The Collected Stories of Colette (25 page)

“——’k you,” says Gloria in an educated voice.

“The pleasure is mine,” our good companion Marcel politely replies. Though billed as a tenor, he may well be dancing this coming month or even performing in a drama at the Gobelins or in a revue at Montrouge.

As if by mere chance, Marcel waits on the landing for the return of the noisy flock of English showgirls. By apparent chance, too, Gloria comes up last and lingers for a moment, time enough to fumble with awkward grace in the paper bag of lemon drops our good companion offers her.

I take careful note of the slow progress of this idyll. He is young, famished, ardent, firmly determined not to “break down,” and looks—in spite of his well-worn tails and artificial lily-of-the-valley buttonhole-like a handsome, crafty, working-class boy. But Gloria’s strange foreign manners baffle him. With a French chum, a little Paris music-hall sparrow, he would already know where he stood—things work, or they don’t—but he simply can’t fathom this funny
anglishe
. She may rush off the stage, disheveled and yelling, hastily unhooking her dress, yet when she reaches the landing she pulls herself together, straightens her face to accept and acknowledge the proffered sweet with the dignified “——’k you” of a young lady in full evening dress.

She attracts him. She irritates him too. Sometimes he shrugs his shoulders as he watches her walk away, but I can feel that it is at himself he is poking fun. The other day he chucked into Gloria’s large hat, held dangling by its ribbons, half a dozen tangerines, seized on at once by the horde of blond savages, who snatched at them with triumphant shrieks, loud laughter, and sharp nails.

This long flirtation exasperates the impatient French boy, lively and inconstant, whereas Gloria revels in its protraction. She now calls Marcel by his name,
Mâss’l
, and has given him a picture postcard of herself. Not the one in which she is dressed as a toddler with a hoop, or that on which she is disguised as a “Poulbot kid,” with a hole in her pants—oh, no!—but the loveliest of all, presenting Gloria as a Medieval Lady wearing a high headdress, a quasi-regal Gloria.

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 Have I not seen him kiss a thin little hand, one that was not withdrawn, a bony little paw, chapped by cold water and liquid white!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
 . . .”

“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?”

“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.