Bread! (Part Five)

At four in the morning Deneulin was already at Jean-Bart. He had not slept. He knew what was coming; Chaval had told him. He went down himself to check the shafts, had the engine-men at their posts, and at dawn sent a messenger to the gendarmes and another to the Prefect. Jean-Bart was all he had. He would not give it up without a fight.

Chaval had gone down with the others, and Catherine with him. He had changed his mind in the night: he would not be the one who led the miners; he would work, and earn, and let Étienne be the hero. Catherine pushed her tubs in silence, sick with fear.

By eight o'clock the strikers had come down from the plain — a thousand, two thousand of them — and filled the yard of Jean-Bart. Deneulin faced them alone on the steps of the office, with his whip, and told them to go home. They did not hear him. Some forced their way into the engine-house; others into the shaft-house. With hatchets they cut the cables of the cages. The cables fell, coiling and whipping down the shaft, and the cages crashed to the bottom. Deneulin looked at his ruined pit and turned grey. It would be weeks before Jean-Bart could work again. He went into his office and sat down with his head in his hands.

Down below, the miners heard the crash and understood. The only way up was by the ladders, seven hundred metres of them, one above the other, slippery with water, in the dark.

They climbed in single file, lamps hooked to their caps. Chaval went first, pushing past the others. Catherine climbed behind him, rung after rung, her arms aching, her legs going numb. Water poured on them. Below, the men shouted at them to hurry. She climbed and climbed. At times her head swam and she thought she would let go and fall back into the dark. She closed her eyes and went on. She did not know how long it lasted — an hour, two hours. When she came out at the top into the daylight, the strikers were waiting.

A great shout rose when they saw Chaval. "Traitor! Coward!" Hands seized him. Étienne stood in front of him, white with rage.

"You swore last night you'd bring them out. And you went down."

"Kill him!" shouted the women. Maheude was among them, her eyes blazing.

"No," said Étienne. "Let him come with us. He'll see what it's like."

They dragged Chaval with them, and Catherine followed, half fainting, because she could not leave him.

The column moved across the plain. It went from pit to pit, gathering numbers like a flood gathering water. At Gaston-Marie, another of Deneulin's pits, they stopped the pumps and drew the fires under the boilers. They made Chaval, who was thirsty and terrified, drink bucket after bucket of water from the boiler tank until he vomited, to the laughter of the crowd. At Mirou the old overman stood at the gate and said they would pass over his body; they did not dare, and turned away. At Madeleine and Crèvecœur and Feutry-Cantel, everything was stopped. Each pit they left dead behind them.

The column grew to three thousand, then more. The women marched at the front, with Maheude, with old Brûlé, Pierronne, Levaque, the Mouquette, carrying their babies, their hair loose. The children ran alongside, Jeanlin among them, limping, screaming with joy. The men came behind with crowbars, picks, axes. They had eaten nothing. Their faces were thin and fierce. And over and over, like the beating of a drum, they shouted the one word that made the earth shake:

"Bread! Bread! Bread!"

On the road near the Bas-de-Soie farm, a carriage had stopped. Madame Hennebeau, Négrel, Cécile Grégoire and the Deneulin girls had been out for a drive, and now, warned too late, they had had to take refuge in a barn. Through a crack in the boards they watched the mob go by.

It passed in front of them for a long time. The sun was going down, and the light was red; the faces in the crowd looked as if they were smeared with blood. Madame Hennebeau, who had never seen a miner close to, shrank back. The women went by first, with their gaunt faces and their open mouths; then the men, with their tools on their shoulders like weapons; then someone carried an axe on a pole, and the axe, standing out against the red sky, looked like the blade of a guillotine. They were singing the Marseillaise, but with hoarse, broken voices that made it terrible.

It seemed to the watchers that they were seeing the vision of what was to come — the red evening of revolution that would fall one day, inevitably, on the old world: the people loose in the roads, the blood, the fire, the great houses burning, the rich cut down, the land swept clean. They stood frozen, white, until the mob had gone.

The column came into Montsou at nightfall and gathered before the director's house. Hennebeau was inside. The gendarmes had been sent for but had not come; there were only a few servants. The crowd shouted for him, threw stones that broke the windows, screamed for bread.

He stood alone upstairs in the dark. A little earlier, going through the house, he had gone into his nephew's room — and found there, on the bed, something of his wife's. He knew then everything he had refused to know. Négrel, his nephew, whom he had brought here and treated as a son. His wife had not loved him in ten years; and she had taken the boy, in his own house, under his own roof.

Now, standing at the window, he looked down at the shouting crowd and felt only a bitter, crushing envy. They were hungry? He would give his fortune, his position, everything, to be one of them — to be a brute who ate and drank and slept with his wife and was faithful to her by instinct, with no knowledge, no refinement, no misery in his soul. They shouted for bread. Fools. Bread did not make men happy. He was not hungry, and he was the most wretched man in Montsou.

On the other side of the road, the strikers had turned on Maigrat's shop. The grocer who had refused them credit, who had weighed every loaf against their misery, was hated by every woman in the village. They broke down the shutters. Maigrat, terrified, climbed out of an upper window and tried to escape across the roof to the wall of the director's garden. Half the crowd watched him, holding their breath. He slipped on the tiles, scrabbled, fell. His skull struck the corner of a stone post and he lay dead at their feet.

For a moment there was silence. Then the women, mad with years of hunger and humiliation, fell on the body. They tore at it with their nails, crying out the debts and the insults of all those years, and old Brûlé, the worst of them, carried away on a stick a grisly trophy torn from it, and the women followed her in a dreadful procession. The men stood back, sobered and afraid.

At that moment Cécile Grégoire, who had been sent to Montsou to fetch her parents, drove up in her carriage. The crowd surrounded it. They dragged her out. Hands were at her throat; she screamed. Étienne pushed through and wrenched her free, and the Grégoires' coachman drove her away.

Then someone shouted, "The gendarmes!" Down the road came the clatter of hooves.

The crowd broke and scattered into the night. Catherine, who had been searching for Étienne, found him in the dark by a wall and pulled him into the shadow.

"Go," she said. "Go, they're looking for you. They'll arrest you."

He looked at her, startled. She had come to warn him. For a moment they stood close together in the dark. Then Chaval's voice called her, and she ran off. Étienne slipped away across the fields.