Complete Works of Emile Zola (1614 page)

“Oh, Martial! you have just returned from a journey, and you are tired; you will not go out now, at ten o’clock in the evening?”

Then he became very gentle, and embraced her.

“Be easy, little sister; do not torment yourself. You know very well that I never do more than I can. I assure you that I shall sleep better if my mind is at ease. The night is not cold, and I shall take my fur cloak.” She herself tied a great muffler around his neck, and accompanied him to the bottom of the outside steps in order to assure herself that the evening was really mild. It was in truth delicious; the fields, the trees, and the water seemed sunk in peaceful slumber under a clear, dark sky dotted with stars.

Monsieur Froment,” said Sœurette, “you know that I confide him to you. Do not let him remain out too late.” The two men returned to the rear of the house and ascended the narrow steps cut in the rock, which led them to a steep path, on the side of which stood the blast-furnace, half-way up the gigantic slope of the Monts Bleuses. This path, winding like a labyrinth among the pines and climbing plants, had an exquisite charm. At each turn of it could be seen the black mass of the blast-furnace standing out more and more clearly against the blue sky, with the strange outlines of its mechanical parts grouped around the central furnace.

Jordan ascended first, with light, quick steps, and as he struck the path he stopped before a mass of rock, where the tiny light of a little lamp was shining.

“Wait,” he said, “I am going to make sure that Morfain is not at home.”

“Where does he live?” asked Luc, in astonishment. “Here, in these old caves, out of which he has made a sort of dwelling, and he persists in living in them, with his son and daughter, in spite of all the offers that I have made him of a little house which is much more habitable.” The entire population of the gorge de Brias occupied these caves. Morfain himself remained there from choice, because he had been born there forty years previously, and finding the situation, which was almost beside the blastfurnace, very convenient for the work that was at once his life, his prison, and his empire. Moreover, he had, in course of time, introduced some comforts into his prehistoric dwelling, where he lived like a civilized cave-dweller; the two grottos were divided by a wooden wall, and a real door and glazed windows were placed at the natural openings. Inside there were three rooms — a bedroom where the father and son slept, another bedroom for the daughter, and a third chamber which served as sitting - room, dining - room, kitchen, and work - room. All three apartments were very neat, with stone walls and ceilings, and furnished with solid furniture, shaped with an axe.

The Morfains, as Jordan had said, had been master-founders in La Crêcherie from father to son. The grandfather had been concerned in establishing it, and now, after eighty years of uninterrupted authority, the grandson watched over the tappings, with a pride in his position as great as though it conferred a patent of nobility. His wife had died four years before, leaving a son of sixteen and a daughter of fourteen. The son had been put to work at the blast-furnace immediately afterwards, and the daughter took entire charge of the two men — cooked, swept, and made a good housekeeper. She was now eighteen years old, and the son twenty; the father contemplated the continuance of his race with a tranquil mind, looking forward to bequeathing the care of the blast-furnace to his son, as his own father had transmitted it to him.

“Ah, you are there, Morfain,” said Jordan, when he had pushed open the door, which was fastened only with a latch. “I have come back, and I wanted to have news of you.”

In this cave in the rock, which was lighted by a little smoky lamp, the father and son were seated at table, eating their supper before their evening occupations, while the daughter, standing behind them, attended to their wants. The silent room seemed to be completely filled by their enormous shadows, as they sat without speaking, according to their custom.

Morfain made answer in a heavy, slow voice:

“We have had a very bad time, Monsieur Jordan. But I have good hopes that now everything is going on quietly.”

He rose as he spoke, and so did his son. As Morfain stood there, between the boy and girl, they seemed like three giants, so tall that their heads almost touched the low ceiling, the stones of which were darkened by “smoke. One could almost have imagined that they were three of the inhabitants of a departed era, instead of ordinary working-people whose natures had been completely modified by centuries of labor.

Luc gazed at Morfain himself in astonishment. He was a colossus, resembling the Vulcans of ancient times, the conquerors of iron. He had an enormous head and a wide face, furrowed and reddened by the furnace flames. A heavy forehead, an aquiline nose, and burning eyes were placed between cheeks which seemed to have been devastated by lava. His mouth was swollen and twisted and his skin tanned to a tawny red. His hands were of the color and strength of two tongs of old steel. Luc then turned his eyes on the son, Petit-Da, whose name had been given him because, when he was little, he had been unable to pronounce certain words, and had once come very near putting his little fingers on a pig of iron which was not yet cooled. He was another colossus, almost as gigantic as his father, with the same square face, prominent nose, and flaming eyes, but he was less hardened, less reddened by exposure to the flames. He knew how to read, and this had given his features refinement and a more thoughtful expression. Luc then looked at the daughter, a blonde goddess, whose father always called her, tenderly, Ma Bleue, because of her large blue eyes — eyes of a blue so intense, so deep, so vivid, that one seemed to see nothing in her face but this unfathomable heaven of blue. She had the bearing of a divinity, with a magnificent and simple beauty; she was the most beautiful girl in the district, but at the same time the most self-contained and the least civilized. Her lack of civilization, however, did not prevent her reading and dreaming of things far off, such as her father had never seen, and which made her dissatisfied with repressed longing. Luc was greatly impressed by this group of heroic figures; he was conscious that centuries of labor had arrested in them the progress of humanity, yet they manifested that melancholy pride in their own continual toil which is characteristic of those who constitute what might be called the ancient nobility of the destroyer, labor.

Jordan answered with some anxiety:

“A very bad time, Morfain — how is that?”

“Yes, Monsieur Jordan; one of the
tuyères
became choked. For two days I was almost sure that we would have some disaster, and I have not been able to sleep because I was so distressed that such a thing should happen to me during your absence.... If you have time, perhaps it would be best to go and see the works. They are just going to tap the furnace.”

The two men finished their soup, standing, and swallowing it in great mouthfuls, while the daughter began to clear the table. They were not in the habit of speaking much to each other — a gesture, a look, was sufficient. Yet the father said to Ma Bleue, in his rough voice, which for the moment was softened by affection:

“You can put out the lights without waiting for us; we shall sleep down below.”

Morfain and Petit-Da accompanied Jordan, and as Luc turned to follow them he saw Ma Bleue standing at the threshold of the cave-dwelling, tall and stately, like a heroine of mediaeval romance, with her large azure eyes lost in dreams, gazing afar off into the clear night.

The dark outline of the blast-furnace soon rose up before them. It was of a very old-fashioned construction, low and massive, and not more than fifty feet high. Successive improvements in the shape of new parts had been added to it, until they had ended by forming a sort of little village, by which it was completely surrounded. The casting-pit, of recent construction, with a floor of fine sand, was of light and graceful construction, with iron trusses, and covered with tiles. To its left, under a glazed shed, was the blast-engine — that is to say, the steam-engine for blowing air — while on the right were two groups of lofty cylinders, where the gases of combustion were purified from dust, and those which were used to heat the air delivered by the blast-engine, in order that it might be hot when it entered the blast-furnace, to accelerate melting. There were also reservoirs of water, with a complete system of piping, which conducted a perpetual stream of cold water around the brick walls of the furnace, in order to cool them off, and thereby diminish the destruction occasioned by the excessive heat within. The monster itself, therefore, was almost obscured by its host of assistants — a pile of buildings, a collection of iron-plate reservoirs, and an entanglement of large metallic pipes, the extraordinary
ensemble
of which, especially at night, took on monstrous silhouettes of fantastic aspect. Above could be seen, cut in the very side of the rock, the tramway over which ran cars loaded with the ore or with fuel from the level ground to the mouth of the furnace. The shaft, beneath, erected its black bell, and afterwards, from the belly to the base of the boshes, there was a strong armor of metal that sustained the brick body and served as a support for the water-pipes and the four
tuyeres
. Farther down still there was nothing but the crucible where the tap-hole was stopped up with a plug of refractory clay. The whole thing was, as it were, a restless, gigantic animal, of terrifying shape, which devoured stones and yielded molten metal.

There was no noise, no light. This formidable digestion was carried on silently in the darkness. The only sound heard was a gentle pattering, caused by the drops of water that fell continually from the brick sides, while at some little distance the incessant snorting of the blast-engine. The sole light cast upon the scene came from three or four lanterns burning alone and solitary in the thick blackness of night, intensified by the shadows cast by the enormous buildings. All that could be distinguished was pale forms, those of the eight founders of the night shift, who were wandering about while awaiting the hour of tapping. Above, upon the platform of the furnace throat, it was impossible even to see the fillers, who were silently, and in obedience to signals from below, throwing the proper quantities of ore and coal into the furnace. In all this there was no outcry, no blaze, nothing but a dark, silent effort, intense and excessive in its character, by means of which the labor of humanity brought forth, as it has done in all ages, the evils of the future.

Luc by this time had rejoined Jordan, who had been much disturbed by the bad news which he had heard, and broke in upon his friend’s dream by pointing out to him with a gesture the whole mass of buildings.

“Look,” he said. “Am I not right to wish to get rid of all this, and to replace this gloomy, unwieldy monster by a system of electric furnaces, which would be so well adapted, so simple, so easy to manage? The casting of metals has really changed very little since the day when primitive man made a hole in the earth and melted ore in it by means of blazing tree-branches. The same childish and elementary method still holds its own; our modern blast-furnaces are nothing more than the prehistoric holes, raised on hollow columns and magnified according to increased requirements, and we continue to throw into them, pell-mell, both the metal that is to be melted and the fuel which is to accomplish it, and let them burn together. It is like the great body of some animal, supplied incessantly with nourishment in the form of coal and iron oxide, which digests these together in a fiery frenzy, and then restores the metal in a state of fusion at one place, while the gas, the dust, and the refuse of all kinds are disposed of at another. And observe that the entire operation of digestion is here represented in the gradual descent of the digested matters, and the final completion of the whole process; moreover, all practical improvements have had for their object the facilitation of this particular end. Thus, formerly, before the introduction of the blast-engine, fusion was slow and more imperfect; then they began to blow cold air; then it was evident that better results would be obtained if the air were hot. Finally the idea was adopted of making use of the blast-furnace itself to heat as air for its own consumption the gas which until then had been burned at the furnace-throat in an outburst of flames. This is why my original blast-furnace has become so complicated with extraneous machinery, such as the blast-engine, the reservoirs for purifying gas, and the cylinders to which the air is carried in order that it may be heated, to say nothing of all the systems of piping that surround it like the meshes of a net. But in spite of all that has been done for its improvement, it remains primitive in spite of its gigantic dimensions, and all that the improvements have accomplished is to make its more delicate function an occasion of continual crises. Ah, you could never imagine the illnesses to which this monster is subject! It is like a little, sickly child, which gives its family, just as this colossus does, mortal uneasiness in regard to its daily digestion. Two separate gangs, each consisting of six fillers above, eight founders at the base, with their respective masters, besides an engineer, are occupied day and night with the food supply of the monster and the results that it returns; and if the smelting is not wholly satisfactory, they are seized with fear of some derangement of its body. This particular one has now been burning five years without the fire within having ceased its labors for a single minute; and it will continue to burn another five years before it is necessary to extinguish it for repairs. All the anxiety, all the care which are expended on its regular performance of its functions arise from the incessant danger of its spontaneous extinction, by reason of some disaster in its own vitals, the gravity of which could not be foreseen. And extinction, for it, is death.... Ah, my little electrical furnaces, which children will be able to manage, they will never disturb any one’s rest, and they will be so well conducted, so active, so tractable!”

Luc could not help laughing, amused by the tender passion which Jordan threw into his scientific researches. Morfain, followed by Petit-Da, had rejoined them, and he pointed out under the dim light of a lantern one of the four
tuyères,
which, at a height of about ten feet, formed an elbow and entered the sides of the colossus.