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  Then she remembered that the lad had been wandering about on a dark night without a penny to his name and perhaps even without any food.

  ‘Would you like some of mine?’

  And when he refused, swearing to her that he wasn’t hungry, his voice trembling from the griping pain in his stomach, she insisted cheerfully:

  ‘Oh well, if it puts you off!…But look, I’ve only eaten out of this side. You can have the other bit.’

  Already she had broken the piece in two. Taking his half, he had to stop himself from devouring it in one gulp; and he placed his elbows on his thighs so as to hide his trembling from her. Calmly treating him as simply another fellow-worker, she had just lain down on her front beside him, and with her chin cupped in one hand she was slowly eating her bread with the other. Their two lamps were on the ground between them, lighting them up.

  Catherine watched him for a moment in silence. She must have found him good-looking, with his delicate features and black moustache. She had a vague smile on her face, a smile of pleasure.

  ‘So you’re a mechanic then, and the railway sacked you?…Why was that?’

  ‘Because I hit my boss.’

  She was astonished to hear this: it offended her own inbred belief that one should be subordinate and do what one’s told.

  ‘To be honest, I’d been drinking,’ he continued, ‘and when I drink, I just get mad, with myself, with everybody…It’s a fact. I can’t even have two tiny glasses of the stuff without wanting to have a go at someone…And then I’m ill for the next couple of days.’

  ‘Then you mustn’t drink,’ she said in a serious voice.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I know what I’m like!’

  And he shook his head; he hated alcohol with the hatred of one who was the last in a long line of drunks and who suffered in his flesh from this wild, drink-sodden inheritance, to such an extent that the merest drop had become the equivalent of poison for him.

  ‘But it’s because of Mother that I’m fed up at being sacked,’ he said, having swallowed a mouthful of bread. ‘She’s not in a good way, and I used to be able to send her a five-franc piece from time to time.’

  ‘Where does your mother live, then?’

  ‘Paris…She’s a laundry-woman, in the rue de la Goutte d’Or.’3

  There was a silence. When he thought of these things, a pale gleam flickered across his dark eyes, a brief moment of apprehension at the lesion whose unknown consequences he harboured within his young, healthy body.4 For a moment he was lost in contemplation of the dark reaches of the mine; and as he sat there, deep beneath the crushing weight of the earth, his mind went back to his childhood, to his mother, when she was still pretty and game for the struggle, to how she’d been abandoned by his father who’d then come back to her after she’d married someone else, and how she’d divided herself between these two men who had both exploited her, and how she’d ended up rolling in the gutter with them, in all the wine and the filth. His childhood…he could see the street now, and memories came flooding back: the dirty washing in the middle of the shop, the drinking sessions that made the whole house reek, the slaps across the face that could have broken a person’s jaw.

  ‘But now,’ he went on slowly, ‘there’ll be nothing left to give her out of thirty sous…She’ll die of poverty, for sure.’

  He shrugged in resigned despair and took another bite of his piece.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Catherine asked, uncorking her flask. ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’s coffee, it won’t do you any harm…You need something to wash that down.’

  But he refused: it was bad enough depriving her of half her piece. However, she insisted in a good-natured way and eventually said:

  ‘All right, I’ll go first, seeing as you’re so polite…But now you can’t refuse. It’d be rude.’

  And she held out her flask. She had hoisted herself on to her knees, and he could see her up close to him in the light of the two lamps. Why had he found her unattractive? Now that she was all black and her face covered in a thin layer of coal-dust, she had a strange charm. Surrounded by the encroaching darkness of this grime, her teeth shone with dazzling whiteness in a mouth that was too large, and her eyes dilated and gleamed with a greenish tinge, like those of a cat. A wisp of reddish hair had escaped from under her cap and was tickling her ear, making her laugh. She no longer looked quite so young, she might even be fourteen.

  ‘Since you insist,’ he said, taking a swig and handing her back the flask.

  She downed a second mouthful and made him have one too: she wanted them to share, she said. They found it amusing to pass the thin spout of the flask from mouth to mouth. Suddenly he wondered if he shouldn’t grab her in his arms and kiss her on the lips. She had thick, pale-pink lips, their colour heightened by the coal-dust, and they tortured him with a growing desire. But he didn’t dare, he felt intimidated. In Lille he had only ever been with prostitutes, and of the cheapest kind at that, which meant that he had no idea how one went about things with a young working girl who had not yet left her family.

  ‘You must be about fourteen?’ he inquired, taking another bite of his bread.

  She was taken aback, almost cross.

  ‘What do you mean ‘‘fourteen’’? Fifteen, if you please!…I know I’m not very big for my age. But girls round here don’t grow very fast.’

  He continued to question her, and she told him everything, neither brazen nor embarrassed. There was evidently nothing she did not know about the ways of men and women, even though he could sense that she was still physically a virgin, a virgin child who had been prevented from maturing into full womanhood by the poor air and state of exhaustion in which she habitually lived. When he returned to the subject of La Mouquette, to try and embarrass her, she told him the most horrendous stories in a perfectly even voice and with considerable relish. Oh, that Mouquette was a one, all right! The things she got up to! And when Étienne asked her if she didn’t perhaps have a boyfriend herself, she replied jokingly that while she didn’t want to upset her mother, she no doubt one day would. She sat with her shoulders hunched, her teeth chattering a little from the cold on account of her sweat-drenched clothes, and wearing the gentle, resigned expression of one who is ready to submit to all things and all men.

  ‘With everyone living so close together, there’s never any shortage of boyfriends, is there?’ Étienne continued.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And anyway, it doesn’t do anyone any harm…Just best not to tell the priest, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, the priest! I don’t care about him!…But there’s the Black Man.’

  ‘What do you mean, the ‘‘Black Man’’?’

  ‘The old miner who haunts the pit and strangles girls who’ve been bad.’

  He looked at her, fearing that she might be having him on.

  ‘You don’t believe that rubbish, do you? Didn’t they teach you anything?’

  ‘Of course they did. I can read and write, I’ll have you know…Which is useful in our house, cos in Mother and Father’s day you didn’t learn such things.’

  She really was very nice: once she had finished eating, he would take her in his arms and kiss those plump, pink lips. It was the resolve of a shy man, and the prospect of this direct approach prevented him from being able to speak further. These boyish clothes, this jacket and trousers on a young girl’s flesh, excited and disturbed him. He had by now swallowed the last of his bread. He drank from the flask and handed it back for her to finish it. The moment for decisive action had arrived, and he was just casting a nervous glance in the direction of the other miners further along the tunnel when a large shadow blocked his view.

  For some moments Chaval had been standing watching them from a distance. He came forward and, making sure that Maheu couldn’t see him, grabbed Catherine by the shoulders where she sat, pulled her head back and pressed a brutal kiss down on to her lips, matter-of-factly and seemingly unaware of Étienne’s presence. This kiss consti
tuted an act of taking possession, and a decision born of jealousy.

  Catherine, meanwhile, had sought to resist.

  ‘Leave me alone, do you hear?’

  He was holding her head and staring into her eyes. His red moustache and small pointed beard were like blazing fires in the blackness of his face, and his large nose had the look of an eagle’s beak. Finally he let go of her and departed without a word.

  Étienne’s blood ran cold. How stupid to have waited. And now, of course, he simply couldn’t kiss her, in case she thought he was simply trying to imitate Chaval. His pride was wounded, and he felt even a sense of despair.

  ‘Why did you lie to me?’ he whispered to her. ‘So he’s your boyfriend.’

  ‘No, he’s not, I swear to you!’ she cried. ‘There’s nothing like that between us. Sometimes he fools around but…And anyway he doesn’t even come from round here. He arrived from the Pas-de-Calais5 six months ago.’

  They had both got to their feet: work was about to resume. When she saw how distant Étienne had become, it seemed to upset her. She must have found him more attractive than the other man, might even have preferred him. She cast about desperately for some means of showing him kindness, in order to make it up to him; and while Étienne stared in astonishment at his lamp, in which the flame was now blue and encircled by a broad ring of pale light, she tried at least to take his mind off what had happened.

  ‘Come, let me show you something,’ she murmured in a friendly way.

  She led him to the end of the coal-face where she pointed to a crevice. A gentle bubbling noise could be heard coming from it, the tiniest of sounds, like the peep of a bird.

  ‘Put your hand there. Can you feel the draught…? That’s firedamp.’

  He was surprised. So that’s all it was? This was the terrible thing that could blow them all up? She laughed and said there must be a lot of it in the air that day since the lamps were burning so blue.

  ‘When you two layabouts have quite finished your chat!’ Maheu shouted roughly.

  Catherine and Étienne hurried to fill their tubs and push them towards the incline, their backs braced as they crawled along the road beneath the bumpy roof. By the second trip they were already bathed in sweat and their bones were cracking once more.

  At the coal-face the men had returned to work. They often cut their break-time short like this, so as not to get cold; but their meal, devoured with mute voracity far from the sunlight, sat like lead on their stomachs. Stretched out on their sides, they were now tapping away harder than ever in their single-minded determination to fill a decent number of tubs. They became oblivious to all else as they gave themselves up to this furious pursuit of a reward so dearly won. They ceased to notice the water streaming down and causing their limbs to swell, or the cramps brought on by being stuck in awkward positions, or the suffocating darkness that was making them go pale like vegetables in a cellar. As the day wore on, the atmosphere became even more poisonous and the air grew hotter and hotter with the fumes from their lamps, and the foulness of their breath, and the asphyxiating firedamp, which clung to their eyes like cobwebs and which would clear only when the mine was ventilated during the night. But despite it all, buried like moles beneath the crushing weight of the earth, and without a breath of fresh air in their burning lungs, they simply went on tapping.

  V

  Without looking at his watch, which was still in his jacket, Maheu stopped and said:

  ‘Nearly one o’clock…Have you finished, Zacharie?’

  Zacharie had been timbering for a while, but then he had stopped in the middle of the job and lain back gazing into space and remembering the games of crosse1 he had played the previous day. He roused himself and replied:

  ‘Yes, that’ll do for now. We can check again tomorrow.’

  He returned to his place at the coal-face, where Levaque and Chaval also downed tools. It was time for a break. They wiped their faces on their bare arms and looked up at the rock above them and the crazed surface of the shale. Work was almost all they ever talked about.

  ‘Typical,’ muttered Chaval. ‘Just our luck to hit loose earth…They don’t take account of that, do they, when they fix the rates?’

  ‘Bastards,’ grumbled Levaque. ‘They want to bloody bury us alive.’

  Zacharie began to laugh. He didn’t give a damn about their work or anything else for that matter, but he liked to hear people having a go at the Company. Maheu pointed out in his quiet way that the nature of the terrain changed every twenty metres and that, to be fair, it was impossible to say in advance what sort they might find. Then, as the other two men continued to sound off about the bosses, he began to glance round uneasily:

  ‘Shh! That’s enough of that!’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Levaque, also lowering his voice. ‘Walls have ears.’

  Even at this depth they were obsessed about the possibility of informers, almost as if the coal in the seam might actually hear them and tell the shareholders.

  ‘All the same,’ Chaval added defiantly at the top of his voice, ‘if that pig Dansaert speaks to me again the way he did the other day, I’ll bloody throw a brick at him…I mean, it’s not as if I was trying to keep him from all those luscious blondes of his.’

  This had Zacharie in fits. The overman’s affair with Pierron’s wife was a standing joke throughout the pit. Even Catherine, leaning on her shovel at the foot of the coal-face, was shaking with laughter as she briefly put Étienne in the picture. Maheu, meanwhile, was getting angry and no longer sought to conceal his anxieties:

  ‘Hold your damned tongue, will you?…If it’s trouble you’re after, then wait till you’re on your own.’

  He was still talking when they heard the sound of footsteps in the roadway above them. Almost immediately young Négrel – as the miners called him among themselves – appeared at the top of the coal-face accompanied by Dansaert, the overman.

  ‘What did I tell you!’ Maheu muttered under his breath. ‘There’s always one of them about the place, appearing out of nowhere.’

  Paul Négrel, the nephew of M. Hennebeau, was a young man of twenty-six, slim and good-looking, with curly hair and a brown moustache. His pointed nose and sharp eyes gave him the look of an amiable ferret, an intelligent, sceptical air which became one of curt authority when he was dealing with the workers. He dressed like them and was, as they were, smeared with coal; and in order to command their respect he demonstrated an almost foolhardy courage, negotiating the most awkward spots in the mine, always the first on the scene when there was a rock-fall or a firedamp explosion.

  ‘Here we are at last. Am I right, Dansaert?’ he asked.

  The overman, a Belgian with a podgy face and a large, sensual nose, replied with exaggerated politeness:

  ‘Yes, Monsieur Négrel, this is the man we took on this morning.’

  They both slithered their way halfway down the coal-face, and Étienne was asked to climb up to them. The engineer raised his lamp to take a look but did not question him.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘It’s just that I don’t like the idea of taking complete strangers in off the street, that’s all…So make sure this doesn’t happen again.’

  He paid no heed to the various arguments that were put to him, about the requirements of the job and the wish to have men rather than women putting the tubs. As the hewers were taking up their picks again, he had begun to examine the roof. All at once he shouted:

  ‘What the hell’s going on, Maheu? Don’t you give a damn what anyone says?…You’ll all be buried alive, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oh, it’s solid enough,’ Maheu replied calmly.

  ‘What do you mean ‘‘solid’’?…But the rock’s already sagging, and the way you’re putting the props in every two metres, anyone would think you’d rather not bother! Ah, you’re all the same, you lot. You’d rather have your skulls crushed to smithereens than leave the seam for a single second and spend the necessary time on timbering!…Kindly sho
re that up at once. And with twice the number of props. Do you understand?’

  When he saw that the miners were going to be uncooperative and start arguing the point, claiming that they were perfectly good judges of what safety measures were necessary, he let fly:

  ‘Look here! When you all get your skulls smashed in, it’s not you that’s going to have to answer for the consequences, is it? Of course not. It’s the Company that’ll have to fork out for pensions for you or your wives…I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again. We know what you’re like. For the sake of two more tubs a day you’d all rather get yourselves killed.’

  Despite his growing anger Maheu still managed to say evenly:

  ‘If we were properly paid, we’d do better timbering.’

  The engineer shrugged but made no reply. He had now reached the bottom of the coal-face and simply called up to them:

  ‘You have one hour left. You’d better all help. And I’m fining this team three francs.’

  There was much muttering and grumbling among the miners at this. Only their sense of hierarchy held them in check, the quasi-military hierarchy from overman down to pit-boy, which made them each subordinate to the person above. Nevertheless Chaval and Levaque both made an angry gesture while Maheu tried to calm them with a look. Zacharie simply shrugged his shoulders in dismissive mockery. But of all of them Étienne was perhaps the most outraged. Ever since he had found himself down in this hell-hole, the spirit of resistance had gradually been growing within him. He looked at Catherine and saw her resigned air, as she bent to the yoke. Was it possible that people could work themselves to death at such terrible labour, down here in this mortal darkness, and still not earn even enough for their daily bread?

  Négrel, meanwhile, was departing with Dansaert, who had been content to keep nodding his approval. Once more their raised voices could be heard; they had stopped again and were inspecting the timbering along the roadway where the hewers were responsible for the maintenance along the first ten metres back from the coal-face.