Love of Seven Dolls (5 page)

Into this plot, without further preparation, Mouche was drawn by the puppets to explain, guide, mother, scold, keeping their secrets, sharing others with the audience, while playing a variety of roles, a maid, Mr. Reynardo’s secretary, Dr. Duclos’ sister, a friend of Mme. Muscat’s . . .

She had a quick wit for situations, but above all she had the ability to forget herself and become wholly immersed in the goings on. Because she believed so completely in the little creatures she had the unique power of transferring this belief to the audience and with a look, a laugh, or a single tender passage between herself and one of the puppets, transport the watchers away from the hard-packed earth on which they stood and into the world of make-believe where the ordinary rules of life and living did not obtain.

Before the little play was over, all concerned had changed sides so often, that Monsieur Nicholas had to appear to untangle them and at the finish, to great applause, Carrot Top and Gigi, Dr. Duclos and Madame Muscat and Ali and Mouche were paired off, for the poor Giant made such a muddle of things that Mouche had to take him under her wing and he proceeded to fall desperately and moon-calf in love with her.

That day the collections made by Golo far surpassed anything Coq and his family had earned heretofore, and the puppeteer took a room in a cheap hotel for himself and a servant’s room upstairs for Mouche. Golo was still relegated to sleep in the car and watch over the puppets. He did not mind this for he preferred to be with them.

And that night all three ate a good supper at the inn with red wine, of which Coq drank heavily. The drink did not make him mellower, but on the contrary still more scornful and contemptuous of Mouche.

He ate grossly, ignoring her presence, but once when he felt her large eyes upon him in the uneasy silence that lay over their table like an oasis in the centre of the noisy, smoky bistro, he looked up from his eating and snarled at her, “What the devil got into you this afternoon when Carrot Top asked you what to do to win Gigi and fly away with him in his helicopter? You stood there frozen and staring like an animal. Why didn’t you tell him?”

It was not the reproof, but the sudden shifting of the base of this new and marvellous world into which she had been ushered that disturbed Mouche. It was as though there had been an unwarranted intrusion by an outsider.

“Why,” she exclaimed carefully, “Carrot Top doesn’t want to be told what to do. He made me promise before he let me come along that I was never to interfere with him. And besides,” she concluded after a moment of reflection, “he doesn’t really love Gigi at all, because . . .”

She broke off in alarm for Capitaine Coq was staring at her, his face now flushed dark with rage.

“What makes YOU think you know who Carrot Top loves or doesn’t love, you milk-faced little fool?”

For a moment Mouche thought the red-headed man was about to hurl his plate of food in her face . . .

Mouche said, “I . . . I’m sorry. I really don’t know . . . I suppose I just guessed. I won’t do it again.”

The fury did not abate from the countenance of Coq, but he did not speak to her again and instead took it out on Golo, shouting at him, “What are you lingering for, you black monkey? Haven’t you stuffed yourself enough? Get away back to the car before everything is pilfered . . .”

They continued to eat and drink in heavy silence again until Mouche gathered the courage to speak to him again. In her simple, gentle way she asked, “Monsieur le Capitaine, why are you always so angry?”

He laid down his knife and fork and stared long at her out of his cold, hard eyes. “Because you are a fool,” he replied finally, “and I have no time for fools, particularly women.”

Mouche was not hurt, for she was used to living where men were outspoken. And besides she did not think she was clever, or, since the disasters that had happened to her, even talented any longer. Impulsively she reached over and placed her hand oupon his in a sweet conciliatory gesture saying, “Dear Capitaine Coq—why cannot you be as kind and patient with me as Carrot Top, Dr. Duclos and Mr. Reynardo. I am sure they thought I was very stupid at times today, but they never showed it.”

The touch of her gentle fingers seemed to sting Capitaine Coq and he snatched his hand away. “Because your staring eyes and whining innocence make me sick.”

The attack was so savage that the tears came to Mouche’s eyes and she nodded her head silently.

“As for them,” Capitaine Coq continued, draining his glass, “it is no concern of mine what they do. Get along with them if you know what is good for you, during working hours. And keep out of my way at other times. Understood?”

Mouche nodded again. “I’ll try.”

Yet in spite of the harshness of Capitaine Coq which had the effect only of moving her to a kind of pity for him, for he seemed to be so wretched in his furies, the week of the street fair in Rheims was one of the happiest times Mouche had ever known.

The warmth of her relationship with the seven puppets seemed to grow by leaps and bounds and soon she was familiar with their characteristics, their strengths and weaknesses, the striving and ambitious little Carrot Top with the soaring imagination which always wished to brush aside earthbound obstacles, and yet was tied down by the responsibility for all the others and the running of the show; the pompous, long-winded, fatuous Dr. Duclos, the prototype of every self-satisfied stuffed shirt, who still in his bumbling way was kind, and the vain, foolish, self-centred ingenue Gigi who of all the little dolls, was not.

Most dependent upon her was Alifanfaron, the giant who frightened no one and was so kind-hearted and slow-witted that everyone took advantage of him. He looked pathetically to Mouche for help and protection and some of the most charming passages took place between the ugly, fearful-looking monster and the young girl who mothered him.

She got on the best with Mme. Muscat, for the Madame was a woman who had seen life and buried husbands, understood men and felt that women should stick together for mutual protection. She was always Mouche’s ally with advice or an aphorism, or a bit of useful gossip as to what was going on backstage, or below the counter, that mysterious domain where the puppets dwelt.

But if Mouche had had to select a favourite of them all, it would have been Mr. Reynardo. He touched her most deeply because he was sly, wicked, not quite honest, knew it and wished and tried, but not too fervently, to be better.

He amused her, too. He baited and teased her and sometimes worked up little intrigues against her with the others, but when it came right down to it he also seemed to love her the most and feel the deepest need for her affection. Much of his yapping was bravado and the moments when Mouche felt almost unbearably touched and happy was when from time to time cracks appeared in his armour of cynicism and through them she caught glimpses of the small child within wanting to be forgiven and loved.

Though he was her friend and counsellor, Mouche remained a little in awe of Monsieur Nicholas, the mender of toys, for he was a dispenser of impartial justice as well as kindness. His glance through his square spectacles always seemed to penetrate her and reach to her innermost secret thoughts.

Child-like, too, but in the primitive fashion backed by the dark lore of his race, was Golo. He was indeed the slave that served the puppets and now that Mouche had become as one of them, hers too. He was versed in the mechanics of the show, yet they meant nothing to him. One moment he could be behind the booth assisting Capitaine Coq in a costume change for one of the puppets, handing him props, or hanging the dolls in proper order, head down so that Coq could thrust his hands into them quickly for those lightning appearances and disappearances of the characters, and the next, out front with Mouche, he looked upon them as living, breathing creatures.

The belief in the separate existence of these little people was even more basic with Mouche for it was a necessity to her and a refuge from the storms of life with which she had been unable to cope.

If fundamentally she must have been aware that it was Coq who animated them, she managed to obliterate the thought. For how could one reconcile the man and his creations? And further she rarely saw Capitaine Coq enter or leave the booth, for he was moody and mysterious in his comings and goings. Sometimes he would sit inside for as long as an hour in the early morning, or even late at night, without giving a sign of his presence there, until suddenly one or more of his puppets would appear onstage.

All orders were given, all business directed through Carrot Top, all rehearsals conducted, new songs learned, plots and bits of business discussed with the puppets until conversing with them became second nature to Mouche and it became almost impossible for her to associate this odd family of such diverse characters with the pale, bitter man who was their creator.

When the week of the fair was at an end in Rheims, they moved on to Sedan for three days and thence to Montmedy and Metz, for that year it was Capitaine Coq’s intention to tour north-eastern France and Alsace, until the cold weather drove them south.

One night, without warning, Capitaine Coq emerged from the tap room of the sordid little inn on the outskirts of the city, where they were quartered, half drunk and amorous.

It was late. There were no women about, the regulars having long since paired off or disappeared. He bethought himself then of a piece of property he considered belonged to him, the thin girl asleep upstairs in the narrow bedroom under the eaves.

It was time, he thought, as well, that the little ninny learned something and became a woman. And besides, since they were travelling together, it would be cheaper if henceforth they occupied one room—and perhaps, if she was not a stick, convenient too.

But there was yet another darker purpose that sent him prowling up the stairs that led to the attic chamber. It was the fact that her gentleness, innocence and purity of heart were a perpetual affront to him, the kind of man he was and the life that he led. It had been worming him ever since he had first laid eyes on her. Now he could no longer bear it unless he pulled her down to his level and made her as he was.

He tiptoed to her door, bent and listened for a moment, then, turning the handle swiftly, he whipped inside with the furtive speed of one of his own puppets and closed the door behind him.

When Mouche awoke the next morning, the sunshine was pouring in through the dormer window as if to deny the nightmare that had happened to her. She had thought she would not sleep that night, or ever sleep again. Yet, somehow, oblivion had come, and now the day.

She got out of bed and went to the window which looked onto the rear courtyard of the Inn where a dog lolloped, a pig lay in the mud, chickens picked at the ground and ducks and a goose waddled through puddles of dirty water.

They reminded her of her childhood and the farmyards of her village in Brittany and she wondered how she could stand there so calmly contemplating them and the memories they aroused, she who would never be as a child again.

Mouche had neither protested nor resisted Capitaine Coq’s act of darkness. Out of the darkness he had come, in darkness taken her and to darkness returned, leaving her bruised, defiled and ashamed.

Startled out of her sleep by his presence, she had recognised him when a shaft of moonlight had fallen across his pale face with the crinkled nose, draining the red from his hair, turning it to purple.

For an instant, her heart had leaped, for she thought that perhaps he loved her, and she would not have denied him.

But there was no love in his eyes or in his heart; no whisper came from his lips and too late she knew what was afoot. It would have been of no use to cry out. Besides, where could she have escaped to, naked, alone, friendless and penniless in a strange inn? He was there before she could make a move, intruding himself into her room, her consciousness, her bed, and then her person.

The brutality of his passion brought her close to a climax of her own, one of seemingly unbearable grief, anguish and pain, and once she murmured his name, “Michel,” piteously. She thought that surely she would die.

Then he was gone at last, leaving her shamed to death because he had abused her so callously without loving her, weeping miserably with humiliation and hurt because of his cynical contempt for her, the disgusting arrogance and carelessness of his possession of her person. He had not given her a single kindly glance, or caress, or kiss; no word, no gentleness. He had left not a solitary ray of hope to illuminate the despair that engulfed her, that within his strong, imprisoning, goatish body there beat a human heart.

And she was the more shamed because of the instinct that told her that despite the horror and brutality, she had yielded and the act and the moment might make her for ever his.

These were the black memories, her thoughts and fears that morning as she washed and clad the body that was no longer a citadel, and prepared to face what the day would bring.

And yet the miracle occurred again, for that day was yet like any other, except if anything the troupe was still kinder and more friendly to her.

Carrot Top greeted her with a shrill cry of delight when he arrived at the booth. “Hey, Mouche! Where you been? Do you know what? There’s sausage for breakfast. Golo! Give Mouche her sausage.”

As the Senegalese appeared from behind the booth with garlic country sausage and fresh bread on a paper plate, Mr. Reynardo popped up from below with a large piece in his jaws and thrust it at her, saying, “Here. I saved a piece of mine for you. And you
know
how I love sausage . . .”

Mouche said, “Oh Rey. Did you really. That was sweet of you . . .”

From below a protesting rumble was heard and as Carrot Top vanished Alifanfaron appeared. “Say, who stole that piece of sausage I was saving for Mouche?”

Shocked at such affrontery Mouche cried, “Rey, you
didn’t . .
.” But the attitude of guilt of the fox condemned him. She said severely, memory of all her own troubles fading, “Rey, give it back to Ali at once. There. Now, Ali, you may give it to me.”