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By Root 1731 0

why he had felt such disgust the day after that furious rampage from pit to pit; but he was loath to answer his own question, feeling repugnance as he thought back to certain things, to the base nature of people’s desires, to the crudeness of their instincts, to the reek of all that poverty borne on the wind. Despite the tormenting darkness he eventually began to dread the moment when he would return to the village. How revolting it was, all those wretched people living on top of each other and washing in each other’s dirty water! And not one of them could he talk to seriously about politics. They might as well be animals, and always that same foul air which stank of onions and left you choking for breath! He wanted to broaden their horizons, to show them the way to the life of comfort and good manners led by the bourgeoisie, to make them the masters. But how long it was all going to take! And he no longer felt he had the courage to wait for victory, here in this prison-house of hunger. Gradually his vanity at being their leader and his constant concern to do their thinking for them were slowly setting him apart and lending him the soul of one of those bourgeois he so despised.

One evening Jeanlin brought him the remains of a candle, which he had stolen from a wagoner’s lantern; and for Étienne this was a great relief. When the darkness began to get to him and his thoughts started weighing on him as though he might soon go mad, he would light it for a moment; and then, when he had chased away the gremlins, he would extinguish it, determined to economize on this bright light that was as necessary to his survival as bread itself. The silence made his ears hum, and all he ever heard was the scuttling of rats, the creaking of the old timbering, or the tiny sound of a spider weaving its web. And as he stared into the warm void, his mind kept returning to the same old question: what were his comrades doing up there? To abandon them would have seemed to him the worst possible act of cowardice. If he was hiding down here like this, it was so that he could remain free, ready to advise and act. His long periods of reflection had shown him where his true ambition lay: pending something better he wanted to be like Pluchart, to stop work and devote himself entirely to politics, but alone, in a nice clean room somewhere, on the grounds that brain work is a full-time job and requires much peace and quiet.

At the beginning of the second week, Jeanlin having told him that the gendarmes believed him to have crossed into Belgium, Étienne ventured out of his hole after nightfall. He wanted to assess the situation, to see if it was still worth resisting. For his own part he thought that their chances of success had been compromised. Before the strike he had had his doubts about the possibility of victory but had simply gone along with things; now, having experienced the heady excitement of rebellion, he had reverted to his original doubts and despaired of ever getting the Company to concede. But he did not yet admit as much to himself, and he was tortured with anguish at the thought of the miseries that defeat would bring, of all the heavy responsibility which he would have to bear for people’s suffering. Would not an end to the strike also mean an end to his own role in the matter, the collapse of his ambitions, a return to his brutish existence in the mine and the revoltingness of life in the village? And he tried in all honesty, without base or false calculations, to recover his sense of commitment, to convince himself that resistance was still feasible, that capital would destroy itself when faced with the heroic suicide of labour.

And indeed news of ruin after ruin was now reverberating across the whole region. At night, as he roamed the dark countryside like a wolf that has left the shelter of its wood, he could almost hear the companies collapsing from one end of the plain to the other. Along the roadsides he was continually passing empty, lifeless factories whose buildings stood rotting beneath a pale, ghostly sky. The sugar-refineries