Germinal - Emile Zola [184]
‘In God’s name, is this what you call meeting up?’
People started cursing, and some wanted to jump on the traitor. What was going on? He had taken a solemn oath with them the night before, and here he was going down the mine with everyone else! Was this some sort of bloody joke?
‘Take him away. Throw him down the pit.’
Chaval, white with fear, was desperately trying to stammer out an explanation. But Étienne cut him short, beside himself with anger, and quite taken up by the general fury.
‘You wanted to join us, and join us you bloody well will…Come on, you bastard. Off we go, left, right, left, right.’
His voice was drowned by a fresh clamour. Catherine herself had just appeared, dazzled by the bright sunshine and terrified to find herself surrounded by these savages. As she stood there trying to catch her breath, her hands bleeding and her legs about to give way beneath her after climbing those hundred and two ladders, La Maheude saw her and ran forward with her arm raised.
‘You too, you little bitch?…Your own mother is dying of hunger, and you go and betray her for that pimp of yours!’
Maheu caught her arm and prevented the blow. But he started shaking his daughter and, like his wife, reproaching her furiously for how she had behaved. They had both lost control and were screaming wildly above the noise of their comrades.
The sight of Catherine had been the final straw for Étienne.
‘Come on!’ he kept insisting. ‘Let’s go to the other pits! And as for you, you filthy bastard, you’re coming with us!’
Chaval scarcely had time to fetch his clogs from the changing-room and to throw his jersey round his freezing shoulders. They dragged him away with them, forcing him to run along in their midst. Distraught, Catherine also put her clogs back on and buttoned up the old jacket, a man’s one, which she had been wearing since the weather turned cold; and she hurried along behind her man, not wanting to let him out of her sight, for they were surely going to slaughter him.
Jean-Bart emptied in two minutes. Jeanlin had found a horn and was blowing it raucously as though he were rounding up cattle. The women, La Brûlé, La Levaque, La Mouquette, all gathered up their skirts in order to run better, while Levaque twirled an axe about as though it were a drum-major’s baton. Other comrades were still arriving, and there was nearly a thousand of them now, a disorderly rabble that flowed out on to the road like a river in spate. The exit was too narrow, and fences were smashed.
‘To the pits! Let’s get the scabs! No more work!’
And suddenly Jean-Bart fell completely silent. Not a worker to be seen, not a breath to be heard. Deneulin came out of the deputies’ room and, all alone, gesturing that no one should follow, he went round inspecting the pit. He was pale and very calm. First he stopped at the shaft and looked up at the severed cables: the steel strands dangled uselessly in the air, and he could see where the file had left its wound, a gleaming sore surrounded by black grease. Then he went up to the winding-gear and stared at the motionless crank-rod, which looked like the joint of some colossal limb that had been suddenly paralysed; he felt the metal, which had already cooled, and its cold touch made him shiver as though he had laid his hand on a corpse. Then he went down to the boilers, where he walked slowly along the line of extinguished fire-grates, now wide open and flooded, and he tapped his foot against the boilers, which sounded hollow. Well, this was it. His ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and relit the fires, where would he find the men? Another two weeks of the strike and he was bankrupt. And in the certain prospect of this disaster he no longer felt hatred towards these bandits from Montsou but rather a kind of complicity, as though together they were all expiating the one same everlasting and universal sin. Animals no doubt they were, but animals who could not read and who were starving to death.
IV
And so, out on the open plain that