Complete Works of Emile Zola (1638 page)

After that came a bitter struggle for long months between the Pit and La Crêcherie. Luc, who for one moment had apprehended failure, exerted all his strength to keep his scheme from gliding to ruin. He knew that for a long time to come he had better not think of acquiring more land. He only aimed to lose none; and began to feel the advantage of remaining stationary, though assailed by blows from all quarters. But what a tremendous business his works were doing — how cheerfully and bravely his people were laboring! He seemed like an apostle watching over the growth of his own idea. He was everywhere at once. He animated the workmen in the great halls of the works, and tightened the bonds of brotherhood between the small and the great in the Communal House; he watched over the administration of affairs in the cooperative stores. He was forever seen on the sunny avenues of his rising city, talking to the women and children, and delighting in taking his share in the play and laughter of all these young people who were his own. Everything started into life, grew, and organized itself as he directed, thanks to his genius and his creative ability. He was the man from whose hands dropped seeds wherever he passed. His greatest miracle was the conquest he made of his workmen, among whom the rising spirit of disorder and rebellion had lasted but a short time. Although Bonnaire did not always think as he did, Luc had captured the affection of this man, who was so brave and so kind-hearted, and found in him the most faithful and devoted of lieutenants, without whom assuredly the work could not have been accomplished. And his power of love had acted in the same way upon his other workmen, all of whom by degrees had rallied round him. They were attached to him personally, they felt him to be so tender and so brotherly. They saw that he lived only for the good of others, and that in their happiness he felt sure of finding his own. The employees of La Crêcherie became like a great family, whose ties were constantly drawn closer. Every one began to understand at last that to work for himself was to work for others. Not one workman left the establishment in six months, though some who had left it had not come back. Those who remained had pledged themselves not to take all that was due to them out of the profits, in order that the house might form a sinking-fund ready for any emergency.

At this critical time it was certainly the firm union of all the members of the association working together for the common good which saved La Crêcherie and prevented it from failing, assailed as it was by the selfish execration and jealousy of old Beauclair. The sinking-fund, so prudently put by, grew larger and larger, and was of great service. It enabled the concern to face bad times with confidence, and it prevented it from being obliged at critical moments to have recourse to the disastrous system of borrowing. Thanks to this fund, they were twice enabled to buy new machinery, made necessary by changes in the way of working metals, and this greatly lowered the price at which their wares could be put on the market. There were also about this time some lucky chances for the firm. Several great works were undertaken. Bridges, iron buildings, and railroads, which took quantities of rails, trusses, and other structural iron, were constructed. The long peace in Europe had wonderfully developed the uses and need of iron, as employed in works of peace and civilization. Never before had beneficent iron entered into men’s homes to such a point. The output of manufactured iron at La Crêcherie had therefore increased, though the profits were not yet very great, for it was the wish of Luc to produce cheaply, thinking that this policy would give him great future advantages. He strengthened the concern by very prudent business methods, and was constantly economizing, laying up money in his sinking-fund, ready for any emergency; and the devotion of his men to the common cause, their readiness to make sacrifices by giving up part of what was due to them, enabled him to wait for a time of prosperity, without suffering greatly in the mean time.

At the Pit affairs were still more flourishing; there the business receipts had not diminished, and the Pit’s costly manufacture of shells and guns seemed to every one a great success. But this was only in appearance, and Delaveau began occasionally to feel serious anxieties which he would not own to every one. All Beauclair was on his side, all its capitalists and
bourgeois
society, which thought its interests endangered by La Crêcherie. Besides this, he had the firm conviction that he was in the right; he had no doubt that he had truth, authority, and force on his side, and that his final victory was sure. But all the same he had some secret doubts; trouble seemed to grow for him out of the prosperity of La Crêcherie, though he prophesied its downfall every three months. He could not strive against all those iron and steel productions in which it did business, those girders and that structural iron which its workshops turned out so cheaply and which were so good. He had to rely only on fine steel and carefully manufactured products that cost three and four francs a kilogramme, which were furnished also by two large concerns in a neighboring department. These two houses offered great competition. He felt that out of the three there was one too many; and the question was, which two should absorb the third. Weakened by the establishment of La Crêcherie, would not the Pit be the one that must go down? This thought continually worried him, though he redoubled his activity, and serenely asserted his confidence in his good cause — the old system of paid workmen who earned no more than their wages. But more than any dread of competition, what haunted him was the consciousness that he had no funds in reserve with which to face necessary expenses or avert an unexpected catastrophe. If there should come a stoppage of work, a strike, or even a bad year, it would be ruin to the Pit, because the concern would have nothing to go on with while waiting for a return of business. Already, in an emergency, when they had to have some new machinery, he had been forced to borrow three hundred thousand francs, the interest on which was a heavy item in the yearly balance-sheet. And how would it be if he had to keep on borrowing and borrowing, until he made his final leap into the gulf of insolvency?

His foolish disinclination to disturb himself prevented him from suspecting that his wife, Fernande, was backing up his foppish cousin; it never entered his head that to her was due the corruption and extravagance of Guerdache, that Boisgelin’s money was spent to satisfy her follies and caprices. At Guerdache there were continual
fêtes
. Fernande was delighted with her triumph; it seemed to give her a revenge over her early destiny; her social success intoxicated her, and to have this come suddenly to an end would seem a dreadful downfall. She spurred on and excited Boisgelin. She assured him that her husband was growing inactive, and did not make the works pay what they ought, and she advised him to spur the manager up by continual demands for money. The attitude of Delaveau, a self-reliant man who never confided business matters to a woman, not even to his wife, though he adored her, had ended by convincing her that she was right, and that if hereafter she hoped to realize her dream, which was to return to Paris with millions of money to spend, she must worry her husband incessantly, and fling money away on everything as a means of getting it back in the future in some form a hundredfold.

One night, however, Delaveau forgot himself. He and his wife were coming home from a hunting-party given at Guerdache, during which Fernande, excited by a swift gallop on horseback, had disappeared with Boisgelin. That evening there had been a great dinner-party, and it was past midnight when the pair drove home. The young wife, who seemed overcome with fatigue, and satiated with the pleasure which made up her daily life, undressed at once and went to bed, while her husband took off his clothes methodically, walking about the room as he did so, apparently preoccupied and out of temper.

“Tell me,” said he at length, “did Boisgelin tell you anything to-day when you rode off together?”

Fernande, much surprised, opened her eyes, which were fast closing in sleep.

“No,” she answered; “at least he said nothing of any consequence. What do you suppose he said to me?”

“Well,” said Delaveau, “we had just had a dispute. He asked me for ten thousand francs, which he wanted by the end of this month. And this time I refused him decidedly; it is impossible. It is madness.”

She raised her head, and her eyes kindled.

“What do you mean by madness?... Why don’t you give him the ten thousand francs?”

In fact she had put Boisgelin up to asking for ten thousand francs from her husband to buy an electric automobile, in which she had a great desire to fly about the country with maddening swiftness.

“But,” cried Delaveau, forgetting his usual reticence, “it is just this. Because that fool will finish by ruining the concern with his continual demands for money. We shall fail before long if he does not make up his mind to slacken his pace. The
fêtes
he is forever giving at Guerdache are such nonsense; it is just like his stupid vanity to let everybody eat him out of house and home.”

She suddenly sat up in bed, somewhat pale, while he continued:

“There is but one sensible person at Guerdache, and that is poor Suzanne. She is the only one who never seems to share in its amusements. It is pitiful to see her so sad, and when I begged her to-day to speak to her husband, she answered, trying, as she spoke, to keep back her tears, that she was not willing to interfere with him in any way.”

This misplaced appeal to the lawful wife, to the woman who had been made a sacrifice, yet who was so dignified in her renouncement of all influence with her husband, put the last touch to Fernande’s exasperation. And the idea that the works that were to furnish money for her pleasures might be in danger put her beside herself., “We might fail, you say? How’s that?... I thought the business was going on well.”

She put so much passionate emphasis into her question that Delaveau became alarmed lest that she should magnify causes for apprehension that he was hardly willing to acknowledge to himself, so he held back the whole truth, which in his angry mood he had been about to tell her.

“Business is going on all right, no doubt; but it would go on still better if Boisgelin was not always taking everything we make to keep up the idiotic life he is carrying on. I tell you he is a fool, with his poor brains of a fop.” Fernande reassured, lay down again. She thought her husband a rough, common man, brutal and miserly, who was trying to keep as tight a hold as he could on the vast sums of money accumulated by the business. The way in which he spoke of Boisgelin seemed to her an insult to herself.

“My dear,” she said, dryly, “every man is not made to stultify himself by working day in and day out the whole time, and if he has money he has a right to do what he likes with it, and to enjoy the pleasures of a superior existence.”

Delaveau had an angry answer on his tongue, but he restrained himself, and made a violent effort to grow calm. Why should he try to convince his wife? He treated her like a spoiled child; he let her do whatever she liked, and never grew angry when he saw in her any errors of conduct, though he was very severe on such things in other people. He even took no notice of her foolish, reckless life, for she was to him his own pet folly, a plaything in his big coarse hands — the hands of a hard - working laborer. After a long day passed in the thick smoke and the darkness and deafening noises of the Pit, he came back to her with ever fresh delight. He gave her his admiration, his adoration. She was an idol set apart, the object of a certain superstition, to whom he sacrificed his dignity and good sense, and, above all, she was above suspicion.

There was silence in the room. Delaveau went to bed, but the little electric night-lamp was still burning. The wife at his side looked so beautiful he could not bear to be displeased with her. He imprinted a kiss upon her cheek, near her ear. She did not move. He thought she must be angry with him, and anxious to do something that would please her, and would show that he, too, could understand the foolish fancies of a luxurious life, he said:

“Well, then! I’ll give him those ten thousand francs if he has such a fancy for an automobile as he says he has. What I said was for the sake of prudence.... It was a splendid hunt we had to-day!”

But still she did not answer. He tried another kiss, but at last, thinking she was really asleep, he said, softly: “Good-night, Fernande!”

He put out the night-lamp and tried to go to sleep; but he could not close his eyes; they stayed wide open in the darkness. He was feverish and could not rest. His fears came crowding on him, and he reviewed all the anxieties caused him by the danger that threatened the concern of which he was in charge. As he lay awake the difficulties he foresaw seemed to increase. Never before had he seen so clearly into the future; never had things seemed to him so dark as they did now. The cause of the approaching ruin he saw clearly was the mad desire of Boisgelin to spend money almost before it had been earned. Somewhere there seemed to yawn a gulf which swallowed up the earnings of the Pit, and absorbed all the fruits of others’ industry. Delaveau made a careful self-examination. He was always severe on himself, but he could not see that in this case he had anything to reproach himself with. He rose early in the morning and left the works late in the evening. He was always overseeing, and managed his clerks and his workmen as he would have handled a regiment. He put into all the details of his management the continuous strain of his remarkable faculties, great rectitude, though with a certain bluntness, rare powers for enforcing method and order, and the brave resolution of a wrestler who has promised himself victory, and will either conquer or perish. He suffered terribly as he felt himself, in spite of his heroism, slipping down into disaster, together with the slow destruction of all that he had created, because of the daily demands made on him for money which he could not supply, and which, with all his energy, he knew not how to arrest. No doubt the continual extravagance of what he called the idiotic life led by Boisgelin, his gluttonous desire for pleasure, was what was slowly destroying everything. But who was it who incited Boisgelin to be such a fool; what made this poor man mad? This he was unable to comprehend, for he himself was an earnest worker, sober and self-restrained, hating idleness, and believing that what some men called pleasure was destruction to their creative faculties.