Germinal - Emile Zola [183]
‘Stop!’ cried La Maheude. ‘The storeroom’s on fire.’
‘So much the better!’ answered La Brûlé. ‘That’ll save us the bother…By God, I always said I’d make them pay for my old man’s death!’
At that moment they heard the high-pitched voice of Jeanlin.
‘Watch out! I’ll soon see to those fires! Here goes!’
Having been one of the first in, he had been darting about in the crowd, delighted by the free-for-all and looking for mischief. That was when he had the idea of opening the steam-cocks and releasing all the steam. Jets escaped like gunshot, and the five boilers blew themselves out like hurricanes, their thunderous hissing loud enough to burst an eardrum. Everything had disappeared in a cloud of steam, the burning coal paled, and the women were like ghosts gesturing wearily through the haze. Only Jeanlin was visible, up in the gallery behind the billowing clouds of white mist, a look of sheer delight on his face, his mouth gaping with joy at having unleashed this tempest.
All this lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. People had thrown buckets of water on to the heaps of coal, finally putting them out; all danger of the building catching fire had been averted. But the anger of the crowd had not abated, on the contrary it had been whipped to a new frenzy. Men were descending into the mine with hammers in their hands, even the women armed themselves with iron bars; and there was talk of puncturing the boilers and smashing the machines, of demolishing the whole mine.
When Étienne was told this, he hurried to the scene with Maheu. Even he was in a state of high excitement, carried away by this feverish thirst for revenge. Nevertheless he did what he could to persuade everyone to calm down, now that the cables had been cut and the fires put out and the boilers emptied of steam, making all further work impossible. But still they refused to listen, and he was about to be overridden once again when booing could be heard outside, coming from beside a small, low door which was the entrance to the emergency ladder shaft.
‘Down with scabs!…Look at the filthy cowards!…Down with scabs!’
Those who had been working underground were beginning to emerge. The first ones stood there blinking, blinded by the daylight. Then they walked past, one by one, hoping to reach the road and make a run for it.
‘Down with scabs! Down with false friends!’
The whole crowd of strikers had come running. In less than three minutes there wasn’t a soul left inside, and the five hundred men from Montsou lined up in two rows opposite each other, forcing the Vandame miners who had betrayed them by working to run the gauntlet between them. And as each new miner appeared at the door of the shaft, his clothes in tatters and covered in the black mud of his labour, he was met by renewed booing and savage ribaldry. Here, look at him, the short-arse runt! And him! The tarts at the Volcano must have done for his nose. And just look at the wax coming out of that man’s ears! You could light a cathedral with that lot! And that tall one with no bum on him and a face as long as Lent! A putter rolled out of the door, so fat that her breasts, her stomach and her backside all merged into one, and she was met by a storm of laughter. Could they have a feel? Then the jokes turned nasty, cruel even, and fists were about to fly. Meanwhile the rest of the poor devils continued to file past, shivering and silent amid all the insults, throwing anxious sideways glances in case they were about to be hit, and relieved when they were finally able to run away from the pit.
‘Just look at them! How many of them are there in there?’ asked Étienne.
He was surprised to see people still coming out, and it irritated him to think that it wasn’t just a case of a few workers who had been driven to it by hunger or by sheer terror of the deputies. So had they lied to him in the forest? Almost the whole of Jean-Bart had gone down. But he gave an involuntary cry and rushed forward