Germinal - Emile Zola [222]
‘Pluchart’s very frustrated about it all,’ Rasseneur went on. ‘And what’s more he’s lost his voice completely now. But he keeps making speeches, he’s thinking of going to give one in Paris…And he told me three times that our strike had failed.’
Staring at the ground, Étienne let him have his say. The previous evening he had talked to some of the comrades, and he had felt the first waves of resentment and suspicion being directed at him, the first stirrings of the unpopularity that presages ultimate defeat. And he sat there gloomily, not wanting to admit his own sense of helplessness in front of a man who had predicted that one day the crowd would jeer at him too when the moment came for it to wreak vengeance for its own miscalculation.
‘No doubt the strike has failed,’ he replied. ‘I know that as well as Pluchart. But we foresaw it would. We only went on strike against our better judgement, and we never thought it would mean the end of the Company…But people get carried away, they start hoping for all sorts of things, and then, when it all goes wrong, they forget that it was only to be expected, and they start wailing and arguing with each other as though the whole disaster were a bolt from the blue.’
‘Well, then,’ asked Rasseneur, ‘if you think the game’s up, why don’t you get the comrades to see sense?’
Étienne glared at him:
‘Look here, enough’s enough…You have your ideas and I have mine. I came in because I wanted to show you that I respect you all the same. But I still think that even if we die in the attempt, our starved corpses will do more for the people’s cause than any amount of your sensible approach…Ah, if only one of those bloody soldiers would put a bullet through my chest! It would be the perfect end!’
His eyes had begun to fill as he gave vent to his feelings, betraying the secret desire of the vanquished for a place of eternal refuge in which all torment shall cease.
‘Well said!’ declared Mme Rasseneur, who shot a disdainful look at her husband in which the radical nature of her own opinions was plain to see.
Souvarine, gazing dreamily into the distance and still fidgeting nervously with his fingers, seemed not to have heard. His mystic reverie, full of sundry bloodthirsty visions, lent an air of savagery to his pale girlish face, with its thin nose and tiny pointed teeth. And now he had begun to think aloud, responding to something Rasseneur had said earlier about the International:
‘They’re all cowards. Only one man could have turned their organization into a truly fearsome instrument of destruction.2 But you have to want to do it, and nobody does, and that’s why yet again the revolution is going to fail.’
He proceeded, in a tone of disgust, to lament the general stupidity of men, while Rasseneur and Étienne listened uneasily as this sleepwalker shared his innermost thoughts with the realms of darkness. In Russia nothing was going right, and he despaired at the news he had been getting. His former comrades were all turning into politicians; the notorious nihilists3 before whom the whole of Europe had trembled, the sons of the petit bourgeois, of priests and shopkeepers, could think no further than liberating their own country and seemed to believe they would have delivered the whole world once they had killed their own particular despot. And the moment he talked to them of razing the old society to the ground like a ripe harvest, or even used that meaningless word ‘republic’, he could see they didn’t understand him, regarding him instead as a loose cannon and writing him off as a man who had stepped outside his class only to become one of the