Germinal - Emile Zola [164]
‘That’s the way, by God! Our day has come!…Death to the oppressors!’
The women were hysterical. La Maheude was no longer her usual calm self, for hunger had made her light-headed; La Levaque was yelling; La Brûlé was quite beside herself and waving her arms about like a witch; Philomène was coughing her lungs up, and La Mouquette was so carried away that she started shouting endearments at the speaker. As to the men, Maheu was now persuaded and shouted his anger, flanked by Pierron who was trembling and Levaque who kept talking too much. Meanwhile the jokesters, Zacharie and Mouquet, tried to make fun of everything but were put off their stroke by their comrade’s astonishing capacity to say so much at once without having a drink. But up on the log-pile Jeanlin was making even more of a racket, egging Bébert and Lydie on to action and brandishing the basket that had Poland in it.
The crowd was in uproar, and Étienne savoured the heady joy of his popularity. It was as if his power had here assumed human form, since one word from him now sufficed to set the pulse racing in three thousand hearts. If Souvarine had deigned to come, he would have applauded his ideas – once he had made out what Étienne was saying – and he would have noted happily his pupil’s progress towards anarchism and agreed with his programme, except for the article about vocational training, a piece of sentimental foolishness, for the sacred and salutary ignorance of the people was to provide the very waters for their cleansing and renewal. As for Rasseneur, he was shrugging his shoulders with angry contempt.
‘Will you finally let me speak!’ he shouted at Étienne.
The latter jumped down from his tree-trunk.
‘Speak, then, and let’s see if they listen to you.’
Already Rasseneur had taken his place and was appealing for silence. But the noise continued unabated as his name was passed from those at the front who had recognized him to those at the back beneath the beech trees; and they all refused to listen to him. He was like a fallen idol, and the very sight of him was enough to make his former followers angry. His gift of the gab and his easy, good-natured manner had charmed them for so long, but what he had to say now seemed rather tepid stuff, suitable merely for reassuring the faint-hearted. He tried in vain to speak through the noise, intending to deliver his usual message of moderation about how you couldn’t change the world just by passing a lot of laws, how you had to give society time to evolve: but they just laughed and hissed and shouted him down. It was the defeat at the Jolly Fellow all over again, only this time much worse – and definitive. Eventually they started throwing lumps of frozen moss at him, and a woman shouted in a shrill voice:
‘He’s a scab!’
He explained why the mine could not belong to the miner in the same way that the craft of weaving belonged to the weaver, and he stated his preference for profit-sharing, with the worker having a stake in the company, like one of the family.
‘He’s a scab!’ a thousand voices repeated, as stones began to whistle through the air.
Rasseneur turned pale, and his eyes filled with tears of despair. For him this meant the end of everything, the fruits of twenty years of power-seeking comradeship swept away by the ingratitude of the crowd. Cut to the quick and without the strength to go on, he climbed down from the tree-trunk.
‘You think it’s funny, don’t you!’ he stammered to a triumphant Étienne. ‘Very well. But I just hope it happens to you one day…And it will happen. Just you wait!’
And as if to disclaim all responsibility for the disasters that he could see about to happen, he gestured the end of his involvement and departed alone across the white and silent countryside.
There was a sound of jeering, and everyone looked round in surprise to see old Bonnemort standing on a tree-trunk and trying to speak above the noise. Until