Part 35

From above, Négrel and Dansaert were shouting to the captain to come in, to lock himself in with them. He refused; he felt that these buildings, with their lockless doors, were going to be stormed, and that there he would suffer the shame of being disarmed. Already his small troop was growling with impatience; one could not flee before those wretches in wooden shoes. The sixty, driven back against the wall, rifles loaded, once more faced the band.

There was at first a recoil, a deep silence. The strikers remained in astonishment at this show of force. Then a cry rose, demanding the prisoners, claiming their immediate release. Voices said they were being slaughtered in there. And, without having agreed among themselves, swept along by the same impulse, the same need for revenge, all ran to the neighboring piles of bricks, to those bricks whose marly soil supplied the clay, and which were baked on the spot. The children hauled them one by one; the women filled their skirts with them. Soon everyone had ammunition at his feet, and the battle with stones began.

It was La Brûlé who planted herself first. She broke the bricks on the thin edge of her knee, and with her right hand and with her left she let fly the two pieces. La Levaque was dislocating her shoulders, so big, so flabby, that she had to come close to hit true, despite the supplications of Bouteloup, who was pulling her back, hoping to take her away now that her husband was in jail. All were working themselves up; Mouquette, bored with drawing blood, breaking the bricks on her too fat thighs, preferred to throw them whole. Even the boys came into line; Bébert was showing Lydie how you sent them, under the elbow. It was a hailstorm, enormous hailstones, whose dull clatter was heard. And suddenly, amid these furies, Catherine was seen, fists in the air, brandishing also halves of brick, throwing them with all the strength of her small arms. She could not have said why; she was suffocating, she was bursting with a desire to massacre the world. Would this cursed existence of misery never soon be over? She had had enough of being slapped and driven off by her man, of floundering like a lost dog in the mud of the roads, without even being able to ask her father for a soup, he who was swallowing his tongue like herself. Never did things go better; on the contrary they worsened since she had known herself; and she broke bricks, and threw them before her, with the single idea of sweeping everything away, her eyes so blinded with blood that she did not even see whose jaws she was crushing.

Étienne, who had stayed before the soldiers, nearly had his skull split. His ear was swelling; he turned, he started on understanding that the brick had come from the feverish fists of Catherine; and, at the risk of being killed, he did not go away, he was looking at her. Many others likewise forgot themselves there, carried away by the battle, hands hanging. Mouquet was judging the blows, as if he had been assisting at a game of skittles: oh! that one, well struck! and that other, no luck! He was laughing, he was nudging Zacharie with his elbow, who was quarreling with Philomène, because he had slapped Achille and Désirée, refusing to take them on his back so they could see. There were spectators, massed far off along the road. And, at the top of the slope, at the entrance of the coron, old Bonnemort had just appeared, dragging himself on a cane, motionless now, upright against the rust-colored sky.

At the first bricks thrown, the deputy Richomme had planted himself again between the soldiers and the miners. He was begging the ones, exhorting the others, heedless of danger, so desperate that big tears ran from his eyes. His words were not heard amid the uproar; only his big gray mustache was seen to tremble.

But the hail of bricks grew thicker; the men were joining in, following the women's example.

Then La Maheude noticed that Maheu remained behind. His hands were empty, his look gloomy.

—What's the matter with you, eh? she cried. Are you a coward? are you going to let your comrades be taken to prison?... Ah! if I didn't have this child, you'd see!

Estelle, who had clung to her neck howling, kept her from joining La Brûlé and the others. And, as her man did not seem to hear, she pushed bricks with her foot against his legs.

—God damn! will you take that! Must I spit in your face before everybody, to put some heart into you?

Turning very red again, he broke bricks, he threw them. She was lashing him, stunning him, barking death-words behind him, stifling her daughter on her throat, in her clutched arms; and he kept advancing, he found himself face to face with the rifles.

Under this storm of stones, the small troop was disappearing. Fortunately they were throwing too high; the wall was riddled with it. What was to be done? The idea of going in, of turning his back, flushed for an instant the pale face of the captain; but it was no longer even possible; they would be cut to pieces at the slightest movement. A brick had just broken the visor of his kepi; drops of blood ran from his forehead. Several of his men were wounded; and he felt them beside themselves, in that unbridled instinct of self-defense where one ceases to obey chiefs. The sergeant had let loose a God's name! his left shoulder half dislocated, the flesh bruised by a dull shock, like a bat-stroke on linen. Grazed twice, the recruit had a crushed thumb, while a burn itched him at the right knee: were they going to let themselves be fooled much longer? A stone having ricocheted and struck the old seasoned soldier under the belly, his cheeks turned green, his weapon trembled, lengthened, at the end of his thin arms. Three times the captain was on the point of ordering fire. An anguish was strangling him; an interminable struggle of some seconds clashed within him ideas, duties, all his beliefs as a man and a soldier. The rain of bricks redoubled, and he opened his mouth, he was about to cry: Fire! when the rifles went off of themselves, three shots first, then five, then a platoon roll, then a single shot, long after, in the great silence.

It was a stupor. They had fired; the gaping crowd remained motionless, not yet believing it. But piercing cries arose, while the bugle sounded the cease-fire. And there was a mad panic, a gallop of shot cattle, a wild flight in the mud.

Bébert and Lydie had collapsed one upon the other at the first three shots, the little girl struck in the face, the little boy pierced below the left shoulder. She, thunderstruck, no longer moved. But he, was stirring, seizing her in full arms, in the convulsions of agony, as if he would take her again, as he had taken her, in the depths of the black hiding-place where they had passed their last night. And Jeanlin, just then, who was finally running up from Réquillart, puffed with sleep, gamboling amid the smoke, watched him clasp his little wife, and die.

The five other shots had brought down La Brûlé and the deputy Richomme. Hit in the back, at the moment he was begging the comrades, he had fallen on his knees; and, slipped on one hip, he was rattling on the ground, his eyes full of the tears he had wept. The old woman, her throat open, had fallen stiff and crackling like a fagot of dry wood, stammering a last oath in the gurgle of blood.

But then the platoon fire swept the ground, mowing down at a hundred paces the groups of curious onlookers who were laughing at the battle. A bullet entered Mouquet's mouth, overturned him, smashed, at the feet of Zacharie and Philomène, whose two brats were covered with red drops. At the same instant Mouquette received two balls in the belly. She had seen the soldiers shoulder; she had thrown herself, with an instinctive movement of a good girl, in front of Catherine, crying to her to take care; and she gave a great cry, she sprawled on her back, overturned by the shock. Étienne ran up, wanted to raise her, carry her off; but, with a gesture, she said she was done for. Then she hiccoughed, without ceasing to smile at the one and the other, as if she were happy to see them together, now that she was going.

All seemed ended; the hurricane of bullets had lost itself very far, even into the façades of the coron, when the last shot went off, isolated, belated.

Maheu, struck full in the heart, wheeled on himself and fell face in a pool of water, black with coal.

Stupid, La Maheude bent down.

—Eh! old man, get up. It's nothing, eh?

Her hands being hindered by Estelle, she had to put her under one arm, to turn back her man's head.

—Speak, then! where does it hurt?

He had empty eyes, a mouth foaming with bloody froth. She understood, he was dead. Then she stayed seated in the muck, her daughter under her arm like a bundle, looking at her old man with a dazed air.

The pit was free. With his nervous gesture, the captain had taken off, then put back on, his kepi cut by a stone; and he kept his pale stiffness before the disaster of his life; while his men, with mute faces, were reloading their weapons. The frightened faces of Négrel and Dansaert were seen at the window of the receiving-house. Souvarine was behind them, his brow barred with a great wrinkle, as if the nail of his fixed idea had printed itself there, threatening. On the other side of the horizon, at the edge of the plateau, Bonnemort had not moved, propped with one hand on his cane, the other hand at his eyebrows to see better, below, the slaughter of his own. The wounded were howling, the dead were cooling in broken postures, muddy with the liquid mud of the thaw, here and there embedded among the ink-spots of coal, which reappeared under the soiled shreds of snow. And, amid these corpses of men, very small, poor-looking with their leanness of misery, lay the corpse of Trompette, a heap of dead flesh, monstrous and lamentable.

Étienne had not been killed. He was still waiting, near Catherine fallen from fatigue and anguish, when a vibrant voice made him start. It was Abbé Ranvier, who was coming back from saying his mass, and who, both arms in the air, in a fury of a prophet, was calling down upon the assassins the anger of God. He announced the era of justice, the near extermination of the bourgeoisie by the fire of heaven, since it was crowning its crimes by having the workers and the disinherited of this world massacred.

Seventh Part

I

The shots of Montsou had resounded even to Paris, in a formidable echo. For four days, all the opposition journals had been indignant, were spreading on their front pages atrocious accounts: twenty-five wounded, fourteen dead, of whom two children and three women; and there were still the prisoners; Levaque had become a sort of hero, they attributed to him a reply to the examining magistrate, of an antique grandeur. The Empire, hit full in the flesh by those few balls, affected the calm of omnipotence, without itself realizing the gravity of its wound. It was simply a regrettable collision, something lost, down there, in the black country, very far from the Parisian pavement which made opinion. They would soon forget; the Company had received the unofficial order to stifle the affair and to finish with this strike, whose irritating length was turning into a social peril.

Also, on Wednesday morning, three of the managers were seen to land at Montsou. The little town, which had not till then dared rejoice at the massacre, its heart sick, breathed and tasted the joy of being at last saved. Just then, the weather had turned fine, a clear sun, one of those first suns of February whose mildness greens the tips of the lilacs. All the shutters of the Manager's office had been lowered, the vast building seemed to come to life again; and the best rumors came out of it; they said these gentlemen were very affected by the catastrophe, had hurried up to open paternal arms to the strayed ones of the corons. Now that the blow had fallen, stronger doubtless than they would have wished, they were prodigal in their work of saviors, they were decreeing late and excellent measures. First, they dismissed the Borains, making a great fuss over this extreme concession to their workers. Then, they caused the military occupation of the pits to cease, which the crushed strikers no longer threatened. It was they again who obtained silence, regarding the sentry of the Voreux who had disappeared: the country had been searched without finding either the rifle or the corpse; they decided to report the soldier as a deserter, although there was suspicion of a crime. In all things, they thus strove to attenuate the events, trembling with fear of the morrow, judging it dangerous to avow the irresistible savagery of a crowd, let loose through the decrepit frames of the old world. And, besides, this work of conciliation did not prevent them from carrying through the purely administrative business; for Deneulin had been seen returning to the Manager's office, where he met M. Hennebeau. The negotiations continued for the purchase of Vandame; it was asserted he was about to accept these gentlemen's offers.

But what particularly stirred the country were great yellow posters which the managers had pasted abundantly on the walls. One read there these few lines, in very large characters: "Workers of Montsou, we do not wish that the wanderings whose sad effects you have seen these last days should deprive of their means of existence the sensible and well-disposed workers. We shall therefore reopen all the pits Monday morning, and when work is resumed, we shall examine with care and benevolence the situations which it might be fitting to improve. We shall finally do all that shall be just and possible to do." In a single morning, the ten thousand colliers filed past these posters. Not one spoke; many shook their heads; others went off with their dragging step, without a fold of their immobile face having moved.

Till then, the coron of the Two Hundred and Forty had persisted in its fierce resistance. It seemed that the blood of the comrades which had reddened the mud of the pit barred the way to the others. Scarcely a dozen had gone down again, Pierron and cowards of his sort, whom they watched go and come back with a gloomy air, without a gesture or a threat. Also a mute distrust greeted the poster, pasted on the church. They did not speak of the booklets returned in there: was the Company refusing to take them back? and the fear of reprisals, the fraternal idea of protesting against the dismissal of the most compromised, made them all still obstinate. It was shady; they must see; they would go back to the pit when these gentlemen would deign to explain themselves frankly. A silence crushed the low houses; hunger itself was no longer anything; all could die, since violent death had passed over the roofs.

But one house among the others, that of the Maheus, remained especially black and mute, in the overwhelm of its mourning. Since she had accompanied her man to the cemetery, La Maheude had not unclenched her teeth. After the battle, she had let Étienne lead Catherine home, muddy, half dead; and, as she was undressing her before the young man, to put her to bed, she had fancied for an instant that her daughter, she too, was coming back to her with a ball in the belly, for the shirt had large blood-stains. But she soon understood; it was the flood of puberty which was at last bursting, in the shock of that abominable day. Ah! another chance, that wound! a fine gift, to be able to have children, whom the gendarmes would afterwards slaughter! And she did not address a word to Catherine, no more indeed than she spoke to Étienne. The latter slept with Jeanlin, at the risk of being arrested, seized with such repugnance at the idea of going back into the darkness of Réquillart, that he preferred prison: a shiver shook him, the horror of night after all those deaths, the unavowed fear of the little soldier who was sleeping there, below the rocks. Besides, he dreamed of prison as of a refuge, amid the torment of his defeat; but they did not even trouble him; he dragged along miserable hours, not knowing with what to fatigue his body. Sometimes only, La Maheude looked at them both, him and her daughter, with an air of rancor, seeming to ask them what they were doing at her house.

Again they all snored in a heap; old Bonnemort occupied the former bed of the two brats, who slept with Catherine, now that poor Alzire no longer dug her hump into her big sister's ribs. It was on going to bed that the mother felt the emptiness of the house, in the cold of her bed become too wide. Vainly she took Estelle to fill the gap; that did not replace her man; and she wept without sound for hours. Then, the days began again to flow as before: still no bread, without however the luck of dying once for all; things picked up here and there, which rendered the wretches the ill service of making them last. Nothing was changed in existence; there was only her man the less.

On the afternoon of the fifth day, Étienne, whom the sight of this silent woman was driving to despair, left the room and walked slowly, along the paved street of the coron. The inaction, which weighed on him, drove him to continual walks, arms hanging, head low, tortured by the same thought. He was thus tramping for half an hour, when he felt, at a redoubling of his unease, that the comrades were placing themselves on the doors to see him. The little that remained of his popularity had gone off in the wind of the fusillade; he no longer passed without meeting glances whose flame followed him. When he raised his head, threatening men were there, women were parting the little window-curtains; and, under the still mute accusation, under the contained anger of those great eyes, widened by hunger and tears, he became awkward, he no longer knew how to walk. Always, behind him, the mute reproach increased. Such a fear seized him of hearing the whole coron come out to cry his misery at him, that he went in again, shivering.

But, at the Maheus', the scene awaiting him completed his upset. Old Bonnemort was near the cold hearth, nailed to his chair, since two neighbors, on the day of the slaughter, had found him on the ground, his cane in pieces, brought down like an old lightning-struck tree. And, while Lénore and Henri, to amuse their hunger, were scraping with a deafening noise an old saucepan, where cabbages had boiled the day before, La Maheude, upright, after setting Estelle on the table, was threatening Catherine with her fist.

—Repeat it a bit, God damn! repeat what you just said!

Catherine had said her intention of going back to the Voreux. The idea of not earning her bread, of being thus tolerated at her mother's, like a cumbersome and useless beast, was becoming each day more intolerable to her; and, but for the fear of receiving some bad blow from Chaval, she would have gone down again on Tuesday. She resumed stammering:

—What do you want? we can't live doing nothing. We'd have bread at least.

La Maheude interrupted her.

—Listen, the first of you who works, I'll strangle... Ah! no, that would be too much, to kill the father and then go on exploiting the children! Enough of that, I'd rather see you all carried off between four planks, like the one who's already gone.

And, furiously, her long silence burst in a flood of words. A fine help, what Catherine would bring her! scarcely thirty sous, to which one might add twenty sous, if the bosses would kindly find a job for that bandit Jeanlin. Fifty sous, and seven mouths to feed! The brats were only good for swallowing soup. As for the grandfather, he must have broken something in his brain, on falling, for he seemed imbecile; unless his blood was turned, from having seen the soldiers fire on the comrades.

—Isn't that so, old man, they've finished demolishing you. You may have a still solid grip, you're done for.

Bonnemort looked at her with his extinguished eyes, without understanding. He stayed for hours with fixed gaze; he had only the intelligence to spit into a plate filled with ashes, which they put beside him, for cleanliness.

—And they haven't settled his pension, she went on, and I'm certain they'll refuse it, because of our ideas... No! I tell you that's too much, with those folk of misfortune!

—And yet, ventured Catherine, they promise on the poster...

—Will you leave me in peace, with your poster!... More birdlime to catch us and eat us. They can play the kind ones, now that they've holed our skin.

—But then, mamma, where shall we go? They won't keep us at the coron, sure.

La Maheude made a vague and terrible gesture. Where they would go? she did not know, she avoided thinking of it, it drove her mad. They would go elsewhere, somewhere. And, as the noise of the saucepan became unbearable, she fell upon Lénore and Henri, slapped them. A fall of Estelle, who had crawled on all fours, increased the uproar. The mother calmed her with a shove: a fine thing if she had killed herself at a stroke! She spoke of Alzire, she wished the others the luck of that one. Then, abruptly, she burst into great sobs, her head against the wall.

Étienne, standing, had not dared intervene. He no longer counted in the house; the children themselves drew back from him, with distrust. But the tears of that unhappy woman were turning his heart over; he murmured:

—Come, come, courage! we'll try to pull through.

She did not seem to hear him; she was complaining now, with a low and continuous plaint.

—Ah! misery, is it possible? It was still going, before those horrors. We ate our dry bread, but we were all together... And what has happened then, my God! what have we done, that we should be in such grief, some under the earth, the others with no longer but the wish to be there?... It's true enough they harnessed us like horses to the work, and it was hardly just, in the sharing, to catch the stick-blows, to round ever the fortune of the rich, without ever hoping to taste the good things. The pleasure of living goes, when hope has gone. Yes, it couldn't last longer, we had to breathe a bit... If only one had known! Is it possible, to have made oneself so unhappy in wanting justice!

Sighs swelled her throat, her voice was strangling in an immense sadness.

—Then, cunning ones are always there, to promise you it can be arranged, if one only takes the trouble... One gets one's head up, one suffers so much from what exists, that one asks for what does not exist. I was already dreaming like a beast, I saw a life of good friendship with everybody, I had gone up in the air, my word! into the clouds. And one breaks one's back, falling back into the muck... It wasn't true, there was nothing yonder of the things one fancied seeing. What there was, was still misery, ah! misery as much as you want, and rifle-shots besides!

Étienne listened to this lamentation whose every tear gave him a remorse. He knew not what to say to calm La Maheude, all broken by her terrible fall, from the height of the ideal. She had come back to the middle of the room, she was looking at him, now; and, thou-ing him, in a last cry of rage:

“Stories of the world, in your language.”