Germinal (58 page)

But then she gave a hoarse cry: cold hands had closed round her throat. It was Bonnemort. The crowd had pushed her up against him, and he had then seized hold of her. He appeared giddy with hunger and somehow dazed and bewildered after all his long years of poverty. It was as if he had now suddenly awoken from half a century's submissiveness, although it was impossible to tell what particular upsurge of rancour had brought this about. Having in the course of his life saved some dozen comrades from death, risking his own skin amid the firedamp and the rock-falls, he was now responding to inner promptings which he could not have described, to the simple
need to do what he was doing, to his fascination with this young girl's white neck. And since this was one of the days when he had temporarily lost his power of speech, he tightened his grip like some old, sick animal and seemed to ruminate his memories.

‘No! No!' the women screamed. ‘Her knickers! Take her knickers off!'

Inside the house, as soon as they realized what was happening, Négrel and M. Hennebeau had bravely opened the front door to rush to Cécile's aid. But the crowd was now pressing up against the garden railing, and it was no longer easy to get out. There was a struggle, and the Grégoires appeared at the top of the steps with a look of horror on their faces.

‘Leave her alone, Grandpa! It's the girl from La Piolaine!' La Maheude shouted, having recognized Cécile when another woman tore her veil.

Étienne for his part was shocked to see them taking out their thirst for vengeance on a mere child, and he did everything he could to get the mob to back off. In a moment of inspiration he started brandishing the axe that he had torn from Levaque's hands.

‘Come on, for God's sake, let's get Maigrat!…He's got bread. Let's smash his shop!'

Whereupon he hit the door of the shop with a random swing of his axe. Some comrades followed his lead, Levaque, Maheu and a few others. But the women were not to be denied. Cécile had escaped the clutches of Bonnemort only to fall into the hands of La Brûlé. Led by Jeanlin, Lydie and Bébert were down on all fours crawling between the skirts to get a glimpse of the young lady's bottom. Cécile was being tugged this way and that and already her clothes were beginning to split when a man on horseback appeared, urging his mount on and using his whip on anyone who was slow to get out of his way.

‘So, you dirty rabble. Now you want to whip our daughters, do you?'

It was Deneulin, arriving for his dinner engagement. In an instant he had jumped down on to the road and grabbed Cécile by the waist. With his other hand he manœuvred his horse with exceptional skill and strength and used it as a living wedge to
drive a path through the crowd, which recoiled from its flying hooves. At the railings the battle was still going on. Nevertheless he managed to get past, crushing various limbs as he did so. Amid the oaths and the fisticuffs this unexpected assistance brought deliverance to Négrel and M. Hennebeau, who had been in considerable danger. And as the young man finally took the unconscious Cécile inside, Deneulin, who was shielding the manager with his large body, was hit by a stone as he reached the top of the steps, and the force of it nearly dislocated his shoulder.

‘That's right!' he cried. ‘You've wrecked my machinery, so why not break my bones while you're at it!'

He promptly shut the door. A volley of stones rained against the wood.

‘They've gone mad!' he continued. ‘Another couple of seconds and they'd have split my skull open, like cracking a nut…There's really no talking to them now. They've lost their senses, the only thing for it is brute force.'

In the drawing-room the Grégoires were in tears as they watched Cécile recover from her faint. She was unharmed, not even a scratch: only her little veil had been lost. But their dismay increased when they found their cook Mélanie standing in front of them recounting how the mob had demolished La Piolaine. Terrified, she had rushed over to inform her master and mistress at once. At the height of the commotion she, too, had managed to get in through the half-opened front door, unnoticed; and in the course of her rambling narrative the single stone thrown by Jeanlin, which had broken one window-pane, became a veritable broadside of cannon fire rending the walls of the house asunder. M. Grégoire was completely bemused. Here they were strangling his child and razing his house to the ground. Was it then true? Was it actually possible that the miners bore him a grudge for living a sober, decent life off the fruits of their labour?

The maid, who had brought a towel and some eau de Cologne, insisted:

‘But it's strange all the same. They're not bad people.'

Mme Hennebeau sat looking very pale, unable to get over
the shock; and she managed a smile only when Négrel was congratulated. Cécile's parents were particularly grateful to the young man: the marriage was settled. M. Hennebeau looked on silently, his gaze passing from his wife to this lover he had that morning sworn to kill, and then to this young girl who would no doubt soon take him off his hands. He was in no hurry: his only remaining fear was that his wife might stoop lower still, with a servant perhaps.

‘And how about you, my dear little ones?' Deneulin asked his daughters. ‘No bones broken?'

Lucie and Jeanne had had a considerable fright, but they were glad to have seen it all and were now laughing about it.

‘My goodness, what a day we've had!' their father continued. ‘If you want a dowry, you'll have to earn it yourselves now, I'm afraid. And what's more you can expect to have me to feed as well!'

He was joking, but his voice was shaking. His eyes filled with tears as his two daughters flung themselves into his arms.

M. Hennebeau had heard this confession of ruin. A sudden thought lit up his face. Yes, Vandame would become part of Montsou. Here was the compensation he'd hoped for, the stroke of luck that would restore him to favour in the eyes of the Board. Each time he had met with catastrophe during his life he had habitually fallen back on the resort of carrying out his orders to the letter, and from this personal version of military discipline he derived the one small share of happiness he enjoyed.

But everyone was now beginning to relax, and an atmosphere of weary calm fell on the room, thanks to the soft, steady light from the two lamps and the cosy warmth created by the door-curtains. But what was happening outside? The shouting had died away, and stones had ceased to rain against the front wall of the house. All that could be heard was a dull thudding, like the sound of an axe far off in the wood. Everybody wanted to know what was going on, so they returned to the hall and ventured to look through the glass panel in the front door. Even the ladies went upstairs to peep through the shutters on the first floor.

‘Just look at that scoundrel Rasseneur standing in the entrance
to that bar over there?' M. Hennebeau said to Deneulin. ‘I knew it. I knew he had to be involved.'

Yet it was not Rasseneur but Étienne who was attacking Maigrat's shop with an axe. He kept on calling to the comrades: didn't everything in the shop belong to the miners? Wasn't it their right to take back what was theirs from this thief who had been exploiting them for so long and who reduced them all to starvation the minute the Company told him to do so? Gradually everyone abandoned the manager's house and rushed across to start looting the nearby shop. Once more the cry went up: ‘We want bread! We want bread!' And bread they would find, beyond this door. They were seized by a frenzy of hunger as if all of a sudden they could wait no longer, as though otherwise they would die right here on this road. And they pressed so hard towards the door that Étienne was afraid of injuring someone each time he swung the axe.

Meanwhile Maigrat had left the hall and taken refuge in the kitchen; but he could hear nothing from there and kept picturing the most terrible assaults taking place against his shop. So he had just come back upstairs again and gone to hide behind the pump outside when he distinctly heard his own front door cracking and people calling his name as they prepared to loot the shop. So it wasn't all simply a bad dream: while he couldn't see, he could now hear what was going on, and his ears rang as he followed the progress of the attack. Each blow of the axe struck at his heart. A hinge must have given way, in another five minutes the shop would be theirs. He could see the whole thing in his mind's eye, real, terrifying images, the plunderers rushing in, breaking open the drawers, emptying the sacks, eating and drinking everything in sight, stripping their living quarters bare and leaving him nothing, not even a stick to go begging with in the neighbouring village. No, he would not let them ruin him completely. Over his dead body! As he stood there, he had been observing a side-window of the house where he could make out the pale, blurred form of his wife in puny silhouette through the glass: no doubt she was watching the attack on the shop with her usual blank expression, like the poor, battered creature she was. Beneath the window was a lean-to shed which was so
positioned that it was possible to climb on to it from the manager's garden by means of the trellis attached to the boundary wall; and from there it was a simple matter to crawl up the tiles as far as the window. He was now obsessed by the thought of returning home in this way, for he bitterly regretted ever having left. Perhaps he would still have time to barricade the shop with furniture; indeed he was busy imagining other forms of heroic defence, like pouring boiling oil or burning paraffin down from above. A desperate struggle was taking place between his fear and his devotion to his stock, and he was panting with the effort of battling against his cowardice. Suddenly, as he heard the axe sink deeper into the door, he made up his mind. Avarice won the day: he and his wife would protect the sacks with their own bodies rather than give up one single loaf of bread.

The jeering started almost at once.

‘Look! Up there! It's the tomcat himself! After him! After him!'

The mob had just caught sight of Maigrat up on the shed roof. In his desperation he had managed to shin up the trellis with ease, despite his weight, quite oblivious to the sound of breaking wood; and now he was stretched out flat over the tiles, trying to reach the window. But the pitch of the roof was very steep, his stomach impeded his progress, and his nails were breaking off. Nevertheless he would have made it to the top if he had not begun to tremble at the thought of being stoned; for down below the crowd, whom he could no longer see, was still shouting:

‘Catch the cat! Catch the cat!…Let's thrash him!'

Suddenly both hands lost their grip, and he rolled down the roof like a ball, bounced off the guttering and landed so awkwardly on the boundary wall that he rebounded on to the road beneath and split his skull on the corner of a milestone. Brains spurted out. He was dead. And the pale blur of his wife continued to gaze down from above.

At first there was a stunned silence. Étienne had stopped, and the axe fell from his hands. Maheu, Levaque and the others forgot about the shop, and all eyes turned to look at a slow trickle of blood running down the wall. The shouting had ceased,
and a deep hush fell amid the gathering gloom. All at once the jeering started up again. It was the women, now rushing forward and thirsting for blood.

‘So there is a God after all! That's the end of you, you pig!'

They all stood round the still-warm corpse and shouted insults and laughed at it, calling the shattered skull a dirty gob and flinging all the accumulated resentment of their long starvation in the face of death itself.

‘I owed you sixty francs, you thief! And there's your payment!' said La Maheude, in as much of a rage as anyone. ‘You won't refuse me credit any more, that's for sure…Wait a minute, though. Let me just fatten you up a bit more.'

And, scratching at the ground with her fingers, she scooped up two handfuls of dirt and rammed them into his mouth.

‘There! Eat that!…Go on, stuff yourself, like you used to stuff us!'

The abuse intensified as the dead man lay there motionless on his back, staring with his big wide eyes at the vast sky where darkness was falling. This earth stuffed into his mouth was the bread he had refused to let them have. And it was the only sort of bread he'd be eating from now on. Much good it had done him, starving the poor to death like that.

But the women had further scores to settle. They prowled round him, nostrils flaring, sizing him up like she-wolves. Each of them was trying to think of some terrible deed, some savage act of vengeance, which might relieve their pent-up fury.

The sour voice of La Brûlé was heard.

‘If he's a tomcat, let's cut him!'

‘Yes, yes. Cut him, cut him. The bastard's used it once too often!'

Already La Mouquette was busy pulling his trousers off as La Levaque lifted his legs. And then, with her old, wizened hands, La Brûlé parted his naked thighs and seized hold of his now defunct manhood. She grabbed the whole thing in one hand and pulled, her bony spine tense with the effort, her long arms cracking. When the flabby skin refused to give, she had to pull even harder, but finally it came away in her hand, a lump
of hairy, bleeding flesh which she proceeded to brandish in triumph:

‘I've got it! I've got it!'

Shrill voices acclaimed the terrible trophy with their imprecations.

‘That's the last time you shove that up our daughters, you dirty sod!'

‘Yeah, no more of your payments in kind. No more spreading our legs just so we can each have a loaf of bread!'

‘That reminds me, I still owe you six francs. Would you like something on account? I'm game…if you feel up to it!'

This joke had them in fits of terrible laughter. They all pointed at the bloody lump of flesh as though it were some nasty animal that had harmed them and they had just crushed it to death and could gaze at its lifeless form, now wholly in their power. They spat on it and from jutting jaws poured out their furious contempt: