Germinal - Emile Zola [262]
But Négrel gave a cry of despair. M. Hennebeau, who had moved back, began to weep. The catastrophe was not over yet. The canal bank gave way, and a sheet of water started gushing out into one of the cracks in the ground. There it vanished, cascading like a waterfall into a deep valley. The mine drank the river down: its roads would be flooded for years to come. Soon the crater began to fill; and where once Le Voreux had been, there now lay an expanse of muddy water, like one of those lakes in which doomed cities lie submerged. A terrified silence had fallen, and all that could be heard was the sound of the water pouring down and rumbling through the bowels of the earth.
At that moment, up on the shaken spoil-heap, Souvarine rose to his feet. He had recognized La Maheude and Zacharie sobbing together at the spectacle of this collapse, the weight of which would be piling down on to the heads of those wretched people still fighting for their lives below. He threw away his last cigarette and, without a backward glance, walked off into the darkness which had now fallen. In the distance his shadowy figure faded from view and melted into the blackness of the night. He was headed somewhere, anywhere, off into the unknown. In his usual calm way he was bound upon extermination, bound for wherever there was dynamite to blow cities and people to smithereens. And in all probability, when the bourgeoisie’s final hour arrives and every cobble is exploding in the road beneath its feet, there he will be.
IV
That very night, following the collapse of Le Voreux, M. Hennebeau had left for Paris, wanting to inform the Board in person before the newspapers had had a chance to report even the bare details of the event. And when he returned the next day, people found him very calm, quite the manager in charge. He had evidently succeeded in absolving himself of all responsibility and seemed to be no less in favour than before; indeed the decree appointing him Officer in the Legion of Honour was signed twenty-four hours later.
But while the manager’s position was safe, the Company itself was reeling from this terrible blow. It was not so much the loss of money that mattered as the injury to its corporate body and the nagging, unspoken fear, in the light of this attack on one of its pits, of what the morrow might bring. Once again the shock was so great that it felt the need for silence. Why cause a stir over this abominable act? Even if they were to identify the criminal responsible, why make a martyr of him? His appalling heroism would serve only to give others the wrong idea and breed a long line of incendiaries and assassins. In any case it did not suspect the real culprit and eventually laid the blame on an army of accomplices, as it could not believe that one man alone could have had the courage and daring to carry out such a deed. And that precisely was what worried the Company most: the thought that its pits might now be under a growing threat. The manager had been instructed to set up an extensive network of informants and then quietly, one by one, to dismiss the troublemakers who were suspected of having had a hand in the crime. A purge of this kind, being the wisest political course to take, would suffice.
Only one person was dismissed immediately, namely Dansaert, the overman. Since the scandal with La Pierronne he had become quite impossible, but the pretext