Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/365

GERMINAL "Look here! this can't go on, we are done for. We must give it up."

Maheude, who had been motionless and silent up to now, suddenly broke out, and treating him familiarly and swearing like a man, she shouted in his face:

"What's that you say? It's you who say that, by God!"

He was about to give reasons, but she would not let him speak.

"Don't repeat that, by God! or, woman as I am, I'll put my fist into your face. Then we have been dying for two months, and I have sold my household, and my little ones have fallen ill of it, and there is to be nothing done, and the injustice is to begin again! Ah! do you know! when I think of that my blood stands still. No, no! I would burn everything, I would kill everything, rather than give up."

She pointed at Maheu in the darkness, with a vague, threatening gesture.

"Listen to this! If my man goes back to the pit, he'll find me waiting for him on the road to spit in his face and cry coward!"

Étienne could not see her, but he felt a heat like the breath of a barking animal. He had drawn back, astonished at this fury which was his work. She was so changed that he could no longer recognise the woman who was once so sensible, reproving his violent schemes, saying that we ought not to wish anyone dead, and who was now refusing to listen to reason and talking of killing people. It was not he now, it was she, who talked politics, who dreamed of sweeping away the bourgeois at a stroke, who demanded the Republic and the guillotine to free the earth of these rich robbers who fattened on the labour of starvelings.

"Yes, I could flay them with my fingers. We've had enough of them! Our turn is come now; you used to say so yourself. When I think of the father, the grandfather, the father's grandfather, what all of them who went before have suffered, what we are suffering, and that our sons and our sons' sons will suffer it over again, it makes me mad—I could take a knife. The other day we didn't do enough at Montsou; we ought to have pulled the bloody place to the ground, down to the last brick. And do you know I've only one regret, that we didn't let the [353]