'If you are not going home at once, give me the key, at any rate,' she continued. 'We've been in the street ever since this morning, without even a morsel of bread to eat.'
At this he burst forth: 'Just let me be! Haven't you done sticking to me like a leech?'
'Why did you carry off the key this morning?' she answered. 'I only ask you to give me the key, you can come in when you like. It is almost night now, and you surely don't want us to sleep on the pavement.'
'The key! the key! I haven't got it, and even if I had I wouldn't give it you. Just understand, once for all, that I've had enough of it, that I don't want to have anything more to do with you, that it's quite enough that we starved together for two months, and that now you can go somewhere else, and see if I'm there!'
He shouted those words in her face, violently and savagely; and she, poor little creature, quivered beneath his insults, whilst gently persevering in her efforts with all the woeful desperation of a wretch who feels the very ground giving way beneath her.
'Oh! you are cruel! you are cruel!' she gasped. 'We'll have a talk when you come home to-night. I'll go away to-morrow if it's necessary. But to-day, give me the key just for to-day.'
Then the man, infuriated, pushed her, thrust her aside with a brutal gesture. 'Curse it all!' he cried, 'doesn't the road belong to me as much as you? Go and croak wherever you like! I tell you that it's all over.' And as little Nanet, seeing his sister sob, stepped forward with his air of decision, his pink face and tangle of fair hair, Ragu added: 'What! the brat as well! Am I to have the whole family on my shoulders now? Wait a minute, you young rascal; I'll let you feel my boot somewhere.'
Josine quickly drew Nanet towards her. And they both remained there, standing in the black mud, shivering with woe, whilst the two workmen went their way, disappearing amidst the gloom in the direction of Beauclair, whose lights, one by one, were now beginning to shine. Bourron, who at bottom was a good-natured fellow, had made a movement as if to intervene; then, however, in a spirit of imitation, yielding to the influence of his rakish companion, he had let things take their course. And Josine, after momentarily hesitating, asking what use it would be to follow, made up her mind to do so with despairing stubbornness as soon as the others had disappeared. With slow steps she descended the road in their wake, dragging her little brother by the hand, and keeping very close to the walls, taking indeed all sorts of precautions, as if she feared that on seeing her they might beat her to prevent her from dogging their steps.
Luc, in his indignation, had almost rushed on Ragu to administer a correction to him. Ah! the misery of labour!—man turned to a wolf by overpowering and unjust toil, by the difficulty of earning the bread for which hunger so wildly contends! During those two months of the strike, crumbs had been fought for amidst all the voracity and exasperation of daily quarrels. Then, on the very first pay-day, the man rushed to Drink for forgetfulness, leaving his companion of woe, whether she were his wife or a girl he had seduced, in the streets! And Luc remembered the four years which he had lately spent in a faubourg of Paris, in one of those huge, poison-reeking buildings where the misery of the working classes sobs and fights upon every floor! How many tragedies had he not witnessed, how many sorrows had he not attempted to assuage! The frightful problem born of all the shame and torture attending the wage system had often arisen before his mind; he had fully sounded that system's atrocious iniquity, the horrible sore which is eating away present-day society, and he had spent hours of generous enthusiasm in dreaming of a remedy, ever encountering, however, the iron wall of existing reality. And now, on the very evening of his return to Beauclair, he came upon that savage scene, that pale and mournful creature cast starving into the streets through the fault of the all-devouring monster, whose internal fire he could ever hear growling, whilst overhead it escaped in murky smoke rolling away under the tragic sky.
A gust of wind passed, and a few rain-drops flew by in the moaning wind. Luc had remained on the bridge, looking towards Beauclair and trying to take his bearings by the last gleams of light that fell athwart the sooty clouds. On his right was the Abyss, with its buildings bordering the Brias road; beneath him rolled the Mionne, whilst higher up, along an embankment on the left, passed the railway line from Brias to Magnolles. These filled the depths of the gorge, between the last spurs of the Bleuse Mountains, at the spot where they parted to disclose the great plain of La Roumagne. And in a kind of estuary, at the spot where the ravine debouched into the plain, Beauclair reared its houses: a wretched collection of working-class dwellings, prolonged over the flat by a little middle-class town, in which were the sub-prefecture, the town-hall, the law-courts, and the prison, whilst the ancient church, whose walls threatened to fall, stood part in new and part in old Beauclair. This town, the chief one of an arrondissement,[[2]] numbered barely six thousand souls, five thousand of them being poor humble souls in suffering bodies, warped, ground to death by iniquitous hard toil. And Luc took in everything fully when, above the Abyss, half-way up the promontory of the Bleuse Mountains, he distinguished the dark silhouette of the blast furnace of La Crêcherie. Labour! labour! ah! who would redeem and reorganise it according to the natural law of truth and equity so as to restore to it its position as the most noble, all-regulating, all-powerful force of the world, and so as to ensure a just division of the world's riches, thereby at last bringing the happiness which is rightly due to every man!