Germinal (57 page)

And indeed it was Étienne who had just cried ‘Halt!' But he had done so to protect the Company yards, which people had begun to talk of ransacking. Now that the stones were already bouncing off the front wall of the house, he was trying desperately to think of some legitimate prey upon which to unleash the mob and so prevent even more serious disasters. As he stood helpless and alone in the middle of the road, someone called to him. It was a man standing in the door of Tison's bar, where the landlady had hastily put up the shutters and left only the doorway clear.

‘Yes, it's me…Listen for a second.'

It was Rasseneur. Some thirty men and women, almost all from Village Two Hundred and Forty, had come to find out what was going on, having spent the earlier part of the day at home; and they had rushed into the bar when they saw the strikers approaching. Zacharie was sitting at one table with his wife Philomène, while further in sat Pierron and La Pierronne, their backs turned and their faces hidden. Not that anyone was actually drinking, they had simply taken refuge there.

Étienne recognized Rasseneur and was beginning to move away when Rasseneur added:

‘Rather not see me here, eh?…Well, I warned you. And now the trouble's starting. You can demand all the bread you want, but bullets are all you'll get.'

Étienne then walked back and gave his answer:

‘What I don't want to see are cowards standing about twiddling their thumbs while the rest of us are busy risking our necks.'

‘What are you going to do? Loot the manager's house?'

‘What I'm going to do is to stick by my friends, even if we do all get killed.'

A despairing Étienne then rejoined the crowd, ready to die. Three children were standing in the road throwing stones: he gave them a mighty kick and told them loudly, for the benefit of the comrades, that smashing windows wouldn't get anyone anywhere.

Bébert and Lydie had just caught up with Jeanlin, who was teaching them how to use a sling. They took it in turns to aim a stone, and the game was to see who could cause the greatest amount of damage. Lydie had just bungled her go and cut a woman's head open in the crowd, leaving the two boys clutching their sides with mirth. On a bench behind them, Bonnemort and Mouque sat watching. Bonnemort's swollen legs made it so hard for him to get about that he had had great difficulty in dragging himself this far, and no one quite knew what it was that he had come to see, for he had that ashen look on his face which he wore on days when it was impossible to get a word out of him.

In any case nobody was heeding Étienne now. Despite his orders the stones continued to rain down, and he gazed in astonishment and growing horror at these brutes he had unmuzzled, so slow to anger and yet, once roused, so fearsome in the stubborn ferocity of their wrath. Here was old Flemish blood at work, thick, placid blood that took months to warm to a task but then sallied forth with unspeakable savagery, deaf to all entreaty until the beast had drunk its fill of terrible deeds. Down south, where he came from, crowds would flare up more quickly but they did less damage in the end. He had to fight Levaque to part him from his axe, and as to the Maheus, who were now throwing stones with both hands, he had no idea how to restrain them. It was the women especially who scared him, La Levaque, La Mouquette and the others, every one of them in the grip of a murderous frenzy, baring tooth and claw and snarling like dogs, all the while urged on by La Brûlé, who held sway over them with her tall, skinny frame.

But there was a sudden lull, as momentary surprise produced some of the calm that all Étienne's pleading had been unable to obtain. It was only the Grégoires, who had resolved to take leave of their notary and were now proceeding across the road to the manager's house; and they looked so peaceable, seemed so clearly to believe that this was all just some joke on the part of these worthy colliers whose submissiveness they had lived off for the past century, that the astonished miners stopped throwing stones for fear of hitting this elderly couple who had appeared from nowhere. They allowed them to enter the garden,
climb the steps and ring the bell at the barricaded door, which no one hurried to open. At that moment Rose, the maid, had just returned from her day out and was laughing gaily in the face of the furious workers for, being from Montsou, she knew them all. And it was she who banged her fists on the door and managed to get Hippolyte to open it a few inches. Just in time, for, as the Grégoires disappeared inside, the stones began to rain down once more. Having recovered from its astonishment, the crowd was now clamouring louder than ever:

‘Death to the bourgeois! Long live socialism!'

Rose continued to laugh merrily in the hallway, as though she found the whole episode highly entertaining, and she kept saying to a terrified Hippolyte:

‘They mean no harm. I know them!'

M. Grégoire, in his tidy way, hung up his hat. Then, when he had helped Mme Grégoire to remove her thick woollen cape, he said in turn:

‘I'm sure that underneath it all they don't mean any real harm. Once they've had a good shout, they'll all go home with a better appetite for supper.'

At that moment M. Hennebeau was on his way down from the second floor. He had seen what happened, and he was coming to receive his guests, with his usual cool politeness. But the pallor of his face bore witness to the tears that had left him shaken. The man in him, the man of flesh and blood, had given up the struggle, leaving only the efficient administrator determined to carry out his duty.

‘You do know,' he said, ‘that the ladies are not back yet.'

For the first time the Grégoires became concerned. Cécile not back! How could she return if the miners carried on with this silly nonsense of theirs?

‘I did think of having them moved away from the house,' M. Hennebeau added. ‘The trouble is that I'm alone here, and in any case I don't know where to send my servant to fetch four men and a corporal who could get rid of this rabble for me.'

Rose was still standing there, and she ventured to mutter once more:

‘Oh, sir! They mean no harm.'

As M. Hennebeau shook his head, the uproar outside grew louder still, and they could hear the dull thud of stones hitting the front of the house.

‘I've nothing against them. Indeed I can excuse them, because you would need to be as stupid as they are to believe that our sole purpose is to do them harm. But it is my responsibility to keep the peace…To think that the roads are swarming with gendarmes – at least so everyone keeps telling me – and that I haven't been able to get hold of a single one all day!'

He broke off and gestured to Mme Grégoire to walk ahead:

‘Please, Madame, let us not remain here. Do come into the drawing-room.'

But they were detained in the hall a few minutes longer by the cook, who had come up from the basement having quite lost her patience. She declared that she could no longer answer for the dinner: she was still waiting for the vol-au-vent cases, which she had ordered to be delivered from the pastry shop in Marchiennes at four o'clock. Obviously the pastryman must have got lost on the way, no doubt scared by these ruffians. Perhaps his baskets had even been looted. She could see it all, the hold-up behind a bush, the vol-au-vent cases surrounded on all sides and then disappearing into the bellies of these three thousand wretches screaming for bread. Whatever happened, Monsieur had better be warned, she would rather put the whole dinner on the fire if it was going to be ruined on account of this here revolution of theirs.

‘Patience, patience,' said M. Hennebeau. ‘All is not lost. The pastryman may still come.'

As he turned round towards Mme Grégoire and opened the drawing-room door for her himself, he was very surprised to catch sight of someone he had not previously noticed sitting on the hall bench in the gathering darkness.

‘Goodness, it's you, Maigrat. What are you doing here?'

Maigrat had risen to his feet, and his fat, pallid face could now be seen, blank with terror. Gone was the bluff demeanour of old as he meekly explained how he had slipped across to Monsieur's house to ask for his help and protection if these criminals should attack his shop.

‘You can see perfectly well that I'm in danger myself, and I've got no one to help me,' M. Hennebeau replied. ‘You'd have done better to remain where you were and guard your stock.'

‘Oh, I've put the iron bars up, and my wife's looking after things.'

M. Hennebeau grew impatient and could not hide his contempt. Some guard she would be, that puny creature Maigrat'd beaten so often she was no more than skin and bones!

‘Well, there's nothing I can do. Defend yourself as best you can. And I advise you to go back at once, because they're still out there demanding bread…Listen to them.'

The clamour was growing louder again, and Maigrat thought he could hear his name being called amid the shouting. It simply wasn't possible for him to go back, he'd be lynched. At the same time he was distraught at the thought of being ruined. He stood with his face glued to the glass panel in the front door, sweating and trembling, on watch as disaster loomed. The Grégoires, meanwhile, finally consented to go into the drawing-room.

M. Hennebeau calmly went through the motions of doing the honours of the house. But he was unable to get his guests to sit down, for, in this airless, barricaded room, which required two lamps even though dusk had not yet fallen, the atmosphere of terror grew with each new round of shouting outside. Muffled by the curtains the crowd's anger became a dull roar, which made it sound all the more alarming and conveyed a sense of some terrible, indeterminate menace. There was conversation none the less, although they could not keep off the subject of this extraordinary revolt. M. Hennebeau, for his part, was surprised not to have seen it coming: and so poorly informed was he that he grew particularly incensed with Rasseneur, whose despicable hand he claimed to recognize in all this. Of course the gendarmes would arrive soon, they were hardly going to abandon him. As for the Grégoires, they had thoughts only for their daughter: the poor darling did take fright so! Perhaps, in view of the danger, the carriage had returned to Marchiennes. The waiting continued for another quarter of an hour, and nerves were stretched by the racket out in the road and the sound of stones hitting the shutters from time to time and
making them reverberate like drums. The situation was becoming intolerable, and M. Hennebeau was talking of going outside to chase the braggarts away himself and to meet the carriage, when Hippolyte appeared, shouting:

‘Monsieur, Monsieur! Madame's arrived. They're killing Madame!'

When the carriage had been unable to get beyond the Réquillart lane because of the threatening groups of people, Négrel had kept to his plan to walk the last hundred yards to the house and then knock on the little gate leading into the garden, next to the outbuildings: the gardener would hear them, there was bound to be someone there who would let them in. Things had gone well at first, and Mme Hennebeau and the young ladies were already knocking on the gate when some women who had been tipped off came rushing into the lane. Then everything went wrong. No one would open the gate, and Négrel had then vainly tried to force it open with his shoulder. The oncoming crowd of women was growing and he was afraid of being swept away in their path, so in desperation he ushered Mme Hennebeau and the girls forward in front of him, through the besieging mob, all the way to the front steps. But this manœuvre led to further commotion: they were still being pursued by a screaming horde of women, and meanwhile the crowd around them was swirling this way and that, not yet having realized what was going on and merely astonished to see these well-dressed ladies wandering about in the midst of battle. Such was the confusion at this point that there occurred one of those inexplicable things that can happen at moments of blind panic. Lucie and Jeanne, having reached the steps, had slipped in through the front door, which the maid was holding ajar: Mme Hennebeau had managed to follow them in; and finally Négrel entered the house and bolted the door, convinced that he had seen Cécile go in first before any of them. She was not there, she had vanished on the way: she had been so frightened that she had walked off in the opposite direction and straight into danger.

At once the cry went up:

‘Long live socialism! Death to the bourgeois!'

At a distance, and because of the veil covering her face, some
people took her for Mme Hennebeau. Others said she was a friend of Mme Hennebeau's, the young wife of a neighbouring factory-owner who was hated by his workers. Not that it mattered, for what infuriated them was the silk dress, the fur coat, everything about her down to the white feather in her hat. She smelled of scent, she wore a watch, and she had the delicate skin of an idle creature who had never had to handle coal.

‘Just you wait!' shouted La Brûlé. ‘We'll soon wipe your arse for you with all that lace.'

‘Those bitches would steal the clothes off your back,' La Levaque added. ‘Wrapping themselves in furs while the rest of us all freeze to death…Come on, undress her. Let's show her what life's really like!'

Suddenly La Mouquette rushed forward:

‘Yes, yes, let's whip her.'

Spurred on by this savage rivalry the women piled in, ragcovered arms outstretched as each of them tried to grab a piece of this little rich girl. No reason why her bum should be prettier than anyone else's! In fact plenty of those bourgeois women were just plain filthy beneath all that finery of theirs. No, this injustice had gone on long enough: they'd soon make them dress like working women, these trollops that spent fifty sous on having their petticoats laundered!

Surrounded by these furies Cécile stood there quaking, her legs paralysed with fear, and she kept mumbling the same thing over and over again:

‘Ladies, please, ladies, please don't hurt me!'