‘Quick, run for it, the gendarmes are coming!’
He, too, told her to go away and shouted abuse; and as he did so, he could feel his cheeks still stinging from the slaps she had given him. But she would not be put off. She forced him to drop the axe, and with both arms began to drag him away. He could not match her strength.
‘I promise you, the gendarmes are coming! You’ve got to listen to me…Chaval went to fetch them, if you must know. He shouldn’t have done it, so I came to warn you…You must get away. I don’t want them to catch you.’
And Catherine led him away just as they began to hear the heavy clatter of hooves in the distance, approaching along the cobbled road. At once the cry went up: ‘The gendarmes! The gendarmes!’ There was chaos as everyone made a run for it, such a wild flight that within a couple of minutes the road was clear, absolutely empty, as though it had been swept by a hurricane. All that was left was the dark patch of shadow made by Maigrat’s corpse where it lay on the white ground. Outside Tison’s only Rasseneur remained, with a look of open relief on his face, applauding the easy victory of the men with sabres; and as Montsou lay silent and deserted, with not a light to be seen, the bourgeois sweated behind closed shutters, not daring to look out, teeth chattering. The plain had now merged with the pitch darkness, and all that could be seen were the blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens, blazing away against the backdrop of a doom-laden sky. The sound of thundering hooves drew closer, and suddenly the gendarmes were there in the street, visible only as one dark, solid mass. Following behind, under their protection, the pastryman’s cart arrived from Marchiennes at last: and a delivery-boy jumped down and calmly proceeded to unload the vol-au-vent cases.
PART VI
I
The first fortnight in February came and went, and a bitter cold spell prolonged the hard winter, offering no mercy to the poor, wretched people. The authorities had once again come to carry out their investigations: the Prefect from Lille, a public prosecutor and a general. The gendarmes had not sufficed, and troops had arrived to occupy Montsou, a whole regiment of them, camped out from Beugnies to Marchiennes. Armed guards were posted at the pit-shafts, and soldiers stood watch over the machinery. The manager’s house, the Company yards and even the houses of some of the bourgeois all bristled with bayonets. The only sound to be heard along the cobbled highway was the slow tramp of army patrols. On top of the spoil-heap at Le Voreux, in the icy wind that blew there constantly, a sentry was permanently positioned, like a lookout standing watch over the entire plain; and every two hours, as though this were enemy territory, the calls of the changing guard would ring out:
‘Who goes there?…Step forward! Password!’
There had been no resumption of work anywhere. On the contrary, the strike had spread: Crèvecœur, Mirou and Madeleine had ceased production, like Le Voreux; Feutry-Cantel and La Victoire were losing more workers with every day that passed; and at Saint-Thomas, which had previously remained unaffected, there were absentees. Faced with this show of military might, which offended their pride, the miners’ mood was now one of mute obstinacy. Amid the beetfields the villages lay seemingly deserted. Not a worker stirred from his house, and if the occasional person was to be seen, he would be walking alone, his eyes averted and his head lowered as he passed the men in uniform. And beneath this bleak tranquillity, this passive refusal to register the presence of all these rifles, there lay a deceptive docility, the patient, enforced obedience of wild animals in a cage, never taking their eyes off the trainer and just waiting to sink their teeth into his neck the moment he turns his back. For the Company the halt in production was ruinous, and it was talking of taking on miners from Le Borinage, on the Belgian border. But it did not dare do so, which meant that the confrontation had now reached an impasse, with the miners staying at home while the troops guarded idle pits.
This period of calm had set in, all of a sudden, on the morning following those terrible events, and it concealed a sense of panic so great that as little as possible was said about the damage and atrocities which had been committed. The public inquest established that Maigrat had died as the result of his fall, and the circumstances surrounding the dreadful mutilation of his body, already the subject of legend, were left vague. For its part the Company did not publicly acknowledge the damage that had been incurred, no more than the Grégoires were eager to expose their daughter to the scandal of a lawsuit in which she would have had to give evidence. Nevertheless a number of arrests had been made, mere bystanders as usual, witless, gawping folk who had no idea what was going on. Pierron had been taken to Marchiennes in handcuffs by mistake, which was still a source of great amusement to the comrades. Rasseneur, too, had almost been marched off by two gendarmes. Management was content to draw up lists of those to be dismised, and whole batches of people were being handed their cards: Maheu had been given his, and Levaque also, along with thirty-four of their comrades from Village Two Hundred and Forty alone. And the harshest penalties were in store for Étienne, who had vanished without trace since the evening of the riot. Chaval in his hatred had denounced him, though he refused to name the others, having been implored not to by Catherine, who wanted to protect her parents. As the days went by, there was a sense of unfinished business, and people waited tensely to see how things would turn out.
In Montsou thenceforth the bourgeois woke up every night with a start, their ears ringing with the sound of imaginary alarm bells and their nostrils filled with the smell of gunpowder. But the final straw was a sermon given by their new priest, Father Ranvier, the scrawny cleric with the blazing red eyes who had taken over from Father Joire. What a change from the diplomatic smiles of that plump and inoffensive man whose sole aim in life had been to get on with everyone! Had not Father Ranvier had the effrontery to defend these frightful criminals who were bringing dishonour on the region? He had made excuses for the strikers’ villainies and launched a violent attack on the bourgeoisie, whom he held entirely responsible. It was the bourgeois themselves who, in robbing the Church of its age-old rights and freedoms only then to abuse them, had turned the world into an accursed place of suffering and injustice; it was they who stood in the way of the strike being settled, and it was they who would precipitate a terrible catastrophe by their godlessness and their refusal to return to the beliefs and brotherly traditions of the early Christians. And Ranvier had even dared to threaten the rich, warning them that if they continued not to listen to the voice of God, God would surely side with the poor: He would take back the fortunes of these self-indulgent heathens and distribute them among the humble of this earth for His greater glory. Pious ladies trembled, while the notary declared that this was the worst kind of socialism, and everyone pictured their priest at the head of a mob, brandishing a crucifix and with mighty blows smashing the bourgeois society born of 1789.
M. Hennebeau, an experienced observer of such things, merely shrugged and said:
‘If he proves to be too much of a nuisance, the bishop will soon get rid of him for us.’
And all the while such panic raged from one end of the plain to the other, Étienne was living underground, in the depths of Réquillart, in Jeanlin’s lair. For this was where he had taken refuge, and no one suspected that he was so close: the brazen cheek of his hiding in the mine itself, in this disused road down in the old pit, had defeated all attempts to find him. Above him the entrance was blocked by the sloe bushes and hawthorns that had grown up through the collapsed timbers of the headgear; nobody ventured down there now, and you had to know the routine of hanging from the roots of the rowan tree and then keeping your nerve and letting yourself drop till you reached the ladder rungs that were still solid. And there were other obstacles to protect him too: the suffocating heat in the shaft, a perilous descent of a hundred and twenty metres, then the painful slide on your front down a quarter of a league, between the narrow walls of the roadway, before you came to the robber’s den and its hoard of plunder. Here Étienne lived surrounded by plenty: he
had found some gin, the remains of the dried cod and further provisions of every kind. The large bed of hay was excellent, there were no draughts, and the temperature was constant, like a warm bath. The only imminent shortage was light. Jeanlin had taken on the job of supplying Étienne, which he carried out with all the careful secretiveness of a young rascal who delights in outsmarting the police; and he brought him everything, even hair-oil, but he simply could not lay his hands on a packet of candles.
By the fifth day Étienne lit a candle only when he needed to eat. The food simply wouldn’t go down if he tried to swallow it in the dark. This interminable total darkness with its unchanging blackness was proving to be his greatest hardship. It was all very well being able to sleep in safety and to have all the bread and warmth he needed, but the fact remained that he had never before felt so oppressed by the dark. It seemed to be crushing the very thoughts out of him. So here he was, living off stolen goods! Despite his communist theories, the old scruples instilled in him by his upbringing continued to trouble him, and he made do with dry bread, eking it out. But what else could he do? He still had to live, his task was not yet accomplished. And something else weighed on him, too: remorse for the drunken savagery that had resulted from his drinking gin on an empty stomach in the bitter cold and which had made him attack Chaval with a knife. The episode had brought him into contact with an uncharted region of terror within himself, his hereditary disease, the long lineage of drunkenness which meant that he couldn’t touch a drop of alcohol without lapsing into homicidal rage. Would he end up killing someone? When he had finally reached this shelter, in the deep calm of the earth, sated with violence, he had slept for two whole days like an animal in a stupor of repletion; and the disgust persisted. His body ached all over, there was a bitter taste in his mouth, and his head hurt, as though he had been attending some wild party. A week went by, but the Maheus, who knew where he was, were unable to send him a candle: and so he had to renounce all hope of being able to see, even to eat by.
Now Étienne would spend hours lying on his bed of hay, turning over vague ideas which he didn’t even know he had. He felt a sense of superiority that set him apart from the rest of the comrades, as though in the process of educating himself he had acceded to some higher plane. He had never reflected so much before, and he wondered why he had felt such disgust the day after that furious rampage from pit to pit; but he was loath to answer his own question, feeling repugnance as he thought back to certain things, to the base nature of people’s desires, to the crudeness of their instincts, to the reek of all that poverty borne on the wind. Despite the tormenting darkness he eventually began to dread the moment when he would return to the village. How revolting it was, all those wretched people living on top of each other and washing in each other’s dirty water! And not one of them could he talk to seriously about politics. They might as well be animals, and always that same foul air which stank of onions and left you choking for breath! He wanted to broaden their horizons, to show them the way to the life of comfort and good manners led by the bourgeoisie, to make them the masters. But how long it was all going to take! And he no longer felt he had the courage to wait for victory, here in this prison-house of hunger. Gradually his vanity at being their leader and his constant concern to do their thinking for them were slowly setting him apart and lending him the soul of one of those bourgeois he so despised.
One evening Jeanlin brought him the remains of a candle, which he had stolen from a wagoner’s lantern; and for Étienne this was a great relief. When the darkness began to get to him and his thoughts started weighing on him as though he might soon go mad, he would light it for a moment; and then, when he had chased away the gremlins, he would extinguish it, determined to economize on this bright light that was as necessary to his survival as bread itself. The silence made his ears hum, and all he ever heard was the scuttling of rats, the creaking of the old timbering, or the tiny sound of a spider weaving its web. And as he stared into the warm void, his mind kept returning to the same old question: what were his comrades doing up there? To abandon them would have seemed to him the worst possible act of cowardice. If he was hiding down here like this, it was so that he could remain free, ready to advise and act. His long periods of reflection had shown him where his true ambition lay: pending something better he wanted to be like Pluchart, to stop work and devote himself entirely to politics, but alone, in a nice clean room somewhere, on the grounds that brain work is a full-time job and requires much peace and quiet.
At the beginning of the second week, Jeanlin having told him that the gendarmes believed him to have crossed into Belgium, Étienne ventured out of his hole after nightfall. He wanted to assess the situation, to see if it was still worth resisting. For his own part he thought that their chances of success had been compromised. Before the strike he had had his doubts about the possibility of victory but had simply gone along with things; now, having experienced the heady excitement of rebellion, he had reverted to his original doubts and despaired of ever getting the Company to concede. But he did not yet admit as much to himself, and he was tortured with anguish at the thought of the miseries that defeat would bring, of all the heavy responsibility which he would have to bear for people’s suffering. Would not an end to the strike also mean an end to his own role in the matter, the collapse of his ambitions, a return to his brutish existence in the mine and the revoltingness of life in the village? And he tried in all honesty, without base or false calculations, to recover his sense of commitment, to convince himself that resistance was still feasible, that capital would destroy itself when faced with the heroic suicide of labour.
And indeed news of ruin after ruin was now reverberating across the whole region. At night, as he roamed the dark countryside like a wolf that has left the shelter of its wood, he could almost hear the companies collapsing from one end of the plain to the other. Along the roadsides he was continually passing empty, lifeless factories whose buildings stood rotting beneath a pale, ghostly sky. The sugar-refineries had suffered particularly; Hoton and Fauvelle, having both reduced their workforces, had just gone bust one after the other. At the Dutilleul flour-mills the last grindstone had stopped turning on the second Saturday of the month, and the Bleuze rope-works, which made cables for the pits, had been been brought down once and for all by the halt in production. Around Marchiennes the situation was daily getting worse: not one furnace operating at the Gagebois glass factory, continual lay-offs at the Sonneville construction works, only one of the three blast-furnaces at Les Forges still functioning, and not a single battery of coke-ovens was to be seen burning on the horizon. The strike by the Montsou miners, itself the result of the industrial crisis which had been worsening for the past two years, had in turn exacerbated that crisis by precipitating this widespread bankruptcy. To the several causes of this painful predicament – the lack of orders from America, the fact that so much capital was tied up in excess production capacity – was now added an unforeseen lack of coal to fuel the few boilers that were still functioning; and this was the final agony, machines deprived of their sustenance because the pits themselves were no longer supplying it. Alarmed by the poor economic outlook, the Company had reduced output and starved its workers, with the inevitable result that since the end of December it had not had a single lump of coal in any of its pit-yards. It was a case of chain reaction: the problems began far away, one collapse led to another, industries knocked each other over as they fell, and all in such a rapid series of disasters that the effects could be felt as close as the neighbouring towns and cities of Lille, Douai and Valenciennes, where whole families were being ruined by bankers calling in their loans.
Often, at a bend in the road, Étienne would stop in the freezing night air and listen to the sound of structures giving way. He would take deep lungfuls of the darkness, filled with euphoria at the prospect of this black void and with the hope that the new day would dawn on the extermination of the old world, with not a single fortune still intact and e
verything levelled to the ground by the scythe of equality. But amid this general destruction it was the Company’s pits which interested him the most. He would set off again, blinded by the darkness, and visit each of them one by one, delighted every time he learned of some further damage. New rock-falls were occurring constantly, and with increasing seriousness the longer the roadways remained out of use. Above the northern roadway at Mirou the subsidence was so great now that a whole hundred-metre stretch of the Joiselle road had fallen in as though there had been an earthquake; and the Company would compensate landowners at once when their fields disappeared, not even bothering to haggle over the price, so anxious were they not to let the news of such accidents spread. Crèvecœur and Madeleine, where the rock was particularly unstable, were suffering more and more blockages. There was talk of two deputies being buried alive at La Victoire; there had been flooding at Feutry-Cantel; one kilometre of roadway at Saint-Thomas would have to be bricked where the timbering had been poorly maintained and was splitting all along its length. Huge repair bills were thus mounting by the hour, making severe inroads into shareholders’ dividends, and in the long run the rapid destruction of the pits would end up consuming those famous Montsou deniers that had increased in value one hundredfold over the course of a century.
And so, presented with the news of this series of disasters, Étienne began once more to hope, and he came to believe that a third month of resistance would finish the monster off, that weary, sated beast squatting like an idol in its far-away temple. He knew that the trouble at Montsou had caused much excitement in the Paris press: a furious debate was raging between the newspapers sympathetic to the government and those which supported the opposition, and terrifying stories were circulating and being used in particular against the International, which the Emperor and his government had at first encouraged but which it now viewed with increasing apprehension. Moreover, since the Company’s Board of Directors could no longer continue to turn a deaf ear to what was going on, two of its members had deigned to come and hold an inquiry, but with such a reluctant air and with such apparent lack of concern for how things would turn out, so thoroughly uninterested, in fact, that they had left three days later saying that everything was perfectly fine. But Étienne had learned from other sources that during their visit these gentlemen had been in permanent session, working at fever pitch and investigating all manner of things which no one in their entourage was prepared to divulge. Whistling in the dark was how Étienne saw it, and he even managed to interpret their hurried departure as sheer panic. Now he was certain of victory, for those fearsome gentlemen had clearly thrown in the towel.