Lust for Life

Jacques thought for a moment and then said, “Be here at noon tomorrow and I will show you how to get it.”

When Vincent arrived at the Salon the next day he found a group of miners’ wives and daughters awaiting him. They had on their black blouses, long black skirts and blue kerchiefs over their heads. All were carrying sacks.

“Monsieur Vincent, I have brought a sack for you,” cried Verney’s young daughter. “You must fill one, too.”

They climbed through the maze of circuitous alleys formed by the miners’ huts, passed the Denis bakery at the top of the hill, struck out across the field in the centre of which sat Marcasse, and skirted the walls of the buildings until they reached the black terril pyramid at the rear. Here they deployed, each one attacking the mountain from a different angle, climbing up its sides like tiny insects swarming over a dead log.

“You must go to the top before you will find any coal, Monsieur Vincent,” said Mademoiselle Verney. “We have been picking the bottom of the heap clean for years. Come along, I’ll show you which is the coal.”

She scrambled up the black slope like a young goat, but Vincent had to go up most of the way on his hands and knees, for the stuff under his feet kept sliding away from him. Mademoiselle Verney scrambled on ahead, squatted on her haunches, and threw little pieces of caked mud at Vincent teasingly. She was a pretty girl with good colour in her cheeks and an alert, vivacious manner; Verney had been made a foreman when she was seven, and she had never seen the inside of a mine.

“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.