Germinal - Emile Zola [182]
Maheu, horrified, had rushed off with the first group, calling to Étienne:
‘They mustn’t kill him.’
Étienne was already running, too; but when he realized that Deneulin had barricaded himself in the deputies’ room, he shouted back:
‘So what if they do? It would hardly be our fault! The man’s off his head!’
Nevertheless he was very worried and as yet too self-possessed to yield to such mass violence. Also his pride as a leader had been hurt by the way the mob had escaped his control and were running wild like this rather than coolly carrying out the will of the people in the manner he had expected. He called in vain for calm, shouting that they mustn’t put their enemies in the right by engaging in senseless destruction.
‘The boilers!’ La Brûlé was screaming. ‘Let’s put out the fires.’
Levaque had found an iron-file, which he was brandishing like a dagger, and his terrible cry rang out over the tumult:
‘Cut the cables! Cut the cables!’
Soon everybody was repeating this; only Étienne and Maheu continued to protest, trying desperately to make themselves heard above the racket but quite unable to obtain silence. Finally Étienne managed to say:
‘But, comrades, there are men down there!’
The racket grew even louder, and voices could be heard coming from all directions:
‘Too bad! They shouldn’t have gone down in the first place!…Serves the scabs right!…Let them stay there!…Anyway, they’ve always got the ladders!’
When they remembered the ladders, everyone became even more determined, and Étienne realized that he would have to give way. Fearing an even worse disaster, he rushed towards the engine-house in the hope of at least being able to bring the cages up, so that if the cables were severed above the shaft, they wouldn’t smash the cages to pieces with their enormous weight when they fell on top of them. The mechanic in charge of it had disappeared along with the few other surface workers, and so Étienne grabbed the starting lever and pulled it while Levaque and two other men clambered up the iron framework that supported the pulleys. The cages had scarcely been locked into their keeps before the rasping sound of the file could be heard as it bit through the steel. There was total silence, and the sound seemed to fill the entire pit; everyone looked up in tense anticipation to watch and listen. Standing in the front row Maheu felt a surge of wild joy run through him, as though the blade of the file would deliver them all from evil by eating through the cable: this would be one miserable hole in the ground they would never have to go down again.
But La Brûlé had disappeared down the steps into the changing-room, still screaming at the top of her voice:
‘Let’s put out the fires! To the boilers! To the boilers!’
Other women followed her. La Maheude hurried to stop them wrecking everything, just as her husband had tried to reason with the comrades. She was the calmest person present: they could demand their rights without destroying people’s property. When she entered the boiler-room, the women were already chasing the two stokers out, and La Brûlé, armed with a large shovel, was squatting in front of one of the boilers and emptying it as fast as she could, throwing the red-hot coal on to the brick floor, where it continued to smoulder. There were ten fire-grates for five boilers. Soon all the women had set to, La Levaque with both hands on her shovel, La Mouquette hoisting her skirts so that she didn’t catch fire, all of them dishevelled and covered in sweat, and all bathed in the blood-red glow coming from the fires of this witches