“The usual thing—lung trouble. Every man who goes down gets it. He probably won’t last the winter out.”
Jacques Verney came in a little later. He was short and stoop shouldered, with the deep set, melancholy eyes of the Borain. Antennae of hair shot out from his nostrils, from the ends of his eyebrows and from the concha of his ears. His head was bald. When he heard that Vincent was an evangelist come to better the lot of the miners, he sighed deeply. “Ah, monsieur,” he said, “so many people have tried to help us. But life here goes on just as it always has.”
“You think conditions bad in the Borinage?” asked Vincent.
Jacques was silent for a moment and then said, “For myself, no. My mother taught me to read a little, and through that I have become a foreman. I have a little brick house on the road leading down to Wasmes, and we are never in want of food. For myself I have nothing to complain . . .”
He was forced to interrupt himself for a violent fit of coughing; it seemed to Vincent that his flat chest would surely burst under the pressure. After walking to the front door and spitting into the road several times, Jacques again took his seat in the warm kitchen and gently pulled on the hairs of his ear, his nose, and his eyebrows.
“You see, Monsieur, I was already twenty-nine when I became a foreman. My lungs were gone by then. Nevertheless it has not been so bad for me these past few years. But the miners . . .” He glanced over at Madame Denis and asked,
“What do you say? Shall I take him down to see Henri Decrucq?”
“Why not? It will do him no harm to hear the full truth.”
Jacques Verney turned back to Vincent apologetically. “After all, Monsieur,” he said, “I am a foreman and I owe some loyalty to ‘Them’. But Henri, he will show you!”
Vincent followed Jacques out into the cold night and plunged immediately into the miners’ ravine. The miners’ huts were simple wooden hovels of one room. They had not been put up with any plan, but ran down the side of the hill haphazardly at crazy angles, creating a labyrinth of dirt-laden alleys, through which only the initiate could find their way. Vincent stumbled after Jacques, falling over rocks, logs, and heaps of refuse. About half-way down they came to Decrucq’s shack. A light shone through the tiny window at the rear. Madame Decrucq answered the knock.
The Decrucqs’ cabin was exactly the same as all the others in the ravine. It had an earthen floor, moss covered roof, and strips of burlap stuck between the planks to keep the wind out. In each of the rear corners there was a bed, one of them already occupied by three sleeping children. The furnishings consisted of an oval stove, a wooden table with benches, one chair, and a box nailed to the wall, containing a few pots and dishes. The Decrucqs, like most Borains, kept a goat and some rabbits so that they might have meat occasionally. The goat slept under the children’s bed; the rabbits had a bit of straw behind the stove.
Madame Decrucq swung open the upper half of the door to see who was there and then bade the two men enter. She had worked in the same couches with Decrucq for many years before their marriage, pushing the little cars of coal down the track to the tally board. Most of the juice was gone out of her. She was faded, worn and aged, and she had not yet celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday.
Decrucq, who had been leaning his chair against the cold part of the stove, sprang up at the sight of Jacques. “Well I” he exclaimed. “It is a long time since you have been in my house. We are glad to have you here. And I bid your friend welcome.”
It was Decrucq’s boast that he was the only man in the Borinage whom the mines could not kill. “I shall die in my bed of old age,” he often said. “They can’t kill me, for I won’t let them!”
On the right side of his head a large square of red scalp-skin glowed like a window through the thatch of his hair. That was a memento of the day when the cage in which he was descending had plunged a hundred metres like a stone in a well and killed his twenty-nine companions. When he walked he dragged one leg after him; it had been broken in four places when the timbers in his cell collapsed and imprisoned him for five days. His coarse, black shirt bulged on the right side over the mound of three broken ribs that had never been set after an explosion of fire-damp had hurled him against a coal car. But he was a fighter, a game-cock of a man; nothing could put him down. Because he always talked so violently against the company, he was given the very worst couches, where it was hardest to get out the coal and where the working conditions were the most difficult. The more he took, the higher he flamed up against “them,” the unknown and unseen but ever present enemy. A dimple, set just off centre in his stubby chin, made his short, compact face seem slightly askew.
“Monsieur Van Gogh,” he said, “you have come to the right place. Here in the Borinage we are not even slaves, we are animals. We descend marcasse at three in the morning; for fifteen minutes we can rest while we eat our dinner, and then we work on until four in the afternoon. It is black down there, Monsieur, and hot. So we must work naked, and the air is full of coal-dust and poison gas, and we cannot breathe! When we take the coal from the couche there is no room to stand up; we must work on our knees and doubled in two. We begin to descend, boys and girls alike, when we are eight or nine. By twenty we have the fever and lung trouble. If we do not get killed by grisou, or in the cage (he tapped the red scalp-patch on his head), we may live until forty and then die of consumption! Do I tell lies, Verney?”
He spoke in such an excited patois that Vincent found difficulty in following him. The askew dimple gave his face an amused look, in spite of the fact that his eyes were black with anger.
“It is just so, Decrucq,” said Jacques.
Madame Decrucq had gone to sit on her bed in the far corner. The faint glow of the kerosene lamp put her half in shadow. She listened to her husband while he spoke, even though she had heard the words a thousand times before. The years pushing coal cars, the birth of three children, and the succession of bitter winters in this burlap-stuffed hut had taken all the fight out of her. Decrucq dragged his bad leg from Jacques back to Vincent.
“And what do we get for all this, Monsieur? A one-room shack and just enough food to keep us swinging a pick. What do we eat? Bread, sour cheese, black coffee. Once or twice a year, perhaps, meat! If they cut off fifty centimes a day we would starve to death! We would not be able to bring up their charbon; that is the only reason they do not pay us less. We are on the margin of death, Monsieur, every day of our lives! If we get sick we are put out without a franc, and we die like dogs while our wives and children are fed by the neighbours. From eight to forty, Monsieur, thirty-two years in the black earth, and then a hole in that hill across the way so we can forget it all.”
10
VINCENT FOUND THAT the miners were ignorant and untaught, most of them being unable to read, but at the same time they were intelligent and quick at their difficult work, were brave and frank and of a very sensitive temperament. They were thin and pale from fever, and looked tired and emaciated. Their skin was pasty and sallow (they saw the sun only on Sundays), marked with thousands of tiny black pores. They had the deep-set, melancholy eyes of the oppressed who cannot fight back.
Vincent found them attractive. They were simple and good natured like the Brabant people in Zundert and Etten. The desolate feeling of the landscape was gone too, for he perceived that the Borinage had character and that things spoke to him.