The Collected Stories of Colette (81 page)

“The back of the seat is all wet,” said Madame Debove. “I’m going home. What are your plans for tomorrow? Are you going in to say goodbye to Armande? She’s expecting you to, you know.”

“She hasn’t invited me.”

“You mean you daren’t go on your own? You may as well admit it, that girl’s thoroughly got you down!”

“I do admit it,” said Maxime, so mildly that his sister stopped cruelly teasing him.

They walked in silence till they reached the Grand Central Pharmacy.

“You’ll lunch with us tomorrow, of course. Hector would have a fit if you didn’t have your last meal with him. Your parcel of ampoules will be all ready. No one can say when we’ll be able to get those particular serums again. Well, shall I ring up Armande and say you’ll be coming over to say goodbye to her? But I needn’t say definitely you’re not coming?”

She was fumbling endlessly with a bunch of keys. Maxime lent her the aid of his flashlight and its beam fell full on Jeanne Debove’s mischievous face and its expression of mixed satisfaction and disapproval.

“She wants me to marry Armande. She’s thinking of the money, of the fine, rich house, of ‘the excellent effect,’ of my career, as she says. But she’d also like me to marry Armande without being overenthusiastic about her. Everything’s perfectly normal. Everything except myself, because I can’t endure the idea that
she
, Armande, could marry me without being in love with me.”

He hurried back to his hotel. The town was asleep but the hotel, close by the station, resounded with all the noises that are hostile to sleep and blazed with lights that aggravate human tiredness. Hobnailed boots, shuddering ceiling lights, uncarpeted floors, the gates of the elevator, the whinnyings of hydraulic pressure, the rhythmic clatter of plates flung into a sink in the basement, the intermittent trilling of a bell never stopped outraging the need for silence that had driven Maxime to his bedroom. Unable to stand any more, he added his own contribution to the selfish human concert, dropped his shoes on the wooden floor, carried them out into the corridor, and shut his door with a loud slam.

He drenched himself with cold water, dried himself carelessly, and got into bed quite naked, after having studied himself in the looking glass. “Big bones, big muscles, and four complete limbs, after all, that’s not too bad, in these days. A large nose, large eyes, a cap of hair as thick as a motorcyclist’s helmet, girls who weren’t Mademoiselle Fauconnier have found all that very much to their taste. I don’t see Mademoiselle Fauconnier sleeping with this naked, black-haired chap . . .”

On the contrary, he saw her only too well. Irritated by fretful desire, he waited for the hotel to become quiet. When—save for a sound of barking, a garage door, the departure of a motorcar—silence was at last established, a breeze sprang up, swept away the last insults inflicted by man on the night, and came in through the open window like a reward.

“Tomorrow,” Maxime vowed to himself. It was a muddled vow that concerned the conquest of Armande quite as much as the return to professional life and the daily, necessary triumph of forced activity over fundamental listlessness.

He reiterated “Tomorrow,” flung away his pillow, rolled over on his stomach, and fell asleep with his head between his folded arms in the same attitude as a small intimidated boy of long ago who used to dream of an Armande with long black curls. Later on, another Maxime had slept like that, the adolescent who had plucked up courage to invite “those Fauconnier ladies,” as they were coming out from High Mass, to have lemon ices at Peyrol’s. “Really, Maxime, one doesn’t eat lemon ices at quarter to twelve in the morning!” Armande had said. In that one word “really” what a number of reproofs she could convey! “Really, Maxime, you needn’t
always
stand right in front of the window, you shut out the daylight. Maxime, really! You’ve gone and returned a ball
again
when it was ‘out.’”

But when a particular period was over, there had been no more “reallys” and no more reproaches showered on his head. Still not properly asleep, Maxime Degouthe groped around a memory, around a moment that had restored a little confidence to his twenty-five-year-old self and had marked the end of Armande’s gracious condescension. That day, he had arrived with Jeanne at the foot of the steps, just as Armande was opening the silvered wrought-iron door to go out. They had not seen each other for a very long time — “Hullo, fancy seeing! — Yes, my sister insisted on bringing me with her, perhaps you’d rather I hadn’t come. —Now, really, you’re joking. —A friend of mine in Paris gave me a lift in his car and dropped me here this morning. —How awfully nice! Are you going to be here for some time? —No, the same friend’s picking me up tomorrow after lunch and driving me back. —Well, that
is
a short stay.” In fact, such trivialities as to make either of them blush had either of them paid any attention to what they were saying. From the height of five or six steps, a wide, startled, offended gaze fell on Maxime. He also caught, at the level of his knees, the brush of a skirt hem and a handbag which Armande had dropped and which he retrieved.

After a gloomy game of ping-pong, a tea composed entirely of sugary things, a handshake—a strong, swift, but promptly withdrawn hand had clasped his own—he had left Armande once again, and on the way back, Jeanne had given her cynical opinion of the situation: “You know, you could have the fair Armande as easy as pie. And I know what I’m talking about.” She added: “You don’t know the right way to go about it.” But those had been the remarks of a twenty-year-old, the infallibility of one girl judging another girl.

He thought he was only half asleep and fell into deep but restless dreams. A nightmare tortured him with the shaming illusion that he was dressing old Queny’s incurable foot on the steps leading up to the Fauconniers’ house and that Armande was enthroned, impassive, at the top of them. Didn’t she owe part of her prestige to those eight broad steps, almost like a series of terraces, that were famous throughout the town? “The Fauconniers’ flight of front steps is so impressive. Without these front steps, the Fauconniers’ house wouldn’t have nearly such a grand air . . .” As if insulted, the sleeper sat up with a start. “Grand air, indeed! That cube! That block with its cast-iron balconies and bands of tiles!” He woke up completely and once again the Fauconnier home inspired him with the old awed respect. The Fauconnier heliotropes, the Fauconnier polygonums, the Fauconnier lobelias recovered their status of flowers adorning the altar where he worshipped. So, to send himself to sleep again, Maxime soberly envisaged the duties that awaited him the next day, the day after, and all the rest of his life, in the guise of the faces of old Queny, of the elder Madame Cauvain, of her father Monsieur Enfert, of “young” Mademoiselle Philippon, the one who was only seventy-two . . . For old people do not die off in wartime. He swallowed half his bottle of mineral water at one gulp and fell heavily asleep again, insensible to the mosquitoes coming up from the shrunken river and the noises of the pale dawn.

“My last day of idle luxury.” He had his breakfast in bed, feeling slightly ashamed, and ordered a bath, for which he had to wait a considerable time. “My last bath . . . I’m not going to get up till I’ve had my bath! I’m not leaving without my bath!” As a matter of fact, he preferred a very stiff shower or the chance plunges he had taken, straight into rivers and canals, these last months between April and August.

With some caution he made use of a toilet water invented by his brother-in-law, the red-haired chemist. “Hector’s perfumes, when they don’t smell of squashed ants, smell of bad cognac.” He chose his bluest shirt and his spotted foulard tie. “I wish I were handsome. And all I am is just so-so. Ah, how I wish I were handsome!” he kept thinking over and over again as he plastered down his brilliantined hair. But it was coarse, intractable, wavy hair, a vigorous bush that preferred standing up to lying down. When Maxime laughed, he wrinkled his nose, crinkled up his yellow-brown eyes, and revealed his “lucky teeth,” healthy and close-set except for a gap between the two upper front ones. Coatless and buckled into his best belt, he had, at nearly thirty, the free and easy charm and slightly plebeian elegance of many an errand boy you see darting through the crowd on his bicycle, nimble as a bird in a bush. “But, in a jacket, I just look common,” Maxime decided, as he straightened the lapels of the hand-me-down jacket. “It’s also the fault of the coat.” He threw his reflection an angry glance. “Nevertheless, beautiful Armande, more than ten others have been quite satisfied with all that and have even said “Thank you.” He sighed, and turned humble again. “But seeing that it’s to no one but Armande I’m appealing when I conjure up my poor little girlfriends, what on earth does it matter whether they thanked me or even asked for more? It’s not of them I’m thinking.”

He packed his suitcase with the care and dexterity of a man accustomed to use his hands for manipulating living substance, stopping the flow of blood, applying and pinning bandages. The September morning, with its flies and its warm yellow light, came in fresh through the open window; at the end of a narrow street a dancing shimmer showed where the river lay. “I shan’t go and say goodbye to Armande,” Maxime Degouthe decided. “For one thing, lunch is always late at Jeanne’s; for another, I’ve got my case of medical supplies to fill up at the last moment, and if I’m to have time to get a bite of food before the train goes, it’ll be impossible, yes, physically impossible.”

At four o’clock, he opened the front gate, marched up the gravel path of the Fauconniers’ garden, climbed the flight of steps, and rang the bell. A second time, he pressed his finger long and vainly on the bell button, sunk in a rosette of white marble. No one came and the blood rushed up into Maxime’s ears. “She’s probably gone out. But where are her two lazy sluts of servants and the gardener who looks like a drunk?” He rang again, restraining himself with difficulty from giving the door a kick. At last he heard steps in the garden and saw Armande running toward him. She stopped in front of him, exclaiming “Ah!” and he smiled at seeing her wearing a big blue apron with a bib that completely enveloped her. She swiftly untied the apron and flung it on a rosebush.

“But it suited you very well,” said Maxime.

Armande blushed and he blushed himself, thinking that perhaps he had hurt her feelings. “She would take it the wrong way, naturally. She’s impossible, impossible! Pretty, those flecks of white soap in her black hair. I’d never noticed that the skin at the edge of her forehead, just under the hair, is slightly blue.”

“I was at the end of the garden, in the washhouse,” said Armande. “It’s laundry day today, so . . . Léonie and Maria didn’t even hear the bell.”

“I shan’t keep you from your work, I only looked in for a couple of minutes. As I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

He had followed her to the top of the steps, and Maxime waited for her to indicate which of the wicker chairs he should sit in. But she said: “From four to seven the sun just beats down on you here,” and she ushered him into the drawing room, where they sat down opposite each other. Maxime seated himself in one of the armchairs tapestried with La Fontaine’s fables—his was “The Cat, the Weasel, and the Little Rabbit”—and stared at the rest of the furniture. The baby-grand piano, the Revolution clock, the plants in pots, he gazed at them all with hostile reverence.

“It’s nice in here, isn’t it?” said Armande. “I keep the blinds down because it faces south. Jeanne wasn’t able to come?”

“Goodness, is she frightened of me?” He was on the point of feeling flattered. But he looked at Armande and saw her sitting stiffly upright on “The Fox and the Stork,” one elbow on the hard arm of the chair, the other on her lap, with her hands clasped together. In the dusk of the lowered blinds, her cheeks and her neck took on the color of very pale terra-cotta, and she was looking straight at him with the steady gaze of a well-brought-up girl who knows she must not blink or look sidelong, or pretend to be shy so as to show off the length of her lashes. “What the hell am I doing here?” thought Maxime furiously. “This is where I’ve got to, where we’ve both got to, after ten, fifteen years of what’s called childhood friendship. This girl is made of wood. Or else she’s choked with pride. You won’t catch me again in the Fauconnier drawing room.” Nevertheless, he replied to Armande’s questions, he talked to her about his “practice” and the “inevitable difficulties” of this postwar period.

Nor did he fail to remark: “But you know better than anyone what these various difficulties are. Look at you, loaded with responsibilities, and all alone in the world!”

Armande’s immobility was shattered by an unexpected movement; she unclasped her fingers and clutched the arms of her chair with both hands as if she were afraid of slipping off it.

“Oh, I’m used to it. You know my mother brought me up in a rather special way. At my age, one’s no longer a child.”

The sentence, begun with assurance, broke off on a childish note that belied the last words. She mastered herself and said, in a different voice: “Won’t you have a glass of port? Or would you prefer orangeade?”

Maxime saw there was a loaded tray within easy reach of her hand and frowned.

“You’re expecting guests? Then I’ll be off!”

He had stood up; she remained seated and laid her hand on Maxime’s arm.

“I never invite anyone on washing day. I assure you I don’t. As you’d told me you were going away again tomorrow, I thought you might possibly . . .”

She broke off, with a little grimace that displeased Maxime. “Ah, no! She’s not to ruin that mouth for me! That outline of the lips, so clear-cut, so full; those corners of the mouth that are so . . . so . . . What’s the matter with her today? You’d think she’d just buried the devil for good and all!”

He realized he was staring at her with unpardonable severity and forced himself to be gay.

“So you’re heavily occupied in domestic chores? What a lovely laundress you make! And all those children at your clinic, do you manage to keep them in order?”