Germinal - Emile Zola [146]
By Tuesday Village Two Hundred and Forty had run out of everything. Étienne had been working round the clock with the delegates: they undertook collections, they organized public meetings, they tried to recruit new members in the neighbouring towns, even as far away as Paris. Their efforts had little effect. At the beginning they had succeeded in arousing public concern, but now, as the strike dragged quietly on without dramatic incident, people were gradually losing interest. Such meagre donations as they did raise were scarcely enough to support the most destitute families. Others survived by pawning their clothes or selling off their household effects one by one. Everything was disappearing in the direction of the second-hand dealers, whether it was the wool stuffing out of their mattresses, or kitchen utensils, or even furniture. For a brief moment they thought they were saved when the small shopkeepers in Montsou started offering credit as a way of taking back customers from Maigrat, who had been gradually putting them out of business; and for one week Verdonck the grocer and Carouble and Smelten the two bakers had virtually held open house; but the credit they gave didn’t go very far, and the three of them then stopped giving it. The bailiffs were pleased, but the net result for the miners was a burden of debt that was to weigh on them for a long time to come. With no more credit available anywhere and not even an old saucepan left to sell, they might as well lie down and die in a corner like so many mangy dogs.
Étienne would have sold his flesh. He had stopped taking his secretarial salary and pawned his smart woollen coat and trousers in Marchiennes, happy to be able to keep the Maheus’ pot on the boil. All he had left were his boots, which he had kept, he said, so that his kicks would hurt. His major regret was that the strike had come too soon, before his provident fund had had time to accumulate. For him that was the only explanation for why they were in the present disastrous situation: come the day when they had saved enough money to fund their struggle, the workers would surely triumph over the bosses. And he remembered how Souvarine had accused the Company of provoking the strike so as to destroy the fund while it was still small.
The sight of the village and all these wretched people without food or coal upset him deeply, and he preferred to absent himself on long, tiring walks. One evening, as he was passing Réquillart on his way home, he came on an old woman who had collapsed by the side of the road and was presumably suffering from starvation. When he had lifted her into a sitting position, he called out to a girl he had seen on the other side of the fence.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, recognizing La Mouquette. ‘Give me a hand, will you? We need to give her something to drink.’
Tears welled in La Mouquette’s eyes, and she ran into her house, the rickety shack that her father had constructed amid the ruins. She was back in a trice with some gin and a loaf of bread. The gin revived the old woman, who gnawed greedily at the loaf without saying a word. She was the mother of one of the miners and lived in a village over towards Cougny; she had collapsed here on her way back from Joiselle, where she had gone in vain to try and borrow ten sous from a sister of hers. After she had eaten, she tottered off in a daze.
Étienne remained behind in the waste ground of Réquillart, with its tumbledown sheds that were gradually disappearing beneath the brambles.
‘Won’t you