The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  Today I gaze at these three feathers as if I had never seen them before; they look fit to adorn a hearse, and so does the woman beneath them.

  She seems out of keeping in the “town where we don’t perform,” rather ludicrous, with her Bourbon profile and her recurrent “I don’t know why everyone tells me I resemble Sarah! What do you think?”

  A gay little squall tugs at our skirts as we turn the corner into a square, and the carefully waved tresses of the ingenue’s peroxide hair stream out in the wind. She utters a shriek as she clutches her hat, and I can see across her forehead—between eyebrows and hair—a carelessly removed red line, the trace of last night’s makeup!

  Why have I not the strength to look away when the duenna’s bloomers brave the light of day! They are tan-colored bloomers and fall in folds over her cloth booties! No mirage could distract my attention from the male star’s shirt collar, grayish white, with a thin streak of “ocher foundation” along the neckline. No enchanted drop curtain of flowers and tremulous leafage could make me overlook the comic’s pipe, that fat, old, juicy pipe; the fag end stuck to the undermanager’s lip; the purple ribbon, turning black, in the makeup man’s buttonhole; the senior lead’s matted beard, ill dyed and in part discolored! They are all so crudely conspicuous in the “town where we don’t perform”!

  But what about myself? Alas, what made me dawdle in front of the watchmaker’s shop, allowing the mirror there time to show me my shimmerless hair, the sad twin shadows under my eyes, lips parched with thirst, and my flabby figure in a chestnut-brown tailor-made whose limp flaps rise and fall with every step I take! I look like a discouraged beetle, battered by the rains of a spring night. I look like a molting bird. I look like a governess in distress. I look . . . Good Lord, I look like an actress on tour, and that speaks for itself.

  At last, the promised park! The reward justifies our long walk, dragging our tired feet, exhausted from keeping on our boots for eighteen hours a day. A deep, shady park; a slumbering castle, its shutters closed, set in the midst of a lawn; avenues of trees, just beginning to unfurl their sparse tender foliage; bluebells and cowslips studding the grass.

  How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor! The filtered light, kind to raddled faces, imposes a relaxed silence. Suddenly a gust of keen air falls from the treetops, dashes off down the alley chasing stray twigs, then vanishes in front of us, like an impish ghost.

  We are tongue-tied, not for long enough.

  “Oh, the countryside!” sighs the ingenue.

  “Yes. If only one could sit down,” suggests the duenna, “my legs are pressing into my body.”

  At the foot of a satin-boled beech we take a rest, inglorious and unattractive strollers. The men smoke; the women turn their eyes toward the blue perspectives of the alley, toward a blazing bush of rhododendrons, the color of red-hot embers, spreading over a neighboring lawn.

  “For my part, the country just drains me . . .” says the comic with an unconcealed yawn, “makes me damned sleepy!”

  “Yes, but it’s healthy tiredness,” decrees the pompous duenna.

  The ingenue shrugs her plump shoulders. “Healthy tiredness! You make me sweat! Nothing ages a woman like living in the country, it’s a well-known fact.”

  Slowly the undermanager extracts his pipe from his mouth, spits, then starts quoting: “A melancholy feeling, not devoid of grandeur, surges from . . .”

  “Oh, shut up!” grumbles the jeune premier, consulting his watch as if terrified of missing a stage entrance.

  A lanky boy, tall and pale-faced, who plays odd-job parts, is watching the movements of a little “dung beetle” with steel-blue armor, teasing it with a long straw.

  I take deep, exhaustive breaths, trying to detect and recapture forgotten smells that are wafted to me as from the depths of a clear well. Some elude me, and I am unable to remember their names.

  None of us laughs, and if the grande coquette hums softly to herself, it is bound to be a broken, soulful little tune. We don’t feel at ease here: we are surrounded by too much beauty.

  At the end of the avenue a friendly peacock appears, and behind his widespread fan we notice that the sky is turning pink. Evening is upon us. Slowly the peacock advances in our direction, like a courteous park-keeper whose task it is to evict us. Oh, surely we must fly! My companions are by now almost on the run.

  “What if we missed it, children!”

  We all know well enough that we shall not miss our train. But we are fleeing the beautiful garden, its silence and its peace, the lovely leisure, the solitude of which we are unworthy. We hurry toward the hotel, to the stifling dressing rooms, the blinding footlights. We scurry along, pressed for time, talkative, screeching like chickens, hurrying toward the illusion of living at high speed, of keeping warm, working hard, shunning thought, and refusing to be burdened with regrets, remorse, or memories.

  Arrival and Rehearsal

  Toward eleven o’clock we arrive at X, a large town (whose name is of no consequence), where we are fairly well paid and have to work hard; the pampered audiences demand “Star Numbers” straight from Paris. It is raining, one of those mild spring showers that induce drowsiness and reduce one’s calves to pulp.

  The heavy lunch and the smoky atmosphere of the tavern, after a long night on the train, have turned me into a sulky little creature, reluctant to face the afternoon’s work. But Brague stands no trifling.

  “Shuffle your guts, come on. The rehearsal’s at two sharp.”

  “Bother! I’m going back to the hotel to get some sleep! Besides, I don’t like you addressing me in that tone of voice.”

  “Apologies, Princess. I simply wanted to beg you to have the extreme kindness of stirring up your wits. Fresh plasters await us!”

  “What plasters?”

  “Those of the ‘Establishment.’ We’re opening cold tonight.”

  I had forgotten. This evening we are to inaugurate a brand-new music hall, called the Atlantic, or the Gigantic, or the Olympic—in any case, the name of a liner. Three thousand seats, an American bar, attractions in the outer galleries during the intervals, and a gipsy band in the main hall! We’ll read about all these glories in tomorrow’s papers. In the meantime, it makes no difference to us, except that we are certain to cough in the dressing rooms, since new central heating never works, making the place either too hot or not warm enough.

  I meekly follow Brague, who elbows his way along the North Avenue, cluttered with clerks and shopgirls, hurrying, like ourselves, to their factories. A nipping March sun makes the rainy air smoke, and my damp hair hangs limp, as in a steambath. Brague’s too-long overcoat flaps over his heels, gathering mud at each step. Taken at our face value we are just worth ten francs per evening: Brague, speckled with dirt; myself, drunk with sleep, sporting a Skye terrier’s hairdo!

  I let my companion guide me, and half dozing, I run over in my mind a few comforting facts and figures. The rehearsal is fixed for two o’clock sharp; with delays, we can count on half past four. One and a half to two hours’ work with the orchestra and we should be back at the hotel about seven o’clock, there to dress, and dine, and return to the joint by nine; by a quarter to twelve I’ll be in my own clothes again and just in time for a lemonade in the tavern. Well! Let’s be reasonable and hope, God willing, that within ten little hours I shall once again be in a bed, with the right to sleep in it until lunchtime the next day! A bed, a nice fresh bed, with smoothly drawn sheets and a hot-water bottle at the end of it, soft to the feet like a live animal’s tummy.

  Brague turns left—I turn left; he stops short—I stop short.

  “Good Lord!” he exclaims, “it isn’t possible!”

  Wide awake, I too judge at a glance that it really is not possible.

  Huge dust carts, laden with sacks of plaster, obstruct the street. Scaffolding screens a light-colored building that looks blurred and barely con
densed into shape, on which masons are hastily molding laurel wreaths, naked females, and Louis XVI garlands above a dark porch. Beyond this can be heard a tumult of inarticulate shouts, a battery of hammers, the screeching of saws, as though the whole assembly of the Niebelungen were busy at their forges.

  “Is that it?”

  “That is it.”

  “Are you certain, Brague?”

  In reply I receive a fulminating glance that should have been reserved solely for the Olympic’s improvident architect.

  “I just meant, you’re certain we rehearse here?”

  The rehearsal takes place. It passes all comprehension, but the rehearsal takes place. We go on through the dark porch under a sticky shower of liquid plaster; we jump over rolls of carpet in the process of being laid, its royal purple already bearing marks of muddy soles. We climb a temporary ladder leading, behind the stage floor, to the artistes’ dressing rooms, and finally we emerge, scared and deafened, in front of the orchestra.

  About thirty performers are disporting themselves here. Bursts of music reach us during lulls in the hammering. On the conductor’s rostrum a lean, hairy, bearded human being beats time with arms, hands, and head, his eyes turned upward to the friezes with the ecstatic serenity of a deaf-mute.

  There we are, a good fifteen “Numbers,” bewildered, and already discouraged. We have never met before, yet we recognize each other. Here is the diseur, paid eight francs a night, who doesn’t care a hoot what goes on.

  “I don’t care a damn. I’m engaged as from this evening, and cash in as from this evening.”

  There is the comic, with a face like a sneaky solicitor’s clerk, who talks of “going to law,” and foresees “a very interesting case.”

  There is the German family, athletes of the flying trapeze, seven Herculean figures with childish features, affrighted, amazed, already worried by the fear of being thrown out of work.

  There stands the little “songstress,” who’s always “out of luck,” the one who’s always in “trouble with the management,” and is supposed to have been robbed of “twenty thousand francs’ worth of jewelry” last month, Marseilles! Naturally she is also the one who’s lost her costume trunk on her way here and has had “words” with the proprietor of her hotel.

  There is even, out in front, an extraordinary little man, looking worn, his cheeks furrowed by two deep ravines, a “star tenor” in his fifties, grown old in goodness knows what outlandish places. Indifferent to the noise, he rehearses implacably.

  Every other minute he flings his arms wide to stop the orchestra, rushing from the double bass to the kettledrums, bent in two over the footlights. He looks like a stormy petrel riding the tempest. When he sings, he emits long shrill notes, metallic and malevolent, in an attempt to bring to life an obsolete repertory in which he impersonates, in turn, Pedro the Bandit, the lighthearted cavalier who forsakes Manon, the crazed villain and his sinister cackling at night on the moors. He scares me, but delights Brague, who instinctively reverts to his nomad fatalism.

  Risking his luck in the general confusion, my companion lights the forbidden “fag” and lends an amused ear to the “vocal phenomenon,” a dark lady who spins out almost inaudible high C’s.

  “She’s killing, isn’t she? Makes me feel as if I were listening through the wrong end of my opera glasses.”

  His laughter is infectious. Mysteriously a comforting cheerfulness starts to spread among us. We feel the approach of night, of the hour when the lamps are lit, the hour of our real awakening, of our glory.

  “ANANKE!” suddenly shouts the litigious comic, a highbrow in his way. “If we perform, we perform; and if we don’t . . . well, we don’t.”

  With a ballet dancer’s leap he skims over the edge of the stage box, ready to give the electricians a helpful hand. The “out of luck” girl goes to crack an acid drop with the Herculean septet. My drowsiness has left me and I settle down on a roll of linoleum, side by side with the “vocal phenomenon,” who is all set to tell my fortune! Still another carefree hour ahead, empty of thought or plans.

  Happy in our obtuse way, devoid of intuition or foresight, we give no thought to the future, to misfortune, to old age—or to the impending failure of this altogether too new and luxurious “Establishment,” which is due to go smash one month from today, precisely on “Saint-Pay-Day.”

  A Bad Morning

  Not one of us four feels fit to face the harsh light that falls from the glass roof like a vertical cold shower. It is nine in the morning; that is, dawn for the likes of us who go to bed late. Is it really possible that there can still exist, within a mile or so, a warm bed and a breakfast cup still steaming with the dregs of scented tea? I feel as if I shall never again lay myself down in my bed. I find this rehearsal room, the scene of our reluctant and too-early foregatherings, utterly depressing.

  “Aah . . .” the lovely Bastienne yawns expressively.

  Brague, the mimic, throws her a fearsome glance, as much as to say, “Serves you right.” He is pale and ill shaven, whereas the lovely Bastienne, battered and shrunk to nothing inside her sentry box of a coat, would wring the heart of anyone other than a good companion by the pink swelling under her eyes and her bloodless ears. Palestrier, the composer, his nose bright purple on a wan countenance, is the personification of a drunk who has spent the night unconscious in a police station. As for myself! Good God, a saber slash across one cheek, limp skeins of hair, and skin left dry by my lazy bloodstream! One might think we are showing off, exaggerating our disgrace, in a fit of witless sadism. “Serves you right,” say Brague’s eyes, probing my sunken cheeks; while mine retort, “You’re just such another wreck yourself.”

  Instead of shortening the rehearsal of our mime, we fritter time away. Palestrier starts on a salacious story, which could be funny, were it not that the dead cigarette he keeps masticating imparts a most obnoxious smell to his every word. The stove roars yet does not heat the hall, and we peer into its small mica window, like chilled savages hoping for some miraculous sunrise.

  “What do they burn in it? I wonder,” Palestrier hazards. “Newspaper logs, maybe, bound together with wire thread. I know how to make that stuff. I learned how from an old lady, the year I won my prize at the Conservatoire. She used to cough up three francs to make me play waltzes for her. There were times when I’d turn up, and she’d just say, ‘We’ll have no music today; my little bitch is nervy, and the piano puts her on edge!’ So she would invite me to help with the fuel provision—nothing but newspapers and wire. It was she, too, who taught me how to burnish brass. I certainly didn’t waste my time with her. In those days, providing I could feed, I would have clipped dogs and doctored cats!”

  In the now glowing square of mica he gazes at the vision of his needy youth, the period when his talent struggled within him like a splendid, famished beast. As he sits staring, his pale-faced hungry youth becomes so alive that he reverts to the juicy slang of the suburbs, the drawling accent and thick voice; and sticking both hands in his pockets, he allows a shudder to shake his frame.

  On this harsh winter morning we lack courage, lack all incentive to face the future. There is nothing inside us to burst into flame or blossom amid the dirty snow. Crouched and fearful, we are driven back by the hour, the cold, our rude awakening, the momentary malevolence in the air, to the most miserable, most humiliating moments of our past.

  “The same goes for me,” Brague breaks out suddenly. “Just to be able to eat one’s fill . . . People who’ve always had plenty can’t imagine what that means. I remember a time when I still had some credit at the pub, but never a chance to make any dough. When I drank down my glass of red wine . . . Well, I could have cried just at the thought of a fresh little crust to dip into it.”

  “The same goes for me . . .” The lovely Bastienne takes her cue. “When I was a mere kid—fifteen or sixteen—I’d all but faint in the mornings at the dancing class, because I hadn’t had enough to eat; but if the ballet mistress asked me whet
her I was ill, I’d brag and answer: ‘It’s my lover, Madame, he’s exhausted me.’ A lover indeed! As if I’d even known what it meant to have one! She’d throw her arms in the air. ‘Ah, you won’t keep your queenly beauty for long! But what on earth have you all got in those bodies of yours?’ What I had not got in my body was a good plateful of soup, and that’s a cert.”

  She speaks slowly, with assiduous care, as if she were spelling out her reminiscences. Sitting with her knees wide apart, the lovely Bastienne has sunk into the posture of a housewife watching her pot boil. Her “queenly beauty” and her brassy smile have been discarded as if they were mere stage props.

  A few slammed chords, a run up the scale by stumbling numb fingers, excite a superficial thrill. I shall have to move out of the posture of a hibernating animal, head inclined on one shoulder, hands tightly clasped like cold-stricken paws. I was not asleep. I am only, like my companions, emerging from a bitter dream. Hunger, thirst . . . they should be a full-time torture, simple and complete, leaving no room for other torments. Privation prevents all thought, and substitutes for any other mental image that of a hot sweet-smelling dish, and reduces hope to the shape of a rounded loaf set in rays of glory.

  Brague is the first to jump to his feet. Rough-and-ready advice and inevitable invective assume, as they flow from his lips, a most familiar sound. What a string of ugly words to accompany so graceful an action! How many traces of trial and error are to be seen on the faces of the three mimes, where effort sets a too quickly broken mask! Hands that we compel to speak our lines, arms for an instant eloquent, seem suddenly to be shattered, and by their strengthless collapse transform us into mutilated statues.