M. Gregoire began again: "And everything goes well at the pit?"

"Well, I am upset over this dirty crisis. Ah! we are paying for the prosperous years! They have built too many workshops, put down too many railways, invested too much capital with a view to a large return, and today the money is asleep. They can't get any more to make the whole thing work. Luckily things are not desperate; I shall get out of it somehow."

Like his cousin he had inherited a denier in the Montsou mines. But being an enterprising engineer, tormented by the desire for a royal fortune, he had hastened to sell out when the denier had reached a million. For some months he had been maturing a scheme. His wife possessed, through an uncle, the little concession of Vandame, where only two pits were open--Jean-Bart and Gaston-Marie--in an abandoned state, and with such defective material that the output hardly covered the cost. Now he was meditating the repair of Jean-Bart, the renewal of the engine, and the enlargement of the shaft so as to facilitate the descent, keeping Gaston-Marie only for exhaustion purposes. They ought to be able to shovel up gold there, he said. The idea was sound. Only the million had been spent over it, and this d.a.m.nable industrial crisis broke out at the moment when large profits would have shown that he was right. Besides, he was a bad manager, with a rough kindness towards his workmen, and since his wife's death he allowed himself to be pillaged, and also gave the rein to his daughters, the elder of whom talked of going on the stage, while the younger had already had three landscapes refused at the Salon, both of them joyous amid the downfall, and exhibiting in poverty their capacity for good household management.

"You see, Leon," he went on, in a hesitating voice, "you were wrong not to sell out at the same time as I did; now everything is going down. You run risk, and if you had confided your money to me and you would have seen what we should have done at Vandame in our mine!"

M. Gregoire finished his chocolate without haste. He replied peacefully: "Never! You know that I don't want to speculate. I live quietly, and it would be too foolish to worry my head over business affairs. And as for Montsou, it may continue to go down, we shall always get our living out of it. It doesn't do to be so diabolically greedy! Then, listen, it is you who will bite your fingers one day, for Montsou will rise again and Cecile's grandchildren will still get their white bread out of it."

Deneulin listened with a constrained smile.

"Then," he murmured, "if I were to ask you to put a hundred thousand francs in my affair you would refuse?"

But seeing the Gregoires' disturbed faces he regretted having gone so far; he put off his idea of a loan, reserving it until the case was desperate.

"Oh! I have not got to that! it is a joke. Good heavens! perhaps you are right; the money that other people earn for you is the best to fatten on."

They changed the conversation. Cecile spoke again of her cousins, whose tastes interested, while at the same time they shocked her. Madame Gregoire promised to take her daughter to see those dear little ones on the first fine day. M. Gregoire, however, with a distracted air, did not follow the conversation. He added aloud: "If I were in your place I wouldn't persist any more; I would treat with Montsou. They want it, and you will get your money back."

He alluded to an old hatred which existed between the concession of Montsou and that of Vandame. In spite of the latter's slight importance, its powerful neighbour was enraged at seeing, enclosed within its own sixty-seven communes, this square league which did not belong to it, and after having vainly tried to kill it had plotted to buy it at a low price when in a failing condition. The war continued without truce. Each party stopped its galleries at two hundred metres from the other; it was a duel to the last drop of blood, although the managers and engineers maintained polite relations with each other.

Deneulin's eyes had flamed up.

"Never!" he cried, in his turn. "Montsou shall never have Vandame as long as I am alive. I dined on Thursday at Hennebeau's, and I saw him fluttering around me. Last autumn, when the big men came to the administration building, they made me all sorts of advances. Yes, yes, I know them--those marquises, and dukes, and generals, and ministers! Brigands who would take away even your shirt at the corner of a wood."

He could not cease. Besides, M. Gregoire did not defend the administration of Montsou--the six stewards established by the treaty of 1760, who governed the Company despotically, and the five survivors of whom on every death chose the new member among the powerful and rich shareholders. The opinion of the owner of Piolaine, with his reasonable ideas, was that these gentlemen were sometimes rather immoderate in their exaggerated love of money.

Melanie had come to clear away the table. Outside the dogs were again barking, and Honorine was going to the door, when Cecile, who was stifled by heat and food, left the table.

"No, never mind! it must be for my lesson."

Deneulin had also risen. He watched the young girl go out, and asked, smiling: "Well! and the marriage with little Negrel?"

"Nothing has been settled," said Madame Gregroire; "it is only an idea. We must reflect."

"No doubt!" he went on, with a gay laugh. "I believe that the nephew and the aunt--What baffles me is that Madame Hennebeau should throw herself so on Cecile's neck."

But M. Gregoire was indignant. So distinguished a lady, and fourteen years older than the young man! It was monstrous; he did not like joking on such subjects. Deneulin, still laughing, shook hands with him and left.

"Not yet," said Cecile, coming back. "It is that woman with the two children. You know, mamma, the miner's wife whom we met. Are they to come in here?"

They hesitated. Were they very dirty? No, not very; and they would leave their sabots in the porch. Already the father and mother had stretched themselves out in the depths of their large easy-chairs. They were digesting there. The fear of change of air decided them.

"Let them come in, Honorine."

Then Maheude and her little ones entered, frozen and hungry, seized by fright on finding themselves in this room, which was so warm and smelled so nicely of the brioche.

Chapter 2.

THE room remained shut up and the shutters had allowed gradual streaks of daylight to form a fan on the ceiling. The confined air stupefied them so that they continued their night's slumber: Lenore and Henri in each other's arms, Alzire with her head back, lying on her hump; while Father Bonnemort, having the bed of Zacharie and Jeanlin to himself, snored with open mouth. No sound came from the closet where Maheude had gone to sleep again while suckling Estelle, her breast hanging to one side, the child lying across her belly, stuffed with milk, overcome also and stifling in the soft flesh of the bosom.

The clock below struck six. Along the front of the settlement one heard the sound of doors, then the clatter of sabots along the pavements; the screening women were going to the pit. And silence again fell until seven o'clock. Then shutters were drawn back, yawns and coughs were heard through the walls. For a long time a coffee-mill sc.r.a.ped, but no one awoke in the room.

Suddenly a sound of blows and shouts, far away, made Alzire sit up. She was conscious of the time, and ran barefooted to shake her mother.

"Mother, mother, it is late! you have to go out. Take care, you are crushing Estelle."

And she saved the child, half-stifled beneath the enormous ma.s.s of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Good gracious!" stammered Maheude, rubbing her eyes, "I'm so knocked up I could sleep all day. Dress Lenore and Henri, I'll take them with me; and you can take care of Estelle; I don't want to drag her along for fear of hurting her, this dog's weather."

She hastily washed herself and put on an old blue skirt, her cleanest, and a loose jacket of grey wool in which she had made two patches the evening before.

"And the soup! Good gracious!" she muttered again.

When her mother had gone down, upsetting everything, Alzire went back into the room taking with her Estelle, who had begun screaming. But she was used to the little one's rages; at eight she had all a woman's tender cunning in soothing and amusing her. She gently placed her in her still warm bed, and put her to sleep again, giving her a finger to suck. It was time, for now another disturbance broke out, and she had to make peace between Lenore and Henri, who at last awoke. These children could never get on together; it was only when they were asleep that they put their arms round one another's necks. The girl, who was six years old, as soon as she was awake set on the boy, her junior by two years, who received her blows without returning them. Both of them had the same kind of head, which was too large for them, as if blown out, with disorderly yellow hair. Alzire had to pull her sister by the legs, threatening to take the skin off her bottom. Then there was stamping over the washing, and over every garment that she put on to them. The shutters remained closed so as not to disturb Father Bonnemort's sleep. He went on snoring amid the children's frightful clatter.

"It's ready. Are you coming, up there?" shouted Maheude.

She had put back the blinds, and stirred up the fire, adding some coal to it. Her hope was that the old man had not swallowed all the soup. But she found the saucepan dry, and cooked a handful of vermicelli which she had been keeping for three days in reserve. They could swallow it with water, without b.u.t.ter, as there could not be any remaining from the day before, and she was surprised to find that Catherine in preparing the briquets had performed the miracle of leaving a piece as large as a nut. But this time the cupboard was indeed empty: nothing, not a crust, not an odd fragment, not a bone to gnaw. What was to become of them if Maigrat persisted in cutting short their credit, and if the Piolaine people would not give them the five francs? When the men and the girl returned from the pit they would want to eat, for unfortunately it had not yet been found out how to live without eating.

"Come down, will you?" she cried out, getting angry. "I ought to be gone by this!"

When Alzire and the children were there she divided the vermicelli in three small portions. She herself was not hungry, she said. Although Catherine had already poured water on the coffee-dregs of the day before, she did so over again, and swallowed two large gla.s.ses of coffee so weak that it looked like rusty water. That would keep her up all the same.

"Listen!" she repeated to Alzire. "You must let your grandfather sleep; you must watch that Estelle does not knock her head; and if she wakes, or if she howls too much, here! take this bit of sugar and melt it and give it her in spoonfuls. I know that you are sensible and won't eat it yourself."

"And school, mother?"

"School! well, that must be left for another day: I want you."

"And the soup? would you like me to make it if you come back late?"

"Soup, soup: no, wait till I come."

Alzire, with the precocious intelligence of a little invalid girl, could make soup very well. She must have understood, for she did not insist. Now the whole settlement was awake, bands of children were going to school, and one heard the trailing noise of their clogs. Eight o'clock struck, and a growing murmur of chatter arose on the left, among the Levaque people. The women were commencing their day around the coffee-pots, with their fists on their hips, their tongues turning without ceasing, like millstones. A faded head, with thick lips and flattened nose, was pressed against a window-pane, calling out: "Got some news. Stop a bit."

"No, no! later on," replied Maheude. "I have to go out."

And for fear of giving way to the offer of a gla.s.s of hot coffee she pushed Lenore and Henri, and set out with them. Up above, Father Bonnemort was still snoring with a rhythmic snore which rocked the house.

Outside, Maheude was surprised to find that the wind was no longer blowing. There had been a sudden thaw; the sky was earth-coloured, the walls were sticky with greenish moisture, and the roads were covered with pitch-like mud, a special kind of mud peculiar to the coal country, as black as diluted soot, thick and tenacious enough to pull off her sabots. Suddenly she boxed Lenore's ears, because the little one amused herself by piling the mud on her clogs as on the end of a shovel. On leaving the settlement she had gone along by the pit-bank and followed the road of the ca.n.a.l, making a short cut through broken-up paths, across rough country shut in by mossy palings. Sheds succeeded one another, long workshop buildings, tall chimneys spitting out soot, and soiling this ravaged suburb of an industrial district. Behind a clump of poplars the old Requillart pit exhibited its crumbling steeple, of which the large skeleton alone stood upright. And turning to the right, Maheude found herself on the high road.

"Stop, stop, dirty pig! I'll teach you to make rissoles." Now it was Henri, who had taken a handful of mud and was moulding it. The two children had their ears impartially boxed, and resumed their orderly progress, squinting down at the tracks they were making in the mud-heaps. They draggled along, already exhausted by their efforts to unstick their shoes at every step.

On the Marchiennes side the road unrolled its two leagues of pavement, which stretched straight as a ribbon soaked in cart grease between the reddish fields. But on the other side it went winding down through Montsou, which was built on the slope of a large undulation in the plain. These roads in the Nord, drawn like a string between manufacturing towns, with their slight curves, their slow ascents, gradually get lined with houses and tend to make the department one laborious city. The little brick houses, daubed over to enliven the climate, some yellow, others blue, others black--the last, no doubt, in order to reach at once their final shade--went serpentining down to right and to left to the bottom of the slope. A few large two-storied villas, the dwellings of the heads of the workshops, made gaps in the serried line of narrow facades. A church, also of brick, looked like a new model of a large furnace, with its square tower already stained by the floating coal dust. And amid the sugar works, the rope works, and the flour mills, there stood out ballrooms, restaurants, and beer-shops, which were so numerous that to every thousand houses there were more than five hundred inns.

As she approached the Company's Yards, a vast series of storehouses and workshops, Maheude decided to take Henri and Lenore by the hand, one on the right, the other on the left. Beyond was situated the house of the director, M. Hennebeau, a sort of vast chalet, separated from the road by a grating, and then a garden in which some lean trees vegetated. Just then, a carriage had stopped before the door and a gentleman with decorations and a lady in a fur cloak alighted: visitors just arrived from Paris at the Marchiennes station, for Madame Hennebeau, who appeared in the shadow of the porch, was uttering exclamations of surprise and joy.

"Come along, then, dawdlers!" growled Maheude, pulling the two little ones, who were standing in the mud.

When she arrived at Maigrat's, she was quite excited. Maigrat lived close to the manager; only a wall separated the latter's ground from his own small house, and he had there a warehouse, a long building which opened on to the road as a shop without a front. He kept everything there, grocery, cooked meats, fruit, and sold bread, beer, and saucepans. Formerly an overseer at the Voreux, he had started with a small canteen; then, thanks to the protection of his superiors, his business had enlarged, gradually killing the Montsou retail trade. He centralized merchandise, and the considerable custom of the settlements enabled him to sell more cheaply and to give longer credit. Besides, he had remained in the Company's hands, and they had built his small house and his shop.

"Here I am again, Monsieur Maigrat," said Maheude humbly, finding him standing in front of his door.

He looked at her without replying. He was a stout, cold, polite man, and he prided himself on never changing his mind.

"Now you won't send me away again, like yesterday. We must have bread from now to Sat.u.r.day. Sure enough, we owe you sixty francs these two years."

She explained in short, painful phrases. It was an old debt contracted during the last strike. Twenty times over they had promised to settle it, but they had not been able; they could not even give him forty sous a fortnight. And then a misfortune had happened two days before; she had been obliged to pay twenty francs to a shoemaker who threatened to seize their things. And that was why they were without a sou. Otherwise they would have been able to go on until Sat.u.r.day, like the others.

Maigrat, with protruded belly and folded arms, shook his head at every supplication.

"Only two loaves, Monsieur Maigrat. I am reasonable, I don't ask for coffee. Only two three-pound loaves a day."

"No," he shouted at last, at the top of his voice.

His wife had appeared, a pitiful creature who pa.s.sed all her days over a ledger, without even daring to lift her head. She moved away, frightened at seeing this unfortunate woman turning her ardent, beseeching eyes towards her. It was said that she yielded the conjugal bed to the putters among the customers. It was a known fact that when a miner wished to prolong his credit, he had only to send his daughter or his wife, plain or pretty, it mattered not, provided they were complaisant.

Maheude, still imploring Maigrat with her look, felt herself uncomfortable under the pale keenness of his small eyes, which seemed to undress her. It made her angry; she would have understood before she had had seven children, when she was young. And she went off, violently dragging Lenore and Henri who were occupied in picking up nut-sh.e.l.ls from the gutter and examining them.

"This won't bring you luck, Monsieur Maigrat, remember!"

Now there only remained the Piolaine people. If these would not throw her a five-franc piece she might as well lie down and die. She had taken the Joiselle road on the left. The administration building was there at the corner of the road, a veritable brick palace, where the great people from Paris, princes and generals and members of the Government, came every autumn to give large dinners. As she walked she was already spending the five francs, first bread, then coffee, afterwards a quarter of b.u.t.ter, a bushel of potatoes for the morning soup and the evening stew; finally, perhaps, a bit of brawn, for the father needed meat.

The cure of Montsou, Abbe Joire, was pa.s.sing, holding up his ca.s.sock, with the delicate air of a fat, well-nourished cat afraid of wetting its fur. He was a mild man who pretended not to interest himself in anything, so as not to vex either the workers or the masters.

"Good day, monsieur le cure."

Without stopping he smiled at the children, and left her planted in the middle of the road. She was not religious, but she had suddenly imagined that this priest would give her something.

And the journey began again through the black, sticky mud. There were still two kilometres to walk, and the little ones dragged behind more than ever, for they were frightened, and no longer amused themselves. To right and to left of the path the same vague landscape unrolled, enclosed within mossy palings, the same factory buildings, dirty with smoke, bristling with tall chimneys. Then the flat land was spread out in immense open fields, like an ocean of brown clods, without a tree-trunk, as far as the purplish line of the forest of Vandame.

"Carry me, mother."

She carried them one after the other. Puddles made holes in the pathway, and she pulled up her clothes, fearful of arriving too dirty. Three times she nearly fell, so sticky was that confounded pavement. And as they at last arrived before the porch, two enormous dogs threw themselves upon them, barking so loudly that the little ones yelled with terror. The coachman was obliged to take a whip to them.

"Leave your sabots, and come in," repeated Honorine. In the dining-room the mother and children stood motionless, dazed by the sudden heat, and very constrained beneath the gaze of this old lady and gentleman, who were stretched out in their easy-chairs.

"Cecile," said the old lady, "fulfil your little duties."

The Gregoires charged Cecile with their charities. It was part of their idea of a good education. One must be charitable. They said themselves that their house was the house of G.o.d. Besides, they flattered themselves that they performed their charity with intelligence, and they were exercised by a constant fear lest they should be deceived, and so encourage vice. So they never gave money, never! Not ten sous, not two sous, for it is a well-known fact that as soon as a poor man gets two sous he drinks them. Their alms were, therefore, always in kind, especially in warm clothing, distributed during the winter to needy children.

"Oh! the poor dears!" exclaimed Cecile, '"how pale they are from the cold! Honorine, go and look for the parcel in the cupboard."

The servants were also gazing at these miserable creatures with the pity and vague uneasiness of girls who are in no difficulty about their own dinners. While the housemaid went upstairs, the cook forgot her duties, leaving the rest of the brioche on the table, and stood there swinging her empty hands.

"I still have two woollen dresses and some comforters," Cecile went on; "you will see how warm they will be, the poor dears!"

Then Maheude found her tongue, and stammered: "Thank you so much, mademoiselle. You are all too good."

Tears had filled her eyes, she thought herself sure of the five francs, and was only preoccupied by the way in which she would ask for them if they were not offered to her. The housemaid did not reappear, and there was a moment of embarra.s.sed silence. From their mother's skirts the little ones opened their eyes wide and gazed at the brioche.

"You only have these two?" asked Madame Gregoire, in order to break the silence.

"Oh, madame! I have seven. "

M. Gregoire, who had gone back to his newspaper. sat up indignantly.

"Seven children! But why? good G.o.d!"

"It is imprudent," murmured the old lady.

Maheude made a vague gesture of apology. What would you have? One doesn't think about it at all, they come quite naturally. And then, when they grow up they bring something in, and that makes the household go. Take their case, they could get on, if it was not for the grandfather who was getting quite stiff, and if it was not that among the lot only two of her sons and her eldest daughter were old enough to go down into the pit. It was necessary, all the same, to feed the little ones who brought nothing in.

"Then," said Madame Gregoire, "you have worked for a long time at the mines?"

A silent laugh lit up Maheude's pale face.

"Ah, yes! ah, yes! I went down till I was twenty. The doctor said that I should stay above for good after I had been confined the second time, because it seems that made something go wrong in my inside. Besides, then I got married, and I had enough to do in the house. But on my husband's side, you see, they have been down there for ages. It goes up from grandfather to grandfather, one doesn't know how far back, quite to the beginning when they first took the pick down there at Requillart."

M. Gregoire thoughtfully contemplated this woman and these pitiful children, with their waxy flesh, their discoloured hair, the degeneration which stunted them, gnawed by anaemia, and with the melancholy ugliness of starvelings. There was silence again, and one only heard the burning coal as it gave out a jet of gas. The moist room had that heavy air of comfort in which our middle-cla.s.s nooks of happiness slumber.

"What is she doing, then?" exclaimed Cecile impatiently. "Melanie, go up and tell her that the parcel is at the bottom of the cupboard, on the left."

In the meanwhile, M. Gregoire repeated aloud the reflections inspired by the sight of these starving ones.

"There is evil in this world, it is quite true; but, my good woman, it must also be said that workpeople are never prudent. Thus, instead of putting aside a few sous like our peasants, miners drink, get into debt, and end by not having enough to support their families."

"Monsieur is right," replied Maheude st.u.r.dily. "They don't always keep to the right path. That's what I'm always saying to the ne'er-do-wells when they complain. Now, I have been lucky; my husband doesn't drink. All the same, on feast Sundays he sometimes takes a drop too much; but it never goes farther. It is all the nicer of him, since before our marriage he drank like a hog, begging your pardon. And yet, you know, it doesn't help us much that he is so sensible. There are days like to-day when you might turn out all the drawers in the house and not find a farthing."

She wished to suggest to them the idea of the five-franc piece, and went on in her low voice, explaining the fatal debt, small at first, then large and overwhelming. They paid regularly for many fortnights. But one day they got behind, and then it was all up. They could never catch up again. The gulf widened, and the men became disgusted with work which did not even allow them to pay their way. Do what they could, there was nothing but difficulties until death. Besides, it must be understood that a collier needed a gla.s.s to wash away the dust. It began there, and then he was always in the inn when worries came. Without complaining of any one it might be that the workmen did not earn as much as they ought to.

"I thought," said Madame Gergoire, "that the Company gave you lodging and firing?"

Maheude glanced sideways at the flaming coal in the fire-place.

"Yes, yes, they give us coal, not very grand, but it burns. As to lodging, it only costs six francs a month; that sounds like nothing, but it is often pretty hard to pay. To-day they might cut me up into bits without getting two sous out of me. Where there's nothing, there's nothing."

The lady and gentleman were silent, softly stretched out, and gradually wearied and disquieted by the exhibition of this wretchedness. She feared she had wounded them, and added, with the stolid and just air of a practical woman: "Oh! I didn't want to complain. Things are like this, and one has to put up with them; all the more that it's no good struggling, perhaps we shouldn't change anything. The best is, is it not, to try and live honestly in the place in which the good G.o.d has put us?"

M. Gregoire approved this emphatically.