Her nose was very red, she shivered a bit, pressing her hands which were stiff with cold around the glass to warm them.
She had just come from the grocery story where you froze to death waiting for a quarter-pound of cheese and so she raved about the warmth of the shop.
It felt so good on one’s skin.
After warming up, she stretched out her long legs and the six of them relaxed together, supping their coffee slowly, surround by all the work still to be done.
Mother Coupeau and Virginie were the only ones on chairs, the others, on low benches, seemed to be sitting on the floor. Squint-eyed Augustine had pulled over a corner of the cloth below the skirt, stretching herself out on it.
No one spoke at first; all kept their noses in their glasses, enjoying their coffee.
“It’s not bad, all the same,” declared Clemence. But she was seized with a fit of coughing, and almost choked.
She leant her head against the wall to cough with more force.
“That’s a bad cough you’ve got,” said Virginie.
“Wherever did you catch it?”
“One never knows!” replied Clemence, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“It must have been the other night.
There were two girls who were flaying each other outside the
‘Grand-Balcony.’
I wanted to see, so I stood there whilst the snow was falling.
Ah, what a drubbing!
It was enough to make one die with laughing.
One had her nose almost pulled off; the blood streamed on the ground.
When the other, a great long stick like me, saw the blood, she slipped away as quick as she could. And I coughed nearly all night.
Besides that too, men are so stupid in bed, they don’t let you have any covers over you half the time.”
“Pretty conduct that,” murmured Madame Putois.
“You’re killing yourself, my girl.”
“And if it pleases me to kill myself!
Life isn’t so very amusing.
Slaving all the blessed day long to earn fifty-five sous, cooking one’s blood from morning to night in front of the stove; no, you know, I’ve had enough of it!
All the same though, this cough won’t do me the service of making me croak.
It’ll go off the same way it came.”
A short silence ensued.
The good-for-nothing Clemence, who led riots in low dancing establishments, and shrieked like a screech-owl at work, always saddened everyone with her thoughts of death.
Gervaise knew her well, and so merely said: “You’re never very gay the morning after a night of high living.”
The truth was that Gervaise did not like this talk about women fighting.
Because of the flogging at the wash-house it annoyed her whenever anyone spoke before her and Virginie of kicks with wooden shoes and of slaps in the face.
It so happened, too, that Virginie was looking at her and smiling.
“By the way,” she said quietly, “yesterday I saw some hair-pulling.
They almost tore each other to pieces.”
“Who were they?” Madame Putois inquired.
“The midwife and her maid, you know, a little blonde. What a pest the girl is!
She was yelling at her employer that she had got rid of a child for the fruit woman and that she was going to tell the police if she wasn’t paid to keep quiet.
So the midwife slapped her right in the face and then the little blonde jumped on her and started scratching her and pulling her hair, really — by the roots.
The sausage-man had to grab her to put a stop to it.”
The workwomen laughed.
Then they all took a sip of coffee.
“Do you believe that she really got rid of a child?” Clemence asked.
“Oh, yes! The rumor was all round the neighborhood,” Virginie answered.
“I didn’t see it myself, you understand, but it’s part of the job.
All midwives do it.”
“Well!” exclaimed Madame Putois.
“You have to be pretty stupid to put yourself in their hands.
No thanks, you could be maimed for life.
But there’s a sure way to do it. Drink a glass of holy water every evening and make the sign of the cross three times over your stomach with your thumb.