12
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Vincent got up at two-thirty, ate a piece of dry bread in the Denis kitchen, and met Jacques in front of the door at a quarter to three. It had snowed heavily during the night. The road leading to Marcasse had been obliterated. As they struck out across the field toward the black chimneys and the terril, Vincent saw the miners scurrying over the snow from all directions, little black creatures hurrying home to their nest. It was bitterly cold; the workers had their thin black coats tucked up around their chins, their shoulders huddled inward for warmth.
Jacques first took him into a room where many kerosene lamps were hanging on racks, each under a specific number. “When we have an accident down below,” said Jacques, “we can tell which men are caught by the lamps that are missing.”
The miners were taking their lamps hastily and rushing across a snow-covered yard to a brick building where the hoist was located. Vincent and Jacques joined them. The descending cage had six compartments, one above the other, in each of which a coal truck could be brought to the surface. A compartment was just large enough for two men to squat comfortably on their haunches while going down; five miners were jammed into each of them, descending like a heap of coal.
Since Jacques was a foreman, only he and Vincent and one of his assistants crowded into the top compartment. They squatted low, their toes jammed up against the sides, their heads pushing against the wire top.
“Keep your hands straight in front of you, Monsieur Vincent,” said Jacques. “If one of them touches the side wall, you will lose it.”
A signal was given and the cage shot downwards on its two steel tracks. The free way through which it descended in the rock was only a fraction of an inch larger than the cage. An involuntary shudder ran through Vincent when he realized that the blackness fell away for half a mile beneath him and that if anything went wrong he would be plunged to death. It was a sort of horror he had never known before, this rocketing down a black hole into the abysmal unknown. He realized that he had little to fear, for there had not been an accident with the hoist in over two months, but the shadowy, flickering light of the kerosene lamps was not conducive to reasoning.
He spoke of his instinctive trembling to Jacques, who smiled sympathetically. “Every miner feels that,” he said.
“But surely they get used to going down?”
“No, never! An unconquerable feeling of horror and fear for this cage stays with them until their dying day.”
“And you, Monsieur . . .?”
“I was trembling inside of me, just as you were, and I have been descending for thirty-three years!”
At three hundred and fifty metres—half-way—the cage stopped for a moment, then hurtled downward again. Vincent saw streams of water oozing out of the side of the hole, and again he shuddered. Looking upward, he saw daylight about the size of a star in the sky. At six hundred and fifty metres they got out, but the miners continued on down. Vincent found himself in a broad tunnel with tracks cut through the rock and clay. He had expected to be plunged into an inferno of heat, but the passageway was fairly cool.
“This is not at all bad, Monsieur Verney!” he exclaimed.
“No, but there are no men working at this level. The couches were exhausted long ago. We get ventilation here from the top, but that does the miners down below no good.”
They walked along the tunnel for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then Jacques turned off. “Follow me, Monsieur Vincent,” he said, “mais doucement, doucement; if you slip once, you will kill us.”
He disappeared into the ground before Vincent’s eyes. Vincent stumbled forward, found an opening in the earth, and groped for the ladder. The hole was just large enough to pass a thin man. The first five metres were not hard, but at the half-way point Vincent had to about-face in mid-air and descend in the opposite direction. Water began to ooze out of the rocks; mud slime covered the rungs of the ladder. Vincent could feel the water dripping over him.
At length they reached the bottom and crawled on their hands and knees through a long passage leading to des caches situated farthest from the exit. There was a long row of cells, like partitions in a vault, supported by rough timbers. In each cell a unit of five miners worked, two digging out the coal with their picks, a third dragging it away from their feet, a fourth loading it into small cars, and a fifth pushing the cars down a narrow track.
The pickers worked in coarse linen suits, filthy and black. The shoveller was usually a young boy, stark naked except for a burlap loin-cloth, his body a dull black, and the miner pushing the car through the three foot passageway was always a girl, as black as the men, with a coarse dress covering the upper part of her body. Water was leaking through the roofs of the cells, forming a grotto of stalactites. The only light was from the small lamps whose wicks were turned down low to save fuel. There was no ventilation. The air was thick with coal-dust. The natural heat of the earth bathed the miners in rivulets of black perspiration. In the first cells Vincent saw that the men could work standing erect with their picks, but as he advanced down the passageway, the cells became smaller and smaller until the miners had to lie on the ground and swing their picks from the elbow. As the hours went on, the bodily heat of the miners raised the temperature of the cells, and the coal-dust thickened in the air until the men were gasping great mouthfuls of hot, black soot.
“These men earn two and a half francs a day,” Jacques told Vincent, “providing the inspector at the checking post approves the quality of their coal. Five years ago they were earning three francs, but wages have been reduced every year since then.”
Jacques inspected the timber proppings that stood between the miners and death. Then he turned to the pickers.
“Your propping is bad,” he told them. “It is working loose and the first thing you know the roof will cave in.”
One of the pickers, the leader of the gang, let forth a volley of abuse so fast that Vincent could catch only a few words.
“When they pay for propping,” the man shouted, “we will prop! If we take the time off to prop, how will we get the coal out? We might as well die here under the rock as at home of starvation.”
Beyond the last cell there was another hole in the ground. This time there was not even a ladder to descend. Logs had been shoved in at intervals to keep the dirt from pouring down and burying the miners below. Jacques took Vincent’s lamp and hung it from his belt. “Doucement, Monsieur Vincent,” he repeated. “Do not step on my head or you will send me crashing.” They climbed down five metres more, foot following foot in the blackness, feeling for its timber to stand on while hands clutched the dirt in the sides, to keep from hurtling into oblivion.
At the next level there was another couche, but this time the miners did not even have cells to work in. The coal had to be picked out of a narrow angle in the wall. The men crouched on their knees, their backs pressed against the rock roof and threw their picks at the corner from which the coal was being taken. Vincent realized now that the cells above had been cool and comfortable; the heat at this lower level was like that of a blazing oven, thick enough to be cut with a blunt instrument. The men at work were panting like stricken animals, their tongues hanging out, thick and dry, and their naked bodies covered with a plaster of filth, grime and dust. Vincent, doing absolutely nothing, thought he could not bear the fierce heat and dust another minute. The miners were doing violent manual labour and their gorge was a thousand times higher than his, yet they could not stop to rest or cool off for a minute. If they did, they would not get out the requisite number of cars of coal and would not receive their fifty cents for the day’s work.