Complete Works of Emile Zola (1622 page)

One morning Fauchard, the man who drew crucibles out of the furnace in the Pit, came strolling up to La Crêcherie to see some of his former comrades. Always doleful, and incapable of deciding on any plan to better himself, he had stayed behind, while Bonnaire carried off to the new works his brother-in-law, Ragu, who persuaded Bourron to go with him. All three were now laboring in Luc’s works, and Fauchard had come up to see and question them, still incapable of making up his mind whether or not to join them, stupefied as he was by fifteen years of monotonous labor, always doing the same thing, making the same effort, in the same burning heat, day after day. His deformity and his apathy had become such that although he had for months intended to make this visit, he had never been able to exert the necessary will-power; and as soon as he entered La Crêcherie he was astonished.

He had come from the dark, dirty, dusty Pit, the dilapidated halls of which were dimly lighted by narrow windows, and the first thing that surprised him was to find how much lighter were the halls of La Crêcherie, built of bricks and iron, with large bay-windows that let in floods of air and sunshine. All were paved with flagstones laid in cement, which greatly diminished the dust, which is so harmful. There was running water everywhere, so that it was easy to wash; and as there was very little smoke, thanks to the new chimneys, which burned up everything, extreme cleanliness prevailed, and could be maintained. The infernal den of the Cyclops had given place to large, light, airy, cheerful shops, where work seemed to have lost all its harshness. No doubt, as the use of electricity was as yet limited, the noise of the machinery was still deafening, and human effort was scarcely lightened. It was as yet hard to foresee that one day in the crucible and puddling furnaces mechanical appliances (as yet defective) might liberate the arms of men from labor that was too severe for human beings. So far, reform had been groping its way upon its march towards future progress. But what an amelioration had been effected by cleanliness, and by the air and sunshine which brightened the great halls, making work more cheerful and less heavy on the back and muscles! What a marvellous difference there was between these workshops and the holes full of darkness and of suffering in which gangs of workmen in the old factory hard by wore out their existence.

Fauchard had expected to find Bonnaire, the masterpuddler, at his furnace, and was surprised to see him in the same hall superintending a great rolling-mill, which was turning out rails.

“Hullo! So you’ve given up puddling?”

“No; but we do a little bit of everything here. It is the rule of the place. We work two hours at one thing, two hours at another, and, upon my word, that rests one.” The truth was that Luc had not found it easy to make the workmen he was endeavoring to train into new methods give up their specialties. Later he knew that this reform would be carried out when children would have passed through several stages of apprenticeship; for satisfactory work needed variety, and only a few hours passed at each separate task.

“Ah!” sighed Fauchard, “how it would please me to have something to do besides pulling crucibles from the bottom of my furnace! But I don’t know how. I could do nothing else.”

The jerky noise of the rolling-mill was so great that it was necessary to speak very loud. He was, therefore, silent, and took advantage of a moment of respite to shake hands with Ragu and Bourron, who also were there, receiving the rails. That, too, surprised him. They did not make rails at the Pit, and he looked at these with confused thoughts, which he could not have put into words. What made him suffer most, conscious as he was that his manhood had been crushed out of him, and that he had become a mere human tool, was a vague feeling that he once had possessed intelligence and will. A little light still burned within him, like the night-lamp that is never put out. And his sad consciousness that he might have been a man, free, healthy, and happy, oppressed him. He thought of what he could have been but for the dark dungeon of brutish labor into which his slavery had thrown him! The rails which grew longer — ever longer — were like a road — an endless road — along which his thoughts travelled into the future, a future in which he had no longer any hope, nor indeed even any clear conception.

Under the hall in the vicinity of the great foundry, a special furnace melted the steel, and the metal in fusion was received in a large steel ladle, lined with fire-clay, which poured it mechanically into moulds in the form of ingots. Electric travelling-cranes of great power carried these heavy masses to the rolling-mills and to the riveting and bolting shops. For great steel frames especially, colossal pieces for bridges, and structural steel, there were trains of gigantic rolling-mills that drew out the ingots according to the shape desired, curved them also when necessary, and made them ready to be riveted or bolted together. For trusses and rails, simple pieces always of the same size, the trains of special rolling-mills worked with regularity and formidable activity. When the ingot of steel, like a gleam of sunshine, came out of the reheating-furnace, short and of the thickness of a man’s body, it was placed in a frame between two rollers, which revolved in opposite directions, whence it came thinned by the groove, and entered the second frame, where it became thinner still. And so in frame after frame the grooves roughened out the piece of steel more and more, and finally gave the rail its exact profile and its proper length of thirty-three feet. All this did not take, place without a deafening uproar, a terrible noise of jaws in the elongations between the frames, something like the mastication of a colossus chewing up a great mass of steel. Rails succeeded rails with marvellous rapidity, and it was difficult to follow the ingot, as it grew thinner and more elongated, and became a new rail, to be added to the others, as if the railroads of the world must extend to the very end of unknown countries, and so make the tour of the globe.

“For whom is all this?” asked the astonished Fauchard.

“
For the Chinese,” said Ragu, with a laugh.

But Luc at that moment was passing the rolling-mills. He generally spent his morning in the works, looking into every hall, conversing with the workmen like a comrade. He had had to retain in part the old hierarchy of master-workmen, superintendents, engineers, and clerks in the account and commercial offices. But he was already making great savings, thanks to his constant efforts to reduce as far as possible the number of heads of departments and of their underlings. Moreover, his hopes had been thus far realized. Although they had not yet found the excellent lodes of former times, the present ore of the mine, treated chemically, was giving a fair quality of cast-iron at a low cost, and hence the manufacture of structural steel and rails, sufficiently remunerative, assured the prosperity of the works. There was enough for every man to live upon, and the amount of the business grew larger every year. That was to Luc the most important thing, for his hopes were set on the future of his plans, on the certainty he felt of victory, whenever the gains of the factory were divided, if the workmen could see that their prosperity was increasing, and enjoy more happiness with less toil. Nevertheless, his life was passed in constant worries from the complex nature of the things he had to superintend, the large sums he had to furnish, the affairs of the little world he had to govern; with all his cares, in short, as an apostle, an engineer, and a financier. No doubt, success seemed to him certain, but how precarious it was as yet, how much his hopes were at the mercy of events that he could not foresee!

In the hubbub, Luc stopped and smiled at Bonnaire, Ragu and Bourron, but he did not perceive Fauchard. He liked to be in this hall among the rolling-mills; to watch the making of the rails and of the structural steel always pleased him. “Ours is the good forge of peace,” he used to say; and he contrasted it with the forge of war — the evil forge — at the Pit, where with so much care and at such great expense men were busy making shells and guns. Works of wonderful perfection, metal delicately manipulated, what for? — to produce monstrous engines of destruction, which cost nations millions of dollars, and ruin them that they may be prepared for war, even when war is not coming to exterminate them! Ah! let structural steel be multiplied, let useful edifices and happy cities be built, and bridges span the streams and valleys, and let rails drop ceaselessly from rolling-mills and elongate railroads endlessly, abolish frontiers, draw nations together, and conquer the whole earth, for the fraternal civilization of to-morrow!

But as Luc passed into the main hall of the foundry, where the great steam-hammer was beginning its dance, forging the entire trussing for an enormous bridge, the rolling-mills stopped, and there was a respite for the making ready of a new profile. Fauchard drew near his old comrades, and conversation began.

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“Well, things are going ahead here. Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied? Of course we are,” said Bonnaire. “We work only eight hours a day, and thanks to the change of work, one grows much less weary. Work is more interesting.”

Bonnaire, tall and strong, with his broad face full of health and kindliness, was one of the firm supporters of the new works. He was one of the council of management. He felt also great gratitude to Luc for having taken him into his employ when he had quitted the Pit, and did not know what was to become of him. Nevertheless, his uncompromising communism suffered under the
regime
of simple association which prevailed at La Crêcherie, in the affairs of which capital played an important part. The revolutionist that was in him — the workman dreaming of perfection — protested against this state of things. But he was wise. He worked, and incited his comrades to work, with the utmost devotion to Luc, since he had promised to await the result of his experiment.

“So,” resumed Fauchard, “you are all making money — twice as much as you did by the day down yonder?”

Ragu began to sneer, and his laugh was bitter.

“Oh! twice as much! Say, a hundred francs a day, besides our champagne and cigars.”

Ragu had merely followed Bonnaire in coming to hire himself to La Crêcherie, and, though he was not badly off, so much order and regularity were offensive to him, and he now began to sneer and treat his good fortune with derision.

“A hundred francs!” cried Fauchard, with a gasp. “Do you earn a hundred francs a day?”

Bourron, who was still Ragu’s shadow, thought he ought to go further.

“A hundred francs to begin with!” he said, “and we get paid for Sundays.”

But Bonnaire shrugged his shoulders with a grave air of contempt, while the two others were joking.

“Can’t YOU see, Fauchard, that they are talking nonsense and making fun of you?... When the accounts are made up after the payment of the dividends, we don’t get more than you do by the day. Only every time they are settled there is a little something extra, and it is quite certain in time it will be something superb.... Then, too, we have all sorts of advantages; our future is assured; it costs us less to live, thanks to our co-operative stores, and we have our pleasant little houses for almost nothing.... Of course, it is not full justice, but all the same we are on the right road.”

Ragu went on laughing, and began to feel a strong wish to gratify one of his other hatreds, for if he mocked at La Crêcherie, he never spoke of the Pit without fierce anger.

“And Delaveau,” said he; “how does that beast of a Delaveau bear up under it? It pleases me to think that all this must annoy him mightily — these new works set up close to his own, which look as if they were going to do a good business.... He is furious, isn’t he?”

Fauchard made a vague gesture.

“Of course he must be furious, but he does not show it.... And then, you see, I don’t know. I have worries enough of my own without troubling myself about those of other people.... I have heard he did not care a rap for your works and your competition. He says, as to that, that he will always have shells and guns to make, because men are such fools that they will always be killing one another.”

Luc, who was returning from the main hall of the great foundry, heard his words. For three years, ever since he had induced Jordan to keep the blast-furnace, and to set up steel-works and forges, he knew that he had Delaveau for his enemy. The blow had fallen heavily on the latter, who had hoped to buy La Crêcherie for a small sum, on long time to meet the payments, and who had instead seen it pass into the hands of a rash experimentalist, full of intelligence and activity, who wanted to turn the world upside down, and who had such creative vigor that he had begun his career by making an embryo city spring out of the ground. Nevertheless, after his first anger and his first surprise, Delaveau recovered confidence. He confined himself to the manufacture of shells and guns, where his profits were large, and in which he feared no competition. The announcement that the rival works were going to undertake rails and structural steel filled him at first with ironical satisfaction, for he did not know of the proposed new exploitation of the mine. Then when he understood how much might be made of the inferior ore, chemically treated, he behaved like an accomplished actor. He told every one who would listen to him that there was room enough in the world for every kind of industry, and that he was quite willing to leave rails and structural steel to his fortunate neighbor, if he would leave him his shells and guns. So peace was not disturbed in appearance, and relations continued cold and polite. But in Delaveau’s heart there was a smothered anxiety for fear of this furnace of free and just labor so near his Pit, the flames from which might reach his halls and laborers. Besides, there was another thing that troubled him — a feeling that he would not put into words; he sometimes thought his old scaffoldings were cracking under him, that there were causes of decay that he had no power to arrest, and that whenever the aid of capital should fail him everything might crumble into dust, and that his own strong arms would not be able to prevent the ruin.