Complete Works of Emile Zola (1595 page)
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Authors: Émile Zola
England. — August 1898-May 1899.
LABOUR
Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
CONTENTS
CHAPTER IV
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
STROLLING without any definite object, Luc Froment, when he left Beauclair, had taken the road to Brias, which follows the glen, down which runs the little torrent called La Mionne. Its course runs between two promontories formed by the Monts Bleuses. And when he reached the Pit — the name given in that neighborhood to the steel and iron works of Qurignon — he noticed at one angle of the wooden bridge, crouching timidly against the parapet, two dark, miserable forms. At once his heart felt pity for them. One was a woman who seemed very young. She was very poorly clad, with her head half hidden in a small, ragged, woollen shawl; the other was a boy of about six, with hardly clothes to cover him. His face was pale, and he clung to the woman’s skirts. The eyes of both were fixed on the door of the works. They were waiting there, motionless, with the hopeless patience of despair.
Luc stopped to see what they were gazing at. It was almost six o’clock; daylight was nearly over — the close of a damp, miserable day in the middle of September. It was Saturday, and since Thursday the rain had never ceased. It was not raining now, but a sharp wind was driving before it streams of soot, and some ragged clouds, through which flickered dim rays of melancholy yellow light. The road, furrowed by rails, with its big paving-stones disjointed by the continual passing of loaded carts, was now a river of black mud; all the black coal-dust scattered from the coal-pits near Brias, where tumbrels were passing incessantly, had blackened the entire glen; coal-dust came down in black streaks on the leprous mass of buildings that formed the works; it seemed to blacken the very clouds of steam and to make them look like coal-smoke. There was a feeling in the very air as if some misfortune were impending over the place, as if the sooty twilight boded some disaster; some persons might have thought it announced the end of the world.
As Luc passed within a few yards of the young woman and the child, he heard the boy say, with the precocious air of a little man:
“Listen, big sister; don’t you think I had better speak to him first? That might make him less angry.”
But the woman answered:
“No, no, little brother; it is not anything for children to interfere with.”
And then they continued to wait, silently, with a look of restless resignation.
Luc looked at the Pit. He had been there as a matter of curiosity, and as a man who knew the business, the first time he had been in Beauclair, which had been the previous spring. And during the few hours he had now been in Beauclair, summoned by his friend Jordan, he had heard something of the frightful state of affairs in that part of the country: A terrible strike had lasted for two months, which had brought ruin on both parties, the works having suffered greatly from the stoppage of their machinery, while the workmen were nearly dead with hunger and with fury at finding themselves unable to coerce their employers. Only the Thursday before had work been resumed, after concessions made on both sides, the terms having been debated with great heat, and concessions from either party extorted with much difficulty. The work-people had gone back to work sullen and dissatisfied, like men who having been conquered, are indignant at their defeat, and cherish in their hearts a vivid remembrance of their sufferings and a bitter desire to avenge them.
Beneath clouds of blackness lay a dark mass of buildings and sheds around the Pit. The Pit was like a monster who, having taken up his abode in that place, had by degrees increased and multiplied habitations round him so as to form a little town. By the color of those buildings it was easy to trace the date of their erection. They were scattered over several acres. The works employed a thousand men. The blue slate roofs of the larger buildings and their many windows looked down on the far more humble buildings of an earlier date. Higher still might be seen from the road the giant domes of the cementation kilns, as well as the tempering-tower, about eighty feet in height, where great guns were suddenly plunged into a bath of petroleum. Taller still, there rose smoking chimneys, chimneys of all heights and sizes — a forest of chimneys — which mingled their own soot with that of the sooty clouds, while little exhaust-pipes shot out from time to time white plumes of steam — the breath of their nostrils. Steam seemed, indeed, to be the monster’s respiration. The dust and steam continually exhaling from him as he worked seemed as if he were sibilating with his labor. Then there was the pulsation that took place in his interior, shocks and groans occasioned by his efforts, the vibration of his machinery, the distinct cadence of the shingling-hammers, the heavy, rhythmic blows of the great steam-hammer, that resounded like bells and made the very earth tremble. And nearer, close to the road, inside a little building where the first Qurignon had had his forge, could be heard the wild throbbing of two steam-hammers, beating like the pulse of the Colossus, whose furnaces again and again sent forth the flames that consumed the lives of men and women.
In the reddened mist of the closing day which hung over the Pit, not a single electric lamp had as yet been lighted in the yards. No light shone through the dusty window-panes. Only, out of one of the great workshops, a vivid jet of flame pierced through the darkness, proceeding from metal in a state of fusion. A master-puddler must have opened the door of his furnace. And nothing else, not so much as a spark, revealed the reign of fire in this place — fire which was all in all in this sad town darkened by men’s weary toil; fire which glowed everywhere within the place; fire subjugated, made useful and obedient, moulding iron as if it were soft wax, giving to man dominion over the earth as it has done since the days of the first Vulcans who mastered it.
But the clock in the little belfry, a wooden structure surmounting the building in which the manager and clerks conducted the business of the works, struck six. And again Luc heard the poor boy saying:
“Listen, big sister; now they will be coming.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” replied the young woman, “only keep quiet.” —
The little movement that she made to detain him caused the ragged woollen shawl round her head to be drawn a little from her face, and Luc was surprised to see the delicacy of her features. She could not have been more than twenty; her light hair was in disorder; she had a little, thin face, which he then thought almost ugly; her blue eyes were dimmed with weeping, and her mouth was colorless, with an expression of suffering. But what a beautiful, girlish form she had, under her old worn gown! and with what weak and trembling arms she pressed to her side the boy who was clinging to her skirts — no doubt her little brother; he was as fair as she was, with his hair ruffled like hers, but with a look that seemed stronger and more resolute. Luc felt his pity for them increase, while they, on their part, sad and distrustful, had been growing uneasy at the observation of the gentleman standing there and looking at them so persistently. The woman especially seemed embarrassed by his gaze. He was a young man of twenty-five, tall and handsome, with square shoulders and powerful hands; his face was full of health and happiness, and above its firm features was a brow straight but prominent, the forehead that belonged to the family of Froment. The girl had several times lowered her blue eyes under the glance of his brown ones, that looked her full in the face. But at last she, in her turn, ventured to steal a glance at him, and then, perceiving that he smiled kindly, she drew back and was again absorbed in her own unhappiness.
There was a ringing of bells, a stir in the Pit, and the day gang began to come out, to be replaced by that of night, for the devouring activity of the monster was never to be suspended; it flamed and forged night and day. The workmen, however, did not come out rapidly. The greater part of them had asked for an advance upon their wages, although work had only recommenced on Thursday; but great was the destitution of their families after two months of the terrible strike. They came out at last in little groups, or one by one, with downcast looks, sadly and hurriedly, with their hands in their pockets, fingering the few five-franc pieces, so hardly earned, which were to give bread to their wives and little ones. Then they disappeared along the dark road.
“Here he comes, sister,” whispered the child. “You can see him now. He is with Bourron.”
“Yes, yes, but hold your tongue.”
Two workmen had just come out — two puddlers. And the first one, walking with Bourron, and with his cloth jacket flung over his shoulder, was a fellow about twenty-six years of age, with red hair and a red beard, rather short, but very muscular, with a snub nose, a prominent forehead, stem jaws, and high cheek-bones; but he had a pleasant laugh, which made him a fellow who makes conquests among women. While Bourron, five years older, buttoned up in his old jacket of green cotton velvet, was a thin, dried-up fellow, whose face was like that of a horse, with long cheeks, short chin, and squinting eyes; evidently he was a man of quiet temper, easy to live with, and always under the influence of some comrade.
At the first glance, when he saw the sad forms of the woman and child on the other side of the road in an angle of the bridge, he gave a shove with his elbow to his companion.
“See, Ragu. There’s Josine and Nanet. Look out, if you don’t wish they should bother you.”
Ragu, in a rage, clinched his fists.
“Devil take the girl! I’ve had enough of her. I’ve turned her out-of-doors. Now if she tries to get hold of me again, you’ll see what I’ll do to her.”
He seemed to be rather drunk, as he usually was at any time when he exceeded his three quarts of wine a day, which he said were absolutely essential to prevent the heat of the furnace from drying up his skin. And in this half-tipsy condition he was quite disposed to boast to a comrade, with what cruelty he could treat a girl whom he no longer loved.
“You’ll see. I’ll drive her to the wall. I’m done with her!”
Josine, with Nanet clinging to her skirts, had timidly made a few steps towards him. But she stopped when she saw two other workmen come up to Ragu and Bourron. These men belonged to the night shift, and were coming from Beauclair. The elder, Fauchard, a fellow about thirty, though he looked forty, was a man who removed the crucibles from the furnaces. He was a wreck already by reason of this work; his face looked as if it had been boiled, his eyes seemed to have been burned out of his head, his body was cooked and knotted up by the heat of the crucible-furnaces from which he extracted the melted metal. The other one, Fortuné, his brother-in-law, was a boy of sixteen, though he looked barely twelve; his body was lean, his face thin, his hair discolored; it seemed as if he had never grown since he had taken to work, and as if he were nothing now but a mere human machine, sitting all day by a lever which set a shingling-hammer in operation, in the midst of the smoke which blinded and the noise which deafened him.
Fauchard had an old black wicker basket on his arm, and he stopped to ask the two others in his hoarse voice:
“Did you get through?”
He meant, had they been to the desk to get their pay, and if they had got an advance? And when Ragu, by way of answer, clapped his hand upon his pocket, where some five-franc pieces clinked together, he gave a gesture of despair.
“Good Heaven! thunder and lightning! now I shall have an empty stomach till to-morrow morning, and tonight I shall perish with thirst unless my wife before long performs the miracle of bringing me my ration.”
His ration meant four quarts of wine a working-day, or night, and he said that that was but just enough to limber up his body, so completely did the furnace dry up all the blood and water that was in him. He gave a mournful glance at his basket, in which was rolling about only one bit of bread. When he could not get his four quarts a day it was to him the end of everything — the long, black hours of suffering in the stifling labors of the furnace became intolerable.
“Bah!” said Bourron, reassuringly, “your wife will not fail you. There is not her equal for contriving to get credit in Beauclair.”
Then all the four, stopping short in the thick mud of the road, became suddenly silent, and all bowed to some one as he drew near them. Luc saw coming along the road, seated in a little wheeled chair, which a servant was pushing, an old gentleman with a broad face, large, regular features, and long, white hair. He recognized Jérôme Qurignon — Monsieur Jérôme, as everybody in that part of the country called him — the son of Blaise Qurignon, once a laborer in the steel-works, the man who had founded the Pit Very old now, and partly paralyzed, he had himself wheeled about thus in all kinds of weather, never speaking a word. This evening, as he was passing by the works on his way to Guerdache, a country-place in the neighborhood where his daughter lived, he made a sign to his servant to go slowly, and with his eyes, still sharp and observant, he gazed for some time at his monster at work, at the day shift coming out, at the night shift going in, under the heavy mist that was making the sky livid, darkened as it was already by passing clouds. Then he looked at the manager’s house, a square building standing in a garden, which he himself had had put up forty years before, when he had reigned there as a king and as a conqueror, and had amassed millions.