GERMINAL
and expressing his doubts by an hypothesis: supposing the old society were no longer to exist, swept away to the crumbs; well, was it not to be feared that the new world would grow up again, slowly spoilt by the same injustices, some sick and others flourishing, some skilful and intelligent, fattening on everything, and others imbecile and lazy, becoming slaves again? But before this vision of eternal wretchedness, the engine-man shouted out fiercely that if justice was not possible with man, then man must disappear. For every rotten society there must be a massacre, until the last creature was exterminated. And there was silence again.
For a long time, with sunken head, Souvarine walked over the short grass, so absorbed that he kept to the extreme edge, by the water, with quiet certainty of a sleeping man dreaming on a roof. Then he shuddered causelessly, as though he had stumbled against a shadow. His eyes lifted and his face was very pale; he said softly to his companion:
"Did I ever tell you how she died?"
"Whom do you mean?"
"My wife, over there, in Russia."
Étienne made a vague gesture, astonished at the tremor in his voice and at the sudden desire for confidence in this lad, who was usually so impassive in his stoical detachment from others and from himself. He only knew that the woman was his mistress, and that she had been hanged at Moscow.
"The affair hadn't gone off," Souvarine said, with eyes still vacantly following the white stream of the canal between the bluish colonnades of tall trees. "We had been a fortnight at the bottom of a hole undermining the railway; and it was not the imperial train that was blown up, it was a passenger train. Then they arrested Annutchka. She brought us bread every evening, disguised as a peasant woman. She lit the fusee, too, because a man might have attracted attention. I followed the trial, hidden in the crowd, for six long days."
His voice became thick, and he coughed as though he were choking.
"Twice I wanted to cry out, and to rush over the people's heads to join her. But what was the good? One man less would be one soldier less; and I could see that she was telling me not to come, when her large eyes met mine."
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