“Just obey me, for once!
I tell you I won’t have ‘em touched!”
“But why?” she asked, turning pale, a terrible suspicion crossing her mind.
“You don’t need your shirts now, you’re not going away. What can it matter to you if I take them?”
He hesitated for an instant, embarrassed by the piercing glance she fixed upon him.
“Why — why — “ stammered he, “because you go and tell everyone that you keep me, that you wash and mend.
Well!
It worries me, there!
Attend to your own business and I’ll attend to mine, washerwomen don’t work for dogs.”
She supplicated, she protested she had never complained; but he roughly closed the trunk and sat down upon it, saying,
“No!” to her face.
He could surely do as he liked with what belonged to him!
Then, to escape from the inquiring looks she leveled at him, he went and laid down on the bed again, saying that he was sleepy, and requesting her not to make his head ache with any more of her row.
This time indeed, he seemed to fall asleep.
Gervaise, for a while, remained undecided.
She was tempted to kick the bundle of dirty clothes on one side, and to sit down and sew.
But Lantier’s regular breathing ended by reassuring her.
She took the ball of blue and the piece of soap remaining from her last washing, and going up to the little ones who were quietly playing with some old corks in front of the window, she kissed them, and said in a low voice:
“Be very good, don’t make any noise; papa’s asleep.”
When she left the room, Claude’s and Etienne’s gentle laughter alone disturbed the great silence beneath the blackened ceiling.
It was ten o’clock.
A ray of sunshine entered by the half open window.
On the Boulevard, Gervaise turned to the left, and followed the Rue Neuve de la Goutte-d’Or.
As she passed Madame Fauconnier’s shop, she slightly bowed her head.
The wash-house she was bound for was situated towards the middle of the street, at the part where the roadway commenced to ascend.
The rounded, gray contours of the three large zinc wash tanks, studded with rivets, rose above the flat-roofed building.
Behind them was the drying room, a high second story, closed in on all sides by narrow-slatted lattices so that the air could circulate freely, and through which laundry could be seen hanging on brass wires.
The steam engine’s smokestack exhaled puffs of white smoke to the right of the water tanks.
Gervaise was used to puddles and did not bother to tuck her skirts up before making her way through the doorway, which was cluttered with jars of bleaching water.
She was already acquainted with the mistress of the wash-house, a delicate little woman with red, inflamed eyes, who sat in a small glazed closet with account books in front of her, bars of soap on shelves, balls of blue in glass bowls, and pounds of soda done up in packets; and, as she passed, she asked for her beetle and her scouring-brush, which she had left to be taken care of the last time she had done her washing there.
Then, after obtaining her number, she entered the wash-house.
It was an immense shed, with large clear windows, and a flat ceiling, showing the beams supported on cast-iron pillars.
Pale rays of light passed through the hot steam, which remained suspended like a milky fog.
Smoke arose from certain corners, spreading about and covering the recesses with a bluish veil.
A heavy moisture hung around, impregnated with a soapy odor, a damp insipid smell, continuous though at moments overpowered by the more potent fumes of the chemicals.
Along the washing-places, on either side of the central alley, were rows of women, with bare arms and necks, and skirts tucked up, showing colored stockings and heavy lace-up shoes.
They were beating furiously, laughing, leaning back to call out a word in the midst of the din, or stooping over their tubs, all of them brutal, ungainly, foul of speech, and soaked as though by a shower, with their flesh red and reeking.
All around the women continuously flowed a river from hot-water buckets emptied with a sudden splash, cold-water faucets left dripping, soap suds spattering, and the dripping from rinsed laundry which was hung up. It splashed their feet and drained away across the sloping flagstones.
The din of the shouting and the rhythmic beating was joined by the patter of steady dripping. It was slightly muffled by the moisture-soaked ceiling. Meanwhile, the steam engine could be heard as it puffed and snorted ceaselessly while cloaked in its white mist. The dancing vibration of its flywheel seemed to regulate the volume of the noisy turbulence.
Gervaise passed slowly along the alley, looking to the right and left, carrying her laundry bundle under one arm, with one hip thrust high and limping more than usual. She was jostled by several women in the hubbub.
“This way, my dear!” cried Madame Boche, in her loud voice.
Then, when the young woman had joined her at the very end on the left, the concierge, who was furiously rubbing a dirty sock, began to talk incessantly, without leaving off her work.
“Put your things there, I’ve kept your place. Oh, I sha’n’t be long over what I’ve got.
Boche scarcely dirties his things at all. And you, you won’t be long either, will you? Your bundle’s quite a little one.
Before twelve o’clock we shall have finished, and we can go off to lunch.
I used to send my things to a laundress in the Rue Poulet, but she destroyed everything with her chlorine and her brushes; so now I do the washing myself.
It’s so much saved; it only costs the soap. I say, you should have put those shirts to soak.
Those little rascals of children, on my word! One would think their bodies were covered with soot.”
Gervaise, having undone her bundle, was spreading out the little ones’ shirts, and as Madame Boche advised her to take a pailful of lye, she answered,
“Oh, no! warm water will do.