“You’re out of luck, comrade,” the others told Coupeau.
They ordered two fresh bottles.
The glasses were filled up again as fast as they were emptied, the booze increased.
Towards five o’clock it began to get disgusting, so much so that Lantier kept very quiet, thinking of how to give the others the slip; brawling and throwing the wine about was no longer his style.
Just then Coupeau stood up to make the drunkard’s sign of the cross.
Touching his head he pronounced Montpernasse, then Menilmonte as he brought his hand to his right shoulder, Bagnolet giving himself a blow in the chest, and wound up by saying stewed rabbit three times as he hit himself in the pit of the stomach.
Then the hatter took advantage of the clamor which greeted the performance of this feat and quietly made for the door.
His comrades did not even notice his departure.
He had already had a pretty good dose.
But once outside he shook himself and regained his self-possession; and he quietly made for the shop, where he told Gervaise that Coupeau was with some friends.
Two days passed by. The zinc-worker had not returned.
He was reeling about the neighborhood, but no one knew exactly where.
Several persons, however, stated that they had seen him at mother Baquet’s, at the
“Butterfly,” and at the
“Little Old Man with a Cough.”
Only some said that he was alone, whilst others affirmed that he was in the company of seven or eight drunkards like himself.
Gervaise shrugged her shoulders in a resigned sort of way.
Mon Dieu! She just had to get used to it.
She never ran about after her old man; she even went out of her way if she caught sight of him inside a wineshop, so as to not anger him; and she waited at home till he returned, listening at night-time to hear if he was snoring outside the door. He would sleep on a rubbish heap, or on a seat, or in a piece of waste land, or across a gutter. On the morrow, after having only badly slept off his booze of the day before, he would start off again, knocking at the doors of all the consolation dealers, plunging afresh into a furious wandering, in the midst of nips of spirits, glasses of wine, losing his friends and then finding them again, going regular voyages from which he returned in a state of stupor, seeing the streets dance, the night fall and the day break, without any other thought than to drink and sleep off the effects wherever he happened to be.
When in the latter state, the world was ended so far as he was concerned.
On the second day, however, Gervaise went to Pere Colombe’s l’Assommoir to find out something about him; he had been there another five times, they were unable to tell her anything more.
All she could do was to take away his tools which he had left under a seat.
In the evening Lantier, seeing that the laundress seemed very worried, offered to take her to a music-hall, just by way of passing a pleasant hour or two.
She refused at first, she was in no mood for laughing.
Otherwise she would not have said, “no,” for the hatter made the proposal in too straightforward a manner for her to feel any mistrust.
He seemed to feel for her in quite a paternal way.
Never before had Coupeau slept out two nights running.
So that in spite of herself, she would go every ten minutes to the door, with her iron in her hand, and look up and down the street to see if her old man was coming.
It might be that Coupeau had broken a leg, or fallen under a wagon and been crushed and that might be good riddance to bad rubbish.
She saw no reason for cherishing in her heart any affection for a filthy character like him, but it was irritating, all the same, to have to wonder every night whether he would come in or not.
When it got dark, Lantier again suggested the music-hall, and this time she accepted.
She decided it would be silly to deny herself a little pleasure when her husband had been out on the town for three days.
If he wasn’t coming in, then she might as well go out herself.
Let the entire dump burn up if it felt like it. She might even put a torch to it herself. She was getting tired of the boring monotony of her present life.
They ate their dinner quickly.
Then, when she went off at eight o’clock, arm-in-arm with the hatter, Gervaise told mother Coupeau and Nana to go to bed at once.
The shop was shut and the shutters up.
She left by the door opening into the courtyard and gave Madame Boche the key, asking her, if her pig of a husband came home, to have the kindness to put him to bed.
The hatter was waiting for her under the big doorway, arrayed in his best and whistling a tune.
She had on her silk dress.
They walked slowly along the pavement, keeping close to each other, lighted up by the glare from the shop windows which showed them smiling and talking together in low voices.
The music-hall was in the Boulevard de Rochechouart.
It had originally been a little cafe and had been enlarged by means of a kind of wooden shed erected in the courtyard.
At the door a string of glass globes formed a luminous porch.
Tall posters pasted on boards stood upon the ground, close to the gutter.
“Here we are,” said Lantier.
“To-night, first appearance of Mademoiselle Amanda, serio-comic.”
Then he caught sight of Bibi-the-Smoker, who was also reading the poster.
Bibi had a black eye; some punch he had run up against the day before.
“Well! Where’s Coupeau?” inquired the hatter, looking about.