Germinal Page 40

  Then Catherine fell. She had shouted out Chaval’s name in one last desperate appeal. He didn’t hear her, he was too busy fighting and kicking a comrade’s ribs with his heels to make sure he stayed ahead of him. She was trodden underfoot. In her unconscious state she dreamed that she was one of the young putters from long ago and that a piece of coal had dropped out of a basket above her and pitched her into the shaft like a sparrow felled by a stone. Only five ladders remained to be climbed, and so far it had taken them nearly an hour. She had no memory of how she reached the surface, borne aloft on people’s shoulders and prevented from falling only by the narrowness of the shaft. Suddenly she found herself in the blinding sunlight surrounded by a noisy crowd of people who were all jeering at her.

  III

  That morning, since before daybreak, there had been a stirring in the villages, a stirring which was now growing and spreading along the highways and byways of the entire region. But the miners had not been able to set out as planned because it was rumoured that the plain was being patrolled by dragoons and gendarmes. It was said that they had arrived from Douai during the night, and some accused Rasseneur of having betrayed the comrades by warning M. Hennebeau; one putter even swore blind that she had seen his servant taking the message to the telegraph office. The miners clenched their fists and watched out for the soldiers behind their shutters in the pale light of dawn.

  At about seven-thirty, as the sun was rising, another rumour circulated, which reassured the impatient. It had been a false alarm, simply a military exercise of the kind that the general had occasionally ordered during the strike at the request of the Prefect in Lille. The strikers hated this particular official, whom they accused of having double-crossed them by promising to act as a go-between, when in fact all he had done was to parade troops through Montsou every week to keep the miners in their place. So when the dragoons and gendarmes quietly departed in the direction of Marchiennes, having been content to deafen every village with the noise of their horses trotting past on the hard ground, the miners scoffed at this naïve Prefect whose troops took to their heels the moment things looked like hotting up. Until nine o’clock they stood around in front of their houses, as cheerful and peaceful as can be, watching until the back of the last harmless gendarme disappeared down the road. Meanwhile the bourgeois of Montsou remained safely tucked up in their warm beds. At the manager’s house Mme Hennebeau had just been seen leaving in her carriage, presumably having left M. Hennebeau at work, for the place was all shut up and silent, seemingly deserted. Not a single pit was under armed guard, which demonstrated a fatal lack of foresight at this perilous moment and just the sort of natural stupidity that occurs at times of impending disaster, the very thing a government fails to think of when it needs to be paying attention to the practicalities of the situation. And nine o’clock was striking when the colliers finally set out along the Vandame road for the meeting-place that had been agreed on the previous evening in the forest.

  In any case Étienne realized at once that he was not going to get the three thousand comrades at Jean-Bart he had been counting on. Many people thought that the demonstration had been postponed, but the worst of it was that two or three groups of men were already on their way and would compromise the cause if, like it or not, he wasn’t there to lead them. Nearly a hundred had left before daybreak and had presumably taken shelter in the forest under the beech trees while they waited for everyone else. Étienne went up to consult Souvarine, who merely shrugged: ten good strong men and true could achieve more than a mob; and he went back to reading his book, having declined to take any part in the proceedings. There would be more sentimental nonsense no doubt, whereas all that was needed was to set fire to Montsou, which was a perfectly straightforward matter. As Étienne left the house by the front path, he saw a pale Rasseneur sitting by the stove while his wife, looking taller than she was because of her perennial black dress, was firmly and politely giving him a piece of her mind.

  Maheu thought that they ought to keep their word. An appointed meeting of this sort was sacrosanct. Nevertheless a night’s sleep had calmed everyone down; he himself was afraid that something bad might happen, and he argued that it was their duty to turn up and make sure that the comrades remained within the law. La Maheude nodded in agreement. Étienne kept complacently insisting that they must act in a revolutionary manner but without threatening anyone’s life. Before leaving he refused his share in a loaf of bread he had been given the night before, along with a bottle of gin; but he did drink three quick tots, just to keep out the cold, and even took a full flask of it with him. Alzire would look after the little ones. Old Bonnemort’s invalid legs were feeling the effects of last night’s exertions, and he had remained in bed.

  They thought it wiser not to leave together. Jeanlin was long gone. Maheu and La Maheude went in one direction, heading for Montsou by an indirect route, while Étienne made for the forest, where he expected to join his comrades. On the way he caught up with a party of women, among whom he recognized La Brûlé and La Levaque: as they walked along, they were eating some chestnuts which La Mouquette had brought them, and swallowing the husks so that they stayed down better. But Étienne found no one in the forest, the comrades were already at Jean-Bart. So he started running and reached the pit just as Levaque and a hundred others entered the yard. Miners were straggling in from every direction, the Maheus by the main road, the women from across the fields, all of them unarmed and leaderless, gravitating there naturally like a stream overflowing down a slope. Étienne spotted Jeanlin perched up on a gangway as though he were waiting for the show to begin. He quickened his pace and entered the yard with the leading group. There were barely three hundred of them altogether.

  The men faltered when Deneulin appeared at the top of the steps leading to the pit-head.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked loudly.

  Having seen the carriage depart with his daughters gaily bidding him farewell, he had returned to the pit, filled with renewed unease. Yet everything seemed to be in order: the workers had gone down, the extraction of coal was proceeding, and he was beginning to take heart once more as he chatted with the overman when someone told him about the approaching strikers. He had at once taken up a position by the window in the screening-shed; and as the swelling crowd poured into the yard, he was immediately aware of his powerlessness. How could he defend these buildings that were open on all sides to anyone who cared to enter? He could barely have mustered twenty workers to protect him. He was lost.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked again, pale with suppressed anger and trying hard to put a brave face on his defeat.

  There was jostling and muttering among the crowd. Eventually Étienne stepped forward and said:

  We mean you no harm, sir. But all work must stop.’

  Deneulin replied to him as if he were quite clearly an idiot.

  ‘What good do you think you’ll do by stopping work here? You might as well shoot me in the back, point blank…Yes, my men are below, and they’re not coming up unless you kill me first.’

  This plain speaking caused an uproar. Maheu had to restrain Levaque, who lunged forward with a menacing air, while Étienne continued to parley, trying to convince Deneulin of the legitimacy of their revolutionary action. But the latter’s response was that everyone had the right to work. And anyway he wasn’t about to discuss such nonsense, he intended to be the master on his own premises. His only regret was that he didn’t have four gendarmes there to rid him of this riff-raff.

  ‘Of course, I can see it’s my own fault. I deserve what I get. Force is the only way with fellows like you. It’s the same with the government. It thinks it can buy you off with concessions, but you’ll simply shoot it dead the moment it gives you the arms.’

  Étienne was shaking but still managing to restrain himself. He lowered his voice:

  ‘I would ask you, sir, to order your men up. I cannot answer for what my comrades may do. You have it in your power to avoid a disast
er.’

  ‘No. You can go to hell! Anyway, who are you? You’re not one of my men, you’ve no business with me…And the whole lot of you are no better than thieves and bandits, rampaging round the countryside like this robbing people of their property.’

  His voice was now drowned by shouting, and the women in particular hurled insults at him. But he continued to hold firm, and it was a relief to be able to speak his authoritarian mind so frankly. Since he was ruined whatever happened, he considered it cowardly to engage in useless platitudes. But the numbers were continually growing, there were now nearly five hundred miners advancing towards the door, and he was just about to be set upon when his overman dragged him back.

  ‘For pity’s sake, sir!…There’ll be a wholesale massacre. There’s no point getting men killed for nothing.’

  Deneulin refused to give in, and he flung one last protest at the crowd.

  ‘You’re just a bunch of common criminals. But you’ll see. Just you wait till we’ve got the upper hand again!’

  He was led away: the crowd had surged forward, pressing the people at the front against the stairway and bending the handrail. It was the women pushing from behind, goading the men with their shrill cries. The door, which had no lock and was simply fastened with a latch, gave way immediately. But the stairway was too narrow, and in the crush people would have taken for ever to get in if the rest of the assailants had not decided to seek out other means of entrance. And in they poured, through the changing-room, through the screening-shed, through the boiler-house. In less than five minutes the entire pit was theirs, and they ran about the place on all three floors shouting and gesticulating, completely carried away by this victory over a boss who had tried to stand in their way.

  Maheu, horrified, had rushed off with the first group, calling to Étienne:

  ‘They mustn’t kill him.’

  Étienne was already running, too; but when he realized that Deneulin had barricaded himself in the deputies’ room, he shouted back:

  ‘So what if they do? It would hardly be our fault! The man’s off his head!’

  Nevertheless he was very worried and as yet too self-possessed to yield to such mass violence. Also his pride as a leader had been hurt by the way the mob had escaped his control and were running wild like this rather than coolly carrying out the will of the people in the manner he had expected. He called in vain for calm, shouting that they mustn’t put their enemies in the right by engaging in senseless destruction.

  ‘The boilers!’ La Brûlé was screaming. ‘Let’s put out the fires.’

  Levaque had found an iron-file, which he was brandishing like a dagger, and his terrible cry rang out over the tumult:

  ‘Cut the cables! Cut the cables!’

  Soon everybody was repeating this; only Étienne and Maheu continued to protest, trying desperately to make themselves heard above the racket but quite unable to obtain silence. Finally Étienne managed to say:

  ‘But, comrades, there are men down there!’

  The racket grew even louder, and voices could be heard coming from all directions:

  ‘Too bad! They shouldn’t have gone down in the first place!…Serves the scabs right!…Let them stay there!…Anyway, they’ve always got the ladders!’

  When they remembered the ladders, everyone became even more determined, and Étienne realized that he would have to give way. Fearing an even worse disaster, he rushed towards the engine-house in the hope of at least being able to bring the cages up, so that if the cables were severed above the shaft, they wouldn’t smash the cages to pieces with their enormous weight when they fell on top of them. The mechanic in charge of it had disappeared along with the few other surface workers, and so Étienne grabbed the starting lever and pulled it while Levaque and two other men clambered up the iron framework that supported the pulleys. The cages had scarcely been locked into their keeps before the rasping sound of the file could be heard as it bit through the steel. There was total silence, and the sound seemed to fill the entire pit; everyone looked up in tense anticipation to watch and listen. Standing in the front row Maheu felt a surge of wild joy run through him, as though the blade of the file would deliver them all from evil by eating through the cable: this would be one miserable hole in the ground they would never have to go down again.

  But La Brûlé had disappeared down the steps into the changing-room, still screaming at the top of her voice:

  ‘Let’s put out the fires! To the boilers! To the boilers!’

  Other women followed her. La Maheude hurried to stop them wrecking everything, just as her husband had tried to reason with the comrades. She was the calmest person present: they could demand their rights without destroying people’s property. When she entered the boiler-room, the women were already chasing the two stokers out, and La Brûlé, armed with a large shovel, was squatting in front of one of the boilers and emptying it as fast as she could, throwing the red-hot coal on to the brick floor, where it continued to smoulder. There were ten fire-grates for five boilers. Soon all the women had set to, La Levaque with both hands on her shovel, La Mouquette hoisting her skirts so that she didn’t catch fire, all of them dishevelled and covered in sweat, and all bathed in the blood-red glow coming from the fires of this witches’ sabbath. As the burning embers were piled higher and higher, the fierce heat began to crack the ceiling of the vast room.

  ‘Stop!’ cried La Maheude. ‘The storeroom’s on fire.’

  ‘So much the better!’ answered La Brûlé. ‘That’ll save us the bother…By God, I always said I’d make them pay for my old man’s death!’

  At that moment they heard the high-pitched voice of Jeanlin.

  ‘Watch out! I’ll soon see to those fires! Here goes!’

  Having been one of the first in, he had been darting about in the crowd, delighted by the free-for-all and looking for mischief. That was when he had the idea of opening the steam-cocks and releasing all the steam. Jets escaped like gunshot, and the five boilers blew themselves out like hurricanes, their thunderous hissing loud enough to burst an eardrum. Everything had disappeared in a cloud of steam, the burning coal paled, and the women were like ghosts gesturing wearily through the haze. Only Jeanlin was visible, up in the gallery behind the billowing clouds of white mist, a look of sheer delight on his face, his mouth gaping with joy at having unleashed this tempest.

  All this lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. People had thrown buckets of water on to the heaps of coal, finally putting them out; all danger of the building catching fire had been averted. But the anger of the crowd had not abated, on the contrary it had been whipped to a new frenzy. Men were descending into the mine with hammers in their hands, even the women armed themselves with iron bars; and there was talk of puncturing the boilers and smashing the machines, of demolishing the whole mine.

  When Étienne was told this, he hurried to the scene with Maheu. Even he was in a state of high excitement, carried away by this feverish thirst for revenge. Nevertheless he did what he could to persuade everyone to calm down, now that the cables had been cut and the fires put out and the boilers emptied of steam, making all further work impossible. But still they refused to listen, and he was about to be overridden once again when booing could be heard outside, coming from beside a small, low door which was the entrance to the emergency ladder shaft.

  ‘Down with scabs!…Look at the filthy cowards!…Down with scabs!’

  Those who had been working underground were beginning to emerge. The first ones stood there blinking, blinded by the daylight. Then they walked past, one by one, hoping to reach the road and make a run for it.

  ‘Down with scabs! Down with false friends!’

  The whole crowd of strikers had come running. In less than three minutes there wasn’t a soul left inside, and the five hundred men from Montsou lined up in two rows opposite each other, forcing the Vandame miners who had betrayed them by working to run the gauntlet between them. And as each new miner appeared at the door of the shaft, his c
lothes in tatters and covered in the black mud of his labour, he was met by renewed booing and savage ribaldry. Here, look at him, the short-arse runt! And him! The tarts at the Volcano must have done for his nose. And just look at the wax coming out of that man’s ears! You could light a cathedral with that lot! And that tall one with no bum on him and a face as long as Lent! A putter rolled out of the door, so fat that her breasts, her stomach and her backside all merged into one, and she was met by a storm of laughter. Could they have a feel? Then the jokes turned nasty, cruel even, and fists were about to fly. Meanwhile the rest of the poor devils continued to file past, shivering and silent amid all the insults, throwing anxious sideways glances in case they were about to be hit, and relieved when they were finally able to run away from the pit.

  ‘Just look at them! How many of them are there in there?’ asked Étienne.

  He was surprised to see people still coming out, and it irritated him to think that it wasn’t just a case of a few workers who had been driven to it by hunger or by sheer terror of the deputies. So had they lied to him in the forest? Almost the whole of Jean-Bart had gone down. But he gave an involuntary cry and rushed forward when he caught sight of Chaval standing in the doorway.

  ‘In God’s name, is this what you call meeting up?’

  People started cursing, and some wanted to jump on the traitor. What was going on? He had taken a solemn oath with them the night before, and here he was going down the mine with everyone else! Was this some sort of bloody joke?

  ‘Take him away. Throw him down the pit.’

  Chaval, white with fear, was desperately trying to stammer out an explanation. But Étienne cut him short, beside himself with anger, and quite taken up by the general fury.

  ‘You wanted to join us, and join us you bloody well will…Come on, you bastard. Off we go, left, right, left, right.’