After that frightful shock, which for two months had caused them to live in a constant tremble, they enjoyed this reaction of absorbing insensibility, in perfect bliss. They only desired never to move again, happy to be simply alive, without trembling and without suffering.
Never had Roubaud been so exact and conscientious. During the week of day duty, he was on the platform at five in the morning. He did not go up to breakfast until ten, and came down again an hour later, remaining there until five in the evening—eleven hours full of work. During the week of night duty, he had not even the brief rest afforded by a meal at home, for he supped in his office. He bore this hard servitude with a sort of satisfaction, seeming to take pleasure in it, entering into details, wishing to see to everything, to do everything, as if he found oblivion in fatigue; the return of a well-balanced, normal life.
Séverine, for her part, almost always alone, a widow one week out of two, and who during the other week, only saw her husband at luncheon and dinner-time, displayed all the energy of a good housewife. She had been in the habit of sitting down to embroidery, detesting to put her hand to household work, which an old woman, called Mother Simon, came to do, from nine to twelve. But since she had recovered tranquillity at home, and felt certain of remaining there, she had been occupied with ideas of cleaning and arranging things; and she now only seated herself, after rummaging everywhere in the apartment. Both slept soundly. In their rare conversations at meal-times, as on the nights which they passed together, they never once alluded to the case, considering it at an end, and buried.
For Séverine, particularly, life once more became extremely pleasant. Her idleness returned. Again she abandoned the housework to Mother Simon, like a young lady brought up for no greater exertion than fine needlework. She had commenced an interminable task, consisting in embroidering an entire bedcover, which threatened to occupy her to the end of her days. She rose rather late, delighted to remain alone in bed, rocked by the trains leaving and coming in, which told her how the hours fled, as exactly as if her eyes had been on a clock.
In the early days of her married life, these violent sounds in the station—the whistling, the shocks of turn-tables, the rolls of thunder, the abrupt oscillations, like earthquakes, which made both her and the furniture totter—had driven her half crazy. Then, by degrees, she had become accustomed to them; the sonorous and vibrating railway station formed part of her existence; and, now, she liked it, finding tranquillity in all this bustle and uproar.
Until lunch-time, she went from one room to another, talking to the charwoman, with her hands idle. Then, she passed the long afternoons, seated before the dining-room window, with her work generally on her lap, delighted at doing nothing. During the weeks when her husband came up at daylight, to go to bed, she heard him snoring until dark; and these had become her good weeks—those during which she lived as formerly, before her marriage, having the whole bed to herself, enjoying her time after rising, as she thought proper, with the entire day before her, to do as she liked.
She rarely went out. All she could see of Havre, was the smoke of the neighbouring factories, whose great turbillions of black stained the sky above the zinc roof, which shut out the view at a few yards from her eyes.
The city was there, behind this perpetual wall; she always felt its presence, and her annoyance at being unable to see it had, in the end, subsided. Five or six pots of wallflowers and verbenas, which she cultivated in the gutter, gave her a small garden to enliven her solitude. At times she spoke of herself as of a recluse in the depths of a wood. Roubaud, in his moments of idleness, would get out of the window, then, passing to the end of the gutter, would ascend the zinc slope, seating himself on the top of the gable, overlooking the Cours Napoléon. There he smoked his pipe, in the open air, towering above the city that lay spread out at his feet, above the docks planted with tall masts, and the pale green sea, expanding as far as the eye could roam.
It seemed that the same somnolence had gained the other households, near the Roubauds. This corridor, where generally whistled such a terrible gale of gossip, was also wrapt in slumber. When Philomène paid a visit to Madame Lebleu, barely a slight murmur could be heard. Both of them, surprised at the turn matters had taken, now spoke of the assistant station-master with disdainful commiseration, convinced that his wife, to keep him in his post, had been up to her games at Paris.
He was now a man with a slur upon him, who would never free himself of certain suspicions. And, as the wife of the cashier felt convinced that, henceforth, her neighbours would not have the power to take her lodging from her, she simply treated them with contempt, stiffening herself when she passed them, and neglecting to bow. This behaviour even estranged Philomène, who called on her less and less frequently. She considered her too proud, and no longer found amusement in her company.