The Strike (Part Four)

At the director's house in Montsou, a luncheon had been arranged for that very Monday. M. Hennebeau, the Company's manager, was a cold, correct man of about fifty, who had risen by hard work and married a rich manufacturer's daughter. His marriage had soured long ago. Madame Hennebeau, beautiful still, bored by the provinces, treated him with indifference. He did not know — or would not let himself know — that she had taken her husband's own nephew, the young engineer Paul Négrel, as her lover. She was busy now trying to arrange a marriage between Négrel and Cécile Grégoire, which would make the young man rich and keep him close.

The Grégoires came with Cécile; Deneulin came too — a cousin of theirs, the owner of the small independent pit of Jean-Bart at Vandame. Deneulin had sold his own share in the Montsou Company years ago to sink everything into Jean-Bart, and he was half ruined, struggling with an old pit, two daughters, and the crisis. The table was laid with silver and flowers, the dishes came and went, and Hennebeau, between courses, was called away twice by messengers.

"The Voreux hasn't gone down," he said, returning. "Nor Mirou. Nor Madeleine. It's a strike."

M. Grégoire was not alarmed. The miners were good people really, he said; it would blow over in a week; they had always been led astray by a few hotheads. Deneulin was alarmed. If the Company's pits stopped, his men at Jean-Bart might follow, and he could not survive a strike. Hennebeau was calm. The Company was rich; it could wait. In fact the strike suited it, with stock piling up in the yards. The men would be back when hunger brought them.

While they were at coffee, the servant announced a delegation of miners.

There were ten of them, in their Sunday clothes, holding their caps, awkward on the carpets among the gilt and the mirrors: Maheu at their head, Étienne beside him, Levaque, Pierron, and others. They had chosen Maheu to speak because he was respected and had never been in trouble. Étienne had prepared him. At first Maheu stammered; then, as he went on, a kind of slow eloquence came out of him — the words of a man saying for the first time what his family had been thinking for a hundred years.

"We're not asking for much, sir. We're only asking to eat. We work in the dark all our lives, and we're hungry. With the new system we'll earn less. We want the old price. And we want them to stop fining us for the timbering when they won't give us time to do it."

Hennebeau listened politely. Then he answered that he had no power to change anything. He was only an employee. The decisions were taken by the Board in Paris. The crisis was real; the Company was suffering too; the miners did not understand economics. Above all, he had heard that they had joined the International, that agitators from outside were stirring them up, and the Company would never negotiate under threat.

"Who's the Company, then?" said Étienne suddenly. "Where is it? Can we go and talk to it?"

Hennebeau looked at him coldly. "You are the one called Lantier, I believe. You are not from here."

The delegation went out empty-handed. In the hall, Maheu said in a low voice, "We've been to see the god. And the god won't come out."

The strike settled in. The first days were almost a holiday. The men slept late, played bowls, sat in the cafés. The weather was fine and frosty. Then the provident fund ran out in a week. Maigrat stopped giving credit. The women stood in the doorways and calculated: one loaf of bread, two, then half of one; then soup made of nothing; then nothing at all.

Étienne was everywhere. He wrote to Pluchart, organised the collection of the few sous the other pits could send, held meetings in the back room of the Avantage until Rasseneur, frightened, quarrelled with him and closed it to him. After that they met at the Bon-Joyeux, where the Widow Désir lent them her ballroom for the love of a good fight.

Pluchart came to Montsou one Sunday in December, a man in a black coat with a hoarse voice from speaking at so many meetings. In the dance hall, in front of a crowd of miners, he spoke about the International — the great union of all the workers of all the world, one immense fraternity that would one day sweep away capital. When he asked them to join, they cheered and wrote their names, all of them, at a franc each, money they did not have. The police commissioner arrived with his men to break up the meeting; the Widow Désir stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and kept them talking until the miners had gone out by the back.

Rasseneur, who had spoken against the International, was booed. That night, for the first time, he hated Étienne.

The weeks went on. December was cruelly cold. In the Maheus' house there was no more coal — miners, who brought it up out of the earth, with no coal to burn — and they burned the chairs. The baby cried at the empty breast. Alzire, the little hunchback, grew transparent with hunger and cold and coughed in her corner. Bonnemort sat motionless by the dead stove, his eyes dull, spitting black into the ashes. Maheude went out begging again, but no one gave anything now; the shopkeepers in Montsou were afraid of being ruined, and the Grégoires sent soup that did not reach far.

Jeanlin, limping on his twisted legs, had found a way of surviving. With Bébert, the Levaques' boy, and little Lydie Pierron, who followed them like a slave, he went out marauding — stealing cabbages, apples, a rabbit once — and hid what he took in the abandoned galleries of Réquillart, where he had made himself a lair underground. He was a savage, sly little creature, all teeth and green eyes, and he shared nothing.

One night Étienne sat with Souvarine in the empty café. The Russian was stroking his rabbit, and for once he talked. He had loved a woman in Moscow, Annouchka, a comrade; they had dug a mine together under a railway to blow up the Tsar's train, and the wrong train had been destroyed. She had been caught and hanged, and he had stood in the crowd and watched her die.

"She was my wife," he said. "When she died, I knew I must have no woman, no friend, nothing that holds me. Nothing that can be used against me." He lit another cigarette. "Your strike is useless, Lantier. Your International is useless. Talk, talk. Nothing will change until everything is destroyed."

Étienne argued with him, but went home that night troubled, as though a cold wind had blown through him.

Then came news that Deneulin's men at Jean-Bart, at Vandame, were still working. Chaval was there, with Catherine; he had gone to Jean-Bart at the start of the strike and was earning while the others starved. The miners of Montsou were furious.

On a moonlit night in January, three thousand miners met in the forest of Vandame, in the clearing called the Plan-des-Dames, where trees had been felled. The cold was terrible; the moon was full, white over the snow and the cut trunks. They came from all the villages, along paths through the frozen woods, men and women and children, silent, and gathered in the clearing like an army waiting.

Étienne climbed onto a tree-stump. Below him the faces were white in the moonlight. He began to speak, and as he spoke he felt himself grow, felt the crowd lift him, felt his words go out and come back to him multiplied. He told them about the misery of their lives, about their fathers who had died in the mine and their children who would die there; about the Company that took everything; about a new world that would come, where the earth would belong to those who worked it. Justice was coming. The old society was rotten; it would fall. They had only to hold together.

The crowd roared. Women wept. Old Bonnemort, who had come with the others, got up on a stump in his turn and told them, in a cracked, wandering voice, about the mine in his youth — the explosions, the floods, the bodies — about his father killed, his grandfather killed, all of them killed. When he had finished there was a terrible silence. Then the shout went up again, from three thousand throats:

"Bread! Bread!"

They voted to continue the strike. And they voted to go to Jean-Bart the next morning and force Deneulin's men to come out.

Chaval was there in the clearing, eager, shouting louder than anyone, swearing that he would bring out Jean-Bart himself. Étienne looked at him with contempt. In the moonlight he saw Catherine, behind Chaval, looking at him — Étienne — with eyes that were wide and strange.

When the meeting broke up, the miners went off into the woods in groups, singing. Chaval went back to Vandame and told Deneulin everything.