Part 42

Pierron had appeared, with the open-flame lamp of the deputy overseers, fixed in the leather of his cap. For a week now he had been a crew chief at the pithead, and the workers made way for him, for the honors had made him proud. The sight of Étienne annoyed him, yet he came nearer, and finally reassured himself when the young man announced his departure. They talked. His wife now kept the Progress tavern, thanks to the backing of all those gentlemen, who showed themselves so kind to her. But, breaking off, he flew into a rage against old Mouque, whom he accused of not having brought up his horses' manure at the regulation hour. The old man listened, his shoulders bowed. Then, before going down, suffocated by the rebuke, he too gave Étienne a handshake, the same as the others', long, warm with swallowed anger, trembling with future rebellions. And that old hand which trembled in his, that old man who forgave him his dead children, moved him so deeply that he watched him disappear without saying a word.

"Isn't La Maheude coming this morning?" he asked Pierron after a moment.

At first the latter affected not to have understood, for bad luck sometimes took hold merely from speaking of it. Then, as he moved away under pretext of giving an order, he said at last:

"Eh? La Maheude... Here she is."

Indeed, La Maheude was arriving from the shanty, with her lamp, dressed in trousers and jacket, her head bound in the kerchief. It was by a charitable exception that the Company, pitying the fate of this unhappy woman, so cruelly stricken, had consented to let her go down again at the age of forty; and, as it seemed difficult to put her back on haulage, she was employed working a small ventilator that had just been installed in the north gallery, in those hellish regions beneath the Tartaret where the air did not circulate. For ten hours, her back broken, she turned her wheel at the end of a burning passage, her flesh cooked by forty degrees of heat. She earned thirty sous.

When Étienne caught sight of her, lamentable in her men's clothes, her chest and belly still seeming swollen from the damp of the workings, he stammered in astonishment, unable to find the words to explain that he was leaving and had wished to bid her farewell.

She looked at him without listening, and finally said, using the familiar form:

"Eh? surprised to see me... It's true enough I threatened to strangle the first of my own who went down again; and here I am going down, I ought to strangle myself, oughtn't I?... Ah! yes, it would be done already, if there weren't the old man and the little ones at home!"

And she went on, in her low, tired voice. She did not excuse herself; she simply told how things were, that they had nearly starved, and that she had decided, so they would not be turned out of the settlement.

"How is the old man?" asked Étienne.

"He's still very gentle and very clean. But his head's gone completely... They didn't convict him for what he did, you know? There was talk of putting him with the madmen, I wouldn't have it, they'd have bundled him off in a trice... His story did us a lot of harm all the same, for he'll never get his pension; one of those gentlemen told me it would be immoral to give him one."

"Is Jeanlin working?"

"Yes, those gentlemen found him a job, by the day. He earns twenty sous... Oh! I'm not complaining, the bosses have been very good, as they explained to me themselves... The lad's twenty sous and my thirty make fifty sous. If there weren't six of us, we'd have enough to eat. Estelle eats like a wolf now, and the worst is we'll have to wait four or five years before Lénore and Henri are old enough to come to the pit."

Étienne could not repress a gesture of pain.

"They too!"

A flush had risen to La Maheude's pale cheeks, while her eyes kindled. But her shoulders sank, as beneath the crushing weight of destiny.

"What would you have? them after the others... They've all left their skins there, it's their turn."

She fell silent; some trammers rolling tubs disturbed them. Through the large dusty windows the early light entered, drowning the lanterns in a gray glimmer; and the motion of the engine resumed every three minutes, the cables unwound, the cages went on swallowing men.

"Come on, you idlers, hurry up!" cried Pierron. "Get aboard, we'll never finish today."

La Maheude, whom he was looking at, did not move. She had already let three cages pass; she spoke as if waking and remembering Étienne's first words:

"So, you're leaving?"

"Yes, this morning."

"You're right, better to be elsewhere when you can... And it pleases me to have seen you, because you'll at least know I bear you no ill will. For a while I'd have knocked you dead, after all that killing. But you think it over, don't you? you see in the end it's nobody's fault... No, no, it's not your fault, it's everybody's fault."

Now she spoke calmly of her dead, of her man, of Zacharie, of Catherine; and tears appeared in her eyes only when she pronounced Alzire's name. She had returned to her calm of a sensible woman, judging things very wisely. It would bring the bourgeois no luck, to have killed so many poor folk. Sure enough they would be punished one day, for everything is paid for. There wouldn't even be need to meddle, the shop would blow up of itself, the soldiers would fire on the masters as they had fired on the workers. And, in her age-old resignation, in that heredity of discipline which bowed her anew, a work had thus been done, the certainty that injustice could not last longer, and that, if there were no more good God, another would grow again, to avenge the wretched.

She spoke low, with mistrustful glances. Then, as Pierron drew near, she added aloud:

"Well! if you're leaving, you must fetch your things from our place... There are still two shirts, three handkerchiefs, an old pair of trousers."

Étienne gestured refusal of these few rags, escaped from the ragpickers.

"No, it's not worth the trouble, they'll be for the children... In Paris I'll manage."

Two more cages had gone down, and Pierron decided to address La Maheude directly.

"I say, over there, they're waiting for you! Is this little chat going to end soon?"

But she turned her back. What business had that sellout to be zealous? The descent was no concern of his. His men already hated him enough at his pithead. And she persisted, her lamp in her fingers, chilled in the drafts, despite the mildness of the season.

Neither Étienne nor she could find another word. They remained face to face, their hearts so full they would have liked to say something more.

At last she spoke just to speak.

"La Levaque is expecting, Levaque's still in prison, it's Bouteloup who's replacing him, for now."

"Ah! yes, Bouteloup."

"And, listen, did I tell you?... Philomène's gone."

"How, gone?"

"Yes, gone off with a miner from the Pas-de-Calais. I was afraid she'd leave me the two brats. But no, she took them along... Eh? a woman who spits blood and always looks like she's swallowing her tongue!"

She dreamed a moment, then went on in a slow voice:

"What talk there's been about me!... You remember, they said I was sleeping with you. Good Lord! after my man's death, it could very well have happened, if I'd been younger, couldn't it? But today I'm glad it didn't, for we'd surely have regretted it."

"Yes, we'd have regretted it," repeated Étienne simply.

That was all; they spoke no more. A cage awaited him, he was called angrily and threatened with a fine. Then she decided, and shook his hand. Very moved, he still looked at her, so ravaged and done for, with her livid face, her discolored hair escaping the blue kerchief, her body of a good too-fruitful beast, deformed under the trousers and linen jacket. And in that last handshake he again found that of the comrades, a long, mute clasp which gave him rendezvous for the day they would begin again. He understood perfectly; she had in the depth of her eyes her tranquil belief. Till soon, and this time it would be the great blow.

"What the hell of a lazy slut!" cried Pierron.

Shoved, jostled, La Maheude packed herself into the bottom of a tub with four others. The signal rope was pulled to knock on the meat, the cage detached, fell into the night; and there was nothing more but the swift flight of the cable.

Then Étienne left the pit. Below, under the screening shed, he caught sight of a being seated on the ground, legs stretched out, amid a thick bed of coal. It was Jeanlin, employed as "lump cleaner." He held a block of coal between his thighs, clearing it with hammer blows of the shale fragments; and a fine powder drowned him in such a flood of soot that the young man would never have recognized him, had the child not lifted his monkey snout, with spread ears and little greenish eyes. He gave a jeering laugh, smashed the block with a final blow, disappeared in the rising black dust.

Outside, Étienne followed the road a while, absorbed. All sorts of ideas buzzed in him. But he had a sensation of open air, of free sky, and he breathed largely. The sun appeared on the glorious horizon, it was a waking of gladness across the whole countryside. A flood of gold rolled from east to west over the immense plain. This warmth of life gained, spread, in a shiver of youth where vibrated the sighs of the earth, the song of birds, all the murmurs of waters and woods. It was good to live, the old world wished to live yet another spring.

And, penetrated with this hope, Étienne slowed his walk, his eyes lost right and left in this gaiety of the new season. He thought of himself, he felt strong, matured by his hard experience at the bottom of the mine. His education was finished, he went away armed, a reasoning soldier of the revolution, having declared war on society such as he saw it and such as he condemned it. The joy of rejoining Pluchart, of being like Pluchart a listened-to chief, breathed him speeches whose phrases he arranged. He meditated widening his program; the bourgeois refinement that had raised him above his class flung him into a greater hatred of the bourgeoisie. These workers whose smell of misery now embarrassed him, he felt the need to set in a glory, he would show them as the only great, the only impeccable, as the sole nobility and sole force wherein humanity might renew itself. Already he saw himself at the tribune, triumphant with the people, if the people did not devour him.

Very high, a lark's song made him look at the sky. Little red clouds, the last vapors of the night, melted in the limpid blue; and the vague faces of Souvarine and Rasseneur appeared to him. Decidedly, all spoiled when each pulled power to himself. Thus this famous International which should have renewed the world, aborted in impotence, after seeing its formidable army divide, crumble in inner quarrels. Had Darwin then been right, would the world be only a battle, the strong eating the weak, for the beauty and continuity of the species? This question troubled him, though he cut it short as a man pleased with his knowledge. But an idea dispelled his doubts, enchanted him: that of taking up his old explanation of the theory, the first time he spoke. If a class must be eaten, was it not the people, vigorous, still fresh, who would eat the bourgeoisie exhausted by pleasure? New blood would make the new society. And, in this expectation of an invasion of barbarians regenerating the old decrepit nations, reappeared his absolute faith in a coming revolution, the true one, that of the workers, whose fire would blaze the end of the century with that purple of rising sun he watched bleed in the sky.

He walked on, dreaming, beating with his dogwood stick the pebbles of the road; and when he cast his eyes about, he recognized corners of the country. Just so, at the Ox-Fork, he remembered he had there taken command of the band, the morning of the wrecking of the pits. Today the brutal work, deadly, ill-paid, began again. Beneath the earth, there, at seven hundred meters, it seemed to him he heard dull, regular, continuous blows: they were the comrades he had just seen descend, the black comrades, who struck in their silent rage. No doubt they were defeated, they had left there money and dead; but Paris would not forget the gunshots of the Voreux, the blood of the empire too would flow from that unhealable wound; and if the industrial crisis drew to its end, if the factories reopened one by one, the state of war was none the less declared, without peace henceforth possible. The colliers had counted themselves, they had tried their strength, shaken with their cry of justice the workers of all France. So their defeat reassured no one; the bourgeois of Montsou, invaded in their victory by the dull unease of strike aftermaths, looked behind them whether their end was not there nonetheless, inevitable, in the depth of that great silence. They understood that the revolution would be born again unceasingly, tomorrow perhaps, with the general strike, the understanding of all workers having relief funds, able to hold for months, eating bread. This time again, it was a shoulder thrust given to the society in ruins, and they had heard it crack beneath their steps, and they felt other shocks rise, always others, until the old building, shaken, collapsed, engulfed like the Voreux, sinking to the abyss.

Étienne took to the left the road to Joiselle. He recalled he had there prevented the band from rushing on Gaston-Marie. Far off, in the clear sun, he saw the headframes of several pits, Mirou on the right, Madeleine and Crèvecoeur side by side. Work roared everywhere, the pick blows he thought to seize in the earth's depth now struck from one end of the plain to the other. A blow, and another blow, and ever blows, beneath the fields, the roads, the villages that laughed in the light: all the obscure labor of the underground prison, so crushed by the enormous mass of rocks, that one had to know it was down there to distinguish its great painful sigh. And he thought now that violence perhaps did not hasten things. Cut cables, torn rails, broken lamps, what useless work! It was well worth galloping three thousand strong in a devastating band! Vaguely he divined that legality, one day, could be more terrible. His reason ripened, he had thrown off the wildness of his resentments. Yes, La Maheude said it well with her good sense, it would be the great blow: to enroll quietly, to know one another, to unite in unions when the laws permitted; then, the morning one felt at the elbows, when one found oneself millions of workers facing a few thousand idlers, to take power, to be the masters. Ah! what a waking of truth and justice! The replete and crouching god would burst of it on the hour, the monstrous idol, hidden in the depth of its tabernacle, in that far unknown where the wretched fed it with their flesh without ever having seen it.

But Étienne, leaving the Vandame road, came out on the pavement. To the right he saw Montsou sloping and losing itself. Facing him he had the ruins of the Voreux, the accursed hole that three pumps drained without rest. Then there were the other pits on the horizon, the Victoire, Saint-Thomas, Feutry-Cantel; while toward the north the tall towers of the blast furnaces and the batteries of coke ovens smoked in the transparent morning air. If he did not wish to miss the eight o'clock train he must hurry, for he still had six kilometers to go.

And beneath his feet the deep blows, the obstinate blows of the picks continued. The comrades were all there, he heard them follow him at every stride. Was it not La Maheude, beneath that field of beets, her spine broken, whose breath rose so raucous, accompanied by the ventilator's rumble? Left, right, farther, he thought to recognize others beneath the wheat, the quick hedges, the young trees. Now, in full sky, the April sun rayed in its glory, warming the earth that gave birth. From the nourishing flank life sprang, buds burst in green leaves, fields quivered with the push of grasses. On all sides seeds swelled, lengthened, cracked the plain, wrought by a need of heat and light. An overflow of sap flowed with whispering voices, the noise of germs spread in a great kiss. Again, again, more and more distinctly, as if they had drawn near the soil, the comrades struck. In the flaming rays of the star, in this morning of youth, it was of this rumor the countryside was big. Men pushed, a black army, vengeful, that germinated slowly in the furrows, growing for the harvests of the future century, and whose germination would soon make the earth burst.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”