‘Oh God, it’s my turn now, take me!…Dear God, take my husband, take the others, for pity’s sake. Please, no more!’
III
By eight o’clock that Sunday evening Souvarine was already the only one left in the saloon at the Advantage, sitting in his usual seat with his head against the wall. There wasn’t a miner now who could lay his hands on the two sous needed for a pint, and the bars had never had so few customers. So Mme Rasseneur, with nothing to do but sit at the counter, maintained a tetchy silence, while Rasseneur stood by the cast-iron stove with a pensive air, seemingly preoccupied with the russet smoke rising from the coal.
Suddenly the stuffy tranquillity characteristic of overheated rooms was broken by the sound of three sharp taps on a windowpane, and Souvarine looked round. He got to his feet, having identified the signal that Étienne had already used several times before as a way of attracting his attention whenever he saw him sitting at an empty table smoking his cigarette. But before Souvarine could reach the door, Rasseneur had opened it; and, having recognized the man standing there, thanks to the bright light from the window, he said:
‘What’s up? Are you afraid I’m going to inform on you?…Come on, you’ll be much more comfortable talking in here than out in the road.’
Étienne walked in. Mme Rasseneur politely offered him a beer, but he refused with a wave of his hand. Rasseneur went on:
‘I guessed long ago where you’ve been hiding. If I were a grass, like your friends say, I’d have had the gendarmes after you days ago.’
‘It’s all right, you don’t need to defend yourself,’ Étienne replied. ‘I know telling tales isn’t your style…People can have different ideas about things and still respect each other.’
Silence fell once more. Souvarine had returned to his seat, with his back to the wall, gazing absently at the smoke from his cigarette; but his restless fingers were fidgeting anxiously and he kept running them over his knees, searching for the warm fur of Poland, who was absent that evening. His uneasiness was quite unconscious, a sense of something missing even though he could not rightly say what it was.
Sitting on the other side of the table, Étienne said finally:
‘Le Voreux’s starting up again tomorrow morning. The Belgians have arrived with young Négrel.’
‘Yes, they brought them in after dark,’ murmured Rasseneur, who had remained standing. ‘Just as long as there’s no more bloodshed!’
Then, in a louder voice:
‘Look, I don’t want to start having an argument with you again, but things really are going to turn nasty if you all carry on being stubborn…It’s just the same with that International of yours, you know. I met Pluchart the day before yesterday in Lille…I had business to attend to there. That whole set-up of his is falling apart, it seems.’
He gave details. Having won over the workers of the world with a propaganda campaign that still had the bourgeoisie quaking in their shoes, the International was now being consumed by internal rivalries born of vanity and ambition, and day by day these were gradually destroying it. Ever since the anarchists had taken control, forcing out the gradualists who had founded it in the first place, everything had been going wrong; the original goal, the reform of the wagesystem, had been lost sight of amid all the infighting, and the intellectuals were in disarray because they hated being regimented. The writing was already on the wall for this mass movement,1 which for one brief moment had threatened to sweep away the old, rotten structures of society at a stroke.
‘Pluchart’s very frustrated about it all,’ Rasseneur went on. ‘And what’s more he’s lost his voice completely now. But he keeps making speeches, he’s thinking of going to give one in Paris…And he told me three times that our strike had failed.’
Staring at the ground, Étienne let him have his say. The previous evening he had talked to some of the comrades, and he had felt the first waves of resentment and suspicion being directed at him, the first stirrings of the unpopularity that presages ultimate defeat. And he sat there gloomily, not wanting to admit his own sense of helplessness in front of a man who had predicted that one day the crowd would jeer at him too when the moment came for it to wreak vengeance for its own miscalculation.
‘No doubt the strike has failed,’ he replied. ‘I know that as well as Pluchart. But we foresaw it would. We only went on strike against our better judgement, and we never thought it would mean the end of the Company…But people get carried away, they start hoping for all sorts of things, and then, when it all goes wrong, they forget that it was only to be expected, and they start wailing and arguing with each other as though the whole disaster were a bolt from the blue.’
‘Well, then,’ asked Rasseneur, ‘if you think the game’s up, why don’t you get the comrades to see sense?’
Étienne glared at him:
‘Look here, enough’s enough…You have your ideas and I have mine. I came in because I wanted to show you that I respect you all the same. But I still think that even if we die in the attempt, our starved corpses will do more for the people’s cause than any amount of your sensible approach…Ah, if only one of those bloody soldiers would put a bullet through my chest! It would be the perfect end!’
His eyes had begun to fill as he gave vent to his feelings, betraying the secret desire of the vanquished for a place of eternal refuge in which all torment shall cease.
‘Well said!’ declared Mme Rasseneur, who shot a disdainful look at her husband in which the radical nature of her own opinions was plain to see.
Souvarine, gazing dreamily into the distance and still fidgeting nervously with his fingers, seemed not to have heard. His mystic reverie, full of sundry bloodthirsty visions, lent an air of savagery to his pale girlish face, with its thin nose and tiny pointed teeth. And now he had begun to think aloud, responding to something Rasseneur had said earlier about the International:
‘They’re all cowards. Only one man could have turned their organization into a truly fearsome instrument of destruction.2 But you have to want to do it, and nobody does, and that’s why yet again the revolution is going to fail.’
He proceeded, in a tone of disgust, to lament the general stupidity of men, while Rasseneur and Étienne listened uneasily as this sleepwalker shared his innermost thoughts with the realms of darkness. In Russia nothing was going right, and he despaired at the news he had been getting. His former comrades were all turning into politicians; the notorious nihilists3 before whom the whole of Europe had trembled, the sons of the petit bourgeois, of priests and shopkeepers, could think no further than liberating their own country and seemed to believe they would have delivered the whole world once they had killed their own particular despot. And the moment he talked to them of razing the old society to the ground like a ripe harvest, or even used that meaningless word ‘republic’, he could see they didn’t understand him, regarding him instead as a loose cannon and writing him off as a man who had stepped outside his class only to become one of the failed princes of international revolution. But he was still a patriot at heart, and it was with painful bitterness that he kept repeating his favourite phrase:
‘It’s all nonsense…They’ll never get anywhere with that nonsense.’
Then, lowering his voice, he began to speak bitterly about his old dream of brotherhood. He had given up his rank and fortune and thrown in his lot with the workers in the sole hope of seeing a new society founded on the communality of labour. Every penny he possessed had long since ended up in the pockets of the village children, and he had always treated the miners with brotherly affection, amused by their distrust of him and eventually winning them round by his quiet manner and the fact that he took pride in his work and kept himself to himself. But quite plainly he was never going to fit in completely, because in their eyes he would always remain a foreigner, a stranger in their midst, what with his scorn for all human ties and his determination to remain true to the cause, uncompromised by the pursuit of pleasure or spurious honour. And since that
morning he had been feeling particularly exasperated by an item that was in all the newspapers.
His voice changed and his eyes lost their dreamy air, as he fixed Étienne with a stare and addressed him directly:
‘Can you believe it? Those hat-makers in Marseilles who’ve won the first prize of a hundred thousand francs in the lottery and then immediately announce they’re going to invest it and live off the dividend and never work again!…That’s it, you see, that’s all you French workers ever think about. Find hidden treasure somewhere and keep it all to yourself, like everyone else who’s selfish and lazy. It’s all very well your complaining about the rich, but when good fortune brings you money, you simply don’t have the courage of your convictions to give it back to the poor…You will never deserve to be happy while you still have things you call your own or while your hatred of the bourgeoisie is still no more than a desperate desire to be bourgeois yourselves.’
Rasseneur burst out laughing; the idea that the two Marseilles workers should hand back their first prize struck him as idiotic. But Souvarine’s face went white and his features contorted into a terrifying expression, moved by the kind of religious wrath that can exterminate entire races.
‘You will all be cut down and tossed aside, cast on to the rubbish-heap of history!’ he cried. ‘One day there shall come a man who will rid the world of all you faint-hearts and pleasureseekers! Look at these hands! If they were strong enough, I’d pick the whole world up just like this and shake it into little pieces, and you’d all be dead and buried beneath the ruins!’
‘Well said!’ Mme Rasseneur declared again, with her usual air of polite conviction.
There was another silence. Then Étienne returned to the subject of the Belgian workers. He asked Souvarine what arrangements had been made at Le Voreux. But the mechanic was once more deep in his own thoughts, and he barely answered; all he knew was that cartridges were to be issued to the soldiers guarding the pit. The nervous fidgeting of his fingers across his knees now reached such a pitch that he finally realized what it was that he was missing, the soft, soothing fur of his pet rabbit.
‘Where’s Poland?’ he asked.
Rasseneur started laughing again and glanced across at his wife. After an embarrassed pause he plucked up courage:
‘Poland? She’s keeping warm.’
Ever since her escapade with Jeanlin, when she must have been injured, every litter the plump rabbit had produced had been stillborn; and so as not to have an unproductive mouth to feed, they had reluctantly decided that very day to serve her up with the potatoes.
‘That’s right. You had one of her legs this evening…Remember? You even licked your fingers!’
Souvarine did not understand at first. Then he turned very pale, his chin twitched as though he were going to be sick, and, despite his cultivation of a stoical indifference, two large tears began to well up in his eyes.
But no one had the time to notice this display of emotion because the door had suddenly been flung open and Chaval had appeared, pushing Catherine forward in front of him. Having got drunk on beer and brave talk in every bar in Montsou, it had suddenly occurred to him to visit the Advantage and show his former friends that he wasn’t afraid of anybody. As he entered, he was saying to Catherine:
‘By Christ, I tell you you’re coming in here and you’re going to have a beer, and I’ll smash anyone’s face in that so much as looks at me!’
Seeing Étienne there, Catherine was taken aback, and the colour drained from her face. When Chaval spotted him also, he gave a nasty snigger.
‘Two beers, please, Madame Rasseneur! We’re celebrating the return to work!’
Without saying a word, she poured the beer with the air of one who will always serve a customer. Everyone had fallen silent, and neither Rasseneur nor the other two men had moved from their places.
‘I know some as have accused me of informing,’ Chaval continued with a swagger, ‘and I’m waiting for them to say it to my face so we can have the matter out once and for all.’
No one answered him, and the men turned away to gaze absently at the walls.
‘There are bastards as works and some as don’t,’ he went on, raising his voice. ‘Me, I’ve got nothing to hide. I’ve quit Deneulin’s rotten outfit and tomorrow I’m going down Le Voreux with twelve Belgians. People think well of me there, so they’ve put me in charge of them. And if anyone doesn’t like it, he can say so, and then we’ll see.’
When his attempts at provocation met with the same contemptuous silence, he rounded on Catherine:
‘Drink, for God’s sake!…Come on, let’s drink to the death of all them bastards that refuse to work!’
She joined him in the toast, but her hand was trembling so much that there was a noisy clink as the glasses met. Chaval had now taken a fistful of shiny coins from his pocket, which he proceeded to display with drunken ostentation, saying that it took the sweat of a man’s brow to earn that sort of money and challenging idle layabouts to produce even ten sous. His comrades’ response infuriated him, so he resorted to direct insults.
‘Moles come out at night, it seems? The gendarmes must be asleep if the robbers are about!’
Étienne had now risen to his feet with calm resolve.
‘Look, you’re getting on my nerves…Yes, you are an informer, and your money must mean you’ve betrayed us again. And the very thought of even touching your toady skin turns my stomach. But no matter! I’m your man. It’s high time one of us sorted the other out.’
Chaval clenched his fists.
‘Christ, it doesn’t half take a lot to get you going, you cowardly bugger!…Just you, then? Fine. Well, I can tell you, you’re going to pay for all those filthy things they did to me!’
Stretching her arms out imploringly, Catherine stepped between them, but they had no difficulty in moving her aside, for she could sense the inevitability of this fight, and slowly she backed away of her own accord. She stood silently against the wall, so paralysed with anxiety that she did not even tremble, and stared wide-eyed at these two men who were going to kill each other on account of her.
Mme Rasseneur calmly removed the glasses from the counter in case they got broken. Then she sat down again on her bench, demonstrating a discreet lack of interest in the proceedings. But it was Rasseneur’s view that two former comrades simply could not be allowed to beat the life out of each other like this, and he persistently attempted to intervene. Souvarine had to grab him by the shoulder and lead him back to the table, saying:
‘It’s none of your business…Even two’s a crowd for them, so let the fittest survive.’
Without waiting to be attacked, Chaval was already punching the air. He was the taller of the two, an ungainly figure, and using both arms he made furious slashing movements in the direction of Étienne’s face, as if he were wielding a pair of sabres. And he kept on talking, playing to the gallery and working himself up even further by unleashing a stream of insults:
‘Right, you little pimp, let’s see if we can shove that nose of yours somewhere where the sun don’t shine!…Mmm, and I think we’ll just rearrange that tarty little pretty-boy mouth of yours, too! Then we’ll see if the bitches still come running after you!’
But Étienne, clenching his teeth and drawing himself up to his full, diminutive height, was fighting like a boxer, using his fists to protect his face and chest; and he waited for his openings, jabbing away fiercely as though his arms were tightly coiled springs.
At first they did each other little harm. The violent windmill action of the one and the cool waiting game of the other both served to prolong the encounter. A chair was knocked over, and their heavy shoes crunched on the white sand strewn over the flagstone floor. But eventually the two men were winded and could be heard gasping for breath, while their red faces began to swell as though there were braziers inside and the flames could be seen through the bright holes that were their eyes.
‘Take that!’ screamed Chaval. ‘Bull’s eye!?
??
And, indeed, like a flail launched at an angle, his fist had caught his opponent’s shoulder. Étienne stifled a groan of pain, and the only sound was a dull thud as his muscles absorbed the bruising blow. And he responded with a straight punch to the chest, which would have floored the other man if he hadn’t been leaping about like a goat. All the same the punch caught him on his left side, and so hard that he staggered and had to catch his breath. When he felt his arms grow limp with the pain, he flew into a rage and started lashing out with his feet like an animal, trying to rip Étienne’s stomach open with his heel.
‘And that one’s for your guts!’ he spluttered in a choking voice. ‘It’s time your innards were pulled.’
Étienne dodged the kick and was so outraged by this infringement of the rules of fair combat that he broke his silence:
‘Shut your mouth, you brute! And no kicking, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll get a chair and knock your brains out!’
The fight now grew fiercer. Rasseneur was sickened and would again have tried to intervene if his wife had not dissuaded him with a stern look: surely two customers were entitled to settle their differences here? So he had merely placed himself in front of the fireplace, for fear they might topple in. With his usual calm air Souvarine had rolled himself a cigarette, but he omitted to light it. Catherine was still standing motionless against the wall: only her hands had moved, rising unbidden to her waist, where they had writhed and begun to tear at her dress in recurrent spasms of nervous anxiety. It took her all her strength not to cry out, not to be the death of one man by proclaiming her preference for the other, though in fact she was so distraught that she no longer knew which one that might be.
Chaval soon grew weary, and he was now drenched in sweat and hitting out at random. Despite his anger Étienne kept up his guard and parried most of the punches, although some did get through. His ear was split, and Chaval’s nail had gouged out a piece of his neck, which smarted so much that he, too, started cursing and swearing as he tried to land one of his direct blows to the chest. Once again Chaval leaped out of the way; but he had bent forward in the process, and Étienne’s fist hit him in the face, flattening his nose and closing an eye. Blood spurted from his nostrils at once, and the eye swelled up and turned blue. Blinded by this red stream and dazed by the blow to his skull, the wretched man was wildly beating the air when another punch straight to the chest finished him off. There was a cracking sound, and he fell backwards on to the floor with a heavy thud like a sack of plaster dumped off a cart.