Complete Works of Emile Zola (1600 page)

“Have you hurt yourself?”

“Yes, monsieur, a machine for stitching women’s boots broke one of my fingers. It had to be amputated. It was all my own fault, the assistant manager said, but Monsieur Gourier made them give me fifty francs.”

She spoke in a somewhat low voice, very sweet, and, it seemed to him, with something of shame in it from time  to time.

“Then you worked at the shoe-factory of Monsieur Gourier, the mayor?”

“Yes, monsieur, I went into it when I was fifteen, and now I am eighteen. My mother worked there more than twenty years; but she is dead now. I am quite alone. I have nobody but my little brother, Nanet, who is six. My name is Josine.”

And she went on to tell him all her story, and Luc had only to put a few questions to learn the pitiful, too-common history of so many poor girls. A father who went off with another woman; a mother who remained with four children to support, and who had had hard work to feed them, though she had had the good-fortune to lose two of them; and when the mother died of overwork and anxiety, the daughter became a mother to the little boy who was left when she was only sixteen. In her turn she was killing herself with work, without always managing to make enough to buy bread sufficient for both of them. At last — it is almost always the sad story of such women — a seducer appeared — Ragu, handsome and manly, was a man who knew how to conquer the hearts of women — and on his arm, alas! she used to take walks every Sunday after the dance. He made so many promises, she thought she was to marry him; she thought that she would have a nice little home of her own, where she could bring up her little brother, together with the children that might come to them. Her only fault was that she yielded to him one evening in the woods behind Guerdache. She herself had hardly known to what she then consented. That was six months ago. She afterwards committed a second fault in going to live with Ragu, who after that ceased to speak to her of marriage. Then she had met with the accident at the shoe-factory. She could not go on with her work just at the very time of the strike, and this made Ragu so terrible, so cruel, that he used to beat her, saying that she was the cause of his poverty and suffering. And so things had gone on from bad to worse, until now he had flung her out on to the street, and would not even let her have the key, that she might go home and sleep with Nanet.

One thought troubled Luc “If you had had a child,” he said, “that might have attached him more to you, and in the end he might have married you.”

She gave an exclamation, and made a gesture of terror.

“A child! — his child!” she cried. “Oh no! that would have been the worst of all.... As he often used to say, ‘I’ll have no string tied to my paw.’ He would not have any child. He took care of that.... His idea is, that when two people take up with each other, they do so only so long as pleasure lasts, and then, when that is over, good-bye — good-night — and that’s the end.”

Again there was silence. They said no more. The certainty that she had never been a mother, that she never would bear children to that man, gave Luc, full as his heart was of sad pity, a curious feeling of pleasure — a sort of comfort, the reason for which he could not understand. Confused feelings seemed to stir within him, while into the darkness and the distance his eyes wandered. He saw the gorge of Brias as he had seen it that evening in the dusk; now it was all in darkness. The two Monts Bleuses rose up on either side, with their rocks and cliffs, and darkness deepened round them. Behind him or beside him, every now and then, he heard the noise of a train which slackened its speed, whistled, and stopped at a station. Below him, at his feet, he could see the Mionne. Its waters, of an unwholesome green, dashed up against the chains and wooden beams that held the bridge. Then, to his left, he saw the gorge opening out between the mountains and lost in the great plain of Roumagne, which black night and the tempest seemed to convert into a dark and shoreless sea beyond, the shadowy islet of Beauclair, which was still lighted — starred, as it were — by little gas-jets that shone like sparks. But his eyes kept turning constantly to the Pit, which he saw before him. It seemed to him the type of something savage, with its clouds of smoke, partially illumined by the electric lights in the yards. Through door openings, from time to time, could be seen the red throats of the furnaces, or blinding jets of fusing metal would start forth in vast red, terrible flames, the fires of a lesser hell, which, devouring and unquiet, burned in the bowels of the monster. The earth trembled all around. The rhythmic beat of the hammers never ceased, nor did the roar of the machinery, nor the powerful strokes of the great steam-hammers, sounding like a cannonade heard from afar.

And Luc, with his eyes filled with all this, and his heart sore with pity as he thought of the probable destiny of Josine, who was seated beside him on the bench, so forlorn and so forsaken, seemed to hear in these confused noises the destruction of labor — labor disorganized, dishonored, and accursed. His evening stroll had ended by his being brought face to face with the extreme misery of the poor young creature beside him, the disasters everywhere caused by the strike, the cruel selfishness of the tradespeople; all hearts and heads seemed poisoned with hate; alcohol seemed to have become a necessity for men, who wished to find forgetfulness; theft seemed to be made legitimate by hunger; society was going to pieces under the weight of its accumulated wrongs. And in his ears rang the voice of Lange, prophesying the final catastrophe which would wipe out this Beauclair, corrupting and corrupted. Especially he seemed to see before him pale girls wandering on the streets, the wretched creatures so common in industrial cities — the lowest class of prostitutes, brought down to that pass from having been the prettiest workwomen in the factories. Would Josine ever come to that? First seduced, then on the streets, then the victim of drunkards — making a rapid descent into the mire. He felt that she was gentle and submissive, one of those tender, loving creatures that so easily become the prey of the strong. And the thought of leaving her upon that bench, of not striving to save her from so horrible a destiny, excited him to such a pitch that it seemed to him that he should die if he did not stretch out a hand of brotherly kindness to help her.

“See here — you cannot sleep upon this bench, you and this child,” he said. “That man must take you back just for to-night. We will see about it afterwards.... Where do you live?”

“Near here, in old Beauclair, Rue des Trois Lunes.” Then she explained to him that Ragu lived in a house where he had three rooms. The house belonged to his sister, named Adèle. She lived there, too; everybody called her La Toupe, though no one seemed to know exactly why. Josine suspected that, if Ragu really had not the key about him, he might have given it to La Toupe, who was a terrible woman, and very hard on poor girls. But when Luc spoke of going quietly to this fury and asking her if she had the key, Josine shuddered.

“Oh no; don’t go to her. She hates me.... If you could fall in with her husband, now, who is a good man.... But I know he is at work to-night in the Pit. He is a master-puddler, and his name is Bonnaire.”

“Bonnaire?” repeated Luc, who thought he remembered the name. “Why, I saw him last spring, when I was here at Beauclair. I went to the Pit. I talked a long time with him, and he explained things to me. He was a very intelligent fellow, and he certainly seemed to me a worthy man.... It will all be easy now. I will go at once and talk over your case with him.”

Josine gave a cry expressive of ardent gratitude. She was trembling all over; her poor hands were clasped in an effort to express bodily her thankfulness.

“Oh, monsieur, how good you are! and how much I thank you!”

A red gleam Game from the Pit, which enabled Luc to see her as she sat there bareheaded, the ragged woollen shawl having fallen on her shoulders. She was not crying now; her blue eyes were bright with tenderness and her little mouth had recovered its youthful smile. Supple, slender, graceful, she had kept a look of childhood in her face; her expression was naturally open and gay. Her long, light hair, the color of ripe grain, had become unknotted at her neck, and made her look young, honest, and forsaken. And Luc, struck by the infinite charm there was about her, by degrees yielded to its influence, and felt an emotion of astonishment in seeing anything so womanly and lovely suddenly emerge out of the poverty-stricken creature he had first seen ill-clad, frightened, and in tears. She looked up at him with such adoration, she gave herself up to him so confidingly, feeling herself a poor creature whom he had helped, and who could not but love him. So good, so handsome he appeared to her, so like a god after her experience of the brutalities of Ragu, that she could have kissed his very footprints. She stood before him with clasped hands, the left one holding the right, which had been injured, its bandage still spotted with blood. And a tie, very sweet and very strong, was in those moments formed between them, a bond of infinite tenderness and of infinite affection.

“Nanet will go with you to the Pit. He knows every corner of it.”

“No, no. I know my way.... Don’t wake him; he will keep you warm. Wait quietly here till I come back, both of you.”

He left her seated on the bench, with the sleeping boy, in the dark night. And as he left her a bright light illuminated the cliffs of the Monts Bleuses on the right, and over the park of La Crêcherie, where Jordan’s house stood. Luc could see the dark outline of the blast-furnace built on the side of the mountain. Workmen were running off the molten metal, and all the rocks around Beauclair and the roofs of its houses were lighted up by it as if by a red aurora.

CHAPTER II

BONNAIRE, the master-puddler, one of the best work-men in the factory, had played a great part in the recent strike. Having read the Paris papers, with a just appreciation of what they contained, and with a heart moved by the injustice inflicted upon wage-earners, he was going through a course of revolutionary instruction, in which there were many omissions, to be sure, but which had made him a warm partisan of the system of co-operation. Besides, as he often said, with the good sense of a man both healthy and industrious, that dream was one which would some day be realized, but, in the mean time, all they had to do was to try and obtain as much justice as possible, that their fellow-workpeople might suffer less acutely.

For some time previous to the strike, it had seemed to him inevitable. Three years before the Pit had been nearly wrecked in the hands of Michel Qurignon, the son of Monsieur Jérôme; then his son-in-law, Boisgelin, an idle, flashy gentleman from Paris, who had married his daughter Suzanne, took it into his head to buy the iron and steel works, and by the advice of Delaveau, a certain poor cousin, he invested in the enterprise what remained of his fortune. Delaveau made a contract to make the works pay thirty per cent, on the capital invested; and for three years, being himself a good engineer and a man of great industry, he had kept his promise by means of first-rate organization and the closest supervision over the smallest details of the workshops, insisting on maintaining the very strictest discipline among his workmen. One of the causes of Michel Qurignon’s bad business was a disaster that befell the market for metals in France, when the manufacture of rails and other iron used in the construction of railroads ceased to pay, because of a discovery in the North and East of a chemical process which enabled manufacturers to utilize vast deposits of ores which up to then had been discarded as being too impure. The iron and steel works of Beauclair could no longer contend against the cheaper rates at which the Northern and Eastern factories sold their products. Ruin stared them in the face. Even Delaveau was convinced that he must make great changes; must give up the manufacture of rails and frame-work, which the North and East could furnish for twenty centimes (four cents) per kilogramme, and confine himself to smaller things which required more skill and care, or to shells mortars, and cannon. Prosperity came back to the Pit after this decision. The money that Boisgelin put into it brought him a considerable revenue. Only it had been necessary to put in new machinery, to engage more skilful workmen, men who gave better attention to their work, and therefore required to be better paid.

The ostensible cause of the strike was this increase of some men’s salaries. The workmen had been paid by the piece, so much the hundred kilogrammes, and Delaveau himself had admitted the necessity of a new scale of wages. But he wished to remain absolute master of the situation, and not to appear to give way to the demands of his workmen. He had made up his mind on certain things, and, being naturally arbitrary and obstinate, he resolved to take a firm stand as to what he deemed his rights, but at the same time to be just to his people, though he denounced a division of the profits as a dangerous dream. He told them that such utopias could not but result in some terrible catastrophe, and the quarrel between him and the little world of workers over whom he ruled was aggravated on the day when Bonnaire set on foot a syndicate for defence; for although Delaveau was not opposed to long-service pensions, life insurance, or insurance in case of sickness, nay, even a certain percentage upon the sales, for he recognized that the workman had the right to improve his condition, he was violently opposed to unions, to societies intended to uphold special interests, and stand ready for united action. Thus the strife began. Delaveau, with a very bad grace, adopted a revision of the scale of prices; he felt it was time for him to take up arms and to announce to the Pit that it was in a state of siege. Since he had assumed the mastership the workmen complained that they had no individual liberty. They were closely watched, as to their actions and their very thoughts, even when they were not in the works. Those who would consent to be humble and to flatter the manager — to be, possibly, spies upon the others — gained his favor, while those men who were proud and independent were treated as dangerous. And as the chief, who by instinct was the defender of things as they were, confessedly desired to employ no men who did not agree with him, the engineers, the firemen, and the superintendents became very particular in the matter of obedience, and what they called a good spirit among the men.