by Emile Zola
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.
With the skill and cool deliberateness of a good worker who has given much thought to the task in hand, he set to work. He immediately began by cutting a panel out of the shaft partition with his saw, so as to gain access to the main winding-shaft. Then, with the aid of matches, which flared and quickly went out, he was able to assess the state of the tubbing and the extent of the recent repairs.
In the area between Calais and Valenciennes the sinking of a pit-shaft was an exceptionally difficult business as they had to pass through the water tables, immense sheets of water that lay at the level of the lowest valleys. Only by installing tubbing, in the form of pieces of wood joined together like the staves of a barrel, was it possible to contain the springs that fed them and to insulate the shafts in the middle of these deep, dark lakes whose waters lapped against their outer walls. When they sank the shaft at Le Voreux, they had had to put in two sections of tubbing: an upper one, through the shifting sands and white clay that are found in the vicinity of cretaceous rock, which is itself riddled with cracks and swollen with water like a sponge; and then a lower one, directly above the coal itself, passing through a yellow, flour-like sand of almost liquid consistency; and this was where the Torrent was, the subterranean sea that terrified the pitmen of that region, a real sea with its own storms and wrecks, a forgotten, unfathomable sea of rolling black waves more than three hundred metres below the sunlight. Generally the tubbing held firm, despite the enormous pressure, and the only real problem came from the settling of the surrounding earth, which had been destabilized by the constant movement of abandoned workings gradually caving in. When the rock sank like this, large cracks sometimes appeared and spread as far as the tubbing, causing it to buckle; and this was where the main danger lay, the threat of major subsidence and the flooding that followed, when the pit would be filled with an avalanche of earth and a deluge of underground springs.
Sitting astride the opening he had made between the two shafts, Souvarine saw that the fifth section of the tubbing had been very badly warped. The wooden staves were bellying out beyond the framework that held them in place, and indeed several had come loose. Numerous little jets of water, pichoux as the miners called them, were spurting from the joints, despite the tow an
d pitch with which they were lagged. And because they had been in such a hurry, the joiners had simply fitted iron brackets at the corners of the shaft without bothering to insert all the screws. It was clear that considerable movement was taking place in the sands of the Torrent that lay behind.
Then, using his brace, he loosened the screws in the brackets so that one last push would tear them all out. This was an extremely risky job, and twenty times or more he nearly lost his balance and plunged down the hundred and eighty metres to the bottom. He had had to grab hold of the oak guides along which the cages travelled up and down, and then, suspended above the void, he moved back and forth along the crossbeams by which these vertical rails were connected at intervals; he would slide along or sit or lean over backwards, with only an elbow or a knee for support, coolly contemptuous of death. The merest draught of air could have sent him flying, and three times he caught himself just in time, unfazed. First he would feel about with his hand, then he would set to, lighting a match only when he had lost his bearings among the greasy beams. Having loosened the screws he set about the tubbing itself; and the danger grew. He had sought out the one key piece of timbering that jammed the others in place, and he attacked it, drilling holes in it, sawing at it, and gradually making it thinner so as to lessen its resistance. And all the time the water continued to spurt in thin jets from every crack and chink, blinding him and soaking him in an icy rain. Two matches failed to light properly. They were all wet now, and it was pitch dark, a bottomless chasm of blackness.
From this point on he was seized with fury. He was exhilarated to feel the breath of the invisible on his skin, and the black horror of this rainswept abyss drove him to a frenzy of destruction. He attacked the tubbing at random, striking where he could, with his brace, with his saw, suddenly determined to rip it open and bring everything crashing down on his head. And he did so with the ferocity of a man plunging a knife into the living flesh of a person he loathed. He would kill it in the end, this foul beast that was Le Voreux, with its ever-gaping maw that had devoured so much human fodder. The sound of his tools rang out, biting into the wood; he stretched, he crawled, he climbed up, he climbed down, always managing by some miracle or other to hang on, ceaseless in his movement like a bird of the night flitting among the rafters of a bell-tower.
But gradually he grew calmer, and then he was cross with himself. Was he incapable of proceeding with due deliberation? Calmly he paused to recover his breath and then returned to the escape shaft, where he blocked the hole by replacing the panel he had sawn out. Enough was enough, he didn’t want to give the game away by creating too much damage, which they would only have tried to repair at once. The beast had been wounded in its belly, and it remained to be seen whether it would survive the day. Moreover, he had left his signature: a horrified world would know that this was no death from natural causes. He took his time wrapping his tools carefully in his jacket, and slowly he climbed back up the ladders. Once he had left the pit without being seen, it didn’t even occur to him to go and change his clothes. Three o’clock struck. He just stood in the road and waited.
At that same hour Étienne, who had been unable to sleep, was disturbed by a slight noise in the thick darkness of the room. He could hear the gentle breathing of the children and the snores of Bonnemort and La Maheude, while next to him Jeanlin was making a long-drawn-out whistling sound, like a flute. He must have dreamed it, and he was just resuming his attempts to go to sleep when he heard the noise again. It was the sound of a mattress creaking, as though someone were trying to get out of bed without being heard. He supposed that Catherine must be feeling unwell.
‘Is that you? What’s the matter?’ he whispered.
There was no reply, only the snoring could still be heard. For the next five minutes nothing stirred, but then there was another creaking sound. Certain this time that he had not been mistaken, he crossed the room, holding his hands out in front of him to feel for the bed opposite. He was extremely surprised to find Catherine sitting there, holding her breath, awake and on her guard.
‘Why didn’t you answer? What are you up to?’
Eventually she said:
‘I’m getting up.’
‘At this hour of the night?’
‘Yes, I’m going back to work at the pit.’
Étienne was shocked, and he had to sit down on the edge of the bed while Catherine explained her reasons to him. She could not bear to live like this, not working and always feeling that she was being reproached for it; she would rather run the risk of some rough treatment from Chaval down the mine; and if her mother wouldn’t take the money she brought in, well, she was old enough to fend for herself and make her own soup.
‘Off you go. I’ve got to dress. And please, not a word about this to anyone.’
But he remained beside her, having now put his arm round her waist in a gesture of sorrowful compassion. As they sat close together in their nightshirts, here on the edge of a bed that was not yet cold after being slept in, they could each feel the warmth of the other’s bare skin. At first she had tried to pull away; then she had begun to cry softly and put her arms round his neck to hold him against her, in a desperate embrace. And there they sat, with no other desires, mindful of their past unhappy love, which they had never been able to satisfy. Was it over between them for ever? Though now the way was open, would the day never come when they would dare to love each other? It would have taken only a brief taste of happiness to dispel the shame and embarrassment that was keeping them apart, the sundry notions they had got into their heads and which even they did not fully understand.
‘Go back to bed,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t want to light the candle, it would wake Mum…Off you go. It’s time I was leaving.’
He wasn’t listening but continued to hold her tight as an immense sadness filled his heart. He was overwhelmed by a desire for peace, by an irresistible need to be happy; and he saw himself married and living in a nice little house, with no other ambition than to live and die there, just the two of them together. A piece of bread would be all they’d need; and even if there were only enough for one, then she could have it. Why ask for anything more? Was there anything else worth having in life?
Meanwhile she unwrapped her bare arms from round his neck.
‘Please, let me go.’
Then, on a sudden, heartfelt impulse, he whispered in her ear:
‘Wait. I’ll come with you.’
And he was astonished at himself for saying such a thing. He had sworn never to go back down the mine again, so where had this sudden decision come from, springing from his lips like that without his ever having dreamed of such a thing, without his ever having thought the possibility over in his mind? He now felt such calm, such a complete release from all his doubts, that he held stubbornly to his decision, like a man saved by accident, who has found the only possible way out of his torment. Thus he refused to listen to her when she, believing that he was doing this just for her and fearful of the nasty comments with which he would be greeted at the pit, expressed some alarm. He could not have cared less: the notices promised a pardon, and that was all that mattered.
‘I want to work. It’s my decision…Come on, let’s get dressed. We must be quiet.’
They got dressed in the dark, taking every possible precaution not to wake anyone. Catherine had secretly got her miner’s clothes ready the night before, and Étienne fetched a jacket and trousers out of the cupboard; they did not wash, for fear of making a noise with the basin. Everyone was asleep, but they still had to pass along the narrow corridor where La Maheude’s bed was. On their way out, as ill luck would have it, they knocked into a chair. She woke up and called out sleepily:
‘What is it? Who’s there?’
Catherine, trembling, had stopped at once and clutched Étienne’s hand very tightly.
‘It’s only me,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m just going out for a breath of air. It’s too stuffy in here.’
‘Oh! All right
.’
And La Maheude went back to sleep. For a time Catherine dared not move. Eventually she went downstairs to the parlour, where she took the slice of bread she had kept from a loaf given them by a lady from Montsou and cut it in half. Then they quietly shut the front door and departed.
Souvarine had remained standing at the corner of the road, near the Advantage. For the past half-hour he had been watching the miners return to work, a jumble of vague shapes in the darkness, tramping past like a herd. He was counting them, as a butcher might count his animals as they enter the abattoir; and he was surprised by how many there were, for, pessimistic though he was, he had not foreseen that there would be quite so many cowards. The queue showed no sign of coming to an end; and as he stood there in the bitter cold, his teeth clenched and his eyes shining, his body stiffened.
But he gave a start. Among the men filing past, whose faces he could not make out, he had nevertheless just recognized one by the way he walked. He stepped forward and stopped him.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
Étienne was so startled that instead of answering him he stammered out:
‘Goodness! I thought you’d left!’
Then he admitted that he was returning to the mine. Yes, all right, he had sworn not to; but what sort of life was it to be standing about with your hands in your pockets waiting for things that might take another hundred years to come about. Besides, he had personal reasons.
Souvarine was shaking as he listened to him. Then he grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him in the direction of the village.
‘Go home! I insist. Do you hear me?’
But just then Catherine stepped forward, and he recognized her too. Étienne was busy protesting that it was nobody’s place but his own to judge his conduct. Souvarine looked from the girl to the comrade, and then stepped back and gestured in sudden resignation. Once a woman had got under a man’s skin, he was done for, he might as well die. Perhaps Souvarine had a sudden memory of his mistress, back there in Moscow, the mistress who had been hanged, severing the last tie that bound his flesh and setting him free to dispose of the lives of others and of his own. He said simply: