Germinal (Part Seven)

By the end of February, the miners began to go back. Little by little, silently, ashamed, they filed past the overmen and took their lamps and went down. There was nothing else to do. They had lost.

Étienne decided to go down once more, at the Voreux, with them. He had nowhere else to go; Pluchart had written to him from Paris, and he would go to Paris in time, but first he wanted to show them that he was not afraid, that he would share their lot to the end. Catherine went down too; she had to earn. Chaval had gone back to work at the Voreux.

Souvarine had made up his mind. He would leave Montsou, but before he left he would do one thing.

The night before the miners returned, he went down alone into the shaft of the Voreux. He climbed down the ladders inside the shaft by the light of a small lamp, to the level where the lining — the timber tubbing that held back the great underground sea called the Torrent, a lake of water trapped between the rocks — was set into the walls. There, hanging over the void, he worked for hours with a brace and bit and a small saw, weakening the timbers, cutting the bolts, loosening the joints, working calmly, precisely, the way he did everything. Water began to seep through the wood. He climbed up again at dawn and went to stand on the road by the pit, waiting.

At four o'clock the men went down. Étienne went down. Catherine went down. Chaval went down. Toward eight o'clock there was a sound in the shaft like a great sigh, then a roar. The lining had given way. The Torrent was pouring into the mine.

Panic broke out underground. The miners ran toward the bottom of the shaft in the darkness, through galleries already filling with water. Above, the alarm bell rang without stopping. The cages brought up men, women, boys, soaked and screaming. Négrel went down himself in the cage, again and again, ice-cold, risking his life with each descent, until the shaft walls began to collapse and the cage could go down no more.

Then the earth itself began to move. Before the eyes of the crowd that had gathered — the families, the engineers, Hennebeau, the soldiers — the Voreux began to sink. The ground cracked; the buildings swayed; the screening hall slid into the earth; the engine-house tilted and went down; the great chimney toppled slowly and broke in two. Last of all, the engine itself, the great pumping machine, still panting, sank into the hole as though the earth were swallowing it, its huge arms raised to the sky, and disappeared. Then the canal broke its banks, and the water rushed into the crater. In the place where the Voreux had stood, there was only a lake.

The beast had devoured itself.

Souvarine watched it all from the road. When it was over he turned and walked away, without looking back, toward the unknown, toward the next place where he would set his fire.

Underground, in the dark, Étienne had seized Catherine's hand when the water came, and they had run. The galleries flooded behind them. They climbed, slipping, through old abandoned workings, upward, always upward, away from the water, until they came to a narrow passage high in the seam where the water had not yet reached. Chaval came up behind them, lost too.

Somewhere far below them, Bataille, the old white horse, had broken loose from the stables and galloped through the drowning galleries, mad with fear, crashing against the walls, looking for the daylight he had not seen in ten years, until the water caught him and he died with his head lifted toward an opening he could not reach.

The three of them stayed in the passage. They had a little bread, a lamp, a trickle of water from the rock. The water rose below them and then stopped. Hours passed; a day; two days. Chaval, who had food in his pocket, ate in front of them and gave Catherine a little, and taunted Étienne. He tried to put his hands on Catherine before Étienne's eyes. Étienne felt the old madness rise again, and this time he did not hold it back. He seized a slab of rock and struck Chaval on the head, once, twice, and Chaval fell dead into the water below.

Afterwards Étienne sat trembling. He had killed a man. It was what he had always feared; it was in his blood. But Catherine leaned against him in the dark and wept, and said she had always hated Chaval, that she had never loved him, only gone with him because she was afraid.

The days went on. The lamp went out. In the total darkness they lost track of time. They heard, far off, a faint knocking — the rescuers digging toward them from the old workings of Réquillart, tapping on the rock to signal. They answered, tapping back with a stone, until they had no strength left. Then the water rose again and brought back Chaval's body, which drifted against their feet in the dark, and they could not push it away.

Catherine grew weaker. She talked in a low voice about the sun, about the fields in spring, about her childhood. She told Étienne that she had loved him from the first day, when she had given him half her bread. He told her he had loved her too, always. They held each other in the dark. She died in his arms quietly, as though falling asleep, and he did not know for a long time that she was dead.

On the surface, the families waited at the rescue workings day after day. Maheude stood there with Estelle in her arms, and Lénore and Henri clinging to her skirts, and did not weep. The rescuers dug through rock toward the trapped miners. Zacharie, wild with grief for his sister, worked in the front line of the diggers, until he went too close to a pocket of firedamp with his lamp. The gas exploded and killed him.

In those days the Grégoires drove to the village with Cécile, bringing clothes and shoes for the Maheu children, out of pity for what had happened. While Maheude was at the pit, Cécile stood in the kitchen alone with old Bonnemort, who sat by the cold stove, mute and paralysed, his eyes empty. She came close to him, gentle and plump, rosy with good food, smiling. Something moved in the old man then — fifty years of hunger, a hundred years of Maheus killed in the mine, all the dull hatred of his race. His hands rose, and closed on the white throat of the girl whose family had lived on his family's labour since his grandfather's time, and he strangled her. When they found them, he was still sitting there, his hands frozen in the air.

On the fifteenth day, the rescuers broke through at last. They found the passage, and in it Chaval's swollen body, and Catherine dead, and Étienne alive, barely breathing, his hair turned white. Négrel carried him out himself. They brought him up into the light, and he did not know where he was.

Weeks passed before he could walk.

On a morning in April, Étienne left Montsou. He was going to Paris, where Pluchart had found work for him in the movement. He walked up to the village one last time to say goodbye, and found Maheude in the road, in her pit clothes, with her lamp. She had been taken on as a haulier. She was going down into the mine that had killed her husband, her son, her daughter. Somebody had to feed the children.

She did not reproach him. "It's nobody's fault," she said slowly. "Maybe one day. Maybe one day it'll be different." She held out her hand. "Go on. Be strong."

He took the road toward the station. It was early, and the sun was coming up over the plain. The air was soft. Everywhere the earth was waking: the wheat was springing green in the fields, the buds were swelling on the hedges, and the whole plain trembled with the stir of growing things. It was April — Germinal — the month of seeds.

As he walked, it seemed to him that under his feet, deep down, he could hear the miners hammering — the blows of their picks against the coal, faint and stubborn and countless, from all the pits of the plain. They were still there, underground, still working. And it seemed to him that the sound was the sound of something growing. In the dark furrows of the earth, a new army was sprouting, a black army of men, slowly ripening toward the harvest of times to come; and one day, soon, it would break through the soil and the earth would split open with its rising.