The trams were not running. They had heard two when the sun had barely risen, but these had been derailed and overturned Fétinne way. On the day before this radiant First of May, all blue and white like the Virgin, Monsieur Monnoyeur had chosen to fall ill, to wrap himself up in mufflers, and to curl up in his leather armchair.
‘What do we decide to do, Monsieur Mamelin?’
And Désiré had replied simply:
‘We open, of course.’
It was as much as he would do, when he was reading the paper in the evening, in his shirtsleeves, by the fireside, to tell Élise that he might not be coming home to dinner. The paper carried in big black disaster letters the words:
‘GENERAL STRIKE DECIDED ON.’
‘What’s going to happen, Désiré?’
‘Why should anything happen?’
He had gone off as usual, with a few extra sandwiches in case the police barriers prevented him from coming home at two o’clock, but he did not think they would.
People had laid in stocks of food. There was nobody in the streets. Godard, the butcher in the Place du Congrès, had left the door of his shop ajar, but only a few neighbours had slipped inside.
It was if everybody had the plague or was afraid of catching it. No postman. The unemptied dustbins had been left on the kerbs. No schoolboys in their hooded cloaks, not a single shout, not a single noise. Unless they were all dead, the inhabitants were somewhere or other, possibly lurking behind their curtains. Now and then a door opened a fraction of an inch, and through the gap you could sense that an eye was studying the dramatic emptiness of the street, somebody who was afraid of breathing the miasmas outside, the hallucinating miasmas of silence.
Yet about ten o’clock Léopold arrived, dragging one leg along, regardless of the fact that he was awakening the echoes of the Rue Pasteur. He looked up for a long time before ringing the bell, for he had a horror of using the bell, on account of the landlady who pretended she had heard only one ring instead of two and hurried to answer the door.
‘Good morning, my girl.’
He looked the same as the other times he had been. He sat down in his usual place in Désiré’s wicker armchair; Élise gave him a cup of strong coffee which she had brewed specially for him.
It was strange that he, who knew everything, gave the same answer as Désiré, who felt nothing, who would go to his office at the same time, by the same route, if the whole town were in flames.
‘What do you expect them to do?’
He never explained himself. He knew what he meant, uttered a few weighty, mysterious words of oracular wisdom, then, after a long silence, produced a disgraceful crackling noise from his old patched-up pipe.
‘Unless the others open fire.’
‘And what if they do?’
The oracle made no answer and plunged into his meditations which the silence of May-day failed to disturb.
Léopold had come. He had sat down. He had drunk his cup of coffee and he had gone off again.
‘Good-bye, my girl.’
Silence once more. The clatter of a spoon on a plate. The sound of footsteps, the familiar metronome footsteps, Désiré coming home at two o’clock as if nothing had happened, just as he had prophesied.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing.’
‘The strikers? The miners from Seraing?’
‘They are staging a march. They are quite calm.’
‘Dear God, Désiré!’
‘But I tell you everything’s quiet. People just get worried about nothing.’
He went off as he had come. The baby seized the opportunity to scream, to howl until he was blue in the face, to pierce the circles of silence with his shrieks.
It was five minutes past four, six minutes past four, by the alarm-clock ticking feverishly on the black mantelpiece, when the feeling of suffocation from which Élise had been suffering since the morning suddenly turned into panic. She could not stand another five minutes of it. She put on her outdoor clothes, not looking at her hat in the mirror, not shutting the window, not putting any coal on the fire. She picked the baby up as if she were saving him from a disaster and went downstairs.
She knew that the landlady, Madame Martin, was listening and was going to open the door. The pram was under the stairs. The door moved. The old woman looked at her tenant. What if she tried to stop Élise from going out? But no! She stared at her in terror, without saying a word, her mouth half open like a fish, looking as if she thought that Élise had gone mad, and then shut herself in again, turning the key in the lock.
Élise walked along, pushing the pram, taking the shortest way into the town, and getting excited, all by herself in the wilderness. She wanted to know what was happening, she had to know.
‘Excuse me …’
The astonished policeman looked at her inquiringly.
‘Is it still possible to cross the bridges?’
‘That depends where you’re going.’
She answered at random.
‘To L’Innovation.’
‘They’ll tell you further on.’
It wasn’t his sector. He didn’t know. It was all one to him. She went off again, pushing the pram along with her belly. She could see some people in the distance, at the Pont des Arches, but she still could not hear any noise.
‘Where are you going?’
She had been trying to slip between the gendarmes guarding the bridge.
‘To L’Inno …’
A sudden inspiration. She corrected herself.
‘Home. I live in the Rue Léopold, over Cession’s, the hat-shop…’
‘Carry on …’
She rushed triumphantly on to the deserted bridge, envied by the onlookers. At the other end, she came up against another barrier.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I live in the Rue Léopold, over Cession’s, the…’
‘Carry on if you can. You’ll see further on.’
She was winning points. She didn’t know where she was going, what she wanted. She went forward for the sake of going forward, because her instinct was impelling her, but at the corner of the Rue de la Cathédrale she met a wall of human backs and stammered in vain:
‘Excuse me, Monsieur … Excuse me … Excuse me …’
She pushed the pram against the legs of the people lining the street and they turned round angrily.
She had come as far as she could. The policemen and the gendarmes could not do any more for her, because she had reached the route of the strikers’ march. All the same, she made another attempt to slip through, stood on tip-toe, hung on, bent down, but could not see anything but heads filing past. Then, beneath the silence of the town, she heard the strangest of noises, composed of footsteps, nothing but footsteps, without a single fanfare, without a single shout, without a single voice, without a single murmur, the footsteps of one hundred and twenty thousand men, women and children who had been marching along in serried ranks since daybreak, past blind windows, with the same policemen at every crossroads, the same gendarmes with their arms at the order, who seemed to be hemming them into an ever-narrowing circle.
‘Madame, with your baby, you’d be well advised…’
But the man who spoke to her so politely was just a little noncommissioned officer whom she could talk round if she tried. Another came running up, a captain or some such rank, with sweat beading his forehead. He had caught sight of the pram.
‘Come on! Push them back! … Push the whole lot back!…’
Everybody suffered on her account. Because of her, the people who had managed to cross the Pont des Arches were forced to go back to the Outremeuse district where there was nothing to be seen.
Why did Élise suddenly feel anxious as she got nearer home? Was it because she had left the window open? Whatever the reason, she felt uneasy. She had to indulge in some complicated gymnastics to get the pram up the three steps outside the front door. On the stairs, the reason for her uneasiness became clear to her. There was
somebody in the flat. Somebody was walking up and down.
Bravely, just as she had borne down upon the town, she threw open the door, and it was in a voice which astonished herself that she murmured:
‘Désiré!’
It was such a shock to find Désiré in his shirtsleeves in the middle of the kitchen! As for him, he asked her, as simply as could be:
‘Where have you been?’
‘But what about you?’
She had already understood. The civic guard’s uniform …
‘Désiré! They’ve …’
‘The town crier has been along all the streets. All the civic guards have to report to the Place Ernest-de-Bavière at seven o’clock.’
‘But what for?’
‘They don’t know themselves. Pass me my belt, will you?’
‘Wait at least until I’ve made some coffee for your flask.’
He did not know how dramatic these little things were. For him, this was just a general strike, a May-day rather more agitated than most, but for her it was a man, her man, putting on his uniform, buckling his belt, and wiping the grease off his rifle. This amused Désiré.
‘It seems they’re going to issue us with cartridges.’
‘Take care of yourself, Désiré.’
If only Valérie had been there! She was immobilized too, over at L’Innovation, where, about three o’clock, the police had ordered them to lower the iron shutters.
What if Élise went to see Madame Pain, fifty yards down the Rue Pasteur? Alas, Madame Pain was always bemoaning her lot. She had something wrong with her liver and her womb. She was bound to be shaking with fright.
‘See you tonight or tomorrow morning. Don’t worry. Nothing can happen.’
Désiré’s moustache when he kissed her did not taste the same as other days.
‘Be careful.’
Careful of what? In the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse, he met some other civic guards, friends he had been to school with, and they sauntered along like boys on holiday.
‘What are they going to make us do?’
The march was still following the route which had been marked out for it, and the strikers were respecting their leaders’ instructions: they were keeping silent. What spoke for them was the flags, the trade unions’ pennons, bright red for the most part, and banners stretching from one pavement to the other, swaying about at the height of the first-storey windows.
They had come a long way, from Seraing, Ougrée, Tilleur, Ans, from the collieries, from the mining villages all round the town, from the factories which you usually glimpsed only from the train, dark and mysterious, with the bloody maws of the furnaces being fed by half-naked demons.
Some had started before daybreak. They were beginning to drag their feet. Their hobnailed boots were scraping along the paving-stones or the asphalt. The men seemed to be astonished by the sight of these districts where they had never been before and where fear had blinded windows and doors.
They were eight or ten abreast. Some of them were carrying a child on their shoulders. There were women stumbling along, clutching dark shawls with thick woollen fringes to their breasts.
The miners were wearing their boiled leather helmets and some people, behind their curtains, shuddered as they watched them pass by, their eyes brighter in their hard faces than those of the other men.
Élise started praying, without knowing exactly why. She felt an urge to kneel down in a corner of the kitchen and murmur:
‘Dear God, Blessed Virgin Mary, grant that …’
Grant that nothing may happen! And yet, she would have liked … No! She didn’t want anything to happen, she didn’t want a riot. It was more a physical need. Her nerves were raw. She would have liked to be over there. She found it unbearable being all alone in her everyday kitchen.
‘Grant that Désiré…’
She was lying to herself. She cried a little. That calmed her down. Then she got Roger’s bath ready.
What were they doing? Why was it that she still couldn’t hear anything?
There were horse-guards all the way round the huge Place Saint-Lambert. The iron shutters were down at the Grand Bazaar, Vaxelaire-Claes’s and L’Innovation, and, when night fell, the milky globes of the arc lamps did not light up. Darker still was the north side, the bulky Palace of the Prince Bishops with the massive pillars which looked as if they were destined to support the sky. Every now and then there was a whistle, a shouted order, a soldier riding across the empty terrace.
The strikers, or rather their leaders, had promised that the Place Saint-Lambert should be neutral ground. All the five or six ways into the square were guarded, including the alleys. The big Café du Phare, with its thirty billiard-tables, was closed. So was the big china-shop. Between these two buildings there was a dark, slender façade, some open windows, a balcony on which a silhouette was outlined now and then.
This was the Populaire, the official headquarters of the unions and the workers’ parties.
It was surprising, coming from the dead town, to see café waiters here serving bottles of beer, red and yellow soda-waters, and ham sandwiches. The floor was dusty grey with trails of moisture here and there, the walls brown. Little tables were being used as desks, men in cloth caps were checking lists, and on the first floor papers were piling up on the secretaries’ long table.
‘Ougrée-Marihaye?’
‘Two thousand two hundred.’
‘The Sclessin wire-mills?’
Somebody went to fetch the secretary in question, who had gone out on the balcony to have a look.
‘Eight hundred and fifty-two: the whole lot.’
‘Vieille-Montagne! Where’s the Vieille-Montagne?’
The march was not far away, moving past less than two hundred yards away as the crow flies, behind the big, shuttered shops; yet there was nothing to be heard, and now and then everybody listened anxiously to this silence; the leaders, standing near the window, talked of other things. They were all bearded men, Vandervelde who had come specially from Brussels, Demblon-the-Thunderer who had written some scholarly studies of Shakespeare and read Ovid in the original, Troclet-of-Liége, and finally a young man who was not a member of parliament yet, a young man of disquieting roughness: Flahaut.
‘Telephone!’
The ringing scarcely ever stopped. This time, it was not a report from the provinces.
‘It’s for the chief.’
‘Hullo! … Yes … What? … But no! I can assure you that orders have been given to that effect …’
The chief of police was speaking at the other end of the line. In the Town Hall offices, they were all gathered together as at the Populaire.
‘There are some rather alarming movements as if …’
Yet the two sides had come to an agreement. A march, well and good, but no singing, no band, above all no International. The workers were to provide relays of guards in the foundries and the factories.
‘Hullo! What’s that you say?’
A few yards from the telephone, you could hear the words:
‘… Civic guards …’
‘That’s a mistake … What? … Certainly not! … But I tell you there’s to be no meeting, no speeches, no …’
The chief looked across at Flahaut and the latter turned his head away.
‘Flahaut! It seems that your men …’
The miners from Seraing … They had apparently withdrawn from the march little by little, in small groups … There was talk of infiltration … Over at the Town Hall they were worried … The civic guard had been called out …
‘I haven’t given any orders,’ said Flahaut, but he was capable of lying.
The gas was lit. Outside, the air was turning misty. The sound of troop movements could be heard coming from the direction of the Rue Léopold. It was the civic guard, which had been mustered in the Place Ernest-de-Bavière and which was coming to take up its position in the Place Saint-Lambert.
As if in confirmation of the chief of police’s fe
ars, some shouts came from the other end of the square. There had been a sudden commotion on the corner of a little street. An orderly from the Populaire was sent across and came back within a few minutes.
‘It’s over already. A few miners who tried to force the barrier …’
And yet they could still feel something like a threat in the air. Where, for instance, had they come from, those men who were beginning to form a group on the terrace and who were looking across towards the windows of the Populaire?
It was too dark to make out their faces. They were strikers, that was certain. How had they managed to get there?
Just as the civic guards, who, for the first time, had been issued with cartridges, came into the square from the Rue Léopold, a chorus of shouts greeted them:
‘Down with the civic guard!’
One solitary shout:
‘Come over to our side!’
There were two hundred of them now, possibly more, who had entered the forbidden quadrilateral. A little group of officials arrived in its turn: the burgomaster wearing his sash, the chief of police, a few policemen.
Some whistles blew.
Nobody knew as yet what was happening on the other side of the barriers, in the streets where a little while ago the strikers had been marching quietly along. Everybody strained his ears. The officials had come close to the Populaire. Their eyes looked up at the balcony like a silent prayer.
There was still time to avert a clash.
No! It was too late. A whole section of the march had taken on a new life, as if an order had been given and passed on, and the direction of the march changed, the line extended, the men dispersed and formed up again in a different order, some policemen were pushed aside.
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