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  ‘Er, comrade, I don’t suppose they’re looking for another pair of hands round here, are they? I’ll do whatever’s required.’

  She looked at him in surprise, startled by this sudden voice coming from the shadows. But, behind her, Maheu had heard and stopped to respond with a brief word. No, they didn’t need anyone. But the thought of this poor devil of a worker being left to roam the countryside stayed with him; and as he walked away, he said to the others:

  ‘There you are! That could be us, you see…So we mustn’t grumble. It’s not everyone who gets the chance to do an honest day’s work.’

  The group walked in and made straight for the changing-area, a huge room with roughly plastered walls and padlocked cupboards along each side. In the middle stood an iron stove, a kind of doorless oven ablaze with red embers and so fully stoked that lumps of coal kept splitting and tumbling out on to the earthen floor. The only light in the room came from this grate, and blood-red reflections played along the grimy woodwork and up on to a ceiling that was coated with black dust.

  As the Maheus came in, peals of laughter could be heard amid the stifling heat. Some thirty workers were standing with their backs to the flames, roasting themselves with an air of profound contentment. Everyone came here like this before going down and got themselves a good skinful of warmth so that they could face the dampness of the mine. But that morning there was even more merriment than usual because they were teasing La Mouquette, one of the putters, a good-natured girl of eighteen with huge breasts and buttocks that were almost bursting out of her clothes. She lived at Réquillart with her father, old Mouque, who looked after the horses, and her brother Mouquet, who was a banksman, except that since they didn’t all work the same hours she would go to the mine on her own; and, whether in the cornfields during summer or up against a wall in wintertime, she would take her pleasure with the lover of the moment. The whole pit had taken its turn; it was simply a case of ‘after you, comrade, and no harm done’. When somebody once suggested she’d been with a nailer from Marchiennes, she had almost exploded with anger, screaming about how she was a respectable girl and how she’d sooner cut off her own arm than for anybody to be able to say they’d ever seen her with anyone but a colliery worker.

  ‘So what about that tall fellow, Chaval, then? He’s had his day, has he?’ one of the miners said with a snigger. ‘Helped yourself to that other little chap instead, have you? But he’d need a ladder, he would!…I’ve seen the pair of you round the back of Réquillart, and sure enough, there he was standing on a milestone.’

  ‘So?’ La Mouquette answered cheerfully. ‘What’s that to you? At least nobody asked you to come and give him a push.’

  The men laughed even louder at this good-natured coarseness as they stood there flexing their shoulders, already half roasted by the fire; and meanwhile La Mouquette, also roaring with laughter, continued to move among them, flaunting the indecency of her dress and offering a spectacle that was at once comic and disturbing as she displayed lumps of flesh so excessively huge that they seemed almost a deformity.

  But the merriment ceased as La Mouquette began to tell Maheu how Fleurance, the tall Fleurance, would not be coming any more: they’d found her stone dead in her bed the night before. Some said she’d died of a heart condition, others of downing a litre of gin too fast. Maheu was in despair. More bad luck! Now he’d lost one of his putters and there was no way of finding an immediate replacement! He worked on a subcontracted basis, and four of them worked the seam together, himself, Zacharie, Levaque and Chaval. If there was only Catherine to put the tubs, their rate of production would be affected. Suddenly he shouted:

  ‘Wait a minute! What about that fellow that was looking for work?’

  At that moment Dansaert was passing the changing-room. Maheu told him what had happened and asked permission to take the man on; and he played on the fact that the Company was keen to replace the female putters with lads, like at Anzin. The overman smiled at this, since normally the policy of excluding women from working below the surface was anathema to the miners, who worried about their daughters finding a job and didn’t much care about questions of hygiene or morality. Eventually, after some hesitation, he gave his permission, but on condition that this had to be ratified by the engineer, M. Négrel.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Zacharie, ‘at the rate he was going, he’ll be miles away by now.’

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

  ‘What are you standing there for, then? Go and fetch him!’ Maheu shouted.

  The girl shot off as a sea of miners moved up towards the shaft and left the fire clear for others. Without waiting for his father, Jeanlin moved away also to go and fetch his lamp, along with Bébert, a big immature lad, and Lydie, a puny little girl of ten. Ahead of them La Mouquette could be heard protesting loudly in the dark staircase, calling them filthy brats and threatening to give them a slap in the face if they pinched her again.

  Sure enough, Étienne was in the boiler-house talking to the stoker as he shovelled coal into the grates. It made him feel very cold to think of the black night into which he now had to return. Nevertheless he was on the point of resolving to leave when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Catherine. ‘There is something for you.’

  At first he did not understand. Then he was overwhelmed with joy and energetically clasped the girl’s hands.

  ‘Thanks, comrade…You’re a decent bugger!’

  She began to laugh, gazing at him in the red light gleaming from the grates. She found it amusing that he should take her for a boy, with her slim figure and her bun hidden under her cap. He, too, laughed happily; and they remained like that for a moment, laughing together, face to face, their cheeks flushed.

  In the changing-room Maheu was crouched in front of his locker taking off his clogs and his thick woollen stockings. When Étienne arrived, everything was quickly settled: thirty sous a day, it was tiring work but he’d soon get the hang of it. Maheu advised him to keep his shoes on, and he lent him an old leather skullcap designed to protect the top of the head, a precaution which both father and children nevertheless scorned to adopt. They took their tools from the locker, which also contained Fleurance’s shovel. Then, after Maheu had locked away their clogs and stockings, as well as Étienne’s bundle, he grew suddenly impatient:

  ‘But where the hell’s that animal Chaval got to now? Screwing some girl on a pile of spoil somewhere, I’ll bet…We’re half an hour late today.’

  Zacharie and Levaque were quietly toasting their backs. Eventually the former said:

  ‘You’re not waiting for Chaval, are you?…He got here before we did and went straight down.’

  ‘What? You knew and didn’t say anything?…Come on, come on, let’s get going then.’

  Catherine, who was warming her hands, was obliged to follow the group. Étienne let her pass and then climbed the steps behind her. Once more he found himself wandering in a labyrinth of dark stairs and corridors, where the tramp of bare feet sounded like the slap of old slippers. But the lamp-room was still blazing away behind its glass partition. It was full of shelves stacked with row upon row of Davy lamps, hundreds of them, which had been inspected and cleaned the night before and now burned like candles in a memorial chapel. As they passed the counter, each miner would take his lamp, which had his number stamped on it, examine it, and then close it himself; while the lamp-clerk, seated at a table, would record the time of descent in a register.

  Maheu had to request a lamp for his new putter. Then came one last safety measure: the miners were required to file past a man who checked that all the lamps were securely closed.

  ‘Blimey! It’s not very warm in here,’ Catherine muttered, shivering.

  Étienne simply shook his head. He was standing in front of the pit-shaft, in the middle of the huge, draughty hall. He considered himself as brave as the next man, but he was unnerved by the rumble of the tubs, the dull thud of t
he signals, the muffled bellowing of the loudhailer, and the sight of the constantly whirring cables as they were wound and unwound at full steam by the spools of the winding-engine. Up and down the cages went, like stealthy beasts of the night, swallowing men by the mouthful as they disappeared down the black throat of the mine. It was his turn now. He was very cold and said nothing as he waited anxiously, which made Zacharie and Levaque snigger; for they both disapproved of the stranger being taken on like this, Levaque especially, who felt hurt at not being consulted. So Catherine was pleased to hear her father explaining things to the young man.

  ‘Can you see, up there, above the cage? There’s a safety brake, iron hooks that dig into the guides if the cable breaks. It works. Well, most of the time anyway…The shaft itself is divided vertically into three sections by wooden planks. In the middle are the cages, on the left is the emergency shaft where there are ladders – ’

  He broke off to complain, though without raising his voice too loudly:

  ‘What’s the hold-up, for God’s sake! It’s bloody freezing in here!’

  Richomme, the deputy, was waiting to go down also, with his open lamp fixed on to a stud in his leather cap, and he heard Maheu complaining.

  ‘Careful! Walls have ears!’ he muttered paternally with the voice of one who used to be a coal-getter and whose sympathies still lay with his comrades. ‘All in good time…Anyway, here we go. In you get with the rest of your team.’

  The cage was indeed now waiting for them, locked into its keeps, its thin wire mesh clamped in bands of sheet metal. Maheu, Zacharie, Levaque and Catherine slipped into a tub at the back and, since this took five people, Étienne climbed in also; but the best places had been taken, and he had to squash in next to the girl, whose elbow stuck into his stomach. His lamp was getting in the way, and they told him to hang it from a buttonhole in his jacket. But he didn’t hear, and continued to hold on to it awkwardly. The loading continued, above and below them, as though a herd of animals was being shovelled pell-mell into a furnace. Why hadn’t they left? What was happening? Étienne felt as if they’d already been waiting for hours. Finally there was a jolt, and they were engulfed; his surroundings took flight, and a giddy sensation clutched at his stomach as they fell. This lasted for as long as they could still see, down past the two levels where the coal was off-loaded, with the shaft lining whizzing past in a blur. As they plunged down the pit into total darkness, he became dizzy and lost all sense of reality.

  ‘We’re away,’ Maheu said simply.

  Everyone was calm. Occasionally Étienne wondered if he was going up or down. There were moments when they seemed not to be moving at all as the cage went straight down without touching the guides on either side; and then suddenly these wooden beams would start vibrating, as though they had come loose, and he would be afraid that some disaster was about to strike. As it was, he couldn’t see the sides of the shaft even though his face was pressed to the mesh of the cage. The bodies huddled at his feet were barely visible in the light from the Davy lamps. Only the deputy’s open lamp, in the next tub, shone out like a lighthouse.

  ‘The shaft’s four metres across,’ Maheu continued to inform him. ‘It could do with being retubbed, the water’s coming in everywhere…Listen! We’re just getting there now. Can you hear it?’

  Étienne had indeed just begun to wonder why it sounded as though it were raining. At first a few heavy drops of water had splattered on to the cage roof, as though a shower were beginning; and now the rain was falling faster, streaming down in a veritable deluge. Presumably the roof must have had a hole in it because a trickle of water had landed on his shoulder and soaked him to the skin. It was becoming icy cold, and they were plunging down into the damp and the dark when suddenly they passed through a blaze of light and caught a flashing glimpse of a cave with men moving about. Already they had resumed their descent into the void.

  Maheu was saying:

  ‘That was the first level. We’re three hundred and twenty metres down now…Look at the speed.’

  He raised his lamp and shone it on to one of the beams that guided the cages; it was tearing past like a railway line beneath a train travelling at full speed. But still that was all they could see. Three more levels flashed past in a startled burst of light. The deafening rain continued to teem down in the darkness.

  ‘My God, it’s deep,’ Étienne muttered under his breath.

  It was as if they had been falling like this for hours. He was suffering from the awkward position he’d taken up in the tub, and especially from the painful presence of Catherine’s elbow, but he didn’t dare move. She didn’t say a word; he could simply feel her next to him, warming him. When the cage finally reached the bottom, five hundred and fifty-four metres down, he was astonished to learn that the descent had taken exactly one minute. But the sound of the cage locking into its keeps and the accompanying sense of having something solid underfoot made him suddenly euphoric; and he joked familiarly with Catherine:

  ‘What have you got under there that keeps you so warm?…I hope that’s only your elbow that’s sticking into my ribs!’

  It was her turn to speak frankly. After all, what a stupid idiot he was, still thinking she was a boy! Couldn’t he see straight?

  ‘Or making you go blind, more like!’ she replied, which provoked a gale of laughter that left an astonished Étienne completely at a loss.

  The cage was emptying, and the miners crossed pit-bottom, a cavity hewn out of the rock, which was reinforced with masonry vaults and lit by three large, open lamps. The onsetters were busy wheeling the full tubs roughly across the cast-iron flooring. A smell of cellars oozed from the walls, a cool, damp reek of saltpetre mixed with the occasional waft of warmth from the nearby stable. Four roadways led off from this point, their mouths gaping.

  ‘This way,’ Maheu told Étienne. ‘We’re not there yet. We’ve still got a good two kilometres to go.’

  The miners split up into groups and vanished into these four black holes. Fifteen of them had just entered the one on the left; and Étienne followed, walking behind Maheu, who was behind Catherine, Zacharie and Levaque. It was an excellent haulage roadway running at right angles to the seam and hollowed out of such solid rock that it had needed very little timbering. Along they walked in single file, on and on, silently, by the tiny light of their lamps. Étienne kept tripping over the rails. For a little while now a particular muffled sound had been worrying him, the distant tumult of a storm rising from the bowels of the earth and which seemed to be getting increasingly violent. Did this thunderous rumbling presage a rock-fall that was going to bring the huge mass of earth overhead crashing down on them all? A patch of light pierced the darkness, he felt the rock vibrate, and, having pressed his back flat to the wall, like his comrades, he saw a large white horse go past his face, pulling a train of coal-tubs. On the first tub, holding the reins, sat Bébert, while Jeanlin ran barefoot behind the last, hanging on to its rim with both hands.

  On they trudged. Presently they came to a crossroads, where two further roadways led off, and the group divided again as the miners gradually dispersed among the various workings in the mine. Here the haulage roadway was timbered: oak props supported the roof and retained the crumbling rock behind a wooden framework through which one could see the layers of shale sparkling with mica and the solid mass of dull, rough sandstone. Trains of tubs went by all the time, full or empty, thundering past each other before being borne off into the darkness by phantom beasts at a ghostly trot. On a double track in a siding a long black snake lay sleeping: it was a stationary train, and its horse snorted in the darkness, which was so thick that the dim outline of the horse’s quarters looked like a lump of rock that had fallen from the roof. Ventilation doors opened with a bang and then slowly closed again. As they walked on, the roadway gradually got narrower and lower, and they kept having to stoop to pass beneath its uneven roof.

  Étienne banged his head, hard. Without his leather cap he would have split his sku
ll. And yet he had been keeping his eyes firmly fixed on Maheu in front of him, following his every movement as his dark shape loomed against the light of the lamps beyond. None of the miners banged their heads, since each of them no doubt knew every bump along the way, whether it was a knot in the wood or a bulge in the rock. Étienne also found the slippery ground difficult, and it was getting wetter and wetter. From time to time they crossed what were virtually pools of water, as they could tell from the muddy squelch of their feet. But what surprised him most of all were the sudden changes in temperature. At the bottom of the shaft it had been very cold, and in the haulage roadway – through which all the air in the mine passed – an icy wind blew, whipped to a storm by the narrowness of the space between the walls. Then, as they penetrated deeper into the other roads, which each received only a meagre ration of air, the wind dropped and the temperature rose, to the point where the air became suffocatingly hot and as heavy as lead.

  Maheu had made no further comment. He turned right into another roadway, simply saying ‘the Guillaume seam’ to Étienne but without bothering to turn round.

  This was the seam where they were working one of the coal-faces. A few steps further and Étienne banged his head and elbows. The roof now sloped down so low that they had to walk for whole stretches of twenty or thirty metres bent double. Water came up to their ankles. They continued on for two hundred metres like this; and then suddenly Étienne saw Levaque, Zacharie and Catherine disappear, as though they had vanished through a thin cleft in the rock in front of him.