Part 30

Immediately, the hooting began again. It was the women who threw themselves forward, seized with the drunkenness of blood.

--So there is a God after all! Ah! you swine, it's over!

They surrounded the still-warm corpse, they insulted it with laughter, calling his shattered head a filthy mug, shouting into the face of death the long rancor of their breadless lives.

--You owed me sixty francs, there you are paid, thief! said Maheude, enraged among the others. You won't refuse me credit anymore... Wait! Wait! I must fatten you up some more.

With her ten fingers, she scratched at the earth, took two handfuls, and violently stuffed his mouth with them.

--Here! eat then!... Here! eat, eat, you who used to eat us!

The insults redoubled, while the dead man, stretched on his back, looked, motionless, with his great fixed eyes, at the immense sky into which night was falling. This earth, packed into his mouth, was the bread he had refused. And he would eat no other bread now. It had not brought him much luck, to starve the poor folk.

But the women had other vengeances to wring from him. They circled around, sniffing him, like she-wolves. Each sought an outrage, a savagery that might ease her.

The shrill voice of la Brûlé was heard.

--He must be cut like a tomcat!

--Yes, yes! cut the cat! cut the cat!... He's done too much, the bastard!

Already, Mouquette was pulling down his breeches, dragging off his trousers, while Levaque lifted his legs. And la Brûlé, with her dry old woman's hands, spread the naked thighs, seized that dead virility. She held it all, tearing, in an effort that strained her meager spine and cracked her long arms. The soft skin resisted; she had to begin again; she ended by carrying off the shred, a bloody packet of hairy flesh, which she waved with a laugh of triumph:

--I've got it! I've got it!

Shrill voices hailed the abominable trophy with imprecations.

--Ah! you bugger, you won't fill our girls anymore!

--Yes, it's done with paying on the beast, we won't all have to bend over for a loaf again.

--Here! I owe you six francs, will you take a down payment? me, I'm willing, if you still can!

This jest shook them with a terrible gaiety. They showed one another the bloody shred, like an evil beast, from which each had suffered, and which they had just crushed at last, which they saw there, inert, in their power. They spat on it, they thrust out their jaws, repeating, in a furious burst of contempt:

--He can't anymore! he can't anymore!... He's no longer a man to be fucked into the earth... Go rot, good-for-nothing!

Then la Brûlé planted the whole packet on the end of her stick; and, holding it aloft, parading it like a flag, she launched herself onto the road, followed by the howling rout of women. Drops of blood rained down, this lamentable flesh hung, like a scrap of meat on a butcher's stall. Up above, at the window, Madame Maigrat still did not move; but, under the last gleam of the sunset, the blurred defects of the panes deformed her white face, which seemed to laugh. Beaten, betrayed every hour, her shoulders bent from morning to night over a ledger, perhaps she laughed, when the band of women galloped by, with the evil beast, the crushed beast, at the end of the stick.

This frightful mutilation was accomplished in a frozen horror. Neither Étienne, nor Maheu, nor the others, had had time to intervene: they remained motionless, before this gallop of furies. At the door of the Tison tavern, heads appeared, Rasseneur pale with revolt, and Zacharie, and Philomène, stupefied at having seen. The two old men, Bonnemort and Mouque, very grave, shook their heads. Alone, Jeanlin laughed, nudged Bébert, forced Lydie to lift her nose. But the women were already coming back, turning upon themselves, passing under the windows of the Management. And, behind the shutters, those ladies and young ladies stretched out their necks. They had not been able to see the scene, hidden by the wall; they made it out poorly, in the night that had turned black.

--What have they got on the end of that stick? asked Cécile, who had ventured to look.

Lucie and Jeanne declared it must be a rabbit skin.

--No, no, murmured Madame Hennebeau, they must have looted the charcuterie, it looks like a scrap of pork.

At that moment, she started and fell silent. Madame Grégoire had given her a kick with her knee. Both remained gaping. The young ladies, very pale, questioned no further, followed with their great eyes that red vision, in the depths of the darkness.

Étienne again brandished the axe. But the unease did not dissipate; this corpse now blocked the road and protected the shop. Many had drawn back. It was like a satiety that calmed them all. Maheu remained gloomy, when he heard a voice say in his ear to run away. He turned, he recognized Catherine, still in her old man's coat, black, breathless. With a gesture, he pushed her away. He would not listen to her, he threatened to beat her. Then, she made a gesture of despair, she hesitated, then ran toward Étienne.

--Run away, run away, here come the gendarmes!

He too drove her off, insulted her, feeling the blood of the slaps he had received rise again to his cheeks. But she was not discouraged, she forced him to drop the axe, she dragged him by both arms, with an irresistible strength.

--When I tell you the gendarmes are here!... Listen to me, then. It's Chaval who went to fetch them and is bringing them, if you want to know. Me, it disgusted me, I came... Run away, I don't want them to take you.

And Catherine led him off, at the instant when a heavy gallop shook the pavement in the distance. At once, a cry broke out: "The gendarmes! the gendarmes!" It was a rout, a flight so distraught that in two minutes the road was clear, absolutely clean, as if swept by a hurricane. The corpse of Maigrat alone made a patch of shadow on the white earth. Before the Tison tavern, only Rasseneur remained, who, relieved, his face open, applauded the easy victory of the sabers; while, in deserted Montsou, extinguished, in the silence of closed façades, the bourgeois, sweat on their skin, not daring to risk an eye, chattered their teeth. The plain was drowning under the thick night, there was nothing more but the blast furnaces and the coke ovens set afire in the depths of the tragic sky. Heavily, the gallop of the gendarmes approached, they emerged without being distinguished, in a dark mass. And, behind them, entrusted to their guard, the pastry-cook's cart from Marchiennes arrived at last, a light wagon from which a kitchen boy jumped, who began in a tranquil air to unpack the crusts of the vol-au-vents.

Sixth Part

I

The first fortnight of February passed again, a black cold prolonged the hard winter, without pity for the wretched. Once more, the authorities had beaten the roads: the prefect of Lille, a prosecutor, a general. And the gendarmes had not sufficed, troops had come to occupy Montsou, a whole regiment, whose men camped from Beaugnies to Marchiennes. Armed posts guarded the pits, there were soldiers before each engine. The director's hotel, the Company's Yards, even to the houses of certain bourgeois, had bristled with bayonets. Nothing more was heard, along the pavement, but the slow passage of patrols. On the spoil-heap of the Voreux, continually, a sentry remained planted, like a lookout above the flat plain, in the freezing gust that blew up there; and, every two hours, as in enemy country, the cries of the watch rang out.

--Who goes there?... Advance to the rallying word!

Work had resumed nowhere. On the contrary, the strike had worsened: Crèvecoeur, Mirou, Madeleine stopped the extraction, like the Voreux; Feutry-Cantel and the Victoire lost some of their men each morning; at Saint-Thomas, until then unharmed, men were missing. It was now a mute obstinacy, face to face with this display of force, which exasperated the pride of the miners. The coron seemed deserted, in the midst of the beet fields. Not a worker stirred, one barely met one by chance, isolated, with sidelong glance, lowering his head before the red breeches. And, under this great morose peace, in this passive stubbornness, butting against the rifles, there was the lying gentleness, the forced and patient obedience of caged wild beasts, eyes on the tamer, ready to eat his neck if he turned his back. The Company, which this death of work was ruining, spoke of hiring miners from the Borinage, on the Belgian frontier; but it dared not; so that the battle remained there, between the colliers who shut themselves in their homes, and the dead pits, guarded by the troops.

From the day after the terrible day, this peace had come about, suddenly, hiding such a panic that one kept as much silence as possible about the damage and the atrocities. The inquiry opened established that Maigrat had died of his fall, and the frightful mutilation of the corpse remained vague, already surrounded by a legend. For its part, the Company did not confess the damages suffered, no more than the Grégoires cared to compromise their daughter in the scandal of a trial, where she would have to testify. However, some arrests had taken place, hangers-on as always, imbecile and bewildered, knowing nothing. By mistake, Pierron had gone, handcuffs on wrists, as far as Marchiennes, at which the comrades still laughed. Rasseneur, likewise, had nearly been taken away between two gendarmes. The Management contented itself with drawing up dismissal lists, it returned the work-books en masse: Maheu had received his, Levaque also, as well as thirty-four of their comrades, in the single coron of the Two-Hundred-Forty. And all the severity fell upon Étienne, disappeared since the evening of the brawl, and whom they sought, without being able to find his trace. Chaval, in his hatred, had denounced him, refusing to name the others, supplicated by Catherine who wanted to save her parents. The days passed, one felt that nothing was finished, one awaited the end, the chest oppressed by an unease.

At Montsou, thenceforth, the bourgeois started up in a start every night, their ears ringing with an imaginary tocsin, their nostrils haunted by a stench of powder. But what finished by cracking their skulls was a sermon of their new curate, Abbé Ranvier, that thin priest with eyes of red ember, who succeeded Abbé Joire. How far from the smiling discretion of the latter, from his sole care as a fat and gentle man to live in peace with everyone! Did not Abbé Ranvier permit himself to take the defense of the abominable brigands who were dishonoring the region? He found excuses for the scoundrelies of the strikers, he violently attacked the bourgeoisie, upon which he cast all responsibilities. It was the bourgeoisie which, by dispossessing the Church of its ancient liberties to misuse them itself, had made of this world a place accursed with injustice and suffering; it was she who prolonged the misunderstandings, who pushed toward an frightful catastrophe, by her atheism, by her refusal to return to the beliefs, to the fraternal traditions of the first Christians. And he had dared to threaten the rich, he had warned them that, if they persisted further in not listening to the voice of God, surely God would place himself on the side of the poor: he would take back their fortunes from the incredulous enjoyers, he would distribute them to the humble of the earth, for the triumph of his glory. The devout women trembled at it, the notary declared there was worse socialism in it, all saw the priest at the head of a band, brandishing a cross, demolishing the bourgeois society of '89, with great blows.

M. Hennebeau, warned, contented himself with saying, with a shrug of the shoulders:

--If he bores us too much, the bishop will rid us of him.

And, while the panic thus blew from one end to the other of the plain, Étienne lived underground, at the bottom of Réquillart, in Jeanlin's burrow. It was there he hid, no one believed him so near, the tranquil audacity of this refuge, in the mine itself, in this abandoned gallery of the old pit, had baffled the searches. Above, the sloes and hawthorns, grown among the fallen timbers of the headframe, blocked the hole; one no longer risked it, one had to know the maneuver, hang from the roots of the sorb-apple, let oneself fall without fear, to reach the still solid rungs; and other obstacles protected him, the suffocating heat of the shaft, a hundred twenty meters of dangerous descent, then the painful sliding on the belly, a quarter of a league, between the narrowed walls of the gallery, before discovering the rascally cavern, filled with plunder. He lived there in the midst of abundance, he had found juniper, the rest of the dried cod, provisions of all sorts. The great bed of hay was excellent, one did not feel a draft, in this even temperature, of a bath's lukewarmth. Only, the light threatened to fail. Jeanlin, who had made himself his purveyor, with the prudence and discretion of a savage delighted to mock the gendarmes, brought him even pomade, but could not manage to lay hand on a packet of candles.

From the fifth day, Étienne lit up only to eat. The bits did not go down, when he swallowed them in the night. This interminable night, complete, always of the same black, was his great suffering. Though he slept in safety, was provided with bread, was warm, never had night weighed so heavily on his skull. It seemed to him to be like the very crushing of his thoughts. Now, see, he lived by theft! Despite his communist theories, the old scruples of upbringing rose up, he contented himself with dry bread, pared his portion. But how to do otherwise? he had to live, his task was not fulfilled. Another shame overwhelmed him, the remorse of that savage drunkenness, of the juniper drunk in the great cold, empty stomach, which had thrown him upon Chaval, armed with a knife. That stirred in him a whole unknown of terror, the hereditary evil, the long heredity of drunkenness, tolerating no longer a drop of alcohol without falling into homicidal fury. Would he then end as an assassin? When he had found himself safe, in this profound calm of the earth, seized with a satiety of violence, he had slept two days a brutish sleep, stuffed, stunned; and the disgust persisted, he lived battered, mouth bitter, head sick, as after some terrible wedding feast. A week passed; the Maheus, warned, could not send a candle: he had to renounce seeing clearly, even to eat.

Now, for hours, Étienne remained stretched on his hay. Vague ideas worked him, which he did not believe he had. It was a sensation of superiority which set him apart from the comrades, an exaltation of his person, as he instructed himself. Never had he reflected so much, he asked himself why his disgust, the day after the furious run across the pits; and he dared not answer, memories repelled him, the baseness of covetousness, the coarseness of instincts, the smell of all that misery shaken in the wind. Despite the torment of the shadows, he came to dread the hour when he would return to the coron. What nausea, those wretches in a heap, living at the common tub! Not one to talk politics with seriously, a beast's existence, always the same onion-pestered air where one suffocated! He wanted to widen their sky, raise them to the well-being and good manners of the bourgeoisie, by making them masters; but how long that would be! and he no longer felt the courage to await victory, in this jail of hunger. Slowly, his vanity at being their chief, his constant preoccupation of thinking in their place, detached him, breathed into him the soul of one of those bourgeois he execrated.

Jeanlin, one evening, brought a bit of candle, stolen from a teamster's lantern; and it was a great relief for Étienne. When the darkness ended by stupefying him, by weighing on his skull to drive him mad, he lit up an instant; then, as soon as he had chased the nightmare, he extinguished, miserly of this clarity necessary to his life, as much as bread. The silence hummed at his ears, he heard only the flight of a band of rats, the cracking of old timbering, the little noise of a spider spinning its web. And eyes open in this tepid void, he returned to his fixed idea, to what the comrades were doing up there. A defection on his part would have seemed to him the last of cowardices. If he hid thus, it was to remain free, to counsel and act. His long musings had fixed his ambition: waiting for better, he would have liked to be Pluchart, quit work, work only at politics, but alone, in a clean room, under the pretext that labors of the head absorb the entire life and demand much calm.

At the beginning of the second week, the child having told him that the gendarmes believed he had crossed into Belgium, Étienne dared to leave his hole, as soon as night fell. He desired to take stock of the situation, see if one must persist further. He, thought the part lost; before the strike, he doubted the result, he had simply yielded to facts; and, now, after having drunk his fill of rebellion, he returned to that first doubt, despairing of making the Company yield. But he did not yet admit it to himself, an anguish tortured him, when he thought of the miseries of defeat, of all that heavy responsibility of suffering which would weigh upon him. The end of the strike, was it not the end of his role, his ambition on the ground, his existence falling back to the brutishness of the mine and the disgusts of the coron? And, honestly, without base calculations of falsehood, he strove to recover his faith, to prove to himself that resistance remained possible, that capital was going to destroy itself, before the heroic suicide of labor.

It was indeed, in the whole country, a long reverberation of ruins. At night, when he wandered by the black countryside, like a wolf out of its wood, he believed he heard the collapses of bankruptcies, from one end of the plain to the other. He no longer skirted, at the edge of the roads, but closed factories, dead, whose buildings rotted under the pallid sky. The sugar refineries especially had suffered; the Hoton refinery, the Fauvelle refinery, after having reduced the number of their workers, had just crumbled in turn. At the Dutilleul flour mill, the last stone had stopped the second Saturday of the month, and the Bleuze ropewalk for mine cables found itself definitively killed by the unemployment. On the Marchiennes side, the situation worsened each day: all fires extinguished at the Gagebois glassworks, continuous dismissals at the Sonneville construction works, only one of the three blast furnaces of the Forges lit, not a battery of coke ovens burning on the horizon. The strike of the Montsou colliers, born of the industrial crisis which had worsened for two years, had increased it, precipitating the rout. To the causes of suffering, the stoppage of American orders, the clogging of capitals immobilized in an excess of production, was now joined the unforeseen lack of coal, for the few boilers still heating; and, there, was the supreme agony, this bread of machines which the pits no longer supplied. Frightened before the general unease, the Company, by diminishing its extraction and starving its miners, had fatally found itself, from the end of December, without a bit of coal on the floor of its pits. All held together, the scourge blew from afar, one fall drew another, industries tumbled in crushing themselves, in so rapid a series of catastrophes, that the recoil resounded even to the depths of the neighboring cities, Lille, Douai, Valenciennes, where fleeing bankers ruined families.

Often, at a bend in a path, Étienne stopped, in the freezing night, to listen to the debris rain down. He breathed deeply the darkness, a joy of nothingness took him, a hope that day would rise on the extermination of the old world, not a fortune standing, the equalizing level passed like a scythe, at the surface of the ground. But the Company's pits above all interested him, in this massacre. He set off again, blinded by shadow, he visited them one after another, happy when he learned of some new damage. Landslips continued to occur, of growing gravity, as the abandonment of the galleries prolonged. Above the north gallery of Mirou, the settling of the soil gained so much, that the Joiselle road, over a stretch of a hundred meters, had been engulfed, as in the shock of an earthquake; and the Company, without haggling, paid the disappeared fields to the owners, uneasy at the noise raised around these accidents. Crèvecoeur and Madeleine, of very crumbly rock, blocked themselves more and more. They spoke of two overseers buried at the Victoire; a water burst had flooded Feutry-Cantel; it would be necessary to wall a kilometer of gallery at Saint-Thomas, where the timber, ill-maintained, broke on all sides. Thus it was, hour by hour, enormous expenses, breaches opened in the shareholders' dividends, a rapid destruction of the pits, which must end, in the long run, by eating the famous funds of Montsou, centupled in a century.

Then, before these repeated blows, hope was reborn in Étienne, he ended by believing that a third month of resistance would finish the monster, the beast weary and replete, crouched yonder like an idol, in the unknown of its tabernacle. He knew that, following the troubles of Montsou, a lively emotion had seized the Paris newspapers, a whole violent polemic between the semi-official sheets and the opposition sheets, terrifying accounts, which were exploited above all against the International, whose empire took fright, after having encouraged it; and, the Administration not daring any longer to turn a deaf ear, two of the administrators had deigned to come for an inquiry, but with an air of regret, without seeming anxious about the outcome, so disinterested, that three days after they had left again, declaring that things were going as well as possible in the world. Yet, he was assured on the other hand that these gentlemen, during their stay, sat in permanence, deployed a feverish activity, sunk in affairs of which no one around them breathed a word. And he accused them of playing at confidence, he came to treat their departure as an affrighted flight, certain now of triumph, since these terrible men let go of everything.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”