Germinal (60 page)

One evening Jeanlin brought him the remains of a candle, which he had stolen from a wagoner's lantern; and for Étienne this was a great relief. When the darkness began to get to him and his thoughts started weighing on him as though he might soon go mad, he would light it for a moment; and then, when he had chased away the gremlins, he would extinguish it, determined to economize on this bright light that was as necessary to his survival as bread itself. The silence made his ears hum, and all he ever heard was the scuttling of rats, the creaking of the old timbering, or the tiny sound of a spider weaving its web. And as he stared into the warm void, his mind kept returning to
the same old question: what were his comrades doing up there? To abandon them would have seemed to him the worst possible act of cowardice. If he was hiding down here like this, it was so that he could remain free, ready to advise and act. His long periods of reflection had shown him where his true ambition lay: pending something better he wanted to be like Pluchart, to stop work and devote himself entirely to politics, but alone, in a nice clean room somewhere, on the grounds that brain work is a full-time job and requires much peace and quiet.

At the beginning of the second week, Jeanlin having told him that the gendarmes believed him to have crossed into Belgium, Étienne ventured out of his hole after nightfall. He wanted to assess the situation, to see if it was still worth resisting. For his own part he thought that their chances of success had been compromised. Before the strike he had had his doubts about the possibility of victory but had simply gone along with things; now, having experienced the heady excitement of rebellion, he had reverted to his original doubts and despaired of ever getting the Company to concede. But he did not yet admit as much to himself, and he was tortured with anguish at the thought of the miseries that defeat would bring, of all the heavy responsibility which he would have to bear for people's suffering. Would not an end to the strike also mean an end to his own role in the matter, the collapse of his ambitions, a return to his brutish existence in the mine and the revoltingness of life in the village? And he tried in all honesty, without base or false calculations, to recover his sense of commitment, to convince himself that resistance was still feasible, that capital would destroy itself when faced with the heroic suicide of labour.

And indeed news of ruin after ruin was now reverberating across the whole region. At night, as he roamed the dark countryside like a wolf that has left the shelter of its wood, he could almost hear the companies collapsing from one end of the plain to the other. Along the roadsides he was continually passing empty, lifeless factories whose buildings stood rotting beneath a pale, ghostly sky. The sugar-refineries had suffered particularly; Hoton and Fauvelle, having both reduced their workforces, had just gone bust one after the other. At the
Dutilleul flour-mills the last grindstone had stopped turning on the second Saturday of the month, and the Bleuze rope-works, which made cables for the pits, had been been brought down once and for all by the halt in production. Around Marchiennes the situation was daily getting worse: not one furnace operating at the Gagebois glass factory, continual lay-offs at the Sonneville construction works, only one of the three blast-furnaces at Les Forges still functioning, and not a single battery of coke-ovens was to be seen burning on the horizon. The strike by the Montsou miners, itself the result of the industrial crisis which had been worsening for the past two years, had in turn exacerbated that crisis by precipitating this widespread bankruptcy. To the several causes of this painful predicament – the lack of orders from America, the fact that so much capital was tied up in excess production capacity – was now added an unforeseen lack of coal to fuel the few boilers that were still functioning; and this was the final agony, machines deprived of their sustenance because the pits themselves were no longer supplying it. Alarmed by the poor economic outlook, the Company had reduced output and starved its workers, with the inevitable result that since the end of December it had not had a single lump of coal in any of its pit-yards. It was a case of chain reaction: the problems began far away, one collapse led to another, industries knocked each other over as they fell, and all in such a rapid series of disasters that the effects could be felt as close as the neighbouring towns and cities of Lille, Douai and Valenciennes, where whole families were being ruined by bankers calling in their loans.

Often, at a bend in the road, Étienne would stop in the freezing night air and listen to the sound of structures giving way. He would take deep lungfuls of the darkness, filled with euphoria at the prospect of this black void and with the hope that the new day would dawn on the extermination of the old world, with not a single fortune still intact and everything levelled to the ground by the scythe of equality. But amid this general destruction it was the Company's pits which interested him the most. He would set off again, blinded by the darkness, and visit each of them one by one, delighted every time he learned of some further damage. New rock-falls were occurring constantly,
and with increasing seriousness the longer the roadways remained out of use. Above the northern roadway at Mirou the subsidence was so great now that a whole hundred-metre stretch of the Joiselle road had fallen in as though there had been an earthquake; and the Company would compensate landowners at once when their fields disappeared, not even bothering to haggle over the price, so anxious were they not to let the news of such accidents spread. Crèvecœur and Madeleine, where the rock was particularly unstable, were suffering more and more blockages. There was talk of two deputies being buried alive at La Victoire; there had been flooding at Feutry-Cantel; one kilometre of roadway at Saint-Thomas would have to be bricked where the timbering had been poorly maintained and was splitting all along its length. Huge repair bills were thus mounting by the hour, making severe inroads into shareholders' dividends, and in the long run the rapid destruction of the pits would end up consuming those famous Montsou deniers that had increased in value one hundredfold over the course of a century.

And so, presented with the news of this series of disasters, Étienne began once more to hope, and he came to believe that a third month of resistance would finish the monster off, that weary, sated beast squatting like an idol in its far-away temple. He knew that the trouble at Montsou had caused much excitement in the Paris press: a furious debate was raging between the newspapers sympathetic to the government and those which supported the opposition, and terrifying stories were circulating and being used in particular against the International, which the Emperor and his government had at first encouraged but which it now viewed with increasing apprehension. Moreover, since the Company's Board of Directors could no longer continue to turn a deaf ear to what was going on, two of its members had deigned to come and hold an inquiry, but with such a reluctant air and with such apparent lack of concern for how things would turn out, so thoroughly uninterested, in fact, that they had left three days later saying that everything was perfectly fine. But Étienne had learned from other sources that during their visit these gentlemen had been in permanent session, working at fever pitch and investigating all manner of things which
no one in their entourage was prepared to divulge. Whistling in the dark was how Étienne saw it, and he even managed to interpret their hurried departure as sheer panic. Now he was certain of victory, for those fearsome gentlemen had clearly thrown in the towel.

But by the following night Étienne was once more in despair. The Company was just too solid to be so easily broken: it could lose millions but it would soon retrieve them at the workers' expense by trimming their wages. That night, having gone as far as Jean-Bart, he realized the truth when a supervisor mentioned to him that there was talk of letting Montsou take over Vandame. It was said that the Deneulins were in a pitiful state, suffering the misery of the rich who have fallen on hard times: the financial worries had aged Deneulin, and he was ill from the sheer frustration of being unable to do anything, while his daughters fought with their creditors and tried to save what clothes they could. There was less suffering in the starving villages than there was in this well-to-do household where they had to drink water in secret for fear anyone should see them do it. Work had not resumed at Jean-Bart, and the pump had had to be replaced at Gaston-Marie, in addition to which, even though they had acted with all speed, there had been some initial flood damage and the repairs were going to be costly. Deneulin had finally plucked up courage to ask the Grégoires for a loan of a hundred thousand francs, and their refusal, which he had in any case expected, had been the final straw. If they refused, they said, it was out of kindness, to spare him an impossible struggle; and they advised him to sell. He still refused, vehemently. It infuriated him that the cost of the strike should fall on him, and he hoped he would die of a rush of blood to the head, choked by apoplexy. But what was to be done? He had listened to the various offers. People tried to beat him down, to minimize the value of this splendid prize, this pit that had been completely renovated and refitted, where only a lack of ready cash was preventing production. He would be jolly lucky to recoup a sufficient sum to pay off his creditors. For two whole days he had wrangled with the two Board directors who had descended on Montsou, infuriated by the calm manner in which
they were taking advantage of his difficulties: ‘Never!' he would shout at them in his thunderous voice. And there the matter rested, for they returned to Paris to wait patiently for him to give up the ghost. Étienne saw only too well how one man's misfortune became another man's gain, and once more it discouraged him deeply to think of the invincible power wielded by the sheer weight of capital, so strong in adversity that it grew fat on the defeat of others, gobbling up the small fry who fell by the wayside.

Fortunately, on the following day, Jeanlin brought him a piece of good news. At Le Voreux the lining of the main pit-shaft was threatening to give way, water was seeping in through every joint, and a team of joiners had had to be sent in to repair the damage as a matter of urgency.

Until then Étienne had avoided Le Voreux, unnerved by the ever-present black silhouette of the sentry up on the spoil-heap, overlooking the plain. You couldn't miss him, planted there against the sky like the regiment's flag and dominating the landscape. Towards three o'clock in the morning the sky grew very dark, and Étienne went over to the pit, where some comrades briefed him on the poor state of the shaft lining: indeed in their view the whole thing needed to be replaced immediately, which would have meant halting production for three months. He wandered around for a long time, listening to the tap-tap of the joiners' mallets down in the shaft. It cheered him to think of the mine being injured and that they were having to bind the wound.

At dawn, on his way back, he found the sentry still standing on the spoil-heap. This time he would surely be spotted. As he walked along, he thought of these soldiers, of these men of the people who had been armed against the people. How easily the revolution would have triumphed had the army suddenly come over to their side! All it needed was for the working man or the peasant in his barracks to remember his origins. This was the supreme danger, the doomsday vision which set bourgeois teeth chattering when they thought about the possibility of the troops defecting. In two short hours they would be swept away, wiped out, along with all the pleasures and abominations of their
iniquitous lives. Already it was said that whole regiments had become infected with socialism. Was it true? Would the age of justice dawn thanks to the very cartridges issued by the bourgeois themselves? And as his mind raced with new hope, the young man imagined the regiment deployed to guard the mines deciding instead to support the strike, turning their guns on the Company's directors, and at last delivering the mine into the hands of the miners themselves.

He suddenly found himself climbing the spoil-heap, his head spinning with these thoughts. Why not have a chat with the soldier? That way he'd learn how the fellow saw things. Casually he drew nearer, pretending to scavenge for old wood among the rubbish. Still the sentry did not move.

‘Hallo, comrade. Bloody awful weather!' Étienne said finally. ‘It looks like snow.'

The soldier was short, with very fair hair and a pale, gentle face covered in freckles. Wrapped in his cape he looked ill at ease, every inch the raw recruit.

‘Yes, it does, doesn't it?' he muttered.

And his blue eyes gazed at the wan sky and a grey misty dawn in which coal-dust seemed to hang like lead over the distant plain.

‘Damned stupid of them to stick you up here like this so you can freeze to death!' Étienne went on. ‘It's not as if we're expecting the Cossacks,
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is it?…And there's always such a terrible wind up here, too!'

The little soldier shivered uncomplainingly. In fact there was the dry-stone hut in which old Bonnemort used to shelter on the nights when it was blowing a gale; but the soldier's orders were not to move from the summit of the spoil-heap, and so he stayed where he was, his hands so stiff from the cold that he could no longer feel his rifle. He belonged to a detachment of sixty men whose job it was to guard Le Voreux; and as this cruel watch fell to him frequently, he had more than once nearly breathed his last up here, all feeling gone from his feet. But it was what the job required; passive obedience had finally numbed his brain, and he replied to questions with the garbled mumblings of a child who is half asleep.

For a quarter of an hour Étienne tried in vain to get him to talk politics. He answered yes and no but without appearing to understand; some comrades said the captain was republican; as for himself, he didn't really know, it was all the same to him. If they ordered him to shoot, he'd shoot, so as not to be punished. As Étienne, the working man, listened to him, he was filled with the people's instinctive hatred of the army, of these brothers whose allegiance changed the minute they pulled on a pair of red trousers.