The Collected Stories of Colette (93 page)

“Well, so one day . . .” said Marco.

A day of license, definitely. One of those rainy Paris days when a mysterious damp that dulls the mirrors and a strange craving to fling off clothes incites lovers to shut themselves up and turn day into night, “one of those days,” Marco said, “that are the perdition of body and soul . . .” I had to follow my friend and to imagine her—she forced me to—half naked on the divan bed, emerging from one of those ecstasies that were so crude and physical that she called them “evil spells.” It was at that moment that her hand, straying over the bed, encountered the peaked forage cap known as a kepi and she yielded to one of those all-too-typical feminine reflexes; she sat up in her crumpled chemise, planted the kepi over one ear, gave it a roguish little tap to settle it, and hummed:

“Never,” Marco told me, “never have I seen anything like Alex’s face. It was . . . incomprehensible. I’d say it was hideous, if he weren’t so handsome . . . I can’t tell you what my feelings were . . .”

She broke off and stared at the empty divan-bed.

“What happened then, Marco? What did he say?”

“Why, nothing. I took off the kepi, I got up, I tidied myself, we had some tea. In fact, everything passed off just as usual. But since that day I’ve two or three times caught Alex looking at me with that face again and with such a very odd expression in his eyes. I can’t get rid of the idea that the kepi was fatal to me. Did it bring back some unpleasant memory? I’d like to know what you think. Tell me straight out, don’t hedge.”

Before replying, I took care to compose my face; I was so terrified it might express the same horror, disapproval, and disgust as Lieutenant Trallard’s. Oh, Marco! In one moment I destroyed you, I wept for you—I saw you. I saw you just as Alexis Trallard had seen you. My contemptuous eyes took in the slack breasts and the slipped shoulder straps of the crumpled chemise. And the leathery, furrowed neck, the red patches on the skin below the ears, the chin left to its own devices and long past hope. . . . And that groove, like a dried-up river, that hollows the lower eyelid after making love, and that vinous, fiery flush that does not cool off quickly enough when it burns on an aging face. And crowning all that, the kepi! The kepi—with its stiff lining and its jaunty peak, slanted over one roguishly winked eye.

“I know very well,” went on Marco, “that between lovers, the slightest thing is enough to disturb a magnetic atmosphere . . . I know very well . . .”

Alas! What did she know?

“And after that, Marco? What was the end?”

“The end? But I’ve told you all there is to tell. Nothing else happened. The mission to Morocco turned up. The date’s been put forward twice. But that isn’t the only reason I’ve been losing sleep. Other signs . . .”

“What signs?”

She did not dare give a definite answer. She put out a hand as if to thrust away my question and averted her head.

“Oh, nothing, just . . . just differences.”

She strained her ears in the direction of the door.

“I haven’t seen him for three days,” she said. “Obviously he has an enormous amount to do getting ready for this mission. All the same . . .”

She gave a sidelong smile.

“All the same, I’m not a child,” she said in a detached voice. “In any case, he writes to me. Express letters.”

“What are his letters like?”

“Oh, charming, of course, what else would they be? He may be very young but
he’s
not quite a child either.”

As I had stood up, Marco suddenly became anguished and humble and clutched my hands.

“What do you think I ought to do? What
does
one do in these circumstances?”

“How can I possibly know, Marco? I think there’s absolutely nothing to be done but to wait. I think it’s essential, for your own dignity.”

She burst into an unexpected laugh.

“My dignity! Honestly, you make me laugh! My dignity! Oh, these young women.”

I found her laugh and her look equally unbearable.

“But, Marco, you’re asking my advice—I’m giving it to you straight from the heart.”

She went on laughing and shrugging her shoulders. Still laughing, she brusquely opened the door in front of me. I thought that she was going to kiss me, that we should arrange another meeting, but I had hardly got outside before she shut the door behind me without saying anything beyond: “My dignity! No, really, that’s too funny!”

If I stick to facts, the story of Marco is ended. Marco had had a lover; Marco no longer had a lover. Marco had brought down the sword of Damocles by putting on the fatal kepi, and at the worst possible moment. At the moment when the man is a melancholy, still-vibrating harp, an explorer returning from a promised land, half glimpsed but not attained, a lucid penitent swearing “I’ll never do it again” on bruised and bended knees.

I stubbornly insisted on seeing Marco again a few days later. I knocked and rang at her door, which was not opened. I went on and on, for I was aware of Marco there behind it, solitary, stony, and fevered. With my mouth to the keyhole, I said: “It’s Colette,” and Marco opened the door. I saw at once that she regretted having let me in. With an absentminded air, she kept stroking the loose skin of her small hands, smoothing it down toward the wrist like the cuff of a glove. I did not let myself be intimidated; I told her that I wanted her to come and dine with me at home that very night and that I wouldn’t take no for an answer. And I took advantage of my authority to add: “I suppose Lieutenant Trallard has left?”

“Yes,” said Marco.

“How long will it take him to get over there?”

“He isn’t
over there
,” said Marco. “He’s at Ville d’Avray, staying with his father. It comes to the same thing.”

When I had murmured “Ah!” I did not know what else to say.

“After all,” Marco went on, “why shouldn’t I come and have dinner with you?”

I made exclamations of delight, I thanked her. I behaved as effusively as a grateful fox terrier, without, I think, quite taking her in. When she was sitting in my room, in the warmth, under my lamp, in the glare of all that reflected whiteness, I could measure not only Marco’s decline in looks but a kind of strange reduction in her. A diminution of weight—she was thinner—a diminution of resonance—she talked in a small, distinct voice. She must have forgotten to feed herself, and taken things to make herself sleep.

Masson came in after dinner. When he found Marco there, he showed as much apprehension as his illegible face could express. He gave her a crab-like, sidelong bow.

“Why, it’s Masson,” said Marco indifferently. “Hello, Paul.”

They started up an old cronies’ conversation, completely devoid of interest. I listened to them and I thought that such a string of bromides ought to be as good as a sleeping draught for Marco. She left early and Masson and I remained alone together.

“Paul, don’t you think she looks ill, poor Marco?”

“Yes,” said Masson. “It’s the phase of the priest.”

“Of the . . .
what
?”

“The priest. When a woman, hitherto extremely feminine, begins to look like a priest, it’s the sign that she no longer expects either kindness or ill treatment from the opposite sex. A certain yellowish pallor, something melancholy about the nose, a pinched smile, falling cheeks: Marco’s a perfect example. The priest, I tell you, the priest.”

He got up to go, adding: “Between ourselves, I prefer that in her to the odalisque.”

In the weeks that followed, I made a special point of not neglecting Marco. She was losing weight very fast indeed. It is difficult to hold on to someone who is melting away, it would be truer to say consuming herself. She moved house, that is to say, she packed her trunk and took it off to another little furnished flat. I saw her often, and never once did she mention Lieutenant Trallard. Then I saw her less often and the coolness was far more on her side than on mine. She seemed to be making a strange endeavor to turn herself into a shriveled little old lady. Time passed . . .

“But, Masson, what’s happened to Marco? It’s ages since . . . Have
you
any news of Marco?”

“Yes,” said Masson.

“And you haven’t told me anything!”

“You haven’t asked me anything.”

“Quick, where is she?”

“Almost every day at the Nationale. She’s translated an extraordinary series of articles about the Ubangi from English into French. As the manuscript is a little short to make a book, she’s making it longer at the publisher’s request, and she’s documenting herself at the library.”

“So she’s taken up her old life again,” I said thoughtfully. “Exactly as it was before Lieutenant Trallard . . .”

“Oh, no,” said Masson. “There’s a tremendous change in her existence!”

“What change? Really, one positively has to drag things out of you!”

“Nowadays,” said Masson, “Marco gets paid two sous a line.”

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

When the woman they called “the photographer’s wife” decided to put an end to her days, she set about realizing her project with much sincerity and painstaking care. But, having no experience whatever of poisons, thank heaven, she failed. At which the inhabitants of the entire building rejoiced, and so did I, though I did not live in the neighborhood.

Madame Armand—of the Armand Studio, Art Photography and Enlargements—lived on the same landing as a pearl stringer and it was rare for me not to meet the amiable “photographer’s wife” when I went up to visit Mademoiselle Devoidy. For, in those far-off days, I had, like everyone else, a pearl necklace. As all women wanted to wear them, there were pearls to suit all women and all purses. What bridegroom would have dared to omit a “string” from his wedding presents to his bride? The craze started at baptism, with the christening gift of a row of pearls no bigger than grains of rice. No fashion, since, has ever been so tyrannical. From a thousand francs upward you could buy a “real” necklace. Mine had cost five thousand francs, that is to say, it did not attract attention. But its living luster and its gay Orient were a proof of its excellent health and mine. When I sold it, during the Great War, it was certainly not for an idle whim.

I used not to wait to have its silk thread renewed till it was really necessary. Having it restrung was an excuse for me to visit Mademoiselle Devoidy, who came from my part of the country, a few villages away. From being a saleswoman in a branch of The Store of a Thousand Necklaces, where everything was sham, she had gone on to being a stringer of real pearls. This unmarried woman of about forty had kept, as I had, the accent of our native parts, and delighted me furthermore by a restrained sense of humor which, from the heights of a punctilious honesty, made fun of a great many people and things.

When I went up to see her, I used to exchange greetings with the photographer’s wife, who was often standing outside her wide-open door, opposite Mademoiselle Devoidy’s closed one. The photographer’s furniture trespassed onto the landing, beginning with a “pedestal” dating back to the infancy of the craft, a camera stand of carved, beautifully grained walnut, itself a tripod. Its bulk and its solid immobility made me think of those massive wooden winepress screws that used to appear, at about the same period, in “artistic” flats, supporting some graceful statuette. A gothic chair kept it company and served as an accessory in photographs of First Communicants. The little wicker kennel and its stuffed Pomeranian, the pair of shrimping nets dear to children in sailor suits, completed the store of accessories banished from the studio.

An incurable smell of painted canvas dominated this top landing. Yet the painting of a reversible canvas background, in monochrome gray, certainly did not date from yesterday. One side of it represented a balustrade on the verge of an English park; the other, a small sea, bounded in the distance by a hazy port, whose horizon dipped slightly to the right. As the front door was frequently left open, it was against this stormy background and this slanting sea that I used to see the photographer’s wife encamped. From her air of vague expectancy I presumed that she had come out there to breathe the coolness of the top landing or to watch for some customer coming up the stairs. I found out later that I was wrong. I would go into her opposite neighbor’s and Mademoiselle Devoidy would offer me one of her dry, pleasant hands; infallible hands, incapable of hurrying or trembling, that never dropped a pearl or a reel or a needle, that gummed the point of a strand of silk by passing it, with one sure twist of the fingers, through a half-moon of virgin wax, then aimed the stiffened thread at the eye of a needle finer than any sewing needle.

What I saw most clearly of Mademoiselle Devoidy was her bust, caught in the circle of light from her lamp, her coral necklace on her starched white collar, her discreetly mocking smile. As to her freckled, rather flat face, it merely served as a frame and a foil for her piercing brown, gold-spangled eyes that needed neither spectacles nor magnifying glass and could count the tiny “seed pearls” used for making those skeins and twists that are known as “bayadères” and are as dull as white bead trimming.