For some little while past an oppressive silence had reigned in that furnace-like heat, interrupted only by the smothered sound of the banging down of the irons on the thick blanket covered with calico.
“Ah, well!” said Gervaise, “it’s enough to melt one!
We might have to take off our chemises.”
She was sitting on the floor, in front of a basin, starching some things.
Her sleeves were rolled up and her camisole was slipping down her shoulders.
Little curls of golden hair stuck were stuck to her skin by perspiration.
She carefully dipped caps, shirt-fronts, entire petticoats, and the trimmings of women’s drawers into the milky water.
Then she rolled the things up and placed them at the bottom of a square basket, after dipping her hand in a pail and shaking it over the portions of the shirts and drawers which she had not starched.
“This basketful’s for you, Madame Putois,” she said.
“Look sharp, now!
It dries at once, and will want doing all over again in an hour.”
Madame Putois, a thin little woman of forty-five, was ironing.
Though she was buttoned up in an old chestnut-colored dress, there was not a drop of perspiration to be seen.
She had not even taken her cap off, a black cap trimmed with green ribbons turned partly yellow.
And she stood perfectly upright in front of the ironing-table, which was too high for her, sticking out her elbows, and moving her iron with the jerky evolutions of a puppet.
On a sudden she exclaimed:
“Ah, no! Mademoiselle Clemence, you mustn’t take your camisole off.
You know I don’t like such indecencies.
Whilst you’re about it, you’d better show everything. There’s already three men over the way stopping to look.”
Tall Clemence called her an old beast between her teeth.
She was suffocating; she might certainly make herself comfortable; everyone was not gifted with a skin as dry as touchwood.
Besides no one could see anything; and she held up her arms, whilst her opulent bosom almost ripped her chemise, and her shoulders were bursting through the straps.
At the rate she was going, Clemence was not likely to have any marrow left in her bones long before she was thirty years old.
Mornings after big parties she was unable to feel the ground she trod upon, and fell asleep over her work, whilst her head and her stomach seemed as though stuffed full of rags.
But she was kept on all the same, for no other workwoman could iron a shirt with her style.
Shirts were her specialty.
“This is mine, isn’t it?” she declared, tapping her bosom. “And it doesn’t bite; it hurts nobody!”
“Clemence, put your wrapper on again,” said Gervaise.
“Madame Putois is right, it isn’t decent. People will begin to take my house for what it isn’t.”
So tall Clemence dressed herself again, grumbling the while.
“Mon Dieu! There’s prudery for you.”
And she vented her rage on the apprentice, that squint-eyed Augustine who was ironing some stockings and handkerchiefs beside her.
She jostled her and pushed her with her elbow; but Augustine who was of a surly disposition, and slyly spiteful in the way of an animal and a drudge, spat on the back of the other’s dress just out of revenge, without being seen.
Gervaise, during this incident, had commenced a cap belonging to Madame Boche, which she intended to take great pains with.
She had prepared some boiled starch to make it look new again. She was gently passing a little iron rounded at both ends over the inside of the crown of the cap, when a bony-looking woman entered the shop, her face covered with red blotches and her skirts sopping wet.
It was a washerwoman who employed three assistants at the wash-house in the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or.
“You’ve come too soon, Madame Bijard!” cried Gervaise.
“I told you to call this evening. I’m too busy to attend to you now!”
But as the washerwoman began lamenting and fearing that she would not be able to put all the things to soak that day, she consented to give her the dirty clothes at once.
They went to fetch the bundles in the left hand room where Etienne slept, and returned with enormous armfuls which they piled up on the floor at the back of the shop.
The sorting lasted a good half hour.
Gervaise made heaps all round her, throwing the shirts in one, the chemises in another, the handkerchiefs, the socks, the dish-cloths in others.
Whenever she came across anything belonging to a new customer, she marked it with a cross in red cotton thread so as to know it again.
And from all this dirty linen which they were throwing about there issued an offensive odor in the warm atmosphere.
“Oh! La, la. What a stench!” said Clemence, holding her nose.
“Of course there is! If it were clean they wouldn’t send it to us,” quietly explained Gervaise.
“It smells as one would expect it to, that’s all! We said fourteen chemises, didn’t we, Madame Bijard?
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen — “
And she continued counting aloud. Used to this kind of thing she evinced no disgust.
She thrust her bare pink arms deep into the piles of laundry: shirts yellow with grime, towels stiff from dirty dish water, socks threadbare and eaten away by sweat.