CHAPTER XII
It must have been the Saturday after quarter day, something like the 12th or 13th of January — Gervaise didn’t quite know.
She was losing her wits, for it was centuries since she had had anything warm in her stomach.
Ah! what an infernal week!
A complete clear out.
Two loaves of four pounds each on Tuesday, which had lasted till Thursday; then a dry crust found the night before, and finally not a crumb for thirty-six hours, a real dance before the cupboard!
What did she know, by the way, what she felt on her back, was the frightful cold, a black cold, the sky as grimy as a frying-pan, thick with snow which obstinately refused to fall.
When winter and hunger are both together in your guts, you may tighten your belt as much as you like, it hardly feeds you.
Perhaps Coupeau would bring back some money in the evening.
He said that he was working.
Anything is possible, isn’t it?
And Gervaise, although she had been caught many and many a time, had ended by relying on this coin.
After all sorts of incidents, she herself couldn’t find as much as a duster to wash in the whole neighborhood; and even an old lady, whose rooms she did, had just given her the sack, charging her with swilling her liqueurs.
No one would engage her, she was washed up everywhere; and this secretly suited her, for she had fallen to that state of indifference when one prefers to croak rather than move one’s fingers.
At all events, if Coupeau brought his pay home they would have something warm to eat.
And meanwhile, as it wasn’t yet noon, she remained stretched on the mattress, for one doesn’t feel so cold or so hungry when one is lying down.
The bed was nothing but a pile of straw in a corner.
Bed and bedding had gone, piece by piece, to the second-hand dealers of the neighborhood.
First she had ripped open the mattress to sell handfuls of wool at ten sous a pound.
When the mattress was empty she got thirty sous for the sack so as to be able to have coffee. Everything else had followed.
Well, wasn’t the straw good enough for them?
Gervaise bent herself like a gun-trigger on the heap of straw, with her clothes on and her feet drawn up under her rag of a skirt, so as to keep them warm.
And huddled up, with her eyes wide open, she turned some scarcely amusing ideas over in her mind that morning.
Ah! no, they couldn’t continue living without food.
She no longer felt her hunger, only she had a leaden weight on her chest and her brain seemed empty.
Certainly there was nothing gay to look at in the four corners of the hovel.
A perfect kennel now, where greyhounds, who wear wrappers in the streets, would not even have lived in effigy.
Her pale eyes stared at the bare walls.
Everything had long since gone to “uncle’s.”
All that remained were the chest of drawers, the table and a chair. Even the marble top of the chest of drawers and the drawers themselves, had evaporated in the same direction as the bedstead.
A fire could not have cleaned them out more completely; the little knick-knacks had melted, beginning with the ticker, a twelve franc watch, down to the family photos, the frames of which had been bought by a woman keeping a second-hand store; a very obliging woman, by the way, to whom Gervaise carried a saucepan, an iron, a comb and who gave her five, three or two sous in exchange, according to the article; enough, at all events to go upstairs again with a bit of bread.
But now there only remained a broken pair of candle snuffers, which the woman refused to give her even a sou for.
Oh! if she could only have sold the rubbish and refuse, the dust and the dirt, how speedily she would have opened shop, for the room was filthy to behold!
She only saw cobwebs in the corners and although cobwebs are good for cuts, there are, so far, no merchants who buy them.
Then turning her head, abandoning the idea of doing a bit of trade, Gervaise gathered herself together more closely on her straw, preferring to stare through the window at the snow-laden sky, at the dreary daylight, which froze the marrow in her bones.
What a lot of worry!
Though, after all, what was the use of putting herself in such a state and puzzling her brains?
If she had only been able to have a snooze.
But her hole of a home wouldn’t go out of her mind.
Monsieur Marescot, the landlord had come in person the day before to tell them that he would turn them out into the street if the two quarters’ rent now overdue were not paid during the ensuing week.
Well, so he might, they certainly couldn’t be worse off on the pavement!
Fancy this ape, in his overcoat and his woolen gloves, coming upstairs to talk to them about rent, as if they had had a treasure hidden somewhere!
Just the same with that brute of a Coupeau, who couldn’t come home now without beating her; she wished him in the same place as the landlord.
She sent them all there, wishing to rid herself of everyone, and of life too.
She was becoming a real storehouse for blows.
Coupeau had a cudgel, which he called his ass’s fan, and he fanned his old woman.
You should just have seen him giving her abominable thrashings, which made her perspire all over.
She was no better herself, for she bit and scratched him.
Then they stamped about in the empty room and gave each other such drubbings as were likely to ease them of all taste for bread for good.
But Gervaise ended by not caring a fig for these thwacks, not more than she did for anything else.