Germinal (70 page)

At that moment Rasseneur's voice was drowned by enthusiastic shouting.

‘Three cheers for Rasseneur! He's the man for us! Hip, hip!'

Rasseneur shut the door as the mob dispersed; and the two men looked at each other in silence. They both shrugged. Then they had a drink together.

That same day there was a grand dinner at La Piolaine, where they were celebrating the engagement of Négrel and Cécile. The previous twenty-four hours had seen much dusting and polishing in the Grégoires' dining-room and drawing-room. Mélanie reigned supreme in the kitchen, supervising the roasts and stirring the sauces, the smell of which wafted all the way up through the house as far as the attic. It had been decided that Francis the coachman would help Honorine to wait at table. The gardener's wife was to wash up, while the gardener himself was to open the front gates for the guests. Never before had such a festive occasion turned this grand and well-appointed house so thoroughly upside down.

Everything went perfectly. Mme Hennebeau behaved charmingly towards Cécile, and she gave Négrel a smile when the notary from Montsou gallantly proposed a toast to the future happiness of the couple. M. Hennebeau, too, was most affable. His cheerful air was noted by the guests, and it was rumoured that, being once more in favour with the Board, he was soon to be appointed Officer in the Legion of Honour, in recognition of his firm action in dealing with the strike. They tried not to talk about the recent events, but there was an element of triumph in the general rejoicing, and the dinner turned into something of an official celebration of victory. They had been delivered at last, and they could begin once more to eat and sleep in peace! Discreet allusion was made to the dead, whose blood still lay fresh in the mud of Le Voreux: they had had to be taught a lesson, and everybody said how sorry they were, with the Grégoires adding that it was now everyone's duty to visit the
villages and to try and bind the wounds. The Grégoires were their old placid, benevolent selves again: they made excuses for their good miners and already they could picture them down the pits providing a fine example of their traditional willingness to knuckle under. The grandees of Montsou, now that they had stopped feeling so nervous, all agreed that the question of pay needed to be looked at carefully. Victory was complete when, during the main course, M. Hennebeau read out a letter from the bishop announcing that Father Ranvier was to be transferred to another parish. The assembled bourgeois of the district thereupon exchanged heated comment on the subject of this priest who considered that the soldiers had been murderers. Finally, with the appearance of dessert, the notary valiantly presented his free-thinking views.

Deneulin was there with his two daughters. Amid all this merriment he tried to conceal his sadness at his own ruin. That very morning he had signed the papers conveying his concession at Vandame into the ownership of the Montsou Mining Company. Cornered and wounded, he had given in to the Board's demands, finally relinquishing this prize that they had had their eyes on for so long and barely extracting enough money to pay his creditors. When they had made him a last-minute offer to stay on at the level of divisional engineer, he had accepted it as a stroke of good fortune, resigned to being a mere employee whose job was to oversee the pit that had swallowed up his fortune. This action sounded the death-knell for the small, private company and presaged the imminent disappearance of individual mine-owners, who were being gobbled up one by one by the insatiable ogre of capital and drowned in the rising tide of corporations. The costs of the strike had thus fallen on his shoulders alone, and for him it was as though everyone was drinking to his misfortune as they toasted M. Hennebeau's new honour. His only slight consolation was the wonderfully brave face being put on by Lucie and Jeanne, who both looked charming in their patched-up dresses, pretty young single girls laughing in the teeth of disaster and thoroughly disdainful of bank accounts.

When they moved into the drawing-room for coffee, M. Grégoire
took his cousin aside and congratulated him on the courage of his decision.

‘You see? Your one mistake was to risk the million you got from your share in Montsou by investing it in Vandame. You went to all that effort, and now it's disappeared along with all your devilish hard work, whereas my share hasn't moved from its drawer, and it still supports me nicely and allows me a life of leisure, just as it will support my grandchildren and my grandchildren's children.'

On Sunday Étienne fled from the village at nightfall. An extremely clear sky, dotted with stars, cast a blue, crepuscular light across the land. He went down to the canal and walked slowly along the bank in the direction of Marchiennes. It was his favourite walk, a grassy path two leagues long running dead straight beside this geometrically precise strip of water, which stretched into the distance like an unending bar of molten silver.

He never met anyone there. But that day he was very put out to see a man coming towards him. And in the pale starlight the two solitary walkers did not recognize each other until they came face to face.

‘Oh, it's you,' muttered Étienne.

Souvarine nodded silently. For a moment they just stood there; then, side by side, they set off together towards Marchiennes. Each man seemed to be continuing with his own train of thought, as if they were separated by a large distance.

‘Did you read in the paper about Pluchart's success in Paris?' Étienne asked eventually. ‘After that meeting at Belleville people waited on the pavement and gave him a great ovation…Oh, he's a coming man all right, whether he's lost his voice or not. He'll go far now.'

Souvarine shrugged. He despised the silver-tongued type, the sort that enters politics the way some people are called to the Bar, just to earn a lot of money with smooth talk.

Étienne had now got as far as Darwin.
¹
He had read this and that, as summarized for a popular audience in a volume costing five sous; and on the basis of his patchy understanding he had come to see revolution in terms of the struggle for survival, with the have-nots eating the haves, a strong people devouring a worn-out bourgeoisie. But Souvarine became angry and started in on the stupidity of socialists who accepted Darwin, that scientific apostle of inequality whose great notion of natural selection might as well be the philosophy of an aristocrat. But Étienne refused to be persuaded and wanted to argue the point, illustrating his reservations with a hypothesis. Say the old society no longer existed and that every last trace of it had been swept away. Wasn't there a risk that the new order which grew up in its place would slowly be corrupted by the same injustices, that there would again be the weak and the strong, that some people would be more skilful or intelligent than others and live off the fat of the land, while the stupid or lazy once more became their slaves? At this prospect of everlasting poverty Souvarine exclaimed fiercely that if justice could not be achieved with man, it would have to be achieved without him. For as long as there were rotten societies, there would have to be wholesale slaughters, until the last human being had been exterminated. The two men fell silent again.

For a long time, with his head bowed, Souvarine walked on over the soft new grass, so deep in thought that he kept to the extreme edge of the water with all the tranquil certainty of a sleepwalker walking beside a gutter. Then, for no apparent reason, he gave a start, as though he had bumped into a shadow. He looked up, and his face was very pale. He said softly to his companion:

‘Did I ever tell you how she died?'

‘Who?'

‘My girl, back in Russia.'

Étienne gestured vaguely, astonished at the catch in Souvarine's voice, at this sudden need to confide on the part of someone who was usually so impassive and who lived in such stoic detachment from people, including from himself. All he knew was that the girl in question had been his mistress and that she had been hanged in Moscow.

‘It all went wrong,' Souvarine explained, his misty eyes now fixed on the white strip of canal as it vanished into the distance between the bluish colonnades of tall trees. ‘We had spent fourteen days down a hole, in order to mine the railway line; but instead of the Imperial train, it was an ordinary passenger train that went up…Then they arrested Annouchka.
²
She used to bring us food each evening, disguised as a peasant. And it was she who had lit the fuse, too, because a man might have attracted attention…I followed the trial, hidden in the crowd, for six long days…'

His voice faltered, and he started coughing as though he were choking.

‘Twice I wanted to shout out, to leap over all those people and be near her. But where was the use? One man less is one man less fighting for the cause; and each time she looked over at me with those big, wide eyes of hers, I could see she was telling me not to.'

He coughed again.

‘That last day, in the square, I was there…It was raining, and the clumsy idiots started panicking because it was raining so hard. It had taken them twenty minutes to hang four others: the rope broke, and they couldn't manage to finish the fourth off…Annouchka was standing there, waiting. She couldn't see me and kept trying to find me in the crowd. I climbed up on to a milestone, and then she saw me. Our eyes never left each other. After she was dead, she still looked at me…I waved my hat and left.'

Again there was silence. The white avenue of the canal seemed to unfurl without end, and the two men walked on with the same muffled tread, as though each had returned to his own private world. At the horizon the pale water seemed to pierce the sky with a thin wedge of light.

‘That was our punishment,' Souvarine continued in a hard voice. ‘We were guilty of loving each other…Yes, it's a good thing she's dead. Heroes will be born out of the blood she shed, and there is no weakness left in my heart…Ah yes, nothing, no parents, no girl, no friend, nothing to make my hand hesitate
come the day when I shall have either to take other people's lives or else lay down my own!'

Étienne had stopped, shivering in the cold night air. He made no comment but simply said:

‘We've come quite far. Shall we go back?'

Slowly they began to make their way back towards Le Voreux, and after a few metres Étienne added:

‘Have you seen the new notices?'

He was referring to some more large yellow posters that the Company had had pasted up that morning. Their message was plainer and more conciliatory, promising to re-employ all dismissed miners who returned to work the next day. Everything would be forgotten, and the pardon extended even to those who had been mostly closely involved.

‘Yes, I've seen them,' Souvarine replied.

‘Well? What do you think?'

‘I think it's all over…The herd will go back. You're all too cowardly.'

Étienne roundly defended the comrades; one man alone can be brave, but a starving crowd is powerless. Little by little they had returned to Le Voreux; and as they reached the black hulk of the pit, he carried on talking, swearing that he himself would never go down the mine again, although he forgave those who would. Then, since there had been a rumour that the joiners had not had time to repair the tubbing in the pit-shaft, he wanted to find out about it. Was it true? Had the pressure of the earth on the wooden casing round the shaft made it bulge so much that one of the extraction cages actually rubbed against it over a distance of more than five metres? Souvarine, who had gone quiet again, replied briefly. He had just been working there the day before, and the cage did indeed catch the side, so much so that the operators had even had to make it go twice as fast just to get it past that spot. But when this was pointed out to the bosses, they all made the same irritated reply: it was coal that was needed, they could do the shoring later.

‘Imagine if it gave way!' Étienne murmured. ‘Some fun we'd have then!'

Staring through the shadows at the vague outline of the pit, Souvarine quietly concluded:

‘Well, the comrades will soon know about it if it does give way, seeing as you're advising them to go back down.'

The church clock at Montsou was just striking nine; and when Étienne said that he was going home to bed, Souvarine added, without even holding out his hand:

‘Well then, goodbye. I'm leaving.'

‘Leaving? What do you mean?'

‘Yes, I've asked for my cards. I'm off.'

Astonished and hurt, Étienne stared at him. Two whole hours walking together, and now he tells him! And all so cool and calm, when the mere announcement of this sudden separation had made his own heart miss a beat. They had got to know each other, they had been through difficult times together; and the idea of never seeing someone again is always grounds for sadness.

‘So you're off, then. Where to?'

‘Oh, somewhere. I don't know.'

‘But we'll meet again?'

‘No, I don't expect so.'

They fell silent, and remained standing in front of each other without finding anything else to say.

‘Well, goodbye then.'

‘Goodbye.'

As Étienne climbed towards the village, Souvarine turned round and went back to the bank of the canal; and there, alone now, he walked and walked, with his head down, so much a part of the darkness that he was little more than a moving shadow of the night. Occasionally he would stop and count the hours chiming in the distance. When midnight struck, he left the towpath and headed towards Le Voreux.

At that hour the pit was empty, and he met only a bleary-eyed deputy. They wouldn't be firing up till two, ready for the return to work. First, he went up to fetch a jacket, which he pretended he'd left in a cupboard. Rolled up inside the jacket were tools, a brace and bit, a small but very sharp saw, and a hammer and chisel. Then he left. But instead of going out through the
changing-room he slipped into the narrow corridor that led to the escape shaft. And with his jacket tucked under his arm he climbed gently down, without a lamp, measuring the depth by counting the ladders. He knew that the cage was catching at the three-hundred-and-seventy-four metre point, against the fifth section of the lower tubbing. When he had counted fifty-four ladders, he felt about with his hand and came on the bulge in the timbering. This was the spot.