Germinal - Emile Zola [118]
Alzire was nodding. Lénore and Henri, terrified by this raging, cried softly as their mother proceeded to list their various misfortunes: first, there was having to let Zacharie get married; then there was old Bonnemort, stuck on his chair with his gammy legs; and then there was Jeanlin, who’d be in bed for another ten days yet, with his bones that didn’t stick together right; and finally the last straw was this trollop Catherine going off with some man! The whole family was falling apart. There was only Father left now at the pit. How on earth were the seven of them, not counting Estelle, supposed to live on the three francs Father earned? They might as well all throw themselves in the canal and be done with it.
‘Moaning never helped anyone,’ Maheu said in a hollow voice. ‘And anyway, we might not have seen the end of it yet.’
Étienne, who was staring at the floor, looked up; and, with his eyes fixed on a vision of the future, he murmured quietly:
‘The time has come! The time has come!’
PART IV
I
That Monday the Hennebeaus were having the Grégoires and their daughter Cécile to lunch. And quite an occasion it was to be. When they had eaten, Paul Négrel was to show the ladies round a mine, the Saint-Thomas mine, which was in the process of being lavishly refitted. But this was by way of being a delightful pretext: the visit was Mme Hennebeau’s device for hastening the marriage between Cécile and Paul.
And then out of the blue, that very Monday, at four o’clock in the morning, the strike had started. When the Company had begun to operate its new wages system on 1 December, the miners had remained calm. Come pay-day a fortnight later, not one of them had raised any objection. The whole staff, from the manager down to the most junior supervisor, thought that the new rates had been accepted; and so since early morning there had been widespread surprise at this declaration of war, and at the tactics and concerted action which seemed to point to strong leadership.
At five o’clock Dansaert woke M. Hennebeau with the news that not a single man had gone down the pit at Le Voreux. He had just come through Village Two Hundred and Forty and found all the windows and doors shut and everyone fast asleep. And from the moment the manager leaped bleary-eyed out of bed, he was swamped: messengers had been rushing in every quarter of an hour, and his desk had disappeared beneath a hail of telegrams. At first he hoped that the unrest was confined to Le Voreux; but the news grew worse with every minute that passed. Next it was Mirou, and then Crèvecœur, and Madeleine, where only the stablemen had turned up; then it was La Victoire and Feutry-Cantel, the two pits with the tightest discipline, yet where only a third of the men had reported for work. Saint-Thomas alone had its full complement and seemed unaffected by the action. It took him till nine o’clock dictating telegrams to be sent in all directions, to the Prefect1 in Lille, to the Company’s directors, warning the authorities and asking for instructions. He had sent Négrel off on a tour of the neighbouring pits to gather accurate information.
Suddenly M. Hennebeau remembered the lunch; and he was about to send the coachman to let the Grégoires know that the party had been postponed when he had a moment’s hesitation and his resolve faltered – he who had just prepared for battle in a few brief, military sentences. He went upstairs to speak to Mme Hennebeau in her dressing-room, where the maid was just finishing attending to her hair.
‘So they’re on strike,’ she said calmly, after he had asked her what they should do. ‘Well, what’s that to us?…We’ve still got to eat, haven’t we?’
She would