Part 7

--But no, said the mother, you see you were expected... Eh? that wind must have kept you from sleeping, poor little darling!

The young girl looked at her, very surprised.

--There was wind?... I know nothing of it, I didn't move all night.

Then, this seemed funny to them, all three began to laugh; and the maids, who were bringing in breakfast, burst out laughing too, so much did the idea that Mademoiselle had slept straight through her twelve hours cheer the house. The sight of the brioche completed the brightening of their faces.

--What! is it baked then? repeated Cécile. What a trick they've played on me!... That's going to be good, all hot, in the chocolate!

They finally sat down to table, the chocolate steamed in the bowls, and for a long time they spoke only of the brioche. Mélanie and Honorine stayed, gave details about the baking, watched them stuff themselves, their lips greasy, saying it was a pleasure to make a cake, when one saw the masters eat it so willingly.

But the dogs barked violently, they thought they were announcing the piano teacher, who came from Marchiennes on Mondays and Fridays. There also came a literature professor. All the young girl's education had thus been made at the Piolaine, in a happy ignorance, in childish whims, throwing the book out the window as soon as a lesson bored her.

--It's M. Deneulin, said Honorine, coming back in.

Behind her, Deneulin, a cousin of M. Grégoire, appeared without ceremony, loud of voice, quick of gesture, with the bearing of a former cavalry officer. Although he had passed fifty, his close-cropped hair and heavy moustaches were ink-black.

--Yes, it's me, good day... Don't disturb yourselves!

He had sat down, while the family exclaimed. They finally went back to their chocolate.

--Have you anything to tell me? asked M. Grégoire.

--No, nothing at all, Deneulin hastened to reply. I went out on horseback to shake off a bit of rust, and as I passed your gate, I wanted to give you a little greeting.

Cécile questioned him about Jeanne and Lucie, his daughters. They were doing perfectly well, the first no longer let go of painting, while the other, the elder, cultivated her voice at the piano, from morning to night. And there was a slight trembling in his voice, a discomfort he hid beneath outbursts of gaiety.

M. Grégoire resumed:

--And is everything going well, at the pit?

--Lord! I'm being jostled by the fellows, with this filthy crisis... Ah! we're paying for the prosperous years! Too many factories built, too many railways constructed, too many capitals tied up in view of a tremendous production. And today, money sleeps, none is to be found to make all that run... Fortunately, nothing is hopeless, I'll pull through all the same.

Like his cousin, he had inherited a share in the Montsou mines. But he, an enterprising engineer, tormented by the need for a royal fortune, had hurried to sell, when the share had reached a million. For months, he had been maturing a plan. His wife had inherited the small Vandame concession, where only two pits were opened, Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie, in such a state of neglect, with such defective equipment, that the working barely covered expenses. Now, he dreamed of repairing Jean-Bart, renewing its engine and widening the shaft so as to descend further, keeping only Gaston-Marie for drainage. They should, he said, find gold there by the shovelful. The idea was sound. Only, the million had gone into it, and this damned industrial crisis broke out at the moment when large profits were about to prove him right. Besides, a bad administrator, of a brusque kindness with his workers, he had let himself be plundered since his wife's death, also giving free rein to his daughters, the elder of whom talked of going on the stage and the younger of whom had already had three landscapes refused at the Salon, both laughing in the rout, and in whom threatening misery revealed very thrifty housekeepers.

--You see, Léon, he continued, his voice hesitant, you were wrong not to sell at the same time as me. Now, everything is tumbling, you may run... And if you had entrusted me with your money, you would have seen what we would have done at Vandame, in our mine!

M. Grégoire finished his chocolate, without haste. He answered peacefully:

--Never!... You know well I don't want to speculate. I live quietly, it would be too stupid to crack my head with business worries. And, as for Montsou, it can keep on dropping, we'll always have enough. One mustn't be so greedy, the devil! Then, listen, it's you who'll bite your fingers one day, for Montsou will go up again, the children of Cécile's children will still draw their white bread from it.

Deneulin listened to him with an embarrassed smile.

--Then, he murmured, if I were to tell you to put a hundred thousand francs into my business, you would refuse?

But, before the anxious faces of the Grégoires, he regretted having gone so fast, he put off his borrowing idea to later, reserving it for a desperate case.

--Oh! I'm not there yet! It's a joke... My God! perhaps you're right: the money others earn is the surest to fatten on.

They changed the conversation. Cécile came back to her cousins, whose tastes preoccupied her even as they shocked her. Madame Grégoire promised to take her daughter to see those dear little ones, on the first sunny day. Meanwhile, M. Grégoire, with a distracted air, was not in the conversation. He added aloud:

--Me, if I were in your place, I wouldn't persist any longer, I'd treat with Montsou... They're quite eager for it, you'd get your money back.

He was alluding to the old hatred that existed between the Montsou concession and that of Vandame. Despite the slight importance of the latter, its powerful neighbor raged to see, enclosed in its sixty-seven communes, this square league that did not belong to it; and, after vainly trying to kill it, it was plotting to buy it cheap, when it should be gasping. The war continued without truce, each exploitation stopped its galleries two hundred meters from the others, it was a duel to the last blood, although the directors and engineers had polite relations among themselves.

Deneulin's eyes had flared.

--Never! he cried in his turn. As long as I live, Montsou won't have Vandame... I dined Thursday at Hennebeau's, and I saw him well enough circling around me. Already, last autumn, when the bigwigs came to the Régie, they made all sorts of soft eyes at me... Yes, yes, I know those marquises and dukes, those generals and ministers! brigands who'd strip you even of your shirt, at the corner of a wood!

He was inexhaustible. Besides, M. Grégoire did not defend the Régie of Montsou, the six regents instituted by the treaty of 1760, who governed the Company despotically, and of whom the five survivors, at each death, chose the new member among the powerful and rich shareholders. The opinion of the owner of the Piolaine, of such reasonable tastes, was that these gentlemen sometimes lacked measure, in their exaggerated love of money.

Mélanie had come to clear the table. Outside, the dogs began barking again, and Honorine was heading toward the door, when Cécile, whom the heat and the food were stifling, left the table.

--No, leave it, it must be for my lesson.

Deneulin, too, had risen. He watched the young girl go out, he asked with a smile:

--Well! and this marriage with little Négrel?

--Nothing is settled, said Madame Grégoire. An idea in the air... One must think it over.

--No doubt, he continued with a roguish laugh. I believe the nephew and the aunt... What overwhelms me is that it's Madame Hennebeau who throws herself thus around Cécile's neck.

But M. Grégoire was indignant. A lady so distinguished, and fourteen years older than the young man! It was monstrous, he didn't like joking on such subjects. Deneulin, still laughing, shook his hand and left.

--It's not that yet, said Cécile, coming back. It's that woman with her two children, you know, mama, the miner's wife we met... Shall we have them come in here?

They hesitated. Were they very dirty? No, not too much, and they would leave their clogs on the step. Already the father and mother had stretched out in the depths of the big armchairs. There they digested. The fear of changing the air finally decided them.

--Show them in, Honorine.

Then, the Maheude and her little ones came in, frozen, famished, seized with a fearful bewilderment, on seeing themselves in this room where it was so warm, and which smelled so good of brioche.

II

In the bedroom, left closed, the shutters had gradually let slip gray bars of daylight, whose fan unfolded on the ceiling; and the enclosed air grew heavier, all continued their sleep of the night: Lénore and Henri with arms around each other, Alzire head thrown back, leaning on her hump; while old Bonnemort, occupying alone the bed of Zacharie and Jeanlin, snored with open mouth. Not a breath came from the cabinet, where the Maheude had fallen asleep again nursing Estelle, her breast flowing sideways, her daughter across the belly, gorged with milk, knocked out too, and stifling in the soft flesh of the breasts.

The cuckoo, below, struck six o'clock. One heard, along the façades of the coron, noises of doors, then clacks of clogs, on the pavement of the sidewalks: these were the screening-women going off to the pit. And the silence fell again until seven o'clock. Then, shutters were thrown back, yawns and coughs came through the walls. For a long time, a coffee-mill ground, without anyone in the room yet waking.

But, suddenly, a clamor of slaps and howls, far off, made Alzire sit up. She was conscious of the hour, she ran barefoot to shake her mother.

--Mama! mama! it's late. You who have an errand... Take care! you're going to crush Estelle.

And she saved the child, half-stifled under the enormous flow of the breasts.

--Bloody hell! stammered the Maheude, rubbing her eyes, one is so worn out one could sleep all day... Dress Lénore and Henri, I'm taking them; and you keep Estelle, I don't want to drag her along, for fear she'd take ill, in this dog weather.

She washed in haste, she put on an old blue petticoat, her cleanest, and a gray wool jacket, on which she had sewn two patches the evening before.

--And some soup, bloody hell! she murmured again.

While her mother went down, bustling everything, Alzire went back into the bedroom, where she carried Estelle who had begun to howl. But she was used to the little one's rages, she had, at eight years, tender womanly wiles to calm and distract her. Gently, she laid her in her still-warm bed, she put her back to sleep by giving her a finger to suck. It was time, for another uproar was breaking out; and she had at once to make peace between Lénore and Henri, who were finally waking. These children hardly got along, only threw their arms around each other kindly when they slept. The girl, aged six, fell as soon as she got up on the boy, her junior by two years, who received the slaps without returning them.

Both had the same head too big and as if puffed, tousled with yellow hair. Alzire had to pull her sister by the legs, threatening to skin her behind. Then, there were stampings over the washing, and at each garment she put on them. They avoided opening the shutters, so as not to disturb old Bonnemort's sleep. He continued to snore, in the awful din of the children.

--It's ready! are you there, up there? cried the Maheude.

She had thrown back the shutters, shaken up the fire, put on more coal. Her hope was that the old man hadn't swallowed all the soup. But she found the pot scraped clean, she cooked a handful of vermicelli, which she had kept in reserve for three days. They would swallow it in water, without butter; there should be nothing left of yesterday's scrap; and she was surprised to see that Catherine, in preparing the kindling, had performed the miracle of leaving a walnut-sized bit. Only, this time, the buffet was truly empty: nothing, not a crust, not a bit of provision, not a bone to gnaw. What were they going to become, if Maigrat persisted in cutting their credit, and if the bourgeois of the Piolaine didn't give her a hundred sous? When the men and the girl came back from the pit, they would have to eat though; for no one had yet invented living without eating, unfortunately.

--Are you coming down, finally! she cried, getting angry. I should have been gone.

When Alzire and the children were there, she divided the vermicelli into three small plates. She, she said, wasn't hungry. Although Catherine had already poured water on yesterday's grounds, she poured it a second time and swallowed two big mugs of a coffee so pale it resembled rusty water. That would sustain her all the same.

--Listen, she repeated to Alzire, you'll let your grandfather sleep, you'll watch well that Estelle doesn't crack her head, and if she wakes, if she howls too much, look! here's a bit of sugar, you'll melt it, you'll give her spoonfuls... I know you're sensible, that you won't eat it.

--And school, mama?

--School, well! that'll be for another day... I need you.

--And the soup, do you want me to make it, if you come back late?

--The soup, the soup... No, wait for me.

Alzire, of a precocious intelligence of an infirm little girl, knew very well how to make soup. She must have understood, insisted no further. Now, the whole coron was awake, bands of children went off to school, with the dragging noise of their clogs. Eight o'clock struck, a growing murmur of chatter rose to the left, at the Levaques'. The women's day began, around the coffee-pots, fists on hips, tongues turning without rest, like the stones of a mill. A withered head, with thick lips, flattened nose, came to lean against a windowpane, crying:

--There's news, just listen!

--No, no, later! answered the Maheude. I have an errand.

And, for fear of succumbing to the offer of a glass of hot coffee, she stuffed Lénore and Henri, she left with them. Upstairs, old Bonnemort snored still, with a rhythmic snore that rocked the house.

Outside, the Maheude was surprised to see the wind no longer blew. It was a sudden thaw, the sky earth-colored, the walls sticky with a greenish dampness, the roads smeared with mud, a mud special to the coal country, black as diluted soot, thick and clinging enough to lose one's clogs in. At once, she had to slap Lénore, because the little one amused herself gathering dung on her clogs, as on the tip of a shovel. On leaving the coron, she had skirted the slag-heap and followed the canal path, cutting across to shorten by broken streets, amid vacant grounds enclosed with mossy palisades. Sheds succeeded one another, long factory buildings, tall chimneys spewing soot, soiling this ravaged countryside of industrial suburb. Behind a clump of poplars, the old Réquillart pit showed the collapse of its headframe, whose heavy timbers alone remained standing. And, turning right, the Maheude found herself on the high road.

--Wait! wait! dirty pig! she cried, I'll make you roll mudballs!

Now, it was Henri who had taken a handful of mud and was kneading it. The two children, slapped without preference, fell back into order, squinting to see the pats they made amid the heaps. They splashed, already worn out by their efforts to unstick their soles, at each stride.

On the Marchiennes side, the road unrolled its two leagues of pavement, shooting straight as a ribbon soaked in axle-grease, between the reddish lands. But, on the other side, it descended in zigzags across Montsou, built on the slope of a wide undulation of the plain. These northern roads, drawn taut between manufacturing towns, going with gentle curves, slow ascents, build themselves up little by little, tend to make of a department but a single working city. The small brick houses, painted up to cheer the climate, some yellow, others blue, others black, these last no doubt in order to arrive at once at the final black, rolled down right and left, serpentining to the bottom of the slope. A few large two-story pavilions, dwellings of plant chiefs, pierced the pressed line of narrow façades. A church, also in brick, resembled a new model of blast furnace, with its square steeple, already dirtied by the flying dust of coal. And, among the sugar-refineries, ropewalks, flour-mills, what dominated were the dance-halls, the taverns, the beer-shops, so numerous, that, out of a thousand houses, there were more than five hundred cabarets.

As she approached the Company Yards, a vast series of warehouses and workshops, the Maheude decided to take Henri and Lénore by the hand, one to the right, the other to the left. Beyond, was the director's hotel, M. Hennebeau, a sort of vast chalet separated from the road by a grating, followed by a garden where lean trees vegetated. Just then, a carriage was stopped before the door, a decorated gentleman and a lady in a fur coat, some visit disembarked from Paris at the Marchiennes station; for Madame Hennebeau, who appeared in the half-light of the vestibule, uttered an exclamation of surprise and joy.

--Walk on, laggards! growled the Maheude, pulling the two little ones, who abandoned themselves in the mud.

She was arriving at Maigrat's, she was all emotion. Maigrat lived right next to the director, a simple wall separated the hotel from his small house; and he had there a depot, a long building which opened on the road in a shop without a front. He kept everything there, groceries, charcuterie, fruit, sold bread, beer, saucepans. Former overseer at the Voreux, he had begun with a narrow canteen; then, thanks to the protection of his chiefs, his business had widened, little by little killing the retail trade of Montsou. He centralized goods, the considerable clientele of the corons allowed him to sell cheaper and give larger credits. Besides, he remained in the hand of the Company, which had built him his small house and store.

--Here I am again, M. Maigrat, said the Maheude with a humble air, finding him just then standing before his door.

He looked at her without answering. He was stout, cold and polite, and prided himself on never going back on a decision.

--Come now, you won't send me away like yesterday. We must eat bread till Saturday... Sure, we owe you sixty francs for two years...

She explained herself, in short painful phrases. It was an old debt, contracted during the last strike. Twenty times, they had promised to pay up, but they couldn't, they couldn't manage to give him forty sous a fortnight. With that, a misfortune had happened to her the day before yesterday, she had had to pay twenty francs to a shoemaker, who threatened to have them seized. And that's why they found themselves without a sou. Otherwise, they would have gone till Saturday, like the comrades.

Maigrat, belly taut, arms crossed, answered no with his head, at each supplication.

--Just two loaves, M. Maigrat. I'm reasonable, I'm not asking for coffee... Just two three-pound loaves a day.

--No! he cried at last, with all his force.

His wife had appeared, a frail creature who spent her days over a ledger, without even daring to raise her head. She slipped away, frightened to see this unhappy woman turn toward her eyes of ardent prayer. It was said she yielded the conjugal bed to the screening-women of the clientele. It was a known fact: when a miner wanted an extension of credit, he had only to send his daughter or wife, ugly or pretty, provided they were complaisant.

The Maheude, who still supplicated Maigrat with her eyes, felt ill at ease, under the pale light of the little eyes with which he undressed her. That angered her, she would have understood still, before having had seven children, when she was young. And she left, she pulled violently on Lénore and Henri, who were picking up walnut shells, thrown in the gutter, and examining them.

--That won't bring you luck, M. Maigrat, remember!

Now, she had left only the bourgeois of the Piolaine. If those didn't loosen a hundred sous, they could all lie down and die. She had taken to the left the Joiselle path. The Régie was there, in the angle of the road, a veritable palace of brick, where the big gentlemen of Paris, and princes, and generals, and government personages, came each autumn to give great dinners. She, while walking, already spent the hundred sous: first bread, then coffee; next, a quarter of butter, a bushel of potatoes, for the morning soup and the evening stew; finally, perhaps a bit of pork cheese, for the father needed meat.

The curate of Montsou, Abbé Joire, passed by tucking up his soutane, with the delicacies of a well-fed fat cat, who fears wetting his robe. He was mild, he affected to concern himself with nothing, so as to anger neither workers nor bosses.

--Good day, M. le Curé.

He did not stop, smiled at the children, and left her planted in the middle of the road. She had no religion, but she had suddenly imagined this priest was going to give her something.

And the errand resumed, in the black and clinging mud. There were still two kilometers, the little ones were pulled more, no longer amusing themselves, downcast. To right and left of the path, unrolled the same vacant grounds enclosed with mossy palisades, the same factory bodies, soiled with smoke, bristling with tall chimneys. Then, in open fields, the flat lands spread out, immense, like an ocean of brown clods, without the mast of a tree, to the violet line of the Vandame forest.

--Carry me, mama.

She carried them one after the other. Puddles pierced the roadway, she tucked up, with the fear of arriving too dirty. Three times, she nearly fell, so greasy was this cursed pavement. And, as they finally emerged before the step, two enormous dogs threw themselves on them, barking so loud, that the little ones howled with fear. The coachman had to take a whip.

--Leave your clogs, come in, repeated Honorine.

In the dining room, the mother and children stood immobile, dizzy from the sudden heat, very embarrassed by the gaze of this old gentleman and old lady, who stretched in their armchairs.

--My daughter, said the latter, fulfill your little office.

The Grégoires charged Cécile with their alms. That fell into their idea of a fine education. One must be charitable, they said themselves their house was the house of the good God. Besides, they prided themselves on giving charity with intelligence, worked by the continual fear of being deceived and encouraging vice. Thus, they never gave money, never! not ten sous, not two sous, for it was a known fact, as soon as a poor man had two sous, he drank them. Their alms were therefore always in kind, especially warm clothing, distributed during the winter to needy children.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”