GERMINAL
children drew back from him suspiciously. But the unfortunate woman's tears went to his heart, and he murmured:
"Come, come! courage! we must try to get out of it."
She did not seem to hear him, and was bemoaning herself now in a low continuous complaint.
"Ah! the wretchedness! is it possible? Things did go on before these horrors. We ate our bread dry, but we were all together; and what has happened, good God! What have we done, then, that we should have such troubles—some under the earth, and the others with nothing left but to long to get there too? It's true enough that they harnessed us like horses to work, and it's not at all a just sharing of things to be always getting the stick and making rich people's fortunes bigger without hope of ever tasting the good things. There's no pleasure in life when hope goes. Yes, that might have gone on longer; we might have breathed a bit. If we had only known! Is it possible to make oneself so wretched through wanting justice?"
Sighs swelled her breast, and her voice choked with immense sadness.
"Then there are always some clever people there who promise you that everything can be arranged by just taking a little trouble. Then one loses one's head, and one suffers so much from things as they are that one asks for things that can't be. Now, I was dreaming like a fool; I seemed to see a life of good friendship with everybody; I got off into the air, my faith! into the clouds. And then one breaks one's back when one tumbles down into the mud again. It's not true; there's nothing over there of the things that people tell of. What there is, is only wretchedness; ah! wretchedness, as much as you like of it, and bullets into the bargain.
Étienne listened to this lamentation, and every tear struck him with remorse. He knew not what to say to calm Maheude, broken by her terrible fall from the heights of the ideal. She had come back to the middle of the room, and was now looking at him; she addressed him with contemptuous familiarity in a last cry of rage:
"And you, do you talk of going back to the pit, too, after driving us out of the bloody place? I've nothing to reproach you with; but if I were in your shoes I should be dead of grief by now after causing such harm to the mates."
[396]
