Germinal - Emile Zola [248]
He never met anyone there. But that day he was very put out to see a man coming towards him. And in the pale starlight the two solitary walkers did not recognize each other until they came face to face.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ muttered Étienne.
Souvarine nodded silently. For a moment they just stood there; then, side by side, they set off together towards Marchiennes. Each man seemed to be continuing with his own train of thought, as if they were separated by a large distance.
‘Did you read in the paper about Pluchart’s success in Paris?’ Étienne asked eventually. ‘After that meeting at Belleville people waited on the pavement and gave him a great ovation…Oh, he’s a coming man all right, whether he’s lost his voice or not. He’ll go far now.’
Souvarine shrugged. He despised the silver-tongued type, the sort that enters politics the way some people are called to the Bar, just to earn a lot of money with smooth talk.
Étienne had now got as far as Darwin.1 He had read this and that, as summarized for a popular audience in a volume costing five sous; and on the basis of his patchy understanding he had come to see revolution in terms of the struggle for survival, with the have-nots eating the haves, a strong people devouring a worn-out bourgeoisie. But Souvarine became angry and started in on the stupidity of socialists who accepted Darwin, that scientific apostle of inequality whose great notion of natural selection might as well be the philosophy of an aristocrat. But Étienne refused to be persuaded and wanted to argue the point, illustrating his reservations with a hypothesis. Say the old society no longer existed and that every last trace of it had been swept away. Wasn’t there a risk that the new order which grew up in its place would slowly be corrupted by the same injustices, that there would again be the weak and the strong, that some people would be more skilful or intelligent than others and live off the fat of the land, while the stupid or lazy once more became their slaves? At this prospect of everlasting poverty Souvarine exclaimed fiercely that if justice could not be achieved with man, it would have to be achieved without him. For as long as there were rotten societies, there would have to be wholesale slaughters, until the last human being had been exterminated. The two men fell silent again.
For a long time, with his head bowed, Souvarine walked on over the soft new grass, so deep in thought that he kept to the extreme edge of the water with all the tranquil certainty of a sleepwalker walking beside a gutter. Then, for no apparent reason, he gave a start, as though he had bumped into a shadow. He looked up, and his face was very pale. He said softly to his companion:
‘Did I ever tell you how she died?’
‘Who?’
‘My girl, back in Russia.’
Étienne gestured vaguely, astonished at the catch in Souvarine’s voice, at this sudden need to confide on the part of someone who was usually so impassive and who lived in such stoic detachment from people, including from himself. All he knew was that the girl in question had been his mistress and that she had been hanged in Moscow.
‘It all went wrong,’ Souvarine explained, his misty eyes now fixed on the white strip of canal as it vanished into the distance between the bluish colonnades of tall trees. ‘We had spent fourteen days down a hole, in order to mine the railway line; but instead of the Imperial train, it was an ordinary passenger train that went up…Then they arrested Annouchka.2 She used to bring us food each evening, disguised as a peasant. And it was she who had lit the fuse, too, because a man might have attracted attention…I followed the trial, hidden in the crowd, for six long days…’
His voice faltered, and he started coughing as though he were choking.