Germinal, Émile Zola [readict .txt] 📗

along with that evil beast, that crushed beast, at the end of the stick.

This frightful mutilation was accomplished in frozen horror. Neither Étienne nor Maheu nor the others had had time to interfere; they stood motionless before this gallop of furies. At the door of the Estaminet Tison a few heads were grouped⁠—Rasseneur pale with disgust, Zacharie and Philoméne stupefied at what they had seen. The two old men, Bonnemort and Mouque, were gravely shaking their heads. Only Jeanlin was making fun, pushing Bébert with his elbow, and forcing Lydie to look up. But the women were already coming back, turning round and passing beneath the manager’s windows. Behind the blinds the ladies were stretching out their necks. They had not been able to observe the scene, which was hidden from them by the wall, and they could not distinguish well in the growing darkness.

“What is it they have at the end of that stick?” asked Cécile, who had grown bold enough to look out.

Lucie and Jeanne declared that it must be a rabbit-skin.

“No, no,” murmured Madame Hennebeau, “they must have been pillaging a pork butcher’s, it seems to be a remnant of a pig.”

At this moment she shuddered and was silent. Madame Grégoire had nudged her with her knee. They both remained stupefied. The young ladies, who were very pale, asked no more questions, but with large eyes followed this red vision through the darkness.

Étienne once more brandished the axe. But the feeling of anxiety did not disappear; this corpse now barred the road and protected the shop. Many had drawn back. Satiety seemed to have appeased them all. Maheu was standing by gloomily, when he heard a voice whisper in his ear to escape. He turned round and recognized Catherine, still in her old overcoat, black and panting. With a movement he repelled her. He would not listen to her, he threatened to strike her. With a gesture of despair she hesitated, and then ran towards Étienne.

“Save yourself! save yourself! the gendarmes are coming!”

He also pushed her away and abused her, feeling the blood of the blows she had given him mounting to his cheeks. But she would not be repelled; she forced him to throw down the axe, and drew him away by both arms, with irresistible strength.

“Don’t I tell you the gendarmes are coming! Listen to me. It’s Chaval who has gone for them and is bringing them, if you want to know. It’s too much for me, and I’ve come. Save yourself, I don’t want them to take you.”

And Catherine drew him away, while, at the same instant, a heavy gallop shook the street from afar. Immediately a voice arose: “The gendarmes! the gendarmes!” There was a general breaking up, so mad a rush for life that in two minutes the road was free, absolutely clear, as though swept by a hurricane. Maigrat’s corpse alone made a patch of shadow on the white earth. Before the Estaminet Tison, Rasseneur only remained, feeling relieved, and with open face applauding the easy victory of the sabres; while in dim and deserted Montsou, in the silence of the closed houses, the bourgeois remained with perspiring skins and chattering teeth, not daring to look out. The plain was drowned beneath the thick night, only the blast furnaces and the coke furnaces were burning against the tragic sky. The gallop of the gendarmes heavily approached; they came up in an indistinguishable sombre mass. And behind them the Marchiennes pastrycook’s vehicle, a little covered cart which had been confided to their care, at last arrived, and a small drudge of a boy jumped down and quietly unpacked the crusts for the vol-au-vent.

Part VI I

The first fortnight of February passed and a black cold prolonged the hard winter without pity for the poor. Once more the authorities had scoured the roads; the prefect of Lille, an attorney, a general, and the police were not sufficient, the military had come to occupy Montsou; a whole regiment of men were camped between Beaugnies and Marchiennes. Armed pickets guarded the pits, and there were soldiers before every engine. The manager’s villa, the Company’s Yards, even the houses of certain residents, were bristling with bayonets. Nothing was heard along the streets but the slow movement of patrols. On the pit-bank of the Voreux a sentinel was always placed in the frozen wind that blew up there, like a lookout man above the flat plain; and every two hours, as though in an enemy’s country, were heard the sentry’s cries:

“Qui vive?⁠—Advance and give the password!”

Nowhere had work been resumed. On the contrary, the strike had spread; Crévecœur, Mirou, Madeleine, like the Voreux, were producing nothing; at Feutry-Cantel and the Victoire there were fewer men every morning; even at Saint-Thomas, which had been hitherto exempt, men were wanting. There was now a silent persistence in the face of this exhibition of force which exasperated the miners’ pride. The settlements looked deserted in the midst of the beetroot fields. Not a workman stirred, only at rare intervals was one to be met by chance, isolated, with sidelong look, lowering his head before the red trousers. And in this deep melancholy calm, in this passive opposition to the guns, there was a deceptive gentleness, a forced and patient obedience of wild beasts in a cage, with their eyes on the tamer, ready to spring on his neck if he turned his back. The Company, who were being ruined by this death of work, talked of hiring miners from the Borinage, on the Belgian frontier, but did not dare; so that the battle continued as before between the colliers, who were shut up at home, and the dead pits guarded by soldiery.

On the morrow of that terrible day this calm had come about at once, hiding such a panic that the greatest silence possible was kept concerning the damage and the atrocities. The inquiry which had been opened