GERMINAL
in the shutter. He stifled a low cry and his back bent with a quiver. In her turn his wife looked through, but she said, as though taken by the colic, that it was disgusting. Maheu, who had pushed her, wishing also to see, then declared that he had had enough for his money. And they began again, in a row, each taking his glance as at a peep-show. The parlour, glittering with cleanliness, was enlivened by a large fire; there were cakes on the table with a bottle and glasses, in fact quite a feast. What they saw going on in there at last exasperated the two men, who under other circumstances would have laughed over it for six months. That she should let herself be stuffed up to the neck, with her skirts in the air, was funny. But, good God! was it not disgusting to do that in front of a great fire, and to get up one's strength with biscuits, when the mates had neither a slice of bread nor a fragment of coal?
"Here's father!" cried Lydie, running away.
Pierron was quietly coming back from the washhouse with the bundle of linen on his shoulder. Maheu immediately addressed him:
"Here! they tell me that your wife says that I sold Catherine, and that we are all rotten in the house. And what do they pay you in your house, your wife and the gentlemen who is making use of her skin?"
The astonished Pierron could not understand, and Pierronne, seized with fear on hearing the tumult of voices, lost her head and set the door ajar to see what was the matter. They could see her, looking very red, with her dress open and her skirt tucked up at her waist; while Dansaert, in the background, was wildly buttoning himself up. The head captain rushed away and disappeared, trembling with fear that this story would reach the manager's ears. Then there would be an awful scandal, laughter and hooting and abuse.
"You, who are always saying that other people are dirty!" shouted the Levaque woman to Pierronne, "it's not surprising that you're clean when you get the bosses to scour you."
"Ah! it's fine for her to talk!" said Levaque again. "Here's a trollop who says that my wife sleeps with me and the lodger, one below and the other above! Yes! yes! that's what they tell me you say."
But Pierronne, grown calm, held her own against this abuse,
[347]
