第 三十一 章 · 第31章

Snow had been falling for two days; since the morning it had ceased,

and an intense frost had frozen the immense sheet. This black country,

with its inky roads and walls and trees powdered with coal dust,

was now white, a single whiteness stretching out without end. The

Deux-Cent-Quarante settlement lay beneath the snow as though it had

disappeared. No smoke came out of the chimneys; the houses, without

fire and as cold as the stones in the street, did not melt the thick

layer on the tiles. It was nothing more than a quarry of white slabs

in the white plain, a vision of a dead village wound in its shroud.

Along the roads the passing patrols alone made a muddy mess with their

stamping.

Among the Maheus the last shovelful of cinders had been burnt the

evening before, and it was no use any longer to think of gleaning on

the pit-bank in this terrible weather, when the sparrows themselves

could not find a blade of grass. Alzire, from the obstinacy with which

her poor hands had dug in the snow, was dying. Maheude had to wrap her

up in the fragment of a coverlet while waiting for Dr. Vanderhaghen,

for whom she had twice gone out without being able to find him. The

servant had, however, promised that he would come to the settlement

before night, and the mother was standing at the window watching, while

the little invalid, who had wished to be downstairs, was shivering

on a chair, having the illusion that it was better there near the

cold grate. Old Bonnemort opposite, his legs bad once more, seemed

to be sleeping; neither Lénore nor Henri had come back from scouring

the roads, in company with Jeanlin, to ask for sous. Maheu alone was

walking heavily up and down the bare room, stumbling against the wall

at every turn, with the stupid air of an animal which can no longer see

its cage. The petroleum also was finished; but the reflection of the

snow from outside was so bright that it vaguely lit up the room, in

spite of the deepening night.

There was a noise of sabots, and the Levaque woman pushed open the

door like a gale of wind, beside herself, shouting furiously from the

threshold at Maheude:

"Then it's you who have said that I forced my lodger to give me twenty

sous when he sleeps with me?"

The other shrugged her shoulders.

"Don't bother me. I said nothing; and who told you so?"

"They tell me you said so; it doesn't concern you who it was. You even

said you could hear us at our dirty tricks behind the wall, and that

the filth gets into our house because I'm always on my back. Just tell

me you didn't say so, eh?"

Every day quarrels broke out as a result of the constant gossiping of

the women. Especially between those households which lived door to

door, squabbles and reconciliations took place every day. But never

before had such bitterness thrown them one against the other. Since the

strike hunger exasperated their rancour, so that they felt the need

of blows; an altercation between two gossiping women finished by a

murderous onset between their two men.

Just then Levaque arrived in his turn, dragging Bouteloup.

"Here's our mate; let him just say if he has given twenty sous to my

wife to sleep with her."

The lodger, hiding his timid gentleness in his great beard, protested

and stammered:

"Oh, that? No! Never anything! never!"

At once Levaque became threatening, and thrust his fist beneath Maheu's

nose.

"You know that won't do for me. If a man's got a wife like that, he

ought to knock her ribs in. If not, then you believe what she says."

"By God!" exclaimed Maheu, furious at being dragged out of his

dejection, "what is all this clatter again? Haven't we got enough to do

with our misery? Just leave me alone, damn you! or I'll let you know

it! And first, who says that my wife said so?"

"Who says so? Pierronne said so."

Maheude broke into a sharp laugh, and turning towards the Levaque woman:

"An! Pierronne, is it? Well! I can tell you what she told me. Yes, she

told me that you sleep with both your men--the one underneath and the

other on top!"

After that it was no longer possible to come to an understanding. They

all grew angry, and the Levaques, as a reply to the Maheus, asserted

that Pierronne had said a good many other things on their account; that

they had sold Catherine, that they were all rotten together, even to

the little ones, with a dirty disease caught by Étienne at the Volcan.

"She said that! She said that!" yelled Maheu. "Good! I'll go to her, I

will, and if she says that she said that, she shall feel my hand on her

chops!"

He was carried out of himself, and the Levaques followed him to see

what would happen, while Bouteloup, having a horror of disputes,

furtively returned home. Excited by the altercation, Maheude was also

going out, when a complaint from Alzire held her back. She crossed the

ends of the coverlet over the little one's quivering body, and placed

herself before the window, looking out vaguely. And that doctor, who

still delayed!

At the Pierrons' door Maheu and the Levaques met Lydie, who was

stamping in the snow. The house was closed, and a thread of light

came though a crack in a shutter. The child replied at first to their

questions with constraint: no, her father was not there, he had gone to

the washhouse to join Mother Brulé and bring back the bundle of linen.

Then she was confused, and would not say what her mother was doing.

At last she let out everything with a sly, spiteful laugh: her mother

had pushed her out of the door because M. Dansaert was there, and she

prevented them from talking. Since the morning he had been going about

the settlement with two policemen, trying to pick up workmen, imposing

on the weak, and announcing everywhere that if the descent did not take

place on Monday at the Voreux, the Company had decided to hire men from

the Borinage. And as the night came on he sent away the policemen,

finding Pierronne alone; then he had remained with her to drink a glass

of gin before a good fire.

"Hush! hold your tongue! We must see them," said Levaque, with a lewd

laugh. "We'll explain everything directly. Get off with you, youngster."

Lydie drew back a few steps while he put his eye to a crack in the

shutter. He stifled a low cry and his back bent with a quiver. In her

turn his wife looked through, but she said, as though taken by the

colic, that it was disgusting. Maheu, who had pushed her, wishing also

to see, then declared that he had had enough for his money. And they

began again, in a row, each taking his glance as at a peep-show. The

parlour, glittering with cleanliness, was enlivened by a large fire;

there were cakes on the table with a bottle and glasses, in fact quite

a feast. What they saw going on in there at last exasperated the two

men, who under other circumstances would have laughed over it for six

months. That she should let herself be stuffed up to the neck, with

her skirts in the air, was funny. But, good God! was it not disgusting

to do that in front of a great fire, and to get up one's strength with

biscuits, when the mates had neither a slice of bread nor a fragment of

coal?

"Here's father!" cried Lydie, running away.

Pierron was quietly coming back from the washhouse with the bundle of

linen on his shoulder. Maheu immediately addressed him:

"Here! they tell me that your wife says that I sold Catherine, and that

we are all rotten at home. And what do they pay you in your house, your

wife and the gentleman who is this minute wearing out her skin?"

The astonished Pierron could not understand, and Pierronne, seized

with fear on hearing the tumult of voices, lost her head and set the

door ajar to see what was the matter. They could see her, looking very

red, with her dress open and her skirt tucked up at her waist; while

Dansaert, in the background, was wildly buttoning himself up. The head

captain rushed away and disappeared trembling with fear that this story

would reach the manager's ears. Then there would be an awful scandal,

laughter, and hooting and abuse.

"You, who are always saying that other people are dirty!" shouted the

Levaque woman to Pierronne; "it's not surprising that you're clean when

you get the bosses to scour you."

"Ah! it's fine for her to talk!" said Levaque again. "Here's a trollop

who says that my wife sleeps with me and the lodger, one below and the

other above! Yes! yes! that's what they tell me you say."

But Pierronne, grown calm, held her own against this abuse, very

contemptuous in the assurance that she was the best looking and the

richest.

"I've said what I've said; just leave me alone, will you! What have my

affairs got to do with you, a pack of jealous creatures who want to get

over us because we are able to save up money! Get along! get along!

You can say what you like; my husband knows well enough why Monsieur

Dansaert was here."

Pierron, in fact, was furiously defending his wife. The quarrel turned.

They accused him of having sold himself, of being a spy, the Company's

dog; they charged him with shutting himself up, to gorge himself with

the good things with which the bosses paid him for his treachery.

In defence, he pretended that Maheu had slipped beneath his door a

threatening paper with two cross-bones and a dagger above. And this

necessarily ended in a struggle between the men, as the quarrels of the

women always did now that famine was enraging the mildest. Maheu and

Levaque rushed on Pierron with their fists, and had to be pulled off.

Blood was flowing from her son-in-law's nose, when Mother Brulé, in her

turn, arrived from the washhouse. When informed of what had been going

on, she merely said:

"The damned beast dishonours me!"

The road was becoming deserted, not a shadow spotted the naked

whiteness of the snow, and the settlement, falling back into its

death-like immobility, went on starving beneath the intense cold.

"And the doctor?" asked Maheu, as he shut the door.

"Not come," replied Maheude, still standing before the window.

"Are the little ones back?"

"No, not back."

Maheu again began his heavy walk from one wall to the other, looking

like a stricken ox. Father Bonnemort, seated stiffly on his chair, had

not even lifted his head. Alzire also had said nothing, and was trying

not to shiver, so as to avoid giving them pain; but in spite of her

courage in suffering, she sometimes trembled so much that one could

hear against the coverlet the quivering of the little invalid girl's

lean body, while with her large open eyes she stared at the ceiling,

from which the pale reflection of the white gardens lit up the room

like moonshine.

The emptied house was now in its last agony, having reached a final

stage of nakedness. The mattress ticks had followed the wool to the

dealers; then the sheets had gone, the linen, everything that could be

sold. One evening they had sold a handkerchief of the grandfather's for

two sous. Tears fell over each object of the poor household which had

to go, and the mother was still lamenting that one day she had carried

away in her skirt the pink cardboard box, her man's old present, as one

would carry away a child to get rid of it on some doorstep. They were

bare; they had only their skins left to sell, so worn-out and injured

that no one would have given a farthing for them. They no longer even

took the trouble to search, they knew that there was nothing left, that

they had come to the end of everything, that they must not hope even

for a candle, or a fragment of coal, or a potato, and they were waiting

to die, only grieved about the children, and revolted by the useless

cruelty that gave the little one a disease before starving it.

"At last! here he is!" said Maheude.

A black figure passed before the window. The door opened. But it was

not Dr. Vanderhaghen; they recognized the new curé, Abbé Ranvier, who

did not seem surprised at coming on this dead house, without light,

without fire, without bread. He had already been to three neighbouring

houses, going from family to family, seeking willing listeners, like

Dansaert with his two policemen; and at once he exclaimed, in his

feverish fanatic's voice:

"Why were you not at mass on Sunday, my children? You are wrong, the

Church alone can save you. Now promise me to come next Sunday."

Maheu, after staring at him, went on pacing heavily, without a word. It

was Maheude who replied:

"To mass, sir? What for? Isn't the good God making fun of us? Look

here! what has my little girl there done to Him, to be shaking with

fever? Hadn't we enough misery, that He had to make her ill too, just

when I can't even give her a cup of warm gruel?"

Then the priest stood and talked at length. He spoke of the strike,

this terrible wretchedness, this exasperated rancour of famine, with

the ardour of a missionary who is preaching to savages for the glory

of religion. He said that the Church was with the poor, that she would

one day cause justice to triumph by calling down the anger of God on

the iniquities of the rich. And that day would come soon, for the rich

had taken the place of God, and were governing without God, in their

impious theft of power. But if the workers desired the fair division

of the goods of the earth, they ought at once to put themselves in the

hands of the priests, just as on the death of Jesus the poor and the

humble grouped themselves around the apostles. What strength the pope

would have, what an army the clergy would have under them, when they

were able to command the numberless crowd of workers! In one week they

would purge the world of the wicked, they would chase away the unworthy

masters. Then, indeed, there would be a real kingdom of God, every

one recompensed according to his merits, and the law of labour as the

foundation for universal happiness.

Maheude, who was listening to him, seemed to hear Étienne, in those

autumn evenings when he announced to them the end of their evils. Only

she had always distrusted the cloth.

"That's very well, what you say there, sir," she replied, "but that's

because you no longer agree with the bourgeois. All our other curés

dined at the manager's, and threatened us with the devil as soon as we

asked for bread."

He began again, and spoke of the deplorable misunderstanding between

the Church and the people. Now, in veiled phrases, he hit at the

town curés, at the bishops, at the highly placed clergy, sated with

enjoyment, gorged with domination, making pacts with the liberal middle

class, in the imbecility of their blindness, not seeing that it was

this middle class which had dispossessed them of the empire of the

world. Deliverance would come from the country priests, who would all

rise to re-establish the kingdom of Christ, with the help of the poor;

and already he seemed to be at their head; he raised his bony form like

the chief of a band, a revolutionary of the gospel, his eyes so filled

with light that they illuminated the gloomy room. This enthusiastic

sermon lifted him to mystic heights, and the poor people had long

ceased to understand him.

"No need for so many words," growled Maheu suddenly. "You'd best begin

by bringing us a loaf."

"Come on Sunday to mass," cried the priest. "God will provide for

everything."

And he went off to catechize the Levaques in their turn, so carried

away by his dream of the final triumph of the Church, and so

contemptuous of facts, that he would thus go through the settlements

without charities, with empty hands amid this army dying of hunger,

being a poor devil himself who looked upon suffering as the spur to

salvation.

Maheu continued his pacing, and nothing was heard but his regular tramp

which made the floor tremble. There was the sound of a rust-eaten

pulley; old Bonnemort was spitting into the cold grate. Then the rhythm

of the feet began again. Alzire, weakened by fever, was rambling in a

low voice, laughing, thinking that it was warm and that she was playing

in the sun.

"Good gracious!" muttered Maheude, after having touched her cheeks,

"how she burns! I don't expect that damned beast now, the brigands must

have stopped him from coming."

She meant the doctor and the Company. She uttered a joyous exclamation,

however, when the door once more opened. But her arms fell back and she

remained standing still with gloomy face.

"Good evening," whispered Étienne, when he had carefully closed the

door.

He often came thus at night-time. The Maheus learnt his retreat after

the second day. But they kept the secret and no one in the settlement

knew exactly what had become of the young man. A legend had grown

up around him. People still believed in him and mysterious rumours

circulated: he would reappear with an army and chests full of gold; and

there was always the religious expectation of a miracle, the realized

ideal, a sudden entry into that city of justice which he had promised

them. Some said they had seen him lying back in a carriage, with three

other gentlemen, on the Marchiennes road; others affirmed that he was

in England for a few days. At length, however, suspicions began to

arise and jokers accused him of hiding in a cellar, where Mouquette

kept him warm; for this relationship, when known, had done him harm.

There was a growing disaffection in the midst of his popularity, a

gradual increase of the despairing among the faithful, and their number

was certain, little by little, to grow.

"What brutal weather!" he added. "And you--nothing new, always from bad

to worse? They tell me that little Négrel has been to Belgium to get

Borains. Good God! we are done for if that is true!"

He shuddered as he entered this dark icy room, where it was some time

before his eyes were able to see the unfortunate people whose presence

he guessed by the deepening of the shade. He was experiencing the

repugnance and discomfort of the workman who has risen above his class,

refined by study and stimulated by ambition. What wretchedness! and

odours! and the bodies in a heap! And a terrible pity caught him by the

throat. The spectacle of this agony so overcame him that he tried to

find words to advise submission.

But Maheu came violently up to him, shouting:

"Borains! They won't dare, the bloody fools! Let the Borains go down,

then, if they want us to destroy the pits!"

With an air of constraint, Étienne explained that it was not possible

to move, that the soldiers who guarded the pits would protect the

descent of the Belgian workmen. And Maheu clenched his fists, irritated

especially, as he said, by having bayonets in his back. Then the

colliers were no longer masters in their own place? They were treated,

then, like convicts, forced to work by a loaded musket! He loved his

pit, it was a great grief to him not to have been down for two months.

He was driven wild, therefore, at the idea of this insult, these

strangers whom they threatened to introduce. Then the recollection that

his certificate had been given back to him struck him to the heart.

"I don't know why I'm angry," he muttered. "I don't belong to their

shop any longer. When they have hunted me away from here, I may as well

die on the road."

"As to that," said Étienne, "if you like, they'll take your certificate

back to-morrow. People don't send away good workmen."

He interrupted himself, surprised to hear Alzire, who was laughing

softly in the delirium of her fever. So far he had only made out Father

Bonnemort's stiff shadow, and this gaiety of the sick child frightened

him. It was indeed too much if the little ones were going to die of it.

With trembling voice he made up his mind.

"Look here! this can't go on, we are done for. We must give it up."

Maheude, who had been motionless and silent up to now, suddenly broke

out, and treating him familiarly and swearing like a man, she shouted

in his face:

"What's that you say? It's you who say that, by God!"

He was about to give reasons, but she would not let him speak.

"Don't repeat that, by God! or, woman as I am, I'll put my fist into

your face. Then we have been dying for two months, and I have sold

my household, and my little ones have fallen ill of it, and there is

to be nothing done, and the injustice is to begin again! Ah! do you

know! when I think of that my blood stands still. No, no, I would burn

everything, I would kill everything, rather than give up."

She pointed at Maheu in the darkness, with a vague, threatening gesture.

"Listen to this! If any man goes back to the pit, he'll find me waiting

for him on the road to spit in his face and cry coward!

Étienne could not see her, but he felt a heat like the breath of a

barking animal. He had drawn back, astonished at this fury which was

his work. She was so changed that he could no longer recognize the

woman who was once so sensible, reproving his violent schemes, saying

that we ought not to wish any one dead, and who was now refusing to

listen to reason and talking of killing people. It was not he now,

it was she, who talked politics, who dreamed of sweeping away the

bourgeois at a stroke, who demanded the republic and the guillotine

to free the earth of these rich robbers who fattened on the labour of

starvelings.

"Yes, I could flay them with my fingers. We've had enough of them! Our

turn is come now; you used to say so yourself. When I think of the

father, the grandfather, the grandfather's father, what all of them who

went before have suffered, what we are suffering, and that our sons and

our sons' sons will suffer it over again, it makes me mad--I could take

a knife. The other day we didn't do enough at Montsou; we ought to have

pulled the bloody place to the ground, down to the last brick. And do

you know I've only one regret, that we didn't let the old man strangle

the Piolaine girl. Hunger may strangle my little ones for all they

care!"

Her words fell like the blows of an axe in the night. The closed

horizon would not open, and the impossible ideal was turning to poison

in the depths of this skull which had been crushed by grief.

"You have misunderstood," Étienne was able to say at last, beating a

retreat. "We ought to come to an understanding with the Company. I know

that the pits are suffering much, so that it would probably consent to

an arrangement."

"No, never!" she shouted.

Just then Lénore and Henri came back with their hands empty. A

gentleman had certainly given them two sous, but the girl kept kicking

her little brother, and the two sous fell into the snow, and as Jeanlin

had joined in the search they had not been able to find them.

"Where is Jeanlin?"

"He's gone away, mother; he said he had business."

Étienne was listening with an aching heart. Once she had threatened

to kill them if they ever held out their hands to beg. Now she sent

them herself on to the roads, and proposed that all of them--the ten

thousand colliers of Montsou--should take stick and wallet, like

beggars of old, and scour the terrified country.

The anguish continued to increase in the black room. The little urchins

came back hungry, they wanted to eat; why could they not have something

to eat? And they grumbled, flung themselves about, and at last trod on

the feet of their dying sister, who groaned. The mother furiously boxed

their ears in the darkness at random. Then, as they cried still louder,

asking for bread, she burst into tears, and dropped on to the floor,

seizing them in one embrace with the little invalid; then, for a long

time, her tears fell in a nervous outbreak which left her limp and worn

out, stammering over and over again the same phrase, calling for death:

"O God! why do you not take us? O God! in pity take us, to have done

with it!"

The grandfather preserved his immobility, like an old tree twisted

by the rain and wind; while the father continued walking between the

fireplace and the cupboard, without turning his head.

But the door opened, and this time it was Doctor Vanderhaghen.

"The devil!" he said. "This light won't spoil your eyes. Look sharp!

I'm in a hurry."

As usual, he scolded, knocked up by work. Fortunately, he had matches

with him, and the father had to strike six, one by one, and to hold

them while he examined the invalid. Unwound from her coverlet, she

shivered beneath this flickering light, as lean as a bird dying in the

snow, so small that one only saw her hump. But she smiled with the

wandering smile of the dying, and her eyes were very large; while her

poor hands contracted over her hollow breast. And as the half-choked

mother asked if it was right to take away from her the only child who

helped in the household, so intelligent and gentle, the doctor grew

vexed.

"Ah! she is going. Dead of hunger, your blessed child. And not the only

one, either; I've just seen another one over there. You all send for

me, but I can't do anything; it's meat that you want to cure you."

Maheu, with burnt fingers, had dropped the match, and the darkness

closed over the little corpse, which was still warm. The doctor had

gone away in a hurry. Étienne heard nothing more in the black room

but Maheude's sobs, repeating her cry for death, that melancholy and

endless lamentation:

"O God! it is my turn, take me! O God! take my man, take the others,

out of pity, to have done with it!"