Complete Works of Emile Zola (815 page)

But M. Grégoire 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 Cécile, 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: Lénore 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 scraped, 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 mass of the breasts.

“Good gracious!” stammered Maheude, rubbing her eyes, “I’m so knocked up I could sleep all day. Dress Lénore 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 Lénore 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 butter, 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 glasses 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 glass of hot coffee she pushed Lénore 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 Lénore’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 canal, 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 Réquillart 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 Lénore 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 Saturday. 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 Saturday, 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 passed 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 Lénore and Henri who were occupied in picking up nut-shells 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 butter, a bushel of potatoes for the morning soup and the evening stew; finally, perhaps, a bit of brawn, for the father needed meat.

The curé of Montsou, Abbé Joire, was passing, holding up his cassock, 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 curé.”

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.