There was general stupefaction. They had actually fired, and the crowd stood there open-mouthed, motionless, unable to believe it. But then there were piercing shrieks, and a bugle sounded the cease-fire. Wild panic followed, a mad flight through the mud like a stampede of wounded cattle.
Bébert and Lydie had collapsed on top of each other after the first three shots; the girl had been hit in the face, while the young boy had a hole through his chest beneath his left shoulder. Lydie lay motionless, as though struck by a thunderbolt. But Bébert was still moving, and in the convulsions of his death throes he grabbed her, as though he wanted to hold her close again as he had held her in the dark hiding-place where they had spent their last night together. And at that moment Jeanlin, who had finally arrived from Réquillart, came skipping bleary-eyed through the smoke just in time to see Bébert embrace his little woman, and die.
The next five shots had brought down La Brûlé and Richomme. Hit in the back just as he was begging the comrades to stop, he had fallen to his knees; and having slumped over on to his side, he now lay gasping for breath, his eyes filled with the tears he had shed. The old woman, her bosom ripped apart, had keeled straight over, landing with a crack like a bundle of dry firewood as she stammered a final curse through a gargle of blood.
But after that the general volley of gunfire had cleared the terrain, mowing down the groups of onlookers who were standing about laughing a hundred paces away. One bullet entered Mouquet’s mouth, shattering his skull and knocking him flat at the feet of Zacharie and Philomène, whose two children were spattered in blood. At the same instant La Mouquette was hit twice in the belly. She had seen the troops take aim and instinctively, with her characteristic generosity of spirit, she had thrown herself in front of Catherine, shouting at her to mind out. With a scream she tumbled backwards under the force of the shots. Étienne rushed across to lift her up and carry her away, but she gestured that it was too late. Then she gave a last gasp, still smiling at the two of them as though she were happy to see them together now that she was taking her leave.
That was it, or so it seemed; the storm of bullets had passed, and the echo was fading away as it reached the houses in the village when the last shot went off, one single, solitary shot, after the others.
It went through Maheu’s heart: he spun round and fell with his face in a puddle of coal-black water.
Stunned, La Maheude bent down.
‘Come on, love! Up you get. Just a little scratch, eh?’
Because of Estelle she did not have her hands free, and she had to tuck her under one arm in order to be able to turn Maheu’s head.
‘Say something! Where does it hurt?’
His eyes were blank, and his mouth was foaming with blood. She understood. He was dead. And she sat down in the mud, holding her daughter under her arm like a parcel, and stared at her husband in utter disbelief.
The pit had been cleared. The captain had nervously removed his damaged cap and then replaced it on his head, but even as he palely surveyed the greatest disaster of his life he maintained his stiff, military bearing. Meanwhile, expressionless, his men reloaded their rifles. The horrified faces of Négrel and Dansaert could be seen at the window of the loading area. Souvarine was standing behind them, a deep furrow etched across his brow as though the steel bolt of his obsession had ominously planted itself there. Over in the other direction, on the crest of the hill, Bonnemort had not moved, still propped on his stick with one hand and shading his eyes with the other so that he could get a better view of the slaughter of his kin below. The wounded were screaming, and the dead were growing rigid in various twisted postures; all were splashed with the liquid mud left by the thaw, and here and there some were sinking into the inky patches of coal that were now re-emerging from under the tatters of dirty snow. And in the midst of these tiny, wretched human corpses, all shrivelled by hunger, lay the carcass of Trumpet, a pitiful, monstrous heap of dead flesh.
Étienne had not been killed. Standing beside Catherine, who had collapsed with exhaustion and shock, he was still awaiting the arrival of death when the ringing tones of a man’s voice startled him. It was Father Ranvier on his way back from saying Mass, and there he stood with his arms in the air like some crazed prophet, calling down the wrath of God on the murderers. He was proclaiming the dawn of a new age of justice and the imminent extermination of the bourgeoisie by the fires of heaven on account of this, the latest and most heinous of their crimes, for it was they who had brought about the massacre of the workers and caused the poor and outcast of this world to be slain.
PART VII
I
The shots fired at Montsou had reverberated as far away as Paris, where the echo was considerable. For the past four days every opposition newspaper had been voicing its outrage and filling its front page with horrifying tales: twenty-five people wounded and fourteen dead, including two children and three women; and then there were the prisoners, with Levaque now something of a hero, credited with having displayed a grandeur worthy of the Ancients in his replies to the examining magistrate. The Empire had received a direct hit from these few bullets, but it was putting on a show of calm omnipotence, oblivious to the gravity of the wound it had sustained. There had simply been an unfortunate encounter, a remote incident somewhere or other in the coal-mining region, very far removed from the streets of Paris where public opinion was formed. People would soon forget, and the Company had been unofficially instructed to hush the matter up and put an end to this strike, which was dragging on in such a tiresome manner and beginning to pose a threat to society.
And so it was that on the following Wednesday morning three members of the Board were to be seen arriving in Montsou. The little town, hitherto shocked and not daring to rejoice in the massacre, now breathed again and tasted the joy of being saved at last. As it happened, there had been a marked improvement in the weather, and there was now bright sunshine, the sunshine of early February whose warmth begins to tinge the lilac shoots with green. The shutters of the Board’s offices had been thrown open, and the huge building seemed to have sprung back to life; the most reassuring rumours began to issue forth, how the gentlemen had been deeply affected by the disaster and how they had hastened to the scene to open their paternal arms and embrace the wayward miners. Now that the blow had been delivered, admittedly rather more violently than they would have wished, they were falling over themselves in their desire to rescue the situation, and they took a number of welcome if overdue measures. First, they dismissed the Belgian workers and made a great fuss about what an enormous concession this was to their workforce. Next, they ended the military occupation of the pits, which were no longer under threat from the crushed miners. By their efforts also a line was drawn under the affair of the vanished sentry at Le Voreux. The whole area had been searched and neither the rifle nor the corpse had been found, and so it was decided to post him as a deserter even though a crime was still suspected. In all matters they endeavoured in this way to take the heat out of the situation, fearful of what the morrow might bring and considering it dangerous to acknowledge their powerlessness in the face of a savage mob let loose on the creaking timbers of the old order. At the same time these attempts at conciliation did not prevent them from getting on with their own administrative affairs, for Deneulin had been seen returning to the Board’s offices, where he had meetings with M. Hennebeau. Negotiations were in hand for the purchase of Vandame, and it was confidently expected that Deneulin would soon accept the gentlemen’s terms.
But what caused a particular stir throughout the district were the large yellow notices that the directors had had posted in great numbers on the walls. They carried these few lines, in very large print: ‘Workers of Montsou, we do not wish the misguided behaviour whose sorry consequences you have witnessed in recent days to deprive workers of good sense and goodwill of their livelihood. We shall therefore reopen all pits on Monday morning, and when work has resumed, we shall investigate with due care and consideration a
ll areas where it may be possible to make some improvement. We shall do everything that is just and within our power.’ In one morning the ten thousand colliers filed past these notices. Not one of them said anything; many just shook their heads, while others simply sloped off without any trace of a reaction on their impassive faces.
Until then Village Two Hundred and Forty had persisted in its fierce resistance. It was as though the comrades’ blood that had turned the mud at the pit red now barred the way for the others. Barely a dozen had gone back down, Pierron and a few toadies of his sort, and people merely watched them grimly as they departed and returned, without a gesture or threat of any kind. Accordingly the notice posted on the wall of the church was greeted with sullen suspicion. There was no mention of the men who had been sacked: did that mean that the Company was refusing to take them back? The fear of reprisals, together with the thought of protesting as comrades against the dismissal of those who had been most directly involved, hardened their stubborn resolve. It was all a bit fishy, the whole thing needed looking into, they would return to work as and when these gentlemen were kind enough to state plainly what they meant. Silence hung heavily over the squat houses; even hunger was no longer of relevance, for now that the shadow of violent death had passed over their roofs it was evident that they might all be going to die whatever happened.
But one house among all the others, that of the Maheus, remained especially dark and silent, plunged in overwhelming grief. Since she had accompanied her husband’s body to the cemetery, La Maheude had not said a word to anyone. After the shooting she had let Étienne bring Catherine home with them, half dead and covered in mud; and as she was undressing her in front of the young man before putting her to bed, she had imagined for a moment that she, too, had returned with a bullet in her stomach, for there were large blood stains on her shirt. But she soon realized why; the flow of puberty had finally broken through under the shock of this terrible day. Ah, what a marvellous stroke of good fortune this menstruation was! A fine blessing indeed to be able to make babies for gendarmes to slaughter in their turn! But she did not speak to Catherine, any more than she spoke to Étienne for that matter. He was now sharing a bed with Jeanlin, at the risk of being arrested, having been seized with such dread at the idea of returning to the dark depths of Réquillart that he preferred prison: the prospect of that horrific blackness after all these deaths made him shudder, and he was secretly afraid of the young soldier at rest down there beneath the rocks. Indeed, amid the torment of his defeat, he dreamed of prison as a place of refuge; but nobody even gave him a thought, and time dragged as he endeavoured in vain to find ways of tiring himself out. Occasionally, however, La Maheude would look at them both with an air of resentment, as though she were asking them what they were doing in her house.
Once more they all found themselves sleeping on top of each other. Old Bonnemort had the bed the two little ones used to sleep in, and they slept with Catherine now that poor Alzire was no longer there to stick her hump into her big sister’s ribs. It was when they went to bed that La Maheude most sensed the emptiness of the house, in the cold of her own bed that was now too large. Vainly she clutched Estelle to her, to fill the gap, but she was no substitute for her husband; and she wept silently for hours at a time. Then the days began to pass as before: still no bread, and yet no opportunity either to die once and for all; just scraps picked up here and there which did the poor the disservice of keeping them alive. Nothing about their lives had changed, it was simply that her husband wasn’t there any more.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, Étienne, thoroughly depressed by the spectacle of this silent woman, left the parlour and walked slowly down the cobbled street through the village. The inactivity was difficult to bear and had prompted him to take endless walks, with his arms by his side, head down, always tormented by the one single thought. He had been trudging along like this for half an hour when he became aware, from an increase in his own sense of discomfort, that the comrades were coming out on to their doorsteps to watch him. What little popularity he still enjoyed had vanished with the first rifle shot, and now wherever he went he was met with blazing eyes that burned into his back as he passed. Each time he looked up, he saw men standing with a menacing air, or women peering from behind their curtains; and, confronted by their as yet unvoiced accusations and the suppressed anger evident in these staring eyes that were widened still further by hunger and tears, he became so ill at ease that he could scarcely walk. And behind him the mute reproach continued to intensify. He was so afraid that the entire village might appear on their doorsteps and scream their wretchedness at him that he returned home shaking.
But at the Maheus’ he was greeted by a scene which shocked him even more. Old Bonnemort was sitting near the empty fireplace, rooted to his chair ever since the day of the slaughter, when two neighbours had found him slumped on the ground beside his broken stick, felled like an old tree that has been struck by lightning. Lénore and Henri, by way of cheating their hunger, were making a deafening racket scraping an old saucepan in which cabbage had been boiled the night before; and La Maheude, having set Estelle down on the table, was standing there brandishing her fist at Catherine:
‘You what? In God’s name, what did you just say?’
Catherine had declared her intention of returning to work at Le Voreux. The thought of not earning her living, of being tolerated like this at her mother’s as though she were some useless animal that was only in the way, was becoming more and more unbearable with each day that passed; and if she hadn’t been afraid of further trouble from Chaval, she would already have gone back on Tuesday. She continued haltingly:
‘What else is there? We can’t just do nothing and expect to live. At least we’ll have something to eat.’
La Maheude broke in:
‘You just listen to me. I’ll strangle the first one of you that goes back to work. No, really, it’s too much. So they can kill the father and then go on exploiting the children just like before? I’m not having it, I tell you. I’d rather see you all carried out in a box, same as him that’s already gone.’
And her long silence was rent by a furious torrent of words. Some improvement that would be, the paltry sum that Catherine would bring in! Thirty sous at most, plus a further twenty if the bosses would be so kind as to find a job for that little thief Jeanlin. Fifty sous, and seven mouths to feed! And of course all the little ones ever did was eat. And as for Grandpa, he must have damaged his brain when he fell, for he seemed to have lost his wits; or else it was the shock of seeing the soldiers firing on the comrades.
‘Isn’t that right, Grandpa? They’ve finished you off, eh? You might still have strength in your arms, but you’re done for.’
Bonnemort gazed uncomprehendingly at her from expressionless eyes. He would sit for hours like this just staring ahead of him, capable only of spitting into a dish filled with ash which they placed beside him, for cleanliness’ sake.
‘They still haven’t sorted out his pension yet,’ she went on, ‘and I know they’re going to refuse it, because of our views…No, it’s too much. I’ve had it with the whole bloody lot of them!’
‘But,’ ventured Catherine, ‘on the notice they promise – ’
‘To hell with the notice!…Just more tricks to trap us and eat us for breakfast. They can afford to be all sweetness and light now they’ve put their bullets through us.’
‘But then where shall we go, Mum? They won’t let us stay in the village, that’s for sure.’
La Maheude gestured in a wild, indeterminate way. Where would they go? She had no idea and tried not to think about it, for it made her head spin. They would go somewhere else, anywhere. And as the noise of the saucepan finally became unbearable, she rounded on Lénore and Henri and smacked them. Estelle, who had been crawling around on the table, fell off and added to the din. By way of comforting her, La Maheude gave her a good whack and told her she’d have done better to have killed herself outright. She start
ed talking about Alzire and about how she wished the rest of them might be as fortunate. Then suddenly she began to sob and pressed her head against the wall.
Still standing there, Étienne had not dared to intervene. He counted for nothing in the household now, even the children backed away from him in distrust. But the tears of this unhappy woman were breaking his heart, and he said softly:
‘Come now, steady. We’ll pull through somehow.’
She appeared not to hear him and poured out her sorrow in a low, continuous lament.
‘Heaven help us, how is it possible? We used to manage all right, before these terrible things. The bread was stale, but at least we were all together…But how did it happen, for God’s sake? What did we do to deserve this grief, with some of us in our graves and the rest of us dearly wishing that we were too?…And yet it’s true, they used to treat us like workhorses, and it just wasn’t right that we should be whipped for our pains while we were busy swelling the coffers of the rich, and with no chance of ever tasting the good things in life for ourselves. The pleasure goes out of living when there’s nothing to hope for any more. No indeed, things couldn’t go on like that any longer, we deserved some respite…But if only we’d known! How is it possible to have made ourselves so wretched when all we wanted was justice!’
Her chest rose with each sigh, and her voice was strangulated by an immense sadness.
‘And then there are always the people who know better, promising you that everything can be sorted out if you’ll just make that little bit of effort…And you get carried away, you’re suffering so much because of what does exist that you start wanting what doesn’t. And there was I dreaming away like a fool, imagining a life where everyone was friends with everyone else. Floating on air I was, no question about it, with my head in the clouds. And then you fall flat on your face again, and you hurt all over…It wasn’t true, all those things you thought you could see were just not there. What was really there was simply more misery, oh yes, as much misery as you could possibly want, and then getting shot into the bargain!’