GERMINAL
because it was clean. No doubt they never told them stories about the head captain. One can afford to be clean when one has lovers who earn three thousand francs, and are lodged and warmed, without counting presents. If it was clean above it was not clean underneath. And all the time that the visitors remained opposite, they went on chattering.
"There, they are coming out," said Levaque at last. "They are going all around. Why, look, my dear—I believe they are going into your place."
Maheude was seized with fear. Who knows whether Alzire had sponged over the table? And her soup, also, which was not yet ready! She stammered a good-day, and ran off home without a single glance aside.
But everything was bright. Alzire, very seriously, with a cloth in front of her, had set about making the soup, seeing that her mother did not return. She had pulled up the last leeks from the garden, gathered the sorrel, and was just then cleaning the vegetables, while a large kettle on the fire was heating the water for the men's baths when they should return. Henri and Lènore were good by chance, being absorbed in tearing up an old almanack. Father Bonnemort was smoking his pipe in silence. As Maheude was getting her breath Madame Hennebeau knocked.
"You will allow me, will you not, my good woman?"
Tall and fair, a little heavy in her superb maturity of forty years, she smiled with an effort of affability, without showing too prominently her fear of soiling her bronze silk dress and black velvet mantle.
"Come in, come in," she said to her guests. "We are not disturbing anyone. Now, isn't this clean again! And this good woman has seven children! All our households are like this. I ought to explain to you that the Company rents them the house at six francs a month. A large room on the ground floor, two rooms above, a cellar, and a garden."
The decorated gentlemen and the lady in the fur cloak, arrived that morning by train from Paris, opened their eyes vaguely, exhibiting on their faces their astonishment at all these new things which took them out of their element.
"And a garden!" repeated the lady. "One could live on that! It is charming!"
[93]
