Silence reigned: they had not exchanged a single word. He seemed to be waiting for something, while she, swallowing her misery and determined not to show her feelings, hurried about her work. When she started making up a parcel of dirty linen, which had been discarded in one corner of the room, behind the trunk, he finally asked: ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’
At first, she did not answer. Then, when he angrily repeated the question, she changed her mind: ‘I should think you could see the answer to that… I’m going to wash all this lot… We can’t have the children living in such filth.’
He let her pick up two or three handkerchiefs, then, after a further silence, he asked: ‘Got any money?’
At once, she got up and looked him straight in the face, without letting go of the children’s shirt that she was holding.
‘Money! Where do you expect me to steal it from? You know I got three francs the day before yesterday on my black skirt. We’ve had two meals out of it: those cooked meats don’t last long… Of course I don’t have money. I’ve got four sous5 for the wash… I don’t earn it the way some women do.’
He ignored the jibe. He had got up off the bed and was looking over the few rags hanging around the room. In the end, he took down the trousers and the scarf, opened the chest of drawers and added a woman’s shift and two blouses to the heap; then, piling all of them on to Gervaise’s arm, said: ‘Right, take this lot to the pawnshop.’
‘Perhaps you’d like me take the children too?’ she replied. ‘Huh? if they lent money on kids, there’d be a real clear-out!’
She did go to the pawnbroker’s, even so. When she came back, half an hour later, she put down a five-franc piece on the mantelpiece, adding the pawn ticket to the others, between the two candlesticks.
‘There’s what they gave me,’ she said. ‘I asked for six, but no way… No! They won’t starve to death, that’s for sure. You always see plenty of people in there.’
Lantier did not take the five-franc coin straight away. He would have liked her to have got some change, so that he could leave her something, but when he looked at the chest and saw some leftover ham, wrapped in a piece of paper, as well as a scrap of bread, he decided to slip the coin into his waistcoat pocket.
‘I didn’t go to the dairy because we owe them for a week already,’ Gervaise added. ‘But I’ll come back early, so while I’m out, you go down and get a loaf, and some chops cooked in egg and breadcrumbs, and we can have a meal together… Fetch up a litre of wine, as well.’
He did not say no. The quarrel seemed to be over. The young woman finished wrapping up the dirty clothes, but when she started to take Lantier’s shirts and socks from the bottom of the trunk, he shouted at her to leave them alone.
‘You leave my washing, do you hear? I won’t have it!’
‘What won’t you have?’ she asked, straightening herself. ‘I don’t suppose you intend to put these grubby things on again, do you? They’ve got to be washed.’
All the time she was anxiously watching him, seeing the same hard expression on the young man’s handsome face, as though nothing now would ever soften it again. He lost his temper and grabbed the washing, which he threw back into the trunk.
‘God in heaven, why don’t you do what I tell you for once! I told you I wouldn’t have it.’
‘Why on earth not?’ she stammered, going pale as a dreadful suspicion entered her head. ‘You don’t need your shirts right now, you’re not going out anywhere… What does it matter to you if I take them?’
He hesitated for a moment, slightly put out by the burning look in her eyes.
‘Why? Why?’ he blurted out. ‘God, woman, you’ll be telling everybody that you’re keeping me, taking in washing and sewing. Well, I don’t like it, see? You do your things, I’ll do mine… Washerwomen expect to be paid for their work.’
She begged him, saying that she had never complained, but he slammed the trunk shut and sat down on top of it, shouting: ‘No!’ in her face. He was the boss of his own things. Then, to escape her look, which followed him around, he went back to the bed and lay down, saying that he was tired and telling her to stop bothering him. And this time he really did seem to go to sleep…
Gervaise hesitated for a moment. She was tempted to put the bundle of washing down and to sit there, sewing. In the end, Lantier’s regular breathing reassured her. She picked up the ball of blueing and the piece of soap that she had left from the last wash, and went over to the children who were quietly playing with some old corks, by the window. She kissed them and whispered: ‘Mind you be good now and don’t make a noise. Dad’s asleep.’
When she left, Claude and Etienne’s hushed laughter was the only sound to be heard under the dark ceiling in the deep silence of the room. It was ten o’clock. A ray of sunlight was streaming through the half-open window.
On the main road, Gervaise turned left and went down the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d’Or.6 As she went past Mme Fauconnier’s small shop, she greeted her with a little nod. The wash-house was halfway down the street, at the point where it started to go uphill. Above a flat-roofed building, you could see the round grey bulk of three huge water tanks, cylinders of galvanized metal studded with rivets, while behind them loomed the drying-room, a tall second–storey area enclosed on all sides by shutters with narrow slats, for the air to blow through, behind which items of washing could be seen drying on lines of brass wire. The narrow pipe from the engine, to the right of the tanks, puffed out whiffs of white steam in rough, regular breaths. Without holding up her skirts Gervaise, who was used to puddles, went in through a doorway cluttered with tubs of bleach. She was already acquainted with the manageress, a delicate little woman with unhealthy eyes, who sat behind a window, with the registers in front of her, in a little room where there were cakes of soap on shelves, balls of blueing in jars and pounds of bicarbonate of soda weighed out into packets. As she went past, Gervaise asked for the beetle7 and brush that she had left for the manageress to look after, after her last wash. Then, taking her number, she went in.
The wash–house was a vast shed with a flat roof, supported by visible beams on cast-iron pillars and enclosed by wide clear-glass windows, which admitted the pale daylight so that it could pass freely through the hot steam that hung like a milky mist. Here and there, wisps of smoke were rising, spreading out to cover the back of the shed with a blueish veil. A heavy dampness rained down, laden with the smell of soap – a moist, insipid, persistent smell, in which, from time to time, stronger whiffs of bleach would dominate. Along the washing-boards that lined both sides of the central aisle were rows of women, their arms naked to the shoulders, their necks bare and their skirts tucked in to reveal coloured stockings and heavy, laced-up shoes. They were beating fiercely, laughing, throwing their heads back to shout something through the din or leaning forward into their tubs, foul-mouthed, brutish, ungainly, soaked through, their flesh reddened and steaming. Around and underneath them, a great stream coursed by, coming from buckets of hot water carried along and tipped out in a single movement, or else from open taps of cold water pissing down, the splashes off the beetles, the drips from rinsed garments, all running off in rivulets across the sloping stone floor from the ponds in which their feet paddled. And, in the midst of the cries, the rhythmical beating noises and the murmurous sound of rain – this tempestuous clamour deadened by the damp roof – the steam-engine, over to the right, completely whitened by a fine dew, panted and snored away unceasingly, its flywheel shivering and dancing, seeming to regulate this monstrous din.
Gervaise, meanwhile, was looking to right and left as she advanced with short steps down the aisle. She had her parcel of washing under her arm, one hip raised, her limp more pronounced than ever in the throng of women who jostled her as they went past.
‘Over here, sweetie!’ thundered Mme Boche.
Then, when the young woman came over to join her, on the left, at the end of the line, the concierge, who was rubbing away ferociously at a sock
, began to speak, in short phrases, without pausing in her work.
‘You slip in here, I’ve kept you a place… Oh, I shan’t be long! Boche keeps his clothes pretty clean… What about you? It won’t take you long, either, by the look of it. You haven’t got too much in there. We’ll be done with this lot before twelve, so we can go and get a bite to eat… I used to give mine to a laundress in the Rue Poulet, but she was destroying it all for me with that chlorine and brushes of hers. So now I wash it myself. It’s pure gain. It only costs me the price of the soap… Well I never! You should have put those shirts to soak! Those wretched kids! They’ve got soot on their bottoms!’
Gervaise was undoing her parcel, spreading out the children’s shirts; and when Mme Boche advised her to take a bucket of soda, she answered: ‘No, no! Hot water’ll do… I know what I’m at.’
She had sorted the washing, putting aside the few coloured garments; and then, after filling her tub with four buckets of cold water from the tap behind her, she threw in the pile of white clothes and, hitching up her skirt and tucking it between her thighs, she got into an upright box which came up to her waist.
‘You do know what you’re at, don’t you,’ Mme Boche echoed. ‘Is it right: you were a laundress back home, sweetie?’
With her sleeves rolled back to display a blonde’s fine arms, still young and only slightly reddened at the elbows, Gervaise started to clean her washing. She had just spread a shirt out on the narrow washboard, worn away and whitened by the constant effect of water; she was rubbing the soap in, turning the shirt over and rubbing it on the other side. Before answering, she grasped her beetle and began to strike the shirt, shouting over the noise and punctuating her remarks with steady, hard blows.
‘Yes, yes, laundress… When I was ten… Twelve years ago… We went down to the river… It used to smell better than here… You should have seen it… There was a spot under the trees… with clear running water… You know, in Plassans8… I doubt if you know it… It’s near Marseille…’
‘You don’t half go it!’
Mme Boche exclaimed, amazed by the force Gervaise was putting behind each stroke. ‘What a wench! Those little lady’s arms of hers: she could flatten an iron with them!’
The conversation went on, very loudly. At times, the concierge had to lean forward to catch what Gervaise was saying. All the white linen was beaten – and how! – and Gervaise threw it back into the tub, then took each piece out one by one to soap a second time, and scrub it. She held the garment on the washboard with one hand, while with the other, holding the short scrubbing brush, she drove out of the material a froth of dirty suds, which hung down in long strands. Now, having only the slight noise from the brush to contend with, the two women came closer and talked more privately.
‘No, we’re not married,’ Gervaise said. ‘I don’t try to hide it. Lantier’s not such a nice chap that you’d want to marry him. And if it wasn’t for the children… I was fourteen and him eighteen when we had our first… The other one came four years after that. It happened as it always does, you know how it is. I wasn’t happy at home. Old Papa Macquart would kick me up the backside at the least excuse, and when it’s like that, you start having fun outside… We might have got married, but one way or another our parents didn’t like the idea.’
She shook her hands, which were going red beneath the white suds.
‘The water’s that hard in Paris,’ she said.
Mine Boche was washing only half-heartedly. She stopped, making her soaping time last, so that she could stay there and listen to this story, which had been tormenting her with curiosity for the past fortnight. Her lips were half open in her plump face and her popping eyes glowed. Satisfied at having guessed the situation, she was thinking: That’s right, the girl’s giving too much away: there must have been a row. Then, aloud, she said:
‘Doesn’t he treat you well then?’
‘Don’t talk to me about it!’ Gervaise answered. ‘Back home, he was real good to me, but since we came up to Paris, I can’t make it out… I should tell you, his mother died last year and left him something, around seventeen hundred francs. He wanted to set off for Paris. So, seeing as Papa Macquart was still laying into me as and when he felt like it, I agreed to go with him; and we made the journey with the two kids. He was meant to set me up as a laundress and work at his own trade, which is hat-making. We could have been happy as a pair of larks… But the thing is, Lantier’s ambitious, a spendthrift, a man who only thinks of his own enjoyment. In a word, he’s a bit of a good-for-nothing… So we came to live in the Hôtel Montmartre, in the Rue Montmartre – and it was dinners here, carriages there, the theatre, a watch for him, a silk dress for me, because he’s quite a decent sort when he’s loaded. You can imagine: the full works, so that in two months, we were cleaned out. So we moved into the Hôtel Boncoeur and that’s when this lousy life began – ’
She stopped, with a sudden lump in her throat, holding back her tears. She had finished scrubbing the clothes.
‘Got to fetch my hot water,’ she muttered.
But Mme Boche, annoyed at seeing the flow of confidences interrupted in this way, called over the wash-house boy who happened to be passing.
‘Charlie, be a good lad and fetch over some hot water for this lady; she’s in a hurry.’
The boy took the bucket and brought it back full. Gervaise paid him: it was one sou a bucket. She poured the hot water into the tub and gave the linen one last soaping, by hand, leaning over the washboard in a cloud of steam that left threads of grey smoke in her blonde hair.
‘Hey, why don’t you put some crystals in, I’ve got some here,’ the concierge said, obligingly. And she emptied the remains of a bag of soda, which she had brought with her, into Gervaise’s tub. She also offered her some bleach, but the other woman refused: that was for when you had grease or wine stains on the clothes.
‘I think he’s a bit of a ladies’ man,’ Mme Boche went on, coming back to the subject of Lantier, but without naming him.
Gervaise, bent double, her hands thrust deep and clenching the clothes, merely shook her head.
‘No, no, I do,’ the concierge insisted. ‘I’ve noticed a lot of little things…’
But when Gervaise pulled herself up and stared at her, white as a sheet, she changed her mind.
‘Oh, no, I’m not saying I know anything… He likes a good laugh, I think, that’s all… You know the two girls who live in our house, Adèle and Virginie, well, he has a bit of fun with them, but I’m sure that’s as far as it goes.’
The young woman was now standing in front of her, sweat pouring down her face, her arms streaming, and staring intently at her. This irritated the concierge, who struck her breast and gave her word of honour, shouting: ‘I don’t know nothing, I swear I don’t!’
Then, more calmly, she added in the sort of soothing tones one uses with someone who doesn’t want to know the truth: ‘If you ask me, he has honest eyes… He’ll marry you, sweetie, I swear he will!’
Gervaise wiped her brow with her wet hand, then pulled another piece of clothing out of the water, shaking her head. For a short while, neither of them said anything. Around them, the wash-house had gone quiet. Eleven o’clock struck. Half the women, sitting with one leg on the rim of their tubs and a litre of wine uncorked between their feet, were eating sausages in slit loaves of bread; only the housewives, who had come to wash their little bundles of clothes, hurried to finish the job, looking up at the round clock over the office. A few thumps still rang out, at intervals, amid hushed laughs and conversations muffled by a greedy sound of chomping jaws, while the steam-engine, ploughing on without halt or respite, seemed to have raised its voice, vibrating, snorting and filling the vast shed. But not one of the women heard it; it was like the very breath of the wash–house, a burning breath, which draws the eternal fog of floating steam up to beneath the roof beams. The heat was becoming intolerable. To the left, through the high windows, rays of sunlight poured in, lighting the
misty vapours with opalescent streaks of delicate greyish pinks and blues. And, since voices were starting to be raised in complaint, the lad Charles went from one window to the next, pulling down coarse linen blinds; then he went over to the other side, where it was shady, and opened the fanlights. He was applauded with clapping hands, and a wave of merriment went round the place. Soon, even the last washboards fell silent. The women, their mouths full, waved only the open knives they were holding. The silence became so profound that one could even hear at the far end the regular scraping of the shovel that the boilerman was using to fill the boiler of the engine with coal.
All this time, Gervaise was washing her coloured linen in the hot water, thick with soap, which she had kept aside. When she had finished, she drew up a trestle and hung all the items across it, so that they made blueish puddles on the ground. And she started to rinse. The cold tap behind her was running into a huge vat, fastened to the ground, with two wooden bars across it to support the clothes. Above these, in the air, were two other bars on which the linen could drip.
‘That’s almost it; not too hard, was it?’ said Mme Boche. ‘I’ll stay behind and help you to wring it all out.’
‘Oh, don’t you bother, thanks all the same,’ said the young woman, who was punching and splashing the coloured linen in the clear water. ‘Now, if I had any sheets, I wouldn’t say no.’
For all that, she was obliged to accept the concierge’s help. The two of them were busy wringing out – one at each end – a skirt and a little brown woollen garment, badly dyed so that the water from it was a yellow colour, when Mme Boche exclaimed:
‘Well, look at that! It’s that Virginie, the tall one. Now, what can she want to wash, her with her four old rags in a kerchief?’
Gervaise looked up sharply. Virginie was a woman of her own age, but taller, dark and pretty, despite a rather long face. She was wearing an old black, flounced dress and a red ribbon round her neck, and her hair was carefully brushed into a bun in a blue chenille net. For a short while, in the middle of the central aisle, she rubbed her eyes as though looking for someone; then, when she caught sight of Gervaise, she deliberately passed close by her, stiff, sneering, swinging her hips, and found a place in the same row, five tubs away.