The Collected Stories of Colette (56 page)

No matter, I find all three of them acting strange and disposed to go off in corners and talk in low voices.

Monday
. The children don’t look at all well this morning, and so I question them.

“What’s wrong with you youngsters?”

“Nothing at all, Tante Colette!” exclaim my stepsons.

“Nothing at all, Mamma!” exclaims Bel-Gazou.

A fine chorus—and certainly a well-organized fib. The thing is becoming serious, all the more so since I overheard the two boys, at dusk, behind the tennis court, engaged in this bit of dialogue:

“I tell you, old man, it didn’t stop from midnight to three in the morning.”

“Who are you telling that to, for goodness’ sake! I didn’t shut an eye, it kept it up from midnight to four this morning. It went
poom . . . poom . . . poom!
Like that, slowly, as if with bare feet, but heavy, heavy . . .”

They glimpsed me and rushed down upon me like two male falcons, with laughter, with white and red balls, with a studied and noisy thoughtlessness. I will learn nothing today.

Wednesday
. When last night toward eleven o’clock I went through Bel-Gazou’s bedroom to reach mine, she was not yet asleep. She was lying on her back, her arms at her side, and her dark eyes beneath the fringe of her hair were moving. A warm August moon, crescent, softly swayed the shadow of the magnolia on the parquet floor and the white bed gave off a bluish light.

“You’re not asleep?”

“No, Mamma.”

“What are you thinking about, all alone like this?”

“I’m listening.”

“For goodness’ sake, to what?”

“Nothing, Mamma.”

At that very second I heard, distinctly, the sound of a heavy footstep, and not shod, on the upper floor. The upper floor is a long attic where no one sleeps, where no one, after nightfall, has occasion to go, and which leads to the top of the most ancient tower. My daughter’s hand, which I squeezed, contracted in mine.

Two mice passed in the wall, playing and emitting birdlike cries.

“Are you afraid of mice now?”

“No, Mamma.”

Above us, the footsteps sounded again, and in spite of myself I put the question “Why, who can be walking up there?”

Bel-Gazou did not reply, and this stubborn silence was unpleasant.

“So you hear something?”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“‘Yes, Mamma!’ Is that all you can think of to say?”

The child suddenly burst into tears and sat up in bed.

“It’s not my fault, Mamma.
He
walks like that every night.”

“Who?”

“The footsteps.”

“The footsteps of whom?”

“Of no one.”

“Heavens, how stupid children are! Here you are again, making a fuss over nothing, you and your brothers! Is this the nonsense you hide in corners to discuss? Well now, I’m going upstairs. Yes, I’m going to let you hear some footsteps overhead!”

On the topmost landing, clusters of flies clinging to the beams whirred like a fire in the chimney as I passed with my lamp, which a gust of air put out the minute I opened the garret door. But there was no need of a lamp in these garret regions with their tall dormer windows where the moonlight entered by milky sheets spread out on the floor. The midnight countryside shimmered as far as the eye could see, the hills embossed with silver, the shallow valleys ashy-mauve, watered in the lowest of the meadows by a river of glittering fog which screened the moonlight . . . A little sparrow owl imitated the cat in a tree, and the cat replied to him. But nothing was walking in the garret beneath the forest of crisscrossed beams. I waited a long while, breathing in the fleeting nocturnal coolness, the odor of a granary which always hovers in a garret, then went downstairs again. Bel-Gazou, worn out, was sleeping.

Saturday
. I have been listening every night since Wednesday. Someone does walk up there, sometimes at midnight, sometimes toward three o’clock. Tonight I climbed up and down the stairs four times. To no purpose. At lunchtime I forced the youngsters to speak out. Anyway, they have reached the limit with their hocus-pocus.

“Children, you must help me clear up a mystery. We’re bound to be enormously amused—even Bertrand, who has lost all his illusions. Just imagine! I’ve been hearing, every night, someone walking above Bel-Gazou’s room . . .”

They exploded, all at once.

“I know, I know!” Renaud exclaims. “It’s the commander in armor, who came back to earth once before, in Grandfather’s time. Page told me all about it and . . .”

“What a farce!” said Bertrand laconically. “The truth is that isolated and collective instances of hallucination have occurred here, ever since the Holy Virgin, in a blue sash and drawn by four white horses, suddenly appeared in front of Guitras and told him . . .”

“She didn’t
tell
him anything!” squealed Bel-Gazou. “She
wrote
to him!”

“And sent the letter by the post?” sneered Renaud. “That’s childish!”

“And your commander isn’t childish?” said Bertrand.

“Excuse me!” retorted Renaud, flushing red. “The commander is a family tradition. Your Virgin, that’s a piece of village folklore, the kind you hear everywhere . . .”

“Now, now, children, have you finished? Can I put in a word? I know just one thing and it’s this: in the garret there are sounds, unexplainable, of footsteps. I’m going to stand watch tomorrow night. Beast or man, we’ll find out who is walking. And those who want to stand watch with me . . . Good. Adopted by a count of hands!”

Sunday
. Sleepless night. Full moon. Nothing to report except the sound of footsteps heard behind the half-open door to the garret, but interrupted by Renaud, who, trigged out in a Henri II breastplate and a red bandanna, dashed forward romantically shouting, “Stand back! Stand back!” We hoot at him and accuse him of having “spoiled everything.”

“Strange,” Bertrand remarks with crushing and reflective irony, “strange how anything fantastic can excite the mind of a boy, even though he grew up in British schools . . .”

“Eh, my lad,” adds my girl in an unmistakably Limousin accent, “you must not say, ‘Stand back!’ You must say, ‘I’m going to give you a wallop!’”

Tuesday
. Last night the two boys and I stood watch, leaving Bel-Gazou asleep.

The moon at the full whitened from one end to the other a long track of light where the rats had left a few ears of nibbled maize. We kept ourselves in the darkness behind the half-open door and suffered boredom for a good half hour, watching the path of moonlight shift, become oblique, lick the lower part of the crisscrossed beams . . . Renaud touched my arm: someone was walking at the far end of the garret. A rat scampered off and climbed along a slanting beam, followed by its serpent tail. The footsteps, solemn-sounding, approached, and I tightened my arms around the necks of the two boys.

It
approached, with a slow, muffled, yet incisive tread, which was echoed by the ancient floorboards. It entered, after a moment that seemed interminable, into the luminous path of moonlight. It was almost white, gigantic: the biggest nocturnal bird I have ever seen, a great horned owl, the kind we call “grand duke,” taller than a wolfhound. He walked emphatically, lifting his feathered feet, his hard bird’s talons, which gave off the sound of a human footstep. The top of his wings gave him the shoulders of a man, and two little feather horns that he raised or lowered trembled like grass in the gust of air from the dormer window. He stopped, puffed out his chest, and all the feathers of his magnificent face swelled out around a fine beak and the two golden pools of his eyes, bathed in moonlight. He turned away from us, showing his speckled white and pale yellow back. He must be quite old, I thought, this solitary and powerful creature. He resumed his parade march and interrupted it to do a kind of war dance, shaking his head from right to left, making fierce right-about turns, which no doubt threatened the rat that had eluded him. For a moment he apparently thought he had his prey, and he jostled the skeleton of a chair, shaking it as if it were a dead twig. He jumped with fury, fell back again, scraped the floor with his fanned-out tail. He had the mien of one used to command, and the majesty of a sorcerer.

No doubt he sensed our presence, for he turned toward us as if outraged. Unhurriedly he went to the window, half opened his angel wings, let out a kind of cooing sound, very low, a short incantation, pressed against the air, and melted into the night, taking on its color of snow and silver.

Thursday
. The younger of the boys, at his desk, writes a long travel story. Title: “My Experiences Hunting the Horned Owl in Eastern Africa.” The older boy has left on my worktable the beginning of “Stanzas”:

Things have returned to normal.

[
Translated by Herma Briffault
]

Three shells like flower petals, white, nacreous, and transparent as the rosy snow that flutters down from the apple trees; two limpets, like Tonkinese hats with converging black rays on a yellow ground; something that looks like a lumpy, cartilaginous potato, inanimate but concealing a mysterious force that squirts, when it is squeezed, a crystal jet of salt water; a broken knife, a stump of pencil, a ring of blue beads, and a book of transfers soaked by the sea; a small pink handkerchief, very dirty . . . That is all. Bel-Gazou has completed the inventory of her left-hand pocket. She admires the mother-of-pearl petals, then drops them and crushes them under her espadrille. The hydraulic potato, the limpets, and the transfers earn no better fate. Bel-Gazou retains only the knife, the pencil, and the string of beads, all of which, like the handkerchief, are in constant use.

Her right-hand pocket contains fragments of that pinkish limestone that her parents, heaven knows why, name lithothamnion, when it is so simple to call it coral. “But it isn’t coral, Bel-Gazou.” Not coral? What do they know about it, poor wretches? Fragments, then, of lithothamnion, and a hollow nut, with a hole bored in it by the emerging maggot. There isn’t a single nut tree within three miles along the coast. The hollow nut, found on the beach, came there on the crest of a wave, from where? “From the other side of the world,” affirms Bel-Gazou. “And it’s very ancient, you know. You can see that by its rare wood. It’s a rosewood nut, like Mother’s little desk.”

With the nut glued to her ear, she listens. “It sings. It says: ‘Hu-u-u . . .’”

She listens, her mouth slightly open, her lifted eyebrows touching her fringe of straight hair. Standing thus motionless, and as though alienated by her preoccupation, she seems almost ageless. She stares at the familiar horizon of her holidays without seeing it. From the ruins of a thatched hut, deserted by the customs officer, Bel-Gazou’s view embraces, on her right hand the Pointe-du-Nez, yellow with lichens, streaked with the bluish purple of a belt of mussels which the low tide leaves exposed; in the center a wedge of sea, blue as new steel, thrust like an ax head into the coast. On the left, an untidy privet hedge in full bloom, whose oversweet almond scent fills the air, while the frenzied little feet of the bees destroy its flowers. The dry sea meadow runs up as far as the hut and its slope hides the shore where her parents and friends lie limply baking on the sand. Presently, the entire family will inquire of Bel-Gazou: “But where were you? Why didn’t you come down to the shore?” Bel-Gazou cannot understand this bay mania. Why the shore, always the shore, and nothing but the shore? The hut is just as interesting as that insipid sand, and there is the damp spinney, and the soapy water of the washhouse, and the field of lucerne as well as the shade of the fig tree. Grown-up people are so constituted that one might spend a lifetime explaining to them—and all to no purpose. So it is with the hollow nut: “What’s the use of that old nut?” Wiser far to hold one’s tongue, and to hide, sometimes in a pocket, and sometimes in an empty vase or knotted in a handkerchief, the nut that a moment, impossible to foresee, will divest of all its virtue, but which meanwhile sings in Bel-Gazou’s ear the song that holds her motionless as though she had taken root.

“I can see it! I can see the song! It’s as thin as a hair, as thin as a blade of grass!”

Next year, Bel-Gazou will be past nine years old. She will have ceased to proclaim those inspired truths that confound her pedagogues. Each day carries her farther from that first stage of her life, so full, so wise, so perpetually mistrustful, so loftily disdainful of experience, of good advice, and humdrum wisdom. Next year, she will come back to the sands that gild her, to the salt butter and the foaming cider. She will find again her dilapidated hut, and her citified feet will once more acquire their natural horny soles, slowly toughened on the flints and ridges of the rough ground. But she may well fail to find again her childish subtlety and the keenness of her senses that can taste a scent, feel a color, and see—“thin as a hair, thin as a blade of grass”—the cadence of an imaginary song.