Germinal - Emile Zola [139]
Speechless with indignation, Étienne had let him go on. But now he shouted:
‘Christ Almighty! Have you got no feelings at all?’
For a moment he was on the verge of hitting him; but to stop himself he walked off, taking his fury out on the benches as he cleared a path through the hall.
‘You might at least shut the door, you two,’ observed Souvarine. ‘We don’t need everyone to hear.’
After going to shut it himself, he came back and sat down quietly on one of the chairs by the table. He had rolled a cigarette and now sat watching the two men with the usual gentle, intelligent look in his eyes and a thin, pursed smile on his lips.
‘You can get as cross as you like,’ Rasseneur continued evenly, ‘but it won’t get us anywhere. I used to think you were sensible. That was a good idea of yours to get the comrades to keep out of trouble, making them stay at home like that, using your influence to maintain law and order. But now you’re all set to land them in it!’
After each trip across the hall Étienne would return to where Rasseneur was standing, grab him by the shoulders and shake him, screaming in his face with each reply:
‘Bloody hell! I do want us to keep out of trouble. Yes, I did impose discipline on them! And yes, I am still telling them to stay calm. But only just as long as people don’t walk all over us…Good for you if you can stay all calm and collected. There are times when I feel as though my head’s going to blow off.’
Now it was his turn to speak his mind. He laughed at his earlier idealism, his schoolboy vision of a brave new world in which justice would reign and men would be brothers. But the one way to make sure that men were at each other’s throats until the end of time was to sit back and wait for things to happen. No! You had to get involved, otherwise injustice would never end and the rich would forever be sucking the blood of the poor. Which was why he couldn’t forgive himself for having once been stupid enough to advocate keeping politics out of the ‘social question’. He knew nothing then, whereas he had since read things, studied things. His ideas had matured now, and he liked to think that he had a system which would work. Nevertheless he explained it badly, in a muddle of statements which bore the trace of all the theories he had encountered and abandoned along the way. At the centre was still the idea put forward by Karl Marx: capital was the result of theft, and labour had the duty and the right to recover this stolen wealth. As to putting this into practice, Étienne had at first been seduced, like Proudhon, by the attractions of mutual credit, of one vast clearing bank that would cut out all the middlemen; then it had been Lassalle’s idea of co-operative societies,1 funded by the State, which would gradually transform the earth into one great big industrial city, and he had been wildly in favour of this until the day he was finally put off by the problem of controls; and recently he had been coming round to collectivism, which called for the means of production to be returned into the ownership of the collective. But this was all still somewhat vague, and he couldn’t quite see how to achieve this new goal, prevented as he was by scruples of humanity and common sense from enjoying the fanatic’s ability to advance ideas with uncompromising conviction. For the moment his line was simply that what they had to do first was take power. Afterwards they’d see.
‘But what on earth’s got into you? Why have you gone over to the bourgeois?’ Étienne continued angrily, as he returned once more to confront Rasseneur. ‘You used to say it yourself: things can’t go on like this!’
Rasseneur flushed slightly.
‘Yes,