The Collected Stories of Colette (40 page)

“So she’s better, then?” I insisted.

“If you like to call it better. She’s feverish now.”

She was speaking to the looking glass, concentrated on penciling a vertical line down the center of her rather flat upper lip to simulate what she called “the groove of chastity.”

“Was that all Impéria said?”

“No. She said it’s simply unbelievable, the size of their room.”

“Whose room?”

“Gribiche and her mother’s. Their Lordships the Management have sent forty-nine francs.”

“What an odd sum.”

In the mirror, Carmen’s green eyes met mine harshly.

“It’s exactly what’s due to Gribiche. Seven days’ salary. You heard them say she gets two hundred and ten francs a month.”

My neighbor turned severe and suspicious whenever I gave some proof of inexperience which reminded her that I was an outsider and a novice.

“Won’t they give her any more than that?”

“There’s nothing to make them. Gribiche doesn’t belong to the union.”

“Neither do I.”

“I should have been awfully surprised if you
did
,” observed Carmen with chill formality.

The third evening, when I inquired, “How’s Gribiche?” Lise Damoiseau raised her long eyebrows as if I had made a social gaffe.

“Colettevilli, I notice that when you have an idea in your head, it stays up in the top story. All other floors vacant and to let.”

“Oh!” sneered Carmen. “You’ll see her again, your precious Gribiche. She’ll come back here, playing the interesting invalid.”

“Well,
isn’t
she interesting?”

“No more than any other girl who’s done the same.”

“You’re young,” said Lise Damoiseau. “Young in the profession I mean, of course.”

“A blind baby could see
that
,” agreed Carmen.

I said nothing. Their cruelty which seemed based on a convention left me with no retort. So did their perspicacity in sensing the bourgeois past that lay behind my inexperience and in guessing that my apparent youth was that of a woman of thirty-two who does not look her age.

It was on the fourth or fifth night that Impéria came rushing in at the end of the show and started whispering volubly to my roommates. Wanting to make a show of indifference in my turn, I stayed on my cane stool, polishing my cheap looking glass, dusting my makeup shelf, and trying to make it as maniacally tidy as my writing table at home.

Then I mended the hem of my skirt and brushed my short hair. Trying to keep my hair well groomed was a joyless and fruitless task, since I could never succeed in banishing the smell of stale tobacco which returned punctually after each shampoo.

Nevertheless, I was observing my neighbors. Whatever was preoccupying them and making them all so passionately eager to speak brought out all their various characters. Lise stood squarely, her hands on her hips, as if she were in the street market of the rue Lepic, throwing back her magnificent head with the authority of a housewife who will stand no nonsense. Little Impéria kept shifting from one leg to the other, twisting her stubby feet and suffering with the patience of an intelligent pony. Carmen was like all those lively energetic girls in Paris who cut out or finish or sell dresses; girls who instinctively know how to trade on their looks and who are frankly and avidly out for money. Only La Toutou belonged to no definite type, except that she embodied a literary infatuation of the time; the legendary princess, the fairy, the siren, or the perverted angel. Her beauty destined her to be perpetually wringing her hands at the top of a tower or shimmering palely in the depths of a dungeon or swooning on a rock in Liberty draperies dripping with jasper and agate. Suddenly Carmen planted herself in the frame of my open doorway and said all in one breath: “Well, so what are we going to do? That little Impéria says things are going pretty badly.”

“What’s going badly?”

Carmen looked slightly embarrassed.

“Oh! Colettevilli, don’t be nasty, dear. Gribiche, of course. Not allowed to get up. Chemist, medicine, dressings, and all that . . .”

“Not to mention food,” added Lise Damoiseau.

“Quite so. Well . . . you get the idea.”

“But where’s she been hurt, then?”

“It’s her . . . back,” said Lise.

“Stomach,” said Carmen, at the same moment.

Seeing them exchange a conspiratorial look, I began to bristle.

“Trying to make a fool of me, aren’t you?”

Lise laid her big, sensible hand on my arm.

“Now, now, don’t get your claws out. We’ll tell you the whole thing. Gribiche has had a miscarriage. A bad one, four and a half months.”

All four of us fell silent. Mademoiselle d’Estouteville nervously pressed both her hands to her small flat stomach, probably by way of a spell to avert disaster.

“Couldn’t we,” I suggested, “get up a collection between us?”

“A collection, that’s the idea,” said Lise. “That’s the word I was looking for and I couldn’t get it. I kept saying a ‘subscription.’ Come on, La Toutou. How much’ll you give for Gribiche?”

“Ten francs,” declared Mademoiselle d’Estouteville without a second’s hesitation. She ran to her dressing room with a clinking of sham diamonds and imitation sapphires and returned with two five-franc pieces.

“I’ll give five francs,” said Carmen Brasero.

“I’ll give five too,” said Lise. “Not more. I’ve got my people at home. Will you give something, Colettevilli?”

All I could find in my handbag was my key, my powder, some sous, and a twenty-franc piece. I was awkward enough to hesitate, though only for a fraction of a second.

“Want some change?” asked Lise with prompt tact.

I assured her that I didn’t need any and handed the louis to Carmen, who hopped on one foot like a little girl.

“A louis . . . oh, goody, goody! Lise, go and extract some sous out of Madame——” (she gave the name of the leading lady). “She’s just come down.”

“Not me,” said Lise. “You or Impéria if you like. I don’t go over big in my dressing gown.”

“Impéria, trot around to Madame X. And bring back at least five hundred of the best.”

The little actress straightened her spangled crescent in her mirror and went off to Madame X’s dressing room. She did not stay there long.

“Got it?” Lise yelled to her from the distance.

“Got what?”

“The big wad.”

The little actress came into my room and opened her closed fist.

“Ten francs!” said Carmen indignantly.

“Well, what she said was . . .” Impéria began.

Lise put out her big hand, chapped with wet white.

“Save your breath, dear. We know just what she said. That business was slack and her rents weren’t coming in on time and things were rotten on the Bourse. That’s what our celebrated leading actress said.”

“No,” Impéria corrected. “She said it was against the rules.”

“What’s against the rules?”

“To get up . . . subscriptions.”

Lise whistled with amazement.

“First I’ve heard of it. Is it true, Toutou?”

Mademoiselle d’Estouteville was languidly undoing her chignon. Every time she pulled out one of the hideous iron hairpins, with their varnish all rubbed off, a twist of gold slid down and unraveled itself on her shoulders.

“I think,” she said, “you’re too clever by half to worry whether it’s against the rules. Just don’t mention it.”

“You’ve hit it for once, dear,” said Lise approvingly. She ended rashly: “Tonight, it’s too late. But tomorrow I’ll go around with the hat.”

During the night, my imagination was busy with this unknown Gribiche. I had almost forgotten her face when she was conscious but I could remember it very clearly white, with the eyes closed, dangling over a stagehand’s arm. The lids were blue and the tip of each separate lash beaded with a little blob of mascara . . . I had never seen a serious accident since I had been on the halls. People who risk their lives daily are extremely careful. The man who rides a bicycle around and around a rimless disk, pitting himself against centrifugal force, the girl whom a knife thrower surrounds with blades, the acrobat who swings from trapeze to trapeze high up in mid-air—I had imagined their possible end just as everyone does. I had imagined it with that vague, secret pleasure we all feel in what inspires us with horror. But I had never dreamed that someone like Gribiche, by falling down a staircase, would kill her secret and lie helpless and penniless.

The idea of the collection was enthusiastically received and everyone swore to secrecy. Nothing else was talked about in the dressing rooms. Our end of the corridor received various dazzling visitors. The “Sacred Scarab,” glittering in purple and green (“Yo
u
know,” Carmen reminded me. “She’s the one who was sick on the stage the night of the dress rehearsal”), and Julia Godard, the queen of male impersonators, who, close to, looked like an old Spanish waiter, came in person to present their ten francs. Their arrival aroused as much curiosity as it would in the street of a little town, for they came from a distant corridor which ran parallel to ours and they featured in tableaux we had never seen. Last of all Poupoute (“wonder quick-change child prodigy”) deigned to bring us what she called her “mite.” She owned to being eight and, dressed as a polo player (“Aristocratic Sports,” Tableau 14), she strutted from force of habit, bowed with inveterate grace, and overdid the silvery laugh! When she left our peaceful regions, she made a careful exit backward, waving her little riding whip. Lise Damoiseau heaved an exasperated sigh.

“Has to be seen to be believed! The nerve of Her Majesty! Fourteen if she’s a day, my dear! After all that, she coughed up ten francs.”

By dint of one- and two-franc and five-franc pieces and the pretty little gold medals worth ten, the treasurer, Lise Damoiseau, amassed three hundred and eighty-seven francs, which she guarded fiercely in a barley-sugar box.

The troupe of “Girls” she left out of the affair. (“How on earth can I explain to them when they only talk English that Gribiche got herself in the family way and had a ‘miss’ and all the rest of it?”) Nevertheless “Les Girls” produced twenty-five francs between them. At the last moment, a charming American who danced and sang (he still dances and he is still charming) slipped Carmen a hundred-franc note as he came off the stage, when we thought the “subscription” was closed.

We received some unexpected help. I won fifty francs for Gribiche playing bezique against a morose and elderly friend. Believe me, fifty francs meant something to him too and made their hole in the pension of a retired official in the Colonial Service. One way and another, we collected over five hundred francs.

“It’s crazy,” said Carmen, the night that we counted out five hundred and eighty-seven francs.

“Does Gribiche know?”

Lise shook her splendid head.

“
I’m
not crazy. Impéria’s taken her sixty francs for the most pressing things. It’s deducted on the account. Look, I’ve written it all down.”

I leaned for some time over the paper, fascinated by the astonishing contrast between the large childish letters, sloping uncertainly now forward, now backward, and the fluent, assured, majestic figures, all proudly clear and even.

“I bet you’re good at sums, Lise!”

She nodded. Her marble chin touched the base of her full, goddess-like neck.

“Quite. I like adding up figures. It’s a pity I don’t usually have many to add up. I like figures. Look, a 5’s pretty, isn’t it? So’s a 7. Sometimes, at night, I sees 5’s and 2’s swimming on the water like swans . . . See what I mean? There’s the swan’s head . . . and there’s its neck when it’s swimming. And there, underneath, it’s sitting on the water.”

She brooded dreamily over the pretty 5’s and the 2’s shaped in the likeness of Leda’s lover.

“Queer, isn’t it? But that’s not the whole story. We’re going to take the five hundred and eighty-seven francs to Gribiche.”

“Of course. I suppose Impéria will take care of that.”

Lise proudly brushed aside my supposition with a jerk of her elbow.

“We’ll do better than that, I hope. We’re not going to fling it at her like a bundle of nonsense. You coming with us? We’re going tomorrow at four.”

“But I don’t know Gribiche.”

“Nor do we. But there’s a right and a wrong way of doing things. Any particular reason for not wanting to come?”

Under such a direct question, reinforced by a severe look, I gave in, while blaming myself for giving in.

“No reason at all. How many of us are going?”

“Three. Impéria’s busy. Meet us outside Number 3 —— Street.”

I have always liked new faces, provided I can see them at a certain distance or through a thick pane of glass. During the loneliest years of my life, I lived on ground floors. Beyond the net curtain and the windowpane passed my dear human beings to whom I would not for the world have been the first to speak or hold out my hand. In those days I dedicated to them my passionate unsociability, my inexperience of human creatures, and my fundamental shyness, which had no relation to cowardice. I was not annoyed with myself because the thought of the visit to Gribiche kept me awake part of the night. But I was vexed that a certain peremptory tone could still produce an instinctive reflex of obedience, or at least of acquiescence.

The next day I bought a bunch of Parma violets and took the métro with as much bored resentment as if I were going to pay a ceremonial New Year’s Day call. On the pavement of ——Street, Carmen and Lise Damoiseau watched me coming but made no welcoming sign from the distance. They were dressed as if for a funeral except for a lace jabot under Lise’s chin and a feather curled like a question mark in Carmen’s hat. It was the first time I had seen my comrades by daylight. Four o’clock on a fine May afternoon is ruthless to any defect. I saw with astonishment how young they were and how much their youth had already suffered.