The Begum's Millions

6. The Albrecht Mine

 Schwartz fell asleep pronouncing the name of Dr. Sarrasin, but in his sleep it was the name of the girl Jeanne which returned to his lips. He remembered her as a child even though, since he left her, Jeanne had become a young lady. This phenomenon is easily explained by the ordinary laws of the association of ideas: the idea of the doctor led to that of his daughter, association by contiguity. So when Schwartz, or rather Marcel Bruckmann, woke up, still having the name of Jeanne on his mind, he was not surprised, and saw in this fact a new proof of the excellence of the psychological principles of John Stuart Mill.8 The Albrecht Mine Mme Bauer, the good woman who had offered hospitality to Marcel Bruckmann, was Swiss by birth and the widow of a miner killed four years earlier in one of those cataclysms which makes the life of a coal miner a continual battle. The company gave her a small annual pension of thirty dollars, to which she added the meager income of one furnished room and the salary brought in weekly by her little son Carl. Although hardly thirteen years old, Carl worked in the mine as a “trapper”; he opened and closed the air vents whenever the coal carts passed through. This was essential to maintain proper ventilation in the galleries, as it forced the air to flow in a predetermined direction. The house which his mother had leased was too far from the Albrecht mine for him to return home every evening, so he had been given an extra little night job at the very bottom of the mine. He kept and groomed six horses in their subterranean stable while the daytime stableman spent the night outside. As a result, Carl’s life was almost entirely spent five hundred meters below ground. During the day he would be at his post next to his air vent; at night he would sleep on straw near his horses. Only on Sunday morning could he return briefly to the light of day and, for a few hours, share 6  the common patrimony of all men: sun, blue sky, and a mother’s smile. As one might well imagine after such a week, when he emerged from the mine, he did not particularly look the part of a young dandy. He looked more like a fairy-tale gnome, a chimney sweep, or a Fiji Islander. So Mme Bauer would generally spend a good hour scraping off his coal dust with a copious supply of warm water and soap. Then she had him put on a good suit of heavy green cloth, sewed out of a paternal cast-off that she pulled out of the depths of her big, pine cupboard, and from that moment on until evening she never tired of admiring her son, finding him to be the handsomest son in the world. With his sediment of dust removed, Carl was really no uglier than anyone else. His blond, silky hair, his gentle blue eyes matched his tint of an excessive pallor; but his body was too thin for his age. This sunless life had made him as anemic as a lettuce stalk, and it is likely that Dr. Sarrasin’s blood-cell counter, applied to the blood of the young miner, would have revealed a totally inadequate supply of corpuscles. Morally, he was a quiet child, phlegmatic, calm with a dash of that pride which the feeling of constant danger, the habit of regular work, and the satisfaction of difficulties overcome give to all miners without exception. His great happiness was to sit down beside his mother at the square table which occupied the center of the lowceilinged room, and to arrange on a piece of cardboard all sorts of dreadful insects that he brought up from the entrails of the Earth. The tepid, unchanging atmosphere of the mines has its special fauna, little known to naturalists, like the moist walls of coal have their strange flora of greenish mosses, indescribable fungi, and amorphous lichen.1 That’s what the engineer Maulesmühle,2 lover of entomology, had noticed, and he had promised Carl a penny for each new specimen that Carl could bring him. This golden opportunity had led the boy to explore the far corners of the coal mine with great care and, little by little, had turned him into a collector. So now it was for himself that he looked for...