Germinal - Emile Zola [161]
At the front, facing down the slope, stood Étienne with Rasseneur and Maheu. A row was going on, and raised voices could be heard in snatches. Close by, other men were listening to them: Levaque with his fists clenched, Pierron with his back towards them, very worried now that he could no longer plead reasons of health for staying away; and Bonnemort and Mouque were there too, sitting side by side on a tree-stump deep in thought. Behind them were the jokesters, Zacharie, Mouquet and others, who had come for the laugh; whereas many of the women, on the contrary, were standing about in respectful groups and wearing an earnest expression as though they were at church. La Maheude nodded in silent agreement as La Levaque muttered her imprecations. Philomène was coughing, her bronchitis having returned with the winter months. Only La Mouquette was laughing, hugely amused by the way La Brûlé was tearing into her daughter and saying how it was just not natural, sending her own mother off like that so that she could stay and stuff herself on rabbit: a whore she was, who’d grown fat on her husband’s cowardly collaborations. Meanwhile Jeanlin had installed himself on top of the pile of logs, pulling Lydie up beside him and ordering Bébert to follow, so that now the three of them were sitting way up high above the entire crowd.
The row had been started by Rasseneur, who wanted to elect a committee in the proper fashion. He was still smarting after his defeat at the Jolly Fellow; and he had sworn to have his revenge, fondly believing that he would be able to regain his authority once they were in front of the whole community of miners and not just the delegates. Étienne was outraged by the idea of a committee, which he considered ridiculous out here in the forest. They had to act like revolutionaries, like wild men, since it was as wolves and wild animals that they were being hunted down.
Seeing no end to this argument, he took control of the crowd at once by climbing on to a tree-trunk and shouting:
‘Comrades! Comrades!’
The hubbub of the crowd died away like a long sigh, as Maheu silenced Rasseneur’s protests. Étienne continued in a rousing tone:
‘Comrades, we are having to meet here because they have forbidden us to talk to each other and because they have sent the gendarmes after us as if we were common criminals. Here we shall be free, here we shall be on home ground, and nobody will be able to come and tell us to shut up, any more than they can tell the birds and the animals to shut up!’
This brought a thunderous response of cries and exclamations.
‘Yes, yes, this is our forest! It’s our right to speak!…Give us a speech!’
Étienne stood still for a moment on his log. The moon was still too low in the sky and shone only on the uppermost branches of the trees, so that the crowd remained plunged in darkness as it gradually settled and fell silent. Above them, at the top of the slope, the equally dark figure of Étienne stood out like a stripe of shadow.
Slowly he raised one arm and began; but the voice of righteous indignation had gone, and he now spoke in the cold, dispassionate tone of a simple envoy of the people delivering his report. At last he was able to give the speech that the police superintendent had interrupted at the Jolly Fellow; and he began with a brief history of the strike, presenting it in the style of a fluent and informed analysis: facts, nothing but the facts. First he said how he didn’t like strikes: the miners hadn’t wanted one, it was management who had driven them to it with its new timbering rate. Then he recalled the first meeting the deputation had sought with the manager and how the Board of Directors had acted in bad faith, and then the delegates’ second approach and the manager’s belated concession, with the Company being prepared to restore the two centimes it had earlier tried to steal from them. That was how matters presently stood. He provided figures showing that the provident fund was exhausted, described how the financial help they