Germinal (31 page)

From then on Étienne underwent a gradual transformation. An instinctive fastidiousness about his personal appearance and a taste for comfortable living, both hitherto dormant beneath his destitution, now declared themselves, and led to the purchase of some good-quality clothes. He treated himself to a fine pair of boots, and at once he was a leader; the village began to rally
to him. There now came moments of delicious gratification for his self-esteem, as he drank deep of these first, heady draughts of popularity: to lead like this, to command, when he was still so young, indeed until recently a mere labourer, it all filled him with pride and fed his dream of an imminent revolution in which he would have his role to play. His facial expression changed, he grew solemn and began to enjoy the sound of his own voice; and burgeoning ambition added fiery urgency to his theorizing and prompted thoughts of combat.

Meanwhile autumn was drawing on, and the October chill had turned the little village gardens the colour of rust. Behind the scraggy lilac bushes pit-boys had ceased to pin putters to the shed roof; all that was to be seen were a few winter plants, cabbages covered in pearly beads of frost, leeks and winter greens. Once again the rain beat down on the red roof tiles and gushed into the water-butts beneath the gutters with the roar of a torrent. In every house the iron stove stayed permanently lit, repeatedly stoked with coal and poisoning the close atmosphere of the parlour. Another season of grinding poverty had begun.

On one of the first of these frosty October nights Étienne was feeling so excited after all the talk downstairs that he could not get to sleep. He had watched Catherine slip into bed and blow out the candle. She, too, seemed restless, a prey to one of her occasional fits of modesty when she still undressed in such clumsy haste that she uncovered herself even more. She lay in the darkness with the stillness of a corpse; but he knew she could not sleep any more than he could; and he could sense her thinking of him, just as he was thinking of her. Never had this silent exchange of their being unsettled them so. Minutes went by, and neither stirred; only their breathing betrayed them, coming in awkward snatches as they strove to control it. Twice he was on the point of going over and taking her. It was daft to want each other so much and never do anything about it. Why be so set against their own desire? The children were asleep, she wanted it, here and now, he knew for certain that she was breathless with the expectation of it, that she would wrap him in her arms, silently, with her mouth tight shut. Nearly an hour went by. He did not go over and take her, and she did not turn
towards him, for fear of summoning him. And the longer they lived in each other's pocket, the more a barrier grew up between them, feelings of embarrassment and distaste, a sense of the proprieties of friendship, none of which they could have explained even to themselves.

‘Look,' said La Maheude, ‘since you're going to Montsou to collect your wages, can you bring me back a pound of coffee and a kilo of sugar?'

Maheu was in the middle of stitching up one of his shoes, to save on the repair.

‘All right,' he muttered, without pausing in his task.

‘And maybe you'd drop in at the butcher's, too?…And get us a bit of veal, eh? It's so long since we had any.'

This time he looked up.

‘It's not thousands I'm collecting, you know…A fortnight's pay just doesn't stretch these days, what with them bloody making us stop work all the time.'

They both fell silent. It was after lunch, one Saturday towards the end of October. Once again the Company had cited the disruption caused by pay-day as an excuse for halting production throughout its pits. Panicked by the worsening industrial crisis, and not wanting to add to its already considerable stockpiles, it was using the slightest pretext to deprive its ten thousand employees of work.

‘You know Étienne's going to be waiting for you at Rasseneur's,' La Maheude continued. ‘Why not take him with you? He'll be better at sorting things out if they don't pay you your full number of hours.'

Maheu nodded.

‘And ask them about that business with your father. The doctor's in cahoots with management over it…Isn't that right, Grandpa? The doctor's got it all wrong. You're still fit to work, aren't you?'

For the past ten days old Bonnemort had not moved from his chair; his pegs had gone to sleep, as he put it. She had to ask him again.

‘Of course I can work,' he growled. ‘No one's done for just cos their legs is playing up. It's all stuff and nonsense, so they don't have to pay me that hundred and eighty francs for my pension.'

La Maheude thought of the forty sous that the old man might never earn again, and she gave an anxious cry:

‘My God! We'll all be dead soon if things go on like this.'

‘At least when you're dead,' said Maheu, ‘you don't feel hungry any more.'

He knocked a few more nails into his shoes and eventually left.

Those who lived in Village Two Hundred and Forty would not be paid until four o'clock or thereabouts. So the men were in no hurry, lingering at home before setting off one by one, and then pursued by entreaties from their wives to make sure and come straight home again. Many were given errands to run, so they wouldn't end up in the bars drowning their sorrows.

At Rasseneur's Étienne had come in search of news. Worrying rumours were circulating, and the Company was said to be getting more and more dissatisfied with the standard of timbering. The miners were being fined heavily now, there was bound to be a stand-off. Anyway, that wasn't the real problem. There was far more to it than that, there were deeper issues at stake.

In fact, just as Étienne arrived, a workmate who had come in for a beer on his way back from Montsou was busy telling everybody about how there was a notice up in the cashier's office; but he didn't rightly know what it said. Another man appeared, then a third; and each one had a different story. What was clear, however, was that the Company had come to some sort of a decision.

‘What do you think?' Étienne asked, as he sat down beside Souvarine at a table where the only visible refreshment was a packet of tobacco.

Souvarine took his time to finish rolling a cigarette.

‘I think it's been obvious all along. They want to force you to the brink.'

He was the only one with sufficient intelligence to analyse the situation accurately, and he explained it with his usual calm. Faced with the crisis, the Company had been forced to reduce its costs in order to avoid going under; and naturally the workers were the ones who were going to have to tighten their belts. The Company would gradually whittle their wages down, using whatever pretext came to hand. Coal had been piling up at the pit-heads for two months now, since all the factories were idle. But the Company didn't dare lay off its own workers because it would be ruinous not to maintain the plant, and so it was looking for some middle way, perhaps a strike, which would bring its workforce to heel and leave it less well paid than before. Last but not least, it was worried about the provident fund: this could prove to be a threat one day, whereas a strike now would eliminate it by depleting the fund while it was still small.

Rasseneur had sat down next to Étienne, and the two of them listened in consternation. They could talk freely since there was only Mme Rasseneur left, sitting at the counter.

‘What a thought!' Rasseneur muttered. ‘But why? It's not in the Company's interest to have a strike, nor in the workers'. It would be better to come to some agreement.'

This was the sensible way forward. He was always the one for making reasonable demands. In fact, since the sudden popularity of his former lodger, he had been rather overdoing his line about politics and the art of the possible, and how people who wanted ‘everything, and now!' got nothing. He was a jovial man, the typical beer-drinker with a fat belly, but deep down he felt a growing jealousy, which was not helped by the fall in his trade: the workers from Le Voreux were coming into his bar less and less to have a drink and listen to him, which meant that sometimes he even found himself defending the Company and forgetting his resentment at having been sacked when he was a miner.

‘So you're against a strike?' Mme Rasseneur shouted over from the counter.

And when he energetically said ‘yes', she cut him short.

‘Pah! You've no guts. You should listen to these two gentlemen.'

Deep in thought, Étienne was gazing down at the beer she had brought him. Eventually he looked up:

‘Everything our friend here says is perfectly possible, and we simply will have to strike if they force us to it…As it happens, Pluchart's recently sent me some sound advice on the subject. He's against a strike, too, because the workers suffer as much as the bosses but end up with nothing to show for it. Except that he sees the strike as a great opportunity to get our men involved in his grand plan…Here's his letter, in fact.'

Sure enough, Pluchart, despairing of the Montsou miners' sceptical attitude towards the International, was hoping to see them join
en masse
if a dispute were to set them at odds with the Company. Despite all his efforts, Étienne had failed to get a single person to join, though he had mainly been using his influence in the cause of his own provident fund, which had been much better received. But the fund was still so small that it would, as Souvarine said, be quickly exhausted; and then, inevitably, the strikers would rush to join the Workers' Association, in the hope that their brothers throughout the world would come to their aid.

‘How much have you got in the fund?' asked Rasseneur.

‘Barely three thousand francs,' Étienne replied. ‘And, you know, management asked to see me the day before yesterday. Oh, they were all nice and polite, and kept saying they wouldn't prevent their workers from setting up a contingency fund. But I could see they wanted to run it themselves…Whatever happens, we're in for a fight over it.'

Rasseneur had begun to pace up and down, and gave a whistle of contempt. Three thousand francs! What good was that, for heaven's sake? It wouldn't even provide six days' worth of bread, and if they were going to count on foreigners, people who lived in England, well, they might as well roll over now and hold their tongues. No, really, this talk of a strike was just daft.

And so, for the first time, bitter words were exchanged between the two men who were normally of one mind in their hatred of capital.

‘So, what do you think?' Étienne asked again, turning towards Souvarine.

The latter replied with his usual pithy scorn.

‘Strikes? More nonsense.'

Then, breaking the angry silence that had now fallen, he added gently:

‘Mind you, I don't say you shouldn't, if you fancy it. A strike ruins some and kills others, which at least makes for a few less in the world…Only at that rate it would take a thousand years to renew the world. Why not start by blowing up Death Row for me!'

With his slender hand he gestured towards the buildings at Le Voreux, which could be seen through the open door. Then he was interrupted by unforeseen drama: Poland, his plump pet rabbit, had ventured outside but come bounding back in to avoid the stones being hurled by a gang of pit-boys; and in her terror she was cowering against his legs, ears back, tail tucked in, scratching and begging to be picked up. He laid her on his lap, under the shelter of his hands, and then fell into a kind of trance, as he did each time he stroked her soft, warm fur.

Almost at once Maheu walked in. He didn't want a drink, despite some polite insistence from Mme Rasseneur, who sold her beer as if she were making a present of it. Étienne had already stood up, and the two men left for Montsou.

On pay-days at the Company yards Montsou wore an air of celebration, as though it were a fine Sunday on the day of the
ducasse
. A horde of miners converged from the surrounding villages. Since the cashier's office was very small, they preferred to wait outside, standing about in groups on the road and causing an obstruction with their continuous queue. Hawkers made the most of the opportunity, setting up their mobile stalls and displaying everything from crockery to cooked meats. But it was the taverns and bars that did a particularly brisk trade, since the miners would go and stand at the counter to pass the time till they were paid, and then return there to celebrate once the money was in their pockets. And they were always very well behaved about it, presuming they didn't go and blow the lot at the Volcano.

As Maheu and Étienne moved along in the queue, they could sense the underlying mood of discontent. This wasn't the usual carefree atmosphere of men collecting their pay and then leaving half of it on the counter of some bar. Fists were clenched, and fighting words were exchanged.

‘So it's true, then?' Maheu asked Chaval when he met him outside Piquette's. ‘They've gone and done the dirty on us?'

But Chaval merely snarled in fury and threw a sideways glance at Étienne. When the concessions were renewed, he had signed on with a different team, increasingly consumed with envy of his comrade, this Johnny-come-lately who'd set himself up as a leader, and whose boots, he said, the whole village now seemed ready to lick. Nor were the lovers' tiffs helping: each time he took Catherine to Réquillart or behind the spoil-heap, he would accuse her in the foulest terms of sleeping with her mother's lodger, after which, in a frenzy of renewed desire, he would almost kill her with his love-making.

Maheu inquired again:

‘Is it Le Voreux's turn yet?'

And when Chaval nodded and turned away, Maheu and Étienne decided it was time to enter the yard.

The cashier's office was a small rectangular room, divided in two by a grille. Five or six miners were waiting on the benches along the wall, while the cashier, assisted by a clerk, was paying another miner, who was standing, cap in hand, at his window. Above the bench on the left a yellow notice had recently been posted, fresh and clean against the grey, smoke-stained plaster; and all day long the men had been filing past it. They would arrive in their twos and threes, stand looking at it for a while, and then silently leave with a sudden sag of the shoulders, as though this was the final straw.