Part 23

M. Hennebeau, who happened to be returning at that hour, mounted on his mare, lent an ear to those faint, lost sounds. He had met couples, a whole slow procession of strollers, on that fine winter evening. More lovers going by, mouth on mouth, to take their pleasure behind the walls. Were these not his usual encounters, girls tumbled into the bottom of every ditch, wretches stuffing themselves with the only joy that cost nothing? And these fools complained of life, when they had, to their full bellies, that unique happiness of loving one another! Gladly would he have starved like them, had he been able to begin existence anew with a woman who would have given herself to him upon the stones, with all her loins and all her heart. His misfortune was without consolation; he envied those miserable ones. His head bowed, he went home, at the slackened pace of his horse, despairing at those long sounds, lost in the depths of the black countryside, and in which he heard nothing but kisses.

VII

It was at the Plan-des-Dames, in that vast clearing which a felling of wood had just opened. It stretched along a gentle slope, enclosed by a tall forest, superb beeches, whose straight and regular trunks surrounded it with a white colonnade, greened with lichens; and felled giants still lay in the grass, while, toward the left, a pile of cut wood aligned its geometrical cube. The cold sharpened with the dusk, the frozen mosses cracked underfoot. It was pitch dark on the ground, the high branches stood out against the pale sky, where the full moon, rising at the horizon, was about to extinguish the stars.

Nearly three thousand miners were at the rendezvous, a swarming crowd, men, women, children, gradually filling the clearing, overflowing far beneath the trees; and latecomers kept arriving, the flood of heads, drowned in shadow, widened to the neighboring thickets. A rumble came from it, like a storm wind, in that immobile and frozen forest.

Above, dominating the slope, Étienne stood with Rasseneur and Maheu. A quarrel had arisen; their voices could be heard in sudden bursts. Near them, men listened: Levaque with clenched fists, Pierron turning his back, very uneasy at not having been able to plead fevers any longer; and there were also old Bonnemort and old Mouque, side by side on a stump, with the air of being deeply reflective. Then, behind, the jokers were there, Zacharie, Mouquet, others still, come to laugh; while, on the contrary, collected and grave as at church, women gathered in a group. La Maheude, mute, nodded her head at the dull oaths of La Levaque. Philomène coughed, her bronchitis returned since winter. Only La Mouquette laughed broadly, amused by the way Mother Brûlé treated her daughter, an unnatural girl who sent her away to stuff herself with rabbit, a sold woman, fattened on her man's cowardices. And, on the woodpile, Jeanlin had planted himself, hoisting Lydie, forcing Bébert to follow him, all three up in the air, higher than everyone.

The quarrel came from Rasseneur, who wanted to proceed regularly with the election of a committee. His defeat at the Bon-Joyeux enraged him; and he had sworn to have his revenge, for he flattered himself he would reconquer his old authority, when face to face, not with the delegates, but with the people of the miners. Étienne, revolted, had found the idea of a committee imbecile, in that forest. They must act revolutionarily, like savages, since they were hunted like wolves.

Seeing the dispute drag on, he suddenly seized hold of the crowd, he climbed onto a tree trunk, crying:

"Comrades! comrades!"

The confused murmur of that people died in a long sigh, while Maheu stifled Rasseneur's protests. Étienne continued in a ringing voice:

"Comrades, since we are forbidden to speak, since they send the gendarmes at us as if we were brigands, it is here we must understand one another! Here, we are free, we are at home, no one will come to silence us, any more than they silence the birds and beasts!"

A thunder answered him, cries, exclamations.

"Yes, yes, the forest is ours, we have the right to talk there... Speak!"

Then Étienne stood motionless a moment on the tree trunk. The moon, still too low at the horizon, lit only the high branches; and the crowd remained drowned in shadows, gradually calmed, silent. He, equally black, made above it, at the top of the slope, a bar of shadow.

He raised an arm in a slow gesture, he began; but his voice no longer rumbled, he had taken the cold tone of a simple mandatary of the people rendering his accounts. At last, he placed the speech the police commissioner had cut short at the Bon-Joyeux; and he opened with a rapid history of the strike, affecting scientific eloquence: facts, nothing but facts. First, he told of his repugnance to the strike: the miners had not wanted it, it was the Management that had provoked them, with its new timbering tariff. Then, he recalled the first step of the delegates at the director's, the bad faith of the Company, and later, at the second step, its belated concession, the ten centimes it gave back, after trying to rob them. Now they were at that point; he established by figures the emptiness of the provident fund, indicated the use of the relief sent, excused in a few phrases the International, Pluchart and the others, for not being able to do more for them, amid the cares of their conquest of the world. Therefore, the situation worsened day by day, the Company was sending back the booklets and threatening to hire workers in Belgium; moreover, it intimidated the weak, it had decided a certain number of miners to go down again. He kept his monotonous voice as if to insist on those bad tidings, he told of victorious hunger, dead hope, the struggle arrived at the last fevers of courage. And, abruptly, he concluded, without raising his tone.

"It is in these circumstances, comrades, that you must take a decision this evening. Do you want the continuation of the strike? and, in that case, what do you count on doing to triumph over the Company?"

A deep silence fell from the starry sky. The crowd, which could not be seen, was silent in the night, under that word which stifled its heart; and nothing was heard but its desperate breath, through the trees.

But Étienne, already, continued in a changed voice. It was no longer the secretary of the association who spoke, it was the bandit chief, the apostle bringing the truth. Would there be cowards to break their word? What! for a month they would have suffered uselessly, they would return to the pits, heads bowed, and the eternal misery would begin again! Was it not better to die at once, trying to destroy that tyranny of capital which starved the worker? Always to submit before hunger, until the moment when hunger, again, threw the calmest into revolt, was it not a stupid game which could not last longer? And he showed the exploited miners, bearing alone the disasters of crises, reduced to eating no more, as soon as the necessities of competition lowered the cost price. No! the timbering tariff was not acceptable, there was only a disguised economy there, they wanted to steal from each man an hour of his labor a day. It was too much this time, the time was coming when the wretches, pushed to the limit, would do justice.

He remained with arms in the air. The crowd, at that word of justice, shaken by a long shiver, burst into applause, which rolled with a noise of dry leaves. Voices cried:

"Justice!... It is time, justice!"

Little by little, Étienne grew warm. He did not have the easy and flowing abundance of Rasseneur. Words often failed him, he had to torture his phrase, he got out of it by an effort which he backed with a shoulder thrust. Only, at those continual jars, he met images of a familiar energy, which seized his audience; while his gestures as a worker at the yard, his elbows drawn in, then extended and launching the fists forward, his jaw abruptly advanced, as if to bite, had also an extraordinary action on the comrades. All said it, he was not tall, but he made himself listened to.

"Wages are a new form of slavery," he resumed in a more vibrant voice. "The mine must belong to the miner, as the sea belongs to the fisher, as the earth belongs to the peasant... Do you hear! the mine belongs to you, to all you who, for a century, have paid for it in so much blood and misery!"

Squarely, he approached obscure questions of law, the procession of special laws on mines, where he lost himself. The subsoil, like the soil, belonged to the nation: only, an odious privilege assured the monopoly of it to Companies; all the more that, for Montsou, the pretended legality of the concessions complicated itself with treaties passed formerly with the owners of the old fiefs, according to the old custom of Hainaut. The people of the miners then had only to reconquer their property; and, hands stretched out, he indicated the whole country, beyond the forest. At this moment, the moon, which rose from the horizon, sliding from the high branches, lit him. When the crowd, still in shadow, saw him thus, white with light, distributing the fortune of his open hands, it applauded anew, with a prolonged beating.

"Yes, yes, he is right, bravo!"

Thenceforth, Étienne rode his favorite question, the attribution of the instruments of labor to the collectivity, as he repeated in a phrase, whose barbarity scratched him deliciously. In him, at that hour, the evolution was complete. Departing from the softened fraternity of catechumens, from the need to reform wages, he arrived at the political idea of suppressing it. Since the meeting of the Bon-Joyeux, his collectivism, still humanitarian and without formula, had stiffened into a complicated program, of which he discussed scientifically each article. First, he posed that liberty could not be obtained but by the destruction of the State. Then, when the people should have seized the government, the reforms would begin: return to the primitive commune, substitution of an equalitarian and free family for the moral and oppressive family, absolute equality, civil, political and economic, guarantee of individual independence thanks to the possession and integral product of the tools of labor, finally professional and gratuitous instruction, paid by the collectivity. That entailed a total recasting of the rotten old society; he attacked marriage, the right of testament, he regulated the fortune of each, he threw down the iniquitous monument of dead centuries, with a great gesture of his arm, always the same, the gesture of the mower who levels the ripe harvest; and he rebuilt afterwards with the other hand, he built the future humanity, the edifice of truth and justice, growing in the dawn of the twentieth century. At that cerebral tension, reason wavered, there remained only the fixed idea of the sectary. The scruples of his sensibility and of his good sense were swept away, nothing became easier than the realization of that new world: he had foreseen all, he spoke of it as of a machine he would mount in two hours, and neither fire nor blood cost him anything.

"Our turn has come," he launched in a last burst. "It is for us to have power and wealth!"

An acclamation rolled to him, from the depth of the forest. The moon, now, whitened all the clearing, cut in sharp ridges the swell of heads, to the confused distances of the thickets, between the great grayish trunks. And it was under the glacial air, a fury of faces, shining eyes, open mouths, a whole rut of people, men, women, children, famished and loosed upon the just pillage of the ancient good of which they were dispossessed. They no longer felt the cold, those ardent words had heated them to the bowels. A religious exaltation lifted them from the ground, the fever of hope of the first Christians of the Church, awaiting the soon reign of justice. Many obscure phrases had escaped them, they scarcely heard those technical and abstract reasonings; but the obscurity itself, the abstraction still enlarged the field of promises, carried them away in a dazzlement. What a dream! to be the masters, to cease suffering, to enjoy at last!

"That's it, goddamn! our turn!... Death to the exploiters!"

The women raved, La Maheude out of her calm, taken by the vertigo of hunger, La Levaque howling, old Brûlé beside herself, agitating sorceress arms, and Philomène shaken by a fit of coughing, and La Mouquette so inflamed, that she cried tender words at the orator. Among the men, Maheu conquered had had a cry of anger, between trembling Pierron and Levaque who talked too much; while the jokers, Zacharie and Mouquet, tried to snicker, ill at ease, astonished the comrade could say so long without drinking a drop. But, on the woodpile, Jeanlin still led the most noise, exciting Bébert and Lydie, shaking the basket where Pologne lay.

The clamor recommenced. Étienne tasted the drunkenness of his popularity. It was his power that he held, as materialized, in those three thousand breasts whose hearts he made beat with a word. Souvarine, had he deigned to come, would have applauded his ideas as he recognized them, content with the anarchic progress of his pupil, satisfied with the program, save the article on instruction, a remainder of sentimental silliness, for the holy and salutary ignorance must be the bath where men would retemper themselves. As for Rasseneur, he shrugged his shoulders with disdain and anger.

"You will let me speak!" he cried at Étienne.

The latter jumped from the tree trunk.

"Speak, we shall see if they listen to you."

Already Rasseneur had replaced him and demanded silence with a gesture. The noise did not calm, his name circulated, from the first rows who had recognized him, to the last lost under the beeches; and they refused to hear him, it was an overturned idol, whose very sight angered his old faithful. His easy elocution, his flowing and good-natured word, which had so long charmed, was treated at that hour as tepid tisane, made to put cowards to sleep. Vainly, he spoke in the noise, he wanted to resume the speech of appeasement that he carried about, the impossibility of changing the world by blows of laws, the necessity of leaving social evolution the time to accomplish itself: they mocked him, they hushed him, his defeat of the Bon-Joyeux worsened still and became irremediable. They ended by throwing handfuls of frozen moss at him, a woman cried in a shrill voice:

"Down with the traitor!"

He explained that the mine could not be the property of the miner, as the trade is that of the weaver, and he said he preferred profit-sharing, the interested worker, become the child of the house.

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

Then, he paled, a despair filled his eyes with tears. It was the collapse of his existence, twenty years of ambitious comradeship which crumbled under the ingratitude of the crowd. He descended from the tree trunk, struck to the heart, without strength to continue.

"That makes you laugh," he stammered, addressing triumphant Étienne. "That's good, I wish it happens to you... It will happen to you, do you hear!"

And, as to reject all responsibility in the misfortunes he foresaw, he made a great gesture, he went away alone, across the mute and white countryside.

Hootings arose, and they were surprised to perceive, standing on the trunk, old Bonnemort speaking amid the uproar. Until then, Mouque and he had kept absorbed, in that air they had of always reflecting on ancient things. Doubtless he yielded to one of those sudden crises of loquacity, which, sometimes, stirred the past in him so violently, that memories rose and flowed from his lips, for hours. A great silence had fallen, they listened to that old man, of a specter pallor under the moon; and, as he told things without immediate link with the discussion, long stories that no one could understand, the stupefaction increased. It was of his youth he spoke, he told the death of his two uncles crushed at the Voreux, then he passed to the chest flux which had carried off his wife. Yet, he did not let go his idea: it had never gone well, and it would never go well. Thus, in the forest, they had gathered five hundred, because the king would not diminish the hours of work; but he stopped short, he began the account of another strike: he had seen so many! All ended under those trees, here at the Plan-des-Dames, there at the Charbonnerie, farther yet toward the Saut-du-Loup. Sometimes it froze, sometimes it was warm. One evening, it had rained so hard, that they had gone home without being able to say anything. And the king's soldiers arrived, and it ended with gunshots.

"We raised the hand like that, we swore not to go down again... Ah! I swore, yes! I swore!"

The crowd listened, gaping, taken with unease, when Étienne, who followed the scene, jumped onto the felled tree and kept the old man at his side. He had just recognized Chaval among the friends, in the front row. The idea that Catherine must be there had lifted him with a new flame, with a need to have himself acclaimed before her.

"Comrades, you have heard, here is one of our elders, here is what he has suffered and what our children will suffer, if we do not finish with the thieves and the executioners."

He was terrible, never had he spoken so violently. With one arm, he held old Bonnemort, he displayed him like a flag of misery and mourning, crying vengeance. In rapid phrases, he went back to the first Maheu, he showed all that family worn by the mine, eaten by the Company, more famished after a hundred years of work; and, before her, he then put the bellies of the Company, which sweated money, all the band of shareholders maintained like girls for a century, doing nothing, enjoying their bodies. Was it not frightful? a people of men dying at the bottom from father to son, so that one might pay bribes to ministers, so that generations of great lords and bourgeois might give feasts or fatten at the corner of their fire! He had studied the diseases of miners, he made them all defile, with frightful details: anemia, scrofula, black bronchitis, asthma which suffocates, rheumatisms which paralyze. Those miserable ones, they threw them to the machines as prey, they penned them like cattle in the coron, the great Companies absorbed them little by little, regulating slavery, threatening to regiment all the workers of a nation, millions of arms, for the fortune of a thousand idlers. But the miner was no longer the ignorant one, the brute crushed in the bowels of the soil. An army pushed from the depths of the pits, a harvest of citizens whose seed germinated and would burst the earth, a day of great sun. And one would then know if, after forty years of service, one would dare offer a hundred and fifty francs of pension to an old man of sixty, spitting coal, legs swollen by the water of the workings. Yes! labor would demand accounts of capital, of that impersonal god, unknown to the worker, crouched somewhere, in the mystery of its tabernacle, whence it sucked the life of the starvelings who fed it! One would go there, one would end by seeing its face in the light of the fires, one would drown it in blood, that filthy hog, that monstrous idol, gorged with human flesh!

He was silent, but his arm, always stretched in the void, designated the enemy, there, he knew not where, from one end to the other of the earth. This time, the clamor of the crowd was so high, that the bourgeois of Montsou heard it and looked toward Vandame, seized with unease at the idea of some tremendous caving-in. Night birds rose above the woods, in the great clear sky.

He, immediately, wanted to conclude:

"Comrades, what is your decision?... Do you vote the continuation of the strike?"

"Yes! yes!" howled the voices.

"And what measures do you adopt?... Our defeat is certain, if cowards go down tomorrow."

The voices took up again, with their storm breath:

"Death to the cowards!"

"You decide then to recall them to duty, to the sworn faith... Here is what we could do: present ourselves at the pits, bring back the traitors by our presence, show the Company that we are all agreed and that we will die rather than yield."

"That's it, to the pits! to the pits!"

Since he had spoken, Étienne had sought Catherine, among the pale heads, growling before him. She was decidedly not there. But he still saw Chaval, who affected to snicker while shrugging his shoulders, devoured with jealousy, ready to sell himself for a little of that popularity.

"And, if there are spies among us, comrades," continued Étienne, "let them beware, they are known... Yes, I see miners from Vandame, who have not left their pit..."

"Is it for me you say that?" asked Chaval with a bravado air.

"For you or for another... But, since you speak, you should understand that those who eat have nothing to do with those who are hungry. You work at Jean-Bart..."

A jeering voice interrupted:

"Oh! he works... He has a woman who works for him."

Chaval swore, blood in his face.

"Goddamn! it is forbidden to work, then?"

"Yes!" cried Étienne, "when the comrades endure misery for the good of all, it is forbidden to put oneself in egoist and stool-pigeon on the side of the bosses. If the strike were general, long ago we would be the masters... Was a single man of Vandame to go down, when Montsou stopped? The great blow, it would be that work stopped in the whole country, at monsieur Deneulin's as here. Do you hear? There are only traitors at the workings of Jean-Bart, you are all traitors!"

Around Chaval, the crowd became threatening, fists rose, cries: To death! to death! began to rumble. He had blanched. But, in his rage to triumph over Étienne, an idea straightened him.

"Listen to me then! Come tomorrow to Jean-Bart, and you will see if I work!... We are yours, I was sent to tell you that. Must put out the fires, must that the engine-men, they too, go on strike. So much the better if the pumps stop! the water will burst the pits, all will be done for!"

They applauded him furiously in his turn, and thenceforth Étienne himself was overflowed. Orators succeeded one another on the tree trunk, gesticulating in the noise, launching ferocious propositions. It was the fit of madness of faith, the impatience of a religious sect, which, weary of hoping for the awaited miracle, decided to provoke it at last. The heads, emptied by famine, saw red, dreamed of fire and blood, amid a glory of apotheosis, where rose universal happiness. And the tranquil moon bathed that swell, the deep forest girdled with its great silence that cry of massacre. Only, the frozen mosses cracked under the heels; while the beeches, standing in their strength, with the delicate branchings of their boughs, black on the white sky, perceived nor heard the miserable beings, who agitated at their foot.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”