The Collected Stories of Colette (95 page)

Mademoiselle Devoidy, who did not like despots, calmly and unhurriedly cut the two silk knots and pushed the free pearl toward her client. The beautiful woman grabbed it and studied it from very close up. Under the lamp, I could have counted her long, fluttering eyelashes, which were stuck together with mascara. She held out the pearl to the stringer.

“You, what’s
your
idea about this here pearl?”

“I know nothing about pearls,” said Mademoiselle Devoidy impassively.

“Sure you’re not joking?”

The beautiful woman pointed to the table, with evident irony. Then her face changed; she seized a little lump of cast iron under which Mademoiselle Devoidy kept a set of ready-threaded needles and brought it down hard on the pearl, which crushed into tiny fragments. I exclaimed “Oh!” in spite of myself. Mademoiselle Devoidy permitted herself no other movement than to clutch an unfinished string and some scattered pearls close against her with her sure hands.

The customer contemplated her work without saying a word. Finally, she burst into vehement tears. She kept noisily sobbing: “The swine, the swine,” and, at the same time, carefully collecting the black from her lashes on a corner of her handkerchief. Then she stuffed her necklace, amputated of one pearl, into her handbag, asked for “a little bit of tissue paper,” stowed every single fragment of the sham pearl into it, and stood up. Before she left the room, she made a point of affirming loudly. “That’s not the last of this business, not by a long shot.” Then she carried away into the outside air the unpleasant whiff of a brand-new, very fashionable scent: synthetic lily-of-the-valley.

“Is that the first time you’ve seen a thing like that happen, Mademoiselle Devoidy?”

Mademoiselle Devoidy was scrupulously tidying up her workbench with her careful hands, unshaking as usual.

“No, the second,” she said. “With this difference, that the first time, the pearl resisted. It was real. So was the rest of the necklace.”

“And what did the lady say?”

“It wasn’t a lady, it was a gentleman. He said: ‘Ah! the bitch!’”

“Why?”

“The necklace was his wife’s. She’d made her husband believe it cost fifteen francs. Yes. Oh, you know, when it comes to pearls, it’s very seldom there isn’t some shady story behind them.”

She touched her little coral necklace with two fingers. I was amazed to catch this slightly sneering skeptic making a gesture to avert ill luck, and to see the cloud of superstition pass over her stubborn brow.

“So you wouldn’t care to wear pearls?”

She raised one shoulder slantwise, torn between her commercial prudence and the desire not to lie.

“I don’t know. One doesn’t know one’s own self. Down there, at Coulanges, there was a chap who couldn’t have been more of an anarchist, he frightened everyone out of their wits. And then he inherited a little house with a garden and a round dovecote and a pigsty. If you were to see the anarchist now! There’s quite a change.”

Almost at once, she recovered her restrained laugh, her pleasantly rebellious expression, and her way of approving without being sycophantic and criticizing without being rude.

One night when I had lingered late with her, she caught me yawning, and I apologized by saying: “I’ve got one of those hungers. I don’t take tea and I had hardly any lunch, there was red meat—I can’t eat underdone meat.”

“Neither can I,” said my fellow countrywoman. “In our part of the world, as you well know, they say raw meat is for cats and the English. But if you can be patient for five minutes, a mille-feuilles will be wafted here to you, without my leaving my chair. What do you bet?”

“A pound of chocolate creams.”

“Pig who backs out of it!” said Mademoiselle Devoidy, holding out her dry palm quite flat to me. I slapped it and said, “Done!”

“Mademoiselle Devoidy, how is it that your flat never smells of fried whiting or onions or stew? Have you got a secret?”

She indicated yes by fluttering her eyelids.

“Can I know?”

An accustomed hand knocked three times on the front door.

“There you are, here it comes, your mille-feuilles. And my secret’s revealed. Come in, Madame Armand, come in!”

Nevertheless, she fastened my little middle-class necklace at the back of my neck. Loaded with a basket, Madame Armand did not at once offer me her chronically trembling fingers and she spoke very hurriedly.

“Mind now, mind now, don’t jostle me, I’ve got something breakable. Today’s chef’s special is
bœuf à la bourguignonne
and I brought you a lovely bit of lettuce. As to mille-feuilles, nothing doing! It’s iced Genoese cakes.”

Mademoiselle Devoidy made a comic grimace at me and attempted to unburden her obliging neighbor. But the latter exclaimed: “I’ll carry it all into the kitchen for you!” and ran toward the dark room at the back. Quickly as she had crossed the lighted zone, I had caught sight of her face and so had Mademoiselle Devoidy.

“I must fly, I must fly, I’ve got some milk on the gas ring,” Madame Armand cried out, in tomboyish tones.

She crossed the front room again at a run and pulled the door closed behind her. Mademoiselle Devoidy went out into the kitchen and came back with two Genoese cakes, with pink icing, on a plate adorned with a flaming bomb and the inscription
Fire Brigade Alarm
.

“As sure as eggs is eggs,” she said, with a thoughtful air, “the photographer’s wife has been crying. And she hasn’t any milk on her gas ring.”

“Domestic scene?”

She shook her head.

“Poor little old Big Eyes! He’s not capable of it. Neither is she, for that matter. My, you’ve gone through that cake quickly. Would you like the other one? She’s rather put me off my food, Monsieur Armand’s good lady, with that face all gone to pieces.”

“Everything will be all right tomorrow,” I said absentmindedly.

In exchange for that flat remark, I received a brief, trenchant glance.

“Oh, of
course
it will, won’t it? And anyway, if it isn’t all right,
you
don’t care a fig.”

“What’s all this? You think I ought to be more passionately concerned over the Armand family’s troubles?”

“The Armand family isn’t asking you for anything. And neither am I. It would most certainly be the first time anyone had heard
me
asking anyone for anything . . .”

Mademoiselle Devoidy had lowered her voice in the effort to control her irritation. We were, I imagine, utterly ridiculous. It was this cloud of anger, rising suddenly between two hot-blooded women, that fixed the details of an absurd, unexpected scene in my memory. I had the good sense to put an end to it at once by laying my hand on her shoulder.

“Now, now. Don’t let’s make ourselves out blacker than we are! You know quite well that if I can be any use to this good lady . . . Are you frightened about her?”

Mademoiselle Devoidy flushed under her freckles and covered the top of her face with one hand, with a simple and romantic gesture.

“Now, you’re being too nice. Don’t be too nice to me. When anyone’s too nice to me, I don’t know what I’m doing, I boil over like a soup.”

She uncovered her beautiful moist spangled eyes and pushed the straw-seated stool toward me.

“One minute, you’ve surely got a minute? That’s rain you hear; wait till the rain’s over.”

She sat down opposite me in her working place and vigorously rubbed her eyes with the back of her forefinger.

“Get this well into your head first—Madame Armand isn’t a tittle-tattle or a woman who goes in for confidences. But she lives very near, right on my doorstep. This place is just a little two-bit block of flats, the old-fashioned kind. Two rooms on the right, two rooms on the left, little businesses that can be done in one room at home. People who live so very near you, it isn’t so much that you hear them, anyway they don’t make any noise, but I’m conscious of them. Especially of the fact that Madame Armand spends so much time out on the landing. In places like this, if anything’s not going right, the neighbors are very soon aware of it, at least I am.”

She lowered her voice and compressed her lips; her little mustache hairs glistened. She pricked her green table with the point of a needle as if she were cabalistically counting her words.

“When the photographer’s wife goes out shopping for herself or for me, you can always see the concierge or the flower seller under the archway or the woman in the little
bistro
, coming out, one or other of them, to see where she’s going. Where is she going? Why, she’s going to the dairy or to buy hot rolls or to the hairdresser, just like anyone else! So then the nosy parkers take their noses inside again, anything but pleased, as if they’d been promised something and not given it. And the next time, they start all over again. But when it’s me who goes out or Madame Gâteroy downstairs or her daughter, people don’t stop and stare after us as if they expected something extraordinary was going to happen.”

“Madame Armand has a . . . a rather individual appearance,” I risked suggesting. “Perhaps she does somewhat overdo the tartan, too.”

Mademoiselle Devoidy shook her head and seemed to despair of making herself understood. It was getting late; from top to bottom of the building, doors were slamming one by one, on every floor chairs were being drawn up around a table and a soup tureen; I took my leave. The door of the photographic studio, unwontedly shut, turned the camera pedestal and the crossed shrimping nets under the gas jet into an important piece of decoration. On the ground floor, the concierge raised her curtain to watch me going: I had never stayed so late.

The warm night was foggy around the gas lamps and the unusual hour gave me that small, yet somehow rewarding pang I used to experience in the old days when I came away from stage performances that had begun when the sun was at its zenith and finished when it was dark.

Do those transient figures who featured in long-past periods of my life deserve to live again in a handful of pages as I here compel them to? They were important enough for me to keep them secret, at least during the time I was involved with them. For example, my husband, at home, did not know of the existence of Mademoiselle Devoidy or of my familiarity with Tigri-Cohen. The same was true of Monsieur Armand’s wife and of a certain sewing woman, expert at repairing worn quilts and making multicolored silk rags into patchwork pram covers. Did I like her for her needlework that disdained both fashion and the sewing machine or was it for her second profession? At six o’clock in the afternoon, she abandoned her hexagonal pieces of silk and went off to the Gaîté-Lyrique, where she sang a part in
Les Mousquetaires au couvent
.

For a long time, in the inner compartment of my handbag, between the leather and the lining, I kept a fifty-centime “synthetic” pearl I had once lost in Tigri-Cohen’s shop. He had found it, and before returning it to me, he had amused himself by studding my initials on it in little diamonds. But at home, I never mentioned either the charming mascot or Tigri himself, for the husband I was married to then had formed such a rigid, foursquare idea of the jeweler, such a conventional notion of a “dealer,” that I could neither have pleaded the cause of the latter nor rectified the error of the former.

Was I genuinely attached to the little needlewoman? Did I feel real affection for the misunderstood Tigri-Cohen? I do not know. The instinct to deceive has not played a very large part in my different lives. It was essential to me, as it is to many women, to escape from the opinions of certain people, which I knew to be subject to error and apt to be proclaimed dogmatically in a tone of feigned indulgence. Treatment of this sort drives us women to avoid the simple truth, as if it were a dull, monotonous tune, to take pleasure in half lies, half suppressions, half escapes from reality.

When the opportunity came, I made my way once more to the narrow-fronted house over whose brow the open blue pane of the photographic studio window slanted like a visor.

As soon as I entered the hall of the block of flats, a cleaner’s deliveryman in a black apron and a woman carrying bread in a long wicker
cistera
barred my-way. The first, without being asked, obligingly informed me: “It’s nothing, just a chimney on fire.” At the same moment, a “runner” from a fashion house came dashing down the stairs, banging her yellow box against all the banisters, and yapping: “She’s as white as a sheet! She hasn’t an hour to live!”

Her scream magically attracted a dozen passers-by who crowded around her, pressing her close on all sides. Desire to escape, slight nausea, and idle curiosity struggled within me, but in the end they gave way to a strange resignation. I knew perfectly well—already out of breath before I had begun to run—I knew perfectly well that I should not stop until I reached the top landing. Which of them was it? The photographer’s wife or Mademoiselle Devoidy? Mentally, I ruled out the latter, as if no peril could ever endanger her mocking wisdom or the sureness of those hands, soft as silky wood shavings, or scatter the milky constellations of precious, tiny moons she pursued on the green baize table and impaled with such deadly aim.

All the while I was breathlessly climbing the stories, I was fighting to reassure myself. An accident? Why shouldn’t it have happened to the knitting women on the fourth floor or the bookbinding couple? The steamy November afternoon preserved the full strength of the smells of cabbage and gas and of the hot, excited human beings who were showing me the way.

The unexpected sound of sobbing is demoralizing. Easy as it is to imitate, that retching, hiccuping noise remains crudely impressive. While I was being secretly crushed to death between the banisters and a telegraph boy who had pushed up too fast, we heard convulsive male sobs and the commentators on the staircase fell silent, avidly. The noise lasted only a moment, it was extinguished behind a door that someone up there had slammed again. Without having ever heard the man whom Mademoiselle Devoidy nicknamed little old Big Eyes weep, I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was he who was sobbing.