Maheu in particular took a liking to Étienne, because he always respected good workmanship. Moreover, like the rest of them, he could sense that Étienne was better educated: he saw him reading, writing, sketching little plans, and he heard him talking about things that he, Maheu, had never even heard of. That didn’t surprise him: colliers are a tough bunch with thicker skulls than mechanics. But he was surprised by the young fellow’s courage, by the way he’d put a brave face on things and just got on with it, knowing that otherwise he’d starve. He was the first casual labourer to have adapted so quickly. And so whenever they were under pressure to produce coal and he couldn’t spare one of his hewers, he’d ask Étienne to do the timbering, knowing he’d make a good solid job of it. The bosses were continuing to badger him about this damnable business of the timbering, and he went in constant fear of Négrel, the engineer, turning up with Dansaert and shouting and arguing and making them do it all over again. But he had noticed that Étienne’s timbering seemed more likely to pass muster with these particular gentlemen, despite the fact that they never looked happy and kept saying that one day the Company would have to sort the matter out once and for all. The issue was still dragging on, and sullen resentment was brewing in the pit. Even Maheu, normally so peaceable, seemed to be spoiling for a fight.
At the beginning there had been some rivalry between Zacharie and Étienne, and one evening they had almost come to blows. But Zacharie was a good-natured lad who didn’t give a damn about anything other than his own pleasures, and so he was quickly pacified by the friendly offer of a beer. Soon he was obliged to recognize the newcomer’s superiority. Levaque, too, was now well disposed to Étienne and talked politics with this putter who, he said, had some interesting ideas. And so among the men in the team the only mute hostility that Étienne now encountered came from Chaval. Not that there was apparently any coldness between them; on the contrary, they seemed to be on friendly terms. It was just that when they laughed and joked together their eyes betrayed a mutual animosity. Now caught between them, Catherine carried on as before, the weary, submissive young girl forever arching her back and putting her shoulder to her tub. She was always kind towards her fellow-putter, who in his turn did what he could to assist her; but otherwise she was subject to the wishes of her lover, whose caresses she now publicly submitted to. It was an accepted situation, an acknowledged relationship to which her family turned a blind eye, so that each evening Chaval took Catherine off behind the spoil-heap and then brought her back to her parents’ front door, where they gave each other one last kiss in full view of the village. Étienne, who thought he’d come to terms with the situation, often teased her about these walks of hers, talking dirty with her for a laugh the way the lads and girls did down the mine; while she would give as good as she got and brag about what her lover had done to her. And yet when their eyes met, she would turn pale and feel uncomfortable. Then they would both look away again, and sometimes they went an hour without exchanging a word, as though they hated each other for some deep-seated reason that they never talked about.
Spring had arrived. Coming up out of the mine-shaft one day Étienne had caught the full blast of a warm April breeze on his face, a lovely smell of fresh earth, tender green shoots and pure, clean air; and now, every time he came up, spring felt even warmer and smelled still sweeter after ten hours spent working in the eternal winter down below, where no summer sunshine ever penetrated to banish the darkness and the damp. The days were drawing out and by May he was going down at sunrise, when Le Voreux would be bathed in the vermilion light of a powdery dawn and the white steam from the drainage-pump would turn pink as it rose into the sky. No one shivered now. Warm air wafted in from across the distant plain, while way up in the sky the larks would sing. Later, at three o’clock, he would be blinded by the dazzling hot sun, which seemed to have set the horizon ablaze and turned the grimy, coal-stained brickwork red. By June the corn was already high, a bluish green against the blacker green of the beet. It was like a boundless sea that seemed to swell and stretch with every day that passed, rippling in the faintest breeze, and in the evening it surprised him sometimes as if he could distinguish the new growth it had achieved even since morning. Along the canal the poplars sprouted leaves like plumes. Weeds overran the spoil-heap, and flowers carpeted the meadows. As he toiled away beneath the earth, groaning with effort and exhaustion, here were the seeds of life germinating and springing up out of the soil.
These days, whenever Étienne went for a stroll in the evening, it was no longer behind the spoil-heap that he came upon young couples. Now he would follow their tracks through the fields, and he could tell where the lovebirds were nesting from the movement of the ripening ears of corn or the tall red poppies. Zacharie and Philomène went back there out of habit, like an old married couple; La Brûlé, in her endless chasing after Lydie, was constantly running her to ground there with Jeanlin, the pair of them so deeply dug in that she had practically to step on them before they would take flight; and as for La Mouquette, she seemed to have lairs all over the place. It was impossible to cross a field without seeing her head ducking down and then just her legs sticking up as she lay pinned to the ground. As far as Étienne was concerned, they could all do as they pleased, except on the evenings when he came across Catherine and Chaval. Twice he saw them drop down in the middle of a field when they spotted him coming, and not a stalk moved afterwards. On another occasion, when he was walking along a narrow path, he saw Catherine’s crystal-clear eyes appear just above the corn and then sink from view. After that the whole vast plain seemed much too small a place, and he preferred to spend his evenings at Rasseneur’s bar, the Advantage.
‘A beer, please, Madame Rasseneur…No, I shan’t be going out this evening. I’m exhausted.’
And then he would turn towards a comrade who was sitting in his usual place at the far table, his head resting against the wall.
‘How about you, Souvarine?’
‘No, nothing, thanks.’
Étienne had got to know Souvarine by virtue of living there in close proximity with him. He worked as a mechanic at Le Voreux, and he rented the furnished room next to his in the attic. He must have been thirty or so, slim, blond, with delicate features framed by thick hair and a light beard. His white, pointed teeth, his small mouth and thin nose, and his rosy complexion all gave him the appearance of a determinedly sweet girl, while the steely glint in his eye gave periodic glimpses of a more savage side. His room, which was otherwise like that of any impoverished workman, contained just a single chest full of books and papers. He was Russian, but he never talked about himself and was content to let various tales circulate on his account. The miners, being deeply suspicious of foreigners and sensing from the sight of his small, bourgeois hands that he belonged to a different class, had originally imagined some story about his being a murderer on the run. But he had then behaved in such a friendly way with them, not at all proud and distributing every coin in his pocket among the village children, that they now accepted him, reassured by the tag of ‘political refugee’ that was bandied about, a rather vague term, which they interpreted as a kind of excuse, even for crime, and which made him seem like their comrade in adversity.
During the first few weeks Étienne had found him fiercely reserved, and so it was only later that he heard the full story. Souvarine was the youngest child of a noble family in the province of Tula. While studying medicine in St Petersburg, he had been swept up in the great wave of socialist fervour just like every other young person in Russia and decided to learn a manual skill instead. Thus he became a mechanic, so that he could mix with the common people and get to know them and help them as one of their own. And this was how he now earned his living, having fled after a failed assassination attempt on the Tsar:1 for a month he had lived in a greengrocer’s cellar while he dug a tunnel under the street and primed his bombs at constant risk of blowing the house up and himself with it. Disowned by his family, penniless, and blacklisted as a
foreigner in French workshops where he was suspected of being a spy, he had been dying of hunger when the Montsou Mining Company had eventually taken him on during a labour shortage. For a year now he had shown himself to be a good worker, sober, quiet, doing the day shift one week and the night shift the next, and always so reliable that the bosses cited him as a model.
‘Aren’t you ever thirsty?’ asked Étienne with a laugh.
And he replied in his gentle voice, with barely the trace of an accent:
‘I only drink at mealtimes.’
Étienne also used to tease him on the subject of girls; he could swear he’d seen him in the cornfields one day with a putter over by the First Estate. But Souvarine would simply shrug his shoulders with calm indifference. A putter? What would he be doing with one of them? As far as he was concerned, women were workmates, comrades, assuming they showed the same courage and sense of solidarity as men. And anyway, why risk developing a soft spot which might one day prove to be a weakness? No girls, no friends: he wanted no ties. He was free, free of his own flesh and blood, and free of everyone else’s.
Each evening towards nine, when the bar emptied, Étienne would remain there talking with Souvarine. He would sip his beer slowly while the mechanic chain-smoked, a habit which had eventually turned his slender fingers a ruddy brown. His eyes had the blank expression of a mystic, and they would follow the smoke upwards as he pursued his dream. He used to search restlessly with his left hand for something to occupy it and often ended up by installing on his knee a large female rabbit that enjoyed the run of the house and was always pregnant. This pet rabbit, whom he had named Poland,2 now adored him: she would come and sniff his trousers, stand on her hind legs and then scratch him until he picked her up, as though she were a small child. As she snuggled down in his lap with her ears flattened along her back, she would close her eyes; and he would stroke her automatically, tirelessly running his hand through the grey silk of her fur and evidently soothed by this warm, living softness.
‘Incidentally,’ Étienne said one evening, ‘I’ve had a letter from Pluchart.’
They were alone except for Rasseneur. The last customer had returned to the village, where it was time for bed.
‘Ah, Pluchart!’ exclaimed Rasseneur, next to the table where his two lodgers were sitting. ‘What’s he doing now?’
For the previous two months Étienne had been in regular correspondence with Pluchart, the mechanic he’d known in Lille. He had thought he would write and tell him about finding a job in Montsou, and Pluchart was now indoctrinating him, realizing how useful Étienne could be for spreading propaganda among the miners.
‘He’s doing fine, the Association’s going very well. People are joining all over the place, it seems.’
‘What do you think about this organization of theirs?’ Rasseneur asked Souvarine.
Souvarine, who was gently scratching Poland’s head, blew out a plume of smoke and murmured gently:
‘More nonsense.’
But Étienne had the bit between his teeth. Fundamentally rebellious by nature and in the first flush of his ignorant illusions, he was immediately attracted by the idea of labour’s struggle against capital. They were talking about the International Association of Workers, the famous International that had just been founded in London.3 Wasn’t it just wonderful, a plan of action that would at last bring justice to all? No more national frontiers, the workers of the world uniting and rising up to ensure that they each received their due wage. And how simple and yet grand the organization was. At the lowest level you had the section, which represented the district; then you had the federation, which brought together all the sections in one province; then came the nation, and finally, above that, humanity itself, embodied in a General Council on which each nation was represented by a corresponding secretary. Before six months were up, they would have conquered the world and be laying down the law to the bosses if they tried to be difficult.
‘It’s all nonsense!’ Souvarine repeated. ‘That Karl Marx of yours is still at the stage where he thinks he can just let nature take its course. No politics, no conspiracies, isn’t that the way of it? Everything out in the open, and all with the sole aim of getting better wages…And as for his idea of gradual evolution, don’t make me laugh! No. Put every town and city to the torch, mow people down, raze everything to the ground, and when there’s absolutely nothing left of this rotten, stinking world, then maybe, just maybe, a better one will grow up in its place.’
Étienne started laughing. He didn’t always understand what his comrade said, and this theory about destroying everything seemed something of a pose. As for Rasseneur, who was even more pragmatically minded and preferred the sensible approach of the man with a position in life, he didn’t even bother to be irritated. But he did want to be quite clear about the matter.
‘So, then. Are you going to try and start a section here in Montsou?’
This was what Pluchart wanted as secretary of the Federation of the Département du Nord, and he laid particular stress on the various ways the Association could help the miners if ever they were to come out on strike. Étienne did in fact think that a strike was imminent: the business over the timbering would turn out badly, and it only needed the Company to make one more demand and every single pit would be up in arms.
‘But the subscriptions are a problem, though,’ Rasseneur said in a measured tone. ‘Fifty centimes a year for the general fund and two francs for the section. It may not seem much, but I bet a lot of them will refuse to pay.’
‘Especially,’ Étienne added, ‘as we ought to start by setting up a miners’ provident fund, which could if necessary be used as a fighting fund…At any rate, it’s time we thought about these things. I’m game if the others are.’
There was a silence. The paraffin lamp was smoking away on the counter. Through the door, which was wide open, they could distinctly hear a stoker down at Le Voreux shovelling coal into one of the boilers that powered the drainage-pump.
‘And everything’s so expensive now!’ continued Mme Rasseneur, who had just come in and was listening with a sombre expression. The black dress she always wore made her look taller than she really was. ‘I tell you, those eggs I bought cost me twenty-two sous! Really, things can’t go on like this.’
This time the three men were in agreement. One after another they spoke in despairing tones, and theirs was a long tale of woe. The working man wouldn’t be able to survive; the Revolution had only made things worse for him; the bourgeois had been living off the fat of the land since 1789, greedily taking everything for themselves and leaving not so much as the scraps off their plates. How could anyone say that the workers had had their fair share of the extraordinary increase in wealth and living standards that had taken place over the previous hundred years? People had simply told them they were free and then washed their hands of them. Free? Yes, free to die of starvation. There was no shortage in that department. But you didn’t get bread on your table by voting for splendid fellows who then promptly went off and led the life of Riley and spared no more of a thought for the poor than they did for an old pair of boots. No, one way or another it was time to put a stop to things, whether they did it all nice and friendly by agreeing new laws between them, or else like savages, torching the place and fighting each other down to the last man. It would happen in their children’s time if not in their own, because there would have to be another revolution before the century was through. A workers’ revolution this time, a right bust-up that would sort society out from top to bottom and rebuild it on a just and proper basis.
‘Things can’t go on like this!’ Mme Rasseneur repeated insistently.
‘Quite right!’ the three of them cried. ‘Things can’t go on like this!’
Souvarine was now stroking Poland’s ears, and she wrinkled her nose with pleasure. Staring into space, he said softly and as though to himself:
‘But how can they put the wages up? Wage levels are fixed by the iron law of t
he irreducible minimum,4 the amount which is just sufficient for the workers to be able to eat stale bread and make babies…If the amount falls too low, the workers die and the demand for new men pushes it up again. If it goes up too high, the surplus supply of labour pushes it down again…The point of equilibrium is the empty stomach, life imprisonment in the house of hunger.’
Whenever he let go like this and touched on socialist theories in the way of an educated man, Étienne and Rasseneur became anxious. It unsettled them to hear these grim assertions, and they did not quite know how to respond.
‘Can’t you see!’ he went on in his usual calm way, looking at them now. ‘We’ve got to bring the whole lot down, or the hunger will simply start all over again. Yes, anarchy! All gone, a world washed clean by blood, purified by fire!…And then we’ll see.’
‘The gentleman’s quite right,’ declared Mme Rasseneur, who was always most polite in the expression of her extreme revolutionary views.
Étienne, in despair at his own ignorance, had had enough of this discussion. Getting to his feet, he said:
‘Time for bed. That’s all well and good, but I’ve still got to get up at three o’clock tomorrow morning.’