There were some stains left.”
And both together, the hatter and the groceress assumed a more important air, as if they had been on a throne whilst Gervaise dragged herself through the black mud at their feet.
Virginie must have enjoyed herself, for a yellowish flame darted from her cat’s eyes, and she looked at Lantier with an insidious smile.
At last she was revenged for that hiding she had received at the wash-house, and which she had never forgotten.
Whenever Gervaise ceased scrubbing, a sound of sawing could be heard from the back room.
Through the open doorway, Poisson’s profile stood out against the pale light of the courtyard.
He was off duty that day and was profiting by his leisure time to indulge in his mania for making little boxes.
He was seated at a table and was cutting out arabesques in a cigar box with extraordinary care.
“Say, Badingue!” cried Lantier, who had given him this surname again, out of friendship.
“I shall want that box of yours as a present for a young lady.”
Virginie gave him a pinch and he reached under the counter to run his fingers like a creeping mouse up her leg.
“Quite so,” said the policeman. “I was working for you, Auguste, in view of presenting you with a token of friendship.”
“Ah, if that’s the case, I’ll keep your little memento!” rejoined Lantier with a laugh.
“I’ll hang it round my neck with a ribbon.”
Then suddenly, as if this thought brought another one to his memory, “By the way,” he cried,
“I met Nana last night.”
This news caused Gervaise such emotion that she sunk down in the dirty water which covered the floor of the shop.
“Ah!” she muttered speechlessly.
“Yes; as I was going down the Rue des Martyrs, I caught sight of a girl who was on the arm of an old fellow in front of me, and I said to myself: I know that shape.
I stepped faster and sure enough found myself face to face with Nana. There’s no need to pity her, she looked very happy, with her pretty woolen dress on her back, a gold cross and an awfully pert expression.”
“Ah!” repeated Gervaise in a husky voice.
Lantier, who had finished the pastilles, took some barley-sugar out of another jar.
“She’s sneaky,” he resumed.
“She made a sign to me to follow her, with wonderful composure.
Then she left her old fellow somewhere in a cafe — oh a wonderful chap, the old bloke, quite used up! — and she came and joined me under the doorway.
A pretty little serpent, pretty, and doing the grand, and fawning on you like a little dog.
Yes, she kissed me, and wanted to have news of everyone — I was very pleased to meet her.”
“Ah!” said Gervaise for the third time.
She drew herself together, and still waited.
Hadn’t her daughter had a word for her then?
In the silence Poisson’s saw could be heard again.
Lantier, who felt gay, was sucking his barley-sugar, and smacking his lips.
“Well, if I saw her, I should go over to the other side of the street,” interposed Virginie, who had just pinched the hatter again most ferociously.
“It isn’t because you are there, Madame Coupeau, but your daughter is rotten to the core. Why, every day Poisson arrests girls who are better than she is.”
Gervaise said nothing, nor did she move; her eyes staring into space.
She ended by jerking her head to and fro, as if in answer to her thoughts, whilst the hatter, with a gluttonous mien, muttered:
“Ah, a man wouldn’t mind getting a bit of indigestion from that sort of rottenness.
It’s as tender as chicken.”
But the grocer gave him such a terrible look that he had to pause and quiet her with some delicate attention.
He watched the policeman, and perceiving that he had his nose lowered over his little box again, he profited of the opportunity to shove some barley-sugar into Virginie’s mouth.
Thereupon she laughed at him good-naturedly and turned all her anger against Gervaise.
“Just make haste, eh?
The work doesn’t do itself while you remain stuck there like a street post. Come, look alive, I don’t want to flounder about in the water till night time.”
And she added hatefully in a lower tone: “It isn’t my fault if her daughter’s gone and left her.”
No doubt Gervaise did not hear. She had begun to scrub the floor again, with her back bent and dragging herself along with a frog-like motion.
She still had to sweep the dirty water out into the gutter, and then do the final rinsing.
After a pause, Lantier, who felt bored, raised his voice again:
“Do you know, Badingue,” he cried, “I met your boss yesterday in the Rue de Rivoli.
He looked awfully down in the mouth.
He hasn’t six months’ life left in his body. Ah! after all, with the life he leads — “