by Emile Zola
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,1 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.
‘So what’s your name?’
‘Jules.’
‘And where are you from?’
‘From Plogoff, over yonder.’
He gestured randomly with his arm. It was in Brittany, that was all he knew. His small, pale face lit up, and he began to laugh with renewed cheer and warmth.
‘I have a mother and sister back there. They can’t wait for me to come home, of course. Though it’ll be some time yet…When I left, they came with me as far as Pont-l’Abbé. We borrowed the horse from the Lepalmecs, and he nearly broke his legs on the journey down from Audierne. My cousin Charles met us with some sausages, but the women were crying so much we just couldn’t enjoy them…Oh God, oh God, how far away home seems now!’
Tears sprang to his eyes although he continued to laugh. He had a vision of the bleak Plogoff moorland and the wild, storm-wracked Pointe du Raz all bathed in dazzling sunshine, in the season of pink heather.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if I behave myself, do you think I might get a month’s leave in two years’ time?’
Then Étienne talked about Provence, which he had left when he was very small. It was getting lighter now, and snowflakes were beginning to flutter down from a grubby sky. But eventually he became anxious when he saw Jeanlin prowling about among the brambles, amazed to see him up there. The boy was beckoning to him. Why dream of fraternizing with the military? It would take years and years, and his futile attempt depressed him, as though he had expected to succeed. But suddenly he understood what Jeanlin’s gesture meant: the sentry was about to be relieved. And so Étienne le
ft to return to Réquillart, running to earth with a heavy heart once more at the certain prospect of defeat; and Jeanlin raced along beside him, accusing that dirty bastard of a soldier of calling out to the guard to shoot at them.
Up on the spoil-heap Jules had not moved, and he went on gazing out into the falling snow. The sergeant was approaching with his men, and the regulation calls were exchanged.
‘Who goes there?…Step forward! Password!’
Then heavy footsteps could be heard receding into the distance, like the ringing gait of a conqueror. Though it was now light, nothing stirred in the villages; and the miners continued to rage in silence beneath the jackboot.
II
Snow had been falling for two days. That morning it had stopped, and had now frozen hard in one vast sheet: the entire region, which had once been black, with its inky roads and its walls and trees covered in coal-dust, was now one single expanse of uniform whiteness stretching to infinity. Buried beneath the snow, Village Two Hundred and Forty seemed to have disappeared. Not a wisp of smoke was to be seen coming from its roof-tops. Without fires the houses were as cold as the stones in the road, and there was nothing to melt the thick layer of snow covering the tiles. The place looked like a quarry of white slabstones set in the midst of the white plain, like some vision of a dead village draped in a shroud. Along the streets only the passing patrols had trampled the snow into a muddy mess.
At the Maheus’ the last shovelful of gleanings from the spoil-heap had been burned the evening before; and in this terrible weather it was out of the question to think of fetching some more when even the sparrows were unable to find a blade of glass. Alzire, whose poor little hands had stubbornly scrabbled through the snow, was dying. La Maheude had had to wrap her in a scrap of blanket as she waited for Dr Vanderhaghen, whom she had been to see twice already without finding him in. The maid, however, had just promised her that the doctor would visit her in the village before dark, and so La Maheude was standing by the window watching out for him while the sick girl, who had insisted on coming downstairs, sat shivering on a chair in the fond belief that she was warmer there next to the cold stove. Opposite her sat old Bonnemort, his legs bad again, apparently asleep. Neither Lénore nor Henri was home yet, still out tramping the highways and byways with Jeanlin, asking people if they had any spare change. Only Maheu moved about, lumbering up and down the other side of the bare room and bumping into the wall each time with the dazed look of an animal that can no longer see the bars of its cage. The paraffin-oil, too, was finished; but the reflection from the snow outside was still so bright that it dimly lit the room even though night had fallen.
There was a sound of clogs, and La Levaque burst in like a gale, beside herself with fury and shouting at La Maheude from the open doorway:
‘So it was you that told everyone I made my lodger give me twenty sous each time he slept with me!’
La Maheude shrugged.
‘Leave me be. I never said such a thing…Anyway, who told you I did?’
‘Somebody told me, never mind who…And you said you could hear our dirty goings-on through the wall, and that my place was filthy because I was always flat on my back…Just try telling me again you never said it!’
Quarrels like this broke out every day as a result of the women’s constant gossiping, and, particularly between families who lived next door to each other, it was one daily round of rows and reconciliation. But never before had they gone for each other with such bitter ill-will. Since the start of the strike hunger had sharpened everyone’s grudges, and there was a general desire to come to blows: an argument between two women would end in a fight to the death between two men.
Indeed at that very moment Levaque himself arrived, dragging Bouteloup with him by force:
‘Here he is. Let’s hear him say whether he gave my wife twenty sous to sleep with her!’
Their meek lodger was shocked and started mumbling a protest into his beard:
‘What an idea. No, of course not. Never.’
At once Levaque turned nasty and shoved a fist under Maheu’s nose.
‘I’m not having it, you hear? When a man’s got a wife like that, he should beat some sense into her…Or maybe you actually believe what she’s been saying?’
‘What is all this, for Christ’s sake?’ Maheu exclaimed, furious at being roused from his gloom. ‘Who are you trying to stir up with all this ‘‘he said’’ and ‘‘she said’’? Haven’t we got enough problems already? Bugger off, or you’ll get this in your face! And anyway, who told you my wife said such a thing?’
‘Who told me?…I’ll tell you who told me! La Pierronne!’
La Maheude gave a shrill laugh and turned towards La Levaque:
‘So La Pierronne told you, did she?…Well, just let me tell you what she told me! Oh yes! She said you were sleeping with the two men at once, one beneath and one on top!’
After that any reconciliation was out of the question. Everybody was angry, and the Levaques retorted that La Pierronne had told them all sorts about the Maheus, like how they’d sold Catherine off, and how Étienne had caught a dose at the Volcano, and now the whole filthy lot of them had it, even the children.
‘She said that! She said that!’ Maheu screamed. ‘Right. I’m off. And if she admits to my face she said it, I’ll knock her bloody block off.’
Already he had rushed outside, pursued by the Levaques, who wanted to see this, while Bouteloup, who hated scenes, sloped off home. Incensed by the row, La Maheude, too, was about to leave when a moan from Alzire detained her. She pulled the ends of the blanket over the little girl’s shivering body and resumed her position by the window, where she gazed blankly into the distance. Still the doctor didn’t come!
Outside the Pierrons’ door Maheu and the Levaques ran into Lydie, who was pacing up and down in the snow. The house was shut up, but a chink of light could be seen through one of the shutters; and the child replied to their questions with some embarrassment: no, her father wasn’t in, he had gone to meet La Brûlé at the wash-house so as to carry the washing home. Then she became flustered and refused to say what her mother was doing. Eventually she revealed all, with a vindictive snigger: her mother had thrown her out because M. Dansaert was there and they couldn’t talk if she was around. Dansaert had been touring the village since morning in the company of two gendarmes in an attempt to recruit some workers, putting pressure on the weak and announcing to all and sundry that if they didn’t go back to work at Le Voreux next Monday the Company had decided to take on men from Belgium. And at dusk, finding La Pierronne alone, he had sent the gendarmes away and stayed to drink a glass of gin with her in front of her warm fire.
‘Shh! Be quiet, this we must see!’ Levaque whispered, giving a dirty laugh. ‘The other business can wait…And you can hop it, you little hussy!’
Lydie stepped back a few paces, while he put his eye to the crack in the shutter. He gave short muffled cries of exclamation as his back rose and shuddered. Then it was La Levaque’s turn to look; but she announced, as though she were about to vomit, that the whole thing was disgusting. Wanting to have a look, too, Maheu pushed her out of the way, and then declared that you certainly got value for money! And they repeated the process, each taking a turn to look, just like in a peep-show. The sitting-room, which was sparklingly clean, looked bright and cheerful with its roaring fire; there were cakes on the table, as well as a bottle and some glasses – quite a party, in fact. So much so that the sight of it all was enough to infuriate the two men, they who in other circumstances would have laughed at the episode for a good six months. The fact that she was lying there with her skirts in the air getting screwed for all she was worth was funny all right. But God Almighty if it wasn’t a rotten trick to be doing it in front of such a huge fire and after getting her strength up with all those biscuits when the comrades hadn’t a crumb of bread or a lump of coal to their name!
‘Here’s Father!’ cried Lydie as she made her escape.
Pi
erron was returning from the wash-house, minding his own business, with the bundle of washing over one shoulder. Maheu bearded him at once:
‘Here you! I’ve been told that your wife said I sold Catherine and that everyone in our house has got a dose of the clap…So, tell me, what’s he paying you for her, eh? You know who I mean, the fellow that’s screwing her stupid right at this very minute.’
Taken by surprise, Pierron was completely nonplussed when La Pierronne, alarmed by the sound of all these voices, forgot herself and opened the door a little to see what was going on. There she stood, all red, her bodice unbuttoned, her skirt still hitched up and tucked into her belt, while in the background Dansaert was desperately pulling on his trousers. The overman made his escape and disappeared from view, terrified that a story of this kind would soon reach the ears of the manager. Then all hell broke loose as people laughed and jeered and flung insults at each other.