Germinal - Emile Zola [189]
‘You fucking bastard!’ Étienne screamed. ‘You’re afraid of getting into trouble, aren’t you? Back there in the forest you were the one who wanted to call out the mechanics and shut down the pumps, and here you are now trying to land us all in the shit…Well, by God, we’re going to go back to Gaston-Marie, and you’re going to smash that pump. Yes you are, you can bloody well smash it!’
He really was drunk now, for here he was dispatching his men against the very pump he had saved from destruction some hours earlier.
‘Gaston-Marie! Gaston-Marie!’
Everyone cheered and began to rush off. Some men grabbed Chaval by the shoulders, hustling him forward roughly while he continued to demand a wash.
‘Clear off, I tell you!’ Maheu shouted at Catherine, who had also begun to run with them again.
This time she did not even falter, but raised her burning eyes to her father’s and continued to run.
Once more the mob cut a swathe across the open plain. It was now retracing its steps, along the long straight highways and across fields that had grown bigger and bigger over the years. It was four o’clock: the sun was setting on the horizon, and the shadows cast by the horde and its wild gesticulations fell across the frozen ground.
They avoided Montsou by joining the Joiselle road higher up, and in order to save having to go round by La Fourche-aux-Bœufs they came past the walls of La Piolaine. By chance the Grégoires had just left, meaning to visit a notary before going on to dine at the Hennebeaus’, where they were to collect Cécile. The place seemed sunk in slumber, with its deserted avenue of limes, and its orchard and kitchen-garden both stripped bare by winter. Nothing stirred in the house, and the closed windows were steamed up with the warmth inside: the deep silence exuded a sense of well-being and good cheer, a patriarchal aura of comfortable beds and good food, all bespeaking the well-regulated happiness in which its owners lived out their lives.
Without breaking step the mob cast sullen glances through the iron railings and along the perimeter walls topped with broken bottles. Again the cry went up:
‘We want bread! We want bread!’
Only the dogs replied, a pair of Great Danes with tawny coats, who barked ferociously and stood on their hind legs baring their teeth. And behind a closed shutter there were just the two maids – Mélanie the cook and Honorine the housemaid – who had been drawn there by the noise of the chanting and now stood sweating with fear, deathly pale at the sight of these savages marching past. They fell to their knees and thought their last hour had come when they heard a single stone breaking a pane of glass in a nearby window. This was one of Jeanlin’s little jokes: he had made a sling out of a piece of rope, and it was his way of leaving his calling card at the Grégoires’. Already he had started blowing his horn again, and as the mob receded into the distance its cry grew fainter and fainter:
‘We want bread! We want bread!’
They arrived at Gaston-Marie in even bigger numbers than before, more than two and a half thousand maniacs bent on destruction and sweeping everything before them with the accumulated energy of a torrent in spate. Gendarmes had been there an hour earlier and then departed in the direction of Saint-Thomas; some farm labourers had given them false information, and they had left in such a hurry that they hadn’t even taken the precaution of leaving a squad of men to guard the pit. In less than a quarter of an hour, the fire-grates were emptied, the boilers drained and the buildings invaded and ransacked. But it was the pump they were really after. It wasn’t enough for it to give out a last gasp of steam and stop working, they had to throw themselves at it as though it were a living