GERMINAL
PART VI
CHAPTER I
THE first fortnight of February passed and a black
cold prolonged the hard winter without pity for
the poor. Once more the authorities had scoured
the roads; the prefect of Lille, an attorney, a
general, and the police were not sufficient, the
military had come to occupy Montsou; a whole
regiment of men were camped between Beaugnies and
Marchiennes. Armed pickets guarded the pits, and
there were soldiers before every engine. The
manager's villa, the Company's Yards, even the
houses of certain residents, were bristling with
bayonets. Nothing was heard along the streets but
the slow movement of patrols. On the pit-bank of
the Voreux a sentinel was always placed in the
frozen wind that blew up there, like a look-out
man above the flat plain; and every two hours, as
though in an enemy's country, were heard the
sentry's cries:
"Qui vive?--Advance and give the
password!"
Nowhere had work been resumed. On the contrary,
the strike had spread; Crévecoeur, Mirou,
Madeleine, like the Voreux, were producing
nothing; at Feutry-Cantel and the Victoire there
were fewer men every morning; even at
Saint-Thomas, which had been hitherto exempt, men
were wanting. There was now a silent persistence
in the face of this exhibition of force which
exasperated the miners' pride. The settlements
looked deserted in the midst of the beetroot
fields. Not a workman stirred, only at rare
intervals was one to be met by chance, isolated,
with sidelong look, lowering his head before the
red trousers. And in this deep melancholy calm,
in this passive opposition to the guns, there was
a deceptive gentleness, a forced and patient
obedience of wild beasts in a cage, with their
eyes on the tamer, ready to spring on his neck if
he turned his back. The Company, who were being
ruined by this death of work, talked of hiring
miners from the Borinage, on the Belgian frontier,
but did not dare; so that the battle continued as
before between the colliers, who were shut up at
home, and the dead pits guarded by soldiery.
On the morrow of that terrible day this calm had
come about at once, hiding such a panic that the
greatest silence possible was kept concerning the
damage and the atrocities. The inquiry which had
been opened showed that Maigrat had died from his
fall, and the frightful mutilation of the corpse
remained uncertain, already surrounded by a
legend. On its side, the Company did not
acknowledge the disasters it had suffered, any
more than the Grégoires cared to compromise
their daughter in the scandal of a trial in which
she would have to give evidence. However, some
arrests took place, mere supernumeraries as usual,
silly and frightened, knowing nothing. By
mistake, Pierron was taken off with handcuffs on
his wrists as far as Marchiennes, to the great
amusement of his mates. Rasseneur, also, was
nearly arrested by two gendarmes. The management
was content with preparing lists of names and
giving back certificates in large numbers. Maheu
had received his, Levaque also, as well as
thirty-four of their mates in the settlement of
the Deux-Cent-Quarante alone. And all the
severity was directed against Étienne, who
had disappeared on the evening of the fray, and
who was being sought, although no trace of him
could be found. Chaval, in his hatred, had
denounced him, refusing to name the others at
Catherine's appeal, for she wished to save her
parents. The days passed, every one felt that
nothing was yet concluded; and with oppressed
hearts every one was awaiting the end.
At Montsou, during this period, the inhabitants
awoke with a start every night, their ears buzzing
with an imaginary alarmbell and their nostrils
haunted by the smell of powder. But what
completed their discomfiture was a sermon by the
new curé, Abbé Ranvier, that lean
priest with eyes like red-hot coals who had
succeeded Abbé Joire. He was indeed unlike
the smiling discreet man, so fat and gentle, whose
only anxiety was to live at peace with everybody.
Abbé Ranvier went so far as to defend these
abominable brigands who had dishonoured the
district. He found excuses for the atrocities of
the strikers; he violently attacked the middle
class, throwing on them the whole of the
responsibility. It was the middle class which, by
dispossessing the Church of its ancient liberties
in order to misuse them itself, had turned this
world into a cursed place of injustice and
suffering; it was the middle class which prolonged
misunderstandings, which was pushing on towards a
terrible catastrophe by its atheism, by its
refusal to return to the old beliefs, to the
fraternity of the early Christians. And he dared
to threaten the rich. He warned them that if they
obstinately persisted in refusing to listen to the
voice of God, God would surely put Himself on the
side of the poor. He would take back their
fortunes from those who faithlessly enjoyed them,
and would distribute them to the humble of the
earth for the triumph of His glory. The devout
trembled at this; the lawyer declared that it was
Socialism of the worst kind; all saw the cur at
the head of a band, brandishing a cross, and with
vigorous blows demolishing the bourgeois society
of '89.
M. Hennebeau, when informed, contented himself
with saying, as he shrugged his shoulders:
"If he troubles us too much the bishop will
free us from him."
And while the breath of panic was thus blowing
from one end of the plain to the other,
Étienne was dwelling beneath the earth, in
Jeanlin's burrow at the bottom of
Réquillart. It was there that he was in
hiding; no one believed him so near; the quiet
audacity of that refuge, in the very mine, in that
abandoned passage of the old pit, had baffled
search. Above, the sloes and hawthorns growing
among the fallen scaffolding of the belfry filled
up the mouth of the hole. No one ventured down;
it was necessary to know the trick--how to hang on
to the roots of the mountain ash and to let go
fearlessly, to catch hold of the rungs that were
still solid. Other obstacles also protected him,
the suffocating heat of the passage, a hundred and
twenty metres of dangerous descent, then the
painful gliding on all fours for a quarter of a
league between the narrowed walls of the gallery
before discovering the brigand's cave full of
plunder. He lived there in the midst of
abundance, finding gin there, the rest of the
dried cod, and provisions of all sorts. The large
hay bed was excellent, and not a current of air
could be felt in this equal temperature, as warm
as a bath. Light, however, threatened to fail.
Jeanlin, who had made himself purveyor, with the
prudence and discretion of a savage and delighted
to make fun of the police, had even brought him
pomatum, but could not succeed in putting his
hands on a packet of candles.
After the fifth day Étienne never lighted
up except to eat. He could not swallow in the
dark. This complete and interminable night,
always of the same blackness, was his chief
torment. It was in vain that he was able to sleep
in safety, that he was warm and provided with
bread, the night had never weighed so heavily on
his brain. It seemed to him even to crush his
thoughts. Now he was living on thefts. In spite
of his communistic theories, old scruples of
education arose, and he contented himself with
gnawing his share of dry bread. But what was to
be done? One must live, and his task was not yet
accomplished. Another shame overcame him: remorse
for that savage drunkenness from the gin, drunk in
the great cold on an empty stomach, which had
thrown him, armed with a knife, on Chaval. This
stirred in him the whole of that unknown terror,
the hereditary ill, the long ancestry of
drunkenness, no longer tolerating a drop of
alcohol without falling into homicidal mania.
Would he then end as a murderer? When he found
himself in shelter, in this profound calm of the
earth, seized by satiety of violence, he had slept
for two days the sleep of a brute, gorged and
overcome; and the depression continued, he lived
in a bruised state with bitter mouth and aching
head, as after some tremendous spree. A week
passed by; the Maheus, who had been warned, were
not able to send a candle; he had to give up the
enjoyment of light, even when eating.
Now Étienne remained for hours stretched
out on his hay. Vague ideas were working within
him for the first time: a feeling of superiority,
which placed him apart from his mates, an
exaltation of his person as he grew more
instructed. Never had he reflected so much; he
asked himself the why of his disgust on the morrow
of that furious course among the pits; and he did
not dare to reply to himself, his recollections
were repulsive to him, the ignoble desires, the
coarse instincts, the odour of all that
wretchedness shaken out to the wind. In spite of
the torment of the darkness, he would come to hate
the hour for returning to the settlement. How
nauseous were all these wretches in a heap, living
at the common bucket! There was not one with whom
he could seriously talk politics; it was a bestial
existence, always the same air tainted by onion,
in which one choked! He wished to enlarge their
horizon, to raise them to the comfort and good
manners of the middle class, by making them
masters; but how long it would take! and he no
longer felt the courage to await victory, in this
prison of hunger. By slow degrees his vanity of
leadership, his constant preoccupation of thinking
in their place, left him free, breathing into him
the soul of one of those bourgeois whom he
execrated.
Jeanlin one evening brought a candle-end, stolen
from a carter's lantern, and this was a great
relief for Étienne. When the darkness
began to stupefy him, weighing on his skull almost
to madness, he would light up for a moment; then,
as soon as he had chased away the nightmare, he
extinguished the candle, miserly of this
brightness which was as necessary to his life as
bread. The silence buzzed in his ears, he only
heard the flight of a band of rats, the cracking
of the old timber, the tiny sound of a spider
weaving her web. And with eyes open, in this warm
nothingness, he returned to his fixed idea--the
thought of what his mates were doing above.
Desertion on his part would have seemed to him the
worst cowardice. If he thus hid himself, it was
to remain free, to give counsel or to act. His
long meditations had fixed his ambition. While
awaiting something better he would like to be
Pluchart, leaving manual work in order to work
only at politics, but alone, in a clean room,
under the pretext that brain labour absorbs the
entire life and needs quiet.
At the beginning of the second week, the child
having told him that the police supposed he had
gone over to Belgium, Étienne ventured out
of his hole at nightfall. He wished to ascertain
the situation, and to decide if it was still well
to persist. He himself considered the game
doubtful. Before the strike he felt uncertain of
the result, and had simply yielded to facts; and
now, after having been intoxicated with rebellion,
he came back to this first doubt, despairing of
making the Company yield. But he would not yet
confess this to himself; he was tortured when he
thought of the miseries of defeat, and the heavy
responsibility of suffering which would weigh upon
him. The end of the strike: was it not the end of
his part, the overthrow of his ambition, his life
falling back into the brutishness of the mine and
the horrors of the settlement? And honestly,
without any base calculation or falsehood, he
endeavoured to find his faith again, to prove to
himself that resistance was still possible, that
Capital was about to destroy itself in face of the
heroic suicide of Labour.
Throughout the entire country, in fact, there was
nothing but a long echo of ruin. At night, when
he wandered through the black country, like a wolf
who has come out of his forest, he seemed to hear
the crash of bankruptcies from one end of the
plain to the other. He now passed by the roadside
nothing but closed dead workshops, becoming rotten
beneath the dull sky. The sugar works had
especially suffered: the Hoton sugar works, the
Fauvelle works, after having reduced the number of
their hands, had come to grief one after the
other. At the Dutilleul flour works the last mill
had stopped on the second Saturday of the month,
and the Bleuze rope works, for mine cables, had
been quite ruined by the strike. On the
Marchiennes side the situation was growing worse
every day. All the fires were out the Gagebois
glass works, men were continually being sent away
from the Sonneville workshops, only one of the
three blast furnaces of the Forges was alight, and
not one battery of coke ovens was burning on the
horizon. The strike of the Montsou colliers, born
of the industrial crisis which had been growing
worse for two years, had increased it and
precipitated the downfall. To the other causes of
suffering--the stoppage of orders from America,
and the engorgement of invested capital in
excessive production--was now added the unforeseen
lack of coal for the few furnaces which were still
kept up; and that was the supreme agony, this
engine bread which the pits no longer furnished.
Frightened by the general anxiety, the Company, by
diminishing its output and starving its miners,
inevitably found itself at the end of December
without a fragment of coal at the surface of its
pits. Everything held together, the plague blew
from afar, one fall led to another; the industries
tumbled each other over as they fell, in so rapid
a series of catastrophes that the shocks echoed in
the midst of the neighbouring cities, Lille,
Douai, Valenciennes, where absconding bankers were
bringing ruin on whole families.
At the turn of a road Étienne often stopped
in the frozen night to hear the rubbish raining
down. He breathed deeply in the darkness, the joy
of annihilation seized him, the hope that day
would dawn on the extermination of the old world,
with not a single fortune left standing, the
scythe of equality levelling everything to the
ground. But in this massacre it was the Company's
pits that especially interested him. He would
continue his walk, blinded by the darkness,
visiting them one after the other, glad to
discover some new disaster. Landslips of
increasing gravity continued to occur on account
of the prolonged abandonment of the passages.
Above the north gallery of Mirou the ground sank
in to such an extent, that the Joiselle road, for
the distance of a hundred metres, had been
swallowed up as though by the shock of an
earthquake; and the Company, disturbed at the
rumours raised by these accidents, paid the owners
for their vanished fields without bargaining.
Crévecoeur and Madeleine, which lay in very
shifting rock, were becoming stopped up more and
more. It was said that two captains had been
buried at the Victoire; there was an inundation at
Feutry-Cantel, it had been necessary to wall up a
gallery for the length of a kilometre at
Saint-Thomas, where the ill-kept timbering was
breaking down everywhere. Thus every hour
enormous sums were spent, making great breaches in
the shareholders' dividends; a rapid destruction
of the pits was going on, which must end at last
by eating up the famous Montsou deniers which had
been centupled in a century.
In the face of these repeated blows, hope was
again born in Étienne; he came to believe
that a third month of resistance would crush the
monster--the weary, sated beast, crouching down
there like an idol in his unknown tabernacle. He
knew that after the Montsou troubles there had
been great excitement in the Paris journals, quite
a violent controversy between the official
newspapers and the opposition newspapers, terrible
narratives, which were especially directed against
the International, of which the empire was
becoming afraid after having first encouraged it;
and the directors not daring to turn a deaf ear
any longer, two of them had condescended to come
and hold an inquiry, but with an air of regret,
not appearing to care about the upshot; so
disinterested, that in three days they went away
again, declaring that everything was going on as
well as possible. He was told, however, from
other quarters that during their stay these
gentlemen sat permanently, displaying feverish
activity, and absorbed in transactions of which no
one about them uttered a word. And he charged
them with affecting confidence they did not feel,
and came to look upon their departure as a nervous
flight, feeling now certain of triumph since these
terrible men were letting everything go.
But on the following night Étienne
despaired again. The Company's back was too
robust to be so easily broken; they might lose
millions, but later on they would get them back
again by gnawing at their men's bread. On that
night, having pushed as far as Jean-Bart, he
guessed the truth when an overseer told him that
there was talk of yielding Vandame to Montsou. At
Deneulin's house, it was said, the wretchedness
was pitiful, the wretchedness of the rich; the
father ill in his powerlessness, aged by his
anxiety over money, the daughters struggling in
the midst of tradesmen, trying to save their
shifts. There was less suffering in the famished
settlements than in this middle-class house where
they shut themselves up to drink water. Work had
not been resumed at Jean-Bart, and it had been
necessary to replace the pump at Gaston-Marie;
while, in spite of all haste, an inundation had
already begun which made great expenses necessary.
Deneulin had at last risked his request for a loan
of one hundred thousand francs from the
Grégoires. and the refusal, though he had
expected it, completed his ejection: if they
refused, it was for his sake, in order to save him
from an impossible struggle; and they advised him
to sell. He, as usual, violently refused. It
enraged him to have to pay the expenses of the
strike; he hoped at first to die of it, with the
blood at his head, strangled by apoplexy. Then
what was to be done? He had listened to the
directors' offers. They wrangled with him, they
depreciated this superb prey, this repaired pit,
equipped anew, where the lack of capital alone
paralysed the output. He would be lucky if he got
enough out of it to satisfy his creditors. For
two days he had struggled against the directors at
Montsou, furious at the quiet way with which they
took advantage of his embarrassment and shouting
his refusals at them in his loud voice. And there
the affairs remained, and they had returned to
Paris to await patiently his last groans.
Étienne smelled out this compensation for
the disasters, and was again seized by
discouragement before the invincible power of the
great capitalists, so strong in battle that they
fattened in defeat by eating the corpses of the
small capitalists who fell at their side.
The next day, fortunately, Jeanlin brought him a
piece of good news. At the Voreux the tubbing of
the shaft was threatening to break, and the water
was filtering in from all the joints; in great
haste a gang of carpenters had been set on to
repair it.
Up to now Étienne had avoided the Voreux,
warned by the everlasting black silhouette of the
sentinel stationed on the pit-bank above the
plain. He could not be avoided, he dominated in
the air, like the flag of the regiment. Towards
three o'clock in the morning the sky became
overcast, and he went to the pit, where some mates
explained to him the bad condition of the tubbing;
they even thought that it would have to be done
entirely over again, which would stop the output
of coal for three months. For a long time he
prowled round, listening to the carpenters'
mallets hammering in the shaft. That wound which
had to be dressed rejoiced his heart.
As he went back in the early daylight, he saw the
sentinel still on the pit-bank. This time he
would certainly be seen. As he walked he thought
about those soldiers who were taken from the
people, to be armed against the people. How easy
the triumph of the revolution would be if the army
were suddenly to declare for it! It would be
enough if the workman and the peasant in the
barracks were to remember their origin. That was
the supreme peril, the great terror, which made
the teeth of the middle class chatter when they
thought of a possible defection of the troops. In
two hours they would be swept away and
exterminated with all the delights and
abominations of their iniquitous life. It was
already said that whole regiments were tainted
with Socialism. Was it true? When justice came,
would it be thanks to the cartridges distributed
by the middle class? And snatching at another
hope, the young man dreamed that the regiment,
with its posts, now guarding the pits, would come
over to the side of the strikers, shoot down the
Company to a man, and at last give the mine to the
miners.
He then noticed that he was ascending the
pit-bank, his head filled with these reflections.
Why should he not talk with this soldier? He
would get to know what his ideas were. With an
air of indifference, he continued to come nearer,
as though he were gleaning old wood among the
rubbish. The sentinel remained motionless.
"Eh, mate! damned weather," said
Étienne, at last. "I think we shall
have snow."
He was a small soldier, very fair, with a pale,
gentle face covered with red freckles. He wore
his military greatcoat with the awkwardness of a
recruit,
"Yes, perhaps we shall, I think," he
murmured.
And with his blue eyes he gazed at the livid sky,
the smoky dawn, with soot weighing like lead afar
over the plain.
"What idiots they are to put you here to
freeze!" Étienne went on. "One
would think the Cossacks were coming! And then
there's always wind here."
The little soldier shivered without complaining.
There was certainly a little cabin of dry stones
there, where old Bonnemort used to take shelter
when it blew a hurricane, but the order being not
to leave the summit of the pit-bank, the soldier
did not stir from it, his hands so stiffened by
cold that he could no longer feel his weapon. He
belonged to the guard of sixty men who were
protecting the Voreux, and as this cruel
sentry-duty frequently came round, he had before
nearly stayed there for good with his dead feet.
His work demanded it; a passive obedience finished
the benumbing process, and he replied to these
questions with the stammered words of a sleepy
child.
Étienne in vain endeavoured during a
quarter of an hour to make him talk about
politics. He replied "yes" or
"no" without seeming to understand.
Some of his comrades said that the captain was a
republican; as to him, he had no idea--it was all
the same to him. If he was ordered to fire, he
would fire, so as not to be punished. The workman
listened, seized with the popular hatred against
the army--against these brothers whose hearts were
changed by sticking a pair of red pantaloons on to
their buttocks.
"What's your name?"
"Jules."
"And where do you come from?"
"From Plogof, over there."
He stretched out his arm at random. It was in
Brittany, he knew no more. His small pale face
grew animated. He began to laugh, and felt
warmer.
"I have a mother and a sister. They are
waiting for me, sure enough. Ah! it won't be for
tomorrow. When I left, they came with me as far
as Pont-l'Abbé. We had to take the horse
to Lepalmec: it nearly broke its legs at the
bottom of the Audierne Hill. Cousin Charles was
waiting for us with sausages, but the women were
crying too much, and it stuck in our throats.
Good Lord! what a long way off our home is!"
His eyes grew moist, though he was still laughing.
The desert moorland of Plogof, that wild
storm-beaten point of the Raz, appeared to him
beneath a dazzling sun in the rosy season of
heather.
"Do you think," he asked, "if I'm
not punished, that they'll give me a month's leave
in two years?"
Then Étienne talked about Provence, which
he had left when he was quite small. The daylight
was growing, and flakes of snow began to fly in
the earthy sky. And at last he felt anxious on
noticing Jeanlin, who was prowling about in the
midst of the bushes, stupefied to see him up
there. The child was beckoning to him. What was
the good of this dream of fraternizing with the
soldiers? It would take years and years, and his
useless attempt cast him down as though he had
expected to succeed. But suddenly he understood
Jeanlin's gesture. The sentinel was about to be
relieved, and he went away, running off to bury
himself at Réquillart, his heart crushed
once more by the certainty of defeat; while the
little scamp who ran beside him was accusing that
dirty beast of a trooper of having called out the
guard to fire at them.
On the summit of the pit-bank Jules stood
motionless, with eyes vacantly gazing at the
falling snow. The sergeant was approaching with
his men, and the regulation cries were exchanged.
"Qui vive?--Advance and give the
password!"
And they heard the heavy steps begin again,
ringing as though on a conquered country. In
spite of the growing daylight, nothing stirred in
the settlements; the colliers remained in silent
rage beneath the military boot.