Germinal (52 page)

‘For pity's sake, sir!…There'll be a wholesale massacre. There's no point getting men killed for nothing.'

Deneulin refused to give in, and he flung one last protest at the crowd.

‘You're just a bunch of common criminals. But you'll see. Just you wait till we've got the upper hand again!'

He was led away: the crowd had surged forward, pressing the people at the front against the stairway and bending the handrail. It was the women pushing from behind, goading the men with their shrill cries. The door, which had no lock and was simply fastened with a latch, gave way immediately. But the stairway was too narrow, and in the crush people would have taken for ever to get in if the rest of the assailants had not decided to seek out other means of entrance. And in they poured, through the changing-room, through the screening-shed, through the boiler-house. In less than five minutes the entire pit was theirs, and they ran about the place on all three floors shouting and gesticulating, completely carried away by this victory over a boss who had tried to stand in their way.

Maheu, horrified, had rushed off with the first group, calling to Étienne:

‘They mustn't kill him.'

Étienne was already running, too; but when he realized that Deneulin had barricaded himself in the deputies' room, he shouted back:

‘So what if they do? It would hardly be our fault! The man's off his head!'

Nevertheless he was very worried and as yet too self-possessed to yield to such mass violence. Also his pride as a leader had been hurt by the way the mob had escaped his control and were running wild like this rather than coolly carrying out the will of the people in the manner he had expected. He called in vain for calm, shouting that they mustn't put their enemies in the right by engaging in senseless destruction.

‘The boilers!' La Brûlé was screaming. ‘Let's put out the fires.'

Levaque had found an iron-file, which he was brandishing like a dagger, and his terrible cry rang out over the tumult:

‘Cut the cables! Cut the cables!'

Soon everybody was repeating this; only Étienne and Maheu continued to protest, trying desperately to make themselves heard above the racket but quite unable to obtain silence. Finally Étienne managed to say:

‘But, comrades, there are men down there!'

The racket grew even louder, and voices could be heard coming from all directions:

‘Too bad! They shouldn't have gone down in the first place!…Serves the scabs right!…Let them stay there!…Anyway, they've always got the ladders!'

When they remembered the ladders, everyone became even more determined, and Étienne realized that he would have to give way. Fearing an even worse disaster, he rushed towards the engine-house in the hope of at least being able to bring the cages up, so that if the cables were severed above the shaft, they wouldn't smash the cages to pieces with their enormous weight when they fell on top of them. The mechanic in charge of it had disappeared along with the few other surface workers, and so Étienne grabbed the starting lever and pulled it while Levaque and two other men clambered up the iron framework that supported the pulleys. The cages had scarcely been locked into their keeps before the rasping sound of the file could be heard as it bit through the steel. There was total silence, and the sound seemed to fill the entire pit; everyone looked up in tense anticipation to watch and listen. Standing in the front row Maheu felt a surge of wild joy run through him, as though the blade of the file would deliver them all from evil by eating through the cable: this would be one miserable hole in the ground they would never have to go down again.

But La Brûlé had disappeared down the steps into the changing-room, still screaming at the top of her voice:

‘Let's put out the fires! To the boilers! To the boilers!'

Other women followed her. La Maheude hurried to stop them wrecking everything, just as her husband had tried to reason
with the comrades. She was the calmest person present: they could demand their rights without destroying people's property. When she entered the boiler-room, the women were already chasing the two stokers out, and La Brûlé, armed with a large shovel, was squatting in front of one of the boilers and emptying it as fast as she could, throwing the red-hot coal on to the brick floor, where it continued to smoulder. There were ten fire-grates for five boilers. Soon all the women had set to, La Levaque with both hands on her shovel, La Mouquette hoisting her skirts so that she didn't catch fire, all of them dishevelled and covered in sweat, and all bathed in the blood-red glow coming from the fires of this witches' sabbath. As the burning embers were piled higher and higher, the fierce heat began to crack the ceiling of the vast room.

‘Stop!' cried La Maheude. ‘The storeroom's on fire.'

‘So much the better!' answered La Brûlé. ‘That'll save us the bother…By God, I always said I'd make them pay for my old man's death!'

At that moment they heard the high-pitched voice of Jeanlin.

‘Watch out! I'll soon see to those fires! Here goes!'

Having been one of the first in, he had been darting about in the crowd, delighted by the free-for-all and looking for mischief. That was when he had the idea of opening the steam-cocks and releasing all the steam. Jets escaped like gunshot, and the five boilers blew themselves out like hurricanes, their thunderous hissing loud enough to burst an eardrum. Everything had disappeared in a cloud of steam, the burning coal paled, and the women were like ghosts gesturing wearily through the haze. Only Jeanlin was visible, up in the gallery behind the billowing clouds of white mist, a look of sheer delight on his face, his mouth gaping with joy at having unleashed this tempest.

All this lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. People had thrown buckets of water on to the heaps of coal, finally putting them out; all danger of the building catching fire had been averted. But the anger of the crowd had not abated, on the contrary it had been whipped to a new frenzy. Men were descending into the mine with hammers in their hands, even the women armed themselves with iron bars; and there was talk of puncturing
the boilers and smashing the machines, of demolishing the whole mine.

When Étienne was told this, he hurried to the scene with Maheu. Even he was in a state of high excitement, carried away by this feverish thirst for revenge. Nevertheless he did what he could to persuade everyone to calm down, now that the cables had been cut and the fires put out and the boilers emptied of steam, making all further work impossible. But still they refused to listen, and he was about to be overridden once again when booing could be heard outside, coming from beside a small, low door which was the entrance to the emergency ladder shaft.

‘Down with scabs!…Look at the filthy cowards!…Down with scabs!'

Those who had been working underground were beginning to emerge. The first ones stood there blinking, blinded by the daylight. Then they walked past, one by one, hoping to reach the road and make a run for it.

‘Down with scabs! Down with false friends!'

The whole crowd of strikers had come running. In less than three minutes there wasn't a soul left inside, and the five hundred men from Montsou lined up in two rows opposite each other, forcing the Vandame miners who had betrayed them by working to run the gauntlet between them. And as each new miner appeared at the door of the shaft, his clothes in tatters and covered in the black mud of his labour, he was met by renewed booing and savage ribaldry. Here, look at him, the short-arse runt! And him! The tarts at the Volcano must have done for his nose. And just look at the wax coming out of that man's ears! You could light a cathedral with that lot! And that tall one with no bum on him and a face as long as Lent! A putter rolled out of the door, so fat that her breasts, her stomach and her backside all merged into one, and she was met by a storm of laughter. Could they have a feel? Then the jokes turned nasty, cruel even, and fists were about to fly. Meanwhile the rest of the poor devils continued to file past, shivering and silent amid all the insults, throwing anxious sideways glances in case they were about to be hit, and relieved when they were finally able to run away from the pit.

‘Just look at them! How many of them are there in there?' asked Étienne.

He was surprised to see people still coming out, and it irritated him to think that it wasn't just a case of a few workers who had been driven to it by hunger or by sheer terror of the deputies. So had they lied to him in the forest? Almost the whole of Jean-Bart had gone down. But he gave an involuntary cry and rushed forward when he caught sight of Chaval standing in the doorway.

‘In God's name, is this what you call meeting up?'

People started cursing, and some wanted to jump on the traitor. What was going on? He had taken a solemn oath with them the night before, and here he was going down the mine with everyone else! Was this some sort of bloody joke?

‘Take him away. Throw him down the pit.'

Chaval, white with fear, was desperately trying to stammer out an explanation. But Étienne cut him short, beside himself with anger, and quite taken up by the general fury.

‘You wanted to join us, and join us you bloody well will…Come on, you bastard. Off we go, left, right, left, right.'

His voice was drowned by a fresh clamour. Catherine herself had just appeared, dazzled by the bright sunshine and terrified to find herself surrounded by these savages. As she stood there trying to catch her breath, her hands bleeding and her legs about to give way beneath her after climbing those hundred and two ladders, La Maheude saw her and ran forward with her arm raised.

‘You too, you little bitch?…Your own mother is dying of hunger, and you go and betray her for that pimp of yours!'

Maheu caught her arm and prevented the blow. But he started shaking his daughter and, like his wife, reproaching her furiously for how she had behaved. They had both lost control and were screaming wildly above the noise of their comrades.

The sight of Catherine had been the final straw for Étienne.

‘Come on!' he kept insisting. ‘Let's go to the other pits! And as for you, you filthy bastard, you're coming with us!'

Chaval scarcely had time to fetch his clogs from the changing-room and to throw his jersey round his freezing shoulders. They dragged him away with them, forcing him to run along in their
midst. Distraught, Catherine also put her clogs back on and buttoned up the old jacket, a man's one, which she had been wearing since the weather turned cold; and she hurried along behind her man, not wanting to let him out of her sight, for they were surely going to slaughter him.

Jean-Bart emptied in two minutes. Jeanlin had found a horn and was blowing it raucously as though he were rounding up cattle. The women, La Brûlé, La Levaque, La Mouquette, all gathered up their skirts in order to run better, while Levaque twirled an axe about as though it were a drum-major's baton. Other comrades were still arriving, and there was nearly a thousand of them now, a disorderly rabble that flowed out on to the road like a river in spate. The exit was too narrow, and fences were smashed.

‘To the pits! Let's get the scabs! No more work!'

And suddenly Jean-Bart fell completely silent. Not a worker to be seen, not a breath to be heard. Deneulin came out of the deputies' room and, all alone, gesturing that no one should follow, he went round inspecting the pit. He was pale and very calm. First he stopped at the shaft and looked up at the severed cables: the steel strands dangled uselessly in the air, and he could see where the file had left its wound, a gleaming sore surrounded by black grease. Then he went up to the winding-gear and stared at the motionless crank-rod, which looked like the joint of some colossal limb that had been suddenly paralysed; he felt the metal, which had already cooled, and its cold touch made him shiver as though he had laid his hand on a corpse. Then he went down to the boilers, where he walked slowly along the line of extinguished fire-grates, now wide open and flooded, and he tapped his foot against the boilers, which sounded hollow. Well, this was it. His ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and relit the fires, where would he find the men? Another two weeks of the strike and he was bankrupt. And in the certain prospect of this disaster he no longer felt hatred towards these bandits from Montsou but rather a kind of complicity, as though together they were all expiating the one same everlasting and universal sin. Animals no doubt they were, but animals who could not read and who were starving to death.

And so, out on the open plain that lay white with frost beneath the pale winter sun, the mob departed along the road, spilling out on both sides into the fields of beet.

By the time they had reached La Fourche-aux-Bœufs, Étienne had taken charge. Without interrupting their advance, he shouted out commands and organized the march. Jeanlin raced along in front, playing barbarous tunes on his horn. Then came the women, in rows, some armed with sticks: La Maheude had a wild look in her eye, as though she were straining to catch a distant glimpse of the promised land of justice, while La Brûlé, La Levaque and La Mouquette strode out in their tattered skirts like soldiers marching off to war. If they ran into any opposition, they'd soon see if the gendarmes would dare to hit a woman. The men followed, a disorderly herd that spread wider and wider as it stretched away into the distance: and among the forest of crowbars Levaque's solitary axe stood out, its blade glinting in the sunlight. Étienne, in the middle, was keeping an eye on Chaval, whom he made walk in front of him; while behind him Maheu looked thunderous and kept casting dirty looks at Catherine, who was the only woman back here among the men and who had insisted on running along beside her lover to prevent any harm coming to him. Some were without caps, their hair tousled by the breeze; and apart from the wild blasts of Jeanlin's horn all that could be heard was the clatter of clogs, which sounded like cattle stampeding.