Germinal - Emile Zola [187]
‘Clear off!’ Maheu insisted vehemently.
This order from her father slowed her for a moment. She was trembling, and tears welled in her eyes. But despite her fear she caught up again and continued to run with them. After that they let her be.
The mob crossed the Joiselle road and then briefly made for Cron before heading up towards Cougny. Here factory chimneys stood like stripes across the flat horizon, and the road was lined with wooden sheds and brick-built workshops with wide, dusty windows. They raced through Villages One Hundred and Eighty and Seventy-Six one after the other, in quick succession, past the tiny houses; and in both villages the noise of their shouting and the clarion calls of the horn brought whole families out to see, men, women and children, who started running also, joining on behind their comrades. By the time they reached Madeleine there were at least fifteen hundred of them. The road sloped gently downwards, and the roaring torrent of strikers had to flow round the spoil-heap before streaming out across the pit-yard.
It had barely gone two o’clock. But the deputy had been alerted and had brought forward the end of the shift, so that when the mob arrived only about twenty men were left at the bottom. When they surfaced and emerged from the cage, they fled while people ran after them and threw stones at them. Two men were beaten up, and another got away only by forfeiting the sleeve of his jacket. This pursuit of human quarry saved the plant, not a cable or boiler was touched; and already the torrent was departing, rolling on towards the neighbouring pit.
This was Crèvecœur, a mere five hundred metres from Madeleine. There, too, the mob arrived just as the men were coming up. One putter was seized by the women, who ripped her trousers open and started flogging her bare buttocks in full view of the men, to their great amusement. The pit-boys got a clip round the ear, while some of the hewers escaped only after receiving bruised ribs or a bloody nose. As the ferocity of the encounter intensified, fuelled by the demented fury of this immemorial thirst for revenge which had turned everybody’s heads, cries rang out or died in the throat, the roar of empty bellies demanding death to the scabs and an end to low wages. They began to cut the cables, but the file was blunt. Anyway it would take too long, for they were in a frenzy now, desperate to be on the move, on, on. A tap was smashed in the boiler-room and buckets of water were thrown on to the fires, causing the cast-iron grates to crack.
Outside there was talk of marching on Saint-Thomas. As the pit with the most docile workforce, it had been unaffected by the strike, and nearly seven hundred men must be underground, which infuriated them. They would wait for them with cudgels, in battle formation, and then they’d see who left the field victorious! But word went round that there were gendarmes at Saint-Thomas, the very gendarmes they’d made fun of that morning. Yet how did anyone actually know that? It was impossible to say. No matter! They lost their nerve and opted for Feutry-Cantel instead. The thrill of the chase took hold of them once more as they found themselves rushing along the road to the sound of their clattering clogs: To Feutry-Cantel! To Feutry-Cantel! There were a good four hundred spineless bastards there, what a laugh! Situated some three kilometres away, the mine was hidden in a dip near La Scarpe. They were already climbing the hillside at Les Plâtrières, beyond the road to Beaugnies, when somebody or other – they never discovered who – started a rumour that maybe the dragoons were at Feutry-Cantel. This was then repeated from from one end of the column to the other: the dragoons were there. They faltered and slowed