Pedigree (15 page)

The strikers, or rather their leaders, had promised that the Place Saint-Lambert should be neutral ground. All the five or six ways into the square were guarded, including the alleys. The big Café du Phare, with its thirty billiard-tables, was closed. So was the big china-shop. Between these two buildings there was a dark, slender façade, some open windows, a balcony on which a silhouette was outlined now and then.

This was the Populaire, the official headquarters of the unions and the workers' parties.

It was surprising, coming from the dead town, to see café waiters here serving bottles of beer, red and yellow soda-waters, and ham sandwiches. The floor was dusty grey with trails of moisture here and there, the walls brown. Little tables were being used as desks, men in cloth caps were checking lists, and on the first floor papers were piling up on the secretaries' long table.

‘Ougrée-Marihaye?'

‘Two thousand two hundred.'

‘The Sclessin wire-mills?'

Somebody went to fetch the secretary in question, who had gone out on the balcony to have a look.

‘Eight hundred and fifty-two: the whole lot.'

‘Vieille-Montagne! Where's the Vieille-Montagne?'

The march was not far away, moving past less than two hundred yards away as the crow flies, behind the big, shuttered shops; yet there was nothing to be heard, and now and then everybody listened anxiously to this silence; the leaders, standing near the window, talked of other things. They were all bearded men, Vandervelde who had come specially from Brussels, Demblon-the-Thunderer who had written some scholarly studies of Shakespeare and read Ovid in the original, Troclet-of-Liége, and finally a young man who was not a member of parliament yet, a young man of disquieting roughness: Flahaut.

‘Telephone!'

The ringing scarcely ever stopped. This time, it was not a report from the provinces.

‘It's for the chief.'

‘Hullo! … Yes … What? … But no! I can assure you that orders have been given to that effect …'

The chief of police was speaking at the other end of the line. In the Town Hall offices, they were all gathered together as at the Populaire.

‘There are some rather alarming movements as if …'

Yet the two sides had come to an agreement. A march, well and good, but no singing, no band, above all no
International.
The workers were to provide relays of guards in the foundries and the factories.

‘Hullo! What's that you say?'

A few yards from the telephone, you could hear the words:

‘… Civic guards …'

‘That's a mistake … What? … Certainly not! … But I tell you there's to be no meeting, no speeches, no …'

The chief looked across at Flahaut and the latter turned his head away.

‘Flahaut! It seems that your men …'

The miners from Seraing … They had apparently withdrawn from the march little by little, in small groups … There was talk of infiltration … Over at the Town Hall they were worried … The civic guard had been called out …

‘I haven't given any orders,' said Flahaut, but he was capable of lying.

The gas was lit. Outside, the air was turning misty. The sound of troop movements could be heard coming from the direction of the Rue Léopold. It was the civic guard, which had been mustered in the Place Ernest-de-Bavière and which was coming to take up its position in the Place Saint-Lambert.

As if in confirmation of the chief of police's fears, some shouts came from the other end of the square. There had been a sudden commotion on the corner of a little street. An orderly from the Populaire was sent across and came back within a few minutes.

‘It's over already. A few miners who tried to force the barrier …'

And yet they could still feel something like a threat in the air. Where, for instance, had they come from, those men who were beginning to form a group on the terrace and who were looking across towards the windows of the Populaire?

It was too dark to make out their faces. They were strikers, that was certain. How had they managed to get there?

Just as the civic guards, who, for the first time, had been issued with cartridges, came into the square from the Rue Léopold, a chorus of shouts greeted them:

‘Down with the civic guard!'

One solitary shout:

‘Come over to our side!'

There were two hundred of them now, possibly more, who had entered the forbidden quadrilateral. A little group of officials arrived in its turn: the burgomaster wearing his sash, the chief of police, a few policemen.

Some whistles blew.

Nobody knew as yet what was happening on the other side of the barriers, in the streets where a little while ago the strikers had been marching quietly along. Everybody strained his ears. The officials had come close to the Populaire. Their eyes looked up at the balcony like a silent prayer.

There was still time to avert a clash.

No! It was too late. A whole section of the march had taken on a new life, as if an order had been given and passed on, and the direction of the march changed, the line extended, the men dispersed and formed up again in a different order, some policemen were pushed aside.

‘Place Saint-Lambert!'

A shout which grew in volume, which was repeated over and over again, hurrying footsteps, piercing whistle-blasts. People almost expected the burgomaster or the chief of police to go into the Populaire and demand an explanation, but that was impossible, for they were forbidden to speak to one another in public.

Some mounted policemen had drawn their swords, over towards the Place du Théâtre, where the crowd seemed to be thickest. Then, just when it was least expected, after some confused pushing, the barrier gave way, and hundreds and thousands of men and women poured into the square, jostling one another as they came.

Should the leaders go on to the balcony and try to make themselves heard? They argued the point, in low voices, among the beermugs, the ham rolls, and the paper littering the dirty floor.

‘Hullo. This is the commandant of the gendarmerie speaking. Unless the strikers withdraw in good order …'

How could they speak to them? To whom? To what? It was a human sea, growing all the time, in which you could no longer make out any individuals. The pressure of the crowd had broken a sheet of glass behind the metal shutters of L'Innovation. This noise had excited the men, and a few stones had been thrown at the frosted-glass panes of the porch.

Somebody in the group of officials sighed:

‘If only it would rain!'

At L'Innovation, Monsieur Wilhems had collected the shop assistants and the inspectors together in the basement, next to the ironmongery department, and Valérie kept thinking about Élise, all alone in the Rue Pasteur with the child.

Everybody was waiting for something which seemed to be inevitable and, contrary to all expectations, that thing did not happen. Time went by, and the noise of stamping feet grew louder until it seemed that the whole town was being angrily trampled underfoot, that the sound was coming from all sides without a shot being fired in reply.

The square had so to speak been divided into two. The terrace opposite the Palace of the Prince Bishops was still surrounded by the mounted gendarmes. The space in front of the Grand Bazaar was occupied by the civic guards whom the pressure of the strikers was crushing closer and closer to the shopfronts.

Night had fallen. There were no lights anywhere except in the windows of the Populaire, where the strikers tried to recognize the shadows moving around.

‘Hullo! … Yes … Close your shutters … That's an order … When they can't see any light, they'll go away …'

The augurs hesitated. If they closed the shutters, they would give the impression of weakening. They decided just to put out the lamps, and once that had been done, there was darkness inside and outside, and they could go out on the balcony without being seen.

Where did it start? It was after ten o'clock. One might have thought that the night would go by in this incoherent expectancy, or that empty stomachs and fatigue would get the better of the strikers. But then there was a vague murmur. A song, first sung softly, then growing louder, spreading from one to another, and finally intoned by thousands of voices:

‘…
The last fight let us face
…'

At the same time, a thrust from the crowd. A few men, in the midst of the chaos, conferred in an undertone. The mayor, a tiny little man, could not see anything beyond his immediate neighbours.

The first couplet was over. A pause. You could sense that the second couplet was about to burst forth, but then, in the short silence, there came the strident call of a bugle, bringing a lump to every throat.

On horseback, standing in his stirrups with drawn sword, the commandant of the gendarmerie advanced as far as he could towards the crowd of men whose faces could no longer be distinguished, and after the third bugle-call his voice rang out, so clear that it must have been audible all over the Place Saint-Lambert.

‘First summons! Let law-abiding citizens go home. We are going to open fire.'

A tremor went through the crowd, which moved forward, then back. A murmur arose.

‘Second summons! Let law-abiding citizens …'

There were shouts as everybody gave voice to his anger.

‘… We are going to open fire!'

Another silence. The bugle.

‘Let law-abiding citizens …'

The shot rang out; a solitary shot, absurdly faint, and yet it resounded in every heart. Nobody knew who had fired, or at what, or whether anybody had been hit.

‘Present, arrrms! … Load, arrrms! …'

Women's screams, a scuffle, a breath of panic passing over the crowd, and another movement, forward this time, deliberate and full of hate.

‘Fire!'

Had they fired into the air? Nobody knew. Nobody knew where he was going, everybody pushed, elbowed and punched in an effort to find a way out, and the mounted gendarmes charged into the crowd, their horses' breasts thrusting the strikers aside while their bare swords zigzagged through the air like lightning.

There was utter silence on the balcony of the Populaire, where there were a score of them crowded together, trying to understand, and peering down at the panic-stricken ebb and flow in the darkness of the square.

Who had had the idea? Who had given the order? The fact remained that all the surviving lamps of the Grand Bazaar, Vaxelaire's and L'Innovation lit up with the bluish crackling of carbon filaments.

Waves of humanity disappeared through all the outlets, into all the streets, and the torrent flowed away little by little, interrupted by isolated barriers, by shots here and there, by charging horses.

Élise was trembling, sitting by the lamp. The door of the bedroom, where the child was asleep, was half open on to the darkness. She did not know what was happening and could not hear anything except a noise like the distant rumbling of a train. She kept trembling, getting up and sitting down again, feeling ill at ease everywhere, and wondering now and then whether she ought not to give in to temptation.

It was impossible! She could not leave the child alone. In the silence of the night, footsteps came running up. You might have thought there was a flock of panic-stricken animals outside, but as the streets grew wider and emptier, and people got further away from the Place Saint-Lambert, the pace slackened, shadows called out to one another, and groups formed up, trying to find their bearings.

Some of these people came running along the Rue Pasteur itself, probably on their way home to Bressoux or Jupille. Élise was at her window, in the bedroom, listening. She could make out nothing but disconnected words, and longed to go downstairs and ask questions.

Finally she made up her mind. She stole downstairs in her slippers and noiselessly opened the outside door a little way; as if on purpose, nobody came along for several long-drawn minutes.

At last a man, a woman, a child being literally dragged along.

‘Excuse me, Monsieur. Has there been any shooting?'

She startled them. The man hesitated for a moment and his wife snapped at him:

‘Come along!'

Élise trembled, wept, went on waiting. She thought she could hear her son crying upstairs and, since she had left the lamp alight, she went back.

She did not go to bed. She did nothing but keep the fire in and make coffee for when Désiré came home. And he returned at last, at six o'clock in the morning, with some of the dawn mist clinging to his moustache; he returned smiling, a smile that was a little forced.

‘Dear God, Désiré! What happened?'

He put his rifle away on top of the wardrobe and emptied his cartridge pouch in which all the cartridges were still in place. There was a little cold coffee left in his flask in its brown cloth casing.

‘We were stuck against the houses between the Rue Gérardrie and the Rue Léopold, next to the Grand Bazaar. We couldn't see a thing. There were some mounted gendarmes in front of us and all that we were afraid of was that the horses might back into us.'

He smiled as he remembered something.

‘You know the clockmaker's next to the chemist's? It's there that we were, a whole bunch of us: Ledent, Grisard and big Martens. Grisard was the first to piddle against the shutter …'

‘Dear God, Désiré!'

‘Then everybody else did the same. It was only this morning that we noticed it was the shutter over the door. The shop is on a lower level. When they open the shop this morning …'

He heaved a sigh of pleasure as he unbuttoned his tunic and dipped his moustache in the hot coffee.

‘As for the rest of it, we didn't see a thing. They read the riot act and they fired into the air, that's all I know. It seems that one gendarme had a bullet through his cap. They say …'

What was the use? It wasn't certain. The ambulance had come to the Place Saint-Lambert twice over. The civic guards, immobilized against the shop fronts, had been unable to see what was happening.