Germinal, Émile Zola [readict .txt] 📗

ever held out their hands to beg. Now she sent them herself on to the roads, and proposed that all of them⁠—the ten thousand colliers of Montsou⁠—should take stick and wallet, like beggars of old, and scour the terrified country.

The anguish continued to increase in the black room. The little urchins came back hungry, they wanted to eat; why could they not have something to eat? And they grumbled, flung themselves about, and at last trod on the feet of their dying sister, who groaned. The mother furiously boxed their ears in the darkness at random. Then, as they cried still louder, asking for bread, she burst into tears, and dropped on to the floor, seizing them in one embrace with the little invalid; then, for a long time, her tears fell in a nervous outbreak which left her limp and worn out, stammering over and over again the same phrase, calling for death:

“O God! why do you not take us? O God! in pity take us, to have done with it!”

The grandfather preserved his immobility, like an old tree twisted by the rain and wind; while the father continued walking between the fireplace and the cupboard, without turning his head.

But the door opened, and this time it was Doctor Vanderhaghen.

“The devil!” he said. “This light won’t spoil your eyes. Look sharp! I’m in a hurry.”

As usual, he scolded, knocked up by work. Fortunately, he had matches with him, and the father had to strike six, one by one, and to hold them while he examined the invalid. Unwound from her coverlet, she shivered beneath this flickering light, as lean as a bird dying in the snow, so small that one only saw her hump. But she smiled with the wandering smile of the dying, and her eyes were very large; while her poor hands contracted over her hollow breast. And as the half-choked mother asked if it was right to take away from her the only child who helped in the household, so intelligent and gentle, the doctor grew vexed.

“Ah! she is going. Dead of hunger, your blessed child. And not the only one, either; I’ve just seen another one over there. You all send for me, but I can’t do anything; it’s meat that you want to cure you.”

Maheu, with burnt fingers, had dropped the match, and the darkness closed over the little corpse, which was still warm. The doctor had gone away in a hurry. Étienne heard nothing more in the black room but Maheude’s sobs, repeating her cry for death, that melancholy and endless lamentation:

“O God! it is my turn, take me! O God! take my man, take the others, out of pity, to have done with it!”

III

On that Sunday, ever since eight o’clock, Souvarine had been sitting alone in the parlour of the Avantage, at his accustomed place, with his head against the wall. Not a single collier knew where to get two sous for a drink, and never had the bars had fewer customers. So Madame Rasseneur, motionless at the counter, preserved an irritated silence; while Rasseneur, standing before the iron fireplace, seemed to be gazing with a reflective air at the brown smoke from the coal.

Suddenly, in this heavy silence of an overheated room, three light quick blows struck against one of the windowpanes made Souvarine turn his head. He rose, for he recognized the signal which Étienne had already used several times before, in order to call him, when he saw him from without, smoking his cigarette at an empty table. But before the engine-man could reach the door, Rasseneur had opened it, and, recognizing the man who stood there in the light from the window, he said to him:

“Are you afraid that I shall sell you? You can talk better here than on the road.”

Étienne entered. Madame Rasseneur politely offered him a glass, which he refused, with a gesture. The innkeeper added:

“I guessed long ago where you hide yourself. If I was a spy, as your friends say, I should have sent the police after you a week ago.”

“There is no need for you to defend yourself,” replied the young man. “I know that you have never eaten that sort of bread. People may have different ideas and esteem each other all the same.”

And there was silence once more. Souvarine had gone back to his chair, with his back to the wall and his eyes fixed on the smoke from his cigarette, but his feverish fingers were moving restlessly, and he ran them over his knees, seeking the warm fur of Poland, who was absent this evening; it was an unconscious discomfort, something that was lacking, he could not exactly say what.

Seated on the other side of the table, Étienne at last said:

“Tomorrow work begins again at the Voreux. The Belgians have come with little Négrel.”

“Yes, they landed them at nightfall,” muttered Rasseneur, who remained standing. “As long as they don’t kill each other after all!”

Then raising his voice:

“No, you know, I don’t want to begin our disputes over again, but this will end badly if you hold out any longer. Why, your story is just like that of your International. I met Pluchart the day before yesterday, at Lille, where I went on business. It’s going wrong, that machine of his.”

He gave details. The association, after having conquered the workers of the whole world, in an outburst of propaganda which had left the middle class still shuddering, was now being devoured and slowly destroyed by an internal struggle between vanities and ambitions. Since the anarchists had triumphed in it, chasing out the earlier evolutionists, everything was breaking up; the original aim, the reform of the wage-system, was lost in the midst of the squabbling of sects; the scientific framework was disorganized by the hatred of discipline. And already it was possible to foresee the final miscarriage of this general revolt which for a moment had threatened to carry away in a breath the old rotten society.

“Pluchart