Germinal (59 page)

‘He can't get it up! He can't get it up!…Some man they'll be burying!…You can rot in hell, you're no good for anything now!'

La Brûlé then stuck the whole thing on the end of her stick, raised it aloft, and set off down the road carrying it like a flag, followed by the screaming horde of women. Blood dripped everywhere, and the miserable lump of flesh hung down like a piece of meat being displayed on a butcher's stall. Up at the window Mme Maigrat had still not moved; but, caught in the last rays of the sun, the flaws in the glass distorted her pale features, and she seemed to be grinning. Having been beaten by a man who was unfaithful to her at every turn, and having spent her days bent double over a ledger from dawn till dusk, perhaps she was indeed laughing as the band of women rushed past with the remains of the evil beast stuck on the end of a stick.

This dreadful act of mutilation had been witnessed with frozen horror. Neither Étienne nor Maheu nor any of the others had had time to intervene: and now they remained where they were as the furies raced off into the distance. Faces began to appear at the doorway of Tison's bar, Rasseneur, ashen with
revulsion, and Zacharie and Philomène, both dumbstruck at what they had seen. The two old men, Bonnemort and Mouque, looked very grave and shook their heads. The only one sniggering was Jeanlin, who was elbowing Bébert in the ribs and trying to make Lydie look up. But the gaggle of women was already returning, doubling back on itself and now passing beneath the windows of the manager's house. And there, behind the shutters, the fine ladies craned their necks to see. They had not been able to observe what had happened, which had been hidden from their view by the wall, and now that it was completely dark they could not make things out properly.

‘Whatever have they got on the end of that stick?' asked Cécile, who had plucked up the courage to watch.

Lucie and Jeanne declared that it must be a rabbit skin.

‘No, I don't think so,' Mme Hennebeau said quietly. ‘They must have looted the meat counter. It looks more like a scrag-end of pork.'

Then she gave a start and fell silent. Mme Grégoire had nudged her with her knee. The pair of them stood there open-mouthed. The young ladies, who had gone very pale, ceased their questions and watched with wide eyes as this crimson apparition vanished into the depths of the night.

Étienne raised his axe again. But the general sense of uneasiness persisted, and the corpse lying across the road now served to protect the shop. Many people had drawn back. It was as though they had all suddenly had their fill. Maheu was standing with a very grim expression on his face when he heard a voice whispering in his ear and telling him to make a run for it. He turned and saw Catherine, still in her man's coat, grime-stained and out of breath. He waved her away. He would not listen and made as if to hit her. Gesturing in despair, she hesitated for a moment and then ran towards Étienne:

‘Quick, run for it, the gendarmes are coming!'

He, too, told her to go away and shouted abuse; and as he did so, he could feel his cheeks still stinging from the slaps she had given him. But she would not be put off. She forced him to drop the axe, and with both arms began to drag him away. He could not match her strength.

‘I promise you, the gendarmes are coming! You've got to listen to me…Chaval went to fetch them, if you must know. He shouldn't have done it, so I came to warn you…You must get away. I don't want them to catch you.'

And Catherine led him away just as they began to hear the heavy clatter of hooves in the distance, approaching along the cobbled road. At once the cry went up: ‘The gendarmes! The gendarmes!' There was chaos as everyone made a run for it, such a wild flight that within a couple of minutes the road was clear, absolutely empty, as though it had been swept by a hurricane. All that was left was the dark patch of shadow made by Maigrat's corpse where it lay on the white ground. Outside Tison's only Rasseneur remained, with a look of open relief on his face, applauding the easy victory of the men with sabres; and as Montsou lay silent and deserted, with not a light to be seen, the bourgeois sweated behind closed shutters, not daring to look out, teeth chattering. The plain had now merged with the pitch darkness, and all that could be seen were the blast-furnaces and the coke-ovens, blazing away against the backdrop of a doom-laden sky. The sound of thundering hooves drew closer, and suddenly the gendarmes were there in the street, visible only as one dark, solid mass. Following behind, under their protection, the pastryman's cart arrived from Marchiennes at last: and a delivery-boy jumped down and calmly proceeded to unload the vol-au-vent cases.

The first fortnight in February came and went, and a bitter cold spell prolonged the hard winter, offering no mercy to the poor, wretched people. The authorities had once again come to carry out their investigations: the Prefect from Lille, a public prosecutor and a general. The gendarmes had not sufficed, and troops had arrived to occupy Montsou, a whole regiment of them, camped out from Beugnies to Marchiennes. Armed guards were posted at the pit-shafts, and soldiers stood watch over the machinery. The manager's house, the Company yards and even the houses of some of the bourgeois all bristled with bayonets. The only sound to be heard along the cobbled highway was the slow tramp of army patrols. On top of the spoil-heap at Le Voreux, in the icy wind that blew there constantly, a sentry was permanently positioned, like a lookout standing watch over the entire plain; and every two hours, as though this were enemy territory, the calls of the changing guard would ring out:

‘Who goes there?…Step forward! Password!'

There had been no resumption of work anywhere. On the contrary, the strike had spread: Crèvecœur, Mirou and Madeleine had ceased production, like Le Voreux; Feutry-Cantel and La Victoire were losing more workers with every day that passed; and at Saint-Thomas, which had previously remained unaffected, there were absentees. Faced with this show of military might, which offended their pride, the miners' mood was now one of mute obstinacy. Amid the beetfields the villages lay seemingly deserted. Not a worker stirred from his house, and if the occasional person was to be seen, he would be walking alone, his eyes averted and his head lowered as he passed the men in uniform. And beneath this bleak tranquillity, this passive refusal to register the presence of all these rifles, there lay a deceptive docility, the patient, enforced obedience of wild animals in a cage, never taking their eyes off the trainer and just waiting to sink their teeth into his neck the moment he turns his back. For the Company the halt in production was ruinous, and it was talking of taking on miners from Le Borinage, on the
Belgian border. But it did not dare do so, which meant that the confrontation had now reached an impasse, with the miners staying at home while the troops guarded idle pits.

This period of calm had set in, all of a sudden, on the morning following those terrible events, and it concealed a sense of panic so great that as little as possible was said about the damage and atrocities which had been committed. The public inquest established that Maigrat had died as the result of his fall, and the circumstances surrounding the dreadful mutilation of his body, already the subject of legend, were left vague. For its part the Company did not publicly acknowledge the damage that had been incurred, no more than the Grégoires were eager to expose their daughter to the scandal of a lawsuit in which she would have had to give evidence. Nevertheless a number of arrests had been made, mere bystanders as usual, witless, gawping folk who had no idea what was going on. Pierron had been taken to Marchiennes in handcuffs by mistake, which was still a source of great amusement to the comrades. Rasseneur, too, had almost been marched off by two gendarmes. Management was content to draw up lists of those to be dismised, and whole batches of people were being handed their cards: Maheu had been given his, and Levaque also, along with thirty-four of their comrades from Village Two Hundred and Forty alone. And the harshest penalties were in store for Étienne, who had vanished without trace since the evening of the riot. Chaval in his hatred had denounced him, though he refused to name the others, having been implored not to by Catherine, who wanted to protect her parents. As the days went by, there was a sense of unfinished business, and people waited tensely to see how things would turn out.

In Montsou thenceforth the bourgeois woke up every night with a start, their ears ringing with the sound of imaginary alarm bells and their nostrils filled with the smell of gunpowder. But the final straw was a sermon given by their new priest, Father Ranvier, the scrawny cleric with the blazing red eyes who had taken over from Father Joire. What a change from the diplomatic smiles of that plump and inoffensive man whose sole aim in life had been to get on with everyone! Had not Father
Ranvier had the effrontery to defend these frightful criminals who were bringing dishonour on the region? He had made excuses for the strikers' villainies and launched a violent attack on the bourgeoisie, whom he held entirely responsible. It was the bourgeois themselves who, in robbing the Church of its age-old rights and freedoms only then to abuse them, had turned the world into an accursed place of suffering and injustice; it was they who stood in the way of the strike being settled, and it was they who would precipitate a terrible catastrophe by their godlessness and their refusal to return to the beliefs and brotherly traditions of the early Christians. And Ranvier had even dared to threaten the rich, warning them that if they continued not to listen to the voice of God, God would surely side with the poor: He would take back the fortunes of these self-indulgent heathens and distribute them among the humble of this earth for His greater glory. Pious ladies trembled, while the notary declared that this was the worst kind of socialism, and everyone pictured their priest at the head of a mob, brandishing a crucifix and with mighty blows smashing the bourgeois society born of 1789.

M. Hennebeau, an experienced observer of such things, merely shrugged and said:

‘If he proves to be too much of a nuisance, the bishop will soon get rid of him for us.'

And all the while such panic raged from one end of the plain to the other, Étienne was living underground, in the depths of Réquillart, in Jeanlin's lair. For this was where he had taken refuge, and no one suspected that he was so close: the brazen cheek of his hiding in the mine itself, in this disused road down in the old pit, had defeated all attempts to find him. Above him the entrance was blocked by the sloe bushes and hawthorns that had grown up through the collapsed timbers of the headgear; nobody ventured down there now, and you had to know the routine of hanging from the roots of the rowan tree and then keeping your nerve and letting yourself drop till you reached the ladder rungs that were still solid. And there were other obstacles to protect him too: the suffocating heat in the shaft, a perilous descent of a hundred and twenty metres, then the
painful slide on your front down a quarter of a league, between the narrow walls of the roadway, before you came to the robber's den and its hoard of plunder. Here Étienne lived surrounded by plenty: he had found some gin, the remains of the dried cod and further provisions of every kind. The large bed of hay was excellent, there were no draughts, and the temperature was constant, like a warm bath. The only imminent shortage was light. Jeanlin had taken on the job of supplying Étienne, which he carried out with all the careful secretiveness of a young rascal who delights in outsmarting the police; and he brought him everything, even hair-oil, but he simply could not lay his hands on a packet of candles.

By the fifth day Étienne lit a candle only when he needed to eat. The food simply wouldn't go down if he tried to swallow it in the dark. This interminable total darkness with its unchanging blackness was proving to be his greatest hardship. It was all very well being able to sleep in safety and to have all the bread and warmth he needed, but the fact remained that he had never before felt so oppressed by the dark. It seemed to be crushing the very thoughts out of him. So here he was, living off stolen goods! Despite his communist theories, the old scruples instilled in him by his upbringing continued to trouble him, and he made do with dry bread, eking it out. But what else could he do? He still had to live, his task was not yet accomplished. And something else weighed on him, too: remorse for the drunken savagery that had resulted from his drinking gin on an empty stomach in the bitter cold and which had made him attack Chaval with a knife. The episode had brought him into contact with an uncharted region of terror within himself, his hereditary disease, the long lineage of drunkenness which meant that he couldn't touch a drop of alcohol without lapsing into homicidal rage. Would he end up killing someone? When he had finally reached this shelter, in the deep calm of the earth, sated with violence, he had slept for two whole days like an animal in a stupor of repletion; and the disgust persisted. His body ached all over, there was a bitter taste in his mouth, and his head hurt, as though he had been attending some wild party. A week went by, but the Maheus, who knew where he was, were unable to
send him a candle: and so he had to renounce all hope of being able to see, even to eat by.

Now Étienne would spend hours lying on his bed of hay, turning over vague ideas which he didn't even know he had. He felt a sense of superiority that set him apart from the rest of the comrades, as though in the process of educating himself he had acceded to some higher plane. He had never reflected so much before, and he wondered why he had felt such disgust the day after that furious rampage from pit to pit; but he was loath to answer his own question, feeling repugnance as he thought back to certain things, to the base nature of people's desires, to the crudeness of their instincts, to the reek of all that poverty borne on the wind. Despite the tormenting darkness he eventually began to dread the moment when he would return to the village. How revolting it was, all those wretched people living on top of each other and washing in each other's dirty water! And not one of them could he talk to seriously about politics. They might as well be animals, and always that same foul air which stank of onions and left you choking for breath! He wanted to broaden their horizons, to show them the way to the life of comfort and good manners led by the bourgeoisie, to make them the masters. But how long it was all going to take! And he no longer felt he had the courage to wait for victory, here in this prison-house of hunger. Gradually his vanity at being their leader and his constant concern to do their thinking for them were slowly setting him apart and lending him the soul of one of those bourgeois he so despised.