Complete Works of Emile Zola (1601 page)

Bonnaire, who thus met with obstacles to his ideas of justice and of liberty, naturally found himself at the head of the dissatisfied party. It was he who, with a few comrades, went to see Delaveau to make known their demands. He spoke very frankly to him, put him out of temper, and they failed to obtain the increase of salary that they had requested. Delaveau did not believe in the possibility of a general strike in his works, for workers in metal are not easily aroused to action; there had not been a strike in the Pit for many years, while they were common among the workers in the coal-mines of Brias. And when this general strike took place, contrary to his expectations, and, one morning, only two hundred men out of one thousand came to work, and he had to close the works, he became so very angry that it was no longer possible to make any terms with him. He began by discharging Bonnaire and all the members of the union when their delegates ventured again to come and speak with him. He would be master in his own house, he said; the quarrel was between his workmen and himself, and he intended to settle it with his men without the intervention of any league or union. Bonnaire went back again to see him, accompanied by only three comrades. But all they got was a remonstrance, statements and calculations going to prove that the manager would compromise the prosperity of the Pit if he increased their wages. Money had been furnished him, an establishment had been given him to look after, and his first duty was to see that the works prospered and that the capital brought in the interest that was expected of it. Of course, he would very much wish to be kind and considerate; but he looked upon himself as a perfectly honest man, and therefore it was only right that he should fulfil his engagements, and so manage the business that it should bring in the most money possible. The rest was all a dream, a vain hope, a future utopia, something very dangerous. And it was after such talks that the disastrous strike took place, and lasted two months, to the injury of the wage-earners as well as to their employers, aggravating the poverty of the workmen, while the machinery was becoming rusted and greatly injured. Then the strike ended by some mutual concessions. Manager and workmen agreed on a new scale of prices. But, a week later, Delaveau refused to take back certain men whom he called ringleaders, among whom was Bonnaire. He was much embittered against this man, although he knew him to be one of his best workmen, sober and skilful. At last, however, he yielded, and took him back with the others, though he declared that this was forcing his hand, that he was made to do what was contrary to his conscience, but that he did it for the sake of peace.

From that day forth Bonnaire felt himself on the blacklist of the manager. At first he would not accept a concession so offered; he declined to return to work with the others. But his fellow-workers, who were much attached to him, declared that if he would not go back they would still stay on strike; so he gave in, that he might not be the cause of a new trouble. His fellow-workmen had suffered enough, he thought, and his resolution was taken; he would offer himself as a sacrifice — the only sacrifice — provided no one else bore the penalty of an only halfwon victory. That was why he went back to work on Thursday, but with the resolution that he would quit on Sunday, feeling that his stay in the Pit was no longer possible. He told no one what he intended; he had only informed the manager on Saturday morning that he should quit that evening, and the reason he stayed in the Pit that night was because there was a piece of work begun that he wished to see finished. He wanted to leave his work honorably.

Luc gave his name to the
concierge,
and asked if he could speak at once with Bonnaire, the master-puddler. The
concierge,
with a gesture, signed to him to go into that part of the works where the puddlers were and those who worked at the rolling-mill, at the end of the second courtyard to the left. These yards, deluged by recent rains, were wretched places, with their paving-stones displaced, and their entanglement of rails, along which a junction train was passing from the works to the station at Beauclair. Under the moonlike rays of the electric lights, through the shadows thrown by the sheds, the tower for tempering newly forged cannon, the cementation kilns, and all kinds of other conical constructions devoted to this barbarous worship of the god of gain, a little locomotive was slowly moving, uttering shrill whistles, that it might not run over any one. But ever since Friday evening the shingling-hammers had been deafening. These two hammers, located in a kind of cellar, whence they thrust out their heads like those of some fierce, wild beasts from their dens, had gone on with their rhythmic beat, had cut the sheets of metal into lengths, and had drawn it out into bars, with the terrible strength of their iron teeth. The workmen who were on the spot, who run the metal from the furnaces, were silent, speaking by gesture, not by words, in this continual throbbing of everything around them.

Luc, after having skirted a long building, where other hammers were at work, turned to the left through the second court-yard, which was littered with rejected pieces of metal, lying in the mud until they should be put back into the smelting-furnace. Men were loading a car with a great piece of machinery, something to be used by a torpedo-boat destroyer, which had been finished that very morning, and which the little locomotive was to carry away. And as it steamed up whistling, Luc had to dodge it, and by following a path that seemed to lead between the rails and the smelting-furnaces, he found himself at last in a building where there were many furnaces, many puddlers, and many men to run off the molten metal.

This building, one of the largest in the place, was never silent; by day it had a fearful hum of working machinery. But at this time of the night the machinery was silent. More than half the great place was in utter darkness; and, out of ten puddling furnaces, four only were lighted. These were provided with two hammers of less power.

Here and there feeble gas-jets wavered in the wind, the light of which was just enough to show great shadows in the place, and, overhead, immense smoke-stained beams that sustained the roof could be indistinctly made out. A noise of splashing water could be heard in the darkness; the earth floor, with cracks and lumps in it, was in some places a sodden mass of fetid mud, in others it was all coal-dust, and everywhere it was covered with rubbish. The whole place was an example of the filth and disorder induced by grinding labor, labor without care, without mirth — labor hated and execrated by those engaged in it, carried on in a den full of smoke, black smuts flying about in the air, in a place filthy and dilapidated.

In some little sheds made of rough planks the outdoor clothes of the workmen were hung up on nails, and with them were thick cloth jackets and leathern aprons. This miserable, dark place was never lighted unless a master-puddler opened the door of his furnace and sent forth a blinding rush of flame, which illumined the whole dark building for a moment like a ray of light from some planet in the heavens.

When Luc presented himself, Bonnaire was just finishing puddling two hundred kilogrammes of the molten iron which furnace and labor were to convert into steel. The whole operation took four hours, and the hardest work was the puddling, after the first hours of waiting. Taking in both hands a paddle that weighed fifty pounds, the master-puddler, in the roar around him and the blazing heat, went on for twenty minutes stirring the incandescent mass upon the bottom of the furnace. Then, by means of a rabble, he loosened the bottom of it, and kneaded the huge sunlike ball, which he alone, with eyes inured to the flame, could look upon, and the condition of which he knew according to the color. When he withdrew the rabble, it was red-hot and emitted sparks.

Then Bonnaire, with a gesture, gave orders to his fireman to urge the fire, while another workman, an assistant puddler, took up another paddle to do the same thing in his turn
— pour faire un crochet,
to use the term employed in the yards.

“Are you quite well, Monsieur Bonnaire?” asked Luc, who now drew near him.

Bonnaire, somewhat surprised, replied in the affirmative by a nod of his head. Dressed only in his shirt and a simple jacket, he looked very handsome; his neck was white, his face had grown pink partly from his efforts to master the great ball of iron, and partly from the scorching necessitated by the work. He was about thirty-five; he was a fair-skinned colossus. His hair was cut short; his face was broad, calm, and massive; while his large, firm mouth and his great quiet eyes indicated uprightness and kindliness.

“I do not know if you remember me, monsieur,” went on Luc.
“
I saw you here last summer, and had a talk with you.”

“Oh, perfectly,” replied the master-puddler. “You are a friend of Monsieur Jordan.”

But when the young man, somewhat embarrassed, had told him the reason of his visit, whom he had met, what he had seen, and how he had found the wretched Josine in the street, and had pointed out the kindness that probably only he (Bonnaire) had the power to do for her, the master-puddler became silent, and seemed in his turn embarrassed. Both men held their peace. There was a pause, broken only by the quick blows of the shingling-hammer, which did duty for two furnaces set back to back. Then, when his voice could again make itself heard, Bonnaire said, simply:

“All right. I will do what I can.... As soon as I have finished here — in three-quarters of an hour — I will go with you.”

Luc, although it was nearly eleven o’clock, resolved to wait, and he occupied himself by examining a shearing-machine which stood in a dark corner, cutting steel into bars as it came from the puddling-furnace, with as quiet ease as if it were cutting butter. Every time its jaws closed a piece of steel dropped onto a mass beneath it, which a wheelbarrow was to remove to the charging-room in another part of the building. There it was formed into charges of thirty kilogrammes, which were carried to the crucible - room. And in order to occupy himself while he waited, Luc went into this room, which was as dirty, as disorderly, as dark, and as dilapidated as the other. Here, on a level with the uneven floor, encumbered with rubbish, were six batteries of furnaces, each divided into three compartments. These long, narrow, glowing pits, so to speak, the brick masonry of which occupied the entire basement, were heated by a mixture of air and ignited gas, which the master-founder regulated himself by means of a damper. And in the clay floor of this dark room there were six openings into the flaming hell below, into the volcano in perpetual activity, fed by subterranean fires. Covers made of bricks set into an iron frame were laid across the furnaces; but, since these covers did not fit closely, an intense rose-colored light came forth from the intervals, as if there were so many risings of stars. Great rays of light seemed to dart out of the earth, which spouted upward to the dusty windows in the roof. Whenever a workman had need to remove any of the covers it seemed as if a whole planet burst forth in spite of obstacles, and the entire room was lighted up as the earth is at sunrise.

At the moment Luc entered the place he could see the whole operation. The workmen were putting crucibles into the furnace. He saw them lower fire-clay pots, which had first been made red-hot, into the furnace; then through a hopper they emptied in the mixture that was in the little boxes, each box holding thirty kilogrammes, just what was needed for each crucible. In three or four hours the fusion would be complete. Then would come the work of taking the crucibles out of the fire and emptying them, the most murderous work of all. And as he walked up to another furnace, where the men who tended it, armed with long iron rods, had just found the fusion to be complete, he recognized Fauchard in the man whose business it was to draw out the crucibles. He was pallid and withered, with a face like leather; but he had preserved his legs and arms, which were those of a Hercules. He was physically deformed by his terrible work, which was always monotonous, and in which he had been employed for fourteen years; but he suffered more from the consciousness that he was losing his intelligence, that he had become a mere machine, doing eternally the same thing — that he was a veritable automaton — a human element struggling for supremacy with fire. It was not merely that he felt what he had physically lost — his bent back, the impaired action of his lower limbs, his eyes burned out of his head, their color grown pale from gazing into the flames — he was conscious that he had deteriorated intellectually, that his intelligence was trembling in the balance, and was now nearly extinct, trodden under the terrible hoof which turned him into a blind beast, crushing him under work that first had poisoned, and then would destroy him. There was but one thing he now craved, he had but one pleasure — that was drink — to drink his four quarts a day or at night — if at work — to drink that the furnace might not burn up his calcined skin like rotten bark, to drink that he might not fall down a heap of ashes, to drink that he might at least enjoy one happiness, and end his life in the blessed unconsciousness of perpetual drunkenness.

That very night Fauchard had apprehended that the fire might dry up what was left of his blood. But about eight o’clock he had had a happy surprise. His wife, Natalie, had brought him his four quarts of wine, got on credit from Caffiaux, and he had not expected her. She apologized for not having a little bit of meat to give him, telling him that Dacheux would not give her any more credit. She was always anxious, for she lived in discouragement; she did not see how their wants would be supplied upon the morrow. But he was too pleased to have his wine to be discouraged, and he sent her away with a promise that, like others, he would ask for an advance next day. His crust of bread had been enough food for him; he drank, and was happy. When the moment came for taking the crucibles out of the furnace, he drank a pint; he dipped his great cloth apron into the common basin and wrapped it closely round him. He put great wooden shoes upon his feet, covered his hands with stout leathern gloves, well wetted, took the long tongs in his hands, and then stood over the furnace with his right foot on the cover which had been removed, his whole body in the fearful blaze which rose as soon as the crater of the volcano was opened. He looked for a moment as if blazing like a torch. His wooden shoes were smoking; so were his apron and his gloves; all his flesh seemed as if it must melt in such a heat. But he, without haste, his eyes being accustomed to such flame, was searching for the crucible at the bottom of the fiery pit; leaning over a little way, the better to seize it with his long tongs, and then throwing himself suddenly back by three subtle, measured movements, he ran one of his hands along his tongs, the other joined it, and he pulled out the crucible by an easy turn of his arm, though crucible and iron rod together weighed one hundred and ten pounds; then he placed it on the ground, where it looked like a bit of the sun, a morsel of dazzling white heat, which a moment after became red. Then he began over again and drew out the crucibles one after another in the increasing heat of that mass of fire, with more exertion of skill than strength, going and coming among the fiery pits without ever burning himself, or even seeming to feel the intolerable blaze or the fierce brightness. The great forge was there, with its monstrous tools, its press with a power of two thousand tons, but all these were now quiet; even the smaller hammers were quiet, which in the dim light showed their dark, dumpy profiles, looking like barbarous gods. Here Luc found shells — shells that had that day been forged by the smallest of the steam-hammers, after coming out of the moulds in which they had been annealed. What also interested him greatly was an enormous naval cannon, nineteen feet in length, which was still warm, after having passed through the press where pieces of steel weighing 4400 pounds were pressed out like soft pastry; and the great cannon stood there chained, ready to be carried off and lifted by great cranes to the lathe-house, which was some way off beyond the hall of the Martin furnace and the building where steel was cast.