The Collected Stories of Colette (75 page)

“‘So you’re not quite up to the mark? You ought to see someone.’ I abstained from replying that, on the contrary, I would far rather see no one, and I kept myself to myself. Except that I undertook to teach a quite good-looking woman, a cousin of the owner’s, how one catalogues a library, and some other pleasant ways of spending a hot afternoon.

“What a country it is, my dear, all that region of Doubs! And what an estate! The new owner had not had time to make disastrous ‘improvements’ or to change that look—burning even more than burnt—that September has up there. The shortened days were still sweltering enough to take the skin off your hands when you lunched outdoors, and at night, just before dawn, a marvelous cold came in through the open windows, a cold that turned the leaves of the cherry trees all red—and the elms and chestnuts prematurely yellow. No season had ever been so yellow, including the grass in the fields which had not had enough rain to give a second hay crop. But, because the trees were so old and thick, the undergrowth remained and as mushroomy as you could wish. There are lots of ‘violets’ in Franche-Comté. The violet is a delicate kind of mushroom.

“Sparrow hawks—they were golden, too—would escort me a little way, circling very high above my head to find out my intentions, and as I was innocent of any evil design, they would abandon me.

“Being a good walker (I’m talking of twenty years ago) I wandered over hill and dale; I discovered a little lock in the park with its sluice gates rotted away and its pool dried up, the remains of a carved saint in her niche, an ancient ‘belvedere,’ from which it had long been impossible to see anything, full of rabbit dung and prickly broom. I left the park without realizing it because the chemist preferred to install bathrooms all over the house rather than rebuild the walls around his property. But a few hundred yards farther on, the landscape became tamer and was cut up into small cultivated squares bounded by low, mortarless walls that made warm shelters for vipers. Although the district was fairly thick with small hills, I did not lose my way. I never do get off my track, you know. What’s making you smile? Ah, I see what you mean. No, thanks, no more brandy. I should love a glass of cold water.

“Perhaps you think I’m overdoing the landscape. But that season of long ago has left me a memory of being severely alone. On certain mornings, the dew was like a white frost, and then you baked for the rest of the day and the evening too, and the grapes—little black grapes in such tight clusters an ant couldn’t have made its way into them—ripened ahead of time on the walls of the farm and the gatekeepers’ lodges while the blue and mauve scabiosas announced that this blazing summer would soon be termed autumn. I was contented, contented without words and without many thoughts; I was getting tanned and beginning to look pleasingly like a country gentleman. One day . . . Yes, you see, I’m coming to the point.

“One day, I was outside the domain. I had shaken off all the fine-weather enthusiasts. I was on a hillside in the woods, climbing the fairly steep slope of a forest path, grassy but scored with wheel ruts. I was walking between birches; the wind was already blowing off their little golden leaves, so light that they fluttered a long time before they settled. Toward the top of the hill, I saw that the birches gave way to apple trees at the edge of a meadow. Behind the apple trees, a beautiful clump of rather melancholy firs more than half hid an ancient dwelling with a gable of old tiles, set very prettily sideways, as if intentionally, at the top of the slope. A great mantle of Virginia creeper, pink in places, covered its shoulder. An adjoining kitchen garden, a garden overgrown with weeds, a valley whose mist was the typical purple-blue of Franche-Comté. I thought, ‘How charming it is—and how neglected,’ and as a final touch, I could hear the ripple of water. Running water is a rare blessing in those little mountains. From the other side of the low, crumbling wall, the horned forehead of a goat touched my hand, a pair of spindle-shaped pupils stared me out of countenance. I put out my hand to scratch the pretty black forehead with a white star on it and it did not turn away.

“‘Don’t touch her, don’t touch her, she’ll chase you!’ cried a young voice.

“The accent of that part of the world drags out the vowels, as you know. ‘Doön’t touch her! She’ll chaäse you!’ Naturally, I stretched out my hand still farther, and with one bound, the goat was after me, pretty as a devil, pursued by a female child shouting, ‘Stop it, you baäd girl, stop it!’ A child . . . no.
I
don’t call persons of around fifteen children. I should lose too much if I did. The young girl grabbed the she-goat by its horns and neatly threw it over on its side. The goat got up and bounded away in little leaps on all four feet.

“‘She’s cross,’ said the young girl.

“She was recovering her wind and breathing with her mouth half open. A blonde, even a little more than a blonde, verging on a redhead, with freckles on her cheeks and forehead and fiery eyelashes. But there was nothing of the albino redhead about her. On the contrary, her complexion was extraordinarily vivid under its bevy of freckles and her gray-green eyes, like her cheeks, were powdered with little chestnut freckles. One of the first things I noticed about her was the color of the little curly tendrils on her forehead and the nape of her neck (she wore her hair pretentiously piled up in a bun), they were almost pink with the midday sun shining through them. For it was noon, and scorching enough on this bare hilltop to peel the skin off your nose.

“I said to her: ‘You’ve just definitely saved my life, Mademoiselle.’

“She laughed, wriggling her shoulders like a coquettish girl who has no idea of good manners. The inside of her mouth, as she laughed with her chin in the air, was lit up right to the back molars and I thought she was throwing her head back on purpose. You don’t often find a flawless set of teeth in country girls. Country girls . . . My young girl had no apron and her clothes were dowdy, rather than rural. A cheap ready-made blue blouse with white spots, a badly cut skirt, and a leather belt—that was all as regards the outside. Underneath there was a young creature. The expression ‘well-rounded,’ so long out of fashion, describes a type of beauty which, believe me, is positively intoxicating when that beauty is adolescent. While I was making the little thing laugh at my simple jokes, I kept thinking, as I looked at that tautness and fullness and suppleness, of the drawings Boucher made of Louise O’Morphy, that girl who had not even finished growing before her entire dimpled body proclaimed its pressing need and cried aloud to lovers: ‘Deliver me from myself or I shall burst!’

“My little O’Morphy ended by blushing, but only when she remembered that she had hung a necklace of ‘square caps’ around her neck, as all children do in autumn—you know, those bright pink wild euonymus berries with four lobes. I am stupid, as you have every reason to know.

“Furiously, she broke the thread and I remarked: ‘That’s a pity, it suited you very well. May I know the name of my protectress?’

“‘Louisette . . . Louise,’ she corrected herself with dignity.

“I replied that my name was Albin and she signified with a little twitch of her mouth that she didn’t care a rap. She was observing me surreptitiously, putting her hand over her eyes as if to keep the sun out of them. A voice called her and she answered with a shrill ‘Yes.’

“‘I live there,’ she said before leaving me. ‘Over there, in the cháteau.’

“She gave her home its name with a mannered haughtiness. Then she ran off toward her ‘château’ with long, boyish strides.

“I don’t imagine I shall astonish you by telling you that . . . No, not the next day. The day after that, I braved the half-past-eleven sun, on the same spot. The day before, I had taken advantage of a car that went in to do the shopping to go into town and buy a little coral necklace whose beads were exactly the same bright pink as the ‘square cap’ berries . . . Excuse me, what were you saying, my dear? That it was a horrid proceeding, and a classic one? Allow me to defend myself. The lover of young girls is neither so simple nor so determined as to imagine the fulfillment of intentions he has not even had time to formulate clearly. But I admit that his method of approach is often of that commonplace kind Faust was taught by a demon whose tactics were far from subtle. Pretty trifles from the squire to the village maiden. So I ambushed myself at the edge of the wood, in that same scorching fine weather that seemed as if it would never end, in that same exacerbating eleven o’clock sun that was fast ripening the apples and the blackberries and those wall peaches known, for obvious reasons, as ‘hardies.’ And there I saw no sign of Louisette, but I could hear the ripple of the running water which marked its path on the other side of the slope by a track of greener herbage, some alders, a few willows. I had walked fast, I was dying to go and drink at it. Suddenly there was my young girl, a yard away, without the sound of a footstep or the rustle of a branch. She was staring at me with such fixed intensity that I can only convey it by brief ejaculations, such as: ‘Well? So you’ve come? What do you want? I’m waiting. Say something. Do something!’ I did not take the risk of using the same language and I greeted her politely as any man would, whether or not he had evil designs.

“‘Good morning, Mademoiselle Louisette.’

“She held out her hand like a young girl who does not know how to shake hands, an impersonal little paw.

“‘Good morning, Monsieur.’

“‘I’ve brought you back the necklace you broke the day before yesterday.’

“And I offered her my little necklace quite naked. Louisette tossed her chin and I observed she had the most delicious neck. An envelope of flesh so perfectly filled, a roundness that revealed not a hint of ligament or bone; never before or since have I seen a neck of such succulent perfection. And, besides, this was no bronzed beach girl I saw before me. Apart from the glorious coloring of her face and a little sunburned triangle in the opening of her blouse, the color of her body began at once at the base of the neck, a color so light, barely tinged with pink.

a lily under crimson skies . . 
.

“Oh, you can laugh! Many a time I’ve felt that poem surging up in me above the purely physical feeling. In similar circumstances, that poem has often saved a young girl—and me—from myself.

“Well, I offered her my necklace, which had a little golden clasp. But Louisette refused it with a shake of the head, adding: ‘No.’

“‘You don’t want it? You think it’s ugly?’

“‘No. But I can’t take it.’

“‘It’s an object of no value,’ I said idiotically.

“‘That makes no difference. I can’t take it because of Mamma. Whatever would Mamma say if she saw me with a necklace?’

“‘Mightn’t you have . . . found it?’

“She gave a cynical little smile. She was still keeping her chestnut-flecked eyes fixed on mine. Spots of sunlight danced from her golden lashes to her chin. I have never seen a complexion like hers, such delicate chiseling of the mouth and nostrils. What’s that? Was she pretty? It’s true I haven’t told you whether she was pretty. Actually, I don’t think she was very pretty. Untidy, anyway. In her shining hair, I could see the ugly, battered, japanned hairpins that kept it in place. I could see that her stockings, beige lisle or cotton, were not very clean. For certain things, I have a remorseless eye.

“She was gazing at me so . . . how can I put it . . . so crudely that for a moment I was afraid there was something wrong with my appearance. But only for a moment. My costume was so simple that it could not make me look absurd: an open-necked shirt and trousers of some smooth material that did not catch on brambles. I was carrying my jacket over my arm—and nineteen less years than now. Long before it became the fashion, I used to walk bareheaded, well thatched as I was with my thick hair, alas! prematurely white. And I was lean, as you’ve always known me.

“Naturally, I was also gazing at Louisette, but in a more cautious, let us say a more civilized way. But even so, I saw that she had extended the outer corners of her eyelids by means of two little penciled lines. Such a preposterous, such an idiotic bit of coquetry made me burst out laughing as one does at children who celebrate Shrove Tuesday by solemnly wearing crepe-hair beards.

“You can imagine my young girl was not at all pleased. She understood perfectly well and rubbed her two forefingers over the corners of her eyes. I took advantage of this to assert my authority.

“‘That’s a nice thing,’ I told her. ‘At your age? You refuse a trifle because you’re afraid of your mother, and you don’t hesitate to make up your eyes!’

“She wriggled her shoulders, the way all badly brought-up girls do. But no girl, badly brought-up or not, ever made such shoulders or such a pair of young breasts tightly attached to them heave inside her blouse. I hoped she was going to snivel a little so that I could console her.

“‘Do take this little necklace,’ I said. ‘Or else I shall throw it away.’

“‘Throw it away, then,’ she said at once. ‘I certainly shan’t pick it up. You’d better give it to someone else.’

“‘Are you so very frightened of your mother?’

“She shook her head again before she spoke, as she had done before.

“‘No. I’m afraid she’d think badly of me.’

“‘And your father, is he a rigid disciplinarian?’

“‘Is he a what?’

“‘Is he strict with you?’

“‘No. He’s dead.’

“‘Forgive me. Was he very old?’

“‘Fifty-two.’

“It was within a month or two of my own age and I mechanically stood up straighter.

“‘So you live alone with your mother?’

“‘And there are the Biguets too. They run the farm.’

“‘Is it yours, that water I can hear rippling?’

“‘Yes. It’s the spring.’

“‘A spring! And a spring that gives so much water you can hear it from here . . . Why, it’s a fortune!’

“‘It’s the most beautiful spring in the world,’ said Louisette simply.