Work [Travail]

by Émile Zola

At first Abbé Marle simply shook his head. As a rule nowadays he did not take the trouble to answer or get angry. At last he slowly said: 'I do the whole of my duty—I am at my altar every morning, even when my church is empty, and I implore God to perform a miracle. He will surely do so, if He deems it necessary.'

This brought the old schoolmaster's exasperation to a climax. 'Pooh! one must help oneself! It is cowardly to do nothing.'

Sœurette, smiling and full of tolerance for those vanquished men, thereupon thought it necessary to intervene: 'If the good doctor was still here,' said she, 'he would beg you not to agree so well together, since your seeming agreement only makes your quarrel worse. You grieve me, my friends; I should have been so happy—not to convert you to our ideas, but to see you admit, by virtue of experience, a little of all the good which our ideas have effected in this region.'

They had both retained great deference for Sœurette, and indeed their presence in that little drawing-room, beside the very hearth, so to say, of the new city, showed what ascendancy she still exercised over them. For her sake they even put up with the presence of Luc, their victorious adversary, though he, it should be admitted, discreetly avoided all appearance of triumphing over them. Thus, on this occasion, he refrained from intervening, however furiously Hermeline might deny all that he had created. After all, thought Luc, this was simply the last revolt of the principle of authority against the liberation of man both naturally and socially. On seeing the nations so near the point of escaping from civil as well as religious servitude, the once all-powerful State and the once all-powerful Church, which had voraciously contended for possession of them, now tried to come to an agreement, and league themselves together in order to reconquer the nations.

'Ah!' cried Hermeline again, 'if you own yourself beaten, abbé, it must be all over. In that case I can only keep silent as you do, and withdraw into my corner to die.'

The priest once more shook his head, preserving silence. But eventually, for the last time, he said: 'God cannot be beaten; it is for God Himself to act.'

The night was now slowly falling over the park, lengthening shadows were filling the little salon, and nobody spoke any further. Only a great quiver, coming from the melancholy past, swept through the room. Finally the schoolmaster rose and took his leave. Then, as the priest was about to do the same, Sœurette wished to slip into his hand the sum which at each recurring visit she had been accustomed to give him for his poor. This time, however, he refused the alms which he had been accepting so regularly for more than forty years; and in a low voice he slowly said: 'No, thank you, mademoiselle; keep that money. I should not know what to do with it; there are no more poor!'

Ah! what words those were for Luc: 'No more poor!' His heart had leapt as he heard them. No more poor, no more starvelings in that town of Beauclair, which he had known so black, so wretched, peopled by such an accursed race of famished toilers! Would all the frightful sores which had come from the wage-system be healed then? would shame and crime soon disappear, even as want did? The reorganisation of work in accordance with justice had sufficed already to bring about a better apportionment of wealth. And thus, when work should on all sides become honour and health and joy, an entirely peaceful and a brotherly race would assuredly people the happy city.

Jordan, who still lay upon the sofa, wrapped in his rug, had hitherto remained motionless, his eyes fixed upon space, through which no doubt his mind was roaming. At last, Abbé Marle and Hermeline having departed, he woke up, and without taking his eyes off the sunset which he seemed to be watching with passionate interest, he said in a dreamy manner: 'Each time that I see the sun set I become dreadfully sad and anxious. Suppose it were not to come back, suppose it were never to rise again over the black and frost-bound earth, what a terrible death would then overtake all life! The sun is the father, the fructifier, without whom all germs would wither or rot. And it is in the sun that we must place our hope of relief and future happiness, for if it were not to help us life would some day dry up.'

Luc had begun to smile. He knew that Jordan, in spite of his great age—he was now nearly seventy-five—had for some years been studying the problem of how he might capture solar heat and store it in vast reservoirs in order to distribute it afterwards as the one, great, eternal, living force. A time would come when the coal in the mines would be exhausted, and where would one then find the necessary energy for the torrent of electricity which had become so needful for life? Thanks to his first discoveries, Jordan had succeeded in supplying an abundance of electrical force for next to nothing. But what a victory it would be if he should succeed in making the sun the universal motor—if he should be able to take from it direct the caloric power which was now found slumbering in coal—if he should manage to employ it as the one sole fructifier, the very father of immortal life! He had but a last discovery to effect, and then his work would be accomplished and he would be ready to die.