“It’s too abominable; you can’t remain here. Come with me.
He won’t hear us. What are you afraid of?”
“No,” she replied firmly, shaking her head vigorously.
Then, to show that she would remain where she was, she began to take off her clothes, throwing her silk dress over a chair. She was quickly in only her chemise and petticoat.
Well, it was her own bed.
She wanted to sleep in her own bed and made two more attempts to reach a clean corner of the bed.
Lantier, having no intention of giving up, whispered things to her.
What a predicament she was in, with a louse of a husband that prevented her from crawling under her own blankets and a low skunk behind her just waiting to take advantage of the situation to possess her again.
She begged Lantier to be quiet.
Turning toward the small room where Nana and mother Coupeau slept, she listened anxiously.
She could hear only steady breathing.
“Leave me alone, Auguste,” she repeated. “You’ll wake them.
Be sensible.”
Lantier didn’t answer, but just smiled at her. Then he began to kiss her on the ear just as in the old days.
Gervaise felt like sobbing. Her strength deserted her; she felt a great buzzing in her ears, a violent tremor passed through her.
She advanced another step forward.
And she was again obliged to draw back.
It was not possible, the disgust was too great. She felt on the verge of vomiting herself.
Coupeau, overpowered by intoxication, lying as comfortably as though on a bed of down, was sleeping off his booze, without life in his limbs, and with his mouth all on one side.
The whole street might have entered and laughed at him, without a hair of his body moving.
“Well, I can’t help it,” she faltered.
“It’s his own fault.
Mon Dieu!
He’s forcing me out of my own bed. I’ve no bed any longer. No, I can’t help it.
It’s his own fault.”
She was trembling so she scarcely knew what she was doing.
While Lantier was urging her into his room, Nana’s face appeared at one of the glass panes in the door of the little room.
The young girl, pale from sleep, had awakened and gotten out of bed quietly.
She stared at her father lying in his vomit. Then, she stood watching until her mother disappeared into Lantier’s room.
She watched with the intensity and the wide-open eyes of a vicious child aflame with curiosity.
CHAPTER IX
That winter mother Coupeau nearly went off in one of her coughing fits.
Each December she could count on her asthma keeping her on her back for two and three weeks at a time.
She was no longer fifteen, she would be seventy-three on Saint-Anthony’s day.
With that she was very rickety, getting a rattling in her throat for nothing at all, though she was plump and stout.
The doctor said she would go off coughing, just time enough to say: “Good-night, the candle’s out!”
When she was in her bed mother Coupeau became positively unbearable.
It is true though that the little room in which she slept with Nana was not at all gay.
There was barely room for two chairs between the beds.
The wallpaper, a faded gray, hung loose in long strips.
The small window near the ceiling let in only a dim light. It was like a cavern.
At night, as she lay awake, she could listen to the breathing of the sleeping Nana as a sort of distraction; but in the day-time, as there was no one to keep her company from morning to night, she grumbled and cried and repeated to herself for hours together, as she rolled her head on the pillow:
“Good heavens! What a miserable creature I am!
Good heavens! What a miserable creature I am!
They’ll leave me to die in prison, yes, in prison!”
As soon as anyone called, Virginie or Madame Boche, to ask after her health, she would not reply directly, but immediately started on her list of complaints:
“Oh, I pay dearly for the food I eat here.
I’d be much better off with strangers.
I asked for a cup of tisane and they brought me an entire pot of hot water. It was a way of saying that I drank too much.
I brought Nana up myself and she scurries away in her bare feet every morning and I never see her again all day.