CHAPTER VII

It was the Plan-des-Dames, that vast glade just opened up by the

felling of trees. It spread out in a gentle slope, surrounded by

tall thickets and superb beeches with straight regular trunks, which

formed a white colonnade patched with green lichens; fallen giants

were also lying in the grass, while on the left a mass of logs formed

a geometrical cube. The cold was sharpening with the twilight and the

frozen moss crackled beneath the feet. There was black darkness on the

earth while the tall branches showed against the pale sky, where a full

moon coming above the horizon would soon extinguish the stars.

Nearly three thousand colliers had come to the rendezvous, a swarming

crowd of men, women, and children, gradually filling the glade and

spreading out afar beneath the trees. Late arrivals were still coming

up, a flood of heads drowned in shadow and stretching as far as the

neighbouring copses. A rumbling arose from them, like that of a storm,

in this motionless and frozen forest.

At the top, dominating the slope, Étienne stood with Rasseneur and

Maheu. A quarrel had broken out, one could hear their voices in

sudden bursts. Near them some men were listening: Levaque, with

clenched fists; Pierron, turning his back and much annoyed that he

had no longer been able to feign a fever. There were also Father

Bonnemort and old Mouque, seated side by side on a stump, lost in deep

meditation. Then behind were the chaffers, Zacharie, Mouquet, and

others who had come to make fun of the thing; while gathered together

in a very different spirit the women in a group were as serious as

if at church. Maheude silently shook her head at the Levaque woman's

muttered oaths. Philoméne was coughing, her bronchitis having come back

with the winter. Only Mouquette was showing her teeth with laughter,

amused at the way in which Mother Brulé was abusing her daughter, an

unnatural creature who had sent her away that she might gorge herself

with rabbit, a creature who had sold herself and who fattened on her

man's cowardice. And Jeanlin had planted himself on the pile of wood,

hoisting up Lydie and making Bébert follow him, all three higher up in

the air than any one else.

The quarrel was raised by Rasseneur, who wished to proceed formally

to the election of officers. He was enraged by his defeat at the

Bon-Joyeux, and had sworn to have his revenge, for he flattered himself

that he could regain his old authority when he was once face to face,

not with the delegates, but with the miners themselves. Étienne was

disgusted, and thought the idea of officers was ridiculous in this

forest. They ought to act in a revolutionary fashion, like savages,

since they were tracked like wolves.

As the dispute threatened to drag on, he took possession of the crowd

at once by jumping on to the trunk of a tree and shouting:

"Comrades! comrades!"

The confused roar of the crowd died down into a long sigh, while Maheu

stifled Rasseneur's protestations. Étienne went on in a loud voice.

"Comrades, since they forbid us to speak, since they send the police

after us as if we were robbers, we have come to talk here! Here we are

free, we are at home. No one can silence us any more than they can

silence the birds and beasts!"

A thunder of cries and exclamations responded to him.

"Yes, yes! the forest is ours, we can talk here. Go on."

Then Étienne stood for a moment motionless on the tree-trunk. The moon,

still beneath the horizon, only lit up the topmost branches, and the

crowd, remaining in the darkness, stood above it at the top of the

slope like a bar of shadow.

He raised his arm with a slow movement and began. But his voice was not

fierce; he spoke in the cold tones of a simple envoy of the people,

who was rendering his account. He was delivering the discourse which

the commissioner of police had cut short at the Bon-Joyeux; and he

began by a rapid history of the strike, affecting a certain scientific

eloquence--facts, nothing but facts. At first he spoke of his dislike

to the strike; the miners had not desired it, it was the management

which had provoked it with the new timbering tariff. Then he recalled

the first step taken by the delegates in going to the manager, the

bad faith of the directors; and, later on, the second step, the tardy

concession, the ten centimes given up, after the attempt to rob them.

Now he showed by figures the exhaustion of the Provident Fund, and

pointed out the use that had been made of the help sent, briefly

excusing the International, Pluchart and the others, for not being able

to do more for them in the midst of the cares of their conquest of the

world. So the situation was getting worse every day; the Company was

giving back certificates and threatening to hire men from Belgium;

besides, it was intimidating the weak, and had forced a certain number

of miners to go down again. He preserved his monotonous voice, as if to

insist on the bad news; he said that hunger was victorious, that hope

was dead, and that the struggle had reached the last feverish efforts

of courage. And then he suddenly concluded, without raising his voice:

"It is in these circumstances, mates, that you have to take a decision

to-night. Do you want the strike to go on? and if so, what do you

expect to do to beat the Company?"

A deep silence fell from the starry sky. The crowd, which could not be

seen, was silent in the night beneath these words which choked every

heart, and a sigh of despair could be heard through the trees.

But Étienne was already continuing, with a change in his voice. It

was no longer the secretary of the association who was speaking; it

was the chief of a band, the apostle who was bringing truth. Could it

be that any were cowardly enough to go back on their word? What! They

were to suffer in vain for a month, and then to go back to the pits,

with lowered heads, so that the everlasting wretchedness might begin

over again! Would it not be better to die at once in the effort to

destroy this tyranny of capital, which was starving the worker? Always

to submit to hunger up to the moment when hunger will again throw the

calmest into revolt, was it not a foolish game which could not go on

for ever? And he pointed to the exploited miners, bearing alone the

disasters of every crisis, reduced to go without food as soon as the

necessities of competition lowered net prices. No, the timbering tariff

could not be accepted; it was only a disguised effort to economize on

the Company's part; they wanted to rob every man of an hour's work a

day. It was too much this time; the day was coming when the miserable,

pushed to extremity, would deal justice.

He stood with his arms in the air. At the word "justice" the crowd,

shaken by a long shudder, broke out into applause which rolled along

with the sound of dry leaves. Voices cried:

"Justice! it is time! Justice!"

Gradually Étienne grew heated. He had not Rasseneur's easy flowing

abundance. Words often failed him, he had to force his phrases,

bringing them out with an effort which he emphasized by a movement of

his shoulders. Only in these continual shocks he came upon familiar

images which seized on his audience by their energy; while his

workman's gestures, his elbows in and then extended, with his fists

thrust out, his jaw suddenly advanced as if to bite, had also an

extraordinary effect on his mates. They all said that if he was not big

he made himself heard.

"The wage system is a new form of slavery," he began again, in a more

sonorous voice. "The mine ought to belong to the miner, as the sea

belongs to the fisherman, and the earth to the peasant. Do you see? The

mine belongs to you, to all of you who, for a century, have paid for it

with so much blood and misery!"

He boldly entered on obscure questions of law, and lost himself in the

difficulties of the special regulations concerning mines. The subsoil,

like the soil, belonged to the nation: only an odious privilege gave

the monopoly of it to the Companies; all the more since, at Montsou,

the pretended legality of the concession was complicated by treaties

formerly made with the owners of the old fiefs, according to the

ancient custom of Hainault. The miners, then, had only to reconquer

their property; and with extended hands he indicated the whole country

beyond the forest. At this moment the moon, which had risen above the

horizon, lit him up as it glided from behind the high branches. When

the crowd, which was still in shadow, saw him thus, white with light,

distributing fortune with his open hands, they applauded anew by

prolonged clapping.

"Yes, yes, he's right. Bravo!"

Then Étienne trotted out his favourite subject, the assumption of the

instruments of production by the collectivity, as he kept on saying

in a phrase the pedantry of which greatly pleased him. At the present

time his evolution was completed. Having set out with the sentimental

fraternity of the novice and the need for reforming the wage system, he

had reached the political idea of its suppression. Since the meeting

at the Bon-Joyeux his collectivism, still humanitarian and without a

formula, had stiffened into a complicated programme which he discussed

scientifically, article by article. First, he affirmed that freedom

could only be obtained by the destruction of the state. Then, when the

people had obtained possession of the government, reforms would begin:

return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equal and free

family for the moral and oppressive family; absolute equality, civil,

political, and economic; individual independence guaranteed, thanks

to the possession of the integral product of the instruments of work;

finally, free vocational education, paid for by the collectivity. This

led to the total reconstruction of the old rotten society; he attacked

marriage, the right of bequest, he regulated every one's fortune, he

threw down the iniquitous monument of the dead centuries with a great

movement of his arm, always the same movement, the movement of the

reaper who is cutting down a ripe harvest. And then with the other hand

he reconstructed; he built up the future humanity, the edifice of truth

and justice rising in the dawn of the twentieth century. In this state

of mental tension reason trembled, and only the sectarian's fixed idea

was left. The scruples of sensibility and of good sense were lost;

nothing seemed easier than the realization of this new world. He had

foreseen everything; he spoke of it as of a machine which he could put

together in two hours, and he stuck at neither fire nor blood.

"Our turn is come," he broke out for the last time. "Now it is for us

to have power and wealth!"

The cheering rolled up to him from the depths of the forest. The moon

now whitened the whole of the glade, and cut into living waves the sea

of heads, as far as the dimly visible copses in the distance between

the great grey trunks. And in the icy air there was a fury of faces,

of gleaming eyes, of open mouths, a rut of famishing men, women, and

children, let loose on the just pillage of the ancient wealth they had

been deprived of. They no longer felt the cold, these burning words

had warmed them to the bone. Religious exaltation raised them from the

earth, a fever of hope like that of the Christians of the early Church

awaiting the near coming of justice. Many obscure phrases had escaped

them, they could not properly understand this technical and abstract

reasoning; but the very obscurity and abstraction still further

enlarged the field of promises and lifted them into a dazzling region.

What a dream! to be masters, to suffer no more, to enjoy at last!

"That's it, by God! it's our turn now! Down with the exploiters."

The women were delirious; Maheude, losing her calmness, was seized

with the vertigo of hunger, the Levaque woman shouted, old Brulé,

carried out of herself, was brandishing her witch-like arms, Philoméne

was shaken by a spasm of coughing, and Mouquette was so excited that

she cried out words of tenderness to the orator. Among the men,

Maheu was won over and shouted with anger, between Pierron who was

trembling and Levaque who was talking too much; while the chaffers,

Zacharie and Mouquet, though trying to make fun of things, were feeling

uncomfortable and were surprised that their mate could talk on so long

without having a drink. But on top of the pile of wood, Jeanlin was

making more noise than any one, egging on Bébert and Lydie and shaking

the basket in which Poland lay.

The clamour began again. Étienne was enjoying the intoxication of his

popularity. He held power, as it were, materialized in these three

thousand breasts, whose hearts he could move with a word. Souvarine,

if he had cared to come, would have applauded his ideas so far as he

recognized them, pleased with his pupil's progress in anarchism and

satisfied with the programme, except the article on education, a relic

of silly sentimentality, for men needed to be dipped in a bath of holy

and salutary ignorance. As to Rasseneur, he shrugged his shoulders with

contempt and anger.

"You shall let me speak," he shouted to Étienne.

The latter jumped from the tree-trunk.

"Speak, we shall see if they'll hear you."

Already Rasseneur had replaced him, and with a gesture demanded

silence. But the noise did not cease; his name went round from the

first ranks, who had recognized him, to the last, lost beneath the

beeches, and they refused to hear him; he was an overturned idol, the

mere sight of him angered his old disciples. His facile elocution,

his flowing, good-natured speech, which had so long charmed them, was

now treated like warm gruel made to put cowards to sleep. In vain he

talked through the noise, trying to take up again his discourse of

conciliation, the impossibility of changing the world by a stroke of

law, the necessity of allowing the social evolution time to accomplish

itself; they joked him, they hissed him; his defeat at the Bon-Joyeux

was now beyond repair. At last they threw handfuls of frozen moss at

him, and a woman cried in a shrill voice:

"Down with the traitor!"

He explained that the miner could not be the proprietor of the mine, as

the weaver is of his loom, and he said that he preferred sharing in the

benefits, the interested worker becoming the child of the house.

"Down with the traitor!" repeated a thousand voices, while stones began

to whistle by.

Then he turned pale, and despair filled his eyes with tears. His whole

existence was crumbling down; twenty years of ambitious comradeship

were breaking down beneath the ingratitude of the crowd. He came down

from the tree-trunk, with no strength to go on, struck to the heart.

"That makes you laugh," he stammered, addressing the triumphant

Étienne. "Good! I hope your turn will come. It will come, I tell you!"

And as if to reject all responsibility for the evils which he foresaw,

he made a large gesture, and went away alone across the country, pale

and silent.

Hoots arose, and then they were surprised to see Father Bonnemort

standing on the trunk and about to speak in the midst of the tumult.

Up till now Mouque and he had remained absorbed, with that air that

they always had of reflecting on former things. No doubt he was

yielding to one of those sudden crises of garrulity which sometimes

made the past stir in him so violently that recollections rose and

flowed from his lips for hours at a time. There was deep silence, and

they listened to this old man, who was like a pale spectre beneath

the moon, and as he narrated things without any immediate relation

with the discussion--long histories which no one could understand--the

impression was increased. He was talking of his youth; he described

the death of his two uncles who were crushed at the Voreux; then he

turned to the inflammation of the lungs which had carried off his

wife. He kept to his main idea, however: things had never gone well

and never would go well. Thus in the forest five hundred of them had

come together because the king would not lessen the hours of work; but

he stopped short, and began to tell of another strike--he had seen so

many! They all broke out under these trees, here at the Plan-des-Dames,

lower down at the Charbonnerie, still farther towards the Saut-du-Loup.

Sometimes it froze, sometimes it was hot. One evening it had rained so

much that they had gone back again without being able to say anything,

and the king's soldiers came up and it finished with volleys of

musketry.

"We raised our hands like this, and we swore not to go back again. Ah!

I have sworn; yes, I have sworn!"

The crowd listened gapingly, feeling disturbed, when Étienne, who had

watched the scene, jumped on to the fallen tree, keeping the old man

at his side. He had just recognized Chaval among their friends in the

first row. The idea that Catherine must be there had roused a new

ardour within him, the desire to be applauded in her presence.

"Mates, you have heard; this is one of our old men, and this is what he

has suffered, and what our children will suffer if we don't have done

with the robbers and butchers."

He was terrible; never had he spoken so violently. With one arm he

supported old Bonnemort, exhibiting him as a banner of misery and

mourning, and crying for vengeance. In a few rapid phrases he went

back to the first Maheu. He showed the whole family used up at the

mine, devoured by the Company, hungrier than ever after a hundred

years of work; and contrasting with the Maheus he pointed to the big

bellies of the directors sweating gold, a whole band of shareholders,

going on for a century like kept women, doing nothing but enjoy with

their bodies. Was it not fearful? a race of men dying down below, from

father to son, so that bribes of wine could be given to ministers, and

generations of great lords and bourgeois could give feasts or fatten

by their firesides! He had studied the diseases of the miners. He

made them all march past with their awful details: anaemia, scrofula,

black bronchitis, the asthma which chokes, and the rheumatism which

paralyses. These wretches were thrown as food to the engines and penned

up like beasts in the settlements. The great companies absorbed them,

regulating their slavery, threatening to enrol all the workers of the

nation, millions of hands, to bring fortune to a thousand idlers. But

the miner was no longer an ignorant brute, crushed within the bowels

of the earth. An army was springing up from the depths of the pits, a

harvest of citizens whose seed would germinate and burst through the

earth some sunny day. And they would see then if, after forty years of

service, any one would dare to offer a pension of a hundred and fifty

francs to an old man of sixty who spat out coal and whose legs were

swollen with the water from the cuttings. Yes! labour would demand

an account from capital: that impersonal god, unknown to the worker,

crouching down somewhere in his mysterious sanctuary, where he sucked

the life out of the starvelings who nourished him! They would go down

there; they would at last succeed in seeing his face by the gleam of

incendiary fires, they would drown him in blood, that filthy swine,

that monstrous idol, gorged with human flesh!

He was silent, but his arm, still extended in space, indicated the

enemy, down there, he knew not where, from one end of the earth to the

other. This time the clamour of the crowd was so great that people at

Montsou heard it, and looked towards Vandame, seized with anxiety at

the thought that some terrible landslip had occurred. Night-birds rose

above the trees in the clear open sky.

He now concluded his speech.

"Mates, what is your decision? Do you vote for the strike to go on?"

Their voices yelled, "Yes! yes!"

"And what steps do you decide on? We are sure of defeat if cowards go

down to-morrow."

Their voices rose again with the sound of a tempest:

"Kill the cowards!"

"Then you decide to call them back to duty and to their sworn word.

This is what we could do: present ourselves at the pits, bring back the

traitors by our presence, show the Company that we are all agreed, and

that we are going to die rather than yield."

"That's it. To the pits! to the pits!"

While he was speaking Étienne had looked for Catherine among the pale

shouting heads before him. She was certainly not there, but he still

saw Chaval, affecting to jeer, shrugging his shoulders, but devoured by

jealousy and ready to sell himself for a little of this popularity.

"And if there are any spies among us, mates," Étienne went on, "let

them look out; they're known. Yes, I can see Vandame colliers here who

have not left their pit."

"Is that meant for me?" asked Chaval, with an air of bravado.

"For you, or for any one else. But, since you speak, you ought to

understand that those who eat have nothing to do with those who are

starving. You work at Jean-Bart."

A chaffing voice interrupted:

"Oh! he work! he's got a wife who works for him."

Chaval swore, while the blood rose to his face.

"By God! is it forbidden to work, then?"

"Yes!" said Étienne, "when your mates are enduring misery for the good

of all, it is forbidden to go over, like a selfish sneaking coward,

to the masters' side. If the strike had been general we should have

got the best of it long ago. Not a single man at Vandame ought to have

gone down when Montsou is resting. To accomplish the great stroke, work

should be stopped in the entire country, at Monsieur Deneulin's as well

as here. Do you understand? there are only traitors in the Jean Bart

cuttings; you're all traitors!"

The crowd around Chaval grew threatening, and fists were raised and

cries of "Kill him! kill him!" began to be uttered. He had grown pale.

But, in his infuriated desire to triumph over Étienne, an idea restored

him.

"Listen to me, then! come to-morrow to Jean-Bart, and you shall see if

I'm working! We're on your side; they've sent me to tell you so. The

fires must be extinguished, and the engine-men, too, must go on strike.

All the better if the pumps do stop! the water will destroy the pits

and everything will be done for!"

He was furiously applauded in his turn, and now Étienne himself was

outflanked. Other orators succeeded each other from the tree-trunk,

gesticulating amid the tumult, and throwing out wild propositions.

It was a mad outburst of faith, the impatience of a religious sect

which, tired of hoping for the expected miracle, had at last decided

to provoke it. These heads, emptied by famine, saw everything red, and

dreamed of fire and blood in the midst of a glorious apotheosis from

which would arise universal happiness. And the tranquil moon bathed

this surging sea, the deep forest encircled with its vast silence this

cry of massacre. The frozen moss crackled beneath the heels of the

crowd, while the beeches, erect in their strength, with the delicate

tracery of their black branches against the white sky, neither saw nor

heard the miserable beings who writhed at their feet.

There was some pushing, and Maheude found herself near Maheu. Both of

them, driven out of their ordinary good sense, and carried away by

the slow exasperation which had been working within them for months,

approved Levaque, who went to extremes by demanding the heads of the

engineers. Pierron had disappeared. Bonnemort and Mouque were both

talking together, saying vague violent things which nobody heard. For a

joke Zacharie demanded the demolition of the churches, while Mouquet,

with his crosse in his hand, was beating it against the ground for

the sake of increasing the row. The women were furious. The Levaque,

with her fists to her hips, was setting to with Philoméne, whom she

accused of having laughed; Mouquette talked of attacking the gendarmes

by kicking them somewhere; Mother Brulé, who had just slapped Lydie on

finding her without either basket or salad, went on launching blows

into space against all the masters whom she would like to have got at.

For a moment Jeanlin was in terror, Bébert having learned through a

trammer that Madame Rasseneur had seen them steal Poland; but when he

had decided to go back and quietly release the beast at the door of

the Avantage, he shouted louder than ever, and opened his new knife,

brandishing the blade and proud of its glitter.

"Mates! mates!" repeated the exhausted Étienne, hoarse with the effort

to obtain a moment's silence for a definite understanding.

At last they listened.

"Mates! to-morrow morning at Jean-Bart, is it agreed?"

"Yes! yes! at Jean-Bart! death to the traitors!"

The tempest of these three thousand voices filled the sky, and died

away in the pure brightness of the moon.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER I

At four o'clock the moon had set, and the night was very dark.

Everything was still asleep at Deneulin's; the old brick house stood

mute and gloomy, with closed doors and windows, at the end of the large

ill-kept garden which separated it from the Jean-Bart mine. The other

frontage faced the deserted road to Vandame, a large country town,

about three kilometres off, hidden behind the forest.

Deneulin, tired after a day spent in part below, was snoring with his

face toward the wall, when he dreamt that he had been called. At last

he awoke, and really hearing a voice, got out and opened the window.

One of his captains was in the garden.

"What is it, then?" he asked.

"There's a rebellion, sir; half the men will not work, and are

preventing the others from going down."

He scarcely understood, with head heavy and dazed with sleep, and the

great cold struck him like an icy douche.

"Then make them go down, by George!" he stammered.

"It's been going on an hour," said the captain. "Then we thought it

best to come for you. Perhaps you will be able to persuade them."

"Very good; I'll go."

He quickly dressed himself, his mind quite clear now, and very

anxious. The house might have been pillaged; neither the cook nor the

man-servant had stirred. But from the other side of the staircase

alarmed voices were whispering; and when he came out he saw his

daughters' door open, and they both appeared in white dressing-gowns,

slipped on in haste.

"Father, what is it?"

Lucie, the elder, was already twenty-two, a tall dark girl, with a

haughty air; while Jeanne, the younger, as yet scarcely nineteen years

old, was small, with golden hair and a certain caressing grace.

"Nothing serious," he replied, to reassure them. "It seems that some

blusterers are making a disturbance down there. I am going to see."

But they exclaimed that they would not let him go before he had taken

something warm. If not, he would come back ill, with his stomach out of

order, as he always did. He struggled, gave his word of honour that he

was too much in a hurry.

"Listen!" said Jeanne, at last, hanging to his neck, "you must drink a

little glass of rum and eat two biscuits, or I shall remain like this,

and you'll have to take me with you."

He resigned himself, declaring that the biscuits would choke him. They

had already gone down before him, each with her candlestick. In the

dining-room below they hastened to serve him, one pouring out the rum,

the other running to the pantry for the biscuits. Having lost their

mother when very young, they had been rather badly brought up alone,

spoilt by their father, the elder haunted by the dream of singing

on the stage, the younger mad over painting in which she showed a

singular boldness of taste. But when they had to retrench after the

embarrassment in their affairs, these apparently extravagant girls

had suddenly developed into very sensible and shrewd managers, with

an eye for errors of centimes in accounts. Today, with their boyish

and artistic demeanour, they kept the purse, were careful over sous,

haggled with the tradesmen, renovated their dresses unceasingly, and in

fact, succeeded in rendering decent the growing embarrassment of the

house.

"Eat, papa," repeated Lucie.

Then, remarking his silent gloomy preoccupation, she was again

frightened.

"Is it serious, then, that you look at us like this? Tell us; we will

stay with you, and they can do without us at that lunch."

She was speaking of a party which had been planned for the morning,

Madame Hennebeau was to go in her carriage, first for Cécile, at

the Grégoires', then to call for them, so that they could all go to

Marchiennes to lunch at the Forges, where the manager's wife had

invited them. It was an opportunity to visit the workshops, the blast

furnaces, and the coke ovens.

"We will certainly remain," declared Jeanne, in her turn.

But he grew angry.

"A fine idea! I tell you that it is nothing. Just be so good as to get

back into your beds again, and dress yourselves for nine o'clock, as

was arranged."

He kissed them and hastened to leave. They heard the noise of his boots

vanishing over the frozen earth in the garden.

Jeanne carefully placed the stopper in the rum bottle, while Lucie

locked up the biscuits. The room had the cold neatness of dining-rooms

where the table is but meagrely supplied. And both of them took

advantage of this early descent to see if anything had been left

uncared for the evening before. A serviette lay about, the servant

should be scolded. At last they were upstairs again.

While he was taking the shortest cut through the narrow paths of his

kitchen garden, Deneulin was thinking of his compromised fortune,

this Montsou denier, this million which he had realized, dreaming to

multiply it tenfold, and which was to-day running such great risks.

It was an uninterrupted course of ill-luck, enormous and unforeseen

repairs, ruinous conditions of exploitation, then the disaster of this

industrial crisis, just when the profits were beginning to come in. If

the strike broke out here, he would be overthrown. He pushed a little

door: the buildings of the pit could be divined in the black night, by

the deepening of the shadow, starred by a few lanterns.

Jean-Bart was not so important as the Voreux, but its renewed

installation made it a pretty pit, as the engineers say. They had

not been contented by enlarging the shaft one metre and a half, and

deepening it to seven hundred and eight metres, they had equipped it

afresh with a new engine, new cages, entirely new material, all set up

according to the latest scientific improvements; and even a certain

seeking for elegance was visible in the constructions, a screening-shed

with carved frieze, a steeple adorned with a clock, a receiving-room

and an engine-room both rounded into an apse like a Renaissance

chapel, and surmounted by a chimney with a mosaic spiral made of black

bricks and red bricks. The pump was placed on the other shaft of the

concession, the old Gaston-Marie pit, reserved solely for this purpose.

Jean-Bart, to right and left of the winding-shaft, only had two

conduits, that for the steam ventilator and that for the ladders.

In the morning, ever since three o'clock, Chaval, who had arrived

first, had been seducing his comrades, convincing them that they ought

to imitate those at Montsou, and demand an increase of five centimes

a tram. Soon four hundred workmen had passed from the shed into the

receiving-room, in the midst of a tumult of gesticulation and shouting.

Those who wished to work stood with their lamps, barefooted, with

shovel or pick beneath their arms; while the others, still in their

sabots, with their overcoats on their shoulders because of the great

cold, were barring the shaft; and the captains were growing hoarse in

the effort to restore order, begging them to be reasonable and not to

prevent those who wanted from going down.

But Chaval was furious when he saw Catherine in her trousers and

jacket, her head tied up in the blue cap. On getting up, he had roughly

told her to stay in bed. In despair at this arrest of work she had

followed him all the same, for he never gave her any money; she often

had to pay both for herself and him; and what was to become of her if

she earned nothing? She was overcome by fear, the fear of a brothel

at Marchiennes, which was the end of putter-girls without bread and

without lodging.

"By God!" cried Chaval, "what the devil have you come here for?"

She stammered that she had no income to live on and that she wanted to

work.

"Then you put yourself against me, wench? Back you go at once, or I'll

go back with you and kick my sabots into your backside."

She recoiled timidly but she did not leave, resolved to see how things

would turn out. Deneulin had arrived by the screening-stairs. In

spite of the weak light of the lanterns, with a quick look he took in

the scene, with this rabble wrapt in shadow; he knew every face--the

pikemen, the porters, the landers, the putters, even the trammers. In

the nave, still new and clean, the arrested task was waiting; the steam

in the engine, under pressure, made slight whistling sounds; the cages

were hanging motionless to the cables; the trams, abandoned on the

way, were encumbering the metal floors. Scarcely eighty lamps had been

taken; the others were flaming in the lamp cabin. But no doubt a word

from him would suffice, and the whole life of labour would begin again.

"Well, what's going on then, my lads?" he asked in a loud voice. "What

are you angry about? Just explain to me and we will see if we can

agree."

He usually behaved in a paternal way towards his men, while at the

same time demanding hard work. With an authoritative, rough manner, he

had tried to conquer them by a good nature which had its outbursts of

passion, and he often gained their love; the men especially respected

in him his courage, always in the cuttings with them, the first in

danger whenever an accident terrified the pit. Twice, after fire-damp

explosions, he had been let down, fastened by a rope under his armpits,

when the bravest drew back.

"Now," he began again, "you are not going to make me repent of having

trusted you. You know that I have refused police protection. Talk

quietly and I will hear you."

All were now silent and awkward, moving away from him; and it was

Chaval who at last said:

"Well, Monsieur Deneulin, we can't go on working; we must have five

centimes more the tram."

He seemed surprised.

"What! five centimes! and why this demand? I don't complain about your

timbering, I don't want to impose a new tariff on you like the Montsou

directors."

"Maybe! but the Montsou mates are right, all the same. They won't have

the tariff, and they want a rise of five centimes because it is not

possible to work properly at the present rates. We want five centimes

more, don't we, you others?"

Voices approved, and the noise began again in the midst of violent

gesticulation. Gradually they drew near, forming a small circle.

A flame came into Deneulin's eyes, and his fist, that of a man who

liked strong government, was clenched, for fear of yielding to the

temptation of seizing one of them by the neck. He preferred to discuss

on the basis of reason.

"You want five centimes, and I agree that the work is worth it. Only

I can't give it. If I gave it I should simply be done for. You must

understand that I have to live first in order for you to live, and

I've got to the end, the least rise in net prices will upset me. Two

years ago, you remember, at the time of the last strike, I yielded, I

was able to then. But that rise of wages was not the less ruinous, for

these two years have been a struggle. To-day I would rather let the

whole thing go than not be able to tell next month where to get the

money to pay you."

Chaval laughed roughly in the face of this master who told them his

affairs so frankly. The others lowered their faces, obstinate and

incredulous, refusing to take into their heads the idea that a master

did not gain millions out of his men.

Then Deneulin, persisting, explained his struggle with Montsou, always

on the watch and ready to devour him if, some day, he had the stupidity

to come to grief. It was a savage competition which forced him to

economize, the more so since the great depth of Jean-Bart increased the

price of extraction, an unfavourable condition hardly compensated by

the great thickness of the coal-beds. He would never have raised wages

after the last strike if it had not been necessary for him to imitate

Montsou, for fear of seeing his men leave him. And he threatened them

with the morrow; a fine result it would be for them, if they obliged

him to sell, to pass beneath the terrible yoke of the directors! He did

not sit on a throne far away in an unknown sanctuary; he was not one

of those shareholders who pay agents to skin the miner who has never

seen them; he was a master, he risked something besides his money, he

risked his intelligence, his health, his life. Stoppage of work would

simply mean death, for he had no stock, and he must fulfil orders.

Besides, his standing capital could not sleep. How could he keep his

engagements? Who would pay the interest on the sums his friends had

confided to him? It would mean bankruptcy.

"That's where we are, my good fellows," he said, in conclusion. "I want

to convince you. We don't ask a man to cut his own throat, do we? and

if I give you your five centimes, or if I let you go out on strike,

it's the same as if I cut my throat."

He was silent. Grunts went round. A party among the miners seemed to

hesitate. Several went back towards the shaft.

"At least," said a captain, "let every one be free. Who are those who

want to work?"

Catherine had advanced among the first. But Chaval fiercely pushed her

back, shouting:

"We are all agreed; it's only bloody rogues who'll leave their mates!"

After that, conciliation appeared impossible. The cries began again,

and men were hustled away from the shaft, at the risk of being crushed

against the walls. For a moment the manager, in despair, tried to

struggle alone, to reduce the crowd by violence; but it was useless

madness, and he retired. For a few minutes he rested, out of breath, on

a chair in the receiver's office, so overcome by his powerlessness that

no ideas came to him. At last he grew calm, and told an inspector to go

and bring Chaval; then, when the latter had agreed to the interview, he

motioned the others away.

"Leave us."

Deneulin's idea was to see what this fellow was after. At the first

words he felt that he was vain, and was devoured by passionate

jealousy. Then he attacked him by flattery, affecting surprise that

a workman of his merit should so compromise his future. It seemed as

though he had long had his eyes on him for rapid advancement; and

he ended by squarely offering to make him captain later on. Chaval

listened in silence, with his fists at first clenched, but then

gradually unbent. Something was working in the depths of his skull;

if he persisted in the strike he would be nothing more than Étienne's

lieutenant, while now another ambition opened, that of passing into the

ranks of the bosses. The heat of pride rose to his face and intoxicated

him. Besides, the band of strikers whom he had expected since the

morning had not arrived; some obstacle must have stopped them, perhaps

the police; it was time to submit. But all the same he shook his head;

he acted the incorruptible man, striking his breast indignantly. Then,

without mentioning to the master the rendezvous he had given to the

Montsou men, he promised to calm his mates, and to persuade them to go

down.

Deneulin remained hidden, and the captains themselves stood aside. For

an hour they heard Chaval orating and discussing, standing on a tram in

the receiving-room. Some of the men hooted him; a hundred and twenty

went off exasperated, persisting in the resolution which he had made

them take. It was already past seven. The sun was rising brilliantly;

it was a bright day of hard frost; and all at once movement began in

the pit, and the arrested labour went on. First the crank of the engine

plunged, rolling and unrolling the cables on the drums. Then, in the

midst of the tumult of the signals, the descent took place. The cages

filled and were engulfed, and rose again, the shaft swallowing its

ration of trammers and putters and pikemen; while on the metal floors

the landers pushed the trams with a sound of thunder.

"By God! What the devil are you doing there?" cried Chaval to

Catherine, who was awaiting her turn. "Will you just go down and not

laze about!"

At nine o'clock, when Madame Hennebeau arrived in her carriage with

Cécile, she found Lucie and Jeanne quite ready and very elegant, in

spite of their dresses having been renovated for the twentieth time.

But Deneulin was surprised to see Négrel accompanying the carriage on

horseback. What! were the men also in the party? Then Madame Hennebeau

explained in her maternal way that they had frightened her by saying

that the streets were full of evil faces, and so she preferred to

bring a defender. Négrel laughed and reassured them: nothing to cause

anxiety, threats of brawlers as usual, but not one of them would dare

to throw a stone at a window-pane. Still pleased with his success,

Deneulin related the checked rebellion at Jean-Bart. He said that he

was now quite at rest. And on the Vandame road, while the young ladies

got into the carriage, all congratulated themselves on the superb day,

oblivious of the long swelling shudder of the marching people afar off

in the country, though they might have heard the sound of it if they

had pressed their ears against the earth.

"Well! it is agreed," repeated Madame Hennebeau. "This evening you will

call for the young ladies and dine with us. Madame Grégoire has also

promised to come for Cécile."

"You may reckon on me," replied Deneulin.

The carriage went off towards Vandame, Jeanne and Lucie leaning down

to laugh once more to their father, who was standing by the roadside;

while Négrel gallantly trotted behind the fleeing wheels.

They crossed the forest, taking the road from Vandame to Marchiennes.

As they approached Tartaret, Jeanne asked Madame Hennebeau if she knew

Côte-Verte, and the latter, in spite of her stay of five years in

the country, acknowledged that she had never been on that side. Then

they made a detour. Tartaret, on the outskirts of the forest, was an

uncultivated moor, of volcanic sterility, under which for ages a coal

mine had been burning. Its history was lost in legend. The miners of

the place said that fire from heaven had fallen on this Sodom in the

bowels of the earth, where the putter-girls had committed abominations

together, so that they had not even had the time to come to the

surface, and today were still burning at the bottom of this hell. The

calcined rocks, of a sombre red, were covered by an efflorescence of

alum as by a leprosy. Sulphur grew like a yellow flower at the edge

of the fissures. At night, those who were brave enough to venture to

look into these holes declared that they saw flames there, sinful

souls shrivelling in the furnace within. Wandering lights moved over

the soil, and hot vapours, the poisons from the devil's ordure and his

dirty kitchen, were constantly smoking. And like a miracle of eternal

spring, in the midst of this accursed moor of Tartaret, Côte-Verte

appeared, with its meadows for ever green, its beeches with leaves

unceasingly renewed, its fields where three harvests ripened. It was

a natural hot-house, warmed by the fire in the deep strata beneath.

The snow never lay on it. The enormous bouquet of verdure, beside the

leafless forest trees, blossomed on this December day, and the frost

had not even scorched the edge of it.

Soon the carriage was passing over the plain. Négrel joked over the

legend, and explained that a fire often occurred at the bottom of a

mine from the fermentation of the coal dust; if not mastered it would

burn on for ever, and he mentioned a Belgian pit which had been flooded

by diverting a river and running it into the pit. But he became silent.

For the last few minutes groups of miners had been constantly passing

the carriage; they went by in silence, with sidelong looks at the

luxurious equipage which forced them to stand aside. Their number went

on increasing. The horses were obliged to cross the little bridge over

the Scarpe at walking pace. What was going on, then, to bring all these

people into the roads? The young ladies became frightened, and Négrel

began to smell out some fray in the excited country; it was a relief

when they at last arrived at Marchiennes. The batteries of coke ovens

and the chimneys of the blast furnaces, beneath a sun which seemed to

extinguish them, were belching out smoke and raining their everlasting

soot through the air.

CHAPTER II

At Jean-Bart, Catherine had already been at work for an hour, pushing

trams as far as the relays; and she was soaked in such a bath of

perspiration that she stopped a moment to wipe her face.

At the bottom of the cutting, where he was hammering at the seam with

his mates, Chaval was astonished when he no longer heard the rumble of

the wheels. The lamps burnt badly, and the coal dust made it impossible

to see.

"What's up?" he shouted.

When she answered that she was sure she would melt, and that her heart

was going to stop, he replied furiously:

"Do like us, stupid! Take off your shift."

They were seven hundred and eight metres to the north in the first

passage of the Désirée seam, which was at a distance of three

kilometres from the pit-eye. When they spoke of this part of the pit,

the miners of the region grew pale, and lowered their voices, as if

they had spoken of hell; and most often they were content to shake

their heads as men who would rather not speak of these depths of fiery

furnace. As the galleries sank towards the north, they approached

Tartaret, penetrating to that interior fire which calcined the rocks

above. The cuttings at the point at which they had arrived had an

average temperature of forty-five degrees. They were there in the

accursed city, in the midst of the flames which the passers-by on

the plain could see through the fissures, spitting out sulphur and

poisonous vapours.

Catherine, who had already taken off her jacket, hesitated, then took

off her trousers also; and with naked arms and naked thighs, her

chemise tied round her hips by a cord like a blouse, she began to push

again.

"Anyhow, that's better," she said aloud.

In the stifling heat she still felt a vague fear. Ever since they began

working here, five days ago, she had thought of the stories told her in

childhood, of those putter-girls of the days of old who were burning

beneath Tartaret, as a punishment for things which no one dared to

repeat. No doubt she was too big now to believe such silly stories; but

still, what would she do if she were suddenly to see coming out of the

wall a girl as red as a stove, with eyes like live coals? The idea made

her perspire still more.

At the relay, eighty metres from the cutting, another putter took the

tram and pushed it eighty metres farther to the upbrow, so that the

receiver could forward it with the others which came down from the

upper galleries.

"Gracious! you're making yourself comfortable!" said this woman, a lean

widow of thirty, when she saw Catherine in her chemise. "I can't do it,

the trammers at the brow bother me with their dirty tricks."

"Ah, well!" replied the young girl. "I don't care about the men! I feel

too bad."

She went off again, pushing an empty tram. The worst was that in this

bottom passage another cause joined with the neighbourhood of Tartaret

to make the heat unbearable. They were by the side of old workings, a

very deep abandoned gallery of Gaston-Marie, where, ten years earlier,

an explosion of fire-damp had set the seam alight; and it was still

burning behind the clay wall which had been built there and was kept

constantly repaired, in order to limit the disaster. Deprived of air,

the fire ought to have become extinct, but no doubt unknown currents

kept it alive; it had gone on for ten years, and heated the clay wall

like the bricks of an oven, so that those who passed felt half-roasted.

It was along this wall, for a length of more than a hundred metres,

that the haulage was carried on, in a temperature of sixty degrees.

After two journeys, Catherine again felt stifled. Fortunately, the

passage was large and convenient in this Désirée seam, one of the

thickest in the district. The bed was one metre ninety in height, and

the men could work standing. But they would rather have worked with

twisted necks and a little fresh air.

"Hallo, there! are you asleep?" said Chaval again, roughly, as soon as

he no longer heard Catherine moving. "How the devil did I come to get

such a jade? Will you just fill your tram and push?"

She was at the bottom of the cutting, leaning on her shovel; she was

feeling ill, and she looked at them all with a foolish air without

obeying. She scarcely saw them by the reddish gleam of the lamps,

entirely naked like animals, so black, so encrusted in sweat and coal,

that their nakedness did not frighten her. It was a confused task,

the bending of ape-like backs, an infernal vision of scorched limbs,

spending their strength amid dull blows and groans. But they could see

her better, no doubt, for the picks left off hammering, and they joked

her about taking off her trousers.

"Eh! you'll catch cold; look out!"

"It's because she's got such fine legs! I say, Chaval, there's enough

there for two."

"Oh! we must see. Lift up! Higher! higher!"

Then Chaval, without growing angry at these jokes, turned on her.

"That's it, by God! Ah! she likes dirty jokes. She'd stay there to

listen till to-morrow."

Catherine had painfully decided to fill her tram, then she pushed it.

The gallery was too wide for her to get a purchase on the timber on

both sides; her naked feet were twisted in the rails where they sought

a point of support, while she slowly moved on, her arms stiffened in

front, and her back breaking. As soon as she came up to the clay wall,

the fiery torture again began, and the sweat fell from her whole body

in enormous drops as from a storm-cloud. She had scarcely got a third

of the way before she streamed, blinded, soiled also by the black mud.

Her narrow chemise, as though dipped in ink, was sticking to her skin,

and rising up to her waist with the movement of her thighs; it hurt her

so that she had once more to stop her task.

What was the matter with her, then, today? Never before had she felt

as if there were wool in her bones. It must be the bad air. The

ventilation did not reach to the bottom of this distant passage. One

breathed there all sorts of vapours, which came out of the coal with

the low bubbling sound of a spring, so abundantly sometimes that

the lamps would not burn; to say nothing of fire-damp, which nobody

noticed, for from one week's end to the other the men were always

breathing it into their noses throughout the seam. She knew that bad

air well; dead air the miners called it; the heavy asphyxiating gases

below, above them the light gases which catch fire and blow up all the

stalls of a pit, with hundreds of men, in a single burst of thunder.

From her childhood she had swallowed so much that she was surprised she

bore it so badly, with buzzing ears and burning throat.

Unable to go farther, she felt the need of taking off her chemise. It

was beginning to torture her, this garment of which the least folds cut

and burnt her. She resisted the longing, and tried to push again, but

was forced to stand upright. Then quickly, saying to herself that she

would cover herself at the relay, she took off everything, the cord and

the chemise, so feverishly that she would have torn off her skin if she

could. And now, naked and pitiful, brought down to the level of the

female animal seeking its living in the mire of the streets, covered

with soot and mud up to the belly, she laboured on like a cab-hack. On

all fours she pushed onwards.

But despair came; it gave her no relief to be naked. What more could

she take off? The buzzing in her ears deafened her, she seemed to feel

a vice gripping her temples. She fell on her knees. The lamp, wedged

into the coal in the tram, seemed to her to be going out. The intention

to turn up the wick alone survived in the midst of her confused ideas.

Twice she tried to examine it, and both times when she placed it before

her on the earth she saw it turn pale, as though it also lacked breath.

Suddenly the lamp went out. Then everything whirled around her in the

darkness; a millstone turned in her head, her heart grew weak and left

off beating, numbed in its turn by the immense weariness which was

putting her limbs to sleep. She had fallen back in anguish amid the

asphyxiating air close to the ground.

"By God! I believe she's lazing again," growled Chaval's voice.

He listened from the top of the cutting, and could hear no sound of

wheels.

"Eh, Catherine! you damned worm!"

His voice was lost afar in the black gallery, and not a breath replied.

"I'll come and make you move, I will!"

Nothing stirred, there was only the same silence, as of death. He

came down furiously, rushing along with his lamp so violently that he

nearly fell over the putter's body which barred the way. He looked

at her in stupefaction. What was the matter, then? was it humbug, a

pretence of going to sleep? But the lamp which he had lowered to light

up her face threatened to go out. He lifted it and lowered it afresh,

and at last understood; it must be a gust of bad air. His violence

disappeared; the devotion of the miner in face of a comrade's peril

was awaking within him. He shouted for her chemise to be brought, and

seized the naked and unconscious girl in his arms, holding her as high

as possible. When their garments had been thrown over her shoulders he

set out running, supporting his burden with one hand, and carrying the

two lamps with the other. The deep galleries unrolled before him as he

rushed along, turning to the right, then to the left, seeking life in

the frozen air of the plain which blew down the air-shaft. At last the

sound of a spring stopped him, the trickle of water flowing from the

rock. He was at a square in the great haulage gallery which formerly

led to Gaston-Marie. The air here blew in like a tempest, and was so

fresh that a shudder went through him as he seated himself on the earth

against the props; his mistress was still unconscious, with closed eyes.

"Catherine, come now, by God! no humbug. Hold yourself up a bit while I

dip this in the water."

He was frightened to find her so limp. However, he was able to dip her

chemise in the spring, and to bathe her face with it. She was like a

corpse, already buried in the depth of the earth, with her slender

girlish body which seemed to be still hesitating before swelling to

the form of puberty. Then a shudder ran over her childish breast, over

the belly and thighs of the poor little creature deflowered before her

time. She opened her eyes and stammered:

"I'm cold."

"Ah! that's better now!" cried Chaval, relieved.

He dressed her, slipped on the chemise easily, but swore over the

difficulty he had in getting on the trousers, for she could not help

much. She remained dazed, not understanding where she was, nor why

she was naked. When she remembered she was ashamed. How had she dared

to take everything off! And she questioned him; had she been seen so,

without even a handkerchief around her waist to cover her? He joked,

and made up stories, saying that he had just brought her there in the

midst of all the mates standing in a row. What an idea, to have taken

his advice and exhibited her bum! Afterwards he declared that the mates

could not even know whether it was round or square, he had rushed along

so swiftly.

"The deuce! but I'm dying of cold," he said, dressing himself in turn.

Never had she seen him so kind. Usually, for one good word that he said

to her she received at once two bullying ones. It would have been so

pleasant to live in agreement; a feeling of tenderness went through her

in the languor of her fatigue. She smiled at him, and murmured:

"Kiss me."

He embraced her, and lay down beside her, waiting till she was able to

walk.

"You know," she said again, "you were wrong to shout at me over there,

for I couldn't do more, really! Even in the cutting you're not so hot;

if you only knew how it roasts you at the bottom of the passage!"

"Sure enough," he replied, "it would be better under the trees. You

feel bad in that stall, I'm afraid, my poor girl."

She was so touched at hearing him agree with her that she tried to be

brave.

"Oh! it's a bad place. Then, to-day the air is poisoned. But you shall

see soon if I'm a worm. When one has to work, one works; isn't it true?

I'd die rather than stop."

There was silence. He held her with one arm round her waist, pressing

her against his breast to keep her from harm. Although she already felt

strong enough to go back to the stall, she forgot everything in her

delight.

"Only," she went on in a very low voice, "I should like it so much if

you were kinder. Yes, it is so good when we love each other a little."

And she began to cry softly.

"But I do love you," he cried, "for I've taken you with me."

She only replied by shaking her head. There are often men who take

women just in order to have them, caring mighty little about their

happiness. Her tears flowed more hotly; it made her despair now to

think of the happy life she would have led if she had chanced to fall

to another lad, whose arm she would always have felt thus round her

waist. Another? and the vague image of that other arose from the depth

of her emotion. But it was done with; she only desired now to live to

the end with this one, if he would not hustle her about too much.

"Then," she said, "try to be like this sometimes."

Sobs cut short her words, and he embraced her again.

"You're a stupid! There, I swear to be kind. I'm not worse than any one

else, go on!"

She looked at him, and began to smile through her tears. Perhaps he

was right; one never met women who were happy. Then, although she

distrusted his oath, she gave herself up to the joy of seeing him

affectionate. Good God! if only that could last! They had both embraced

again, and as they were pressing each other in a long clasp they heard

steps, which made them get up. Three mates who had seen them pass had

come up to know how she was.

They set out together. It was nearly ten o'clock, and they took their

lunch into a cool corner before going back to sweat at the bottom of

the cutting. They were finishing the double slice of bread-and-butter,

their brick, and were about to drink the coffee from their tin, when

they were disturbed by a noise coming from stalls in the distance. What

then? was it another accident? They got up and ran. Pikemen, putters,

trammers crossed them at every step; no one knew anything; all were

shouting; it must be some great misfortune. Gradually the whole mine

was in terror, frightened shadows emerged from the galleries, lanterns

danced and flew away in the darkness. Where was it? Why could no one

say?

All at once a captain passed, shouting:

"They are cutting the cables! they are cutting the cables!"

Then the panic increased. It was a furious gallop through the gloomy

passages. Their heads were confused. Why cut the cables? And who was

cutting them, when the men were below? It seemed monstrous.

But the voice of another captain was heard and then lost:

"The Montsou men are cutting the cables! Let every one go up!"

When he had understood, Chaval stopped Catherine short. The idea that

he would meet the Montsou men up above, should he get out, paralysed

his legs. It had come, then, that band which he thought had got into

the hands of the police. For a moment he thought of retracing his path

and ascending through Gaston-Marie, but that was no longer possible. He

swore, hesitating, hiding his fear, repeating that it was stupid to run

like that. They would not, surely, leave them at the bottom.

The captain's voice echoed anew, now approaching them:

"Let every one go up! To the ladders! to the ladders!"

And Chaval was carried away with his mates. He pushed Catherine and

accused her of not running fast enough. Did she want, then, to remain

in the pit to die of hunger? For those Montsou brigands were capable

of breaking the ladders without waiting for people to come up. This

abominable suggestion ended by driving them wild. Along the galleries

there was only a furious rush, helter-skelter; a race of madmen, each

striving to arrive first and mount before the others. Some men shouted

that the ladders were broken and that no one could get out. And then in

frightened groups they began to reach the pit-eye, where they were all

engulfed. They threw themselves toward the shaft, they crushed through

the narrow door to the ladder passage; while an old groom who had

prudently led back the horses to the stable, looked at them with an air

of contemptuous indifference, accustomed to spend nights in the pit and

certain that he could eventually be drawn out of it.

"By God! will you climb up in front of me?" said Chaval to Catherine.

"At least I can hold you if you fall."

Out of breath, and suffocated by this race of three kilometres which

had once more bathed her in sweat, she gave herself up, without

understanding, to the eddies of the crowd. Then he pulled her by the

arm, almost breaking it; and she cried with pain, her tears bursting

out. Already he was forgetting his oath, never would she be happy.

"Go on, then!" he roared.

But he frightened her too much. If she went first he would bully her

the whole time. So she resisted, while the wild flood of their comrades

pushed them to one side. The water that filtered from the shaft was

falling in great drops, and the floor of the pit-eye, shaken by this

tramping, was trembling over the sump, the muddy cesspool ten metres

deep. At Jean-Bart, two years earlier, a terrible accident had happened

just here; the breaking of a cable had precipitated the cage to the

bottom of the sump, in which two men had been drowned. And they all

thought of this; every one would be left down there if they all crowded

on to the planks.

"Confounded dunderhead!" shouted Chaval. "Die then; I shall be rid of

you!"

He climbed up and she followed.

From the bottom to daylight there were a hundred and two ladders, about

seven metres in length, each placed on a narrow landing which occupied

the breadth of the passage and in which a square hole scarcely allowed

the shoulders to pass. It was like a flat chimney, seven hundred metres

in height, between the wall of the shaft and the brattice of the

winding-cage, a damp pipe, black and endless, in which the ladders were

placed one above the other, almost straight, in regular stages. It took

a strong man twenty-five minutes to climb up this giant column. The

passage, however, was no longer used except in cases of accident.

Catherine at first climbed bravely. Her naked feet were used to the

hard coal on the floors of the passages, and did not suffer from the

square rungs, covered with iron rods to prevent them from wearing

away. Her hands, hardened by the haulage, grasped without fatigue the

uprights that were too big for her. And it even interested her and took

her out of her grief, this unforeseen ascent, this long serpent of

men flowing on and hoisting themselves up three on a ladder, so that

even when the head should emerge in daylight the tail would still be

trailing over the sump. They were not there yet, the first could hardly

have ascended a third of the shaft. No one spoke now, only their feet

moved with a low sound; while the lamps, like travelling stars, spaced

out from below upward, formed a continually increasing line.

Catherine heard a trammer behind her counting the ladders. It gave her

the idea of counting them also. They had already mounted fifteen, and

were arriving at a landing-place. But at that moment she collided with

Chaval's legs. He swore, shouting to her to look out. Gradually the

whole column stopped and became motionless. What then? had something

happened? and every one recovered his voice to ask questions and to

express fear. Their anxiety had increased since leaving the bottom;

their ignorance as to what was going on above oppressed them more as

they approached daylight. Someone announced that they would have to go

down again, that the ladders were broken. That was the thought that

preoccupied them all, the fear of finding themselves face to face with

space. Another explanation came down from mouth to mouth; there had

been an accident, a pikeman slipped from a rung. No one knew exactly,

the shouts made it impossible to hear; were they going to bed there? At

last, without any precise information being obtained, the ascent began

again, with the same slow, painful movement, in the midst of the tread

of feet and the dancing of lamps. It must certainly be higher up that

the ladders were broken.

At the thirty-second ladder, as they passed a third landing-stage,

Catherine felt her legs and arms grow stiff. At first she had felt a

slight tingling in her skin. Now she lost the sensation of the iron

and the wood beneath her feet and in her hands. A vague pain, which

gradually became burning, heated her muscles. And in the dizziness

which came over her, she recalled her grandfather Bonnemort's stories

of the days when there was no passage, and little girls of ten used to

take out the coal on their shoulders up bare ladders; so that if one

of them slipped, or a fragment of coal simply rolled out of a basket,

three or four children would fall down head first from the blow. The

cramp in her limbs became unbearable, she would never reach the end.

Fresh stoppages allowed her to breathe. But the terror which was

communicated every time from above dazed her still more. Above and

below her, respiration became more difficult. This interminable ascent

was causing giddiness, and the nausea affected her with the others. She

was suffocating, intoxicated with the darkness, exasperated with the

walls which crushed against her flesh, and shuddering also with the

dampness, her body perspiring beneath the great drops which fell on

her. They were approaching a level where so thick a rain fell that it

threatened to extinguish their lamps.

Chaval twice spoke to Catherine without obtaining any reply. What the

devil was she doing down there? Had she let her tongue fall? She might

just tell him if she was all right. They had been climbing for half an

hour, but so heavily that he had only reached the fifty-ninth ladder;

there were still forty-three. Catherine at last stammered that she was

getting on all right. He would have treated her as a worm if she had

acknowledged her weariness. The iron of the rungs must have cut her

feet; it seemed to her that it was sawing in up to the bone. After

every grip she expected to see her hands leave the uprights; they were

so peeled and stiff she could not close her fingers, and she feared she

would fall backward with torn shoulders and dislocated thighs in this

continual effort. It was especially the defective slope of the ladders

from which she suffered, the almost perpendicular position which

obliged her to hoist herself up by the strength of her wrists, with her

belly against the wood. The panting of many breaths now drowned the

sound of the feet, forming an enormous moan, multiplied tenfold by the

partition of the passage, arising from the depths and expiring towards

the light. There was a groan; word ran along that a trammer had just

cut his head open against the edge of a stair.

And Catherine went on climbing. They had passed the level. The rain

had ceased; a mist made heavy the cellar-like air, poisoned with the

odour of old iron and damp wood. Mechanically she continued to count

in a low voice--eighty-one, eighty-two, eighty-three; still nineteen.

The repetition of these figures supported her merely by their rhythmic

balance; she had no further consciousness of her movements. When she

lifted her eyes the lamps turned in a spiral. Her blood was flowing;

she felt that she was dying; the least breath would have knocked her

over. The worst was that those below were now pushing, and that the

entire column was stampeding, yielding to the growing anger of its

fatigue, the furious need to see the sun again. The first mates had

emerged; there were, then, no broken ladders; but the idea that they

might yet be broken to prevent the last from coming up, when others

were already breathing up above, nearly drove them mad. And when a new

stoppage occurred oaths broke out, and all went on climbing, hustling

each other, passing over each other's bodies to arrive at all costs.

Then Catherine fell. She had cried Chaval's name in despairing appeal.

He did not hear; he was struggling, digging his heels into a comrade's

ribs to get before him. And she was rolled down and trampled over.

As she fainted she dreamed. It seemed to her that she was one of

the little putter-girls of old days, and that a fragment of coal,

fallen from the basket above her, had thrown her to the bottom of the

shaft, like a sparrow struck by a flint. Five ladders only remained

to climb. It had taken nearly an hour. She never knew how she reached

daylight, carried up on people's shoulders, supported by the throttling

narrowness of the passage. Suddenly she found herself in the dazzling

sunlight, in the midst of a yelling crowd who were hooting her.

CHAPTER III

From early morning, before daylight, a tremor had agitated the

settlements, and that tremor was now swelling through the roads and

over the whole country. But the departure had not taken place as

arranged, for the news had spread that cavalry and police were scouring

the plain. It was said that they had arrived from Douai during the

night, and Rasseneur was accused of having betrayed his mates by

warning M. Hennebeau; a putter even swore that she had seen the servant

taking a dispatch to the telegraph office. The miners clenched their

fists and watched the soldiers from behind their shutters by the pale

light of the early morning.

Towards half-past seven, as the sun was rising, another rumour

circulated, reassuring the impatient. It was a false alarm, a simple

military promenade, such as the general occasionally ordered since

the strike had broken out, at the desire of the prefect of Lille. The

strikers detested this official; they reproached him with deceiving

them by the promise of a conciliatory intervention, which was limited

to a march of troops into Montsou every week, to overawe them. So when

the cavalry and police quietly took the road back to Marchiennes, after

contenting themselves with deafening the settlements by the stamping of

their horses over the hard earth, the miners jeered at this innocent

prefect and his soldiers who turned on their heels when things were

beginning to get hot. Up till nine o'clock they stood peacefully about,

in good humour, before their houses, following with their eyes up the

streets the meek backs of the last gendarmes. In the depths of their

large beds the good people of Montsou were still sleeping, with their

heads among the feathers. At the manager's house, Madame Hennebeau had

just been seen setting out in the carriage, leaving M. Hennebeau at

work, no doubt, for the closed and silent villa seemed dead. Not one

of the pits had any military guard; it was a fatal lack of foresight

in the hour of danger, the natural stupidity which accompanies

catastrophes, the fault which a government commits whenever there is

need of precise knowledge of the facts. And nine o'clock was striking

when the colliers at last took the Vandame road, to repair to the

rendezvous decided on the day before in the forest.

Étienne had very quickly perceived that he would certainly not find

over at Jean-Bart the three thousand comrades on whom he was counting.

Many believed that the demonstration was put off, and the worst was

that two or three bands, already on the way, would compromise the cause

if he did not at all costs put himself at their head. Almost a hundred,

who had set out before daylight, were taking refuge beneath the forest

beeches, waiting for the others. Souvarine, whom the young man went

up to consult, shrugged his shoulders; ten resolute fellows could do

more work than a crowd; and he turned back to the open book before

him, refusing to join in. The thing threatened to turn into sentiment

when it would have been enough to adopt the simple method of burning

Montsou. As Étienne left the house he saw Rasseneur, seated before the

metal stove and looking very pale, while his wife, in her everlasting

black dress, was abusing him in polite and cutting terms.

Maheu was of opinion that they ought to keep their promise. A

rendezvous like this was sacred. However, the night had calmed their

fever; he was now fearing misfortune, and he explained that it was

their duty to go over there to maintain their mates in the right path.

Maheude approved with a nod. Étienne repeated complacently that it

was necessary to adopt revolutionary methods, without attempting any

person's life. Before setting out he refused his share of a loaf that

had been given him the evening before, together with a bottle of gin;

but he drank three little glasses, one after the other, saying that

he wanted to keep out the cold; he even carried away a tinful. Alzire

would look after the children. Old Bonnemort, whose legs were suffering

from yesterday's walk, remained in bed.

They did not go away together, from motives of prudence. Jeanlin had

disappeared long ago. Maheu and Maheude went off on the side sloping

towards Montsou; while Étienne turned towards the forest, where he

proposed to join his mates. On the way he caught up a band of women

among whom he recognized Mother Brulé and the Levaque woman; as they

walked they were eating chestnuts which Mouquette had brought; they

swallowed the skins so as to feel more in their stomachs. But in the

forest he found no one; the men were already at Jean-Bart. He took the

same course, and arrived at the pit at the moment when Levaque and

some hundreds others were penetrating into the square. Miners were

coming up from every direction--the men by the main road, the women by

the fields, all at random, without leaders, without weapons, flowing

naturally thither like water which runs down a slope. Étienne perceived

Jeanlin, who had climbed up on a foot-bridge, installed as though at

a theatre. He ran faster, and entered among the first. There were

scarcely three hundred of them.

There was some hesitation when Deneulin showed himself at the top of

the staircase which led to the receiving-room.

"What do you want?" he asked in a loud voice.

After having watched the disappearance of the carriage, from which

his daughters were still laughing towards him, he had returned to the

pit overtaken by a strange anxiety. Everything, however, was found in

good order. The men had gone down; the cage was working, and he became

reassured again, and was talking to the head captain when the approach

of the strikers was announced to him. He had placed himself at a window

of the screening-shed; and in the face of this increasing flood which

filled the square, he at once felt his impotence. How could he defend

these buildings, open on every side? he could scarcely group some

twenty of his workmen round himself. He was lost.

"What do you want?" he repeated, pale with repressed anger, making an

effort to accept his disaster courageously.

There were pushes and growls amid the crowd. Étienne at last came

forward, saying:

"We do not come to injure you, sir, but work must cease everywhere."

Deneulin frankly treated him as an idiot.

"Do you think you will benefit me if you stop work at my place? You

might just as well fire a gun off into my back. Yes, my men are below,

and they shall not come up, unless you mean to murder me first!"

These rough words raised a clamour. Maheu had to hold back Levaque,

who was pushing forward in a threatening manner, while Étienne went on

discussing, and tried to convince Deneulin of the lawfulness of their

revolutionary conduct. But the latter replied by the right to work.

Besides, he refused to discuss such folly; he meant to be master in his

own place. His only regret was that he had not four gendarmes here to

sweep away this mob.

"To be sure, it is my fault; I deserve what has happened to me. With

fellows of your sort force is the only argument. The Government thinks

to buy you by concessions. You will throw it down, that's all, when it

has given you weapons."

Étienne was quivering, but still held himself in. He lowered his voice.

"I beg you, sir, give the order for your men to come up. I cannot

answer for my mates. You may avoid a disaster."

"No! be good enough to let me alone! Do I know you? You do not belong

to my works, you have no quarrel with me. It is only brigands who thus

scour the country to pillage houses."

Loud vociferations now drowned his voice, the women especially abused

him. But he continued to hold his own, experiencing a certain relief in

this frankness with which he expressed his disciplinarian nature. Since

he was ruined in any case, he thought platitudes a useless cowardice.

But their numbers went on increasing; nearly five hundred were pushing

towards the door, and he might have been torn to pieces if his head

captain had not pulled him violently back.

"For mercy's sake, sir! There will be a massacre. What is the good of

letting men be killed for nothing?"

He struggled and protested in one last cry thrown at the crowd:

"You set of brigands, you will know what, when we are strongest again!"

They led him away; the hustling of the crowd had thrown the first ranks

against the staircase so that the rail was twisted. It was the women

who pushed and screamed and urged on the men. The door yielded at

once; it was a door without a lock, simply closed by a latch. But the

staircase was too narrow for the pushing crowd, which would have taken

long to get in if the rear of the besiegers had not gone off to enter

by other openings. Then they poured in on all sides--by the shed, the

screening-place, the boiler buildings. In less than five minutes the

whole pit belonged to them; they swarmed at every story in the midst

of furious gestures and cries, carried away by their victory over this

master who resisted.

Maheu, in terror, had rushed forward among the first, saying to Étienne:

"They must not kill him!"

The latter was already running; then, when Étienne understood that

Deneulin had barricaded himself in the captains' room, he replied:

"Well, would it be our fault? such a madman!"

He was feeling anxious, however, being still too calm to yield to this

outburst of anger. His pride of leadership also suffered on seeing the

band escape from his authority and become enraged, going beyond the

cold execution of the will of the people, such as he had anticipated.

In vain he called for coolness, shouting that they must not put right

on their enemies' side by acts of useless destruction.

"To the boilers!" shouted Mother Brulé. "Put out the fires!"

Levaque, who had found a file, was brandishing it like a dagger,

dominating the tumult with a terrible cry:

"Cut the cables! cut the cables!"

Soon they all repeated this; only Étienne and Maheu continued to

protest, dazed, and talking in the tumult without obtaining silence. At

last the former was able to say:

"But there are men below, mates!"

The noise redoubled and voices arose from all sides:

"So much the worse!--Ought not to go down!--Serve the traitors

right!--Yes, yes, let them stay there!--And then, they have the

ladders!"

Then, when this idea of the ladders had made them still more obstinate,

Étienne saw that he would have to yield. For fear of a greater disaster

he hastened towards the engine, wishing at all events to bring the

cages up, so that the cables, being cut above the shaft, should not

smash them by falling down with their enormous weight. The engine-man

had disappeared as well as the few daylight workers; and he took hold

of the starting lever, manipulating it while Levaque and two other

climbed up the metal scaffold which supported the pulleys. The cages

were hardly fixed on the keeps when the strident sound was heard of

the file biting into the steel. There was deep silence, and this

noise seemed to fill the whole pit; all raised their heads, looking

and listening, seized by emotion. In the first rank Maheu felt a

fierce joy possess him, as if the teeth of the file would deliver

them from misfortune by eating into the cable of one of these dens of

wretchedness, into which they would never descend again.

But Mother Brulé had disappeared by the shed stairs still shouting:

"The fires must be put out! To the boilers! to the boilers!"

Some women followed her. Maheude hastened to prevent them from smashing

everything, just as her husband had tried to reason with the men. She

was the calmest of them; one could demand one's rights without making

a mess in people's places. When she entered the boiler building the

women were already chasing away the two stokers, and the Brulé, armed

with a large shovel, and crouching down before one of the stoves,

was violently emptying it, throwing the red-hot coke on to the brick

floor, where it continued to burn with black smoke. There were ten

stoves for the five boilers. Soon the women warmed to the work, the

Levaque manipulating her shovel with both hands, Mouquette raising her

clothes up to her thighs so as not to catch fire, all looking red in

the reflection of the flames, sweating and dishevelled in this witch's

kitchen. The piles of coal increased, and the burning heat cracked the

ceiling of the vast hall.

"Enough, now!" cried Maheude; "the store-room is afire."

"So much the better," replied Mother Brulé. "That will do the work. Ah,

by God! haven't I said that I would pay them out for the death of my

man!"

At this moment Jeanlin's shrill voice was heard:

"Look out! I'll put it out, I will! I'll let it all off!"

He had come in among the first, and had kicked his legs about among the

crowd, delighted at the fray and seeking out what mischief he could do;

the idea had occurred to him to turn on the discharge taps and let off

the steam.

The jets came out with the violence of volleys; the five boilers were

emptied with the sound of a tempest, whistling in such a roar of

thunder that one's ears seemed to bleed. Everything had disappeared

in the midst of the vapour, the hot coal grew pale, and the women

were nothing more than shadows with broken gestures. The child alone

appeared mounted on the gallery, behind the whirlwinds of white steam,

filled with delight and grinning broadly in the joy of unchaining this

hurricane.

This lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. A few buckets of water had

been thrown over the heaps to complete their extinction; all danger of

a fire had gone by, but the anger of the crowd had not subsided; on

the contrary, it had been whipped up. Men went down with hammers, even

the women armed themselves with iron bars; and they talked of smashing

boilers, of breaking engines, and of demolishing the mine.

Étienne, forewarned, hastened to come up with Maheu. He himself was

becoming intoxicated and carried away by this hot fever of revenge. He

struggled, however, and entreated them to be calm, now that, with cut

cables, extinguished fires, and empty boilers, work was impossible.

He was not always listened to; and was again about to be carried away

by the crowd, when hoots arose outside at a little low door where the

ladder passage emerged.

"Down with the traitors!--Oh! the dirty chops of the cowards!--Down

with them! down with them!"

The men were beginning to come up from below. The first arrivals,

blinded by the daylight, stood there with quivering eyelids. Then they

moved away, trying to gain the road and flee.

"Down with the cowards! down with the traitors!"

The whole band of strikers had run up. In less than three minutes there

was not a man left in the buildings; the five hundred Montsou men were

ranged in two rows, and the Vandame men, who had had the treachery to

go down, were forced to pass between this double hedge. And as every

fresh miner appeared at the door of the passage, covered with the

black mud of work and with garments in rags, the hooting redoubled,

and ferocious jokes arose. Oh! look at that one!--three inches of legs

and then his arse! and this one with his nose eaten by those Volcan

girls! and this other, with eyes pissing out enough wax to furnish

ten cathedrals! and this other, the tall fellow without a rump and as

long as Lent! An enormous putter-woman, who rolled out with her breast

to her belly and her belly to her backside, raised a furious laugh.

They wanted to handle them, the joking increased and was turning to

cruelty, blows would soon have rained; while the row of poor devils

came out shivering and silent beneath the abuse, with sidelong looks in

expectation of blows, glad when they could at last rush away out of the

mine.

"Hallo! how many are there in there?" asked Étienne.

He was astonished to see them still coming out, and irritated at the

idea that it was not a mere handful of workers, urged by hunger,

terrorized by the captains. They had lied to him, then, in the forest;

nearly all Jean-Bart had gone down. But a cry escaped from him and he

rushed forward when he saw Chaval standing on the threshold.

"By God! is this the rendezvous you called us to?"

Imprecations broke out and there was a movement of the crowd towards

the traitor. What! he had sworn with them the day before, and now they

found him down below with the others! Was he, then, making fools of

people?

"Off with him! To the shaft! to the shaft!"

Chaval, white with fear, stammered and tried to explain. But Étienne

cut him short, carried out of himself and sharing the fury of the band.

"You wanted to be in it, and you shall be in it. Come on! take your

damned snout along!"

Another clamour covered his voice. Catherine, in her turn, had just

appeared, dazzled by the bright sunlight, and frightened at falling

into the midst of these savages. She was panting, with legs aching from

the hundred and two ladders, and with bleeding palms, when Maheude,

seeing her, rushed forward with her hand up.

"Ah! slut! you, too! When your mother is dying of hunger you betray her

for your bully!"

Maheu held back her arm, and stopped the blow. But he shook his

daughter; he was enraged, like his wife; he threw her conduct in her

face, and both lost their heads, shouting louder than their mates.

The sight of Catherine had completed Étienne's exasperation. He

repeated:

"On we go to the other pits, and you come with us, you dirty devil!"

Chaval had scarcely time to get his sabots from the shed and to throw

his woollen jacket over his frozen shoulders. They all dragged him on,

forcing him to run in the midst of them. Catherine, bewildered, also

put on her sabots, buttoning at her neck her man's old jacket, with

which she kept off the cold; and she ran behind her lover, she would

not leave him, for surely they were going to murder him.

Then in two minutes Jean-Bart was emptied. Jeanlin had found a horn

and was blowing it, producing hoarse sounds, as though he were

gathering oxen together. The women--Mother Brulé, the Levaque, and

Mouquette--raised their skirts to run, while Levaque, with an axe in

his hand, manipulated it like a drum-major's stick. Other men continued

to arrive; they were nearly a thousand, without order, again flowing on

to the road like a torrent let loose. The gates were too narrow, and

the palings were broken down.

"To the pits!--Down with the traitors!--No more work!"

And Jean-Bart fell suddenly into a great silence. Not a man was left,

not a breath was heard. Deneulin came out of the captains' room, and

quite alone, with a gesture forbidding any one to follow him, he went

over the pit. He was pale and very calm.

At first he stopped before the shaft, lifting his eyes to look at the

cut cables; the steel ends hung useless, the bite of the file had

left a living scar, a fresh wound which gleamed in the black grease.

Afterwards he went up to the engine, and looked at the crank, which

was motionless, like the joint of a colossal limb struck by paralysis.

He touched the metal, which had already cooled, and the cold made him

shudder as though he had touched a corpse. Then he went down to the

boiler-room, walked slowly before the extinguished stoves, yawning

and inundated, and struck his foot against the boilers, which sounded

hollow. Well! it was quite finished; his ruin was complete. Even if he

mended the cables and lit the fires, where would he find men? Another

fortnight's strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of

disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou brigands; he felt

that all had a complicity in it, that it was a general agelong fault.

They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were

dying of hunger.

CHAPTER IV

And the troop went off over the flat plain, white with frost beneath

the pale winter sun, and overflowed the path as they passed through the

beetroot fields.

From the Fourche-aux-Boeufs, Étienne had assumed command. He cried

his orders while the crowd moved on, and organized the march. Jeanlin

galloped at the head, performing barbarous music on his horn. Then

the women came in the first ranks, some of them armed with sticks:

Maheude, with wild eyes seemed to be seeking afar for the promised

city of justice, Mother Brulé, the Levaque woman, Mouquette, striding

along beneath their rags, like soldiers setting out for the seat of

war. If they had any encounters, we should see if the police dared

to strike women. And the men followed in a confused flock, a stream

that grew larger and larger, bristling with iron bars and dominated by

Levaque's single axe, with its blade glistening in the sun. Étienne,

in the middle, kept Chaval in sight, forcing him to walk before him;

while Maheu, behind, gloomily kept an eye on Catherine, the only woman

among these men, obstinately trotting near her lover for fear that he

would be hurt. Bare heads were dishevelled in the air; only the clank

of sabots could be heard, like the movement of released cattle, carried

away by Jeanlin's wild trumpeting.

But suddenly a new cry arose:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

It was midday; the hunger of six weeks on strike was awaking in

these empty stomachs, whipped up by this race across the fields. The

few crusts of the morning and Mouquette's chestnuts had long been

forgotten; their stomachs were crying out, and this suffering was added

to their fury against the traitors.

"To the pits! No more work! Bread!"

Étienne, who had refused to eat his share at the settlement, felt an

unbearable tearing sensation in his chest. He made no complaint, but

mechanically took his tin from time to time and swallowed a gulp of

gin, shaking so much that he thought he needed it to carry him to the

end. His cheeks were heated and his eyes inflamed. He kept his head,

however, and still wished to avoid needless destruction.

As they arrived at the Joiselle road a Vandame pikeman, who had joined

the band for revenge on his master, impelled the men towards the right,

shouting:

"To Gaston-Marie! Must stop the pump! Let the water ruin Jean-Bart!"

The mob was already turning, in spite of the protests of Étienne,

who begged them to let the pumping continue. What was the good of

destroying the galleries? It offended his workman's heart, in spite

of his resentment. Maheu also thought it unjust to take revenge on

a machine. But the pikeman still shouted his cry of vengeance, and

Étienne had to cry still louder:

"To Mirou! There are traitors down there! To Mirou! to Mirou!"

With a gesture, he had turned the crowd towards the left road; while

Jeanlin, going ahead, was blowing louder than ever. An eddy was

produced in the crowd; this time Gaston-Marie was saved.

And the four kilometres which separated them from Mirou were traversed

in half an hour, almost at running pace, across the interminable plain.

The canal on this side cut it with a long icy ribbon. The leafless

trees on the banks, changed by the frost into giant candelabra,

alone broke this pale uniformity, prolonged and lost in the sky at

the horizon as in a sea. An undulation of the ground hid Montsou and

Marchiennes; there was nothing but bare immensity.

They reached the pit, and found a captain standing on a foot-bridge at

the screening-shed to receive them. They all well knew Father Quandieu,

the _doyen_ of the Montsou captains, an old man whose skin and

hair were quite white, and who was in his seventies, a miracle of fine

health in the mines.

"What have you come after here, you pack of meddlers?" he shouted.

The band stopped. It was no longer a master, it was a mate; and a

certain respect held them back before this old workman.

"There are men down below," said Étienne. "Make them come up."

"Yes, there are men there," said Father Quandieu, "some six dozen; the

others were afraid of you evil beggars! But I warn you that not one

comes up, or you will have to deal with me!"

Exclamations arose, the men pushed, the women advanced. Quickly coming

down from the foot-bridge, the captain now barred the door.

Then Maheu tried to interfere.

"It is our right, old man. How can we make the strike general if we

don't force all the mates to be on our side?"

The old man was silent a moment. Evidently his ignorance on the subject

of coalition equalled the pikeman's. At last he replied:

"It may be your right, I don't say. But I only know my orders. I am

alone here; the men are down till three, and they shall stay there till

three."

The last words were lost in hooting. Fists were threateningly advanced,

the women deafened him, and their hot breath blew in his face. But he

still held out, his head erect, and his beard and hair white as snow;

his courage had so swollen his voice that he could be heard distinctly

over the tumult.

"By God! you shall not pass! As true as the sun shines, I would rather

die than let you touch the cables. Don't push any more, or I'm damned

if I don't fling myself down the shaft before you!"

The crowd drew back shuddering and impressed. He went on:

"Where is the beast who does not understand that? I am only a workman

like you others. I have been told to guard here, and I'm guarding."

That was as far as Father Quandieu's intelligence went, stiffened by

his obstinacy of military duty, his narrow skull, and eyes dimmed by

the black melancholy of half a century spent underground. The men

looked at him moved, feeling within them an echo of what he said, this

military obedience, the sense of fraternity and resignation in danger.

He saw that they were hesitating still, and repeated:

"I'm damned if I don't fling myself down the shaft before you!"

A great recoil carried away the mob. They all turned, and in the rush

took the right-hand road, which stretched far away through the fields.

Again cries arose:

"To Madeleine! To Crévecoeur! no more work! Bread! bread!"

But in the centre, as they went on, there was hustling. It was Chaval,

they said, who was trying to take advantage of an opportunity to

escape. Étienne had seized him by the arm, threatening to do for him if

he was planning some treachery. And the other struggled and protested

furiously:

"What's all this for? Isn't a man free? I've been freezing the last

hour. I want to clean myself. Let me go!"

He was, in fact, suffering from the coal glued to his skin by sweat,

and his woollen garment was no protection.

"On you go, or we'll clean you," replied Étienne. "Don't expect to get

your life at a bargain."

They were still running, and he turned towards Catherine, who was

keeping up well. It annoyed him to feel her so near him, so miserable,

shivering beneath her man's old jacket and her muddy trousers. She must

be nearly dead of fatigue, she was running all the same.

"You can go off, you can," he said at last.

Catherine seemed not to hear. Her eyes, on meeting Étienne's, only

flamed with reproach for a moment. She did not stop. Why did he want

her to leave her man? Chaval was not at all kind, it was true; he

would even beat her sometimes. But he was her man, the one who had had

her first; and it enraged her that they should throw themselves on

him--more than a thousand of them. She would have defended him without

any tenderness at all, out of pride.

"Off you go!" repeated Maheu, violently.

Her father's order slackened her course for a moment. She trembled, and

her eyelids swelled with tears. Then, in spite of her fear, she came

back to the same place again, still running. Then they let her be.

The mob crossed the Joiselle road, went a short distance up the Cron

road and then mounted towards Cougny. On this side, factory chimneys

striped the flat horizon; wooden sheds, brick workshops with large

dusty windows, appeared along the street. They passed one after another

the low buildings of two settlements--that of the Cent-Quatre-Vingts,

then that of the Soixante-Seize; and from each of them, at the sound of

the horn and the clamour arising from every mouth, whole families came

out--men, women, and children--running to join their mates in the rear.

When they came up to Madeleine there were at least fifteen hundred. The

road descended in a gentle slope; the rumbling flood of strikers had to

turn round the pit-bank before they could spread over the mine square.

It was now not more than two o'clock. But the captains had been warned

and were hastening the ascent as the band arrived. The men were all

up, only some twenty remained and were now disembarking from the cage.

They fled and were pursued with stones. Two were struck, another left

the sleeve of his jacket behind. This man-hunt saved the material, and

neither the cables nor the boilers were touched. The flood was already

moving away, rolling on towards the next pit.

This one, Crévecoeur, was only five hundred metres away from Madeleine.

There, also, the mob arrived in the midst of the ascent. A putter-girl

was taken and whipped by the women with her breeches split open and

her buttocks exposed before the laughing men. The trammer-boys had

their ears boxed, the pikemen got away, their sides blue from blows

and their noses bleeding. And in this growing ferocity, in this old

need of revenge which was turning every head with madness, the choked

cries went on, death to traitors, hatred against ill-paid work, the

roaring of bellies after bread. They began to cut the cables, but the

file would not bite, and the task was too long now that the fever was

on them for moving onward, for ever onward. At the boilers a tap was

broken; while the water, thrown by bucketsful into the stoves, made the

metal gratings burst.

Outside they were talking of marching on Saint-Thomas. This was the

best disciplined pit. The strike had not touched it, nearly seven

hundred men must have gone down there. This exasperated them; they

would wait for these men with sticks, ranged for battle, just to see

who would get the best of it. But the rumour ran along that there were

gendarmes at Saint-Thomas, the gendarmes of the morning whom they had

made fun of. How was this known? nobody could say. No matter! they

were seized by fear and decided on Feutry-Cantel. Their giddiness

carried them on, all were on the road, clanking their sabots, rushing

forward. To Feutry-Cantel! to Feutry-Cantel! The cowards there were

certainly four hundred in number and there would be fun! Situated three

kilometres away, this pit lay in a fold of the ground near the Scarpe.

They were already climbing the slope of the Platriéres, beyond the road

to Beaugnies, when a voice, no one knew from whom, threw out the idea

that the soldiers were, perhaps, down there at Feutry-Cantel. Then from

one to the other of the column it was repeated that the soldiers were

down there. They slackened their march, panic gradually spread in the

country, idle without work, which they had been scouring for hours. Why

had they not come across any soldiers? This impunity troubled them, at

the thought of the repression which they felt to be coming.

Without any one knowing where it came from, a new word of command

turned them towards another pit.

"To the Victoire! to the Victoire!"

Were there, then, neither soldiers nor police at the Victoire? Nobody

knew. All seemed reassured. And turning round they descended from the

Beaumont side and cut across the fields to reach the Joiselle road. The

railway line barred their passage, and they crossed it, pulling down

the palings. Now they were approaching Montsou, the gradual undulation

of the landscape grew less, the sea of beetroot fields enlarged,

reaching far away to the black houses at Marchiennes.

This time it was a march of five good kilometres. So strong an impulse

pushed them on that they had no feeling of their terrible fatigue, or

of their bruised and wounded feet. The rear continued to lengthen,

increased by mates enlisted on the roads and in the settlements. When

they had passed the canal at the Magache bridge, and appeared before

the Victoire, there were two thousand of them. But three o'clock had

struck, the ascent was completed, not a man remained below. Their

disappointment was spent in vain threats; they could only heave

broken bricks at the workmen who had arrived to take their duty at

the earth-cutting. There was a rush, and the deserted pit belonged to

them. And in their rage at not finding a traitor's face to strike,

they attacked things. A rankling abscess was bursting within them, a

poisoned boil of slow growth. Years and years of hunger tortured them

with a thirst for massacre and destruction. Behind a shed Étienne saw

some porters filling a wagon with coal.

"Will you just clear out of the bloody place!" he shouted. "Not a bit

of coal goes out!"

At his orders some hundred strikers ran up, and the porters only had

time to escape. Men unharnessed the horses, which were frightened and

set off, struck in the haunches; while others, overturning the wagon,

broke the shafts.

Levaque, with violent blows of his axe, had thrown himself on the

platforms to break down the foot-bridges. They resisted, and it

occurred to him to tear up the rails, destroying the line from one

end of the square to the other. Soon the whole band set to this task.

Maheu made the metal chairs leap up, armed with his iron bar which

he used as a lever. During this time Mother Brulé led away the women

and invaded the lamp cabin, where their sticks covered the soil with

a carnage of lamps. Maheude, carried out of herself, was laying about

her as vigorously as the Levaque woman. All were soaked in oil, and

Mouquette dried her hands on her skirt, laughing to find herself so

dirty. Jeanlin for a joke, had emptied a lamp down her neck. But all

this revenge produced nothing to eat. Stomachs were crying out louder

than ever. And the great lamentation dominated still:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

A former captain at the Victoire kept a stall near by. No doubt he had

fled in fear, for his shed was abandoned. When the women came back, and

the men had finished destroying the railway, they besieged the stall,

the shutters of which yielded at once. They found no bread there; there

were only two pieces of raw flesh and a sack of potatoes. But in the

pillage they discovered some fifty bottles of gin, which disappeared

like a drop of water drunk up by the sand.

Étienne, having emptied his tin, was able to refill it. Little by

little a terrible drunkenness, the drunkenness of the starved, was

inflaming his eyes and baring his teeth like a wolf's between his

pallid lips. Suddenly he perceived that Chaval had gone off in the

midst of the tumult. He swore, and men ran to seize the fugitive, who

was hiding with Catherine behind the timber supply.

"Ah! you dirty swine; you are afraid of getting into trouble!" shouted

Étienne. "It was you in the forest who called for a strike of the

engine-men, to stop the pumps, and now you want to play us a filthy

trick! Very well! By God! we will go back to Gaston-Marie. I will have

you smash the pump; yes, by God! you shall smash it!"

He was drunk; he was urging his men against this pump which he had

saved a few hours earlier.

"To Gaston-Marie! to Gaston-Marie!"

They all cheered, and rushed on, while Chaval, seized by the shoulders,

was drawn and pushed violently along, while he constantly asked to be

allowed to wash.

"Will you take yourself off, then?" cried Maheu to Catherine who had

also begun to run again.

This time she did not even draw back, but turned her burning eyes on

her father, and went on running.

Once more the mob ploughed through the flat plain. They were retracing

their steps over the long straight paths, by the fields endlessly

spread out. It was four o'clock; the sun which approached the horizon,

lengthened the shadows of this horde with their furious gestures over

the frozen soil.

They avoided Montsou, and farther on rejoined the Joiselle road; to

spare the journey round Fourche-aux-Boeufs, they passed beneath the

walls of Piolaine. The Grégoires had just gone out, having to visit a

lawyer before going to dine with the Hennebeaus, where they would find

Cécile. The estate seemed asleep, with its avenue of deserted limes,

its kitchen garden and its orchard bared by the winter. Nothing was

stirring in the house, and the closed windows were dulled by the warm

steam within. Out of the profound silence an impression of good-natured

comfort arose, the patriarchal sensation of good beds and a good table,

the wise happiness of the proprietor's existence.

Without stopping, the band cast gloomy looks through the grating and at

the length of protecting walls, bristling with broken bottles. The cry

arose again:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

The dogs alone replied, by barking ferociously, a pair of Great Danes,

with rough coats, who stood with open jaws. And behind the closed

blind there were only the servants. Mélanie the cook and Honorine

the housemaid, attracted by this cry, pale and perspiring with fear

at seeing these savages go by. They fell on their knees, and thought

themselves killed on hearing a single stone breaking a pane of a

neighbouring window. It was a joke of Jeanlin's; he had manufactured a

sling with a piece of cord, and had just sent a little passing greeting

to the Grégoires. Already he was again blowing his horn, the band was

lost in the distance, and the cry grew fainter:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

They arrived at Gaston-Marie in still greater numbers, more than two

thousand five hundred madmen, breaking everything, sweeping away

everything, with the force of a torrent which gains strength as it

moves. The police had passed here an hour earlier, and had gone off

towards Saint-Thomas, led astray by some peasants; in their haste they

had not even taken the precaution of leaving a few men behind to guard

the pit. In less than a quarter of an hour the fires were overturned,

the boilers emptied, the buildings torn down and devastated. But it was

the pump which they specially threatened. It was not enough to stop it

in the last expiring breath of its steam; they threw themselves on it

as on a living person whose life they required.

"The first blow is yours!" repeated Étienne, putting a hammer into

Chaval's hand. "Come! you have sworn with the others!"

Chaval drew back trembling, and in the hustling the hammer fell; while

other men, without waiting, battered the pump with blows from iron

bars, blows from bricks, blows from anything they could lay their hands

on. Some even broke sticks over it. The nuts leapt off, the pieces of

steel and copper were dislocated like torn limbs. The blow of a shovel,

delivered with full force, fractured the metal body; the water escaped

and emptied itself, and there was a supreme gurgle like an agonizing

death-rattle.

That was the end, and the mob found themselves outside again, madly

pushing on behind Étienne, who would not let Chaval go.

"Kill him! the traitor! To the shaft! to the shaft!"

The livid wretch, clinging with imbecile obstinacy to his fixed idea,

continued to stammer his need of cleaning himself.

"Wait, if that bothers you, said the Levaque woman. "Here! here's a

bucket!"

There was a pond there, an infiltration of the water from the pump. It

was white with a thick layer of ice; and they struck it and broke the

ice, forcing him to dip his head in this cold water.

"Duck then," repeated Mother Brulé. "By God! if you don't duck we'll

shove you in. And now you shall have a drink of it; yes, yes, like a

beast, with your jaws in the trough!"

He had to drink on all fours. They all laughed, with cruel laughter.

One woman pulled his ears, another woman threw in his face a handful

of dung found fresh on the road. His old woollen jacket in tatters no

longer held together. He was haggard, stumbling, and with struggling

movements of his hips he tried to flee.

Maheu had pushed him, and Maheude was among those who grew furious,

both of them satisfying their old spite; even Mouquette, who generally

remained such good friends with her old lovers, was wild with this one,

treating him as a good-for-nothing, and talking of taking his breeches

down to see if he was still a man.

Étienne made her hold her tongue.

"That's enough. There's no need for all to set to it. If you like, you,

we will just settle it together."

His fists closed and his eyes were lit up with homicidal fury; his

intoxication was turning into the desire to kill.

"Are you ready? One of us must stay here. Give him a knife; I've got

mine."

Catherine, exhausted and terrified, gazed at him. She remembered his

confidences, his desire to devour a man when he had drunk, poisoned

after the third glass, to such an extent had his drunkards of parents

put this beastliness into his body. Suddenly she leapt forward, struck

him with both her woman's hands, and choking with indignation shouted

into his face:

"Coward! coward! coward! Isn't it enough, then, all these abominations?

You want to kill him now that he can't stand upright any longer!"

She turned towards her father and her mother; she turned towards the

others.

"You are cowards! cowards! Kill me, then, with him! I will tear your

eyes out, I will, if you touch him again. Oh! the cowards!"

And she planted herself before her man to defend him, forgetting the

blows, forgetting the life of misery, lifted up by the idea that she

belonged to him since he had taken her, and that it was a shame for her

when they so crushed him.

Étienne had grown pale beneath this girl's blows. At first he had

been about to knock her down; then, after having wiped his face with

the movement of a man who is recovering from intoxication, he said to

Chaval, in the midst of deep silence:

"She is right; that's enough. Off you go."

Immediately Chaval was away, and Catherine galloped behind him. The

crowd gazed at them as they disappeared round a corner of the road; but

Maheude muttered:

"You were wrong; ought to have kept him. He is sure to be after some

treachery."

But the mob began to march on again. Five o'clock was about to strike.

The sun, as red as a furnace on the edge of the horizon, seemed to

set fire to the whole plain. A pedlar who was passing informed them

that the military were descending from the Crévecoeur side. Then they

turned. An order ran:

"To Montsou! To the manager!--Bread! bread! bread!"

CHAPTER V

M. Hennebeau had placed himself in front of his study window to watch

the departure of the carriage which was taking away his wife to

lunch at Marchiennes. His eyes followed Négrel for a moment, as he

trotted beside the carriage door. Then he quietly returned and seated

himself at his desk. When neither his wife nor his nephew animated

the place with their presence the house seemed empty. On this day the

coachman was driving his wife; Rose, the new housemaid, had leave to

go out till five o'clock; there only remained Hippolyte, the valet de

chambre, trailing about the rooms in slippers, and the cook, who had

been occupied since dawn in struggling with her saucepans, entirely

absorbed in the dinner which was to be given in the evening. So M.

Hennebeau promised himself a day of serious work in this deep calm of

the deserted house.

Towards nine o'clock, although he had received orders to send every

one away, Hippolyte took the liberty of announcing Dansaert, who

was bringing news. The manager then heard, for the first time, of

the meeting in the forest the evening before; the details were very

precise, and he listened while thinking of the intrigue with Pierronne,

so well known that two or three anonymous letters every week denounced

the licentiousness of the head captain. Evidently the husband had

talked, and no doubt the wife had, too. He even took advantage of the

occasion; he let the head captain know that he was aware of everything,

contenting himself with recommending prudence for fear of a scandal.

Startled by these reproaches in the midst of his report, Dansaert

denied, stammered excuses, while his great nose confessed the crime

by its sudden redness. He did not insist, however, glad to get off so

easily; for, as a rule, the manager displayed the implacable severity

of the virtuous man whenever an employee allowed himself the indulgence

of a pretty girl in the pit. The conversation continued concerning the

strike; that meeting in the forest was only the swagger of blusterers;

nothing serious threatened. In any case, the settlements would surely

not stir for some days, beneath the impression of respectful fear which

must have been produced by the military promenade of the morning.

When M. Hennebeau was alone again he was, however, on the point of

sending a telegram to the prefect. Only the fear of uselessly showing

a sign of anxiety held him back. Already he could not forgive himself

his lack of insight in saying everywhere, and even writing to the

directors, that the strike would last at most a fortnight. It had

been going on and on for nearly two months, to his great surprise,

and he was in despair over it; he felt himself every day lowered and

compromised, and was forced to imagine some brilliant achievement

which would bring him back into favour with the directors. He had just

asked them for orders in the case of a skirmish. There was delay over

the reply, and he was expecting it by the afternoon post. He said to

himself that there would be time then to send out telegrams, and to

obtain the military occupation of the pits, if such was the desire of

those gentlemen. In his own opinion there would certainly be a battle

and an expenditure of blood. This responsibility troubled him in spite

of his habitual energy.

Up to eleven o'clock he worked peacefully; there was no sound in the

dead house except Hippolyte's waxing-stick, which was rubbing a floor

far away on the first floor. Then, one after the other, he received two

messages, the first announcing the attack on Jean-Bart by the Montsou

band, the second telling of the cut cables, the overturned fires, and

all the destruction. He could not understand. Why had the strikers gone

to Deneulin instead of attacking one of the Company's pits? Besides,

they were quite welcome to sack Vandame; that would merely ripen the

plan of conquest which he was meditating. And at midday he lunched

alone in the large dining-room, served so quietly by the servant

that he could not even hear his slippers. This solitude rendered his

preoccupations more gloomy; he was feeling cold at the heart when a

captain, who had arrived running, was shown in, and told him of the

mob's march on Mirou. Almost immediately, as he was finishing his

coffee, a telegram informed him that Madeleine and Crévecoeur were

in their turn threatened. Then his perplexity became extreme. He was

expecting the postman at two o'clock; ought he at once to ask for

troops? or would it be better to wait patiently, and not to act until

he had received the directors' orders? He went back into his study;

he wished to read a report which he had asked Négrel to prepare the

day before for the prefect. But he could not put his hand on it; he

reflected that perhaps the young man had left it in his room, where he

often wrote at night, and without taking any decision, pursued by the

idea of this report, he went upstairs to look for it in the room.