“Come along, Monsieur Vincent,” she cried, “Or you will be the last to get your sack filled!” This was an excursion for her; the company sold Verney fair coal at reduced rates.
They could not go altogether to the top for the little cars were dumping their loads of waste, first down one side, then down the other with mechanical regularity. It was no easy task to find coal on that pyramid. Mademoiselle Verney showed Vincent how to scoop up the terril in his hands and let the mud, rocks, clay and other foreign substances slip through his fingers. The amount of coal that escaped the company was negligible. The only thing the miners’ wives ever found was a sort of shale composite which could not be sold in the commercial market. The terril was wet from the snow and rain, and soon Vincent’s hands were scratched and cut, but he managed to get a quarter of a sackful of what he hoped was coal by the time the women had nearly filled theirs.
Each of the women left her sack at the Salon and rushed home to prepare the family supper, but not before promising to come to services that night and bring her family. Mademoiselle Verney invited Vincent home to share their supper, and he accepted with alacrity. The Verney house had two complete rooms; the stove, cooking equipment, and tableware in one room, the family beds in the other. Despite the fact that Jacques was fairly well off there was no soap in the house, for as Vincent had learned, soap was an impossible luxury for the Borains. From the time that the boy begins to descend the charbonnage and the girl begins to ascend the terril until the day they die, the Borains never completely get the coal-dust off their faces.
Mademoiselle Verney put a pan of cold water out in the street for Vincent. He scrubbed up as best he could. He did not know how well he had succeeded, but as he sat opposite the young girl and saw the black streaks from the coal-dust and smoke still lining her face, he realized that he must look as she did. Mademoiselle Verney chatted gaily all through the supper.
“You know, Monsieur Vincent,” said Jacques, “you have been in Petit Wasmes almost two months now, and yet you really don’t know the Borinage.”
“It is true, Monsieur Verney,” replied Vincent in all humility, “but I think I am slowly coming to understand the people.”
“I don’t mean that,” said Jacques, plucking a long antenna out of his nose and looking at it with interest. “I mean you have only seen our life above ground. That is not important. We merely sleep above ground. If you would understand what our lives are like, you must descend one of the mines and see how we work from three in the morning until four in the afternoon.”
“I am very eager to go down,” said Vincent, “but can I get permission from the company?”
“I already have asked for you,” replied Jacques, holding a cube of sugar in his mouth and letting the tepid, inky, bitter coffee pour over it and down his throat. “Tomorrow I descend Marcasse for safety inspection. Be in front of the Denis house at a quarter before three in the morning and I will pick you up.”
The entire family accompanied Vincent to the Salon, but on the way over, Jacques, who had appeared so well and expansive in his warm house, shrivelled up with a violent cough and had to go home again. When Vincent arrived at the Salon he found Henri Decrucq already there, dragging his dead leg after him and tinkering with the stove.
“Ah, good evening, Monsieur Vincent,” he cried with a smile as broad as his compact face would allow. “I am the only one in Petit Wasmes who can light this stove. I know it from old, when we used to have parties here. It is méchant, but I know all its tricks.”
The content of the sacks was damp and only a small part of it was coal, but Decrucq soon had the bulging, oval stove sending out good warmth. As he hobbled about excitedly, the blood pounded to the bare spot on the scalp and turned the corrugated skin a dirty beet-red.
Nearly every miner’s family in Petit Wasmes came to the Salon that night to hear Vincent preach the first sermon in his church. When the benches were filled, the neighbouring families brought in their boxes and chairs. Over three hundred souls crowded in. Vincent, his heart warmed by the kindness of the miners’ wives that afternoon, and the knowledge that he was at last speaking in his own temple, preached a sermon so sincere and believing that the melancholy look on the Borains’ faces fell away.
“It is an old belief and a good one,” said Vincent to his blackjaw congregation, “that we are strangers on earth. Yet we are not alone, for our Father is with us. We are pilgrims; our life is a long journey from earth to Heaven.
“Sorrow is better than joy—and even in mirth the heart is sad. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasts, for by sadness the countenance of the heart is made better.
“For those who believe in Jesus Christ there is no sorrow that is not mixed with hope. There is only a constantly being born again, a constantly going from darkness to light.
“Father, we pray Thee to keep us from evil. Give us neither poverty nor riches, but feed us with bread appropriate to us.
“Amen.”
Madame Decrucq was the first to reach his side. There was a mist before her eyes and a quiver at the corner of her mouth. “Monsieur Vincent,” she said, “my life was so hard that I had lost God. But you have given Him back to me. And I thank you for that.”
When they were all gone, Vincent locked the Salon and walked thoughtfully up the hill to the Denises’. He could tell from the reception he had received that night that the reserve was completely gone from the attitude of the Borains, and that they trusted him at last. He was now fully accepted by the blackjaws as a Minister of God. What had caused the change? It could not have been because he had a new church; such things mattered not at all to the miners. They did not know about his evangelical appointment because he had not told them in the first place that he had no official position. And although he had preached a warm, beautiful sermon, he had delivered equally good ones in the wretched huts and in the abandoned stable.
The Denises had already gone to sleep in their little cubbyhole off the kitchen, but the bakery was still redolent of fresh, sweet bread. Vincent drew up some water from the deep well that had been enclosed in the kitchen, poured it out of the bucket into a bowl, and went upstairs to get his soap and mirror. He propped the mirror against the wall and looked at himself. Yes, his surmise had been correct; he had taken off only a small portion of the coal-dust at the Verneys’. His eyelids and jaws were still black. He smiled to himself as he thought of how he had consecrated the new temple with coal-dust all over his face, and how horrified his father and Uncle Stricker would have been if they could have seen him.
He dipped his hands into the cold water, worked up a lather from the soap he had brought with him from Brussels, and was just about to apply the suds vigorously to his face when something turned over in his mind. He poised his wet hands in mid-air. He looked into the mirror once again and saw the black coal-dust from the terril in the lines of his forehead, on the lids of his eyes, down the sides of his cheeks, and on the great ball of his chin.
“Of course!” he said aloud. “That’s why they’ve accepted me. I’ve become one of them at last.”
He rinsed his hands in the water and went to bed without touching his face. Every day that he remained in the Borinage he rubbed coal-dust on his face so that he would look like everyone else.