As Étienne listened to this lamentation, he felt a pang of remorse with each tear that fell. He didn’t know what to say to comfort La Maheude, who was utterly bruised by her terrible fall from the summit of the ideal. She had returned into the middle of the room, where she now stood looking at him; and in a final surge of rage she addressed him without ceremony:
‘And what about you? Are you planning to go back to the pit, now that you’ve landed us all in the shit?…Not that I blame you, of course. Only if it was me, I’d have died of shame long ago for having brought so much harm on my friends.’
He was going to reply, but instead he just shrugged in despair: why bother to offer explanations which in her grief she would not understand? It was all too much to bear, and so he departed once more on one of his sorry walks.
Again it was as though the village was waiting for him, the men on their doorsteps, the women at their windows. As soon as he appeared, the muttering started and a crowd began to gather. A storm of whispering had been brewing for the past four days, and now it broke in universal condemnation. Fists were raised in his direction, mothers pointed him out to their sons with gestures of reproach, and old men spat when they saw him. Here was the sudden reversal in sentiment that follows on the heels of a defeat, the inevitable other side of popularity, a hatred fuelled by all the suffering endured to no purpose. He was being made to pay for the hunger and the deaths.
Zacharie, arriving with Philomène, bumped into Étienne as he was leaving and sneered:
‘Blimey, he’s getting fatter! Must be cos he feeds off the rest of us.’
Already La Levaque had stepped out on to her doorstep, with Bouteloup. Mindful of Bébert, her boy who had been killed by a bullet, she shouted:
‘Yeah, there are some cowards about the place who like to get the children slaughtered instead. If he wants to give me mine back, he’d better go and dig him out of the ground.’
She had forgotten all about her imprisoned husband, and her household was no longer on strike since Bouteloup was working. Nevertheless the thought of Levaque did now suddenly occur to her, and she continued in a shrill voice:
‘Shame on you! It’s only the villains that walk about as they like when the good men are locked up inside!’
In trying to avoid her Étienne had run into La Pierronne, who was arriving in a hurry across the gardens. She had welcomed her mother’s death as a blessed relief, for her violent behaviour had threatened to get them all hanged. Nor did she grieve over the loss of Pierron’s daughter, that little minx Lydie. Good riddance! But she now sided with her neighbours, hoping to patch things up with them:
‘And what about my mother? And the little girl? Everybody saw you hiding behind them when they stopped all those bullets that were meant for you!’
What should he do? Throttle La Pierronne and the other women, take on the whole village? For a moment Étienne felt like doing just that. The blood was throbbing in his head, and he now considered the comrades little better than dumb animals. He was irritated by their primitiveness and the lack of intelligence that had led them to blame him for the logic of events. How stupid could you get! In his inability to influence them any more he felt disgust for them; and he simply quickened his step, as if deaf to their abuse. But soon he was in headlong flight, with each household booing him as he passed, and people chasing after him, a whole crowd cursing him in a thunderous crescendo as their hatred spilled over. He was the one, the one who had exploited them, the one who had murdered them, the unique cause of all their wretchedness. Pale and frightened, Étienne ran from the village with the screaming horde at his heels. Eventually, once they were out on the open road, many stopped chasing; but a few were still after him when, at the bottom of the hill, outside the Advantage, he met another group coming out of Le Voreux.
Old Mouque and Chaval were among them. Since the death of La Mouquette, his daughter, and of his son, Mouquet, the old man had continued to work on as a stableman without a word of regret or complaint. But suddenly, on catching sight of Étienne, he was seized with fury; tears streamed from his eyes, and a torrent of bad language came pouring out of his mouth, which was black and bleeding from chewing tobacco:
‘You bastard! You shit! You sodding, fucking bastard!…Just you wait! You’re damn well going to pay me back for my poor bloody children! It’s your turn now.’
He picked up a brick, broke it in two, and threw both pieces at Étienne.
‘Yeah, come on, let’s get rid of the scum!’ sneered Chaval loudly, overjoyed at this opportunity for revenge and in a lather of excitement. ‘We’ll take it in turns…There, how does that feel to have your back to the wall, you filthy piece of shit!’
And he too attacked Étienne, with stones. A wild clamour broke out, and everybody picked up bricks and started breaking them and throwing them. They wanted to slaughter him, as though it was the soldiers themselves they were slaughtering. Dazed and bewildered, Étienne ceased his attempts at escape and turned to face them, trying to placate them with his words. His old speeches, which had previously been so warmly acclaimed, sprang once more to his lips. He repeated the phrases with which he had turned the heads of his loyal followers in the days when they had listened to him with rapt attention; but his power had gone, and the only response was brickbats. He had just been hit on the left arm and was backing away, in some considerable danger, when he found himself pinned against the front wall of the Advantage.
Rasseneur had recently appeared on his doorstep.
‘Come in,’ he said simply.
Étienne hesitated. It galled him to take refuge there.
‘Come in, for goodness’ sake. I’ll speak to them.’
Étienne accepted reluctantly and hid at the far end of the saloon while Rasseneur blocked the doorway with his broad shoulders.
‘Now then, my friends, easy does it…You know that I at least have never let you down. I’ve always been one for the softly softly approach, and if you’d listened to me, there is no doubt that you would not be in the position you’re all in now.’
Shoulders back and belly out, he spoke at length, letting his undemanding eloquence pour forth with the soothing gentleness of warm water. And once more he succeeded as of old, effortlessly regaining his former popularity, quite naturally, as though only one month ago the comrades had never booed him or called him a coward. Voices shouted their approval. Hear, hear! You can count on us! That’s the stuff! There was a thunderous burst of applause.
Standing in the background, Étienne felt sickened, and his heart was filled with bitterness. He remembered Rasseneur’s prediction in the forest when he had warned him about the ingratitude of the crowd. What mindless brutality! How appalling it was, the way they had forgotten everything he had done for them! They were like a blind force constantly feeding on itself. But beneath his anger at seeing these brutes wrecking their own cause there lay despair at his own collapse, at the tragic end of his own ambitions. So that was it? It was all over? He remembered the occasion, under the beech trees, when he had listened to three thousand hearts beating in time with his own. That day he had been in control of his popularity, these people had belonged to him, he had felt himself to be their master. Then he had been drunk on wild dreams: Montsou at his feet, Paris beckoning, perhaps election to the Chamber of Deputies, lambasting the bourgeois with his oratory, the first parliamentary speech ever made by a working man. And now it was all over! Now he had awoken from the dream, wretched and hated, and his people had just thrown bricks at him and banished him from their midst.
Rasseneur’s voice grew louder.
‘Violence has never succeeded. You can’t remake the world in a single day. Those who promised you they could change things at a stroke were either fools or rogues.’
‘Hear, hear!’ cried the crowd.
So who was to blame? For Étienne this question, which he had never ceased to ask himself, was the last straw. Was it really his fault, all this suffering – which affected him too after all
–this poverty, the shooting, these emaciated women and children who had no bread to eat? He had once had a dire vision of this kind, one evening before everything began to go wrong. But at that stage he had already felt buoyed up by some external force, which had carried him away with the rest of the comrades. Besides, it had never been a case of his telling them what to do; rather it was they who had led him, forcing him to do things that he would never have done on his own without the pressure of the mob urging him on from behind. With each new act of violence he had been left stunned by the outcome, which he had neither sought nor foreseen. How could he have ever predicted, for example, that one day his loyal flock from the village would actually stone him? These madmen were lying when they accused him of having promised them a life of leisure and plenty to eat. Yet behind his attempts at self-justification, behind all the arguments with which he tried to combat his remorse, lay the unspoken fear that he had not been equal to his task and the niggling doubt of the semi-educated man who realizes that he doesn’t know the half of it. But he had run out of courage, and he no longer felt the same bond with the comrades, indeed he was afraid of them, of the huge, blind, irresistible mass that is the people, passing like a force of nature and sweeping away everything in its path, beyond the compass of rule or theory. He had begun to view them with distaste and had gradually grown apart from them, as his more refined tastes made him feel ill at ease in their company, and as his whole nature slowly began to aspire towards membership of a higher class.
At that moment Rasseneur’s voice was drowned by enthusiastic shouting.
‘Three cheers for Rasseneur! He’s the man for us! Hip, hip!’
Rasseneur shut the door as the mob dispersed; and the two men looked at each other in silence. They both shrugged. Then they had a drink together.
That same day there was a grand dinner at La Piolaine, where they were celebrating the engagement of Négrel and Cécile. The previous twenty-four hours had seen much dusting and polishing in the Grégoires’ dining-room and drawing-room. Mélanie reigned supreme in the kitchen, supervising the roasts and stirring the sauces, the smell of which wafted all the way up through the house as far as the attic. It had been decided that Francis the coachman would help Honorine to wait at table. The gardener’s wife was to wash up, while the gardener himself was to open the front gates for the guests. Never before had such a festive occasion turned this grand and well-appointed house so thoroughly upside down.
Everything went perfectly. Mme Hennebeau behaved charmingly towards Cécile, and she gave Négrel a smile when the notary from Montsou gallantly proposed a toast to the future happiness of the couple. M. Hennebeau, too, was most affable. His cheerful air was noted by the guests, and it was rumoured that, being once more in favour with the Board, he was soon to be appointed Officer in the Legion of Honour, in recognition of his firm action in dealing with the strike. They tried not to talk about the recent events, but there was an element of triumph in the general rejoicing, and the dinner turned into something of an official celebration of victory. They had been delivered at last, and they could begin once more to eat and sleep in peace! Discreet allusion was made to the dead, whose blood still lay fresh in the mud of Le Voreux: they had had to be taught a lesson, and everybody said how sorry they were, with the Grégoires adding that it was now everyone’s duty to visit the villages and to try and bind the wounds. The Grégoires were their old placid, benevolent selves again: they made excuses for their good miners and already they could picture them down the pits providing a fine example of their traditional willingness to knuckle under. The grandees of Montsou, now that they had stopped feeling so nervous, all agreed that the question of pay needed to be looked at carefully. Victory was complete when, during the main course, M. Hennebeau read out a letter from the bishop announcing that Father Ranvier was to be transferred to another parish. The assembled bourgeois of the district thereupon exchanged heated comment on the subject of this priest who considered that the soldiers had been murderers. Finally, with the appearance of dessert, the notary valiantly presented his free-thinking views.
Deneulin was there with his two daughters. Amid all this merriment he tried to conceal his sadness at his own ruin. That very morning he had signed the papers conveying his concession at Vandame into the ownership of the Montsou Mining Company. Cornered and wounded, he had given in to the Board’s demands, finally relinquishing this prize that they had had their eyes on for so long and barely extracting enough money to pay his creditors. When they had made him a last-minute offer to stay on at the level of divisional engineer, he had accepted it as a stroke of good fortune, resigned to being a mere employee whose job was to oversee the pit that had swallowed up his fortune. This action sounded the death-knell for the small, private company and presaged the imminent disappearance of individual mine-owners, who were being gobbled up one by one by the insatiable ogre of capital and drowned in the rising tide of corporations. The costs of the strike had thus fallen on his shoulders alone, and for him it was as though everyone was drinking to his misfortune as they toasted M. Hennebeau’s new honour. His only slight consolation was the wonderfully brave face being put on by Lucie and Jeanne, who both looked charming in their patched-up dresses, pretty young single girls laughing in the teeth of disaster and thoroughly disdainful of bank accounts.
When they moved into the drawing-room for coffee, M. Grégoire took his cousin aside and congratulated him on the courage of his decision.
‘You see? Your one mistake was to risk the million you got from your share in Montsou by investing it in Vandame. You went to all that effort, and now it’s disappeared along with all your devilish hard work, whereas my share hasn’t moved from its drawer, and it still supports me nicely and allows me a life of leisure, just as it will support my grandchildren and my grandchildren’s children.’
II
On Sunday Étienne fled from the village at nightfall. An extremely clear sky, dotted with stars, cast a blue, crepuscular light across the land. He went down to the canal and walked slowly along the bank in the direction of Marchiennes. It was his favourite walk, a grassy path two leagues long running dead straight beside this geometrically precise strip of water, which stretched into the distance like an unending bar of molten silver.
He never met anyone there. But that day he was very put out to see a man coming towards him. And in the pale starlight the two solitary walkers did not recognize each other until they came face to face.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ muttered Étienne.
Souvarine nodded silently. For a moment they just stood there; then, side by side, they set off together towards Marchiennes. Each man seemed to be continuing with his own train of thought, as if they were separated by a large distance.
‘Did you read in the paper about Pluchart’s success in Paris?’ Étienne asked eventually. ‘After that meeting at Belleville people waited on the pavement and gave him a great ovation…Oh, he’s a coming man all right, whether he’s lost his voice or not. He’ll go far now.’
Souvarine shrugged. He despised the silver-tongued type, the sort that enters politics the way some people are called to the Bar, just to earn a lot of money with smooth talk.
Étienne had now got as far as Darwin.1 He had read this and that, as summarized for a popular audience in a volume costing five sous; and on the basis of his patchy understanding he had come to see revolution in terms of the struggle for survival, with the have-nots eating the haves, a strong people devouring a worn-out bourgeoisie. But Souvarine became angry and started in on the stupidity of socialists who accepted Darwin, that scientific apostle of inequality whose great notion of natural selection might as well be the philosophy of an aristocrat. But Étienne refused to be persuaded and wanted to argue the point, illustrating his reservations with a hypothesis. Say the old society no longer existed and that every last trace of it had been swept away. Wasn’t there a risk that the new order which grew up in its place would slowly be corrupted by the same injustices, that th
ere would again be the weak and the strong, that some people would be more skilful or intelligent than others and live off the fat of the land, while the stupid or lazy once more became their slaves? At this prospect of everlasting poverty Souvarine exclaimed fiercely that if justice could not be achieved with man, it would have to be achieved without him. For as long as there were rotten societies, there would have to be wholesale slaughters, until the last human being had been exterminated. The two men fell silent again.
For a long time, with his head bowed, Souvarine walked on over the soft new grass, so deep in thought that he kept to the extreme edge of the water with all the tranquil certainty of a sleepwalker walking beside a gutter. Then, for no apparent reason, he gave a start, as though he had bumped into a shadow. He looked up, and his face was very pale. He said softly to his companion:
‘Did I ever tell you how she died?’
‘Who?’
‘My girl, back in Russia.’
Étienne gestured vaguely, astonished at the catch in Souvarine’s voice, at this sudden need to confide on the part of someone who was usually so impassive and who lived in such stoic detachment from people, including from himself. All he knew was that the girl in question had been his mistress and that she had been hanged in Moscow.
‘It all went wrong,’ Souvarine explained, his misty eyes now fixed on the white strip of canal as it vanished into the distance between the bluish colonnades of tall trees. ‘We had spent fourteen days down a hole, in order to mine the railway line; but instead of the Imperial train, it was an ordinary passenger train that went up…Then they arrested Annouchka.2 She used to bring us food each evening, disguised as a peasant. And it was she who had lit the fuse, too, because a man might have attracted attention…I followed the trial, hidden in the crowd, for six long days…’