Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/482

GERMINAL parliament, triumphing with the people, if the people had no devoured him.

The loud song of a lark made him look up towards the sky. Little red clouds, the last vapours of the night, were melting in the limpid blue; and the vague faces of Souvarine and Rasseneur came to his memory. Decidedly, all was spoilt when each man tried to get power for himself. Thus that famous International which was to have renewed the world had impotently aborted, and its formidable army had been cut up and crumbled away from internal dissensions. Was Darwin right, then, and the world only a battlefield, where the strong ate the weak for the sake of the beauty and continuance of the race? This question troubled him, although he settled it like a man who is satisfied with his knowledge. But one idea dissipated his doubts and enchanted him—that of taking up his old explanation of the theory the first time that he should speak. If any class must be devoured, would not the people, still new and full of life, devour the middle class, exhausted by enjoyment? The new society would arise from new blood. And in this expectation of an invasion of barbarians, regenerating the old decayed nations, reappeared his absolute faith in an approaching revolution, the real one—that of the workers—the fire of which `would inflame this century's end with that purple of the rising sun which he saw like blood on the sky. He still walked, dreaming, striking his briar stick against the flints on the road, and when he glanced around him he recognised the various places. Just there, at the Fourche-aux-Bufs, he remembered that he had taken command of the band that morning when the pits were sacked. To-day the brutish, deathly, ill-paid work was beginning over again. Beneath the earth, down there at seven hundred mètres, it seemed to him he heard low, regular, continuous blows; it was the men he had just seen go down, the black workers, who were hammering in their silent rage. No doubt they were beaten. They had left their dead and their money on the field; but Paris would not forget the volleys fired at the Voreux, and the blood of the Empire, too, would flow from that incurable wound. And if the industrial crisis was drawing to an end, if the workships were opening again one by one, a state of war was not less declared, and peace was henceforth impossible. The colliers had reckoned up their men; they had tried [470]