The Collected Stories of Colette (33 page)

“What’s more,” Brague said for all to hear, “she dances with her hands!”

Hands, arms, hips, eyes, eyebrows, hair—her feet, being unskilled, did not know what they were up to. What saved the day for her was the cocksure flamboyance, the assured insolence of her least gesture. She congratulated herself if she made a false step, seemed highly delighted if she fluffed an entrechat, and, back in the wings, gave herself no time to draw breath before starting to talk, talk, talk, and lie with all the abandon of a southerner born in Russia.

She addressed herself to the world in general with the familiarity of a tipsy princess. She stopped one of the blond Schmetz boys, in his pale mauve tights, by laying both hands on his shoulders, so that with lowered eyes and blushing, he dared not make good his escape; she forcibly drove Mutter Schmetz into a corner, only to be met with a volley of
Ja, ja, ja’s
as stinging as smacks in the face; the facetious stage manager got more than he bargained for in the way of abuse, as did Brague, who kept whistling throughout her tirade.

“My family . . . My native land . . . I’m a Russian . . . I speak fourteen languages, like all my compatriots . . . I’ve gotten myself six thousand francs’ worth of stage costumes for this wretched little number worth nothing at all . . . But you should see, my dearrr, all the town clothes I have! Money means nothing to me! . . . I can’t tell you my real name: there’s no knowing what might happen if I did! My father holds the most important position in Moscow. He’s married, you know. Only he’s not married to my mother . . . He gives me everything I want . . . You’ve seen my sister? She’s a good-for-nothing. I beat her a lot, she won’t work. All I can say is, she’s pure! On my life, she’s that! . . . You none of you saw me last year in Berlin? Oh, that’s where you should have seen me! A thirty-two-thousand-franc act, my dearrr! With that blackguard Castillo, the dancer. He robbed me, on my worrrd of honorr, he stole from me! But once across the Russian border and I told my father everything. Castillo was jugged! In Russia, we show no mercy to thieves. Jugged, I tell you, jugged! Like this!”

She went through the motions of turning a key in its lock, and her heavily violet-penciled eyes sparkled with cruelty. Then, played out, she went down to her dressing room, where she relieved her nervous tension by giving her “sister” more than one good clout on the ears. Genuine stage slaps they were, resounding right enough, but they rang true on those young cheeks. They could be heard up on the stage. Mutter Schmetz, outraged, spoke of “gomblaining to de bolice” and pressed to her bosom two flaxen-haired lads of seven and eight, the youngest born of her flaxen-haired brood, as if “Poison Ivy” were about to give them a spanking.

By what noxious flames was this fiend of a woman consumed? Before the week was out, she had hurled a satin slipper at the bandleader’s head, referred to the secretary-general, in his hearing, as a “pimp,” and, by accusing her dresser of stealing her jewelry, reduced the poor creature to tears. Gone were the quiet evenings of the Élysée-Pigalle and the peaceful slumbers of its cells behind closed doors! Gone for good! “Poison Ivy” had ruined everything.

“She’s out for my blood, is she!” was Jady’s bold threat. “Let me hear one single word from that one, no, not even that, let her so much as brush against me in the doorway, and I’ll get her fired!”

Brague, for once, might well have supported Jady, for he could not stomach the unwarrantable success of La Roussalka, and the way she glittered among the mended tights, home-cleaned dresses and smoke-blackened scenery, like a sham jewel in an imitation setting.

“I enjoy my rest,” Ida whispered to Brague. “There’s never been so much as a word uttered against my husband and me, you know that! Well then, I can assure you, that
when
I leave the stage, you know,
when
I carry Hector off standing on my hands, and I catch sight of ‘Poison Ivy’ sniggering at the two of us, it wouldn’t need much for me to drop Hector plonk on her head!”

Nobody bothered anymore about the little blond “sister,” who never uttered a word and danced like a sleepwalker between one stinging blow and the next. She was to be met with in the corridors, her shoulder weighed down by a slop pail or a pitcher full of water, shuffling along in bedraggled old slippers, her petticoats trailing behind her.

But after the show, La Roussalka rigged her out in a loosely belted dress, too voluminous for her flat-chested figure, and a hat that came halfway down her back, and whisked her off, red-cheeked from her drubbing and gummy-eyed, to the night haunts on the Butte de Montmartre. There she made her sit down, docile and half asleep, with cocktails in front of her, and once again, to the cynical amazement of chance “friends,” she started to talk and talk and tell lies.

“My father . . . the most influential man in Moscow . . . I speak fourteen languages . . . I myself never tell lies; but my compatriots, the Russians, are one and all liars . . . I’ve sailed twice around the world on a princely yacht . . . My jewels are all in Moscow, for my family forbids me to wear them on the stage, because of the ducal coronets on every piece . . .”

Meanwhile, the little sister dozed on half awake. From time to time she almost took a somersault when one of the “friends” tried to squeeze her thin waist or stroke her bare neck, pale mauve with pearl powder. Her surprise unloosed the rage of La Roussalka.

“Wake up, you, where do you think you are? Jesus, what a life, having to drag this child around with me!”

Calling to witness not only the “friends” but the restaurant at large, she shouted, “Look at her there, that good-for-nothing! This table couldn’t hold the piles of dough I’ve spent on her! I’m reduced to tears the whole day long because she will do nothing, nothing, nothing!”

The slapped child never batted an eyelid. Of what youthful past, or of what escape, was she dreaming behind her mysteriously vacant, huge brown eyes?

2

“This child,” Brague decrees, “is a kid we’ll stick in the chorus. One more, one less, it makes little difference. She’ll always earn her forty sous . . . though I don’t much like having to deal with misfits . . . I say this now so’s it’s known another time.”

Brague speaks pontifically, in his dark kingdom of the Élysée-Pigalle, where his double function of mime and producer assure him undisputed authority.

The “misfit,” or so it would seem, pays no heed to his words. Her vague thanks are expressed in a meaningless smile that does not spread to her large eyes, the color of clouded coffee, and she lingers on, arms limp, twiddling the handle of a faded bag.

She has just this moment been christened by Brague: henceforth she will be known as “Misfit.” A week ago she was the “good-for-nothing little sister”; she gains by the change.

Little matter, for she discourages malice, and even attention, this foundling who has just been dumped down here, without a sound, by “La Roussalka, her sister,” who went off leaving her with three torn silk underslips, a couple of “latest models” sizes too big for her, a pair of evening shoes with paste buckles, not to mention a hat, and the key to the room they occupied together in the rue Fontaine.

La Roussalka, alias “Poison Ivy,” that human hurricane, that storm-cloud charged with hail ready to burst at the least shock, has shown in her flight a strange discretion, by removing her four large trunks, her “family papers,” the portrait of her
fatherrr
“who controls rain and sunshine in Moscow,” while forgetting the little sister who danced with her, docile, half asleep, and somehow weighed down by blows.

Misfit neither wept nor wailed. She stated her case to the lady manager in a few words and with a Flemish accent exactly suited to her blond sheep-like appearance. Madame did not overflow with maternal protestations or pitying indignation, any more than did Jady, the
diseuse
, or Brague himself. Misfit has attained the age of eighteen, and is therefore old enough to go out alone and look after her own affairs.

“Eighteen!” Jady grumbled, suffering from a hangover and bronchitis. “Eighteen, and she expects me to take pity on her!”

Brague, a good fellow at heart, felt more kindly disposed. “Forty sous, did I say? We’ll bloody well give three francs, so’s to give her time to look around.”

Since then Misfit comes every day, at one, to sit in one of the canvas-covered stalls of the Élysée-Pigalle, and wait. When Brague calls out, “On stage, the great hetaerae!” she climbs onto the gangway that spans the orchestra pit and sits down at a sticky zinc table such as is used in low pubs. In the pantomime now in rehearsal she will take the part, wearing a reconditioned pink gown, of an “elegant customer” at a Montmartre cabaret.

She can hardly be seen from the auditorium, since she has been placed at the very back of the stage, behind the huge seedy-looking hats of the other ladies of the chorus. The stagehand sets in front of her an empty glass and a spoon, and there she poses, her childish chin resting on a dubiously gloved hand.

She is a thoroughly safe customer. She doesn’t jabber on the stage, never complains of the icy draft whistling around her legs, nor has she either the unhappy look of young Miriam, so furiously hungry that it seems to demand food, or Vanda’s feverish activity, Vanda the Cluck, forever producing from her pocket a baby’s sock in need of darning, or a flannelette brassiere that she mends while trying to hide it.

Misfit has fallen into oblivion again, apparently thankful at last to be able to roll up into a ball, as though the general indifference has spared her the trouble of existing. She speaks even less than the star dancer from Milan, a heavy woman, pitted with smallpox and plastered with holy medals and coral callosities. Her silence, at any rate, is born of contempt, she being interested solely in the “five points,” the
entrechats-six
, the whole graceless and laborious range of acrobatics that exercise the sailor’s muscles on her calves.

Upstage, Brague is doing his level best not to husband an ounce of his energy. “Isn’t he lucky to sweat like that!” sighs the wretched brat Miriam, white with cold under her rouge. Brague sweats in vain at his miming. He wears himself out trying to communicate his faith, his feverish enthusiasm, to the little tart in her hairless fur, to the stubborn mender of baby socks, to the arrogant ballerina. He insists—oh, the folly of it!—that Miriam, Vanda, and the Italian should at least appear to take an interest in the action of his piece.

“I’m telling you . . . Good God! I’m trying to tell you this is the moment when these two characters are starting to fight! When two chaps start a fight close beside you, doesn’t it affect you more than that? Good God, do stir your stumps! At least say Ah! as you would when there’s a brawl in a pub and you pick up your skirts ready to fly!”

After the sound and the fury of an hour’s effort, Brague takes a rest, finding some compensation in running through his big scene, the scene where he reads the letter from his mother. Joy and surprise, then terror, and finally despair, are depicted on features seamed with such intensity of expression, such excess of pathos, that Vanda stops sewing, Miriam slapping the soles of her feet, and the Italian dancer, swathed in a gray woolen shawl, deigns to leave the framework of a flat to watch Brague’s tears flow. A minor daily triumph, delectable all the same.

On each such occasion, however, a faint chortle like a smothered laugh has spoiled this affecting moment. Brague’s sharp ear caught it from the very first day.

The second day: “Which of you ladies is the chucklehead that’s convulsed with laughter?” he shouts. No answer, and the dismal faces of the “great hetaerae” reveal nothing.

The third day: “There’s a fine of forty sous about to fall on somebody’s nut—and I know very well who it is—for causing a disturbance during rehearsal!” But Brague does not know who it is.

The fourth day: “You there, Misfit, are you trying to get a rise out of me?” Brague storms. “You wear yourself to a shadow, yes, you strive to put into what you’re doing a little . . . of the tragic side of life, of . . . simple truth and beauty, you try to pull the mimodrama out of the common rut, only to succeed in what? In reducing misfits like you to a state of hopeless giggles!”

A chair falls, and the pale trembling form of Misfit rises from out of the Stygian gloom, bleating like a goat. “But Mon . . . Monsieur Brague, I . . . I’m not laughing, I’m crying!”

3

Misfit leans against an iron strut, swaying like a small chained bear as she automatically rubs her powdered shoulder blades to and fro against the cold metal. She listens, while gazing from a distance at the character whom the Compère is about to introduce to the Commère as a choice titbit, by gently pressing forefinger to thumb as if he held between them a folded butterfly.

“Plebiscites are all the fashion, my dear friend: I am happy to present to you tonight the man who, by an impressive majority, has been newly elected the Prince of Mirth—our joyous friend, adventurer, and companion—Sarracq!”

“The frock coat don’t fit him half as well as Raffort,” thinks Misfit. “And you could see even then it hadn’t been made to fit Raffort.”

She notes the difference between the pearl gray frock coat that hangs too long and loose on Sarracq and the violet silk tail coat that trusses the stout body of the Compère, who does his best, by rounding his arms and shoulders, to conceal the shortness of his sleeves. As he steps up onto the stage again, his back to the public, he turns sideways and draws in his waist, to ease the tightness of the knee breeches that are squeezing the life out of him.

An ominous heat hangs heavy on the close of the evening performance. The exasperation is due not so much to the storm that is about to break into a torrential downpour as to the fact that it is one more August night in a succession of cloudless days and nights without a drop of rain. It is a merciless summer heat that has slowly penetrated through the dim recesses of the wings down to the musty lower regions of the Empyrée-Palace. The performers know it well. Shouts of laughter are no longer heard; even the chorus girls’ dressing rooms, wide open to the corridors, no longer resound with the tumult of invigorating slanging matches. From the Commère to the grips and flymen, all creep about cautiously, with the economy of movement of shipwrecked people determined to harbor the last ounce of their strength.