by Colette
“The public can soon tell the difference between a dainty number like my girl’s and one like those three little miseries who’ve just gone rushing off. They’re so scraggy, Madame, and they look so scared, too. Those frightened eyes they roll at the smallest mistake they make in their work! As I was saying only the other day to my Lily, ‘They make a pitiful sight!’ ‘Phooey!’ she gives me for answer, ‘they’re not interesting.’ I know well enough it’s that competitive spirit in her that makes her say things like that, but all the same she comes out with remarks that knock the stuffing out of me.
“I’m telling you all this, but you’ll keep it to yourself, you won’t let it go any farther, will you? I feel a bit nervy today because she’s answered me back just now, me, her mother!
“Oh, I can’t say I bless the man who put Lily on the stage! Fine gentleman though he is, and a good writer of plays. I used to work for his lady, by the day, embroidering fine linen. His lady was very kind to me, and allowed Lily to come and wait for me there when she came out of school.
“One day, it must be nearly four years since, the gentleman I was speaking of was on the lookout for a clever child to take a little girl’s part in one of his plays, and for a lark he asked me for my Lily . . . It was soon settled, Madame. My little girl had them all flabbergasted from the start. Poise, memory, proper intonation, she’d got all that and more. I didn’t take it too serious at first till I heard they’d pay Lily up to eight francs a day. There was nothing you could say against that, was there?
“After that play came another, and then another. And every time I’d say, ‘After success like that, it’s the last time Lily will act,’ they all got after me. ‘Now stop all this nonsense! Just drop that damned embroidery job of yours! Can’t you see you’ve got a gold mine in that child! Not to mention you’ve no right to stifle a talent like hers.’ And so on and so forth, till I hardly dared breathe . . .
“And during that time, you should have seen the progress my little one made! Hobnobbing with the celebrities, and saying ‘My dear’ to the manager himself! And grave as a judge with it all, which made everyone split their sides.
“Then came the time, two years ago, when my daughter found herself out of a job. ‘Thank the Lord,’ I says to myself, ‘now we can have a rest, and settle down on the nice little sum we’ve put by from the theater.’ I consult Lily, as was my duty; she’d already made a big impression on me with her knowing ways. Can you guess what she answered? ‘My poor mamma, you must be crazy! I shan’t always be eleven, unfortunately. This is not the time to go to sleep. There’s nothing doing in the theater this season, but the music hall’s there, all right, for me to have a go!’
“As you may imagine, Madame, she didn’t lack encouragement from these, and those, and especially the others, none of whose business it was! Gifted as she is, it didn’t take her long to learn to dance and sing. Her chief worry is that she’s growing up. I have to measure her every fortnight: she’d like so much to stay small! Only last month she flew into a rage because she’d put on two centimeters in the last year, and reproached me for not having made her a dwarf from birth.
“It’s terrible, the manner of speaking she’s picked up backstage, and her bossiness, too! She soon gets the upper hand, I being so weak. She argued back at me again today. She’d been that la-di-da in her answers that for a moment I saw red and got on my high horse. ‘And so what! I’m your mother, I’d have you know! And supposing I took you by the arm and put a stop to you going on with the theater!’
“She was busy making up her eyes; she didn’t even turn around, she just started to laugh. ‘Stop me going on with the theater? Ha! ha! ha! And I suppose you’d go on in my place and sing them “Chiribibibi” to pay the rent!’
“Tears came to my eyes, Madame: it’s hard when one is humiliated by one’s own flesh and blood. But it’s not altogether that I feel so bad about. It’s . . . I’m not sure how to explain what it is. There are times when I look at her and think, ‘She’s my little daughter, and she’s thirteen. She’s been four years in show business. Rehearsals, backstage tittle-tattle, unfair treatment on the part of the manager, rivalry between the stars, jealousy of her comrades, her posters, the bandleader who bears her a grudge, the call boy who was too late—or too soon—with her bell, the claque, her costume maker . . . That’s all she’s had in her head and on her lips for the last four years. All these past four years I’ve never once heard her talk like a child . . . And never, never, never again shall I hear her talk like a child—like a real child . . .”
[Translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi]
The Misfit
1
The stagehands called her “a choice piece”; but the Schmetz family—eight acrobats, their mother, wives, and “young ladies”—never mentioned her; Ida and Hector, “Duo Dancers,” said severely, “She brings shame on the house.” Jady, the “diseuse” from Montmartre, made use of her most rasping contralto to exclaim, on seeing her, “Well, what d’you know about that number!” and was quizzed in reply with imperious disdain, and the flashy deployment of a long ermine stole.
For the public this outcast was billed as “La Roussalka”; but for the entire caf’-conc’ personnel she became, on the spot, “Poison Ivy.” Within the span of a mere six days the austere backstage staff of the Élysée-Pigalle were at their wits’ end, and deplored her superfluous presence. Dancer? Singer? Pah! Neither the one, nor t’other . . .
“She displaces air, that’s all!” Brague assured everyone.
She sang Russian songs and danced the jota, the sevillana, and the tango, revised and corrected by an Italian ballet master—Spanish olé! with a Frenchified flavor!
No sooner was Friday’s band call over than the whole house was eyeing her askance. La Roussalka chose to rehearse in a carefully considered Liberty gown and hat, hands in muff, indicating the jota with discreet little jerks of her hobble-skirted posterior, stopping abruptly to shout, “That’s not it, Jesus! That’s not it,” stamping and screaming “Brutes!” at the members of the band.
Mutter Schmetz, who sat mending her sons’ tights in the circle, could hardly be kept in her seat. “That, an ardisde! That, a tanzer! Ach! she is nozzings but a dard, yes?”
And La Roussalka continued, “with enough brazen cheek to gobble up her parents,” to employ Brague’s energetic metaphor, bullying the property man, cursing the electrician, demanding a blue flood on her entrance and a red spot on her exit, and goodness knows what else!
“I’ve played all the big houses in Europe,” she yelled, “and I’ve neverrr seen a joint so disgrrracefully rrrun!”
She rolled her r’s in a most insulting manner, as if she were chucking a handful of pebbles straight in your face.
During this rehearsal one saw nothing but La Roussalka, and heard nothing but La Roussalka. In the evening, however, it was discovered that there were two of them: opposite La Roussalka, dark, ablaze with purple spangles and imitation topazes, danced a soft, fair-haired child, graceful, light as air. “This is my sisterrr,” La Roussalka declared, though no one had asked for enlightenment. Further, she had an offensive way of clinching matters, on her “worrrd of honorrr,” that shocked even her most candid listener.
Whether sister, servile poor relation, or a little dancer hired for a pittance—nobody knew or cared. She appeared, a mere chit of a girl, to be dancing in her sleep, docile as a lamb, pretty, with huge, vacant, brown eyes. At the end of the sevillana, she rested a moment against a flat, mouth agape, then noiselessly returned to the cellar, while La Roussalka started on her tango.
“What’s more,” Brague said for all to hear, “she dances with her hands!”
Hands, arms, hips, eyes, eyebrows, hair—her feet, being unskilled, did not know what they were up to. What saved the day for her was the cocksure flamboyance, the assured insolence of her least gesture. She congratulated herself if she made a false step, seemed highly delighted if she fluffed an entrechat, and, back in the wings, gave herself
no time to draw breath before starting to talk, talk, talk, and lie with all the abandon of a southerner born in Russia.
She addressed herself to the world in general with the familiarity of a tipsy princess. She stopped one of the blond Schmetz boys, in his pale mauve tights, by laying both hands on his shoulders, so that with lowered eyes and blushing, he dared not make good his escape; she forcibly drove Mutter Schmetz into a corner, only to be met with a volley of Ja, ja, ja’s as stinging as smacks in the face; the facetious stage manager got more than he bargained for in the way of abuse, as did Brague, who kept whistling throughout her tirade.
“My family . . . My native land . . . I’m a Russian . . . I speak fourteen languages, like all my compatriots . . . I’ve gotten myself six thousand francs’ worth of stage costumes for this wretched little number worth nothing at all . . . But you should see, my dearrr, all the town clothes I have! Money means nothing to me! . . . I can’t tell you my real name: there’s no knowing what might happen if I did! My father holds the most important position in Moscow. He’s married, you know. Only he’s not married to my mother . . . He gives me everything I want . . . You’ve seen my sister? She’s a good-for-nothing. I beat her a lot, she won’t work. All I can say is, she’s pure! On my life, she’s that! . . . You none of you saw me last year in Berlin? Oh, that’s where you should have seen me! A thirty-two-thousand-franc act, my dearrr! With that blackguard Castillo, the dancer. He robbed me, on my worrrd of honorr, he stole from me! But once across the Russian border and I told my father everything. Castillo was jugged! In Russia, we show no mercy to thieves. Jugged, I tell you, jugged! Like this!”
She went through the motions of turning a key in its lock, and her heavily violet-penciled eyes sparkled with cruelty. Then, played out, she went down to her dressing room, where she relieved her nervous tension by giving her “sister” more than one good clout on the ears. Genuine stage slaps they were, resounding right enough, but they rang true on those young cheeks. They could be heard up on the stage. Mutter Schmetz, outraged, spoke of “gomblaining to de bolice” and pressed to her bosom two flaxen-haired lads of seven and eight, the youngest born of her flaxen-haired brood, as if “Poison Ivy” were about to give them a spanking.
By what noxious flames was this fiend of a woman consumed? Before the week was out, she had hurled a satin slipper at the bandleader’s head, referred to the secretary-general, in his hearing, as a “pimp,” and, by accusing her dresser of stealing her jewelry, reduced the poor creature to tears. Gone were the quiet evenings of the Élysée-Pigalle and the peaceful slumbers of its cells behind closed doors! Gone for good! “Poison Ivy” had ruined everything.
“She’s out for my blood, is she!” was Jady’s bold threat. “Let me hear one single word from that one, no, not even that, let her so much as brush against me in the doorway, and I’ll get her fired!”
Brague, for once, might well have supported Jady, for he could not stomach the unwarrantable success of La Roussalka, and the way she glittered among the mended tights, home-cleaned dresses and smoke-blackened scenery, like a sham jewel in an imitation setting.
“I enjoy my rest,” Ida whispered to Brague. “There’s never been so much as a word uttered against my husband and me, you know that! Well then, I can assure you, that when I leave the stage, you know, when I carry Hector off standing on my hands, and I catch sight of ‘Poison Ivy’ sniggering at the two of us, it wouldn’t need much for me to drop Hector plonk on her head!”
Nobody bothered anymore about the little blond “sister,” who never uttered a word and danced like a sleepwalker between one stinging blow and the next. She was to be met with in the corridors, her shoulder weighed down by a slop pail or a pitcher full of water, shuffling along in bedraggled old slippers, her petticoats trailing behind her.
But after the show, La Roussalka rigged her out in a loosely belted dress, too voluminous for her flat-chested figure, and a hat that came halfway down her back, and whisked her off, red-cheeked from her drubbing and gummy-eyed, to the night haunts on the Butte de Montmartre. There she made her sit down, docile and half asleep, with cocktails in front of her, and once again, to the cynical amazement of chance “friends,” she started to talk and talk and tell lies.
“My father . . . the most influential man in Moscow . . . I speak fourteen languages . . . I myself never tell lies; but my compatriots, the Russians, are one and all liars . . . I’ve sailed twice around the world on a princely yacht . . . My jewels are all in Moscow, for my family forbids me to wear them on the stage, because of the ducal coronets on every piece . . .”
Meanwhile, the little sister dozed on half awake. From time to time she almost took a somersault when one of the “friends” tried to squeeze her thin waist or stroke her bare neck, pale mauve with pearl powder. Her surprise unloosed the rage of La Roussalka.
“Wake up, you, where do you think you are? Jesus, what a life, having to drag this child around with me!”
Calling to witness not only the “friends” but the restaurant at large, she shouted, “Look at her there, that good-for-nothing! This table couldn’t hold the piles of dough I’ve spent on her! I’m reduced to tears the whole day long because she will do nothing, nothing, nothing!”
The slapped child never batted an eyelid. Of what youthful past, or of what escape, was she dreaming behind her mysteriously vacant, huge brown eyes?
2
“This child,” Brague decrees, “is a kid we’ll stick in the chorus. One more, one less, it makes little difference. She’ll always earn her forty sous . . . though I don’t much like having to deal with misfits . . . I say this now so’s it’s known another time.”
Brague speaks pontifically, in his dark kingdom of the Élysée-Pigalle, where his double function of mime and producer assure him undisputed authority.
The “misfit,” or so it would seem, pays no heed to his words. Her vague thanks are expressed in a meaningless smile that does not spread to her large eyes, the color of clouded coffee, and she lingers on, arms limp, twiddling the handle of a faded bag.
She has just this moment been christened by Brague: henceforth she will be known as “Misfit.” A week ago she was the “good-for-nothing little sister”; she gains by the change.
Little matter, for she discourages malice, and even attention, this foundling who has just been dumped down here, without a sound, by “La Roussalka, her sister,” who went off leaving her with three torn silk underslips, a couple of “latest models” sizes too big for her, a pair of evening shoes with paste buckles, not to mention a hat, and the key to the room they occupied together in the rue Fontaine.
La Roussalka, alias “Poison Ivy,” that human hurricane, that storm-cloud charged with hail ready to burst at the least shock, has shown in her flight a strange discretion, by removing her four large trunks, her “family papers,” the portrait of her fatherrr “who controls rain and sunshine in Moscow,” while forgetting the little sister who danced with her, docile, half asleep, and somehow weighed down by blows.
Misfit neither wept nor wailed. She stated her case to the lady manager in a few words and with a Flemish accent exactly suited to her blond sheep-like appearance. Madame did not overflow with maternal protestations or pitying indignation, any more than did Jady, the diseuse, or Brague himself. Misfit has attained the age of eighteen, and is therefore old enough to go out alone and look after her own affairs.
“Eighteen!” Jady grumbled, suffering from a hangover and bronchitis. “Eighteen, and she expects me to take pity on her!”
Brague, a good fellow at heart, felt more kindly disposed. “Forty sous, did I say? We’ll bloody well give three francs, so’s to give her time to look around.”
Since then Misfit comes every day, at one, to sit in one of the canvas-covered stalls of the Élysée-Pigalle, and wait. When Brague calls out, “On stage, the great hetaerae!” she climbs onto the gangway that spans the orchestra pit and sits down at a sticky zinc table such as is used in low pubs. In the pa
ntomime now in rehearsal she will take the part, wearing a reconditioned pink gown, of an “elegant customer” at a Montmartre cabaret.
She can hardly be seen from the auditorium, since she has been placed at the very back of the stage, behind the huge seedy-looking hats of the other ladies of the chorus. The stagehand sets in front of her an empty glass and a spoon, and there she poses, her childish chin resting on a dubiously gloved hand.
She is a thoroughly safe customer. She doesn’t jabber on the stage, never complains of the icy draft whistling around her legs, nor has she either the unhappy look of young Miriam, so furiously hungry that it seems to demand food, or Vanda’s feverish activity, Vanda the Cluck, forever producing from her pocket a baby’s sock in need of darning, or a flannelette brassiere that she mends while trying to hide it.
Misfit has fallen into oblivion again, apparently thankful at last to be able to roll up into a ball, as though the general indifference has spared her the trouble of existing. She speaks even less than the star dancer from Milan, a heavy woman, pitted with smallpox and plastered with holy medals and coral callosities. Her silence, at any rate, is born of contempt, she being interested solely in the “five points,” the entrechats-six, the whole graceless and laborious range of acrobatics that exercise the sailor’s muscles on her calves.
Upstage, Brague is doing his level best not to husband an ounce of his energy. “Isn’t he lucky to sweat like that!” sighs the wretched brat Miriam, white with cold under her rouge. Brague sweats in vain at his miming. He wears himself out trying to communicate his faith, his feverish enthusiasm, to the little tart in her hairless fur, to the stubborn mender of baby socks, to the arrogant ballerina. He insists—oh, the folly of it!—that Miriam, Vanda, and the Italian should at least appear to take an interest in the action of his piece.