‘Take his legs.’
Jeanlin grabbed the legs, while Étienne slung the rifle over his shoulder and took hold of the body under the arms. Slowly the pair of them made their way down the spoil-heap, trying hard not to dislodge any rocks. Fortunately the moon had gone in. But as they were going along the side of the canal, it came out again and shone brightly; it was a miracle the guards at Le Voreux didn’t see them. They hurried on in silence, but the swaying of the corpse made progress difficult, and they were forced to set it down every hundred metres. At the corner of the lane leading to Réquillart a sudden noise struck terror into their hearts, and they only just had time to hide behind a wall before a patrol came past. Further on they bumped into a man, but he was drunk and went on his way cursing and swearing at them. But finally they reached the old mine, drenched in sweat and in such a state that their teeth were chattering.
Étienne had realized already that it would not be easy to manhandle the body down the shaft. It was a nasty job. First, Jeanlin had to lower the body from above while he hung from the bushes and guided it down past the first two ladders, where some of the rungs were broken. Then with each new ladder he had to repeat the same manœuvre, climbing down ahead and then taking it in his arms; and there were thirty ladders in all, two hundred and ten metres in which to feel the body continually falling into his arms. The rifle was rubbing on his spine, and he had stopped the lad from fetching his one bit of candle, which he was jealously preserving. What would have been the point? The light would only have been a further encumbrance in the confined space. All the same, when they finally reached the loadingbay, completely out of breath, he did send the boy off to get it. He sat down and waited in the darkness, next to the corpse, his heart pounding.
As soon as Jeanlin came back with the candle, Étienne asked his advice, for the child had explored every inch of these old workings, down to the narrow clefts, which were impossible for a grown man to pass through. They set off again, dragging the dead man behind them for nearly a kilometre through a maze of ruined roadways. Eventually the roof began to sink lower, and they found themselves on their knees beneath some crumbling rock that was held up only by some half-broken timbering. The space had the dimensions of a long box, and they laid the young soldier down in it as though it were a coffin, placing the rifle alongside him; then they gave the props a few hefty kicks with the backs of their heels to break them completely, even though they themselves risked being buried alive. The rock gave way at once, and they barely had time to crawl free on their hands and knees. Unable to resist a last look, Étienne saw the roof gradually collapse and slowly crush the corpse beneath its enormous weight. And then that was all that was left, just the earth’s solid mass.
Jeanlin, now back home in his robber’s den, flung himself down on the hay and muttered in a weary voice:
‘Phew! Lydie and Bébert will just have to wait for me. I’ve got to have an hour’s kip.’
Étienne had blown out the candle, of which only a tiny stub remained. He, too, was completely exhausted, but he did not feel sleepy since painful nightmarish thoughts were hammering away inside his head. Soon only one remained, a single tormenting question that nagged away at him but which he could not answer: why had he not stabbed Chaval when he had held him at knifepoint? And why had this child just slit a soldier’s throat without even knowing his name? It all undermined his revolutionary notions about being prepared to kill, about having the right to kill. Did this mean he was a coward? Over in the hay the child had begun to snore, like a drunk, as though he had binged on slaughter. And Étienne felt disgust and irritation at knowing the boy was there and at having to listen to him. Suddenly he gave a shudder, he had just felt the breath of fear on his face. It was as though a faint ripple of air, like a sob, had issued from the depths of the earth. The picture of the young soldier lying there beneath the rocks with his rifle by his side sent shivers down his spine and made his hair stand on end. It was ridiculous, but the whole mine seemed to fill with the sound of voices, and he had to relight the candle; he only regained his composure once he could see the empty roadways in its pale glow.
For a further quarter of an hour he pondered things, still wrestling with the same question, his eyes fixed on the burning wick. Then there was a sizzling sound, the wick drowned in wax, and everything was once more plunged into darkness. His shudders returned, and he felt like hitting Jeanlin to stop him snoring so loudly. The proximity of the boy became so intolerable that he fled, filled with a desperate need for fresh air, and rushed through the roadways and up the shaft as though he could hear a ghost panting at his heels.
Back on the surface, amid the ruins of Réquillart, Étienne could at last breathe freely. Since he hadn’t dared to kill, he would have to die himself, and the prospect of his own death, which had already vaguely occurred to him, now loomed once more and lodged firmly in his mind, like one last hope. If he died a valiant death, if he died for the revolution, that would be the end of it, that would resolve things one way or another, for good or ill, it would mean he didn’t have to think about the matter any further. If the comrades were going to attack the Belgians, he would make sure he was in the front line, and with a bit of luck he might get shot. And so it was with a resolute step that he returned to Le Voreux to see what was going on. Two o’clock struck, and the sound of voices could be heard coming noisily from the deputies’ room, which had been taken over by the military guards. The sentry’s disappearance had caused a considerable stir; they had gone to wake the captain, and in the end, after a careful inspection of the scene, it was decided that the soldier must have deserted. As Étienne listened from the shadows, he remembered the republican captain the young soldier had told him about. Supposing he could be persuaded to come over to the people’s side? The troops would carry their guns reversed, and that could prove to be a general signal for the wholesale slaughter of the bourgeois. A new dream took hold of him. He forgot all about dying and continued to stand there in the mud, for hour after hour; and as the drizzle from the thaw settled on his shoulders, he was filled with the feverish hope that victory might yet be possible.
He kept an eye out for the Belgians until five o’clock. Then he realized that the Company had cunningly arranged for them to spend the night at Le Voreux itself. The men were already beginning to go down, and the handful of strikers from Village Two Hundred and Forty who had been posted as lookouts were unsure whether to inform the comrades or not. It was Étienne who told them about the clever ploy, and they ran off, while he waited on the towpath behind the spoil-heap. Six o’clock struck, and the murky sky was beginning to turn pale in the light from a russet dawn when Father Ranvier emerged from a path, his cassock hoisted over his spindly legs. Every Monday he went to say early-morning Mass at a convent chapel on the other side of the pit.
‘Good-morning, my friend,’ he called loudly, having given Étienne a long hard stare with his blazing eyes.
But Étienne made no reply. In the distance he had caught sight of a woman passing between the supports of the overhead railway at Le Voreux, and he had rushed off anxiously, thinking it was Catherine.
Since midnight Catherine had been wandering the streets in the slush. When Chaval had returned home to find her in bed, he had soon got her up again with a slap in the face. He had screamed at her to leave at once, by the door if she didn’t want to leave by the window; and so, in tears, with barely any clothes on, and badly bruised where he had kicked her in the legs, she had been forced downstairs and then dispatched into the street with one last blow. Dazed and bewildered by this brutal separation, she had sat down on a milestone, watching the house and waiting for him to call her back. For he was bound to; he would be waiting to see what she did, and when he saw her shivering in the cold like this, abandoned, with nobody in the world to put a roof over her head, he would surely call her back upstairs.
Two hours later, having sat there motionless like a dog turned out into the street, and now freezing to death, she made
up her mind and left Montsou. But back she came, though she still didn’t dare to call up from the pavement or knock at the door. In the end she departed down the long straight road out of Montsou, meaning to return to her parents’ house in the village. But when she got there, she suddenly felt so ashamed that she began to run the length of the gardens, afraid she might be recognized despite the fact that behind all the closed shutters everyone was fast asleep. After that she just wandered about. The slightest sound made her jump, and she was terrified of being picked up as a vagrant and marched off to the brothel at Marchiennes, a prospect that had been giving her nightmares for several months. Twice she ended up at Le Voreux, took fright at the loud voices coming from the guardroom, and scurried away in breathless panic, glancing behind her to make sure that no one was following her. Réquillart was always full of drunks, but she went back there nevertheless in the vague hope of meeting the man she had rejected a few hours earlier.
Chaval was due to go down that morning, and knowledge of the fact drew Catherine to the pit even though she realized the futility of trying to speak to him: it was all over between them. Work had now stopped completely at Jeanbart, and he had threatened to throttle her if she went back to her old job at Le Voreux, where he was afraid her presence might make things awkward for him. But what could she do? Go somewhere else, die of starvation, yield to every passing man who beat her up? She struggled on, stumbling over the ruts in the road, her legs almost giving way beneath her, and covered up to the waist in dirt. The thaw had turned the roads into rivers of mud, but she floundered on, not even daring to find a stone to sit on.
Daylight came. Catherine had just recognized Chaval’s back as he cautiously turned the corner of the spoil-heap, and then she caught sight of Lydie and Bébert peeping out of their den beneath the timberstack. They had been keeping watch there all night, refusing to give in and go home on account of Jeanlin’s order to wait for him; and while the latter was sleeping off his murderous excesses at Réquillart, the two children had been holding each other tight to keep warm. The wind whistled through the props of oak and chestnut, and they snuggled together as though they were in some abandoned woodman’s hut. Lydie no more dared to talk openly about all she had suffered as the child version of a battered wife than Bébert could find the courage to complain of the slaps in the face he got from their leader and which made his cheeks swell up. But really, Jeanlin had gone too far, making them risk their necks in all these mad escapades and then refusing to share the spoils; their hearts rebelled, and eventually they kissed, despite his having forbidden it and despite the risk of getting a clip round the ear from out of the blue, as he had threatened. The clip round the ear did not materialize, and they continued to exchange soft kisses, having no thought to any other form of contact and putting into their embrace all the pent-up passion of their forbidden feelings, every moment of affection and painful martyrdom they had ever known. They had kept each other warm like this the whole night through, so happy in their remote hideaway that they could not remember ever having felt happier, even on St Barbe’s Day when everyone had fritters and wine.
A sudden bugle-call made Catherine jump. She craned her neck and saw the guards at Le Voreux taking up their weapons. Étienne was running towards her, Bébert and Lydie had leaped out of their hiding-place. And in the distance, in the growing daylight, a band of men and women could be seen coming down from the village, angrily waving their arms.
V
All the entrances to Le Voreux had just been closed; and the sixty soldiers of the guard, with their rifles at their sides, were barring the way to the only door still left open, the one that led up to the pit-head via a narrow flight of steps and past the doors to the deputies’ office and the changing-room. The captain had lined the men up in two ranks with their backs to the brick wall so that they could not be attacked from behind.
At first the band of miners from the village kept its distance. There were thirty of them at most, and they were busy arguing loudly about the best course of action to take.
La Maheude had been the first to reach the pit, with her dishevelled hair bundled hastily under a black scarf and carrying a sleeping Estelle on her arm; and she kept repeating with feverish urgency:
‘No one goes in and no one comes out! We’re going to corner the lot of them!’
Maheu was nodding in agreement when old Mouque arrived from Réquillart. They tried to stop him getting through. But he would have none of it; his horses, he said, still had to have their oats and they didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about any revolution. Besides, one of the horses was dead, and they were waiting for him to arrive before bringing it out. Étienne cleared a path for the old stableman, and the soldiers let him climb the steps into the mine. A quarter of an hour later, as the swelling band of strikers was becoming more threatening, a large door opened at ground level and some men appeared, hauling the dead animal, a sorry bundle still wrapped in its rope net, which they then abandoned among the puddles of melted snow. Everybody was so shocked that no one tried to prevent them going back inside and barricading the door again after them. They had all recognized the horse by its head, which was bent back stiffly against its side. People whispered to each other:
‘That’s Trumpet, isn’t it? I’m sure it is.’
And indeed it was. He had never been able to accustom himself to life underground. He had always looked miserable and never wanted to work, as though tormented by longing for the daylight he had lost. Battle, the doyen of the pit horses, had tried in vain to pass on some of his ten years’ accumulated compliance by rubbing up against him in a friendly way and nibbling at his neck. Such caresses had only made Trumpet more miserable, and his coat would quiver as he received these confidences from his elderly comrade who had grown old in the darkness. Each time they met and exchanged a snort, they both seemed to be uttering a lament, the older horse because he could no longer remember, the younger because he could not yet forget. In the stables they shared a manger and spent their time together hanging their heads and blowing into each other’s nostrils, sharing their constant dream of daylight, their visions of green grass and white roads and yellow brightness stretching into infinity. Then, as Trumpet lay dying in the straw, bathed in sweat, Battle had begun to nuzzle him, in despair, with short snuffles that sounded like sobs. He could feel him getting cold: the mine was taking away his one last joy in life, this friend who had come down from above all full of lovely smells that recalled the days of his own youth up in the fresh air. And when he had seen that the other horse was no longer moving, he had broken his tether and whinnied with fear.
In fact Mouque had been warning the overman for the past week. But what did they care about a sick horse at a time like this! These gentlemen were not keen on moving horses. But now they really would have to do something about getting him out. The previous day the stableman and two other men had spent an hour trying ropes round Trumpet, and then Battle was harnessed to haul him as far as the shaft. Slowly the old horse pulled his dead comrade along, dragging him through a tunnel which was so narrow that he had to jerk him forward from time to time, at the risk of skinning him. It was heavy going, and the horse kept shaking his head as he listened to this mass of flesh scraping against the rock on its way to the knacker’s yard. When they unharnessed him at pit-bottom, he gazed with a doleful eye at the preparations for Trumpet’s ascent, watching as they pushed him on to cross-beams placed over the sump and roped him to the bottom of a cage. Eventually the onsetters signalled that the ‘meat’ was on its way, and he raised his head to watch him leave, gently at first, then suddenly being whisked away into the darkness, lost for ever up the black hole. And as he stood there craning his neck, the animal could perhaps dimly remember the things of this earth. But it was all over, his comrade would never see anything ever again, and one day he too would be tied into a miserable parcel like this and make his way to the surface. His legs started trembling, and he began to choke on the fresh air coming down from those distant
landscapes; and as he plodded slowly back to his stable, it was as though he were drunk.
In the pit-yard the mood was sombre as the miners stood round Trumpet’s corpse. One woman said softly:
‘At least a person can decide if they want to go down there or not.’
But a new wave of people was arriving from the village, and Levaque, marching at their head followed by La Levaque and Bouteloup, was shouting:
‘Death to the Belgians! No foreigners in our pit! Death to the Belgians.’
They all surged forward, and Étienne had to check them. He walked up to the captain, a tall, thin young man in his late twenties, who looked grim but determined, and he explained the situation to him, trying to win him over, watching carefully to see what effect his words would have. Why risk a pointless massacre? Wasn’t justice on the side of the miners? They were all brothers, they ought to be able to come to some agreement. At the mention of a republic, the captain gestured nervously, but he maintained his stiff military bearing and said abruptly:
‘Stand back. Don’t force me to do my duty!’
Three times Étienne tried again. Behind him the comrades were becoming restive. A rumour was going round that M. Hennebeau was at the pit, and somebody suggested letting him down the shaft by his neck to see if he would dig out the coal himself. But the rumour was false; only Négrel and Dansaert were there, and they appeared briefly at a pit-head window. The overman remained in the background, unwilling to show his face since his episode with La Pierronne, but the engineer boldly surveyed the crowd with his sharp little eyes, smiling with the cheerful contempt that he habitually bestowed on all men and all things. People started hissing and booing, and the two men vanished from sight. And in the place where they had been standing, only the fair, pale face of Souvarine could now be seen. It happened to be his shift. Since the beginning of the strike he had never left his machinery even for a single day, but he had become more and more taciturn and more and more preoccupied by some obsession or other, which seemed to gleam like a bolt of steel in the depths of his pale eyes.