Germinal (75 page)

It was the third day. Négrel despaired, and was resolved to abandon the search that evening. At noon, after lunch, when he came back with his men to make one last attempt, he was surprised to see Zacharie coming out of the shaft, all red in the face, waving frantically and shouting:

‘She's there! She answered me! Come on, quickly!'

He had sneaked down the ladders unseen by the guard, and he swore that he'd heard tapping over in the first road in the Guillaume seam.

‘We've checked there twice already,' Négrel objected in disbelief. ‘But, all right, let's go and see.'

La Maheude had risen to her feet and had to be prevented from going down with them. She stood waiting at the edge of the shaft, staring into the dark hole.

Down below Négrel tapped three times himself, leaving a reasonable space between each tap, and then pressed his ear to the coal, bidding the men be as quiet as possible. Not a sound came, and he shook his head; the poor lad had plainly been imagining it. Zacharie tapped frantically himself, and again he did hear something; his eyes shone, and he was shaking all over with joy. Then the other men repeated the exercise, one after another; and they all became excited as they distinctly made out a response coming from far away. Négrel was astonished, and
when he listened again he eventually heard the faintest of sounds, like the waft of a breeze, a barely audible rhythmic drumming that followed the familiar pattern used by miners when they tap out the signal to evacuate at times of danger. For coal can transmit crystal-clear sound over a great distance.

A deputy who was there estimated the thickness of the intervening mass of coal at not less than fifty metres. But for everyone present it was as though they could shake hands with them already, and they were elated. Négrel duly gave orders at once to dig towards them.

When Zacharie saw his mother again back above ground, they hugged each other.

‘I shouldn't get carried away,' La Pierronne was cruel enough to say, having come out for a walk to see what was going on. ‘If Catherine's not there, it'll only make it worse for you.'

It was true, Catherine might be somewhere else.

‘Mind your own bloody business!' Zacharie said savagely. ‘She's there all right. I know she is!'

La Maheude had resumed her seat, silent and expressionless, and once more she settled down to wait.

As soon as word reached Montsou, people again arrived in their droves. There was nothing to see, but they stayed all the same, and the more curious among them had to be kept back. Below ground, work continued round the clock. In case they met anything that completely blocked their way, Négrel had ordered three sloping shafts to be cut through the seam, which would all converge down at the point where the miners were thought to be trapped. In the cramped space at the end of each shaft there was room for only one miner at a time to cut the coal, and he was replaced every two hours; the coal itself was loaded into baskets, which were passed back along a human chain which grew longer with the shaft. They made rapid progress at first: six metres in one day.

Zacharie had managed to get himself included among those selected for the task of cutting the coal. It was a position of honour and much sought after. He would get cross when they tried to relieve him after his regulation two-hour stint, and he would pinch the comrades' turns and refuse to relinquish his
pick. His shaft was soon ahead of the others, and he attacked the coal with such ferocity that the panting and grunting coming up from below sounded like the noise of bellows in an underground forge. When he emerged, covered in black dirt and giddy with exhaustion, he would collapse on the ground and have to be covered with a blanket. Then back he would go, still staggering with exhaustion, and battle recommenced to the sound of thudding pick and muffled groan as he slew the coal in furious triumph. The worst of it was that the coal was becoming hard, and twice he broke his tool on it in his rage at not being able to go as fast as before. He was also suffering from the heat, which was increasing with every metre, and it was quite unbearable at the bottom of the tiny shaft where the air had no room to circulate. A hand-operated ventilator was working well enough, but it was difficult to get a draught going, and three times they had to pull a man free after he passed out for lack of air.

Négrel lived underground with his men. Meals were sent down to him, and occasionally he snatched a couple of hours' sleep, wrapped in his coat on top of a bale of straw. What kept everyone going was the desperate pleading of the poor wretches below, who could be heard tapping out the signal more and more distinctly and urging them to come quickly. This tapping was now clearly audible, like a tune being played on the keys of a harmonica. It helped to guide them, and they advanced to its music like soldiers marching to the sound of cannon on a battlefield. Each time a hewer was relieved, Négrel would go down himself, tap and listen; and each time, so far, the response had come, swiftly and urgently. He no longer had any doubt, they were heading in the right direction. But how dangerously slow it all was! They would never get there in time. Over the first two days they had cut their way through no less than thirteen metres; but on the the third day this had fallen to five, and on the fourth to three. The coal was becoming so much denser and harder that now they could barely manage two metres in a day. By the ninth day, thanks to their superhuman efforts, they had covered a distance of thirty-two metres, and they calculated that another twenty remained in front of them. For the trapped miners it was their twelfth day that was starting,
twelve times twenty-four hours without food or warmth in that icy darkness! This horrific thought brought tears to the eyes of the men and stiffened their sinews to the task in hand. It seemed impossible that any God-fearing soul could survive much longer; the distant tapping had been growing fainter since the previous day, and they were extremely concerned that it might cease at any minute.

La Maheude still came regularly to sit at the entrance to the pit. She would bring Estelle along in her arms, since she could not be left on her own all day. For hour after hour she followed the progress of the rescue work, sharing in the hopes and the disappointments. The tension among the groups of people waiting around, and even in Montsou, was at fever pitch, and nobody talked of anything else. Every heart in the district was beating in time with those beneath the ground.

On the ninth day, at lunch-time, Zacharie failed to answer when they called to him that it was time for him be replaced. It was as though he had gone mad, and with much cursing and swearing he refused to stop. Négrel, who had left the mine for a moment, was not there to make him obey; and in fact the only people present were a deputy and three miners. Unable to see properly and frustrated by the delay caused by the dim, flickering light from his lamp, Zacharie must have been foolish enough to turn it up. Strict orders had been given not to do so: firedamp had been detected, and huge pockets of gas had been building up in the narrow, unventilated shafts. Suddenly there was a thunderous explosion, and a jet of flame shot out of the shaft like the flash from a gun loaded with grapeshot. Everything ignited, and from one end to the other each shaft caught fire like a trail of gunpowder. The sudden torrent of flame engulfed the deputy and the three miners, travelled up the main pit-shaft, and erupted into the open air, spewing out rock and broken timber. The onlookers fled, and La Maheude leaped to her feet, clutching a terrified Estelle to her chest.

When Négrel and the other men returned, they were filled with unspeakable rage. They stamped their feet on the earth as if it were some wicked stepmother who had gratuitously slaughtered her children in an act of cruel, mindless whimsy.
You did what you could as best you could, you rushed to the rescue of your comrades, and then you lost even more men! After three long, exhausting and dangerous hours they finally managed to reach the rescue shafts, and then they had the gruesome task of bringing the victims up to the surface. Neither the deputy nor the three men were dead, but they were covered in terrible burns and giving off a smell of roast meat; having inhaled the burning air, they had suffered further burns all the way down their throats. They kept screaming and begging to be put out of their misery. One of the three miners was the man who, during the strike, had demolished the pump at Gaston-Marie with that final blow of his pick; the other two still had the scars on their hands where their fingers had been cut or rubbed raw from throwing bricks at the soldiers. As they were carried past, the crowd of onlookers, each of them white-faced and trembling with shock, bared their heads.

La Maheude stood waiting. Eventually Zacharie's body appeared. His clothes had been burned away and the body reduced to an unrecognizable, charred lump. The head was missing, blown to bits by the explosion. After his ghastly remains had been placed on a stretcher, La Maheude followed them mechanically, her eyes blazing, without a tear. Holding the sleeping Estelle in her arms, she cut a tragic figure as she left the scene, with her loose hair blowing in the wind. Back in the village Philomène received the news in stunned silence but soon found relief in floods of tears. La Maheude, on the other hand, had immediately turned round and gone back to Réquillart: the mother had brought home her son and was now returning to wait for her daughter.

Another three days went by. The rescue work had resumed, despite the appallingly difficult conditions. Fortunately the new shafts had not collapsed in the firedamp explosion, but they were thick with hot, foul air and more ventilators had to be installed. The hewers relieved each other every twenty minutes. And on they went, with only two metres remaining between them and their comrades. But now they worked with a heavy heart, and if they struck hard into the coal, it was only by way of revenge; for the tapping had stopped, and its bright little tune
was no longer to be heard. This was the twelfth day of the rescue work and the fifteenth since the disaster; and that morning a deathly silence had fallen.

This latest accident had revived the interest of people in Montsou, and so many bourgeois were enthusiastically arranging excursions to the mine that the Grégoires decided to follow the fashion. They wanted to make a party of it, and so it was agreed that they would drive to Le Voreux in their carriage while Mme Hennebeau would bring Lucie and Jeanne along in hers. Deneulin would show them how his repair work was progressing, and then they would come back via Réquillart, where Négrel would be able to tell them how far the rescue shafts had got and whether he thought there was still hope. And then they would all have dinner together that evening.

At three o'clock, when the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile stepped down from their carriage at the ruined pit, they found Mme Hennebeau already there, dressed in navy blue and carrying a parasol to protect herself from the pale February sun. The sky was perfectly clear, and there was a spring-like warmth in the air. M. Hennebeau happened to be there also, with Deneulin; and she was listening with a rather absent air as the latter told her about everything that had been done to mend the breach in the canal. Jeanne, who always had her sketchbook with her, had begun to draw, captivated by the violent beauty of the scene; while Lucie, sitting beside her on a wrecked railway wagon, was in similar ecstasies and finding it all ‘thrilling'. The dyke, as yet unfinished, was still leaking in many places, and foaming water was tumbling into the enormous cavity of the flooded mine. Nevertheless the crater was gradually emptying, and as the water-level dropped, so it uncovered the terrible mess beneath. On this beautiful day, under the soft blue of the sky, it looked like a cesspit, the remains of a ruined city that had sunk into the mire.

‘So much fuss just to see this?' exclaimed a disappointed M. Grégoire.

Cécile, quite pink with health and enjoying the pure fresh air, was laughing and joking, but Mme Hennebeau grimaced with distaste and muttered:

‘It's not a very pretty sight, I must say.'

The two engineers began to laugh. They tried to make it interesting for the visitors by taking them round everywhere and explaining how the pumps operated and how the pile-driver did its work. But the ladies were starting to fret. It gave them goose-pimples when they learned that the pumps would need to keep going for years, perhaps six or seven, before the pit-shaft was rebuilt and all the water had been drained from the mine. No, they would rather think about something else, an upsetting scene like this only gave you bad dreams.

‘Let's go,' said Mme Hennebeau, making for her carriage.

Jeanne and Lucie protested. What! So soon! The drawing wasn't finished yet! They wanted to stay, their father could bring them on for dinner that evening. And so only M. Hennebeau climbed into the carriage beside his wife, for he too wished to talk to Négrel.

‘Very well, you go on ahead,' said M. Grégoire. ‘We'll catch you up. We have a little visit to make in the village. No more than five minutes…Off you go. We'll reach Réquillart by the time you do.'

He climbed in after Mme Grégoire and Cécile; and while the other carriage sped off along the canal, theirs slowly made its way up the hill.

Their excursion was to include an act of charity. Zacharie's death had filled them with pity for the tragic Maheu family, whom everyone was talking about. They didn't feel sorrow for the father, that scoundrel of a man who killed soldiers and who had had to be shot dead like a wolf. But they were touched by the mother, that poor woman who'd lost her son when she'd only just lost her husband, and when her daughter might even now be lying dead beneath the ground. Moreover there was some talk of an ailing grandfather, and a boy crippled in a rock-fall, and a little girl who had died of hunger during the strike. So, while this family had partly deserved its misfortunes, because of its hateful attitude, the Grégoires had nevertheless decided to demonstrate the broad-mindedness of their charity and their wish to forgive and forget by bringing alms to them in
person. Two carefully wrapped parcels were stowed under a seat in the carriage.