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The two children crouched in a corner, while Lalie stood in the center of the floor, frozen stiff with terror, for Bijard held in his hand a new whip with a long and wicked-looking lash. He laid this whip on the bed and did not kick either one of the children but smiled in the most vicious way, showing his two lines of blackened, irregular teeth. He was very drunk and very noisy.
As she passed she looked in at Father Bru, but to her surprise he was not there, and she asked herself with a pang of jealousy if anyone could possibly have asked him out to dine. When she reached the Bijards' she heard a groan. She went in. "What is the matter?" she said. The room was very clean and in perfect order. Lalie that very morning had swept and arranged everything.
Gervaise snatched a chair and flew at the brute, but the little girl held her skirts and said it did not hurt much; it would be over soon, and she washed the blood away, speaking gently to the frightened children. When Gervaise thought of Lalie she was ashamed to complain. She wished she had the courage of this child.
Whenever she smuggled some remnants of meat to Lalie, it almost broke her heart to see the child weeping silently and nibbling it down only by little bits because her throat was so shrunken. Gervaise looked on Lalie as a model of suffering and forgiveness and tried to learn from her how to suffer in silence. In the Coupeau household the vitriol of l'Assommoir was also commencing its ravages.
Little Lalie, so thin it made you cry, took it all without a word of complaint in her beautiful, patient eyes. Never would she revolt. She bent her neck to protect her face and stifled her sobs so as not to alarm the neighbors. When her father got tired of kicking her, she would rest a bit until she got her strength back and then resume her work. It was part of her job, being beaten daily.
The job was not an easy one because she had two little tots, her brother Jules and her sister Henriette, aged three and five, to watch all day long while sweeping and cleaning. Ever since Bijard had killed his wife with a kick in the stomach, Lalie had become the little mother of them all.
"Leave her alone, you brigand! I'll put the police on to you." Bijard growled like an animal being disturbed, and stuttered: "Mind your own business a bit, Limper. Perhaps you'd like me to put gloves on when I stir her up. It's merely to warm her, as you can plainly see simply to show her that I've a long arm." And he gave a final lash with the whip which caught Lalie across the face.
And during all this onslaught, Gervaise beheld in a corner of the room little Lalie, then four years old, watching her father murdering her mother. The child held in her arms, as though to protect her, her sister Henriette, only recently weaned. She was standing up, her head covered with a cotton cap, her face very pale and grave.
Lalie wore only a tiny chemise over her bruised and bleeding flesh; marks of a lash striped her sides; a livid spot was on her right arm, and from head to foot she was one bruise. Gervaise was paralyzed at the sight. She wondered, if there were a God above, how He could have allowed the child to stagger under so heavy a cross.
Poor little Lalie darted about the room like a terrified bird, but the lash tingled over her shoulders, coiled around her slender legs and stung like a viper. She was like an India-rubber ball bounding from the floor, while her beast of a father laughed aloud and asked her if she had had enough. The door opened and Gervaise entered. She had heard the noise.
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