Complete Works of Emile Zola (816 page)

“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.

“Cécile,” said the old lady, “fulfil your little duties.”

The Grégoires charged Cécile 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 God. 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 Cécile, ‘“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,” Cécile 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 embarrassed 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 Grégoire, in order to break the silence.

“Oh, madame! I have seven. “

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

“Seven children! But why? good God!”

“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 Grégoire, “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 Réquillart.”

M. Grégoire 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-class nooks of happiness slumber.

“What is she doing, then?” exclaimed Cécile impatiently. “Mélanie, go up and tell her that the parcel is at the bottom of the cupboard, on the left.”

In the meanwhile, M. Grégoire 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 sturdily. “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 glass 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 Gérgoire, “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 God has put us?”

M. Grégoire approved this emphatically.

“With such sentiments, my good woman, one is above misfortune.”

Honorine and Mélanie at last brought the parcel.

Cécile unfastened it and took out the two dresses. She added comforters, even stockings and mittens. They would all fit beautifully; she hastened and made the servants wrap up the chosen garments; for her music mistress had just arrived; and she pushed the mother and children towards the door.

“We are very short,” stammered Maheude; “if we only had a five-franc piece — —”

The phrase was stifled, for the Maheus were proud and never begged. Cécile looked uneasily at her father; but the latter refused decisively, with an air of duty.

“No, it is not our custom. We cannot do it.”

Then the young girl, moved by the mother’s overwhelmed face, wished to do all she could for the children. They were still looking fixedly at the brioche; she cut it in two and gave it to them.

“Here! this is for you.”

Then, taking the pieces back, she asked for an old newspaper:

“Wait, you must share with your brothers and sisters.” And beneath the tender gaze of her parents she finally pushed them out of the room. The poor starving urchins went off, holding the brioche respectfully in their benumbed little hands.

Maheude dragged her children along the road, seeing neither the desert fields, nor the black mud, nor the great livid sky. As she passed through Montsou she resolutely entered Maigrat’s shop, and begged so persistently that at last she carried away two loaves, coffee, butter, and even her five-franc piece, for the man also lent money by the week. It was not her that he wanted, it was Catherine; she understood that when he advised her to send her daughter for provisions. They would see about that. Catherine would box his ears if he came too close under her nose.

CHAPTER 3

ELEVEN o’clock struck at the little church in the Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement, a brick chapel to which Abbé Joire came to say mass on Sundays. In the school beside it, also of brick, one heard the faltering voices of the children, in spite of windows closed against the outside cold. The wide passages, divided into little gardens, back to back, between the four large blocks of uniform houses, were deserted; and these gardens, devastated by the winter, exhibited the destitution of their marly soil, lumped and spotted by the last vegetables. They were making soup, chimneys were smoking, a woman appeared at distant intervals along the fronts, opened a door and disappeared. From one end to the other, on the pavement, the pipes dripped into tubs, although it was no longer raining, so charged was this grey sky with moistness. And the village, built altogether in the midst of the vast plain, and edged by its black roads as by a mourning border, had no touch of joyousness about it save the regular bands of its red tiles, constantly washed by showers.

When Maheude returned, she went out of her way to buy potatoes from an overseer’s wife whose crop was not yet exhausted. Behind a curtain of sickly poplars, the only trees in these flat regions, was a group of isolated buildings, houses placed four together, and surrounded by their gardens. As the Company reserved this new experiment for the captains, the workpeople called this corner of the hamlet the settlement of the Bas-de-Soie, just as they called their own settlement Paie-tes-Dettes, in good-humoured irony of their wretchedness.

“Eh! Here we are,” said Maheude, laden with parcels, pushing in Lénore and Henri, covered with mud and quite tired out.

In front of the fire Estelle was screaming, cradled in Alzire’s arms. The latter, having no more sugar and not knowing how to soothe her, had decided to pretend to give her the breast. This ruse often succeeded. But this time it was in vain for her to open her dress, and to press the mouth against the lean breast of an eight-year-old invalid; the child was enraged at biting the skin and drawing nothing.

“Pass her to me,” cried the mother as soon as she found herself free; “she won’t let us say a word.”

When she had taken from her bodice a breast as heavy as a leather bottle, to the neck of which the brawler hung, suddenly silent, they were at last able to talk. Otherwise everything was going on well; the little housekeeper had kept up the fire and had swept and arranged the room. And in the silence they heard upstairs the grandfather’s snoring, the same rhythmic snoring which had not stopped for a moment.

“What a lot of things!” murmured Alzire, smiling at the provisions. “If you like, mother, I’ll make the soup.”

The table was encumbered: a parcel of clothes, two loaves, potatoes, butter, coffee, chicory, and half a pound of brawn.

“Oh! the soup!” said Maheude with an air of fatigue. “We must gather some sorrel and pull up some leeks. No! I will make some for the men afterwards. Put some potatoes on to boil; we’ll eat them with a little butter and some coffee, eh? Don’t forget the coffee!”

But suddenly she thought of the brioche. She looked at the empty hands of Lénore and Henri who were fighting on the floor, already rested and lively. These gluttons had slyly eaten the brioche on the road. She boxed their ears, while Alzire, who was putting the saucepan on the fire, tried to appease her.

“Let them be, mother. If the brioche was for me, you know I don’t mind a bit. They were hungry, walking so far.”

Midday struck; they heard the clogs of the children coming out of school. The potatoes were cooked, and the coffee, thickened by a good half of chicory, was passing through the percolator with a singing noise of large drops. One corner of the table was free; but the mother only was eating there. The three children were satisfied with their knees; and all the time the little boy with silent voracity looked, without saying anything, at the brawn, excited by the greasy paper.

Maheude was drinking her coffee in little sips, with her hands round the glass to warm them, when Father Bonnemort came down. Usually he rose late, and his breakfast waited for him on the fire. But to-day he began to grumble because there was no soup. Then, when his daughter-in-law said to him that one cannot always do what one likes, he ate his potatoes in silence. From time to time he got up to spit in the ashes for cleanliness, and, settled in his chair, he rolled his food round in his mouth, with lowered head and dull eyes.

“Ah! I forgot, mother,” said Alzire. “The neighbour came — —”

Her mother interrupted her.

“She bothers me!”

She felt a deep rancour against the Levaque woman, who had pleaded poverty the day before to avoid lending her anything; while she knew that she was just then in comfort, since her lodger, Bouteloup, had paid his fortnight in advance. In the settlement they did not usually lend from household to household.

“Here! you remind me,” said Maheude. “Wrap up a millful of coffee. I will take it to Pierronne; I owe it her from the day before yesterday.”

And when her daughter had prepared the packet she added that she would come back immediately to put the men’s soup on the fire. Then she went out with Estelle in her arms, leaving old Bonnemort to chew his potatoes leisurely, while Lénore and Henri fought for the fallen parings.

Instead of going round, Maheude went straight across through the gardens, for fear lest Levaque’s wife should call her. Her garden was just next to that of the Pierrons, and in the dilapidated trellis-work which separated them there was a hole through which they fraternized. The common well was there, serving four households. Beside it, behind a clump of feeble lilacs, was situated the shed, a low building full of old tools, in which were brought up the rabbits which were eaten on feast days. One o’clock struck; it was the hour for coffee, and not a soul was to be seen at the doors or windows. Only a workman belonging to the earth-cutting, waiting the hour for descent, was digging up his patch of vegetable ground without raising his head. But as Maheude arrived opposite the other block of buildings, she was surprised to see a gentleman and two ladies in front of the church. She stopped a moment and recognized them; it was Madame Hennebeau bringing her guests, the decorated gentleman and the lady in the fur mantle, to see the settlement.