Bab Bab 19 · 第19章

A fortnight had passed, and on the Monday of the third week the lists

sent up to the managers showed a fresh decrease in the number of the

miners who had gone down. It was expected that on that morning work

would be resumed, but the obstinacy of the directors in not yielding

exasperated the miners. The Voreux, Crévecoeur, Mirou, and Madeleine

were not the only pits resting; at the Victoire and at Feutry-Cantel

only about a quarter of the men had gone down; even Saint-Thomas was

affected. The strike was gradually becoming general.

At the Voreux a heavy silence hung over the pit-mouth. It was a dead

workshop, these great empty abandoned Yards where work was sleeping.

In the grey December sky, along the high foot-bridges three or four

empty trams bore witness to the mute sadness of things. Underneath,

between the slender posts of the platforms, the stock of coal was

diminishing, leaving the earth bare and black; while the supplies of

wood were mouldering beneath the rain. At the quay on the canal a barge

was moored, half-laden, lying drowsily in the murky water; and on the

deserted pit-bank, in which the decomposed sulphates smoked in spite of

the rain, a melancholy cart showed its shafts erect. But the buildings

especially were growing torpid, the screening-shed with closed

shutters, the steeple in which the rumbling of the receiving-room no

more arose, and the machine-room grown cold, and the giant chimney too

large for the occasional smoke. The winding-engine was only heated

in the morning. The grooms sent down fodder for the horses, and the

captains worked alone at the bottom, having become labourers again,

watching over the damages that took place in the passages as soon as

they ceased to be repaired; then, after nine o'clock the rest of the

service was carried on by the ladders. And above these dead buildings,

buried in their garment of black dust, there was only heard the

escapement of the pumping-engine, breathing with its thick, long breath

all that was left of the life of the pit, which the water would destroy

if that breathing should cease.

On the plain opposite, the settlement of the Deux-Cent-Quarante seemed

also to be dead. The prefect of Lille had come in haste and the

police had tramped all the roads; but in face of the calmness of the

strikers, prefect and police had decided to go home again. Never had

the settlement given so splendid an example in the vast plain. The

men, to avoid going to the public-house, slept all day long; the women

while dividing the coffee became reasonable, less anxious to gossip and

quarrel; and even the troops of children seemed to understand it all,

and were so good that they ran about with naked feet, smacking each

other silently. The word of command had been repeated and circulated

from mouth to mouth; they wished to be sensible.

There was, however, a continuous coming and going of people in the

Maheus' house. Étienne, as secretary, had divided the three thousand

francs of the Provident Fund among the needy families; afterwards

from various sides several hundred francs had arrived, yielded by

subscriptions and collections. But now all their resources were

exhausted; the miners had no more money to keep up the strike, and

hunger was there, threatening them. Maigrat, after having promised

credit for a fortnight, had suddenly altered his mind at the end of

a week and cut off provisions. He usually took his orders from the

Company; perhaps the latter wished to bring the matter to an end by

starving the settlements. He acted besides like a capricious tyrant,

giving or refusing bread according to the look of the girl who was

sent by her parents for provisions; and he especially closed his door

spitefully to Maheude, wishing to punish her because he had not been

able to get Catherine. To complete their misery it was freezing very

hard, and the women watched their piles of coal diminish, thinking

anxiously that they could no longer renew them at the pits now that the

men were not going down. It was not enough to die of hunger, they must

also die of cold.

Among the Maheus everything was already running short. The Levaques

could still eat on the strength of a twenty-franc piece lent by

Bouteloup. As to the Pierrons, they always had money; but in order

to appear as needy as the others, for fear of loans, they got their

supplies on credit from Maigrat, who would have thrown his shop at

Pierronne if she had held out her petticoat to him. Since Saturday many

families had gone to bed without supper, and in face of the terrible

days that were beginning not a complaint was heard, all obeyed the word

of command with quiet courage. There was an absolute confidence in

spite of everything, a religious faith, the blind gift of a population

of believers. Since an era of justice had been promised to them they

were willing to suffer for the conquest of universal happiness. Hunger

exalted their heads; never had the low horizon opened a larger beyond

to these people in the hallucination of their misery. They saw again

over there, when their eyes were dimmed by weakness, the ideal city

of their dream, but now growing near and seeming to be real, with its

population of brothers, its golden age of labour and meals in common.

Nothing overcame their conviction that they were at last entering it.

The fund was exhausted; the Company would not yield; every day must

aggravate the situation; and they preserved their hope and showed a

smiling contempt for facts. If the earth opened beneath them a miracle

would save them. This faith replaced bread and warmed their stomachs.

When the Maheus and the others had too quickly digested their soup,

made with clear water, they thus rose into a state of semi-vertigo,

that ecstasy of a better life which has flung martyrs to the wild

beasts.

Étienne was henceforth the unquestioned leader. In the evening

conversations he gave forth oracles, in the degree to which study

had refined him and made him able to enter into difficult matters.

He spent the nights reading, and received a large number of letters;

he even subscribed to the _Vengeur_, a Belgian Socialist paper,

and this journal, the first to enter the settlement, gained for him

extraordinary consideration among his mates. His growing popularity

excited him more every day. To carry on an extensive correspondence, to

discuss the fate of the workers in the four corners of the province,

to give advice to the Voreux miners, especially to become a centre and

to feel the world rolling round him--continually swelled the vanity

of the former engine-man, the pikeman with greasy black hands. He

was climbing a ladder, he was entering this execrated middle class,

with a satisfaction to his intelligence and comfort which he did not

confess to himself. He had only one trouble, the consciousness of

his lack of education, which made him embarrassed and timid as soon

as he was in the presence of a gentleman in a frock-coat. If he went

on instructing himself, devouring everything, the lack of method

would render assimilation very slow, and would produce such confusion

that at last he would know much more than he could understand. So at

certain hours of good sense he experienced a restlessness with regard

to his mission--a fear that he was not the man for the task. Perhaps

it required a lawyer, a learned man, able to speak and act without

compromising the mates? But an outcry soon restored his assurance. No,

no; no lawyers! They are all rascals; they profit by their knowledge to

fatten on the people. Let things turn out how they will, the workers

must manage their own affairs. And his dream of popular leadership

again soothed him: Montsou at his feet, Paris in the misty distance,

who knows? The elections some day, the tribune in a gorgeous hall,

where he could thunder against the middle class in the first speech

pronounced by a workman in a parliament.

During the last few days Étienne had been perplexed. Pluchart wrote

letter after letter, offering to come to Montsou to quicken the zeal

of the strikers. It was a question of organizing a private meeting

over which the mechanic would preside; and beneath this plan lay the

idea of exploiting the strike, to gain over to the International these

miners who so far had shown themselves suspicious. Étienne feared a

disturbance, but he would, however, have allowed Pluchart to come if

Rasseneur had not violently blamed this proceeding. In spite of his

power, the young man had to reckon with the innkeeper, whose services

were of older date, and who had faithful followers among his clients.

So he still hesitated, not knowing what to reply.

On this very Monday, towards four o'clock, a new letter came from Lille

as Étienne was alone with Maheude in the lower room. Maheu, weary of

idleness, had gone fishing; if he had the luck to catch a fine fish

under the sluice of the canal, they could sell it to buy bread. Old

Bonnemort and little Jeanlin had just gone off to try their legs,

which were now restored; while the children had departed with Alzire,

who spent hours on the pit-bank collecting cinders. Seated near the

miserable fire, which they no longer dared to keep up, Maheude, with

her dress unbuttoned and one breast hanging out of her dress and

falling to her belly, was suckling Estelle.

When the young man had folded the letter, she questioned him:

"Is the news good? Are they going to send us any money?"

He shook his head, and she went on:

"I don't know what we shall do this week. However, we'll hold on all

the same. When one has right on one's side, don't you think it gives

you heart, and one ends always by being the strongest?"

At the present time she was, to a reasonable extent, in favour of the

strike. It would have been better to force the Company to be just

without leaving off work. But since they had left it they ought not

to go back to it without obtaining justice. On this point she was

relentless. Better to die than to show oneself in the wrong when one

was right!

"Ah!" exclaimed Étienne, "if a fine old cholera was to break out, that

would free us of all these Company exploiters."

"No, no," she replied, "we must not wish any one dead. That wouldn't

help us at all; plenty more would spring up. Now I only ask that they

should get sensible ideas, and I expect they will, for there are worthy

people everywhere. You know I'm not at all for your politics."

In fact she always blamed his violent language, and thought him

aggressive. It was good that they should want their work paid for at

what it was worth, but why occupy oneself with such things as the

bourgeois and Government? Why mix oneself up with other people's

affairs, when one would get nothing out of it but hard knocks? And she

kept her esteem for him because he did not get drunk, and regularly

paid his forty-five francs for board and lodging. When a man behaves

well one can forgive him the rest.

Étienne then talked about the Republic, which would give bread to

everybody. But Maheude shook her head, for she remembered 1848, an

awful year, which had left them as bare as worms, her and her man, in

their early housekeeping years. She forgot herself in describing its

horrors, in a mournful voice, her eyes lost in space, her breast open;

while her infant, Estelle, without letting it go, had fallen asleep on

her knees. And Étienne, also absorbed in thought, had his eyes fixed on

this enormous breast, of which the soft whiteness contrasted with the

muddy yellowish complexion of her face.

"Not a farthing," she murmured, "nothing to put between one's teeth,

and all the pits stopped. Just the same destruction of poor people as

to-day."

But at that moment the door opened, and they remained mute with

surprise before Catherine, who then came in. Since her flight with

Chaval she had not reappeared at the settlement. Her emotion was so

great that, trembling and silent, she forgot to shut the door. She

expected to find her mother alone, and the sight of the young man put

out of her head the phrases she had prepared on the way.

"What on earth have you come here for?" cried Maheude, without even

moving from her chair. "I don't want to have anything more to do with

you; get along."

Then Catherine tried to find words:

"Mother, it's some coffee and sugar; yes, for the children. I've been

thinking of them and done overtime."

She drew out of her pockets a pound of coffee and a pound of sugar,

and took courage to place them on the table. The strike at the Voreux

troubled her while she was working at Jean-Bart, and she had only been

able to think of this way of helping her parents a little, under the

pretext of caring for the little ones. But her good nature did not

disarm her mother, who replied:

"Instead of bringing us sweets, you would have done better to stay and

earn bread for us."

She overwhelmed her with abuse, relieving herself by throwing in her

daughter's face all that she had been saying against her for the past

month. To go off with a man, to hang on to him at sixteen, when the

family was in want! Only the most degraded of unnatural children could

do it. One could forgive a folly, but a mother never forgot a trick

like that. There might have been some excuse if they had been strict

with her. Not at all; she was as free as air, and they only asked her

to come in to sleep.

"Tell me, what have you got in your skin, at your age?"

Catherine, standing beside the table, listened with lowered head. A

quiver shook her thin under-developed girlish body, and she tried to

reply in broken words:

"Oh! if it was only me, and the amusement that I get! It's him. What

he wants I'm obliged to want too, aren't I? because, you see, he's the

strongest. How can one tell how things are going to turn out? Anyhow

it's done and can't be undone; it may as well be him as another now.

He'll have to marry me."

She defended herself without a struggle, with the passive resignation

of a girl who has submitted to the male at an early age. Was it not the

common lot? She had never dreamed of anything else; violence behind

the pit-bank, a child at sixteen, and then a wretched household if her

lover married her. And she did not blush with shame; she only quivered

like this at being treated like a slut before this lad, whose presence

oppressed her to despair.

Étienne had risen, however, and was pretending to stir up the nearly

extinct fire in order not to interrupt the explanation. But their looks

met; he found her pale and exhausted; pretty, indeed, with her clear

eyes in the face which had grown tanned, and he experienced a singular

feeling; his spite had vanished; he simply desired that she should

be happy with this man whom she had preferred to him. He felt the

need to occupy himself with her still, a longing to go to Montsou and

force the other man to his duty. But she only saw pity in his constant

tenderness; he must feel contempt for her to gaze at her like that.

Then her heart contracted so that she choked, without being able to

stammer any more words of excuse.

"That's it, you'd best hold your tongue," began the implacable Maheude.

"If you come back to stay, come in; else get along with you at once,

and think yourself lucky that I'm not free just now, or I should have

put my foot into you somewhere before now."

As if this threat had suddenly been realized, Catherine received a

vigorous kick right behind, so violent that she was stupefied with

surprise and pain. It was Chaval who had leapt in through the open door

to give her this lunge of a vicious beast. For a moment he had watched

her from outside.

"Ah! slut," he yelled, "I've followed you. I knew well enough you were

coming back here to get him to fill you. And it's you that pay him, eh?

You pour coffee down him with my money!"

Maheude and Étienne were stupefied, and did not stir. With a furious

movement Chaval chased Catherine towards the door.

"Out you go, by God!"

And as she took refuge in a corner he turned on her mother.

"A nice business, keeping watch while your whore of a daughter is

kicking her legs upstairs!"

At last he caught Catherine's wrist, shaking her and dragging her out.

At the door he again turned towards Maheude, who was nailed to her

chair. She had forgotten to fasten up her breast. Estelle had gone to

sleep, and her face had slipped down into the woollen petticoat; the

enormous breast was hanging free and naked like the udder of a great

cow.

"When the daughter is not at it, it's the mother who gets herself

plugged," cried Chaval. "Go on, show him your meat! He isn't

disgusted--your dirty lodger!"

At this Étienne was about to strike his mate. The fear of arousing the

settlement by a fight had kept him back from snatching Catherine from

Chaval's hands. But rage was now carrying him away, and the two men

were face to face with inflamed eyes. It was an old hatred, a jealousy

long unacknowledged, which was breaking out. One of them now must do

for the other.

"Take care!" stammered Étienne, with clenched teeth. "I'll do for you."

"Try!" replied Chaval.

They looked at one another for some seconds longer, so close that

their hot breaths burnt each other's faces. And it was Catherine who

suppliantly took her lover's hand again to lead him away. She dragged

him out of the settlement, fleeing without turning her head.

"What a brute!" muttered Étienne, banging the door, and so shaken by

anger that he was obliged to sit down.

Maheude, in front of him, had not stirred. She made a vague gesture,

and there was silence, a silence which was painful and heavy with

unspoken things. In spite of an effort his gaze again returned to her

breast, that expanse of white flesh, the brilliance of which now made

him uncomfortable. No doubt she was forty, and had lost her shape, like

a good female who had produced too much; but many would still desire

her, strong and solid, with the large long face of a woman who had once

been beautiful. Slowly and quietly she was putting back her breast with

both hands. A rosy corner was still obstinate, and she pushed it back

with her finger, and then buttoned herself up, and was now quite black

and shapeless in her old gown.

"He's a filthy beast," she said at last. "Only a filthy beast could

have such nasty ideas. I don't care a hang what he says; it isn't worth

notice."

Then in a frank voice she added, fixing her eyes on the young man:

"I have my faults, sure enough, but not that one. Only two men have

touched me--a putter, long ago, when I was fifteen, and then Maheu. If

he had left me like the other, Lord! I don't quite know what would have

happened; and I don't pride myself either on my good conduct with him

since our marriage, because, when one hasn't gone wrong, it's often

because one hasn't the chance. Only I say things as they are, and I

know neighbours who couldn't say as much, don't you think?"

"That's true enough," replied Étienne.

And he rose and went out, while she decided to light the fire again,

after having placed the sleeping Estelle on two chairs. If the father

caught and sold a fish they could manage to have some soup.

Outside, night was already coming on, a frosty night; and with lowered

head Étienne walked along, sunk in dark melancholy. It was no longer

anger against the man, or pity for the poor ill-treated girl. The

brutal scene was effaced and lost, and he was thrown back on to the

sufferings of all, the abominations of wretchedness. He thought of the

settlement without bread, these women and little ones who would not

eat that evening, all this struggling race with empty bellies. And

the doubt which sometimes touched him awoke again in the frightful

melancholy of the twilight, and tortured him with a discomfort which he

had never felt so strongly before. With what a terrible responsibility

he had burdened himself! Must he still push them on in obstinate

resistance, now that there was neither money nor credit? And what

would be the end of it all if no help arrived, and starvation came to

beat down their courage? He had a sudden vision of disaster; of dying

children and sobbing mothers, while the men, lean and pale, went down

once more into the pits. He went on walking, his feet stumbling against

the stones, and the thought that the Company would be found strongest,

and that he would have brought misfortune on his comrades, filled him

with insupportable anguish.

When he raised his head he saw that he was in front of the Voreux. The

gloomy mass of buildings looked sombre beneath the growing darkness.

The deserted square, obstructed by great motionless shadows, seemed

like the corner of an abandoned fortress. As soon as the winding-engine

stopped, the soul left the place. At this hour of the night nothing was

alive, not a lantern, not a voice; and the sound of the pump itself

was only a distant moan, coming one could not say whence, in this

annihilation of the whole pit.

As Étienne gazed the blood flowed back to his heart. If the workers

were suffering hunger, the Company was encroaching on its millions. Why

should it prove the stronger in this war of labour against gold? In any

case, the victory would cost it dear. They would have their corpses to

count. He felt the fury of battle again, the fierce desire to have done

with misery, even at the price of death. It would be as well for the

settlement to die at one stroke as to go on dying in detail of famine

and injustice. His ill-digested reading came back to him, examples of

nations who had burnt their towns to arrest the enemy, vague histories

of mothers who had saved their children from slavery by crushing their

heads against the pavement, of men who had died of want rather than

eat the bread of tyrants. His head became exalted, a red gaiety arose

out of his crisis of black sadness, chasing away doubt, and making

him ashamed of this passing cowardice of an hour. And in this revival

of his faith, gusts of pride reappeared and carried him still higher;

the joy of being leader, of seeing himself obeyed, even to sacrifice,

the enlarged dream of his power, the evening of triumph. Already he

imagined a scene of simple grandeur, his refusal of power, authority

placed in the hands of the people, when it would be master.

But he awoke and started at the voice of Maheu, who was narrating his

luck, a superb trout which he had fished up and sold for three francs.

They would have their soup. Then he left his mate to return alone to

the settlement, saying that he would follow him; and he entered and

sat down in the Avantage, awaiting the departure of a client to tell

Rasseneur decisively that he should write to Pluchart to come at once.

His resolution was taken; he would organize a private meeting, for

victory seemed to him certain if the Montsou colliers adhered in a mass

to the International.