, seated itself on the bolts, with its four storeys each holding two tubs full of coal. Pit-bottom men, at the different landings, took out the tubs, replaced them with others, empty or pre-loaded with timber. And it was in the empty tubs that the workers piled, five by five, up to forty at a time, when they filled all the bays. An order left the speaking-trumpet, a dull and indistinct bellow, while the rope of the bottom signal was pulled four times, 'ringing for meat', to warn of this loading of human flesh. Then, after a slight start, the cage plunged silent, fell like a stone, left behind only the vibrating flight of the cable.

--Is it deep? Étienne asked a miner, who waited near him, looking sleepy.

--Five hundred and fifty-four metres, answered the man. But there are four landings above, the first at three hundred and twenty.

Both fell silent, eyes on the cable coming up. Étienne resumed:

--And when it breaks?

--Ah! when it breaks...

The miner finished with a gesture. His turn had come, the cage had reappeared, with its easy and tireless motion. He squatted in it with comrades, it plunged again, then sprang up anew in barely four minutes, to engulf another load of men. For half an hour the shaft devoured thus, with a more or less greedy maw, according to the depth of the landing they descended to, but without a stop, always hungry, of giant bowels able to digest a people. It filled, filled still, and the darkness stayed dead, the cage rose from the void in the same voracious silence.

Étienne, in the long run, was seized again by the unease he had felt already on the spoil-heap. Why persist? that head porter would dismiss him like the others. A vague fear decided him abruptly: he went off, stopped outside only before the generator building. The door, wide open, showed seven boilers with two furnaces each. In the white steam, in the hiss of leaks, a fireman was busy charging one of the furnaces, whose burning fire was felt even to the threshold; and the young man, glad to be warm, was approaching, when he met a new band of colliers arriving at the pit. They were the Maheus and the Levaques. When he caught sight, at the head, of Catherine with her gentle boy's air, the superstitious idea came to him to risk one last request.

--Say, mate, is there no need of a worker here, for any sort of work?

She looked at him, surprised, a little frightened by this abrupt voice out of the shadow. But, behind her, Maheu had heard, and he answered, he spoke a moment. No, they needed no one. This poor devil of a worker, lost on the roads, interested him. When he left him, he said to the others:

--Eh! we might be like that... No use complaining, not all have work to drop dead at.

The band went in and made straight for the cabin, a vast room roughly plastered, surrounded by lockers closed with padlocks. At the centre, an iron chimney, a sort of doorless stove, was red, so stuffed with incandescent coal that pieces cracked and rolled onto the beaten earth of the floor. The room was lit only by this brazier, whose bloody reflections danced along the filthy woodwork, to the ceiling soiled with black dust.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”