Part 3

As the Maheus arrived, laughter broke out in the heavy heat. Some thirty workers were standing, their backs turned to the flame, roasting themselves with an air of enjoyment. Before going down, all came thus to take and carry away in their skin a good dose of fire, to defy the dampness of the pit. But, that morning, they were merrier, they were teasing Mouquette, an eighteen-year-old drawer, a good-natured girl whose enormous breasts and backside burst through her jacket and trousers. She lived at Réquillart with her father, old Mouque, a stableman, and Mouquet her brother, a miller; only, the working hours not being the same, she went to the pit alone; and, amid the wheat in summer, against a wall in winter, she took her pleasure, in the company of her sweetheart of the week. The whole mine passed through, a regular round of comrades, without further consequence. One day when she was reproached for a nailer from Marchiennes, she had nearly burst with anger, crying that she respected herself too much, that she would cut off an arm, if anyone could boast of having seen her with other than a collier.

--So it's no longer big Chaval? said a miner with a snicker. You've taken up with that little runt? But he'd need a ladder!... I spotted you behind Réquillart. Proof is he was up on a boundary stone.

--So what? answered Mouquette in high spirits. What's it to you? You weren't called to lend a hand.

And this good-natured crudeness redoubled the men's outbursts, who swelled their shoulders, half-cooked by the stove; while she, herself shaken with laughter, paraded among them the indecency of her attire, of a troubling comicality, with her lumps of flesh, exaggerated to the point of deformity.

But the gaiety fell, Mouquette was telling Maheu that Fleurance, big Fleurance, would come no more: she had been found the day before, stiff on her bed, some said of a heart slip, others of a liter of gin drunk too fast. And Maheu was in despair: more bad luck, here he was losing one of his drawers, without being able to replace her at once! He worked on contract, they were four hewers associated in his stall, him, Zacharie, Levaque and Chaval. If they had only Catherine to haul, the work would suffer. Suddenly, he cried:

--Why! and that man who was looking for work!

Just then, Dansaert was passing in front of the shanty. Maheu told him the story, asked permission to hire the man; and he insisted on the Company's wish to substitute boys for drawers, as at Anzin. The head porter at first smiled, for the plan of excluding women from the pit usually repelled the miners, who worried about the employment of their daughters, little touched by the question of morality and hygiene. At last, after hesitating, he permitted it, but reserving the right to have his decision ratified by Mr. Négrel, the engineer.

--Ah well! declared Zacharie, the man's far off, if he's still running!

--No, said Catherine, I saw him stop at the boilers.

--Go on then, lazybones! cried Maheu.

The young girl darted off, while a stream of miners went up to the pit, yielding the fire to others. Jeanlin, without waiting for his father, also went to take his lamp, with Bébert, a big naive boy, and Lydie, a frail little girl of ten. Gone ahead of them, Mouquette was exclaiming in the black stairway, calling them dirty kids and threatening to slap them, if they pinched her.

Étienne, in the boiler building, was indeed talking with the stoker, who was loading the furnaces with coal. He felt a great cold, at the thought of the night where he must return. Yet, he was deciding to leave, when he felt a hand rest on his shoulder.

--Come, said Catherine, there's something for you.

At first, he did not understand. Then, he had a surge of joy, he shook the young girl's hands energetically.

--Thank you, comrade... Ah! you're a good fellow, I must say!

She began to laugh, looking at him in the red glow of the furnaces, which lit them. It amused her, that he took her for a boy, still slight, her chignon hidden under the hood. He, too, laughed with contentment; and they remained a moment both laughing in each other's face, cheeks aflame.

Maheu, in the shanty, squatting before his box, was pulling off his clogs and his thick woolen socks. When Étienne was there, everything was settled in four words: thirty sous a day, tiring work, but he would learn it quickly. The hewer advised him to keep his shoes, and lent him an old barrette, a leather cap meant to protect the skull, a precaution the father and children disdained. The tools were taken from the box, where happened to be Fleurance's shovel. Then, when Maheu had locked in their clogs, their socks, as well as Étienne's bundle, he suddenly grew impatient.

--What's that rascal Chaval up to? Some girl tumbled on a pile of stones again!... We're half an hour late today.

Zacharie and Levaque were quietly roasting their shoulders. The first finally said:

--It's Chaval you're waiting for?... He arrived before us, he went down right away.

--What! you know that and say nothing!... Come on! come on! hurry up.

Catherine, who was warming her hands, had to follow the band. Étienne let her pass, climbed behind her. Again, he traveled through a maze of stairs and dark corridors, where bare feet made a soft noise like old slippers. But the lamp room flamed, a glazed room, filled with racks which aligned by tiers hundreds of Davy lamps, inspected, washed the day before, lit like candles at the back of a blazing chapel. At the window, each worker took his own, stamped with his number; then, he examined it, closed it himself; while the marker, seated at a table, inscribed on the register the hour of descent.

Maheu had to intervene for the lamp of his new drawer. And there was yet another precaution, the workers filed past a checker, who assured himself all lamps were well closed.

--Damn! it's not warm here, murmured Catherine shivering.

Étienne only nodded. He found himself before the pit, in the middle of the vast room, swept by drafts. Certainly, he thought himself brave, and yet an unpleasant emotion tightened his throat, in the thunder of the tubs, the dull beats of the signals, the muffled bellow of the speaking-trumpet, facing the continual flight of those cables, unwound and wound at full steam by the reels of the engine. The cages rose, descended with their glide of a night beast, ever swallowing men, whom the mouth of the hole seemed to drink. It was his turn now, he was very cold, he kept a nervous silence, which made Zacharie and Levaque snicker; for both disapproved the hiring of this stranger, Levaque especially, wounded at not having been consulted. So Catherine was glad to hear her father explain things to the young man.

--Look, above the cage, there's a parachute, iron crampons which sink into the guides, in case of breakage. It works, oh! not always... Yes, the pit is divided into three compartments, closed by planks, from top to bottom: in the middle the cages, to the left the ladder shaft...

But he broke off to grumble, without allowing himself to raise his voice too much:

--What are we doing there, good God! Is it allowed to freeze us like this!

The porter Richomme, who was going down too, his open-flame lamp fixed by a nail in the leather of his cap, heard him complain.

--Beware, watch your ears! he murmured paternally, as an old miner remained good to comrades. The maneuvers must be made... Look! here we are, get in with your lot.

The cage, indeed, lined with sheet iron and a fine-mesh grating, awaited them, square on the bolts. Maheu, Zacharie, Levaque, Catherine slipped into a tub at the bottom; and, as five had to fit, Étienne got in too; but the good places were taken, he had to squeeze near the young girl, whose elbow plowed his belly. His lamp embarrassed him, they advised him to hook it to a buttonhole of his jacket. He did not hear, kept it awkwardly in his hand. The loading continued, above and below, a confused penning of cattle. Could they not leave, what was happening? It seemed to him he had been impatient for long minutes. At last, a jolt shook him, and all sank; the objects around him flew off, while he felt an anxious vertigo of falling, which pulled at his guts. That lasted as long as he was in daylight, crossing the two stories of the landings, amid the whirling flight of the timbering. Then, fallen into the black of the pit, he remained stunned, no longer having clear perception of his sensations.

--There we go, said Maheu placidly.

All were at ease. He, at moments, wondered if he was descending or ascending. There were like immobilities, when the cage shot straight, without touching the guides; and sudden tremblings occurred afterwards, a sort of dancing in the beams, which gave him fear of a catastrophe. Besides, he could not distinguish the pit walls, behind the grating where he pressed his face. The lamps lit poorly the packing of bodies, at his feet. Only, the open-flame lamp of the porter, in the neighboring tub, shone like a beacon.

--This one is four meters in diameter, Maheu continued, to instruct him. The tubbing could well use being redone, for water filters from all sides... Look! we're arriving at the level, do you hear?

Étienne was just wondering what this sound of rain was. A few big drops had first rung on the cage roof, as at the start of a shower; and, now, the rain increased, streamed, changed into a veritable deluge. No doubt, the roof was holed, for a thread of water, flowing on his shoulder, soaked him to the flesh. The cold became glacial, they sank into a black humidity, when they crossed a rapid dazzlement, the vision of a cavern where men stirred, in the light of a flash. Already, they fell back into nothingness.

Maheu said:

--That's the first landing. We're at three hundred twenty meters... Look at the speed.

Raising his lamp, he lit a beam of the guides, which shot past like a rail under a train launched at full steam; and, beyond, one still saw nothing. Three other landings passed, in a flight of lights. The deafening rain beat the darkness.

--How deep it is! murmured Étienne.

This fall must have lasted for hours. He suffered from the false position he had taken, not daring to move, tortured above all by Catherine's elbow. She did not utter a word, he only felt her against him, warming him. When the cage, at last, stopped at the bottom, at five hundred fifty-four meters, he was astonished to learn the descent had lasted exactly one minute. But the noise of the bolts fixing, the sensation beneath him of this solidity, cheered him suddenly; and it was jestingly that he addressed Catherine familiarly.

--What have you under your skin, to be so warm?... I've got your elbow in my belly, sure enough.

Then, she burst out too. Was he silly, to still take her for a boy! Had he then his eyes stopped up?

--It's in the eye you've got it, my elbow, she answered, amid a tempest of laughter, which the young man, surprised, did not explain.

The cage emptied, the workers crossed the landing room, a room cut in the rock, vaulted in masonry, and which three big open-flame lamps lit. On the cast-iron flags, the loaders violently rolled full tubs. An odor of cellar sweated from the walls, a saltpeter freshness where passed hot breaths, come from the neighboring stable. Four galleries opened there, gaping.

--This way, said Maheu to Étienne. You're not there, we have two good kilometers to make.

The workers separated, lost themselves by groups, at the bottom of these black holes. Some fifteen had just engaged in the left one; and Étienne walked last, behind Maheu, preceded by Catherine, Zacharie and Levaque. It was a fine haulage gallery, through the seam, and of so solid a rock, that it had needed only partly to be walled. One by one, they went, they went always, without a word, with the small flames of the lamps. The young man stumbled at every step, entangled his feet in the rails. For an instant, a dull noise had worried him, the distant noise of a storm whose violence seemed to grow and come from the bowels of the earth. Was it the thunder of a fall, crushing on their heads the enormous mass which separated them from daylight? A clarity pierced the night, he felt the rock tremble; and, when he had ranged himself along the wall, like the comrades, he saw pass against his face a big white horse, hitched to a train of tubs. On the first, holding the reins, Bébert was seated; while Jeanlin, fists on the edge of the last, ran barefoot.

They set off again. Further on, a crossroads presented itself, two new galleries opened, and the band divided there again, the workers distributed little by little in all the stalls of the mine. Now, the haulage gallery was timbered, oak props upheld the roof, made to the crumbling rock a frame shirt, behind which one glimpsed the blades of schists, sparkling with mica, and the coarse mass of sandstones, dull and rough. Trains of full or empty tubs passed continually, crossed, with their thunder carried into the shadow by vague beasts, at the trot of phantoms. On the double track of a siding, a long black serpent slept, a stopped train, whose horse shook itself, so drowned in night, that its confused croup was like a block fallen from the vault. Air doors beat, closed slowly. And, as one advanced, the gallery became narrower, lower, uneven of roof, forcing the backs to bend ceaselessly.

Étienne, roughly, struck his head. Without the leather cap, he would have had his skull split. Yet, he followed with attention, before him, the slightest gestures of Maheu, whose dark silhouette detached against the glow of the lamps. Not one of the workers bumped himself, they must have known each bump, knot of wood or swelling of rock. The young man also suffered from the slippery ground, which soaked more and more. At moments, he crossed veritable pools, which the muddy churn of feet alone revealed. But what astonished him above all, were the sudden changes of temperature. At the bottom of the pit, it was very cool, and in the haulage gallery, where all the air of the mine passed, blew an icy wind, whose violence turned to tempest, between the narrow walls. Then, as one sank into the other ways, which received only their disputed share of airing, the wind fell, the heat grew, a suffocating heat, of a leaden heaviness.

Maheu had no longer opened his mouth. He took to the right a new gallery, saying simply to Étienne, without turning:

--The Guillaume seam.

It was the seam where their stall was. From the first strides, Étienne bruised his head and elbows. The sloping roof descended so low, that, over lengths of twenty and thirty meters, he had to walk bent double. The water came to the ankles. They thus made two hundred meters; and, suddenly, he saw Levaque, Zacharie and Catherine disappear, who seemed to have flown off through a thin fissure, opened before him.

--You must climb, Maheu resumed. Hang your lamp to a buttonhole, and hook onto the timber.

He himself disappeared. Étienne had to follow him. This chimney, left in the seam, was reserved for miners and served all the secondary ways. It had the thickness of the coal bed, hardly sixty centimeters. Happily, the young man was slim, for, still clumsy, he hoisted himself there with useless expense of muscle, flattening shoulders and hips, advancing by the strength of the wrists, clawed to the wood. Fifteen meters higher, they met the first secondary way; but they had to continue, Maheu and company's stall was at the sixth way, in hell, as they said; and, fifteen meters by fifteen meters, the ways superposed, the climb never ended, through this slit which scraped the back and chest. Étienne panted, as if the weight of the rocks had crushed his limbs, the hands torn, the legs bruised, lacking air above all, to the point of feeling the blood burst his skin. Vaguely, in a way, he glimpsed two crouching beasts, a small, a big, who pushed tubs: they were Lydie and Mouquette, already at work. And he still had to scramble the height of two stalls! Sweat blinded him, he despaired of catching the others, whose agile limbs he heard graze the rock with a long sliding.

--Courage, there it is! said Catherine's voice.

But, as he indeed arrived, another voice cried from the bottom of the stall:

--Well! what then? are they making fun of people...? I've two kilometers to make from Montsou, and I'm the first here!

It was Chaval, a big thin fellow of twenty-five, bony, strong-featured, who was angry at having waited. When he glimpsed Étienne, he asked, with a surprise of contempt:

--What's that?

And, Maheu having told him the story, he added between his teeth:

--So, the boys eat the girls' bread!

The two men exchanged a look, lit with one of those instinctive hates which flare suddenly. Étienne had felt the insult, without yet understanding. A silence reigned, all set to work. These were finally the seams gradually filled, the stalls in activity, at each floor, at the end of each way. The devouring pit had swallowed its daily ration of men, near seven hundred workers, who labored at this hour in this giant ant-heap, boring the earth on all sides, riddling it like an old wood gnawed by worms. And, amid the heavy silence, the crushing of the deep strata, one might have, ear to the rock, heard the stir of these human insects in march, from the flight of the cable which raised and lowered the extraction cage, to the bite of tools entering the coal, at the bottom of the cutting stalls.

Étienne, turning, found himself again pressed against Catherine. But, this time, he guessed the nascent roundness of her bosom, he understood suddenly this warmth which had penetrated him.

--You're a girl then? he murmured, stupefied.

She answered in her gay air, without redness:

--But yes... Truly! you took your time!

IV

The four hewers had just stretched themselves one above the others, over all the rise of the face. Separated by the hooked planks which held the cut coal, they each occupied about four meters of the seam; and this seam was so thin, hardly thick in this spot at fifty centimeters, that they found themselves there as flattened between roof and wall, dragging on knees and elbows, unable to turn without bruising their shoulders. They had to, to attack the coal, remain lying on the side, neck twisted, arms raised and obliquely brandishing the rivelaine, the short-handled pick.

Below, there was first Zacharie; Levaque and Chaval were staged above; and, finally at the very top, was Maheu. Each hewed the schist bed, which he hollowed with blows of rivelaine; then, he practiced two vertical notches in the seam, and detached the block, by driving an iron wedge, at the upper part. The coal was fat, the block broke, rolled in pieces along the belly and thighs. When these pieces, held by the plank, had amassed under them, the hewers disappeared, walled in the narrow slit.

It was Maheu who suffered most. At the top, the temperature rose to thirty-five degrees, the air did not circulate, the suffocation in the long run became mortal. He had had to, to see clear, fix his lamp to a nail, near his head; and this lamp, which heated his skull, finished burning his blood. But his torment worsened above all from the humidity. The rock, above him, a few centimeters from his face, streamed with water, big continuous and rapid drops, falling on a sort of stubborn rhythm, always in the same place. He might twist his neck, throw back his nape: they beat his face, smashed, clapped without respite. At the end of a quarter hour, he was soaked, covered with sweat himself, smoking with a hot vapor of wash. That morning, a drop, harrying his eye, made him swear. He would not let go his hewing, he gave big blows, which shook him violently between the two rocks, like an aphid caught between two leaves of a book, under threat of complete flattening.

Not a word was exchanged. They all struck, one heard only these irregular blows, veiled and as if distant. The noises took a raucous sonority, without an echo in the dead air. And it seemed the darkness was of an unknown black, thickened by the flying dust of coal, weighed down by gases which pressed on the eyes. The wicks of the lamps, under their metal cloth hats, put there only reddish points. One distinguished nothing, the stall opened, rose like a wide chimney, flat and oblique, where the soot of ten winters would have amassed a deep night. Spectral forms stirred there, the lost gleams let glimpse a roundness of hip, a knotty arm, a violent head, smeared as for a crime. Sometimes, detaching, shone blocks of coal, pans and edges, suddenly lit with a crystal reflection. Then, all fell back to black, the rivelaines struck with great dull blows, there was no more than the panting of chests, the grunt of unease and fatigue, under the heaviness of air and the rain of springs.

Zacharie, arms limp from a previous night's carouse, quickly dropped the work under pretext of needing to timber, which allowed him to forget himself whistling softly, eyes vague in the shadow. Behind the hewers, near three meters of the seam remained empty, without they having yet taken the precaution to support the rock, careless of danger and stingy of their time.

--Eh! the aristo! cried the young man to Étienne, pass me wood.

Étienne, who was learning from Catherine to maneuver his shovel, had to carry wood up into the stall. There was from the day before a small provision. Each morning, usually, they were lowered all cut to the measure of the seam.

--Hurry up then, damn laziness! resumed Zacharie, seeing the new drawer hoist himself awkwardly amid the coal, arms encumbered with four pieces of oak.

He made, with his pick, a notch in the roof, then another in the wall; and he wedged the two ends of the wood there, which thus shored up the rock. In the afternoon, the cutters on the surface took the rubble left at the bottom of the gallery by the hewers, and filled the exploited trenches of the seam, where they drowned the wood, sparing only the lower way and the upper way, for the haulage.

Maheu ceased to moan. At last, he had detached his block. He wiped on his sleeve his streaming face, he worried that Zacharie had come to do behind him.

--Leave that, he said. We'll see after breakfast... Better to cut, if we want our count of tubs.

--It's that, answered the young man, it's sinking. Look, there's a crack. I'm afraid it'll cave in.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”