Germinal - Emile Zola [23]
Étienne looked at him and then at the stain he had just made on the ground.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘have you been working at the pit for long?’
Bonnemort spread his arms wide.
‘Long? I should say!…I wasn’t even eight years old the first time I went down a mine. It was Le Voreux, as it happens. And today I’m fifty-eight. You work it out…I’ve done every job there is down there. Simple pit-boy to start with, then putter once I was strong enough to push the tubs, and then hewer for eighteen years. After that, because of my damned legs, they put me on maintenance work, filling in seams, repairing the roads, that sort of thing, until the day they had to bring me up and give me a surface job because the doctor said otherwise I’d ’ave stayed down there for good. So five years ago they made me a driver…Not bad, eh? Fifty years working at the pit, and forty-five of them underground!’
As he spoke, flaming coals would now and again fall from the brazier and cast a gleam of blood-red light across his pallid face.
‘And then they tell me to call it a day,’ he went on. ‘Not likely. They must think I’m daft!…I can manage another two years all right, till I’m sixty, so I get the pension of a hundred and eighty francs. If I was to pack it in now, they’d turn round and give me the one at a hundred and fifty. Cunning buggers!…Anyway, I’m as fit as a fiddle, apart from my legs. It’s the water that’s got under my skin, you see, what with getting soaked all the time down at the coal-face. Some days I can’t even put one foot in front of the other without screaming the place down.’
He was interrupted by another fit of coughing.
‘And that’s what makes you cough as well?’ asked Étienne.
But he shook his head fiercely. When he could speak, he continued:
‘No, no, I caught a cold, last month. I never used to cough, but now I just can’t get rid of it…And the funny part is I keep coughing this stuff up. More and more of it.’
A rasp rose in his throat, and he spat black phlegm.
‘Is it blood?’ Étienne asked, eventually daring to put the question.
Slowly Bonnemort wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘It’s coal…I’ve got enough coal inside this carcass of mine to keep me warm for the rest of my days. And it’s five whole years since I was last down the mine. Seems I was storing it up without even knowing. Ah well, it’s a good preservative!’
There was silence; the distant, rhythmic sound of hammering could be heard coming from the pit, and the moan of the wind continued to sweep past, like a cry of hunger and exhaustion rising from the depths of the night. Standing beside the startled flickering of the flames, the old man went on, lowering his voice as he revisited his memories. Oh yes indeed! He and his family were old hands at cutting the coal! They’d been working for the Montsou Mining Company ever since the beginning, and that was a long time ago, one hundred and six years to be precise. It was his grandfather, Guillaume Maheu, then a lad of fifteen, who had discovered soft coal at Réquillart, which had become the Company’s first pit but was now just an old disused shaft, over near the Fauvelle sugar-refinery. That much was common knowledge, and proof was that the new seam had been called the Guillaume seam, after his grandfather’s Christian name. He hadn’t known him himself, but he’d been a big man by all accounts, and very strong. Died in his bed at the age of sixty. Then there was his father, Nicolas Maheu, known as Maheu the Red. He’d died when he was barely forty, at Le Voreux, back when they were still sinking the shaft; a rock-fall it was, completely flattened him, swallowed him whole, bones, flesh, blood, the lot. Two of his uncles and then, later on, his own three brothers had all lost their lives down there. As for him, Vincent Maheu, he’d managed to escape more or less unscathed, apart from his gammy legs, that is, and everyone thought him a clever bastard for doing so. But what else could you do? You had to work, and this was simply what they did, from father to son, the same