by Colette
They don’t seem worried at being unable to talk to each other. With subtle shrewdness the boy sets out to be assiduous and unassuming. Have I not seen him kiss a thin little hand, one that was not withdrawn, a bony little paw, chapped by cold water and liquid white! But, on the sly, he looks at Gloria with indiscreet persistence, as if he were choosing in advance the proper place to implant a kiss. Once behind the closed door of the dressing room, she sings for him, then shouts his name, “Mâss’l,” as if she were throwing him flowers.
In short, things go well: even too well . . . This quasi-mute idyll unfurls like a mimodrama, with no other music than Gloria’s exuberant voice and no words but the name Mâss’l, diversified by love’s numberless inflections. After the first radiant Mâss’ls, shouted on a slightly nasal note, I have heard lower Mâss’ls, provocative and tender, exacting too—and then, one fine day, came a tremulous Mâss’l, so low that it sounded like an entreaty.
Tonight, I fear, I am hearing it for the last time. At the head of the staircase, hovering on its top step, I find a forlorn little Gloria, with a distorted wig, crying humbly all over her makeup, and repeating under her breath, “Mâss’l . . . Mâss’l . . .”
The Hard Worker
“Your arms, Hélène! Your arm control! That’s the second time your hand has struck your head while you’re dancing! I’ve told you again and again, my girl: the arms must curve like handles above your head, as if you were balancing a basket of flowers!”
Hélène answers with a sullen out-of-patience look only, and corrects the position of her arms. She’s ready to launch forth again on the studio floor—a well-worn shiny parquet floor, battered by the raps of heels and the ballet master’s wand—when she changes her mind, and cries out: “Are you still there, Robert?”
“Of course,” replies a submissive voice from the other side of the door.
“Supposing you took the car and popped over to the furrier’s and told him I won’t be coming till tomorrow?”
No answer; but I hear the tap-tap of a walking stick and the sound of the front door being closed. “Robert” has gone.
“So much the better!” murmurs Hélène in a softened voice. “It exasperates me to feel he’s there waiting for me and doing nothing.”
Twice a week I sit through the last minutes of Hélène Gromet’s dancing lesson: she is put through her paces from four to five, just before my own turn comes. She treats me more as a colleague than a friendly companion, much as if we were workers in the same factory; by which I mean that we talk little but seriously, and that sometimes she reveals her feelings with the same cool candor as when confiding in her masseuse or her pedicurist.
Hélène is not a real dancer, but a “little piece who dances.” She made her music-hall debut last season, in a revue, and as her first attempt, she “flung” at her audience two scabrous little ditties, putting them across at the top of her brand-new, unsophisticated, brassy voice, without any of the simperings of false modesty, but with a perfectly straight face, and with an aggressive innocence that enchanted. Substantial offers of work, a no less substantial “friend,” two motorcars, a string of pearls, and a mink coat were all showered on Hélène in one single stroke of luck—but her steady little head never wavered. She boasts of being a “hard worker,” and sticks to her ungainly, plebeian name.
“Do you imagine I’m going to rechristen myself? A simple name, not too pretty, that’s what puts you straight into the top class. Look at Badet and Bordin!”
All her entries amount to a miniature apotheosis. The subdued thunder of a motorcar heralds her approach, then she appears, weighed down under ermine and velvet, a trembling cloud of osprey feathers in her hat. A decisive and carefully devised makeup standardizes her youthful face under a mask of dead-white powder, with pink touches on the cheeks and chin. Her blued eyelids carry a heavy double fringe of lashes, stiff with mascara, and her teeth shine almost woundingly against the purplish lipstick that outlines her mouth.
“I know I’m young enough to do without all that muck,” Hélène explains, “but it’s now part of my array, and it’s useful too. For like this I am made up for life. I’ll have nothing to add when I’m twenty years older. Under this coating I can afford to look ill or to have tired eyes; it’s as practical as a disguise. For you’d better know, I do nothing without good reason.”
This young utilitarian scares me. She takes her lesson as she would swallow a glass of cod-liver oil: conscientiously, and to the bitter end. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to watch her exercise, flexible and well balanced on her clever legs. She is pretty, and touchingly young. What then does she lack? For she does lack something.
“Your smile, Hélène, your smile!” exclaims the ballet mistress. “Don’t put on your cashier’s face. You don’t seem to realize that you’re dancing, my child.”
The former ballerina’s broad and blotched face endeavors in vain to teach Hélène that the lips must part to disclose the teeth, while the corners of the mouth must curve upward like the horns of a crescent moon. And I can’t help laughing at the commercial composure of the pupil, as she faces her grinning teacher with a thoughtful brow and a rigid, painted mouth.
What are the thoughts of this obstinate child, this insensitive bee? She often repeats: “When one wants to get somewhere . . .” Get somewhere, but where? What suspended mirage keeps her eyes uplifted when she seems to look through me, through the walls, through the submissive features of her admiring young “friend”?
She is tense, and appears to aim relentlessly at some concealed goal. Glory? no . . . Those who seek glory admit it, and I have never heard Hélène Gromet express a desire for glamorous parts or proudly say, “When I can rival Simone . . .” Money! That sounds more likely. At the finish of a lively lesson, like today’s, it is from her fatigue that I best discover in Hélène the solid little “child of the people,” eager to earn and to hoard.
She bears her fatigue with the air of graceful fulfillment, the happily satisfied expression of a young washerwoman who has just put down her load of freshly laundered linen. Scantily clothed in a damp underslip and a tiny pair of silk knickers, she comes to sit beside me on the side bench. She has crossed her legs and remains silent, one shoulder hunched, while her bare arms hang limp.
As the twilight deepens, the black undulations of her hair seem tinged with a deeper blue.
My imagination conjures up somewhere, in some poor place, Hélène’s mama, who, returning at this same hour from the trough by the river, lets her reddened arms hang loose in just the same way: or a sister, or a brother, who has just left a workshop or a stuffy office. They too are punctual, and bent, and temporarily weary, like Hélène.
She rests a while before redoing her face, with the aid of a fat powder puff and a small pad of rouged cotton wool. With the trusting calm of a drowsy animal she allows me to see on her dark-skinned undressed face the tawniness and slightly coarse grain that most common mortals ignore. In a moment or two a surfeit of powder will blur the sharply arched curve of her imperious nose, not unlike that of a bird of prey.
The return of “Robert” brings her to her feet, and immediately puts her on the defensive. Yet he is only a fair-haired, rather humble boy, eager to wait on her and help her to dress, fastening the shiny straps of her little shoes, and pulling the long pink lace of her stays. The pair of them together barely miss making an enchanting picture.
I can see she does not hate him, but I cannot see that she loves him either. The attention she grants him shows no subservience. When they leave together, she takes full stock of him with that penetrating, antagonistic look of hers, as if he were yet another lesson to be learned. And I feel, at times, very much like seizing this avaricious child’s arm and asking her: “But, Hélène, what about Love?”
After Midnight
“How nice it is here.”
The little dancer rubs her bare arms, the rather red, coarse-skinned arms of an undernourished blonde, and breathes in the hot dry air of
the restaurant as if it were ozone.
On a polished strip of linoleum in the center of the big dining room a few couples are already revolving, among them a girl from Normandy in the lace headdress of the Caux district, a painted hussy with a red silk scarf, an Egyptian dancing girl, and a curly-headed baby wearing a tartan sash. This establishment, highly rated on the Riviera, employs some dozen dance hostesses and as many singers.
Little Maud comes here from the Eldorado, where she croons and gambols through an “English Number.” She has just arrived, after running all the way through an icy wind, to earn her twenty francs’ pittance at the Restaurant of the Good Hostess, from midnight till six in the morning.
She flexes her knees a little as she leans against the wall, and, after a rough calculation of her dancing at both performances at the Eldorado, and now waltzing here till dawn, finds it amounts to seven hours of valse and cakewalk, not counting dressing and undressing, rubbing on and removing her makeup. She was hungry enough when she arrived, but her appetite has been stayed by a glass of beer gulped down in the artistes’ room. “So much the better,” she reflects. “I’ve not got to get fat.”
Maud’s attraction lies in her angular girlish slimness; she is labeled English because of her fair hair, reddish elbows, and her funny little tippler’s nose, blotchy around the nostrils. She has acquired a vicious little smile, and learned to shake her schoolgirl locks and hide her face behind her square-fingered paws, chapped by liquid white, at any suggestion of a risqué joke. In private life she is simply a “caf’ conc’” girl like any of the others, overworked, innocent of malice or coquetry, forever on the move from hotel to train, from station to theater, ever tormented by hunger, lack of sleep, and the morrow’s insecurity.
For the time being she takes a rest on her feet, like a saleswoman in a big store, and keeps worrying a recent hole in her flesh-tinted tights with her big toe. “Five francs for invisible mending!”
One hand absentmindedly smoothes the creases in the hem of her babyish satin frock, once Nile green, now yellow. “Dry cleaning, ten francs. Hell, that eats up my night’s earnings! If only that tipsy little lady would come back, the one who was here the night of the masked ball, and threw me the change from her bill!”
A violinist in an embroidered Rumanian shirt plays “You Once Vowed to Be Mine” with such amorous intensity that he is smothered in encores.
“So much the better,” she says to herself once more. “How I wish he’d play all night long, for then I’d be living on unearned income!”
Her fond hopes are dashed. A wink from the manager orders her to waltz, clinging to the shoulders of a sham toreador, thin and willowy and far too tall for her. Maud is so tired by this time that she waltzes without being aware of it, hanging on to the youth, who clasps her to him with professional, almost indecent unconcern. Everything swirls about her. The head of a hatpin, the clasp of a necklace, the setting of a ring, pierce her eyes as she dances around. The polished floor glides under her feet, glistening, soapy, as if wet.
“If I go on waltzing for very long tonight,” she muses in a daze, “I’ll end up without a thought in my head.”
She shuts her eyes and abandons herself to her partner’s insensitive breast, throwing herself into the whirl with the trustful semiconsciousness of a child ready to drown. But the music stops suddenly, and the toreador lets his charge drop without a glance, without a word, like flotsam, on the nearest table.
Maud smiles, passes a hand across her forehead, and looks around. “Ah, there’s my ‘sympathetic couple.’” For every night she picks out among those supping at the Good Hostess a couple who catch her fancy—in all innocence—and on whom she lavishes her most childish smiles, occasionally blowing them a kiss, or throwing them a flower; a couple whose departure brings her a short pang of regret, when she watches the woman rise to go with the air of regal boredom befitting one who knows she is being followed by an enamored escort.
“How sweet they are this evening, my sympathetic couple!”
Sweet . . . in a way. Maud chooses to see things in that way. A restless, vindictive desire seems to possess the man, who is very young and can barely conceal his impatience. His eyes are bright and shifty, and so constantly changing in color that they turn pale more often than his tanned face. He eats hurriedly, as if he had a train to catch. When his glance catches his companion’s, he throws his head back as if a bunch of too-fragrant flowers had touched his nostrils.
She had arrived looking happy and self-assured, stimulated by the cold outside and a hearty appetite. She had clasped her hands under her chin and then asked the violinist in the embroidered shirt to play waltzes, more waltzes, and still more waltzes. He played for her “You Once Vowed to Be Mine” . . . “Now You Will Never Know!” . . . “Your Heart Was Cruel.”
“Oh, how I adore that music!” she had sighed aloud.
She had smiled at Maud as she whirled past. And then she had fallen silent, gazing intently at her companion. “Leave me alone,” she told him, pulling away the hand he was stroking.
“They’re sweet, but they seem to quarrel without a word passing,” Maud observes. “They may be in love, but they’re not true friends.”
Now the woman is leaning back in her chair, never taking her eyes off the ferocious eater facing her. Maud is fascinated by the woman’s slender, feverish face, as though something were soon about to happen. The manager clacks his tongue to no purpose, in his attempt to recall the little dancer to her duty; Maud lingers on, bound by some mysterious telepathy to the woman who sits there, speechless, separated from her friend by gulfs of music, drifting farther from him, perhaps, at every throbbing note of the violin, with despairing clairvoyance.
“They love each other, but they’re ill at ease in each other’s company.” Such devotion wells up in the woman’s dark glances, yet she remains obstinately silent as though fearful of bursting into tears or unburdening her heart in a flood of banal complaints. Her eyes are beautiful, eloquent, and frightened, and seem to be telling the man: “You’re a clumsy lover . . . You don’t begin to understand me . . . I don’t really know you, and you scare me . . . You sneer at everything I like . . . You lie so well! . . . You possess me completely, yet I can’t trust you . . . If you knew what limpid springs you wall up within me because I fear you! ‘What am I doing here at your side? Would that this music could free me of you forever! Or else that this violin would stop before I find out any more about you! You yearn for my undoing, not my happiness, and what is worst in me assures you of your victory.”
Maud sighs, “Oh, what an ill-assorted pair they are this evening! She ought to leave him, but . . .”
“Come along,” the man murmurs as he stands up.
His companion rises to her feet, tall, black, and glittering, like an obedient serpent, under the threat of his two bright eyes, so caressing, so treacherous. Defenseless, she follows him, with no support other than the sisterly smile of a little blond dancer, who inwardly regrets the exit of her “sympathetic couple” and whose pout seems to indicate a reproachful “Already?”
“Lola”
From my dressing room I could hear, every night, the tap-tap of heavy crutches on the iron steps leading up to the stage.
Yet there was no “Cripple’s Number” on our program. I used to open my door to watch the midget pony climbing the stairs on its nimble unshod feet. The white donkey followed, clip-clopping behind, then the piebald Great Dane on its thick soft paws, then the beige poodle and the fox terriers.
Bringing up the rear, the plump Viennese lady in charge of the “Miniature Circus” would herself supervise the ascent of the tiny brown bear, always reluctant and somehow desperate, clutching at the banisters and moaning as he mounted, like a punished child being sent up to bed. Two monkeys followed, in flounced silk sprinkled with sequins, smelling like an ill-kept chicken run. All of them climbed with stifled sighs, subdued groans, and inaudible expletives; they were on their way up to wait their daily hour�
�s work.
I never again wished to see them up there, under full control and tame; the sight of their submissiveness had become intolerable to me. I knew too well that the martingaled pony tried in vain to toss its head and constantly pawed with one of its front legs, in a sort of ataxic jerk. I knew that the ailing, melancholic monkey would close its eyes and let its head rest in childish despair on its companion’s shoulder; that the stupid Great Dane would stare into vacancy, gloomy and rigid, while the old poodle would wag its tail with senile benevolence; above all, I knew that the pathetic little brown bear would seize its head in both paws, whimpering and almost in tears, because a very narrow strap fastened around its muzzle cut into its lip.
I should have liked to forget the entire misery-stricken group, in their white leather harness hung with jingle bells and adorned with ribbons and bows, forget their slavering jaws, the rasping breath of these starved animals; I never again wanted to witness, and pity, this dumb animal distress I could do nothing to alleviate. So I remained down below, with Lola.
Lola did not come to visit me straightaway. She waited until the sounds of the laborious ascent had died away, till the last fox terrier had whisked its rump, white as a rabbit’s scut, around the angle of the stairs. Only then did she push my half-open door with her long insinuating nose.
She was so white that her presence lit up my sordid dressing room. A slim, elongated greyhound body, white as snow; her neck, her leg joints, her flanks and tail, bristled with fine silver; her fleecy coat shone like spun glass. She walked in and looked up at me with eyes of orange melting into brown, a color so rare that it alone was enough to touch my heart. Her tongue hung out a little, pink and dry, and she panted gently from thirst . . . “Give me a drink. Give me a drink, though I know it’s forbidden. My companions up there are thirsty too, none of us is allowed to drink before working time. But you’ll give me a drink.”