no doubt through Hippolyte's forgetfulness or laziness. There was a
moist heat there, the close heat of the past night, made heavier from
the mouth of the hot-air stove being left open; and he was suffocated,
too, with a penetrating perfume, which he thought must be the odour
of the toilet waters with which the basin was full. There was great
disorder in the room--garments scattered about, damp towels thrown
on the backs of chairs, the bed yawning, with a sheet drawn back and
draggling on the carpet. But at first he only glanced round with an
abstracted look as he went towards a table covered with papers to look
for the missing report. Twice he examined the papers one by one, but it
was certainly not there. Where the devil could that madcap Paul have
stuffed it?
And as M. Hennebeau went back into the middle of the room, giving a
glance at each article of furniture, he noticed in the open bed a
bright point which shone like a star. He approached mechanically and
put out his hand. It was a little gold scent-bottle lying between two
folds of the sheet. He at once recognized a scent-bottle belonging to
Madame Hennebeau, the little ether bottle which was always with her.
But he could not understand its presence here: how could it have got
into Paul's bed? And suddenly he grew terribly pale. His wife had slept
there.
"Beg your pardon, sir," murmured Hippolyte's voice through the door. "I
saw you going up."
The servant entered and was thrown into consternation by the disorder.
"Lord! Why, the room is not done! So Rose has gone out, leaving all the
house on my shoulders!"
M. Hennebeau had hidden the bottle in his hand and was pressing it
almost to breaking.
"What do you want?"
"It's another man, sir; he has come from Crévecoeur with a letter."
"Good! Leave me alone; tell him to wait."
His wife had slept there! When he had bolted the door he opened his
hand again and looked at the little bottle which had left its image in
red on his flesh. Suddenly he saw and understood; this filthiness had
been going on in his house for months. He recalled his old suspicion,
the rustling against the doors, the naked feet at night through the
silent house. Yes, it was his wife who went up to sleep there!
Falling into a chair opposite the bed, which he gazed at fixedly,
he remained some minutes as though crushed. A noise aroused him;
someone was knocking at the door, trying to open it. He recognized the
servant's voice.
"Sir--Ah! you are shut in, sir."
"What is it now?"
"There seems to be a hurry; the men are breaking everything. There are
two more messengers below. There are also some telegrams."
"You just leave me alone! I am coming directly."
The idea that Hippolyte would himself have discovered the scent-bottle,
had he done the room in the morning, had just frozen him. And besides,
this man must know; he must have found the bed still hot with adultery
twenty times over, with madame's hairs trailing on the pillow, and
abominable traces staining the linen. The man kept interrupting him,
and it could only be out of inquisitiveness. Perhaps he had stayed with
his ear stuck to the door, excited by the debauchery of his masters.
M. Hennebeau did not move. He still gazed at the bed. His long past
of suffering unrolled before him: his marriage with this woman, their
immediate misunderstanding of the heart and of the flesh, the lovers
whom she had had unknown to him, and the lover whom he had tolerated
for ten years, as one tolerates an impure taste in a sick woman. Then
came their arrival at Montsou, the mad hope of curing her, months
of languor, of sleepy exile, the approach of old age which would,
perhaps, at last give her back to him. Then their nephew arrived, this
Paul to whom she became a mother, and to whom she spoke of her dead
heart buried for ever beneath the ashes. And he, the imbecile husband,
foresaw nothing; he adored this woman who was his wife, whom other men
had possessed, but whom he alone could not possess! He adored her with
shameful passion, so that he would have fallen on his knees if she
would but have given him the leavings of other men! The leavings of the
others she gave to this child.
The sound of a distant gong at this moment made M. Hennebeau start. He
recognized it; it was struck, by his orders, when the postman arrived.
He rose and spoke aloud, breaking into the flood of coarseness with
which his parched throat was bursting in spite of himself.
"Ah! I don't care a bloody hang for their telegrams and their letters!
not a bloody hang!"
Now he was carried away by rage, the need of some sewer in which to
stamp down all this filthiness with his heels. This woman was a vulgar
drab; he sought for crude words and buffeted her image with them. The
sudden idea of the marriage between Cécile and Paul, which she was
arranging with so quiet a smile, completed his exasperation. There
was, then, not even passion, not even jealousy at the bottom of this
persistent sensuality? It was now a perverse plaything, the habit of
the woman, a recreation taken like an accustomed dessert. And he put
all the responsibility on her, he regarded as almost innocent the lad
at whom she had bitten in this reawakening of appetite, just as one
bites at an early green fruit, stolen by the wayside. Whom would she
devour, on whom would she fall, when she no longer had complaisant
nephews, sufficiently practical to accept in their own family the
table, the bed, and the wife?
There was a timid scratch at the door, and Hippolyte allowed himself to
whisper through the keyhole:
"The postman, sir. And Monsieur Dansaert, too, has come back, saying
that they are killing one another."
"I'm coming down, good God!"
What should he do to them? Chase them away on their return from
Marchiennes, like stinking animals whom he would no longer have
beneath his roof? He would take a cudgel, and would tell them to carry
elsewhere their poisonous coupling. It was with their sighs, with their
mixed breaths, that the damp warmth of this room had grown heavy;
the penetrating odour which had suffocated him was the odour of musk
which his wife's skin exhaled, another perverse taste, a fleshly need
of violent perfumes; and he seemed to feel also the heat and odour of
fornication, of living adultery, in the pots which lay about, in the
basins still full, in the disorder of the linen, of the furniture,
of the entire room tainted with vice. The fury of impotence threw
him on to the bed, which he struck with his fists, belabouring the
places where he saw the imprint of their two bodies, enraged with the
disordered coverlets and the crumpled sheets, soft and inert beneath
his blows, as though exhausted themselves by the embraces of the whole
night.
But suddenly he thought he heard Hippolyte coming up again. He was
arrested by shame. For a moment he stood panting, wiping his forehead,
calming the bounds of his heart. Standing before a mirror he looked at
his face, so changed that he did not recognize himself. Then, when he
had watched it gradually grow calmer by an effort of supreme will, he
went downstairs.
Five messengers were standing below, not counting Dansaert. All brought
him news of increasing gravity concerning the march of the strikers
among the pits: and the chief captain told him at length what had gone
on at Mirou and the fine behaviour of Father Quandieu. He listened,
nodding his head, but he did not hear; his thoughts were in the room
upstairs. At last he sent them away, saying that he would take due
measures. When he was alone again, seated before his desk, he seemed
to grow drowsy, with his head between his hands, covering his eyes.
His mail was there, and he decided to look for the expected letter,
the directors' reply. The lines at first danced before him, but he
understood at last that these gentlemen desired a skirmish; certainly
they did not order him to make things worse, but they allowed it to be
seen that disturbances would hasten the conclusion of the strike by
provoking energetic repression. After this, he no longer hesitated, but
sent off telegrams on all sides--to the prefect of Lille, to the corps
of soldiery at Douai, to the police at Marchiennes. It was a relief; he
had nothing to do but shut himself in; he even spread the report that
he was suffering from gout. And all the afternoon he hid himself in his
study, receiving no one, contenting himself with reading the telegrams
and letters which continued to rain in. He thus followed the mob from
afar, from Madeleine to Crévecoeur, from Crévecoeur to the Victoire,
from the Victoire to Gaston-Marie. Information also reached him of the
bewilderment of the police and the troops, wandering along the roads,
and always with their backs to the pit attacked. They might kill one
another, and destroy everything! He put his head between his hands
again, with his fingers over his eyes, and buried himself in the deep
silence of the empty house, where he only heard now and then the noise
of the cook's saucepans as she bustled about preparing the evening's
dinner.
The twilight was already darkening the room; it was five o'clock when a
disturbance made M. Hennebeau jump, as he sat dazed and inert with his
elbows in his papers. He thought that it was the two wretches coming
back. But the tumult increased, and a terrible cry broke out just as he
was going to the window:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
It was the strikers, now invading Montsou, while the police, expecting
an attack on the Voreux, were galloping off in the opposite direction
to occupy that pit.
Just then, two kilometres away from the first houses, a little beyond
the crossways where the main road cut the Vandame road, Madame
Hennebeau and the young ladies had witnessed the passing of the mob.
The day had been spent pleasantly at Marchiennes; there had been a
delightful lunch with the manager of the Forges, then an interesting
visit to the workshops and to the neighbouring glass works to occupy
the afternoon; and as they were now going home in the limpid decline
of the beautiful winter day, Cécile had had the whim to drink a glass
of milk, as she noticed a little farm near the edge of the road. They
all then got down from the carriage, and Négrel gallantly leapt off
his horse; while the peasant-woman, alarmed by all these fine people,
rushed about, and spoke of laying a cloth before serving the milk. But
Lucie and Jeanne wanted to see the cow milked, and they went into the
cattle-shed with their cups, making a little rural party, and laughing
greatly at the litter in which one sank.
Madame Hennebeau, with her complacent maternal air, was drinking
with the edge of her lips, when a strange roaring noise from without
disturbed her.
"What is that, then?"
The cattle-shed, built at the edge of the road, had a large door for
carts, for it was also used as a barn for hay. The young girls, who had
put out their heads, were astonished to see on the left a black flood,
a shouting band which was moving along the Vandame road.
"The deuce!" muttered Négrel, who had also gone out. "Are our brawlers
getting angry at last?"
"It is perhaps the colliers again," said the peasant-woman. "This is
twice they've passed. Seems things are not going well; they're masters
of the country."
She uttered every word prudently, watching the effect on their faces;
and when she noticed the fright of all of them, and their deep anxiety
at this encounter, she hastened to conclude:
"Oh, the rascals! the rascals!"
Négrel, seeing that it was too late to get into their carriage and
reach Montsou, ordered the coachman to bring the vehicle into the
farmyard, where it would remain hidden behind a shed. He himself
fastened his horse, which a lad had been holding, beneath the shed.
When he came back he found his aunt and the young girls distracted, and
ready to follow the peasant-woman, who proposed that they should take
refuge in her house. But he was of opinion that they would be safer
where they were, for certainly no one would come and look for them in
the hay. The door, however, shut very badly, and had such large chinks
in it, that the road could be seen between the worm-eaten planks.
"Come, courage!" he said. "We will sell our lives dearly."
This joke increased their fear. The noise grew louder, but nothing
could yet be seen; along the vacant road the wind of a tempest seemed
to be blowing, like those sudden gusts which precede great storms.
"No, no! I don't want to look," said Cécile, going to hide herself in
the hay.
Madame Hennebeau, who was very pale and felt angry with these people
who had spoilt her pleasure, stood in the background with a sidelong
look of repugnance; while Lucie and Jeanne, though trembling, had
placed their eyes at a crack, anxious to lose nothing of the spectacle.
A sound of thunder came near, the earth was shaken, and Jeanlin
galloped up first, blowing into his horn.
"Take out your scent-bottles, the sweat of the people is passing by!"
murmured Négrel, who, in spite of his republican convictions, liked to
make fun of the populace when he was with ladies.
But this witticism was carried away in the hurricane of gestures
and cries. The women had appeared, nearly a thousand of them, with
outspread hair dishevelled by running, the naked skin appearing through
their rags, the nakedness of females weary with giving birth to
starvelings. A few held their little ones in their arms, raising them
and shaking them like banners of mourning and vengeance. Others, who
were younger with the swollen breasts of amazons, brandished sticks;
while frightful old women were yelling so loudly that the cords of
their fleshless necks seemed to be breaking. And then the men came up,
two thousand madmen--trammers, pikemen, menders--a compact mass which
rolled along like a single block in confused serried rank so that it
was impossible to distinguish their faded trousers or ragged woollen
jackets, all effaced in the same earthy uniformity. Their eyes were
burning, and one only distinguished the holes of black mouths singing
the _Marseillaise_; the stanzas were lost in a confused roar,
accompanied by the clang of sabots over the hard earth. Above their
heads, amid the bristling iron bars, an axe passed by, carried erect;
and this single axe, which seemed to be the standard of the band,
showed in the clear air the sharp profile of a guillotine-blade.
"What atrocious faces!" stammered Madame Hennebeau.
Négrel said between his teeth:
"Devil take me if I can recognize one of them! Where do the bandits
spring from?"
And in fact anger, hunger, these two months of suffering and this
enraged helter-skelter through the pits had lengthened the placid
faces of the Montsou colliers into the muzzles of wild beasts. At
this moment the sun was setting; its last rays of sombre purple cast
a gleam of blood over the plain. The road seemed to be full of blood;
men and women continued to rush by, bloody as butchers in the midst of
slaughter.
"Oh! superb!" whispered Lucie and Jeanne, stirred in their artistic
tastes by the beautiful horror of it.
They were frightened, however, and drew back close to Madame Hennebeau,
who was leaning on a trough. She was frozen at the thought that a
glance between the planks of that disjointed door might suffice to
murder them. Négrel also, who was usually very brave, felt himself grow
pale, seized by a terror that was superior to his will, the terror
which comes from the unknown. Cécile, in the hay, no longer stirred;
and the others, in spite of the wish to turn away their eyes, could not
do so: they were compelled to gaze.
It was the red vision of the revolution, which would one day inevitably
carry them all away, on some bloody evening at the end of the century.
Yes, some evening the people, unbridled at last, would thus gallop
along the roads, making the blood of the middle class flow, parading
severed heads and sprinkling gold from disembowelled coffers. The women
would yell, the men would have those wolf-like jaws open to bite. Yes,
the same rags, the same thunder of great sabots, the same terrible
troop, with dirty skins and tainted breath, sweeping away the old world
beneath an overflowing flood of barbarians. Fires would flame; they
would not leave standing one stone of the towns; they would return to
the savage life of the woods, after the great rut, the great feast-day,
when the poor in one night would emaciate the wives and empty the
cellars of the rich. There would be nothing left, not a sou of the
great fortunes, not a title-deed of properties acquired; until the day
dawned when a new earth would perhaps spring up once more. Yes, it
was these things which were passing along the road; it was the force
of nature herself, and they were receiving the terrible wind of it in
their faces.
A great cry arose, dominating the _Marseillaise_:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
Lucie and Jeanne pressed themselves against Madame Hennebeau, who was
almost fainting; while Négrel placed himself before them as though
to protect them by his body. Was the old social order cracking this
very evening? And what they saw immediately after completed their
stupefaction. The band had nearly passed by, there were only a few
stragglers left, when Mouquette came up. She was delaying, watching
the bourgeois at their garden gates or the windows of their houses;
and whenever she saw them, as she was not able to spit in their faces,
she showed them what for her was the climax of contempt. Doubtless she
perceived someone now, for suddenly she raised her skirts, bent her
back, and showed her enormous buttocks, naked beneath the last rays of
the sun. There was nothing obscene in those fierce buttocks, and nobody
laughed.
Everything disappeared: the flood rolled on to Montsou along the turns
of the road, between the low houses streaked with bright colours. The
carriage was drawn out of the yard, but the coachman would not take it
upon him to convey back madame and the young ladies without delay; the
strikers occupied the street. And the worst was, there was no other
road.
"We must go back, however, for dinner will be ready," said Madame
Hennebeau, exasperated by annoyance and fear. "These dirty workpeople
have again chosen a day when I have visitors. How can you do good to
such creatures?"
Lucie and Jeanne were occupied in pulling Cécile out of the hay. She
was struggling, believing that those savages were still passing by,
and repeating that she did not want to see them. At last they all took
their places in the carriage again. It then occurred to Négrel, who had
remounted, that they might go through the Réquillart lanes.
"Go gently," he said to the coachman, "for the road is atrocious. If
any groups prevent you from returning to the road over there, you can
stop behind the old pit, and we will return on foot through the little
garden door, while you can put up the carriage and horses anywhere, in
some inn outhouse."
They set out. The band, far away, was streaming into Montsou. As they
had twice seen police and military, the inhabitants were agitated and
seized by panic. Abominable stories were circulating; it was said that
written placards had been set up threatening to rip open the bellies of
the bourgeois. Nobody had read them, but all the same they were able
to quote the exact words. At the lawyer's especially the terror was
at its height, for he had just received by post an anonymous letter
warning him that a barrel of powder was buried in his cellar, and that
it would be blown up if he did not declare himself on the side of the
people. Just then the Grégoires, prolonging their visit on the arrival
of this letter, were discussing it, and decided that it must be the
work of a joker, when the invasion of the mob completed the terror of
the house. They, however, smiled, drawing back a corner of the curtain
to look out, and refused to admit that there was any danger, certain,
they said, that all would finish up well. Five o'clock struck, and they
had time to wait until the street was free for them to cross the road
to dine with the Hennebeaus, where Cécile, who had surely returned,
must be waiting for them. But no one in Montsou seemed to share their
confidence. People were wildly running about; doors and windows were
banged to. They saw Maigrat, on the other side of the road, barricading
his shop with a large supply of iron bars, and looking so pale and
trembling that his feeble little wife was obliged to fasten the screws.
The band had come to a halt before the manager's villa, and the cry
echoed:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
M. Hennebeau was standing at the window when Hippolyte came in to close
the shutters, for fear the windows should be broken by stones. He
closed all on the ground floor, and then went up to the first floor;
the creak of the window-fasteners was heard and the clack of the
shutters one by one. Unfortunately, it was not possible to shut the
kitchen window in the area in the same way, a window made disquietingly
ruddy by the gleams from the saucepans and the spit.
Mechanically, M. Hennebeau, who wished to look out, went up to Paul's
room on the second floor: it was on the left, the best situated, for it
commanded the road as far as the Company's Yards. And he stood behind
the blinds overlooking the crowd. But this room had again overcome
him, the toilet table sponged and in order, the cold bed with neat and
well-drawn sheets. All his rage of the afternoon, that furious battle
in the depths of his silent solitude, had now turned to an immense
fatigue. His whole being was now like this room, grown cold, swept of
the filth of the morning, returned to its habitual correctness. What
was the good of a scandal? had anything really changed in his house?
His wife had simply taken another lover; that she had chosen him in the
family scarcely aggravated the fact; perhaps even it was an advantage,
for she thus preserved appearances. He pitied himself when he thought
of his mad jealousy. How ridiculous to have struck that bed with his
fists! Since he had tolerated another man, he could certainly tolerate
this one. It was only a matter of a little more contempt. A terrible
bitterness was poisoning his mouth, the uselessness of everything, the
eternal pain of existence, shame for himself who always adored and
desired this woman in the dirt in which he had abandoned her.
Beneath the window the yells broke out with increased violence:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
"Idiots!" said M. Hennebeau between his clenched teeth.
He heard them abusing him for his large salary, calling him a bloated
idler, a bloody beast who stuffed himself to indigestion with good
things, while the worker was dying of hunger. The women had noticed the
kitchen, and there was a tempest of imprecations against the pheasant
roasting there, against the sauces that with fat odours irritated their
empty stomachs. Ah! the stinking bourgeois, they should be stuffed with
champagne and truffles till their guts burst.
"Bread! bread! bread!"
"Idiots!" repeated M. Hennebeau; "am I happy?"
Anger arose in him against these people who could not understand. He
would willingly have made them a present of his large salary to possess
their hard skin and their facility of coupling without regret. Why
could he not seat them at his table and stuff them with his pheasant,
while he went to fornicate behind the hedges, to tumble the girls over,
making fun of those who had tumbled them over before him! He would have
given everything, his education, his comfort, his luxury, his power
as manager, if he could be for one day the vilest of the wretches who
obeyed him, free of his flesh, enough of a blackguard to beat his wife
and to take his pleasure with his neighbours' wives. And he longed also
to be dying of hunger, to have an empty belly, a stomach twisted by
cramps that would make his head turn with giddiness: perhaps that would
have killed the eternal pain. Ah! to live like a brute, to possess
nothing, to scour the fields with the ugliest and dirtiest putter, and
to be able to be happy!
"Bread! bread! bread!"
Then he grew angry and shouted furiously in the tumult:
"Bread! is that enough, idiots!"
He could eat, and all the same he was groaning with torment. His
desolate household, his whole wounded life, choked him at the throat
like a death agony. Things were not all for the best because one had
bread. Who was the fool who placed earthly happiness in the partition
of wealth? These revolutionary dreamers might demolish society and
rebuilt another society; they would not add one joy to humanity,
they would not take away one pain, by cutting bread-and-butter for
everybody. They would even enlarge the unhappiness of the earth; they
would one day make the very dogs howl with despair when they had taken
them out of the tranquil satisfaction of instinct, to raise them to the
unappeasable suffering of passion. No, the one good thing was not to
exist, and if one existed, to be a tree, a stone, less still, a grain
of sand, which cannot bleed beneath the heels of the passer-by.
And in this exasperation of his torment, tears swelled in M.
Hennebeau's eyes, and broke in burning drops on his cheeks. The
twilight was drowning the road when stones began to riddle the front
of the villa. With no anger now against these starving people, only
enraged by the burning wound at his heart he continued to stammer in
the midst of his tears:
"Idiots! idiots!"
But the cry of the belly dominated, and a roar blew like a tempest,
sweeping everything before it:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
CHAPTER VI
Sobered by Catherine's blows, Étienne had remained at the head of his
mates. But while he was hoarsely urging them on to Montsou, he heard
another voice within him, the voice of reason, asking, in astonishment,
the meaning of all this. He had not intended any of these things; how
had it happened that, having set out for Jean-Bart with the object of
acting calmly and preventing disaster, he had finished this day of
increasing violence by besieging the manager's villa?
He it certainly was, however, who had just cried, "Halt!" Only at first
his sole idea had been to protect the Company's Yards, which there had
been talk of sacking. And now that stones were already grazing the
facade of the villa, he sought in vain for some lawful prey on which to
throw the band, so as to avoid greater misfortunes. As he thus stood
alone, powerless, in the middle of the road, he was called by a man
standing on the threshold of the Estaminet Tison, where the landlady
had just put up the shutters in haste, leaving only the door free.
"Yes, it's me. Will you listen?"
It was Rasseneur. Some thirty men and women, nearly all belonging to
the settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante, who had remained at home in
the morning and had come in the evening for news, had invaded this
estaminet on the approach of the strikers. Zacharie occupied a table
with his wife, Philoméne. Farther on, Pierron and Pierronne, with their
backs turned, were hiding their faces. No one was drinking, they had
simply taken shelter.
Étienne recognized Rasseneur and was turning away, when the latter
added:
"You don't want to see me, eh? I warned you, things are getting
awkward. Now you may ask for bread, they'll give you lead."
Then Étienne came back and replied:
"What troubles me is, the cowards who fold their arms and watch us
risking our skins."
"Your notion, then, is to pillage over there?" asked Rasseneur.
"My notion is to remain to the last with our friends, quit by dying
together."
In despair, Étienne went back into the crowd, ready to die. On the
road, three children were throwing stones, and he gave them a good
kick, shouting out to his comrades that it was no good breaking windows.
Bébert and Lydie, who had rejoined Jeanlin, were learning from him how
to work the sling. They each sent a flint, playing at who could do the
most damage. Lydie had awkwardly cracked the head of a woman in the
crowd, and the two boys were loudly laughing. Bonnemort and Mouque,
seated on a bench, were gazing at them behind. Bonnemort's swollen legs
bore him so badly, that he had great difficulty in dragging himself
so far; no one knew what curiosity impelled him, for his face had the
earthy look of those days when he never spoke a word.
Nobody, however, any longer obeyed Étienne. The stones, in spite of his
orders, went on hailing, and he was astonished and terrified by these
brutes he had unmuzzled, who were so slow to move and then so terrible,
so ferociously tenacious in their rage. All the old Flemish blood was
there, heavy and placid, taking months to get heated, and then giving
itself up to abominable savagery, listening to nothing until the beast
was glutted by atrocities. In his southern land crowds flamed up more
quickly, but they did not effect so much. He had to struggle with
Levaque to obtain possession of his axe, and he knew not how to keep
back the Maheus, who were throwing flints with both hands. The women,
especially, terrified him--the Levaque, Mouquette, and the others--who
were agitated by murderous fury, with teeth and nails out, barking like
bitches, and driven on by Mother Brulé, whose lean figure dominated
them.
But there was a sudden stop; a moment's surprise brought a little of
that calmness which Étienne's supplications could not obtain. It was
simply the Grégoires, who had decided to bid farewell to the lawyer,
and to cross the road to the manager's house; and they seemed so
peaceful, they so clearly had the air of believing that the whole
thing was a joke on the part of their worthy miners, whose resignation
had nourished them for a century, that the latter, in fact, left off
throwing stones, for fear of hitting this old gentleman and old lady
who had fallen from the sky. They allowed them to enter the garden,
mount the steps, and ring at the barricaded door, which was by no means
opened in a hurry. Just then, Rose, the housemaid, was returning,
laughing at the furious workmen, all of whom she knew, for she belonged
to Montsou. And it was she who, by striking her fists against the
door, at last forced Hippolyte to set it ajar. It was time, for as the
Grégoires disappeared, the hail of stones began again. Recovering from
its astonishment, the crowd was shouting louder than ever:
"Death to the bourgeois! Hurrah for the people!"
Rose went on laughing, in the hall of the villa, as though amused by
the adventure, and repeated to the terrified man-servant:
"They're not bad-hearted; I know them."
M. Grégoire methodically hung up his hat. Then, when he had assisted
Madame Grégoire to draw off her thick cloth mantle, he said, in his
turn:
"Certainly, they have no malice at bottom. When they have shouted well
they will go home to supper with more appetite."
At this moment M. Hennebeau came down from the second floor. He had
seen the scene, and came to receive his guests in his usual cold and
polite manner. The pallor of his face alone revealed the grief which
had shaken him. The man was tamed; there only remained in him the
correct administrator resolved to do his duty.
"You know," he said, "the ladies have not yet come back."
For the first time some anxiety disturbed the Grégoires. Cécile not
come back! How could she come back now if the miners were to prolong
their joking?
"I thought of having the place cleared," added M. Hennebeau. "But the
misfortune is that I'm alone here, and, besides, I do not know where to
send my servant to bring me four men and a corporal to clear away this
mob."
Rose, who had remained there, ventured to murmur anew:
"Oh, sir! they are not bad-hearted!"
The manager shook his head, while the tumult increased outside, and
they could hear the dull crash of the stones against the house.
"I don't wish to be hard on them, I can even excuse them; one must be
as foolish as they are to believe that we are anxious to injure them.
But it is my duty to prevent disturbance. To think that there are
police all along the roads, as I am told, and that I have not been able
to see a single man since the morning!"
He interrupted himself, and drew back before Madame Grégoire, saying:
"Let me beg you, madame, do not stay here, come into the drawing-room."
But the cook, coming up from below in exasperation, kept them in the
hall a few minutes longer. She declared that she could no longer accept
any responsibility for the dinner, for she was expecting from the
Marchiennes pastrycook some _vol-au-vent_ crusts which she had
ordered for four o'clock. The pastrycook had evidently turned aside
on the road for fear of these bandits. Perhaps they had even pillaged
his hampers. She saw the _vol-au-vent_ blockaded behind a bush,
besieged, going to swell the bellies of the three thousand wretches
who were asking for bread. In any case, monsieur was warned; she would
rather pitch her dinner into the fire if it was to be spoilt because of
the revolt.
"Patience, patience," said M. Hennebeau. "All is not lost, the
pastrycook may come."
And as he turned toward Madame Grégoire, opening the drawing-room door
himself, he was much surprised to observe, seated on the hall bench, a
man whom he had not distinguished before in the deepening shade.
"What! you, Maigrat! what is it, then?"
Maigrat arose; his fat, pale face was changed by terror. He no longer
possessed his usual calm stolidity; he humbly explained that he had
slipped into the manager's house to ask for aid and protection should
the brigands attack his shop.
"You see that I am threatened myself, and that I have no one," replied
M. Hennebeau. "You would have done better to stay at home and guard
your property."
"Oh! I have put up iron bars and left my wife there."
The manager showed impatience, and did not conceal his contempt. A fine
guard, that poor creature worn out by blows!
"Well, I can do nothing; you must try to defend yourself. I advise you
to go back at once, for there they are again demanding bread. Listen!"
In fact, the tumult began again, and Maigrat thought he heard his own
name in the midst of the cries. To go back was no longer possible, they
would have torn him to pieces. Besides, the idea of his ruin overcame
him. He pressed his face to the glass panel of the door, perspiring and
trembling in anticipation of disaster, while the Grégoires decided to
go into the drawing-room.
M. Hennebeau quietly endeavoured to do the honours of his house. But
in vain he begged his guests to sit down; the close, barricaded room,
lighted by two lamps in the daytime, was filled with terror at each
new clamour from without. Amid the stuffy hangings the fury of the mob
rolled more disturbingly, with vague and terrible menace. They talked,
however, constantly brought back to this inconceivable revolt. He was
astonished at having foreseen nothing; and his information was so
defective that he specially talked against Rasseneur, whose detestable
influence, he said, he was able to recognize. Besides, the gendarmes
would come; it was impossible that he should be thus abandoned. As
to the Grégoires, they only thought about their daughter, the poor
darling who was so quickly frightened! Perhaps, in face of the peril,
the carriage had returned to Marchiennes. They waited on for another
quarter of an hour, worn out by the noise in the street, and by the
sound of the stones from time to time striking the closed shutters
which rang out like gongs. The situation was no longer bearable. M.
Hennebeau spoke of going out to chase away the brawlers by himself, and
to meet the carriage, when Hippolyte appeared, exclaiming:
"Sir! sir, here is madame! They are killing madame!"
The carriage had not been able to pass through the threatening groups
in the Réquillart lane. Négrel had carried out his idea, walking the
hundred metres which separated them from the house, and knocking at
the little door which led to the garden, near the common. The gardener
would hear them, for there was always someone there to open. And, at
first, things had gone perfectly; Madame Hennebeau and the young ladies
were already knocking when some women, who had been warned, rushed into
the lane. Then everything was spoilt. The door was not opened, and
Négrel in vain sought to burst it open with his shoulder. The rush of
women increased, and fearing they would be carried away, he adopted the
desperate method of pushing his aunt and the girls before him, in order
to reach the front steps, by passing through the besiegers. But this
manoeuvre led to a hustling. They were not left free, a shouting band
followed them, while the crowd floated up to right and to left, without
understanding, simply astonished at these dressed-up ladies lost in the
midst of the battle. At this moment the confusion was so great that
it led to one of those curious mistakes which can never be explained.
Lucie and Jeanne reached the steps, and slipped in through the door,
which the housemaid opened; Madame Hennebeau had succeeded in following
them, and behind them Négrel at last came in, and then bolted the door,
feeling sure that he had seen Cécile go in first. She was no longer
there, having disappeared on the way, so carried away by fear, that she
had turned her back to the house, and had moved of her own accord into
the thick of danger.
At once the cry arose:
"Hurrah for the people! Death to the bourgeois! To death with them!"
A few of those in the distance, beneath the veil which hid her face,
mistook her for Madame Hennebeau; others said she was a friend of the
manager's wife, the young wife of a neighbouring manufacturer who
was execrated by his men. And besides it mattered little, it was her
silk dress, her fur mantle, even the white feather in her hat, which
exasperated them. She smelled of perfume, she wore a watch, she had the
delicate skin of a lazy woman who had never touched coal.
"Stop!" shouted Mother Brulé, "we'll put it on your arse, that lace!"
"The lazy sluts steal it from us," said the Levaque. "They stick fur
on to their skins while we are dying of cold. Just strip her naked, to
show her how to live!"
At once Mouquette rushed forward.
"Yes, yes! whip her!"
And the women, in this savage rivalry, struggled and stretched out
their rags, as though each were trying to get a morsel of this rich
girl. No doubt her backside was not better made than any one else's.
More than one of them were rotten beneath their gewgaws. This injustice
had lasted quite long enough; they should be forced to dress themselves
like workwomen, these harlots who dared to spend fifty sous on the
washing of a single petticoat.
In the midst of these furies Cécile was shaking with paralysed legs,
stammering over and over again the same phrase:
"Ladies! please! please! Ladies, please don't hurt me!"
But she suddenly uttered a shrill cry; cold hands had seized her by
the neck. The rush had brought her near old Bonnemort, who had taken
hold of her. He seemed drunk from hunger, stupefied by his long misery,
suddenly arousing himself from the resignation of half a century, under
the influence of no one knew what malicious impulse. After having in
the course of his life saved a dozen mates from death, risking his
bones in fire-damps and landslips, he was yielding to things which he
would not have been able to express, compelled to do thus, fascinated
by this young girl's white neck. And as on this day he had lost his
tongue, he clenched his fingers, with his air of an old infirm animal
ruminating over his recollections.
"No! no!" yelled the women. "Uncover her arse! out with her arse!"
In the villa, as soon as they had realized the mishap, Négrel and M.
Hennebeau bravely reopened the door to run to Cécile's help. But the
crowd was now pressing against the garden railings, and it was not easy
to go out. A struggle took place here, while the Grégoires in terror
stood on the steps.
"Let her be then, old man! It's the Piolaine young lady," cried Maheude
to the grandfather, recognizing Cécile, whose veil had been torn off by
one of the women.
On his side, Étienne, overwhelmed at this retaliation on a child, was
trying to force the band to let go their prey. An inspiration came to
him; he brandished the axe, which he had snatched from Levaque's hands.
"To Maigrat's house, by God! there's bread in there! Down to the earth
with Maigrat's damned shed!"
And at random he gave the first blow of the axe against the shop door.
Some comrades had followed him--Levaque, Maheu, and a few others. But
the women were furious, and Cécile had fallen from Bonnemort's fingers
into Mother Brulé's hands. Lydie and Bébert, led by Jeanlin, had
slipped on all fours between her petticoats to see the lady's bottom.
Already the women were pulling her about; her clothes were beginning
to split, when a man on horseback appeared, pushing on his animal, and
using his riding-whip on those who would not stand back quick enough.
"Ah! rascals! You are going to flog our daughters, are you?"
It was Deneulin who had come to the rendezvous for dinner. He quickly
jumped on to the road, took Cécile by the waist, and, with the other
hand manipulating his horse with remarkable skill and strength, he used
it as a living wedge to split the crowd, which drew back before the
onset. At the railing the battle continued. He passed through, however,
with some bruises. This unforeseen assistance delivered Négrel and M.
Hennebeau, who were in great danger amid the oaths and blows. And while
the young man at last led in the fainting Cécile, Deneulin protected
the manager with his tall body, and at the top of the steps received a
stone which nearly put his shoulder out.
"That's it," he cried; "break my bones now you've broken my engines!"
He promptly pushed the door to, and a volley of flints fell against it.
"What madmen!" he exclaimed. "Two seconds more, and they would have
broken my skull like an empty gourd. There is nothing to say to them;
what could you do? They know nothing, you can only knock them down."
In the drawing-room, the Grégoires were weeping as they watched Cécile
recover. She was not hurt, there was not even a scratch to be seen,
only her veil was lost. But their fright increased when they saw before
them their cook, Mélanie, who described how the mob had demolished
Piolaine. Mad with fear she had run to warn her masters. She had come
in when the door was ajar at the moment of the fray, without any one
noticing her; and in her endless narrative the single stone with which
Jeanlin had broken one window-pane became a regular cannonade which had
crushed through the walls. Then M. Grégoire's ideas were altogether
upset: they were murdering his daughter, they were razing his house to
the ground; it was, then, true that these miners could bear him ill
will, because he lived like a worthy man on their labour?
The housemaid, who had brought in a towel and some eau-de-Cologne,
repeated:
"All the same it's queer, they're not bad-hearted."
Madame Hennebeau, seated and very pale, had not recovered from the
shock to her feelings; and she was only able to find a smile when
Négrel was complimented. Cécile's parents especially thanked the young
man, and the marriage might now be regarded as settled. M. Hennebeau
looked on in silence, turning from his wife to this lover whom in the
morning he had been swearing to kill, then to this young girl by whom
he would, no doubt, soon be freed from him. There was no haste, only
the fear remained with him of seeing his wife fall lower, perhaps to
some lackey.
"And you, my little darlings," asked Deneulin of his daughters; "have
they broken any of your bones?"
Lucie and Jeanne had been much afraid, but they were pleased to have
seen it all. They were now laughing.
"By George!" the father went on, "we've had a fine day! If you want a
dowry, you would do well to earn it yourselves, and you may also expect
to have to support me."
He was joking, but his voice trembled. His eyes swelled with tears as
his two daughters threw themselves into his arms.
M. Hennebeau had heard this confession of ruin. A quick thought lit up
his face. Vandame would now belong to Montsou; this was the hoped-for
compensation, the stroke of fortune which would bring him back to
favour with the gentlemen on the directorate. At every crisis of his
existence, he took refuge in the strict execution of the orders he had
received; in the military discipline in which he lived he found his
small share of happiness.
But they grew calm; the drawing-room fell back into a weary
peacefulness, with the quiet light of its two lamps, and the warm
stuffiness of the hangings. What, then, was going on outside? The
brawlers were silent, and stones no longer struck the house; one only
heard deep, full blows, those blows of the hatchet which one hears in
distant woods. They wished to find out, and went back into the hall to
venture a glance through the glass panel of the door. Even the ladies
went upstairs to post themselves behind the blinds on the first floor.
"Do you see that scoundrel, Rasseneur, over there on the threshold of
the public-house?" said M. Hennebeau to Deneulin. "I had guessed as
much; he must be in it."
It was not Rasseneur, however, it was Étienne, who was dealing blows
from his axe at Maigrat's shop. And he went on calling to the men; did
not the goods in there belong to the colliers? Had they not the right
to take back their property from this thief who had exploited them so
long, who was starving them at a hint from the Company? Gradually they
all left the manager's house, and ran up to pillage the neighbouring
shop. The cry, "Bread! bread! bread!" broke out anew. They would find
bread behind that door. The rage of hunger carried them away, as if
they suddenly felt that they could wait no longer without expiring on
the road. Such furious thrusts were made at the door that at every
stroke of the axe Étienne feared to wound someone.
Meanwhile Maigrat, who had left the hall of the manager's house, had
at first taken refuge in the kitchen; but, hearing nothing there, he
imagined some abominable attempt against his shop, and came up again
to hide behind the pump outside, when he distinctly heard the cracking
of the door and shouts of pillage in which his own name was mixed. It
was not a nightmare, then. If he could not see, he could now hear, and
he followed the attack with ringing ears; every blow struck him in the
heart. A hinge must have given way; five minutes more and the shop
would be taken. The thing was stamped on his brain in real and terrible
images--the brigands rushing forward, then the drawers broken open, the
sacks emptied, everything eaten, everything drunk, the house itself
carried away, nothing left, not even a stick with which he might go and
beg through the villages. No, he would never allow them to complete
his ruin; he would rather leave his life there. Since he had been here
he noticed at a window of his house his wife's thin silhouette, pale
and confused, behind the panes; no doubt she was watching the blows
with her usual silent air of a poor beaten creature. Beneath there was
a shed, so placed that from the villa garden one could climb it from
the palings; then it was easy to get on to the tiles up to the window.
And the idea of thus returning home now pursued him in his remorse at
having left. Perhaps he would have time to barricade the shop with
furniture; he even invented other and more heroic defences--boiling
oil, lighted petroleum, poured out from above. But this love of his
property struggled against his fear, and he groaned in the battle with
cowardice. Suddenly, on hearing a deeper blow of the axe, he made up
his mind. Avarice conquered; he and his wife would cover the sacks with
their bodies rather than abandon a single loaf.
Almost immediately hooting broke out:
"Look! look!--The tom-cat's up there! After the cat! after the cat!"
The mob had just seen Maigrat on the roof of the shed. In his fever of
anxiety he had climbed the palings with agility in spite of his weight,
and without troubling over the breaking wood; and now he was flattening
himself along the tiles, and endeavouring to reach the window. But the
slope was very steep; he was incommoded by his stoutness, and his nails
were torn. He would have dragged himself up, however, if he had not
begun to tremble with the fear of stones; for the crowd, which he could
not see, continued to cry beneath him:
"After the cat! after the cat!--Do for him!"
And suddenly both his hands let go at once, and he rolled down like a
ball, leapt at the gutter, and fell across the middle wall in such a
way that, by ill-chance, he rebounded on the side of the road, where
his skull was broken open on the corner of a stone pillar. His brain
had spurted out. He was dead. His wife up above, pale and confused
behind the window-panes, still looked out.
They were stupefied at first. Étienne stopped short, and the axe
slipped from his hands. Maheu, Levaque, and the others forgot the shop,
with their eyes fixed on the wall along which a thin red streak was
slowly flowing down. And the cries ceased, and silence spread over the
growing darkness.
All at once the hooting began again. It was the women, who rushed
forward overcome by the drunkenness of blood.
"Then there is a good God, after all! Ah! the bloody beast, he's done
for!"
They surrounded the still warm body. They insulted it with laughter,
abusing his fractured head, the dirty chops, hurling in the dead man's
face the long venom of their starved lives.
"I owed you sixty francs, now you're paid, thief!" said Maheude,
enraged like the others. "You won't refuse me credit any more. Wait!
wait! I must fatten you once more!"
With her fingers she scratched up some earth, took two handfuls and
stuffed it violently into his mouth.
"There! eat that! There! eat! eat! you used to eat us!"
The abuse increased, while the dead man, stretched on his back, gazed
motionless with his large fixed eyes at the immense sky from which the
night was falling. This earth heaped in his mouth was the bread he had
refused to give. And henceforth he would eat of no other bread. It had
not brought him luck to starve poor people.
But the women had another revenge to wreak on him. They moved round,
smelling him like she-wolves. They were all seeking for some outrage,
some savagery that would relieve them.
Mother Brulé's shrill voice was heard: "Cut him like a tom-cat!"
"Yes, yes, after the cat! after the cat! He's done too much, the dirty
beast!"
Mouquette was already unfastening and drawing off the trousers, while
the Levaque woman raised the legs. And Mother Brulé with her dry old
hands separated the naked thighs and seized this dead virility. She
took hold of everything, tearing with an effort which bent her lean
spine and made her long arms crack. The soft skin resisted; she had to
try again, and at last carried away the fragment, a lump of hairy and
bleeding flesh, which she brandished with a laugh of triumph.
"I've got it! I've got it!"
Shrill voices saluted with curses the abominable trophy.
"Ah! swine! you won't fill our daughters any more!"
"Yes! we've done with paying on your beastly body; we shan't any more
have to offer a backside in return for a loaf."
"Here, I owe you six francs; would you like to settle it? I'm quite
willing, if you can do it still!"
This joke shook them all with terrible gaiety. They showed each other
the bleeding fragment as an evil beast from which each of them had
suffered, and which they had at last crushed, and saw before them
there, inert, in their power. They spat on it, they thrust out their
jaws, saying over and over again, with furious bursts of contempt:
"He can do no more! he can do no more!--It's no longer a man that
they'll put away in the earth. Go and rot then, good-for-nothing!"
Mother Brulé then planted the whole lump on the end of her stick, and
holding it in the air, bore it about like a banner, rushing along the
road, followed, helter-skelter, by the yelling troop of women. Drops
of blood rained down, and that pitiful flesh hung like a waste piece
of meat on a butcher's stall. Up above, at the window, Madame Maigrat
still stood motionless; but beneath the last gleams of the setting
sun, the confused flaws of the window-panes distorted her white face
which looked as though it were laughing. Beaten and deceived at every
hour, with shoulders bent from morning to night over a ledger, perhaps
she was laughing, while the band of women rushed along with that evil
beast, that crushed beast, at the end of the stick.
This frightful mutilation was accomplished in frozen horror. Neither
Étienne nor Maheu nor the others had had time to interfere; they stood
motionless before this gallop of furies. At the door of the Estaminet
Tison a few heads were grouped--Rasseneur pale with disgust, Zacharie
and Philoméne stupefied at what they had seen. The two old men,
Bonnemort and Mouque, were gravely shaking their heads. Only Jeanlin
was making fun, pushing Bébert with his elbow, and forcing Lydie to
look up. But the women were already coming back, turning round and
passing beneath the manager's windows. Behind the blinds the ladies
were stretching out their necks. They had not been able to observe
the scene, which was hidden from them by the wall, and they could not
distinguish well in the growing darkness.
"What is it they have at the end of that stick?" asked Cécile, who had
grown bold enough to look out.
Lucie and Jeanne declared that it must be a rabbit-skin.
"No, no," murmured Madame Hennebeau, "they must have been pillaging a
pork butcher's, it seems to be a remnant of a pig."
At this moment she shuddered and was silent. Madame Grégoire had nudged
her with her knee. They both remained stupefied. The young ladies, who
were very pale, asked no more questions, but with large eyes followed
this red vision through the darkness.
Étienne once more brandished the axe. But the feeling of anxiety did
not disappear; this corpse now barred the road and protected the shop.
Many had drawn back. Satiety seemed to have appeased them all. Maheu
was standing by gloomily, when he heard a voice whisper in his ear to
escape. He turned round and recognized Catherine, still in her old
overcoat, black and panting. With a movement he repelled her. He would
not listen to her, he threatened to strike her. With a gesture of
despair she hesitated, and then ran towards Étienne.
"Save yourself! save yourself! the gendarmes are coming!"
He also pushed her away and abused her, feeling the blood of the
blows she had given him mounting to his cheeks. But she would not be
repelled; she forced him to throw down the axe, and drew him away by
both arms, with irresistible strength.
"Don't I tell you the gendarmes are coming! Listen to me. It's Chaval
who has gone for them and is bringing them, if you want to know. It's
too much for me, and I've come. Save yourself, I don't want them to
take you."
And Catherine drew him away, while, at the same instant, a heavy gallop
shook the street from afar. Immediately a voice arose: "The gendarmes!
the gendarmes!" There was a general breaking up, so mad a rush for life
that in two minutes the road was free, absolutely clear, as though
swept by a hurricane. Maigrat's corpse alone made a patch of shadow on
the white earth. Before the Estaminet Tison, Rasseneur only remained,
feeling relieved, and with open face applauding the easy victory of the
sabres; while in dim and deserted Montsou, in the silence of the closed
houses, the bourgeois remained with perspiring skins and chattering
teeth, not daring to look out. The plain was drowned beneath the thick
night, only the blast furnaces and the coke furnaces were burning
against the tragic sky. The gallop of the gendarmes heavily approached;
they came up in an indistinguishable sombre mass. And behind them the
Marchiennes pastrycook's vehicle, a little covered cart which had been
confided to their care, at last arrived, and a small drudge of a boy
jumped down and quietly unpacked the crusts for the _vol-au-vent_.
PART SIX
CHAPTER I
The first fortnight of February passed and a black cold prolonged
the hard winter without pity for the poor. Once more the authorities
had scoured the roads; the prefect of Lille, an attorney, a general,
and the police were not sufficient, the military had come to occupy
Montsou; a whole regiment of men were camped between Beaugnies and
Marchiennes. Armed pickets guarded the pits, and there were soldiers
before every engine. The manager's villa, the Company's Yards, even
the houses of certain residents, were bristling with bayonets. Nothing
was heard along the streets but the slow movement of patrols. On the
pit-bank of the Voreux a sentinel was always placed in the frozen wind
that blew up there, like a look-out man above the flat plain; and every
two hours, as though in an enemy's country, were heard the sentry's
cries:
"_Qui vive?_--Advance and give the password!"
Nowhere had work been resumed. On the contrary, the strike had spread;
Crévecoeur, Mirou, Madeleine, like the Voreux, were producing nothing;
at Feutry-Cantel and the Victoire there were fewer men every morning;
even at Saint-Thomas, which had been hitherto exempt, men were wanting.
There was now a silent persistence in the face of this exhibition of
force which exasperated the miners' pride. The settlements looked
deserted in the midst of the beetroot fields. Not a workman stirred,
only at rare intervals was one to be met by chance, isolated, with
sidelong look, lowering his head before the red trousers. And in this
deep melancholy calm, in this passive opposition to the guns, there was
a deceptive gentleness, a forced and patient obedience of wild beasts
in a cage, with their eyes on the tamer, ready to spring on his neck if
he turned his back. The Company, who were being ruined by this death
of work, talked of hiring miners from the Borinage, on the Belgian
frontier, but did not dare; so that the battle continued as before
between the colliers, who were shut up at home, and the dead pits
guarded by soldiery.
On the morrow of that terrible day this calm had come about at once,
hiding such a panic that the greatest silence possible was kept
concerning the damage and the atrocities. The inquiry which had been
opened showed that Maigrat had died from his fall, and the frightful
mutilation of the corpse remained uncertain, already surrounded by a
legend. On its side, the Company did not acknowledge the disasters it
had suffered, any more than the Grégoires cared to compromise their
daughter in the scandal of a trial in which she would have to give
evidence. However, some arrests took place, mere supernumeraries as
usual, silly and frightened, knowing nothing. By mistake, Pierron was
taken off with handcuffs on his wrists as far as Marchiennes, to the
great amusement of his mates. Rasseneur, also, was nearly arrested
by two gendarmes. The management was content with preparing lists
of names and giving back certificates in large numbers. Maheu had
received his, Levaque also, as well as thirty-four of their mates in
the settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante alone. And all the severity
was directed against Étienne, who had disappeared on the evening of
the fray, and who was being sought, although no trace of him could be
found. Chaval, in his hatred, had denounced him, refusing to name the
others at Catherine's appeal, for she wished to save her parents. The
days passed, every one felt that nothing was yet concluded; and with
oppressed hearts every one was awaiting the end.
At Montsou, during this period, the inhabitants awoke with a start
every night, their ears buzzing with an imaginary alarm-bell and their
nostrils haunted by the smell of powder. But what completed their
discomfiture was a sermon by the new curé, Abbé Ranvier, that lean
priest with eyes like red-hot coals who had succeeded Abbé Joire. He
was indeed unlike the smiling discreet man, so fat and gentle, whose
only anxiety was to live at peace with everybody. Abbé Ranvier went
so far as to defend these abominable brigands who had dishonoured the
district. He found excuses for the atrocities of the strikers; he
violently attacked the middle class, throwing on them the whole of
the responsibility. It was the middle class which, by dispossessing
the Church of its ancient liberties in order to misuse them itself,
had turned this world into a cursed place of injustice and suffering;
it was the middle class which prolonged misunderstandings, which was
pushing on towards a terrible catastrophe by its atheism, by its
refusal to return to the old beliefs, to the fraternity of the early
Christians. And he dared to threaten the rich. He warned them that if
they obstinately persisted in refusing to listen to the voice of God,
God would surely put Himself on the side of the poor. He would take
back their fortunes from those who faithlessly enjoyed them, and would
distribute them to the humble of the earth for the triumph of His
glory. The devout trembled at this; the lawyer declared that it was
Socialism of the worst kind; all saw the curé at the head of a band,
brandishing a cross, and with vigorous blows demolishing the bourgeois
society of '89.
M. Hennebeau, when informed, contented himself with saying, as he
shrugged his shoulders:
"If he troubles us too much the bishop will free us from him."
And while the breath of panic was thus blowing from one end of the
plain to the other, Étienne was dwelling beneath the earth, in
Jeanlin's burrow at the bottom of Réquillart. It was there that he was
in hiding; no one believed him so near; the quiet audacity of that
refuge, in the very mine, in that abandoned passage of the old pit,
had baffled search. Above, the sloes and hawthorns growing among the
fallen scaffolding of the belfry filled up the mouth of the hole. No
one ventured down; it was necessary to know the trick--how to hang on
to the roots of the mountain ash and to let go fearlessly, to catch
hold of the rungs that were still solid. Other obstacles also protected
him, the suffocating heat of the passage, a hundred and twenty metres
of dangerous descent, then the painful gliding on all fours for a
quarter of a league between the narrowed walls of the gallery before
discovering the brigand's cave full of plunder. He lived there in the
midst of abundance, finding gin there, the rest of the dried cod, and
provisions of all sorts. The large hay bed was excellent, and not a
current of air could be felt in this equal temperature, as warm as a
bath. Light, however, threatened to fail. Jeanlin, who had made himself
purveyor, with the prudence and discretion of a savage and delighted
to make fun of the police, had even brought him pomatum, but could not
succeed in putting his hands on a packet of candles.
After the fifth day Étienne never lighted up except to eat. He could
not swallow in the dark. This complete and interminable night, always
of the same blackness, was his chief torment. It was in vain that he
was able to sleep in safety, that he was warm and provided with bread,
the night had never weighed so heavily on his brain. It seemed to him
even to crush his thoughts. Now he was living on thefts. In spite of
his communistic theories, old scruples of education arose, and he
contented himself with gnawing his share of dry bread. But what was to
be done? One must live, and his task was not yet accomplished. Another
shame overcame him: remorse for that savage drunkenness from the gin,
drunk in the great cold on an empty stomach, which had thrown him,
armed with a knife, on Chaval. This stirred in him the whole of that
unknown terror, the hereditary ill, the long ancestry of drunkenness,
no longer tolerating a drop of alcohol without falling into homicidal
mania. Would he then end as a murderer? When he found himself in
shelter, in this profound calm of the earth, seized by satiety of
violence, he had slept for two days the sleep of a brute, gorged and
overcome; and the depression continued, he lived in a bruised state
with bitter mouth and aching head, as after some tremendous spree. A
week passed by; the Maheus, who had been warned, were not able to send
a candle; he had to give up the enjoyment of light, even when eating.
Now Étienne remained for hours stretched out on his hay. Vague ideas
were working within him for the first time: a feeling of superiority,
which placed him apart from his mates, an exaltation of his person
as he grew more instructed. Never had he reflected so much; he
asked himself the why of his disgust on the morrow of that furious
course among the pits; and he did not dare to reply to himself, his
recollections were repulsive to him, the ignoble desires, the coarse
instincts, the odour of all that wretchedness shaken out to the wind.
In spite of the torment of the darkness, he would come to hate the hour
for returning to the settlement. How nauseous were all these wretches
in a heap, living at the common bucket! There was not one with whom he
could seriously talk politics; it was a bestial existence, always the
same air tainted by onion, in which one choked! He wished to enlarge
their horizon, to raise them to the comfort and good manners of the
middle class, by making them masters; but how long it would take!
and he no longer felt the courage to await victory, in this prison
of hunger. By slow degrees his vanity of leadership, his constant
preoccupation of thinking in their place, left him free, breathing into
him the soul of one of those bourgeois whom he execrated.
Jeanlin one evening brought a candle-end, stolen from a carter's
lantern, and this was a great relief for Étienne. When the darkness
began to stupefy him, weighing on his skull almost to madness, he
would light up for a moment; then, as soon as he had chased away the
nightmare, he extinguished the candle, miserly of this brightness which
was as necessary to his life as bread. The silence buzzed in his ears,
he only heard the flight of a band of rats, the cracking of the old
timber, the tiny sound of a spider weaving her web. And with eyes open,
in this warm nothingness, he returned to his fixed idea--the thought
of what his mates were doing above. Desertion on his part would have
seemed to him the worst cowardice. If he thus hid himself, it was to
remain free, to give counsel or to act. His long meditations had fixed
his ambition. While awaiting something better he would like to be
Pluchart, leaving manual work in order to work only at politics, but
alone, in a clean room, under the pretext that brain labour absorbs the
entire life and needs quiet.
At the beginning of the second week, the child having told him that
the police supposed he had gone over to Belgium, Étienne ventured out
of his hole at nightfall. He wished to ascertain the situation, and
to decide if it was still well to persist. He himself considered the
game doubtful. Before the strike he felt uncertain of the result, and
had simply yielded to facts; and now, after having been intoxicated
with rebellion, he came back to this first doubt, despairing of making
the Company yield. But he would not yet confess this to himself; he
was tortured when he thought of the miseries of defeat, and the heavy
responsibility of suffering which would weigh upon him. The end of the
strike: was it not the end of his part, the overthrow of his ambition,
his life falling back into the brutishness of the mine and the horrors
of the settlement? And honestly, without any base calculation or
falsehood, he endeavoured to find his faith again, to prove to himself
that resistance was still possible, that Capital was about to destroy
itself in face of the heroic suicide of Labour.
Throughout the entire country, in fact, there was nothing but a long
echo of ruin. At night, when he wandered through the black country,
like a wolf who has come out of his forest, he seemed to hear the crash
of bankruptcies from one end of the plain to the other. He now passed
by the roadside nothing but closed dead workshops, becoming rotten
beneath the dull sky. The sugar works had especially suffered: the
Hoton sugar works, the Fauvelle works, after having reduced the number
of their hands, had come to grief one after the other. At the Dutilleul
flour works the last mill had stopped on the second Saturday of the
month, and the Bleuze rope works, for mine cables, had been quite
ruined by the strike. On the Marchiennes side the situation was growing
worse every day. All the fires were out at the Gagebois glass works,
men were continually being sent away from the Sonneville workshops,
only one of the three blast furnaces of the Forges was alight, and not
one battery of coke ovens was burning on the horizon. The strike of the
Montsou colliers, born of the industrial crisis which had been growing
worse for two years, had increased it and precipitated the downfall.
To the other causes of suffering--the stoppage of orders from America,
and the engorgement of invested capital in excessive production--was
now added the unforeseen lack of coal for the few furnaces which were
still kept up; and that was the supreme agony, this engine bread which
the pits no longer furnished. Frightened by the general anxiety, the
Company, by diminishing its output and starving its miners, inevitably
found itself at the end of December without a fragment of coal at
the surface of its pits. Everything held together, the plague blew
from afar, one fall led to another; the industries tumbled each other
over as they fell, in so rapid a series of catastrophes that the
shocks echoed in the midst of the neighbouring cities, Lille, Douai,
Valenciennes, where absconding bankers were bringing ruin on whole
families.
At the turn of a road Étienne often stopped in the frozen night to
hear the rubbish raining down. He breathed deeply in the darkness,
the joy of annihilation seized him, the hope that day would dawn on
the extermination of the old world, with not a single fortune left
standing, the scythe of equality levelling everything to the ground.
But in this massacre it was the Company's pits that especially
interested him. He would continue his walk, blinded by the darkness,
visiting them one after the other, glad to discover some new disaster.
Landslips of increasing gravity continued to occur on account of the
prolonged abandonment of the passages. Above the north gallery of
Mirou the ground sank in to such an extent, that the Joiselle road,
for the distance of a hundred metres, had been swallowed up as though
by the shock of an earthquake; and the Company, disturbed at the
rumours raised by these accidents, paid the owners for their vanished
fields without bargaining. Crévecoeur and Madeleine, which lay in very
shifting rock, were becoming stopped up more and more. It was said that
two captains had been buried at the Victoire; there was an inundation
at Feutry-Cantel, it had been necessary to wall up a gallery for the
length of a kilometre at Saint-Thomas, where the ill-kept timbering
was breaking down everywhere. Thus every hour enormous sums were
spent, making great breaches in the shareholders' dividends; a rapid
destruction of the pits was going on, which must end at last by eating
up the famous Montsou deniers which had been centupled in a century.
In the face of these repeated blows, hope was again born in Étienne;
he came to believe that a third month of resistance would crush the
monster--the weary, sated beast, crouching down there like an idol
in his unknown tabernacle. He knew that after the Montsou troubles
there had been great excitement in the Paris journals, quite a violent
controversy between the official newspapers and the opposition
newspapers, terrible narratives, which were especially directed against
the International, of which the empire was becoming afraid after having
first encouraged it; and the directors not daring to turn a deaf ear
any longer, two of them had condescended to come and hold an inquiry,
but with an air of regret, not appearing to care about the upshot; so
disinterested, that in three days they went away again, declaring that
everything was going on as well as possible. He was told, however, from
other quarters that during their stay these gentlemen sat permanently,
displaying feverish activity, and absorbed in transactions of which
no one about them uttered a word. And he charged them with affecting
confidence they did not feel, and came to look upon their departure as
a nervous flight, feeling now certain of triumph since these terrible
men were letting everything go.
But on the following night Étienne despaired again. The Company's
back was too robust to be so easily broken; they might lose millions,
but later on they would get them back again by gnawing at their men's
bread. On that night, having pushed as far as Jean-Bart, he guessed
the truth when an overseer told him that there was talk of yielding
Vandame to Montsou. At Deneulin's house, it was said, the wretchedness
was pitiful, the wretchedness of the rich; the father ill in his
powerlessness, aged by his anxiety over money, the daughters struggling
in the midst of tradesmen, trying to save their shifts. There was
less suffering in the famished settlements than in this middle-class
house where they shut themselves up to drink water. Work had not been
resumed at Jean-Bart, and it had been necessary to replace the pump
at Gaston-Marie; while, in spite of all haste, an inundation had
already begun which made great expenses necessary. Deneulin had at
last risked his request for a loan of one hundred thousand francs from
the Grégoires, and the refusal, though he had expected it, completed
his dejection: if they refused, it was for his sake, in order to save
him from an impossible struggle; and they advised him to sell. He, as
usual, violently refused. It enraged him to have to pay the expenses of
the strike; he hoped at first to die of it, with the blood at his head,
strangled by apoplexy. Then what was to be done? He had listened to the
directors' offers. They wrangled with him, they depreciated this superb
prey, this repaired pit, equipped anew, where the lack of capital alone
paralysed the output. He would be lucky if he got enough out of it
to satisfy his creditors. For two days he had struggled against the
directors at Montsou, furious at the quiet way with which they took
advantage of his embarrassment and shouting his refusals at them in
his loud voice. And there the affair remained, and they had returned
to Paris to await patiently his last groans. Étienne smelled out this
compensation for the disasters, and was again seized by discouragement
before the invincible power of the great capitalists, so strong in
battle that they fattened in defeat by eating the corpses of the small
capitalists who fell at their side.
The next day, fortunately, Jeanlin brought him a piece of good news. At
the Voreux the tubbing of the shaft was threatening to break, and the
water was filtering in from all the joints; in great haste a gang of
carpenters had been set on to repair it.
Up to now Étienne had avoided the Voreux, warned by the everlasting
black silhouette of the sentinel stationed on the pit-bank above the
plain. He could not be avoided, he dominated in the air, like the flag
of the regiment. Towards three o'clock in the morning the sky became
overcast, and he went to the pit, where some mates explained to him
the bad condition of the tubbing; they even thought that it would have
to be done entirely over again, which would stop the output of coal
for three months. For a long time he prowled round, listening to the
carpenters' mallets hammering in the shaft. That wound which had to be
dressed rejoiced his heart.
As he went back in the early daylight, he saw the sentinel still on the
pit-bank. This time he would certainly be seen. As he walked he thought
about those soldiers who were taken from the people, to be armed
against the people. How easy the triumph of the revolution would be if
the army were suddenly to declare for it! It would be enough if the
workman and the peasant in the barracks were to remember their origin.
That was the supreme peril, the great terror, which made the teeth of
the middle class chatter when they thought of a possible defection of
the troops. In two hours they would be swept away and exterminated
with all the delights and abominations of their iniquitous life. It
was already said that whole regiments were tainted with Socialism.
Was it true? When justice came, would it be thanks to the cartridges
distributed by the middle class? And snatching at another hope, the
young man dreamed that the regiment, with its posts, now guarding the
pits, would come over to the side of the strikers, shoot down the
Company to a man, and at last give the mine to the miners.
He then noticed that he was ascending the pit-bank, his head filled
with these reflections. Why should he not talk with this soldier? He
would get to know what his ideas were. With an air of indifference, he
continued to come nearer, as though he were gleaning old wood among the
rubbish. The sentinel remained motionless.
"Eh! mate! damned weather," said Étienne, at last. "I think we shall
have snow."
He was a small soldier, very fair, with a pale, gentle face covered
with red freckles. He wore his military great-coat with the awkwardness
of a recruit.
"Yes, perhaps we shall, I think," he murmured.
And with his blue eyes he gazed at the livid sky, the smoky dawn, with
soot weighing like lead afar over the plain.
"What idiots they are to put you here to freeze!" Étienne went on. "One
would think the Cossacks were coming! And then there's always wind
here."
The little soldier shivered without complaining. There was certainly
a little cabin of dry stones there, where old Bonnemort used to take
shelter when it blew a hurricane, but the order being not to leave the
summit of the pit-bank, the soldier did not stir from it, his hands so
stiffened by cold that he could no longer feel his weapon. He belonged
to the guard of sixty men who were protecting the Voreux, and as this
cruel sentry-duty frequently came round, he had before nearly stayed
there for good with his dead feet. His work demanded it; a passive
obedience finished the benumbing process, and he replied to these
questions with the stammered words of a sleepy child.
Étienne in vain endeavoured during a quarter of an hour to make
him talk about politics. He replied "yes" or "no" without seeming
to understand. Some of his comrades said that the captain was a
republican; as to him, he had no idea--it was all the same to him.
If he was ordered to fire, he would fire, so as not to be punished.
The workman listened, seized with the popular hatred against the
army--against these brothers whose hearts were changed by sticking a
pair of red pantaloons on to their buttocks.
"Then what's your name?"
"Jules."
"And where do you come from?"
"From Plogof, over there."
He stretched out his arm at random. It was in Brittany, he knew no
more. His small pale face grew animated. He began to laugh, and felt
warmer.
"I have a mother and a sister. They are waiting for me, sure enough.
Ah! it won't be for to-morrow. When I left, they came with me as far as
Pont-l'Abbé. We had to take the horse to Lepalmec: it nearly broke its
legs at the bottom of the Audierne Hill. Cousin Charles was waiting for
us with sausages, but the women were crying too much, and it stuck in
our throats. Good Lord! what a long way off our home is!"
His eyes grew moist, though he was still laughing. The desert moorland
of Plogof, that wild storm-beaten point of the Raz, appeared to him
beneath a dazzling sun in the rosy season of heather.
"Do you think," he asked, "if I'm not punished, that they'll give me a
month's leave in two years?"
Then Étienne talked about Provence, which he had left when he was quite
small. The daylight was growing, and flakes of snow began to fly in
the earthy sky. And at last he felt anxious on noticing Jeanlin, who
was prowling about in the midst of the bushes, stupefied to see him
up there. The child was beckoning to him. What was the good of this
dream of fraternizing with the soldiers? It would take years and years,
and his useless attempt cast him down as though he had expected to
succeed. But suddenly he understood Jeanlin's gesture. The sentinel was
about to be relieved, and he went away, running off to bury himself at
Réquillart, his heart crushed once more by the certainty of defeat;
while the little scamp who ran beside him was accusing that dirty beast
of a trooper of having called out the guard to fire at them.
On the summit of the pit-bank Jules stood motionless, with eyes
vacantly gazing at the falling snow. The sergeant was approaching with
his men, and the regulation cries were exchanged.
"_Qui vive?_--Advance and give the password!"
And they heard the heavy steps begin again, ringing as though on a
conquered country. In spite of the growing daylight, nothing stirred
in the settlements; the colliers remained in silent rage beneath the
military boot.
CHAPTER II
Snow had been falling for two days; since the morning it had ceased,
and an intense frost had frozen the immense sheet. This black country,
with its inky roads and walls and trees powdered with coal dust,
was now white, a single whiteness stretching out without end. The
Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement lay beneath the snow as though it had
disappeared. No smoke came out of the chimneys; the houses, without
fire and as cold as the stones in the street, did not melt the thick
layer on the tiles. It was nothing more than a quarry of white slabs
in the white plain, a vision of a dead village wound in its shroud.
Along the roads the passing patrols alone made a muddy mess with their
stamping.
Among the Maheus the last shovelful of cinders had been burnt the
evening before, and it was no use any longer to think of gleaning on
the pit-bank in this terrible weather, when the sparrows themselves
could not find a blade of grass. Alzire, from the obstinacy with which
her poor hands had dug in the snow, was dying. Maheude had to wrap her
up in the fragment of a coverlet while waiting for Dr. Vanderhaghen,
for whom she had twice gone out without being able to find him. The
servant had, however, promised that he would come to the settlement
before night, and the mother was standing at the window watching, while
the little invalid, who had wished to be downstairs, was shivering
on a chair, having the illusion that it was better there near the
cold grate. Old Bonnemort opposite, his legs bad once more, seemed
to be sleeping; neither Lénore nor Henri had come back from scouring
the roads, in company with Jeanlin, to ask for sous. Maheu alone was
walking heavily up and down the bare room, stumbling against the wall
at every turn, with the stupid air of an animal which can no longer see
its cage. The petroleum also was finished; but the reflection of the
snow from outside was so bright that it vaguely lit up the room, in
spite of the deepening night.
There was a noise of sabots, and the Levaque woman pushed open the
door like a gale of wind, beside herself, shouting furiously from the
threshold at Maheude:
"Then it's you who have said that I forced my lodger to give me twenty
sous when he sleeps with me?"
The other shrugged her shoulders.
"Don't bother me. I said nothing; and who told you so?"
"They tell me you said so; it doesn't concern you who it was. You even
said you could hear us at our dirty tricks behind the wall, and that
the filth gets into our house because I'm always on my back. Just tell
me you didn't say so, eh?"
Every day quarrels broke out as a result of the constant gossiping of
the women. Especially between those households which lived door to
door, squabbles and reconciliations took place every day. But never
before had such bitterness thrown them one against the other. Since the
strike hunger exasperated their rancour, so that they felt the need
of blows; an altercation between two gossiping women finished by a
murderous onset between their two men.
Just then Levaque arrived in his turn, dragging Bouteloup.
"Here's our mate; let him just say if he has given twenty sous to my
wife to sleep with her."
The lodger, hiding his timid gentleness in his great beard, protested
and stammered:
"Oh, that? No! Never anything! never!"
At once Levaque became threatening, and thrust his fist beneath Maheu's
nose.
"You know that won't do for me. If a man's got a wife like that, he
ought to knock her ribs in. If not, then you believe what she says."
"By God!" exclaimed Maheu, furious at being dragged out of his
dejection, "what is all this clatter again? Haven't we got enough to do
with our misery? Just leave me alone, damn you! or I'll let you know
it! And first, who says that my wife said so?"
"Who says so? Pierronne said so."
Maheude broke into a sharp laugh, and turning towards the Levaque woman:
"An! Pierronne, is it? Well! I can tell you what she told me. Yes, she
told me that you sleep with both your men--the one underneath and the
other on top!"
After that it was no longer possible to come to an understanding. They
all grew angry, and the Levaques, as a reply to the Maheus, asserted
that Pierronne had said a good many other things on their account; that
they had sold Catherine, that they were all rotten together, even to
the little ones, with a dirty disease caught by Étienne at the Volcan.
"She said that! She said that!" yelled Maheu. "Good! I'll go to her, I
will, and if she says that she said that, she shall feel my hand on her
chops!"
He was carried out of himself, and the Levaques followed him to see
what would happen, while Bouteloup, having a horror of disputes,
furtively returned home. Excited by the altercation, Maheude was also
going out, when a complaint from Alzire held her back. She crossed the
ends of the coverlet over the little one's quivering body, and placed
herself before the window, looking out vaguely. And that doctor, who
still delayed!
At the Pierrons' door Maheu and the Levaques met Lydie, who was
stamping in the snow. The house was closed, and a thread of light
came though a crack in a shutter. The child replied at first to their
questions with constraint: no, her father was not there, he had gone to
the washhouse to join Mother Brulé and bring back the bundle of linen.
Then she was confused, and would not say what her mother was doing.
At last she let out everything with a sly, spiteful laugh: her mother
had pushed her out of the door because M. Dansaert was there, and she
prevented them from talking. Since the morning he had been going about
the settlement with two policemen, trying to pick up workmen, imposing
on the weak, and announcing everywhere that if the descent did not take
place on Monday at the Voreux, the Company had decided to hire men from
the Borinage. And as the night came on he sent away the policemen,
finding Pierronne alone; then he had remained with her to drink a glass
of gin before a good fire.
"Hush! hold your tongue! We must see them," said Levaque, with a lewd
laugh. "We'll explain everything directly. Get off with you, youngster."
Lydie drew back a few steps while he put his eye to a crack in the
shutter. He stifled a low cry and his back bent with a quiver. In her
turn his wife looked through, but she said, as though taken by the
colic, that it was disgusting. Maheu, who had pushed her, wishing also
to see, then declared that he had had enough for his money. And they
began again, in a row, each taking his glance as at a peep-show. The
parlour, glittering with cleanliness, was enlivened by a large fire;
there were cakes on the table with a bottle and glasses, in fact quite
a feast. What they saw going on in there at last exasperated the two
men, who under other circumstances would have laughed over it for six
months. That she should let herself be stuffed up to the neck, with
her skirts in the air, was funny. But, good God! was it not disgusting
to do that in front of a great fire, and to get up one's strength with
biscuits, when the mates had neither a slice of bread nor a fragment of
coal?
"Here's father!" cried Lydie, running away.
Pierron was quietly coming back from the washhouse with the bundle of
linen on his shoulder. Maheu immediately addressed him:
"Here! they tell me that your wife says that I sold Catherine, and that
we are all rotten at home. And what do they pay you in your house, your
wife and the gentleman who is this minute wearing out her skin?"
The astonished Pierron could not understand, and Pierronne, seized
with fear on hearing the tumult of voices, lost her head and set the
door ajar to see what was the matter. They could see her, looking very
red, with her dress open and her skirt tucked up at her waist; while
Dansaert, in the background, was wildly buttoning himself up. The head
captain rushed away and disappeared trembling with fear that this story
would reach the manager's ears. Then there would be an awful scandal,
laughter, and hooting and abuse.
"You, who are always saying that other people are dirty!" shouted the
Levaque woman to Pierronne; "it's not surprising that you're clean when
you get the bosses to scour you."
"Ah! it's fine for her to talk!" said Levaque again. "Here's a trollop
who says that my wife sleeps with me and the lodger, one below and the
other above! Yes! yes! that's what they tell me you say."
But Pierronne, grown calm, held her own against this abuse, very
contemptuous in the assurance that she was the best looking and the
richest.
"I've said what I've said; just leave me alone, will you! What have my
affairs got to do with you, a pack of jealous creatures who want to get
over us because we are able to save up money! Get along! get along!
You can say what you like; my husband knows well enough why Monsieur
Dansaert was here."
Pierron, in fact, was furiously defending his wife. The quarrel turned.
They accused him of having sold himself, of being a spy, the Company's
dog; they charged him with shutting himself up, to gorge himself with
the good things with which the bosses paid him for his treachery.
In defence, he pretended that Maheu had slipped beneath his door a
threatening paper with two cross-bones and a dagger above. And this
necessarily ended in a struggle between the men, as the quarrels of the
women always did now that famine was enraging the mildest. Maheu and
Levaque rushed on Pierron with their fists, and had to be pulled off.
Blood was flowing from her son-in-law's nose, when Mother Brulé, in her
turn, arrived from the washhouse. When informed of what had been going
on, she merely said:
"The damned beast dishonours me!"
The road was becoming deserted, not a shadow spotted the naked
whiteness of the snow, and the settlement, falling back into its
death-like immobility, went on starving beneath the intense cold.
"And the doctor?" asked Maheu, as he shut the door.
"Not come," replied Maheude, still standing before the window.
"Are the little ones back?"
"No, not back."
Maheu again began his heavy walk from one wall to the other, looking
like a stricken ox. Father Bonnemort, seated stiffly on his chair, had
not even lifted his head. Alzire also had said nothing, and was trying
not to shiver, so as to avoid giving them pain; but in spite of her
courage in suffering, she sometimes trembled so much that one could
hear against the coverlet the quivering of the little invalid girl's
lean body, while with her large open eyes she stared at the ceiling,
from which the pale reflection of the white gardens lit up the room
like moonshine.
The emptied house was now in its last agony, having reached a final
stage of nakedness. The mattress ticks had followed the wool to the
dealers; then the sheets had gone, the linen, everything that could be
sold. One evening they had sold a handkerchief of the grandfather's for
two sous. Tears fell over each object of the poor household which had
to go, and the mother was still lamenting that one day she had carried
away in her skirt the pink cardboard box, her man's old present, as one
would carry away a child to get rid of it on some doorstep. They were
bare; they had only their skins left to sell, so worn-out and injured
that no one would have given a farthing for them. They no longer even
took the trouble to search, they knew that there was nothing left, that
they had come to the end of everything, that they must not hope even
for a candle, or a fragment of coal, or a potato, and they were waiting
to die, only grieved about the children, and revolted by the useless
cruelty that gave the little one a disease before starving it.
"At last! here he is!" said Maheude.
A black figure passed before the window. The door opened. But it was
not Dr. Vanderhaghen; they recognized the new curé, Abbé Ranvier, who
did not seem surprised at coming on this dead house, without light,
without fire, without bread. He had already been to three neighbouring
houses, going from family to family, seeking willing listeners, like
Dansaert with his two policemen; and at once he exclaimed, in his
feverish fanatic's voice:
"Why were you not at mass on Sunday, my children? You are wrong, the
Church alone can save you. Now promise me to come next Sunday."
Maheu, after staring at him, went on pacing heavily, without a word. It
was Maheude who replied:
"To mass, sir? What for? Isn't the good God making fun of us? Look
here! what has my little girl there done to Him, to be shaking with
fever? Hadn't we enough misery, that He had to make her ill too, just
when I can't even give her a cup of warm gruel?"
Then the priest stood and talked at length. He spoke of the strike,
this terrible wretchedness, this exasperated rancour of famine, with
the ardour of a missionary who is preaching to savages for the glory
of religion. He said that the Church was with the poor, that she would
one day cause justice to triumph by calling down the anger of God on
the iniquities of the rich. And that day would come soon, for the rich
had taken the place of God, and were governing without God, in their
impious theft of power. But if the workers desired the fair division
of the goods of the earth, they ought at once to put themselves in the
hands of the priests, just as on the death of Jesus the poor and the
humble grouped themselves around the apostles. What strength the pope
would have, what an army the clergy would have under them, when they
were able to command the numberless crowd of workers! In one week they
would purge the world of the wicked, they would chase away the unworthy
masters. Then, indeed, there would be a real kingdom of God, every
one recompensed according to his merits, and the law of labour as the
foundation for universal happiness.
Maheude, who was listening to him, seemed to hear Étienne, in those
autumn evenings when he announced to them the end of their evils. Only
she had always distrusted the cloth.
"That's very well, what you say there, sir," she replied, "but that's
because you no longer agree with the bourgeois. All our other curés
dined at the manager's, and threatened us with the devil as soon as we
asked for bread."
He began again, and spoke of the deplorable misunderstanding between
the Church and the people. Now, in veiled phrases, he hit at the
town curés, at the bishops, at the highly placed clergy, sated with
enjoyment, gorged with domination, making pacts with the liberal middle
class, in the imbecility of their blindness, not seeing that it was
this middle class which had dispossessed them of the empire of the
world. Deliverance would come from the country priests, who would all
rise to re-establish the kingdom of Christ, with the help of the poor;
and already he seemed to be at their head; he raised his bony form like
the chief of a band, a revolutionary of the gospel, his eyes so filled
with light that they illuminated the gloomy room. This enthusiastic
sermon lifted him to mystic heights, and the poor people had long
ceased to understand him.
"No need for so many words," growled Maheu suddenly. "You'd best begin
by bringing us a loaf."
"Come on Sunday to mass," cried the priest. "God will provide for
everything."
And he went off to catechize the Levaques in their turn, so carried
away by his dream of the final triumph of the Church, and so
contemptuous of facts, that he would thus go through the settlements
without charities, with empty hands amid this army dying of hunger,
being a poor devil himself who looked upon suffering as the spur to
salvation.
Maheu continued his pacing, and nothing was heard but his regular tramp
which made the floor tremble. There was the sound of a rust-eaten
pulley; old Bonnemort was spitting into the cold grate. Then the rhythm
of the feet began again. Alzire, weakened by fever, was rambling in a
low voice, laughing, thinking that it was warm and that she was playing
in the sun.
"Good gracious!" muttered Maheude, after having touched her cheeks,
"how she burns! I don't expect that damned beast now, the brigands must
have stopped him from coming."
She meant the doctor and the Company. She uttered a joyous exclamation,
however, when the door once more opened. But her arms fell back and she
remained standing still with gloomy face.
"Good evening," whispered Étienne, when he had carefully closed the
door.
He often came thus at night-time. The Maheus learnt his retreat after
the second day. But they kept the secret and no one in the settlement
knew exactly what had become of the young man. A legend had grown
up around him. People still believed in him and mysterious rumours
circulated: he would reappear with an army and chests full of gold; and
there was always the religious expectation of a miracle, the realized
ideal, a sudden entry into that city of justice which he had promised
them. Some said they had seen him lying back in a carriage, with three
other gentlemen, on the Marchiennes road; others affirmed that he was
in England for a few days. At length, however, suspicions began to
arise and jokers accused him of hiding in a cellar, where Mouquette
kept him warm; for this relationship, when known, had done him harm.
There was a growing disaffection in the midst of his popularity, a
gradual increase of the despairing among the faithful, and their number
was certain, little by little, to grow.
"What brutal weather!" he added. "And you--nothing new, always from bad
to worse? They tell me that little Négrel has been to Belgium to get
Borains. Good God! we are done for if that is true!"
He shuddered as he entered this dark icy room, where it was some time
before his eyes were able to see the unfortunate people whose presence
he guessed by the deepening of the shade. He was experiencing the
repugnance and discomfort of the workman who has risen above his class,
refined by study and stimulated by ambition. What wretchedness! and
odours! and the bodies in a heap! And a terrible pity caught him by the
throat. The spectacle of this agony so overcame him that he tried to
find words to advise submission.
But Maheu came violently up to him, shouting:
"Borains! They won't dare, the bloody fools! Let the Borains go down,
then, if they want us to destroy the pits!"
With an air of constraint, Étienne explained that it was not possible
to move, that the soldiers who guarded the pits would protect the
descent of the Belgian workmen. And Maheu clenched his fists, irritated
especially, as he said, by having bayonets in his back. Then the
colliers were no longer masters in their own place? They were treated,
then, like convicts, forced to work by a loaded musket! He loved his
pit, it was a great grief to him not to have been down for two months.
He was driven wild, therefore, at the idea of this insult, these
strangers whom they threatened to introduce. Then the recollection that
his certificate had been given back to him struck him to the heart.
"I don't know why I'm angry," he muttered. "I don't belong to their
shop any longer. When they have hunted me away from here, I may as well
die on the road."
"As to that," said Étienne, "if you like, they'll take your certificate
back to-morrow. People don't send away good workmen."
He interrupted himself, surprised to hear Alzire, who was laughing
softly in the delirium of her fever. So far he had only made out Father
Bonnemort's stiff shadow, and this gaiety of the sick child frightened
him. It was indeed too much if the little ones were going to die of it.
With trembling voice he made up his mind.
"Look here! this can't go on, we are done for. We must give it up."
Maheude, who had been motionless and silent up to now, suddenly broke
out, and treating him familiarly and swearing like a man, she shouted
in his face:
"What's that you say? It's you who say that, by God!"
He was about to give reasons, but she would not let him speak.
"Don't repeat that, by God! or, woman as I am, I'll put my fist into
your face. Then we have been dying for two months, and I have sold
my household, and my little ones have fallen ill of it, and there is
to be nothing done, and the injustice is to begin again! Ah! do you
know! when I think of that my blood stands still. No, no, I would burn
everything, I would kill everything, rather than give up."
She pointed at Maheu in the darkness, with a vague, threatening gesture.
"Listen to this! If any man goes back to the pit, he'll find me waiting
for him on the road to spit in his face and cry coward!
Étienne could not see her, but he felt a heat like the breath of a
barking animal. He had drawn back, astonished at this fury which was
his work. She was so changed that he could no longer recognize the
woman who was once so sensible, reproving his violent schemes, saying
that we ought not to wish any one dead, and who was now refusing to
listen to reason and talking of killing people. It was not he now,
it was she, who talked politics, who dreamed of sweeping away the
bourgeois at a stroke, who demanded the republic and the guillotine
to free the earth of these rich robbers who fattened on the labour of
starvelings.
"Yes, I could flay them with my fingers. We've had enough of them! Our
turn is come now; you used to say so yourself. When I think of the
father, the grandfather, the grandfather's father, what all of them who
went before have suffered, what we are suffering, and that our sons and
our sons' sons will suffer it over again, it makes me mad--I could take
a knife. The other day we didn't do enough at Montsou; we ought to have
pulled the bloody place to the ground, down to the last brick. And do
you know I've only one regret, that we didn't let the old man strangle
the Piolaine girl. Hunger may strangle my little ones for all they
care!"
Her words fell like the blows of an axe in the night. The closed
horizon would not open, and the impossible ideal was turning to poison
in the depths of this skull which had been crushed by grief.
"You have misunderstood," Étienne was able to say at last, beating a
retreat. "We ought to come to an understanding with the Company. I know
that the pits are suffering much, so that it would probably consent to
an arrangement."
"No, never!" she shouted.
Just then Lénore and Henri came back with their hands empty. A
gentleman had certainly given them two sous, but the girl kept kicking
her little brother, and the two sous fell into the snow, and as Jeanlin
had joined in the search they had not been able to find them.
"Where is Jeanlin?"
"He's gone away, mother; he said he had business."
Étienne was listening with an aching heart. Once she had threatened
to kill them if they ever held out their hands to beg. Now she sent
them herself on to the roads, and proposed that all of them--the ten
thousand colliers of Montsou--should take stick and wallet, like
beggars of old, and scour the terrified country.
The anguish continued to increase in the black room. The little urchins
came back hungry, they wanted to eat; why could they not have something
to eat? And they grumbled, flung themselves about, and at last trod on
the feet of their dying sister, who groaned. The mother furiously boxed
their ears in the darkness at random. Then, as they cried still louder,
asking for bread, she burst into tears, and dropped on to the floor,
seizing them in one embrace with the little invalid; then, for a long
time, her tears fell in a nervous outbreak which left her limp and worn
out, stammering over and over again the same phrase, calling for death:
"O God! why do you not take us? O God! in pity take us, to have done
with it!"
The grandfather preserved his immobility, like an old tree twisted
by the rain and wind; while the father continued walking between the
fireplace and the cupboard, without turning his head.
But the door opened, and this time it was Doctor Vanderhaghen.
"The devil!" he said. "This light won't spoil your eyes. Look sharp!
I'm in a hurry."
As usual, he scolded, knocked up by work. Fortunately, he had matches
with him, and the father had to strike six, one by one, and to hold
them while he examined the invalid. Unwound from her coverlet, she
shivered beneath this flickering light, as lean as a bird dying in the
snow, so small that one only saw her hump. But she smiled with the
wandering smile of the dying, and her eyes were very large; while her
poor hands contracted over her hollow breast. And as the half-choked
mother asked if it was right to take away from her the only child who
helped in the household, so intelligent and gentle, the doctor grew
vexed.
"Ah! she is going. Dead of hunger, your blessed child. And not the only
one, either; I've just seen another one over there. You all send for
me, but I can't do anything; it's meat that you want to cure you."
Maheu, with burnt fingers, had dropped the match, and the darkness
closed over the little corpse, which was still warm. The doctor had
gone away in a hurry. Étienne heard nothing more in the black room
but Maheude's sobs, repeating her cry for death, that melancholy and
endless lamentation:
"O God! it is my turn, take me! O God! take my man, take the others,
out of pity, to have done with it!"
CHAPTER III
On that Sunday, ever since eight o'clock, Souvarine had been sitting
alone in the parlour of the Avantage, at his accustomed place, with
his head against the wall. Not a single collier knew where to get two
sous for a drink, and never had the bars had fewer customers. So Madame
Rasseneur, motionless at the counter, preserved an irritated silence;
while Rasseneur, standing before the iron fireplace, seemed to be
gazing with a reflective air at the brown smoke from the coal.
Suddenly, in this heavy silence of an over-heated room, three light
quick blows struck against one of the window-panes made Souvarine turn
his head. He rose, for he recognized the signal which Étienne had
already used several times before, in order to call him, when he saw
him from without, smoking his cigarette at an empty table. But before
the engine-man could reach the door, Rasseneur had opened it, and,
recognizing the man who stood there in the light from the window, he
said to him:
"Are you afraid that I shall sell you? You can talk better here than on
the road."
Étienne entered. Madame Rasseneur politely offered him a glass, which
he refused, with a gesture. The innkeeper added:
"I guessed long ago where you hide yourself. If I was a spy, as your
friends say, I should have sent the police after you a week ago."
"There is no need for you to defend yourself," replied the young man.
"I know that you have never eaten that sort of bread. People may have
different ideas and esteem each other all the same."
And there was silence once more. Souvarine had gone back to his chair,
with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed on the smoke from his
cigarette, but his feverish fingers were moving restlessly, and he ran
them over his knees, seeking the warm fur of Poland, who was absent
this evening; it was an unconscious discomfort, something that was
lacking, he could not exactly say what.
Seated on the other side of the table, Étienne at last said:
"To-morrow work begins again at the Voreux. The Belgians have come with
little Négrel."
"Yes, they landed them at nightfall," muttered Rasseneur, who remained
standing. "As long as they don't kill each other after all!"
Then raising his voice:
"No, you know, I don't want to begin our disputes over again, but this
will end badly if you hold out any longer. Why, your story is just like
that of your International. I met Pluchart the day before yesterday, at
Lille, where I went on business. It's going wrong, that machine of his."
He gave details. The association, after having conquered the workers
of the whole world, in an outburst of propaganda which had left the
middle class still shuddering, was now being devoured and slowly
destroyed by an internal struggle between vanities and ambitions.
Since the anarchists had triumphed in it, chasing out the earlier
evolutionists, everything was breaking up; the original aim, the reform
of the wage-system, was lost in the midst of the squabbling of sects;
the scientific framework was disorganized by the hatred of discipline.
And already it was possible to foresee the final miscarriage of this
general revolt which for a moment had threatened to carry away in a
breath the old rotten society.
"Pluchart is ill over it," Rasseneur went on. "And he has no voice at
all now. All the same, he talks on in spite of everything and wants to
go to Paris. And he told me three times over that our strike was done
for."
Étienne with his eyes on the ground let him talk on without
interruption. The evening before he had chatted with some mates, and he
felt that breaths of spite and suspicion were passing over him, those
first breaths of unpopularity which forerun defeat. And he remained
gloomy, he would not confess dejection in the presence of a man who had
foretold to him that the crowd would hoot him in his turn on the day
when they had to avenge themselves for a miscalculation.
"No doubt the strike is done for, I know that as well as Pluchart," he
said. "But we foresaw that. We accepted this strike against our wishes,
we didn't count on finishing up with the Company. Only one gets carried
away, one begins to expect things, and when it turns out badly one
forgets that one ought to have expected that, instead of lamenting and
quarrelling as if it were a catastrophe tumbled down from heaven."
"Then if you think the game's lost," asked Rasseneur, "why don't you
make the mates listen to reason?"
The young man looked at him fixedly.
"Listen! enough of this. You have your ideas, I have mine. I came in
here to show you that I feel esteem for you in spite of everything.
But I still think that if we come to grief over this trouble, our
starved carcasses will do more for the people's cause than all your
common-sense politics. Ah! if one of those bloody soldiers would just
put a bullet in my heart, that would be a fine way of ending!"
His eyes were moist, as in this cry there broke out the secret desire
of the vanquished, the refuge in which he desired to lose his torment
for ever.
"Well said!" declared Madame Rasseneur, casting on her husband a look
which was full of all the contempt of her radical opinions.
Souvarine, with a vague gaze, feeling about with his nervous hands, did
not appear to hear. His fair girlish face, with the thin nose and small
pointed teeth, seemed to be growing savage in some mystic dream full
of bloody visions. And he began to dream aloud, replying to a remark
of Rasseneur's about the International which had been let fall in the
course of the conversation.
"They are all cowards; there is only one man who can make their machine
into a terrible instrument of destruction. It requires will, and none
of them have will; and that's why the revolution will miscarry once
more."
He went on in a voice of disgust, lamenting the imbecility of men,
while the other two were disturbed by these somnambulistic confidences
made in the darkness. In Russia there was nothing going on well, and
he was in despair over the news he had received. His old companions
were all turning to the politicians; the famous Nihilists who made
Europe tremble--sons of village priests, of the lower middle class,
of tradesmen--could not rise above the idea of national liberation,
and seemed to believe that the world would be delivered--when they had
killed their despot. As soon as he spoke to them of razing society
to the ground like a ripe harvest--as soon as he even pronounced the
infantile word "republic"--he felt that he was misunderstood and a
disturber, henceforth unclassed, enrolled among the lost leaders of
cosmopolitan revolution. His patriotic heart struggled, however, and it
was with painful bitterness that he repeated his favourite expression:
"Foolery! They'll never get out of it with their foolery."
Then, lowering his voice still more, in a few bitter words he described
his old dream of fraternity. He had renounced his rank and his fortune;
he had gone among workmen, only in the hope of seeing at last the
foundation of a new society of labour in common. All the sous in his
pockets had long gone to the urchins of the settlement; he had been
as tender as a brother with the colliers, smiling at their suspicion,
winning them over by his quiet workmanlike ways and his dislike of
chattering. But decidedly the fusion had not taken place; he remained
a stranger, with his contempt of all bonds, his desire to keep himself
free of all petty vanities and enjoyments. And since this morning
he had been especially exasperated by reading an incident in the
newspapers.
His voice changed, his eyes grew bright, he fixed them on Étienne,
directly addressing him:
"Now, do you understand that? These hatworkers at Marseilles who have
won the great lottery prize of a hundred thousand francs have gone off
at once and invested it, declaring that they are going to live without
doing anything! Yes, that is your idea, all of you French workmen; you
want to unearth a treasure in order to devour it alone afterwards in
some lazy, selfish corner. You may cry out as much as you like against
the rich, you haven't got courage enough to give back to the poor the
money that luck brings you. You will never be worthy of happiness as
long as you own anything, and your hatred of the bourgeois proceeds
solely from an angry desire to be bourgeois yourselves in their place."
Rasseneur burst out laughing. The idea that the two Marseilles workmen
ought to renounce the big prize seemed to him absurd. But Souvarine
grew pale; his face changed and became terrible in one of those
religious rages which exterminate nations. He cried:
"You will all be mown down, overthrown, cast on the dung-heap.
Someone will be born who will annihilate your race of cowards and
pleasure-seekers. And look here! you see my hands; if my hands were
able they would take up the earth, like that, and shake it until it was
smashed to fragments, and you were all buried beneath the rubbish."
"Well said," declared Madame Rasseneur, with her polite and convinced
air.
There was silence again. Then Étienne spoke once more of the Borinage
men. He questioned Souvarine concerning the steps that had been taken
at the Voreux. But the engine-man was still preoccupied, and scarcely
replied. He only knew that cartridges would be distributed to the
soldiers who were guarding the pit; and the nervous restlessness of his
fingers over his knees increased to such an extent that, at last, he
became conscious of what was lacking--the soft and soothing fur of the
tame rabbit.
"Where is Poland, then?" he asked.
The innkeeper laughed again as he looked at his wife. After an awkward
silence he made up his mind:
"Poland? She is in the pot."
Since her adventure with Jeanlin, the pregnant rabbit, no doubt
wounded, had only brought forth dead young ones; and to avoid feeding a
useless mouth they had resigned themselves that very day to serve her
up with potatoes.
"Yes, you ate one of her legs this evening. Eh! You licked your fingers
after it!"
Souvarine had not understood at first. Then he became very pale, and
his face contracted with nausea; while, in spite of his stoicism, two
large tears were swelling beneath his eyelids.
But no one had time to notice this emotion, for the door had opened
roughly and Chaval had appeared, pushing Catherine before him.
After having made himself drunk with beer and bluster in all the
public-houses of Montsou, the idea had occurred to him to go to the
Avantage to show his old friends that he was not afraid. As he came in,
he said to his mistress:
"By God! I tell you you shall drink a glass in here; I'll break the
jaws of the first man who looks askance at me!"
Catherine, moved at the sight of Étienne, had become very pale. When
Chaval in his turn perceived him, he grinned in his evil fashion.
"Two glasses, Madame Rasseneur! We're wetting the new start of work."
Without a word she poured out, as a woman who never refused her beer to
any one. There was silence, and neither the landlord nor the two others
stirred from their places.
"I know people who've said that I was a spy," Chaval went on
swaggeringly, "and I'm waiting for them just to say it again to my
face, so that we can have a bit of explanation."
No one replied, and the men turned their heads and gazed vaguely at the
walls.
"There are some who sham, and there are some who don't sham," he went
on louder. "I've nothing to hide. I've left Deneulin's dirty shop,
and to-morrow I'm going down to the Voreux with a dozen Belgians, who
have been given me to lead because I'm held in esteem; and if any one
doesn't like that, he can just say so, and we'll talk it over."
Then, as the same contemptuous silence greeted his provocations, he
turned furiously on Catherine.