Germinal - Emile Zola [223]
‘It’s all nonsense…They’ll never get anywhere with that nonsense.’
Then, lowering his voice, he began to speak bitterly about his old dream of brotherhood. He had given up his rank and fortune and thrown in his lot with the workers in the sole hope of seeing a new society founded on the communality of labour. Every penny he possessed had long since ended up in the pockets of the village children, and he had always treated the miners with brotherly affection, amused by their distrust of him and eventually winning them round by his quiet manner and the fact that he took pride in his work and kept himself to himself. But quite plainly he was never going to fit in completely, because in their eyes he would always remain a foreigner, a stranger in their midst, what with his scorn for all human ties and his determination to remain true to the cause, uncompromised by the pursuit of pleasure or spurious honour. And since that morning he had been feeling particularly exasperated by an item that was in all the newspapers.
His voice changed and his eyes lost their dreamy air, as he fixed Étienne with a stare and addressed him directly:
‘Can you believe it? Those hat-makers in Marseilles who’ve won the first prize of a hundred thousand francs in the lottery and then immediately announce they’re going to invest it and live off the dividend and never work again!…That’s it, you see, that’s all you French workers ever think about. Find hidden treasure somewhere and keep it all to yourself, like everyone else who’s selfish and lazy. It’s all very well your complaining about the rich, but when good fortune brings you money, you simply don’t have the courage of your convictions to give it back to the poor…You will never deserve to be happy while you still have things you call your own or while your hatred of the bourgeoisie is still no more than a desperate desire to be bourgeois yourselves.’
Rasseneur burst out laughing; the idea that the two Marseilles workers should hand back their first prize struck him as idiotic. But Souvarine’s face went white and his features contorted into a terrifying expression, moved by the kind of religious wrath that can exterminate entire races.
‘You will all be cut down and tossed aside, cast on to the rubbish-heap of history!’ he cried. ‘One day there shall come a man who will rid the world of all you faint-hearts and pleasureseekers! Look at these hands! If they were strong enough, I’d pick the whole world up just like this and shake it into little pieces, and you’d all be dead and buried beneath the ruins!’
‘Well said!’ Mme Rasseneur declared again, with her usual air of polite conviction.
There was another silence. Then Étienne returned to the subject of the Belgian workers. He asked Souvarine what arrangements had been made at Le Voreux. But the mechanic was once more deep in his own thoughts, and he barely answered; all he knew was that cartridges were to be issued to the soldiers guarding the pit. The nervous fidgeting of his fingers across his knees now reached such a pitch that he finally realized what it was that he was missing, the soft, soothing fur of his pet rabbit.
‘Where’s Poland?’ he asked.
Rasseneur started laughing again and glanced across at his wife. After an embarrassed pause he plucked up courage:
‘Poland? She’s keeping warm.’
Ever since her escapade with Jeanlin, when she must have been injured, every litter the plump rabbit had produced had been stillborn; and so as not to have an unproductive mouth to feed, they had reluctantly decided that very day to serve her up with the potatoes.
‘That’s right. You had one of her legs this evening…Remember? You even licked your fingers!’
Souvarine did not understand at first. Then he turned very pale, his chin twitched as though he were going to be sick, and, despite his cultivation of a stoical indifference, two large tears began to well up in his eyes.
But no one had the