Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/369

GERMINAL discomfort, something that was lacking, he could not exactly say what.

Seated on the other side of the table, Étienne at last said: "To-morrow work begins again at the Voreux. The Belgians have come with little Négrel."

"Yes, they landed them at nightfall," muttered Rasseneur, who remained standing. "As long as they don't kill each other, after all!"

Then, raising his voice:

"No, you know, I don't want to begin our disputes over again, but this will end badly if you hold out any longer. Why, your story is just like that of your International. I met Pluchart the day before yesterday, at Lille, where I went on business. It's going wrong, that machine of his."

He gave details. The association, after having conquered the workers of the whole world, in an outburst of propaganda which had left the middle class still shuddering, was now being devoured and slowly destroyed by an internal struggle between vanities and ambitions. Since the anarchists had truimphedtriumphed [sic] in it, chasing out the earlier evolutionists, everything was breaking up; the original aim, the reform of the wage-system, was lost in the midst of the squabbling of sects; the scientific framework was disorganised by the hatred of discipline. And already it was possible to foresee the final abortion of this general revolt which for a moment had threatened to carry away in a breath the old rotten society.

"Pluchart is ill over it," Rasseneur went on. "And he has no voice at all now. All the same, he talks on in spite of everything and wants to go to Paris. And he told me three times over that our strike was done for."

Étienne with his eyes on the ground let him talk on without interruption. The evening before he had chatted with some mates, and he felt that breaths of spite and suspicion were passing over him, those first breaths of unpopularity which fore-run defeat. And he remained gloomy, he would not confess dejection in the presence of a man who had foretold to him that the crowd would hoot him in his turn on the day when they had to avenge themselves for a miscalculation.

"No doubt the strike is done for, I know that as well as Pluchart," he said. "But we foresaw that. We accepted this [357]