A VOICE IN THE EVENING
I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler's
lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to
understand. So I inform myself in the matter of those around me.
"You want to see the greasers' work? Here I am," said Marcassin,
surnamed Pétrolus. "I'm the lamp-man. Before that I was a greaser.
Is that any better? Can't say. It's here that that goes on,
look--there. My place you'll find at night by letting your nose guide
you."
The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has an
aggressive smell. The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto are
adorned with shelves full of leaking lamps--lamps dirty as beasts. In
a bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot of
a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper
shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and
ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is
elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes
only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with
yellow paper. The great stones--the rocks--of the walls are
upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a
stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on the
floor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps.
There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth as
dark as coffee-grounds. In his poor claw he grips the chief implement
of his work--a black rag. His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and the
oil, sunk and blackened in his nails, gives them a look of wick ends.
All day long he cleans lamps, and repairs, and unscrews, and fills, and
wipes them. The dirt and the darkness of this population of appliances
he attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger.
"For it's got to be well done," he says, "and even when you're fagged
out, you must keep on rubbing hard."
"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" as
soon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart ones
in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night
watchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity that
lights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin for
next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with up
yonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'm
tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with
eating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything."
The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off his
blue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner--two objects
which have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell of
his toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter,
and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His
bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom
in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles;
and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints,
rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.
Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my
head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the
rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and
tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes
get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) The dark doorway to
my vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front the
sable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain that
bristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron planted
black and vertical in nakedness--a plain vaguely scribbled with
geometrical lines, rails and cinder paths--a plain utilized yet barren.
In some places about the approaches to the factory cartloads of clinker
and cinders have been dumped, and some of it continues to burn like
pyres, throwing off dark flames and darker curtains. Higher, the hazy
clouds vomited by the tall chimneys come together in broad mountains
whose foundations brush the ground and cover the land with a stormy
sky. In the depths of these clouds humanity is let loose. The immense
expanse of men moves and shouts and rolls in the same course all
through the suburb. An inexhaustible echo of cries surrounds us; it is
like hell in eruption and begirt by bronze horizons.
At that moment I am afraid of the multitude. It brings something
limitless into being, something which surpasses and threatens us; and
it seems to me that he who is not with it will one day be trodden
underfoot.
My head goes down in thought. I walk close to Marcassin, who gives me
the impression of an escaping animal, hopping through the
darkness--whether because of his name,[1] or his stench, I do not know.
The evening is darkening; the wind is tearing leaves away; it thickens
with rain and begins to nip.
[Footnote 1: _Marcassin_--a young wild boar.--Tr.]
My miserable companion's voice comes to me in shreds. He is trying to
explain to me the law of unremitting toil. An echo of his murmur
reaches my face.
"And that's what one hasn't the least idea of. Because what's nearest
to us, often, one doesn't see it."
"Yes, that's true," I say, rather weary of his monotonous complaining.
I try a few words of consolation, knowing that he was recently married.
"After all, no one comes bothering you in your own little corner.
There's always that. And then, after all, you're going home--your wife
is waiting for you. You're lucky----"
"I've no time; or rather, I've no strength. At nights, when I come
home I'm too tired--I'm too tired, you understand, to be happy, you
see. Every morning I think I shall be, and I'm hoping up till noon;
but at night I'm too knocked out, what with walking and rubbing for
eleven hours; and on Sundays I'm done in altogether with the week.
There's even times that I don't even wash myself when I come in. I
just stay with my hands mucky; and on Sundays when I'm cleaned up, it's
a nasty one when they say to me, 'You're looking well.'"
And while I am listening to the tragicomical recital which he retails,
like a soliloquy, without expecting replies from me--luckily, for I
should not know how to answer--I can, in fact, recall those holidays
when the face of Pétrolus is embellished by the visible marks of water.
"Apart from that," he goes on, withdrawing his chin into the gray
string of his over-large collar; "apart from that, Charlotte, she's
very good. She looks after me, and tidies the house, and it's her that
lights _our_ lamp; and she hides the books carefully away from me so's
I can't grease 'em, and my fingers make prints on 'em like criminals.
She's good, but it doesn't turn out well, same as I've told you, and
when one's unhappy everything's favorable to being unhappy."
He is silent for a while, and then adds by way of conclusion to all he
has said, and to all that one can say, "_My_ father, he caved in at
fifty. And I shall cave in at fifty, p'raps before."
With his thumb he points through the twilight at that sort of indelible
darkness which makes the multitude, "Them others, it's not the same
with them. There's those that want to change everything and keep going
on that notion. There's those that drink and want to drink, and keep
going that way."
I hardly listen to him while he explains to me the grievances of the
different groups of workmen, "The molders, monsieur, them, it's a
matter of the gangs----"
Just now, while looking at the population of the factory, I was almost
afraid; it seemed to me that these toilers were different sorts of
beings from the detached and impecunious people who live around me.
When I look at this one I say to myself, "They are the same; they are
all alike."
In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combination
is a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One must
not look at them in the distance.
Pétrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches out
again with his fist, the hat which is stuck askew on his conical head,
over the ears that are pointed like artichoke leaves. He is in front
of me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in water
from the saturated ground.
"The unions, monsieur----" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it's
dangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think any
more--that's what they call liberty. If you're in _them_, you've got
to be agin the parsons--(I'm willing, but what's that got to do with
labor?)--and there's something more serious," the lamp-man adds, in a
suddenly changed voice, "you've got to be agin the army,--the _army_!"
And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution. He
stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy,
emaciated face, he says, "_I'm_ always thinking about something. What?
you'll say. Well, here it is. I belong to the League of Patriots."
As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the
darkness, "Déroulède!" he cries; "that's the man--he's _my_ God!"
Pétrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in
the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long
elastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's for
Alsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothing
else. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappear
off the earth, else it'll be us. Ah, when they talk politics to _me_,
I ask 'em, 'Are you for Déroulède, yes or no?' That's enough! I got
my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it's
grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'm
adjutant[1]--almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"
[Footnote 1: A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental
sergeant-major.--Tr.]
He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the
open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Déroulède
had spoken to him. "He spoke to everybody, an' then he spoke to me, as
close to me as you and me; but it was _him_! I wanted an idea, and he
gave it to me!"
"Very good," I say to him; "very good. You are a patriot, that's
excellent."
I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demands
of labor--although I have never had the time to think much about these
things--and it strikes me as touching and noble.
A last fiery spasm gets hold of Pétrolus as he espies afar Eudo's
pointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there will
be some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearer
cools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads. He is now
no more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing. His
face mournfully awakes to the evening. He shuffles along, bows his
long and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, he
approaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him.