Germinal (47 page)

‘Our day has dawned,' he proclaimed in a final flourish. ‘It is our turn to have all the power and the wealth!'

The roar of acclamation rolled towards him from the depths of the forest. The whole clearing was now bathed in the pale light of the moon, and the sea of faces resolved itself into sharply delineated rows that stretched away beyond the tall grey tree-trunks into the darker recesses of the forest. Here in the freezing cold there swirled a tide of angry expressions, of shining eyes and bared teeth, a pack of starving humanity, of men, women and children unleashed upon the rightful pillage of ancient property that others had taken from them. They no longer felt the cold, for this fiery oratory had warmed them to the cockles of their hearts. They were borne up on a wave of religious exaltation, filled with the feverish expectancy of the early Christians living in hope of the new age of justice. Many obscure phrases had passed them by, and they understood little of all the more technical and abstract arguments; but the very
obscurity and abstraction of the speech simply enhanced the vista of a promised land and dazzled them into agreement. What a vision! To be the masters! To know an end to suffering! To live and enjoy life at last!

‘That's the way, by God! Our day has come!…Death to the oppressors!'

The women were hysterical. La Maheude was no longer her usual calm self, for hunger had made her light-headed; La Levaque was yelling; La Brûlé was quite beside herself and waving her arms about like a witch; Philomène was coughing her lungs up, and La Mouquette was so carried away that she started shouting endearments at the speaker. As to the men, Maheu was now persuaded and shouted his anger, flanked by Pierron who was trembling and Levaque who kept talking too much. Meanwhile the jokesters, Zacharie and Mouquet, tried to make fun of everything but were put off their stroke by their comrade's astonishing capacity to say so much at once without having a drink. But up on the log-pile Jeanlin was making even more of a racket, egging Bébert and Lydie on to action and brandishing the basket that had Poland in it.

The crowd was in uproar, and Étienne savoured the heady joy of his popularity. It was as if his power had here assumed human form, since one word from him now sufficed to set the pulse racing in three thousand hearts. If Souvarine had deigned to come, he would have applauded his ideas – once he had made out what Étienne was saying – and he would have noted happily his pupil's progress towards anarchism and agreed with his programme, except for the article about vocational training, a piece of sentimental foolishness, for the sacred and salutary ignorance of the people was to provide the very waters for their cleansing and renewal. As for Rasseneur, he was shrugging his shoulders with angry contempt.

‘Will you finally let me speak!' he shouted at Étienne.

The latter jumped down from his tree-trunk.

‘Speak, then, and let's see if they listen to you.'

Already Rasseneur had taken his place and was appealing for silence. But the noise continued unabated as his name was passed from those at the front who had recognized him to those at the
back beneath the beech trees; and they all refused to listen to him. He was like a fallen idol, and the very sight of him was enough to make his former followers angry. His gift of the gab and his easy, good-natured manner had charmed them for so long, but what he had to say now seemed rather tepid stuff, suitable merely for reassuring the faint-hearted. He tried in vain to speak through the noise, intending to deliver his usual message of moderation about how you couldn't change the world just by passing a lot of laws, how you had to give society time to evolve: but they just laughed and hissed and shouted him down. It was the defeat at the Jolly Fellow all over again, only this time much worse – and definitive. Eventually they started throwing lumps of frozen moss at him, and a woman shouted in a shrill voice:

‘He's a scab!'

He explained why the mine could not belong to the miner in the same way that the craft of weaving belonged to the weaver, and he stated his preference for profit-sharing, with the worker having a stake in the company, like one of the family.

‘He's a scab!' a thousand voices repeated, as stones began to whistle through the air.

Rasseneur turned pale, and his eyes filled with tears of despair. For him this meant the end of everything, the fruits of twenty years of power-seeking comradeship swept away by the ingratitude of the crowd. Cut to the quick and without the strength to go on, he climbed down from the tree-trunk.

‘You think it's funny, don't you!' he stammered to a triumphant Étienne. ‘Very well. But I just hope it happens to you one day…And it will happen. Just you wait!'

And as if to disclaim all responsibility for the disasters that he could see about to happen, he gestured the end of his involvement and departed alone across the white and silent countryside.

There was a sound of jeering, and everyone looked round in surprise to see old Bonnemort standing on a tree-trunk and trying to speak above the noise. Until then Mouque and he had appeared preoccupied, with that air they always had of thinking back to the old days. No doubt he had been taken with one of his periodic fits of garrulousness in which his memories were so
strongly stirred that they welled up inside him and poured out of his mouth for hours on end. A deep silence fell and people listened to the old man, who looked as white as a ghost standing there in the moonlight; and as he talked of things that had no immediate bearing on the recent debate, long tales that no one could quite follow, so their amazement grew. He was talking about his youth and about his two uncles who had been buried alive in Le Voreux, and then he moved on to the pneumonia that had carried off his wife. But he kept to his point all the same: things had never been good, and they never would be. They, too, had met like this in the forest, five hundred of them, because the King had refused to reduce the number of working hours; but then he stopped and began to talk about another strike. He had seen so many! It always ended up with them meeting here under the trees at Le Plan-des-Dames, or over at La Charbonnerie, or even as far away as Le Saut-du-Loup. Sometimes it was freezing cold, sometimes it was hot. One evening it had rained so hard that they had had to go home again without a word being said. And always the King's soldiers would come, and always it would end in a shooting match.

‘We raised our hands like this, and we took an oath not to go back down. And I took that oath! Yes I did, I took that oath!'

The crowd listened open-mouthed, and it was beginning to have misgivings when Étienne, who had been attending keenly, leaped on to the fallen tree-trunk and stood beside the old man. He had just recognized Chaval among the people he knew in the front row. The thought that Catherine must be there had put new fire in his belly and a strong desire to be acclaimed in front of her.

‘Comrades, you've just heard what he said. Here is one of our oldest miners, and this is what he has suffered and what our children will suffer, too, if we don't have done with these thieves and murderers once and for all!'

He was awesome: he had never spoken with such vehemence before. With one arm he held on to old Bonnemort, displaying him like an emblem of misery and grief and baying for vengeance as he did so. Speaking very quickly, he went back in time to the first of the Maheus and described how since then the whole
family had been worn out by the mine and exploited by the Company and now found itself, after a hundred years of toil, even hungrier than it had ever been before; and then he compared them with the fat-bellied directors, men who oozed money from every pore, and with all those shareholders who had spent the past century living like kept women with nothing to do but delight in the pleasures of the flesh. Wasn't it terrible? A whole lineage of human beings working themselves to death down the mine from father to son so that government ministers could have their kickbacks and generations of noble lords and gentlemen could give grand parties or sit and grow fat by their firesides! He had studied the occupational diseases of miners, and he regaled them with the full panoply in gruesome detail: anaemia, scrofula, the bronchitis that made them spit black coal, the asthma that choked them, the rheumatisms that stopped them walking. The miserable devils were no better than machine-fodder, they were penned in villages like livestock, and the big companies were gradually absorbing them all, regulating their slavery and threatening to enlist every worker in the country, millions upon millions of hands, in order to make the fortunes of a thousand idle men. But the miner was no longer the ignorant brute who could be crushed underfoot in the bowels of the earth. An army was taking root in the depths of the mines, a crop of citizens whose seed was slowly germinating under the surface of the earth and who would, one fine sunny day, finally break through to the light. And then they'd learn whether anyone would still dare to offer a pension of a hundred and fifty francs to a sixty-year-old miner after forty years' service, a man who was coughing up coal-dust and whose legs were swollen with the water from the coal-faces he had worked. Yes, labour was going to call capital to account and confront this anonymous god that the worker never met, the god that squatted somewhere in its mysterious inner sanctuary and sucked the blood of the poor devils that kept it alive! They would go there themselves and they would finally see its face by the light of the coming conflagration; and then they would drown the filthy swine in its own blood, they would destroy this monstrous idol that had gorged on human flesh!

He fell silent, but his other arm was still outstretched, pointing at the enemy in the distance, over there, wherever, somewhere on this earth. This time the cheering of the crowd was so loud that the bourgeois heard it in Montsou and cast anxious glances in the direction of Vandame, thinking that there had been some terrible collapse in the mine. Birds of the night flew up out of the forest into the vast, clear sky.

Étienne decided to bring things to a head:

‘Comrades, what is your decision?…Do you vote to continue the strike?'

‘Yes, yes!' they screamed.

‘And what action do you propose to take?…We are certain to be defeated if those cowards go back down tomorrow.'

‘Death to the cowards!' came the reply, like the blast of a storm.

‘So you are resolved to remind them of their duty, of their sworn oath…Then this is what I propose. We shall go to the pits ourselves, and just by being there we'll shame the traitors into stopping work. And that way we'll show the Company that we're all of one mind, that we are ready to die rather than surrender.'

‘Yes, yes! To the pits.'

Since he had started speaking again, Étienne had been trying to catch sight of Catherine among the pale, seething mass of faces beneath him. There was absolutely no sign of her. But he could still see Chaval, who was shrugging his shoulders and pretending to sneer at the whole thing; he was consumed with envy and would have sold himself to the highest bidder if he could have obtained but one small part of this popularity.

‘And if there are any informers among us here, comrades,' Étienne continued, ‘they'd better watch their step. Because we know who they are…Yes, I can see some Vandame miners here who haven't left their pit…'

‘I suppose that's meant for me, is it?' Chaval asked cockily.

‘You or anyone else…But since it's you that's spoken, you might as well understand that people that can eat shouldn't meddle in the affairs of those that can't. You're working at Jean-Bart…'

They were interrupted by a taunting voice:

‘Him? Working?…More like he has a woman who does the working for him.'

Chaval flushed and swore:

‘Christ! Aren't we allowed to work, then?'

‘No!' shouted Étienne. ‘At a time when your comrades are going through hell for the good of all, you're not allowed to be a selfish hypocrite and side with the bosses. If the strike had been general, we'd have been the masters long ago…Should any Vandame miner have gone down when Montsou was out on strike? The great thing would be if the whole area stopped work, at Monsieur Deneulin's as well as here. Don't you see? The people working the coal-faces at Jean-Bart are scabs. You're all scabs!'

The crowd around Chaval was beginning to look menacing; fists were raised, and people began to shout: ‘Kill them! Kill them!' He had turned very pale. But in his furious desire to outdo Étienne, he suddenly had an idea.

‘Listen to me! Come to Jean-Bart tomorrow, and then you'll see if I'm working or not!…We're with you, they sent me here to tell you so. And we must shut down the furnaces and get the mechanics to join the strike too. So much the better if the pumps stop! The water will destroy the pits, and then the whole bloody lot will be ruined!'

He in turn was furiously applauded, and from then on even Étienne was overrun. Speaker after speaker came to the tree-trunk, gesticulating above the noise and making wild proposals. It was faith gone mad, the impatience of a religious sect that has tired of waiting for the expected miracle and has decided to bring one about by itself. Minds emptied of all thought by hunger now saw red and dreamed of burning and killing, of a glorious apotheosis that would usher in the dawn of universal happiness. Meanwhile the quiet moon bathed the heaving mass of people in its light, and the thick forest cast a deep ring of silence around their murderous cries. The only other sound was the continued crunch of frozen moss as it was trampled underfoot; and the beech trees simply stood there, strong and tall, the delicate tracery of their branches etched in black against
the pallor of the sky, and they neither saw nor heard the commotion of these wretched beings at their feet.

People started shoving and pushing, and La Maheude found herself next to Maheu; and now, after months of growing frustration and having lost all sense of proportion, they both supported Levaque when he went one further than everybody else and called for the death of the engineers. Pierron had disappeared. Bonnemort and Mouque were both talking at once and saying vague and terrible things that no one quite understood. As a joke Zacharie called on them to demolish the churches, while Mouquet, who was still holding his
crosse
, banged it on the ground just to add to the racket. The women were in a frenzy: La Levaque, hands on hips, was ready for a fight with Philomène, whom she accused of laughing; La Mouquette said she would soon sort the gendarmes out with a good kick up the you-know-where; La Brûlé had just slapped Lydie, having come across her without basket or salad leaves, and was continuing to beat the air in an imaginary assault on all the bosses she would dearly have laid her hands on. Jeanlin had panicked for a moment when Bébert heard from a pit-boy that Mme Rasseneur had seen them take Poland; but once he had decided he would take the rabbit back to the Advantage and quietly release it outside the door, he began to yell louder; and he got out his new knife and brandished the blade, proudly making it gleam.