Germinal (74 page)

Following this hour of respite, M. Hennebeau began to entertain some hope. The earth must have stopped shifting, they would be able to save the winding-engine and the remainder of the buildings. But he still forbade people to go near and wanted to give it another half-hour. The waiting was becoming unbearable, and the raised hopes made the anxiety worse; every heart was beating wildly. A dark cloud looming over the horizon was hastening the onset of dusk, and a sinister twilight began to fall on the wreckage left by the earth's tumult. They had all been standing there for seven hours now, not moving, not eating.

And suddenly, just as the engineers were starting to edge
forward, one last convulsion of the earth put them to flight. There was a whole series of underground explosions, as though some monstrous artillery were firing cannon in the void. On the surface the remaining buildings toppled over and crumpled to the ground. The ruins of the screening-shed and the pit-head were swallowed up in a kind of whirlpool. Then the boiler-house burst apart and vanished. Next it was the turn of the square tower where the drainage-pump used to pant away at its work; the tower fell flat on its face like a man hit by a bullet. And then came the terrifying spectacle of the winding-engine, now wrenched from its moorings, fighting for its life on spread-eagled limbs. It was on the move, stretching its crank – its giant's knee – as though it were trying to struggle to its feet; but then it fell back dead, crushed, and was swallowed up by the earth. Now only the tall, thirty-metre chimney remained standing, shaking like a mast in a hurricane. It looked as though it might shatter into tiny pieces and be blown away like powder when suddenly it sank in one piece, absorbed into the ground, melted away like some colossal candle; and nothing visible remained, not even the tip of the lightning-conductor. It was all over: the vile beast squatting in its hollow in the ground, gorged on human flesh, had drawn the last of its long, slow, gasping breaths. Le Voreux had now vanished in its entirety down into the abyss.

The crowd fled, screaming. Women covered their eyes as they ran, and the men were swept along like a swirl of dead leaves by the sheer horror of the scene. They tried not to scream, but scream they did, with their arms in the air and their lungs bursting, at the sight of the vast hole that had opened up. Like the crater of some extinct volcano it stretched from the road as far as the canal, fifteen metres deep and at least forty metres wide. The whole pit-yard had gone the way of the buildings, the gigantic trestles, the overhead railway and all its track, an entire train of tubs, as well as three railway wagons, not to mention the store of pit-props, a forest of newly cut poles that had been swallowed up like so many straws. At the bottom of the crater all that could be seen was a tangled mass of wooden beams, bricks, ironwork and plaster, a dreadful array of wreckage that had been pounded, mangled and splattered with mud by the
raging storm of catastrophe. And the hole was spreading: fissures ran from the edge of it far off into the surrounding fields. One stretched as far as Rasseneur's public house, where there was a crack in the front wall. Was the whole village going to be engulfed as well? How far did they have to run to find safe ground, in this fearsome twilight and under a leaden sky that looked as though it, too, were bent on destroying the world?

But Négrel gave a cry of despair. M. Hennebeau, who had moved back, began to weep. The catastrophe was not over yet. The canal bank gave way, and a sheet of water started gushing out into one of the cracks in the ground. There it vanished, cascading like a waterfall into a deep valley. The mine drank the river down: its roads would be flooded for years to come. Soon the crater began to fill; and where once Le Voreux had been, there now lay an expanse of muddy water, like one of those lakes in which doomed cities lie submerged. A terrified silence had fallen, and all that could be heard was the sound of the water pouring down and rumbling through the bowels of the earth.

At that moment, up on the shaken spoil-heap, Souvarine rose to his feet. He had recognized La Maheude and Zacharie sobbing together at the spectacle of this collapse, the weight of which would be piling down on to the heads of those wretched people still fighting for their lives below. He threw away his last cigarette and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie's final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.

That very night, following the collapse of Le Voreux, M. Hennebeau had left for Paris, wanting to inform the Board in person before the newspapers had had a chance to report even the bare details of the event. And when he returned the next day, people found him very calm, quite the manager in charge. He had evidently succeeded in absolving himself of all responsibility and seemed to be no less in favour than before; indeed the decree appointing him Officer in the Legion of Honour was signed twenty-four hours later.

But while the manager's position was safe, the Company itself was reeling from this terrible blow. It was not so much the loss of money that mattered as the injury to its corporate body and the nagging, unspoken fear, in the light of this attack on one of its pits, of what the morrow might bring. Once again the shock was so great that it felt the need for silence. Why cause a stir over this abominable act? Even if they were to identify the criminal responsible, why make a martyr of him? His appalling heroism would serve only to give others the wrong idea and breed a long line of incendiaries and assassins. In any case it did not suspect the real culprit and eventually laid the blame on an army of accomplices, as it could not believe that one man alone could have had the courage and daring to carry out such a deed. And that precisely was what worried the Company most: the thought that its pits might now be under a growing threat. The manager had been instructed to set up an extensive network of informants and then quietly, one by one, to dismiss the troublemakers who were suspected of having had a hand in the crime. A purge of this kind, being the wisest political course to take, would suffice.

Only one person was dismissed immediately, namely Dansaert, the overman. Since the scandal with La Pierronne he had become quite impossible, but the pretext was his response in the face of danger, his cowardice as a leader in abandoning his men. At the same time his dismissal was intended as something of an overture to the miners, who detested the man.

Meanwhile rumours had spread among the general public, and the management had had to write to one newspaper correcting its version of events and denying that the strikers had exploded a barrel of gunpowder. After a rapid inquiry the report by the government-appointed engineer had already concluded that the tubbing in the pit-shaft had given way of its own accord following some subsidence in the surrounding earth; and the Company had preferred to keep quiet and accept the blame for inadequate maintenance supervision. By the third day the disaster had become one of the topical news items in the Parisian press: people talked of nothing else but the workers still fighting for their lives at the bottom of the mine, and each morning everyone avidly scanned the latest reports. In Montsou itself the bourgeois turned pale and seemed to lose the power of speech as soon as Le Voreux was mentioned, and a legend was beginning to form which even the bravest were afraid to whisper in each other's ear. The whole region was full of pity for the victims, and people organized excursions to the demolished pit, with entire families rushing to the scene to treat themselves to the horror of its ruins and the heavy mass of debris hanging over the heads of the wretched people incarcerated below.

Deneulin, as newly appointed divisional engineer, found himself in the thick of dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophe; and his first priority was to stop the flooding from the canal, which was steadily aggravating the damage to the pit with each hour that passed. Substantial work was required, and he put a hundred workers on the job of building a dyke. Twice the sheer weight of water had swept away the initial dams. Now they were installing pumps, and it was a long, hard struggle as they fought inch by inch to reclaim the land that had been submerged.

But the rescue of the trapped miners was causing even more excitement. Négrel's orders were still to make one last attempt, and he did not lack for volunteers as all the miners rushed to offer their services in an upsurge of fraternal solidarity. Now that comrades' lives were in danger they had forgotten all about the strike, and their rate of pay was no longer an issue; as far as they were concerned it wouldn't matter if they weren't paid at all, just as long as they could be allowed to risk their own lives
to save them. They were all there, tools at the ready and raring to go, just waiting to be told where to dig first. Many had not recovered from the shock of the accident and still had constant nightmares about it. But though they had the shakes and kept breaking out in cold sweats, they dragged themselves from their beds none the less and were among the most determined to engage in combat with the earth, as if they wanted revenge. Unfortunately the one difficult question was precisely that of how best to proceed: what should they do? How could they get down? Which side should they attack the rocks from?

In Négrel's view none of the poor wretches would have survived; all fifteen would certainly have perished, whether by drowning or from lack of oxygen. But in mining disasters the rule is always to assume that the people trapped are still alive, and so he reasoned accordingly. The first problem was to work out where they might have tried to seek refuge. When he consulted the deputies and the old hands among the miners, everyone was agreed: faced with the rising floodwater, the comrades would definitely have made their way upwards from roadway to roadway, until they reached the coal-faces nearest the surface, which meant that they were probably trapped at the end of one of the higher roads. Moreover, this tallied with the information given by old Mouque, whose garbled account even suggested that in the general panic as they tried to escape the miners might have split up into smaller groups, with people disappearing off in all directions and ending up on separate levels within the mine. But when it came to deciding what they could do to rescue them, opinion among the deputies was divided. Since even the roads nearest to the surface were a hundred and fifty metres down, sinking a new shaft was out of the question. This left Réquillart, which was the only way in and the only way of getting near them. But the worst of it was that the old mine, which had itself been flooded, no longer connected with Le Voreux, and that the only free means of access, above the flood-level, were a few short roadways running out from the first loading-bay. Draining the mine was going to take years, so the best plan would be to inspect these areas to see if they might not be close to the flooded roads at the far end of which they
suspected the trapped miners to be. Before reaching this logical conclusion there had been considerable discussion, and a whole host of other, impracticable suggestions had been rejected.

At this point Négrel went through the files and found the original plans for the two pits, which he studied carefully, identifying the places where they ought to search. Little by little, this hunt for the trapped miners had begun to excite him, and he, too, now felt passionately committed to finding them, despite his customary ironic nonchalance towards the affairs of men and the things of this world. There were initial difficulties in getting into Réquillart: they had to clear the entrance to the shaft by removing the rowan tree and cutting back the sloe and hawthorn bushes, and then there were the ladders to be repaired as well. After that the preliminary search began. Négrel went down with ten men and had them tap their iron tools against certain parts of the seam which he indicated; and then in complete silence each man pressed his ear to the coal and listened for answering taps in the distance. They tried every roadway they could reach, but in vain; there was no answer. Now they were in even more of a quandary: where should they start cutting through the coal? In which direction should they go, since there was nobody there to guide them forward? But they kept at it, searching and searching, and the tension rose as they became increasingly concerned.

From the very first day La Maheude had come to Réquillart each morning. She would sit down on an old beam opposite the entrance and stay there till the evening. Whenever a man came out, she stood up and gave him a questioning look. Anything yet? No, nothing. And then she would sit down again and continue to wait, without a word, her face set hard and closed. Jeanlin, too, on seeing that his den was being invaded, had been prowling around with the frightened look of an animal whose burrow full of plundered prey is about to be uncovered. He was also thinking about the young soldier whose body lay under the rock, worried that the men might be about to disturb his peaceful resting-place; but that part of the mine had been flooded, and in any case the search was being carried out further over to the left, in the west part. At first Philomène had come along also, to
accompany Zacharie, who was part of the rescue team; but she had got fed up getting cold for no good reason and with nothing to show for it. And so she remained behind in the village and spent her days mooching about, unconcerned, coughing from morning till night. Zacharie, on the other hand, had no thought for his own life and would have eaten the earth beneath him if it meant finding his sister. He cried out in his sleep: he saw her, he heard her, shrivelled by starvation, her throat worn out from shouting for help. Twice he had been about to start digging of his own accord, without authorization, saying this was the spot, he could feel it in his bones. Négrel wouldn't let him go down any more, but he refused to leave the mine even though it was out of bounds; he couldn't even sit down and wait beside his mother, but instead kept walking round and round, desperate with the need to do something.