Page:Germinal - Zola - 1925.djvu/483

GERMINAL their strength, with their cry for justice arousing the workers all over France. Their defeat, therefore, reassured no one. The Montsou bourgeois, in their victory, were carried away by their deep anxiety over to-morrow's strike, looking behind them to see if their end did not lie inevitably over there, in spite of all, beyond that great silence. They understood that the revolution would be born again unceasingly, perhaps to-morrow, with a general strike—the common understanding of all workers having general funds, and so able to hold out for months, eating their own bread. This time a push only had been given to a ruinous society, but they had heard the rumbling beneath their feet, and they felt more shocks arising, and still more, until the old edifice would be crushed, fallen in and swallowed, going down like the Voreux to the abyss.

Étienne took the Joiselle road, to the left. He remembered that he had prevented the band from rushing on to Gaston-Marie. Afar, in the clear sky he saw the steeples of several pits—Mirou to the right, Madeleine and Crèvecoeur side by side. Work was going on everywhere; he seemed to be able to catch the blows of the axe at the bottom of the earth, striking now from one end of the plain to the other, one blow, and another blow, and yet more blows, beneath the fields and roads and villages which were laughing in the light, all the obscure labour of the underground prison, so crushed by the enormous mass of the rocks that one had to know it was underneath there to distinguish its great painful sigh. And he now thought that, perhaps violence would not hasten things. Cutting cables, tearing up rails, breaking lamps, what useless task it was! It was not worth while for three thousand men to rush about in a devastating band doing that. He vaguely divined that lawful methods might one day be more terrible. His reason was ripening, he had sown the wild oats of his spite. Yes, Maheude had well said, with her good sense, that that would be the great blow—to organise quietly, to know one another, to unite in Associations when the laws would permit it; then, on the morning when they felt their strength, and millions of workers would be face to face with a few thousand idlers, to take the power into their own hands and become the masters. Ah! what a reawakening of truth and justice! The sated and crouching god would at once get his deathblow, the monstrous idol hidden in the depths [471]