by Colette
After a silence, I resume, with genuine weariness:
“Allow me to generalize, as you call it, in spite of my one and only experiment, from which I still feel black and blue. I’m no longer young enough, enthusiastic enough, or noble enough to try marriage again—or living together, if you prefer. Allow me to await—adorned, idle, alone in my secluded room—the arrival of the man who has chosen me for his harem. All I’d want to know of him is his tenderness and his ardor; in short, I want only the amorous side of love . . .”
“I know a lot of people,” Hamond says after a silence, “who’d call that kind of love dissolute.”
I shrug my shoulders, irritated at being so misunderstood:
“Yes,” Hamond persists, “dissolute! But since I know you . . . a little, I would rather conjecture that you have a fanciful, childish craze for the unattainable: the loving couple locked in a warm bedroom and cut off by its four walls from the rest of the world . . . That’s the familiar dream of a girl who knows very little of life . . .”
“Or of a woman already mature, Hamond!”
He protests, with an evasive but polite gesture, and avoids a direct reply.
“In any case, my dear child, it isn’t love.”
“Why?”
My old friend tosses away his cigarette with a gesture that’s nearly impetuous:
“Because! You said to me a few minutes ago, ‘For a woman, marriage is a home life of sad submission and humiliation; marriage is “tie my cravat, prepare me an enema, keep an eye on my cutlet, submit to my bad moods and my infidelities.” ’ You should have said, ‘love,’ not ‘marriage.’ Because only love makes that bondage you speak of easy, happy, and glorious! Right now you hate it, you reject it, you spew it out, because you no longer love Taillandy! Remember the days when, through the power of love, the cravat, the footbath, and the camomile tea became sacred, revered, and awesome symbols. Remember the wretched part you played! I used to tremble with indignation to see you used as an accomplice, almost as a bawd, between Taillandy and his girlfriends, but if I had ever lost all my discretion and patience, you would have replied, ‘To love is to obey!’ . . . Be frank, Renée, be lucid and tell me whether all your sacrifices don’t have greater value in your eyes ever since you’ve recovered your freedom of will? You gauge them at their real value now that you no longer love him! Before then—I’ve seen you at work, I know you, Renée!—didn’t you subconsciously enjoy the merciful anesthesia that love dispenses?”
What’s the good of answering? . . . Yet I’m ready to argue, as dishonestly as I can: today I couldn’t feel any pity, except for this poor man who is enumerating all my marital misfortunes while thinking of his own . . . How young he is, and vulnerable, and totally imbued with the poison he wanted to be cured of! . . . Here we are, far from my own adventure and from Maxime Dufferein-Chautel . . .
I wanted to confide in Hamond and ask him for advice . . . What road has led us inescapably to the past, so that we’re flayed all over by dead thorns? I feel that, if Maxime were to come in, Hamond and I wouldn’t have time to remove from our faces quickly enough those expressions which no one ought to display: Hamond is all yellow with bile and has a little tic over his left cheekbone, and I am drawing my eyebrows together as if they were oppressed by a headache, and stretching my neck forward stiffly—my neck, which is still robust but is losing the soft suppleness of young flesh . . .
“Hamond,” I say very softly, “you’re not forgetting that I must leave on tour, to enjoy a change?”
“Leaving . . . Yes, yes,” he says, like a man being awakened. “Well?”
“Well, what about Maxime?”
“You’re taking him along, naturally?”
“ ‘Naturally!’ It’s not as simple as you seem to believe! That life on tour is awful . . . for a couple! Getting up and catching a train in the wee hours or the dead of night, the endless evenings for the man who’s waiting, and then the hotels! . . . What a beginning for a honeymoon! . . . Even a twenty-year-old woman wouldn’t expose herself to the shocking revelations of the dawn hour, to being seen asleep on the train—that sleep at the end of exhausting days which makes you look like a somewhat bloated corpse . . . No, no, it’s too great a risk for me! Besides, he and I deserve better! I had been thinking, vaguely, . . . of postponing our . . .”
“Meeting of the hearts . . .”
“Thank you . . . until the tour was over; then we’d begin a life—oh, what a life! . . . Not to have to think any more, Hamond; to hide away somewhere, with him, in a countryside that would actually afford me, within reach of my mouth and hands, all that is merely offered to me, and then snatched away, through the train window: damp leaves, flowers swaying in the breeze, dewy fruit, and especially brooks, free, capricious water, living water . . . You see, Hamond, after someone has been living on trains for a month, you can’t possibly know how the sight of running water between banks of fresh grass makes her skin tingle all over with a kind of indefinable thirst . . . During my last tour, I recall, we were traveling all morning and often through the afternoon, as well. At noon, in the meadows, the farmgirls were milking the cows: in the tall grass I’d see the polished copper pails into which the foaming milk spurts in stiff, thin jets. What a thirst, what a painful desire I felt for that warm milk topped with foam! It was a real little daily torture, I assure you . . . When that day comes, I want to enjoy, all at the same time, everything I’ve been missing: fresh air, a fertile, abundant countryside, and my man . . .”
In spite of myself, I hold out my arms, with hands joined, the better to conjure up all I desire. Hamond is still listening, as if I hadn’t finished speaking:
“And then, child, after that?”
“What do you mean, ‘after that?’ ” I ask vehemently . . . “After that? That’s all! I ask for nothing more.”
“How fortunate!” he mutters to himself . . . “I meant, after that will you live with Maxime? Will you give up touring? You . . . won’t work in vaudeville any more?”
His very natural question is enough to stop me in my tracks, and I look at my old friend with suspicion, so nervous that I’m almost intimidated:
“Why shouldn’t I?” I ask feebly.
He shrugs his shoulders:
“Come now, Renée, think things out a bit! Thanks to Maxime, you’ll be able to live in comfort, even in luxury, and . . . as we’re all hoping, you’ll be able to pick up once more that clever pen of yours which has been rusting . . . Then, maybe a child . . . What a pretty little fellow he’d be!”
Thoughtless Hamond! Did he succumb to his instinct as a former genre artist? That little tableau of my future life, between a faithful lover and a beautiful child, has the most inexplicable and disastrous effect on me . . . But he continues, the wretch! He persists, without noticing that a hateful merriment is dancing in my eyes, which avoid his, and that all he’s now getting out of me is a bored “yes,” “no doubt,” or “I don’t know,” the responses of a schoolgirl who finds the lesson too long . . .
***
A beautiful child . . . a faithful husband . . . after all, that was nothing to laugh about!
I’m still searching for the reason why I was so naughtily jolly . . . A beautiful child . . . I confess I never thought about it. I didn’t have the time when I was married and occupied by love first and jealousy later—in short, when I was completely taken up by Taillandy, who, for his part, didn’t care about cumbersome, expensive progeny . . .
Now I’m past thirty-three and I’ve never contemplated the possibility of being a mother. Am I a monster? . . . A beautiful child . . . gray eyes, a slender muzzle, the air of a fox cub, like its mother; big hands and broad shoulders, like Maxime . . . Well, no! No matter how I try, I can’t see or love the child I might have had, or maybe still will have . . .
“What do you think about it, tell me, Big Ninny, darling?”
He has arrived, very quietly, already so present in my heart that, with him standing by, I continue my self-exami
nation . . .
“What do you think about the child we could have? It’s Hamond who wants one, just imagine!”
My friend opens his mouth like a Pierrot, a round, stupefied mouth; he opens his eyes very wide and exclaims:
“Great! Hurray for Hamond! He’ll have his kid! . . . And right away, Renée, if you’re willing!”
I defend myself, because he’s jostling me in the worst and best way, biting me a little, kissing me a lot, with that starving expression which frightens me just enough . . .
“A child!” he cries. “A little one of our own! I hadn’t thought about it, Renée! How intelligent Hamond is! That’s a brilliant idea!”
“You think so, darling? Selfish brute that you are! You don’t give a damn if I lose my figure, get ugly, and suffer, do you?”
Still laughing, he plunks me down on the couch, at the end of his outstretched arms:
“Lose your figure? Get ugly? You’re the one who’s a silly goose, Madame! You’ll be magnificent, the little one, too, and we’ll have a wonderful time!”
Suddenly he stops laughing and knits his fierce eyebrows over those gentle eyes:
“Besides, then a least you would no longer be able to leave me and tramp the highways alone, would you? You’d be caught!”
Caught . . . I go limp and play idly with the fingers that pin me down. But going limp is also the weaker party’s ruse . . . Caught . . . Yes, that’s what he said, carried away by selfish ness . . . I had judged him correctly when I laughingly called him a monogamous bourgeois, a sit-by-the-fire patriarch.
Could I, then, live out my days peacefully, cowering in his mighty shadow? Would his faithful eyes still love me after my charms had faded one by one? . . . Oh, how different he was, how different from . . . the other man!
Except that the other man also made pronouncements like a master and, while holding me tight in a rough grasp, also knew how to say very quietly, “Walk straight! I’ve got hold of you! . . .” I’m suffering . . . I’m tormented by their differences, I’m tormented by their similarities . . . And I caress this innocent, unknowing man’s forehead, saying, “My little one . . .”
“Don’t call me your ‘little one,’ darling, it makes me ridiculous!”
“I’ll make you ridiculous if I feel like it. You are my little one because you’re younger than . . . than your real age, because you’ve suffered very little and loved very little, because you aren’t mean . . . Listen, my little one: I am going on tour.”
“Not without me, Renée!”
How he shouted it! I shudder with vexation and pleasure . . .
“Without you, darling, without you! I must. Listen to me . . . No . . . Max . . . I’ll speak all the same, later on . . . Listen, Max! Don’t you want to wait for me? Can’t you? Don’t you love me well enough, then?”
He tears himself out of my hands and moves away from me violently:
“Not well enough! Not well enough! Oh, that female reasoning! I don’t love you enough if I follow you, and not enough if I stay behind! Admit it: if I had answered, ‘All right, darling, I’ll wait for you,’ what would you have thought of me? And since you’re going when you don’t have to, how do you want me to believe you love me? In fact . . .”
He takes a stand in front of me, his forehead thrust forward, as if suspicious:
“In fact, you’ve never said it!”
“Said what?”
“That you love me!”
I feel myself blushing, as if he had caught me committing some crime . . .
“You’ve never said it!” he repeats obstinately.
“Oh, Max!”
“You’ve said . . . you’ve said, ‘Darling . . . My beloved Big Ninny . . . Max . . . you dear man . . .’ You moaned out loud, as if singing, the day when . . .”
“Max! . . .”
“Yes, that day when you couldn’t help calling me ‘My love . . .’ But you didn’t say, ‘I love you!’ ”
It’s true. I was hoping madly that he wouldn’t notice. One day, another fine day, I sighed so heavily in his arms that the words “. . . love you . . .” were forced out of me, like a sigh that was a little louder than the rest, and immediately I became mute and cold . . .
“. . . Love you . . .” I don’t want to say those words any more, not ever! I no longer want to hear that voice, my past voice, hoarse and low, murmuring uncontrollably those words out of the past . . . But I don’t know any others . . . There aren’t any others . . .
“Say it to me! Say it to me! Say you love me! Say it to me, I beg you!”
My friend has kneeled down before me, and his imperious supplication will give me no rest. I smile at him, my face close to his, as if I were merely playing at resisting him, and suddenly I feel like hurting him so he’ll suffer a little, too . . . But he’s so gentle, so far removed from my pain! Why burden him with it? He doesn’t deserve it . . .
“Poor darling . . . don’t be nasty, don’t be sad! Yes, I love you, I love you, oh I do . . . But I don’t want to tell you. I’m so proud, deep down, if you only knew!”
Leaning against my bosom, he shuts his eyes, he accepts my lie with loving trust, and still listens to me saying “I love you” after I’ve stopped speaking . . .
What a strange load on my arms, which were empty for such a long time! I don’t know how to rock a child this big, and how heavy his head is . . . But let him rest there, sure of me!
Sure of me . . . because a well-known aberration makes him jealous of my present and of my vagabond future, while he reposes trustingly on this heart which another man inhabited for such a long time! This honorable, careless lover doesn’t imagine that he’s sharing me with a memory, and that he’ll never savor that greatest of glories: to be able to tell me, “I’m bringing you a joy and a pain completely unknown to you . . .”
Here he is, on my bosom . . . Why he, and not some other man? I don’t know. I lean over his forehead, I’d like to protect him from myself, apologize for giving him only an unoccupied heart, not a purified one. I’d like to defend him against the grief I may cause him . . . Come now! Margot had predicted it. I’m returning to the fire . . . but this fire is perfectly safe and has nothing infernal about it: it’s more like the low flame under a kettle on the stove . . .
“Wake up, darling!”
“I’m not sleeping,” he murmurs, without raising his lovely eyelashes . . . “I’m breathing you in . . .”
“Will you wait for me in Paris while I’m on tour, or will you go to your mother’s in the Ardennes?”
He gets up without replying, and smoothes his hair with the palm of his hand.
“Tell me.”
He takes his hat from the table and walks away with lowered eyes, still silent . . . With a bound I reach him and cling to his shoulders:
“Don’t leave! Don’t leave! I’ll do what you want! Come back! Don’t leave me alone! Oh, don’t leave me alone!”
What’s come over me? I’m now just a poor rag soaked in tears . . . I saw, departing with him, my warmth, my light, and that second love mingled with the burning embers of the first, yet so dear to me and so unhoped-for! . . . I remain hanging to my friend with hands like those of a shipwrecked woman, and I repeatedly stammer, without hearing it:
“Every one is leaving me! . . . I’m all alone! . . .”
Since he loves me, he knows there’s no need for speeches or rational arguments to calm me down. Cradling arms, a warm murmur of vague, caressing words, kisses and more kisses . . .
“Don’t look at me, darling! I’m ugly, my mascara is running, and my nose is all red . . . I’m ashamed for having been so stupid!”
“My Renée! My little one! What a brute I’ve been! . . . Yes, yes, I’m nothing but a big brute! You want me to wait in Paris? I will. You want me to go to Mother’s? I will!”
Undecided, embarrassed by my victory, I no longer know what I want:
“Listen, Max darling, here’s what we must do: I’ll leave alone, with as much enthusiasm as a whi
pped dog . . . We’ll write each other every day . . . We’ll be heroic, won’t we, till we reach the day, the lovely fifteenth of May, that will reunite us? ”
Gloomily my hero consents with a resigned nod.
“May fifteenth, Max! . . . I think,” I say more quietly, “that on that day I’ll fling myself at you as if hurling myself into the sea, just as irrevocably, just as willingly . . .”
The embrace and look I receive in reply make me lose my head somewhat:
“And then, listen . . . If we can’t wait, well, too bad about it . . . you’ll come and look me up . . . or I’ll send for you . . . Happy? After all, heroism is idiotic . . . and life is short . . . It’s a deal! The one who’s more unhappy will look up the other one, or will write asking him to come . . . But still we’re going to try, because . . . a honeymoon on a train . . . Happy? What are you looking for?”
“I’m thirsty: imagine! I’m dying of thirst! Do you want to ring for Blandine?”
“No need of her! Stay here: I’ll go get what’s needed.”
Contented, he passively lets himself be waited on, and I watch him drink as if he were doing me a great favor. If he wants, I’ll tie his cravat, and I’ll look after the dinner menu . . . And I’ll bring him his slippers . . . And he’ll be able to ask me in a master’s voice, “Where are you going?” A female I was, and a female I find myself again, to suffer from it and to rejoice in it . . .
The twilight conceals my hastily repaired face and, sitting on his lap, I allow him to inhale from my lips the breath still shaken from my recent sobbing. As one of his hands passes, I kiss it, and it descends from my forehead to my bosom . . . In his arms, I relapse into the state of pampered victim, quietly complaining of what she neither can, nor wants to, prevent . . .
But suddenly I jump up, struggle with him for a few seconds wordlessly, and manage to escape, exclaiming:
“No!”
I nearly let myself be taken by surprise there, at the corner of the couch! His attempt was so rapid, and so skillful! . . . Out of reach, I look at him without anger, merely giving him this reproach: