Germinal - Emile Zola [72]
La Maheude was aghast. What if Alzire hadn’t wiped the table? And what about her own soup? She hadn’t made it yet! With a rapid goodbye she rushed round to her own house without a glance to right or left.
But everything was spotlessly clean. When she saw that her mother was not coming back, Alzire had donned a tea-towel for an apron and solemnly begun to make the soup. She had pulled up the last leeks from the garden and picked some sorrel, and now she was carefully washing the vegetables; over the fire a large cauldron of water was heating up for the men’s bath when they got home. Henri and Lénore happened to be quiet, since they were busy tearing up an old calendar. Bonnemort sat silently smoking his pipe.
La Maheude was still trying to catch her breath when Mme Hennebeau knocked on the door.
‘May we, my good woman?’
Tall, blonde, a little full in the figure having reached her matronly prime at the age of forty, Mme Hennebeau smiled with forced affability and endeavoured to conceal her fear that she might dirty the bronze silk outfit she was wearing under a black velvet cape.
‘Come in, come in,’ she urged her guests. ‘We shan’t be in anyone’s way…Well, now! Look how clean everything is again. And this good woman has seven children! All our households are like this…As I was explaining, the Company lets the house to them for six francs a month. One large room on the ground floor, two bedrooms upstairs, a cellar and a garden.’
The man with the ribbon in his buttonhole and the lady in the fur coat, having arrived by the Paris train that morning, gazed about them blankly and seemed rather dazed by this sudden exposure to unfamiliar surroundings.
‘And a garden, too,’ the lady kept saying. ‘Really one could live here oneself it’s so charming.’
‘We give them all the coal they need and more,’ Mme Hennebeau continued. ‘A doctor visits them twice a week; and when they’re old, they’re paid a pension even though no deduction is ever made from their wages towards it.’
‘It’s Eldorado. A land of milk and honey!’ the gentleman muttered, quite entranced.
La Maheude had hastened to offer them all a seat. The ladies declined the offer. Mme Hennebeau was already growing tired of this visit, happy one minute to alleviate the tedium of her exile by playing this role of zoo guide, and then immediately repulsed by the vague odour of poverty that hung everywhere, despite the cleanliness of the carefully selected houses she dared to enter. In any case all she did was to repeat a series of stock phrases; she never otherwise bothered her head about all these workers toiling and suffering at her gates.
‘What lovely children!’ the lady in the fur coat said softly, while thinking them perfectly frightful with their excessively large heads and their mops of straw-coloured hair.
La Maheude had to say how old each of them was, and then they politely asked her about Estelle too. As a mark of respect old Bonnemort had taken the pipe from his mouth; but he still presented a rather worrying sight, ravaged as he had so clearly been by forty years of working down the mine, with his stiff legs, crumpled body and ashen face; and when he was seized by a violent coughing fit, he thought he had better go and spit outside, thinking that his black phlegm might upset people.
Alzire was the star of the show. What a pretty little housewife, with her tea-towel for an apron! They complimented her mother on having a little girl who was so grown-up for her age. And though nobody mentioned the hump, they could not help staring at the poor little cripple with uneasy sympathy.
‘Now,’ said Mme Hennebeau, resting her case, ‘if anyone in Paris asks you about our villages, you can tell them. Never noisier than it is now, people living proper family lives, with everybody healthy and happy as you can see. It’s the sort of place where you could come for a holiday, with clean air and lots of peace and quiet.’
‘It’s wonderful, wonderful!’ the gentleman exclaimed in one last burst of enthusiasm.
They left the house