“I say Golden-Mug, here’s a lady wants you!”
But a clanging of iron drowned the cry!
Gervaise went to the end. She reached a door and stretching out her neck looked in.
At first she could distinguish nothing.
The forge had died down, but there was still a little glow which held back the advancing shadows from its corner.
Great shadows seemed to float in the air.
At times black shapes passed before the fire, shutting off this last bit of brightness, silhouettes of men so strangely magnified that their arms and legs were indistinct.
Gervaise, not daring to venture in, called from the doorway in a faint voice:
“Monsieur Goujet!
Monsieur Goujet!”
Suddenly all became lighted up.
Beneath the puff of the bellows a jet of white flame had ascended and the whole interior of the shed could be seen, walled in by wooden planks, with openings roughly plastered over, and brick walls reinforcing the corners.
Coal-ash had painted the whole expanse a sooty grey.
Spider webs hung from the beams like rags hung up to dry, heavy with the accumulated dust of years.
On shelves along the walls, or hanging from nails, or tossed into corners, she saw rusty iron, battered implements and huge tools.
The white flame flared higher, like an explosion of dazzling sunlight revealing the trampled dirt underfoot, where the polished steel of four anvils fixed on blocks took on a reflection of silver sprinkled with gold.
Then Gervaise recognized Goujet in front of the forge by his beautiful yellow beard.
Etienne was blowing the bellows.
Two other workmen were there, but she only beheld Goujet and walked forward and stood before him.
“Why it’s Madame Gervaise!” he exclaimed with a bright look on his face.
“What a pleasant surprise.”
But as his comrades appeared to be rather amused, he pushed Etienne towards his mother and resumed:
“You’ve come to see the youngster.
He behaves himself well, he’s beginning to get some strength in his wrists.”
“Well!” she said, “it isn’t easy to find your way here.
I thought I was going to the end of the world.”
After telling about her journey, she asked why no one in the shop knew Etienne’s name.
Goujet laughed and explained to her that everybody called him “Little Zouzou” because he had his hair cut short like that of a Zouave.
While they were talking together Etienne stopped working the bellows and the flame of the forge dwindled to a rosy glow amid the gathering darkness.
Touched by the presence of this smiling young woman, the blacksmith stood gazing at her.
Then, as neither continued speaking, he seemed to recollect and broke the silence:
“Excuse me, Madame Gervaise, I’ve something that has to be finished. You’ll stay, won’t you?
You’re not in anybody’s way.”
She remained.
Etienne returned to the bellows.
The forge was soon ablaze again with a cloud of sparks; the more so as the youngster, wanting to show his mother what he could do, was making the bellows blow a regular hurricane.
Goujet, standing up watching a bar of iron heating, was waiting with the tongs in his hand.
The bright glare illuminated him without a shadow — sleeves rolled back, shirt neck open, bare arms and chest.
When the bar was at white heat he seized it with the tongs and cut it with a hammer on the anvil, in pieces of equal length, as though he had been gently breaking pieces of glass.
Then he put the pieces back into the fire, from which he took them one by one to work them into shape.
He was forging hexagonal rivets.
He placed each piece in a tool-hole of the anvil, bent down the iron that was to form the head, flattened the six sides and threw the finished rivet still red-hot on to the black earth, where its bright light gradually died out; and this with a continuous hammering, wielding in his right hand a hammer weighing five pounds, completing a detail at every blow, turning and working the iron with such dexterity that he was able to talk to and look at those about him.
The anvil had a silvery ring.
Without a drop of perspiration, quite at his ease, he struck in a good-natured sort of a way, not appearing to exert himself more than on the evenings when he cut out pictures at home.
“Oh! these are little rivets of twenty millimetres,” said he in reply to Gervaise’s questions.
“A fellow can do his three hundred a day. But it requires practice, for one’s arm soon grows weary.”
And when she asked him if his wrist did not feel stiff at the end of the day he laughed aloud.
Did she think him a young lady?
His wrist had had plenty of drudgery for fifteen years past; it was now as strong as the iron implements it had been so long in contact with.
She was right though; a gentleman who had never forged a rivet or a bolt, and who would try to show off with his five pound hammer, would find himself precious stiff in the course of a couple of hours.