The Village (Part Two)

The Grégoires' house at La Piolaine stood in a park of old trees two kilometres from Montsou, square and solid, warm with ease. At eight o'clock that morning Cécile, their only daughter, was still asleep. She was eighteen, plump and rosy, and her parents adored her and would not let anyone wake her.

The Grégoire fortune went back to an ancestor, Honoré Grégoire, who in the last century had invested ten thousand francs in a small speculative company digging for coal near Montsou. Everyone had laughed at him. Then the coal had been found, the company had grown into the great Montsou Company, and the single share he had bought had multiplied until it was worth a million. For three generations the Grégoires had lived on it without lifting a finger. M. Grégoire liked to say that the share was like land: it worked for you while you slept. He did not like to sell, did not like to gamble; he believed in the mine as one believes in God.

In the kitchen, Mélanie the cook had baked a brioche. When Cécile came down at last, the whole household fussed over her, and they were at breakfast, the brioche golden on its plate, when the maid announced that a woman from the village had come with two children.

It was Maheude, with Lénore and Henri, shivering in the hall. She had walked from the Two Hundred and Forty in the wind. She stood with her hands crossed over her belly, ashamed, and explained in a low voice: seven children, the eldest earning, the little ones not; the debts; the cuts in pay; nothing in the house since yesterday.

"Poor woman," said Madame Grégoire. "Cécile, find those clothes for the children."

Cécile brought out a bundle of old woollens and two little dresses. Maheude thanked her, but her eyes kept going back to the brioche on the table. She hesitated, and then forced herself to say it:

"If you could lend me five francs, Madame…"

The Grégoires exchanged looks. It was a rule with them never to give money. Money went to drink; the poor wasted it. They gave bread, clothes, advice. Cécile, flushing a little, cut two slices of the brioche and wrapped them for the children. M. Grégoire spoke kindly but firmly about thrift, about the drink-shops, about how the miners had too many children. Maheude listened in silence, then took her children and went out.

Out on the road she let her anger come. Five francs! Their brioche alone was worth more. And to think that the money in that house came out of the pit, out of Maheu's back and Catherine's arms.

She went next to Maigrat's shop on the Montsou road. Maigrat, a former overman, kept the grocery the Company tolerated, and all the village bought there on credit. He stood behind his counter, fat and pale, and refused her. Sixty francs owing already. She begged; he said no again; she begged again, without pride now, for the children. At last, with a sour face, he let her have a loaf, some coffee and a little butter, and wrote it down. She went home with her bundle, half relieved, half sick.

The village spent the day as it always did when the men were down. The women gossiped from doorstep to doorstep. La Levaque, untidy and fat, kept a lodger, Bouteloup, who was said to share more than her table; La Pierronne, pretty and coquettish, was whispered to be the favourite of Dansaert, the head overman. The Levaques' daughter Philomène, nineteen, already had two children by Zacharie Maheu and lived at home, coughing, waiting for him to marry her. Old Bonnemort sat by the stove, spitting black. Alzire, the little hunchback, nine years old, did the housework like a small woman, scrubbing and minding the baby, while Lénore and Henri squabbled under the table.

At three, the men came back. Maheu sat down to his soup black from head to foot, and then Maheude filled the big tub with hot water in front of the fire and he stripped and washed, as all the miners did, in the middle of the kitchen, with no shame because there was no room for shame. His wife scrubbed his back. It was the hour of the day that belonged to them. When he was clean he sat in his shirt and smoked his pipe, and she told him about the Grégoires and the brioche and Maigrat, and he said nothing, only drew harder on his pipe.

Étienne, in his room at the Avantage, could not sleep that night for the pain in his limbs. In the days that followed, his body hardened. He learned the work. He learned to push without wasting his strength, to crouch without cracking his head, to breathe the hot air. Maheu, who was fair, began to like him: the lad was intelligent, worked hard, did not drink too much. Catherine spoke to him less; Chaval was always somewhere near.

In the evenings, below in Rasseneur's café, Étienne listened and talked. Rasseneur, a big moderate man with a round face, had been sacked by the Company three years earlier for leading a protest, and had married a woman who kept the café; he still had great influence over the miners. He wanted change, but slowly, reasonably, by asking. With him often sat a thin, fair, silent young man with a girl's face and very pale eyes — Souvarine, an engine-man at the Voreux. He was Russian, of noble family, who had studied medicine, then fled his country after a failed plot against the Tsar, and now lived here, poor, drinking nothing, saying little, with a tame rabbit named Pologne that he held in his lap and stroked while he smoked cigarette after cigarette.

Étienne told them about Pluchart, his old foreman at Lille, now an organiser of the International Working Men's Association, newly founded in London. Rasseneur was wary; Souvarine smiled with contempt.

"Your International," he said. "Nonsense. Workers who want to become bosses. It's all got to go. Fire everywhere, the old world burned to the ground. Afterwards — something will grow."

Étienne listened, half shocked, half fascinated. He had read a little, without method — pamphlets, newspapers, things he half understood — and he was beginning to feel words gathering in him.

On Sunday evening he walked out on the plain. Spring had come at last, sharp and green. Along the roads, behind the slag-heaps, in the young wheat, couples from the village lay in the warm dusk; it was the only place they had to themselves. Étienne walked on, troubled, toward the old abandoned pit of Réquillart, its shaft half caved in.

And there, behind the rotting sheds, he saw Catherine with Chaval. Chaval had his arms around her and was pulling her toward the dark corner by the wall. She seemed to try to draw back, and then she gave in, not out of love, but because she did not dare refuse — because that was what happened to girls in the village sooner or later. Étienne stood rooted. What he was seeing was a man forcing a child who would not say no, and something murderous rose in him. He turned and walked away into the night, his fists clenched, his throat burning, telling himself that it was nothing to him — that she was not his — that he would leave this place.