The Collected Stories of Colette

by Colette

  I remember that, about that very time, the weather changed again. During the twilight of a long April day, the southeast wind began to blow in short gusts, bringing with it a heat which mounted from the soil as from an oven full of burning bread. All four of us were playing bowls. Madame Suzanne kept shaking her white linen sleeves to “air herself” as she sighed: “If it weren’t that I want to slim down!”

  Bowls is a good game, like all games capable of revealing some trait of character in the expert player. Much to my surprise, Monsieur Daste was “shooter.” Before launching his wood, he held it hidden almost behind his back. The arm, the small manicured hand, and the wood rose together and the heavy nailed ball fell on his adversary’s with a resounding crack which sent Monsieur Daste into ecstasy.

  “On his skull! Bang on top of his skull!” he cried.

  Madame Suzanne, the “shooter” of the other side, rated about the same as I did as “marker” for Monsieur Daste’s. Sometimes I “mark” very well, sometimes like a complete duffer. Madame Ruby “marked” to perfection, rolling her wood as softly as a ball of wool to within a hairbreadth of the jack. Disdaining our heavy woods, Pati snapped and spat out again innumerable insects which had been driven inland by the approach of a solid wall of purple clouds which was advancing toward us from the sea.

  “My children, I can feel the storm coming. The roots of my hair are hurting me!” wailed Madame Suzanne.

  At the first flash which broke into twigs of incandescent pink as it ran down the sky into the flat sea, Madame Suzanne gave a great “Ha!” and covered her eyes.

  A warm gust played all around the courtyard, rolling faded flowers, straws, and leaves into wreaths and spirals, and the swallows circled in the air in the same direction. Warm heavy drops splayed on my hands. Madame Ruby ran to the garage, taking great strides, pulled on a black oilskin, and returned to her friend, who had not stirred. White as chalk, her hands over her eyes, the sturdy Suzanne collapsed, weak and tottering, on the shoulder of Madame Ruby, who looked like a dripping lifeboatman.

  The strange couple and I ran toward our twin little flights of steps. Having shut Madame Suzanne in her room, Madame Ruby rushed to the rescue of other shipwrecked creatures, such as the bloodthirsty rabbit and the stupid greyhound. She wheeled the aviary into the garage, shouted orders to the two invisible kitchen maids and to Lucie, who stood in a doorway, her loosened hair hanging in a cloud around her pale face. She closed all the banging doors and brought in the cushions from the garden chairs.

  From my window, I watched the hurly-burly which the American woman directed with a slightly theatrical calm. Nestled against my arm, my excited dog followed all that was going on while she waited for the battle of the elements. She shone in exceptional circumstances; particularly in great storms which she boldly defied where a bulldog would have panted with fear and done his best to die flattened out under an armchair. A minute dog with a great brain, Pati welcomed tempests on land or sea like a joyous stormy petrel.

  Behind me, the violet darkness of the sky, magnificently rent by each flash, was stealing into my red-and-pink room. Some small, hollow-sounding thunder which echoed back from the hills decided to accompany the lightning flashes, and a crushing curtain of rain, which dropped suddenly from the sky, made me hastily shut my window.

  It was almost time for the real night to close in. But the passing night of the storm had taken the place of dusk and I sat down, sullen and unwilling, to my work. I had begun it without inclination and continued it in a desultory way without being decided enough to abandon it altogether. The dog, becoming virtuously quiet as soon as she saw me busy with papers, gnawed her claws and listened to the thunder and the rain. I think that both she and I longed with all our hearts for Paris, for our friends there, for the reassuring mutter of a city.

  The rain, which had fallen from a moderate-sized cloud which the wind had not had time to shred, stopped suddenly. My ear, made alert by the startling silence, caught the sound of voices on the other side of the partition. I could hear a high voice and a lower one, then the sound of tearful recriminations. “Extraordinary!” I thought. “The fat Madame Suzanne getting herself in such a state because of a storm!”

  She did not appear at dinner.

  “Madame Suzanne isn’t feeling well?” I asked Madame Ruby.

  “Her nerves. You is no idea how nervous she is.”

  “The first storm of the season affects the nerves,” said Monsieur Daste, whose opinion no one had asked. “This one is the first . . . but not the last,” he added, pointing to wavering flashes on the horizon.

  I began to think impatiently of my approaching departure. Bella-Vista could no longer assuage my increasing restlessness and my sense of foreboding. I took my dog out into the courtyard before her usual time. Like a child with new shoes, she deliberately splashed through the puddles of rain which reflected a few stars. I had to scold her to get her away from a frog which she doubtless wanted to bring home and add to her collections in Paris: collections of mammoth bones, ancient biscuits, punctured balls, and sulphur lozenges. Monsieur Daste undermined my authority and egged Pati on with innumerable “huisipisis.” The night had stayed warm and its scents made me languid. What tropics exhale more breaths of orange blossom, resin, rain-soaked carnations, and wild peppermint than a spring night in Provence?

  After reading in bed, I switched off my lamp rather late and got up to open the door and window so as to let in as much as possible of the meager coolness and the overabundant scent. Standing in the dark room, I remembered that I had not heard Monsieur Daste come in. For the first time, I found something unpleasant in the thought of Monsieur Daste’s small, agile feet walking, on a moonless night, not far from my open and accessible window. I know from experience how easily a fixed idea of a terror can take concrete shape and I invariably take pains to crush their first, faint intimations. Various mnemonic tricks and musical rhymes served to lull me into a dream in which printed letters danced before me, and I was asleep when the french window which led into my hostesses’ room was clicked open.

  I sat up in bed and heard, from the other side, a deep chest inhaling and exhaling the air. In the silence which foreboded other storms, I was also aware of the slither of two bare feet on my neighbors’ stone steps.

  “You makes me die of heat with your nerves,” said Madame Ruby in a muffled voice. “The storm’s over.”

  The rectangle of my open window was suddenly lit up. I realized that Madame Suzanne had turned on the ceiling light in her room.

  “Idiot! I’m naked,” whispered Ruby furiously.

  The light was promptly switched off.

  “Too late. Daste’s right opposite, in the courtyard.”

  I heard a stifled exclamation and the thump of two heavy feet landing on the wooden floor. Madame Suzanne went over to her friend.

  “Where d’you say he is?”

  “Over by the garage.”

  “It’s quite a long way off.”

  “Not for him. In any case, it is telling him nothing he doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, don’t . . . oh, don’t.”

  “Don’t get upset, darling. There, there . . .”

  “My pet . . . oh, my pet!”

  “Shut up so I can listen. He’s opening the door of the garage.”

  They went silent for a long moment. Then Madame Suzanne whispered vehemently: “Get it well into your head that if they separate us, if they come here to . . .”

  Madame Ruby’s light whistle ordered her to be quiet. The dog had growled and I gently closed my hand over her muzzle.

  “Suppose I shoot?” said the voice of Madame Ruby.

  “Are you quite mad?”

  This startling interchange was followed by a scuffle of bare feet. I imagined that Madame Suzanne was dragging her friend back into the room.

  “Really, Richard, you must be mad. Aren’t we in a bad enough mess as it is? Isn’t it enough for you to have got Lucie in the family way without wanting to pu
t a bullet through Daste into the bargain? You couldn’t control yourself just for once, could you? No, of course not. You men are all the same. Come on, now. No more nonsense. Come indoors, and for heaven’s sake, stay there.”

  The french window shut and there was complete silence.

  I made no further attempt to sleep. My astonishment was soon over. Had Madame Suzanne’s cry of revelation really given me a genuine surprise? What excited my interest and moved me profoundly was the thought of Madame Suzanne’s vigilance, the discreet and devoted cynicism she interposed between the disguised, suspected “Madame” Ruby and the malevolent little Daste.

  If the idle looker-on in me exclaimed delightedly, “What a story!” my honorable side wanted me to keep the story to myself. I have done so for a very long time.

  Toward three in the morning, the wind changed and a fresh storm attacked Bella-Vista. It was accompanied by continuous thunder and slanting rain. In the moment or two it took to gather up my strewn, sopping papers, my nightdress was soaked and clung to my body. The dog followed all my movements, holding herself ready for any contingency. “Have we got to swim? Have we got to run away?” I set her an example of immovable patience and made her a cave out of a scarf. In the shelter of this she played at shipwrecks and desert islands and even at earthquakes.

  Now against a background of total darkness, now against a screen lit up with lightning flashes and driving rain, I reconstructed the neighboring couple, the man and the woman. Two normal people, undoubtedly with the police on their track, lay side by side in the next room, awaiting their fate.

  Perhaps the woman’s head rested on the man’s shoulder while they exchanged anxious speculations. In imagination I saw again the back of “Madame” Ruby’s neck, that thumb, that roughened cheek, that large, well-shaved upper lip. Then I dwelt again on Madame Suzanne and wished good luck to that heroic woman; so jealous and so protective; so terrified, yet ready to face anything.

  Daybreak brought a gray drizzle on the heels of the tornado and sleep overtook me at last. No hand knocked on my door or laid my breakfast tray with its customary rose on my table. The unwonted silence awakened me and I rang for Lucie. It was Marguerite who came.

  “Where is Lucie?”

  “I don’t know, Madame. But won’t I do instead?”

  Under the impalpable rain, the courtyard and climbing roses torn from their trellis had the aspect of October. “The train, the first train! I won’t stay another twenty-four hours!”

  In the wide-open garage, I caught sight of the white linen overall and the dyed gold hair of Madame Suzanne and I went out to join her. She was sitting on an upturned pail and candidly let me see her ravaged face. It was the face of an unhappy middle-aged wife, the eyes small and swollen and the cheeks scoured with recent tears.

  “Look,” she said. “A nice sight, isn’t it?”

  At her feet lay the nineteen parakeets, dead. Assassinated would be a better word for the frenzy with which they had been destroyed. They had been torn and almost pulped in a peculiarly revolting way. The dog sniffed at the birds from a distance and planted herself at my heels.

  “Monsieur Daste’s car isn’t in the garage any longer?”

  Madame Suzanne’s little swollen eyes met my own.

  “Nor is he in the house,” she said. “Gone. After doing that, it’s hardly surprising.”

  With her foot, she pushed away a headless parakeet.

  “If you’re sure he did it, why don’t you complain to the police? In your place, I should certainly lodge a complaint.”

  “Yes. But you’re not in my place.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Ah, my dear, lodge a complaint! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Besides,” she added, “he’d paid his bill for the week. He doesn’t owe us a farthing.”

  “Is he a madman?”

  “I’d like to believe so. I must go and find Paulius and get him to bury all this. Was there something you wanted?”

  “Nothing special. As I told you already, I’m leaving. Tomorrow. Or even today unless that’s quite impossible.”

  “Just as you like,” she said indifferently. “Today, if you’d rather. Because tomorrow . . .”

  “You’re expecting someone to arrive tomorrow?”

  She ran her tongue over her dry, unpainted lips.

  “Someone to arrive? I wonder. If anyone could tell me what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

  She got up as heavily as an old woman.

  “I’ll go and tell Madame Ruby to see about your seat in the train. Marguerite will help you with your packing.”

  “Or Lucie. She knows where I keep all my things.”

  The unhappy, tear-washed elderly woman reared herself up straight. Flushed and sparkling with anger, she looked suddenly young again.

  “Terribly sorry. Lucie’s not there. Lucie’s through!”

  “She’s leaving you?”

  “Leaving me? Considering I’ve thrown her out, the slut! There are . . . interesting conditions that I find very far from interesting! Really, the things one has to put up with in this world!”

  She went off down the muddy path, her white skirt held up in both hands. I did not linger to consider the scattered wreckage at my feet, the work of the civilized monster masquerading in human shape, the creature who lusted to kill birds.

  Madame Suzanne did everything possible to satisfy my keen and slightly cowardly desire to leave Bella-Vista that very day. She did not forget Pati’s ticket and insisted on accompanying me to the train. Dressed in tight-fitting black, she sat beside me on the back seat, and all through the drive, she preserved a stiffness which was equally suitable to a well-to-do businesswoman or a proud creature going to the scaffold. In front of us was Madame Ruby’s erect, T-shaped torso and her handsome head with its rakishly tilted beret.

  At the station, I managed to persuade Madame Suzanne to stay in the car. My last sight of her was behind the windows misted with fine rain. It was Madame Ruby who carried my heaviest suitcase, bought me papers, and settled me in my carriage with the greatest possible friendliness.

  But I received these attentions somewhat ungraciously. I had an unjust feeling which refused to admit that this easy assurance quite caught the manner of a masculine female, adept at making women blush under her searching glances. I was on the verge of reproaching myself for ever having been taken in by this tough fellow whose walk, whose whole appearance was that of an old Irish sergeant who had dressed himself up as a woman for a joke on St. Patrick’s Day.

  [Translated by Antonia White]

  April

  “Count again,” ordered Vinca. “That makes nine. You made a mistake.”

  Phil sighed, and then raised his lustrous eyebrows in weariness.

  “The two Viénots, Maria and her brother, La Folle and her little dog . . .”

  Vinca chewed on her pencil anxiously, turning her blue eyes up toward the denser blue of a spring storm which was raining down a soft and ephemeral snow of plum blossoms and hazelnut-tree caterpillars, blown down from an invisible garden in Auteuil.

  “Will the dog follow along?”

  “No, he doesn’t follow. She puts him in a strawberry basket attached to the handlebars, nestled in a Basque beret and slipped into the sleeve of an old sweater. He loves it.”

  “Well, it’s fine with me . . . We said six, including us, the three Lapins-Géants-des-Flandres, nine. That’s all.”

  “Worse than a wedding,” said Phil scornfully.

  “The hard-boiled eggs, the pâté, the roast beef, and the ham . . .”

  “. . . Thirteen,” said Philippe. “Miscount.”

  Vinca burst out laughing, once again behaving like the fifteen-year-old girl she was, and Phil deigned to smile. He dark, she blond and rosy, they looked vaguely alike from having lived near one another since they were born and having loved one another in the aggressive way of adolescents.

  “Viénot Henri says he’s bringing some Calvados and so
me . . . kümmel.”

  Phil raised his head from the back of the wicker chair.

  “Oh, yeah? Viénot Henri can do whatever he wants. We’re not touching any liquor, if you don’t mind! Viénot Henri has the manners of a boor!”

  Vinca blushed and did not reply. With Philippe, she would accept authority and rebelled only when teased. She raised her generous face toward him, the face of a blossoming young girl with glowing cheeks. She had glistening, decidedly blue eyes, straight blond hair, and between her slightly chapped lips, teeth that were strong, white, and rounded at the edges.

  “You know, Phil, I have a rack on my bike. I can take whatever might get in your way.”

  “Nothing’ll get in my way,” said Phil roguishly. “Nothing except our caravan, all the others . . . I’d like for us to go by car, you and me . . .”

  “Yes, but since we don’t have a car, Phil . . .”

  He felt ashamed of himself, as he did whenever Vinca accepted her situation as a young girl without means and without money, taught to ride a bike as well as do the laundry, adept at beating and folding an omelette, at shampooing her little sister Lisette’s hair and ironing her father’s pants. Tall for her age, long-legged and lanky, she was nonetheless exactly like a woman and often anxious.

  “Phil, does your mother know about the roast beef? Tell her she should only get enough for six, meat is so overpriced . . .”

  She broke off to listen to the pearly rippling of a hailstorm and Phil snickered, pointing to the low sky.

  “A week from today . . .” said Vinca hopefully.

  And already her eyes were the color of clear blue skies.

  And so it was that the weather did in fact change.

  The next day, around the church in Auteuil, Palm Sunday gave forth its odor of tomcat and flowers. Vinca opened the window facing the street, one of the last village streets left in Auteuil, to watch for Philippe and his parents, who were coming for lunch. She leaned out to wonder at the spent lilacs and the mahonia with leaves the color of reddish iron, squeezed in between the gate and the front of the house.