The Voreux (Part One)

The plain lay bare and flat under a starless night, a darkness so thick it seemed solid. Along the high road from Marchiennes to Montsou, ten straight kilometres of paving cut through beet fields, a man was walking alone. He could not see the black ground in front of him, and he only knew how wide and flat the horizon was by the March wind, which swept across it in long icy gusts, as if over a sea, frozen from crossing leagues of marsh and naked earth. Not a tree stood against the sky. The road ran on with the stiffness of a jetty through the blinding spray of the dark.

He had left Marchiennes at about two in the morning. He walked with long strides, shivering in his thin cotton jacket and corduroy trousers, a small bundle knotted in a checked handkerchief bothering him under his arm. His hands were raw with cold and he kept shoving them into his pockets. His name was Étienne Lantier. He was twenty-one, a mechanic, and a week ago he had been thrown out of his job on the railway at Lille for striking his foreman — he had been drinking, and drink always woke something savage in him that frightened him afterwards. Since then he had tramped from works to works, and everywhere the answer was the same: no hands wanted, times were bad, the crisis was spreading.

Three red fires appeared to the left, burning in the open air as though hung in space. Closer, he made out the shape of a pit — a few lanterns, buildings huddled together, a chimney, the gallows-frame of a headgear. Out of a pipe somewhere came the long, heavy, steady breath of a pumping engine, panting like a monster that never slept.

By the nearest brazier stood an old man in a woollen cap and a blue jacket, with a wagon and a white horse waiting at the edge of a tip of slag.

"Good morning," said Étienne. "Is there any work going here?"

The old man looked at him for a long moment before answering, and then began to cough — a hard, scraping cough that ended with him spitting a gob of black on the reddened ground.

"Work? No. No work here."

He was the carter on the tip, and he had been in the pits for fifty years. He told Étienne so in the slow way of old men who talk to keep warm. He had started at eight, a trapper boy, then haulier, then hewer, and when his legs went they had put him up top, first to sort coal and now to drive the horse. People called him Bonnemort — "good death" — because three times they had pulled him half-dead out of the mine: once roasted, once with his legs crushed, once full of earth. His real name was Vincent Maheu, and the Maheus had been at the Voreux and the other Montsou pits for a hundred years and more, since his grandfather Guillaume found the rich seam that still bore his name.

"And what I spit," he said, wiping his mouth, "is coal. I'll be spitting it till I die. There's enough in my body to keep me warm the rest of my days."

Étienne looked at the pit. Little by little, out of the dark, it took shape: the sheds, the screening hall, the tall chimney, the brick engine-house. Crouched in the hollow, it had the look of some evil beast, squatting there to swallow men, and its slow, heavy breathing seemed to grow louder as it digested human flesh.

"And who does it all belong to?"

The old man waved his hand toward the dark. "Them. The Company." He did not really know who they were. Somewhere, in Paris, people who never came here; shareholders who lived in their fine houses while the coal came up. There was the director, M. Hennebeau, whose house stood in Montsou. There were rich people round about who held shares — the Grégoires, at La Piolaine. "But the ones who own it, the real ones — nobody's ever seen them. It's like a god sitting somewhere in a tabernacle, being fed."

The wind had grown stronger. The red fires leaned and flared. Down there, the old man said, things were going badly; orders were falling off; at Montsou they had begun to lay men off. Then the bell of the pit rang four, and he climbed back onto his wagon. Étienne stood alone, hungry, his stomach empty since the day before, looking at the monster in its hollow and asking himself whether he should go on walking.

In the miners' village called the Two Hundred and Forty, the cuckoo clock struck four in the Maheus' house. Nothing stirred. Then Catherine woke, from long habit, before anyone else. She was fifteen, small and pale, with the greenish complexion of girls who grow up in the dark. She felt for the matches, lit the candle, and the narrow upstairs room came out of the night: three beds jammed together, her brothers Zacharie and Jeanlin asleep in one, she and her sister Alzire in another, and through the door on the landing her parents with the little ones and the baby, Estelle, three months old, in her cradle.

"Get up, Zacharie! Jeanlin, it's four o'clock!"

There was groaning and pulling of covers. The boys dragged themselves out. In the next room Maheu, her father, coughed and sat up; he was forty-two, broad and slow, with the pale skin of a man who had always worked by lamplight. Maheude, the mother, woke with the baby already crying.

Downstairs the kitchen smelled of cold fat. Catherine raked the fire, made the coffee — mostly chicory, boiled again from yesterday's grounds — and cut the bread for the "briquets," the two slices of bread and butter, or of bread and nothing, that the miners took down with them. There was nothing left in the cupboard. Maheude came down in her nightdress with the baby at her breast and stood looking at the empty shelf.

"There's nothing for tonight," she said. "Not a sou in the house, and pay day not till next week. And we owe sixty francs at Maigrat's."

"I'll try at the Grégoires'," she went on, more to herself than to anyone. "They give sometimes."

Maheu said nothing. He drank his coffee, laced his heavy shoes, and the four of them — the father, Zacharie, Catherine in her trousers and canvas jacket like a boy, little Jeanlin with his green eyes and big ears — went out into the black wind. All along the rows of brick houses, doors were opening; there were coughs, the click of clogs, lamps bobbing. The whole village was flowing out toward the Voreux.

At the pit, the shed where the men gathered was full of the clamour of the lamp-room and the clatter of iron. Étienne had come down to it after all, drawn by the warmth. The Maheus' team was one short: the haulier Fleurance, a big girl who pushed tubs for them, had died suddenly in the night, and they were going down with no one to replace her. Maheu, seeing the young stranger standing there, looked him over.

"You want work? Can you push a tub?"

"I can learn."

Maheu went to the overman. A few minutes later, Étienne was standing in the iron cage with a lamp in his hand and a leather cap on his head, wedged among men he did not know, and the cage dropped.

It fell into blackness with a dull hiss. The light of the shaft top vanished. Water dripped and then streamed on them, icy, as they went past the water-bearing strata; the walls rushed by. Étienne gripped the bar, feeling as if he were falling forever. Beside him a slender boy in trousers watched him with a mocking smile — and when they reached the bottom, five hundred and fifty metres down, and the boy laughed at his face, he realised with a jolt that it was a girl. It was Catherine.

"You're a girl!"

"What did you think?" she said, and laughed again.

A big young man with a red moustache had pushed between them — Chaval, a hewer in Maheu's team, who looked at Étienne with immediate dislike.

The main roadway at the bottom was lit and vaulted, with rails and a great echoing coming and going of tubs and horses. Old Bataille, the white horse who had lived down here ten years without seeing daylight, plodded past dragging his train. Then the team set off along the galleries, which grew lower and narrower and hotter, until they reached the seam they were working, the Guillaume seam, so thin that the hewers had to lie on their sides to cut.

There Étienne watched them begin. Maheu, Zacharie, Levaque and Chaval stripped to the waist and then further, wedged in the coal like insects in a crack, picking away with short strokes, the sweat streaming down their blackened bodies, the heat rising as they worked. Each man was lying with his shoulder squeezed under the rock, a lamp hooked a few inches from his face, breathing the dust. Coal fell. The water dripping from above landed steadily on Maheu's face, drop by drop, in the same spot, until it drove him mad and he swore.

Catherine showed Étienne how to load the tubs and push them along the rails to the passing-place. He was clumsy at first; his tub went off the rails, and he had to put his back against it and heave it up while she watched with her hands on her hips. She lifted hers back on as easily as a cat. He was furious at being beaten by a girl, and then furious with himself, and he set his teeth and pushed until his shoulders burned.

Around ten, the engineer Négrel, the director's nephew, came by with Dansaert, the head overman. Négrel was a thin young man with a small fair moustache, clever, cool, mocking. He looked up at the timbering and frowned.

"Your timbers are a disgrace. You'll have the roof on top of you. You'll be fined three francs."

Maheu protested: if they spent their time on timbering, they would never cut their coal; and they were paid by the tub. Négrel shrugged. The Company would have to do something about the timbering, he said; one of these days it would. And he went off, leaving behind him a muttering anger.

At the break, Catherine sat down by Étienne with her bread. He had nothing. She broke her slices in two and gave him half without a word.

They talked in low voices, their faces close in the little light of their lamps. She told him she was fifteen; that she had started down at ten; that her mother had had seven children; that there was no money anywhere. He told her about Lille, about his trade, about his mother in Paris. He felt a softness growing in him toward this pale child who was so tough and so gentle at once. He asked her if she had a sweetheart, and she said no, laughing, embarrassed. He was about to touch her hand when Chaval came out of the dark, seized her by the shoulders, and kissed her hard on the mouth in front of him, as if to show him who she belonged to. Then he went back to his place without a word.

Catherine was red to the ears. "He's not my sweetheart," she said. "He does that." Étienne said nothing. Something hot and violent rose in him and he pushed it down.

The afternoon was long. The heat grew worse. Down the passages there were sudden draughts and the smell of firedamp; somewhere, a fall of rock rumbled. When the shift ended and they climbed back to the bottom of the shaft and stood once more in the cage, Étienne was so exhausted that he could hardly see. On the surface, in the grey afternoon, he swore to himself that he would leave, that he would never go down that hole again.

But when he saw Catherine walking off toward the village with her father and brothers, her lamp swinging, looking back once over her shoulder, he did not leave. He went to the Avantage, the café kept by Rasseneur, a sacked miner, and took a room. He would go down again tomorrow.