The Collected Stories of Colette (80 page)

I used to listen to them living close at hand behind a curtain of leaves. I would hear the embroidery scissors clattering on an iron table, the thimble rolling on the gravel, and the pages of a magazine rustling. A cheerful noise of spoons and cups told me that it was five o’clock and I would yawn with hunger. Now nothing remains all around me but the relics of a long summer: an empty hammock swings in the wind and a metal frog, belonging to some garden game, gulps the rain. Paths that have lost their mystery wind under the tattered trees, and walls stripped bare reveal the limits of our jealously measured paradises.

I am afraid now of discovering that the young girl in pink—a slim gardener who used to prune the rose bushes on the other side of the arbor—is ugly. I would like to remain uncertain, until the trees are green again, whether the united couple, whose leisurely sauntering I used to hear twice a day, is young or old.

The three children who sit singing on the terrace steps of the house that belongs to the lady in mourning stop abruptly if I look at them. I make them feel uncomfortable. All the same, they were aware this summer that I was here; but I didn’t know which one it was who called out “Thank you” when I threw a lost ball back over the hedge of clipped acacias. Now I make them feel uncomfortable and they embarrass me. I shan’t dare any longer to cross the garden wearing a dressing gown, with my hair still wet.

My thoughts turn to the house, to the fire and the lamp; there are books and cushions and a bunch of dahlias the color of dark blood; in these short afternoons, when the early evenings turn the bay window blue, decidedly it’s time to be indoors. Already on the tops of the walls and on the still-warm slates of the roofs, there appear with tails like plumes, wary ears, cautious paws, and arrogant eyes, those new masters of our gardens, the cats.

A long black torn keeps continual watch on the roof of the empty kennel; and the gentle night, blue with motionless mist that smells of kitchen gardens and the smoke of green wood, is peopled with little velvety phantoms. Claws lacerate the barks of trees, and a feline voice, low and hoarse, begins a thrilling lament that never ends.

The Persian cat, draped like a feather boa along my windowsill, stretches and sings in honor of his mate dozing down below in front of the kitchen. He sings under his breath, as though in an aside, and seems to be awaking from a six months’ sleep. He inhales the wind with little sniffs, his head thrown back, and the day is not far off when my house will lose its chief ornament, its two faithful and magnificent guests, my Angoras, silvery as the leaves of the hairy sage and the gray aspen, as the cobweb covered with dew or the budding flower of the willow.

Already they refuse to eat from the same plate. While waiting for the periodical and inevitable delirium, each plays a part before the other, just for the pleasure of making themselves unrecognizable to each other.

The male conceals his strength, walking with his loins low, so that the fluffy fringe of his flanks brushes the ground. The she-cat pretends to forget him, and when they are in the garden she no longer favors him with a single glance. In the house she becomes intolerant, and jealous of her prerogatives, grimacing with a look of bitter hatred if he hesitates to give way to her on the staircase. If he settles on the cushion that she wants, she explodes like a chestnut thrown on the fire, and scratches him in the face, like a true little cowardly female, going for his eyes and the tender velvet of his nose.

The male accepts the harsh rules of the game and serves his sentence, as its duration is secretly fixed. Scratched and humiliated, he waits. Some days yet must pass, the sun must sink lower toward the horizon, the acacia must decide to shed, one by one, the fluttering gold of its oval coins. Then there must come some dry nights, and an east wind to frighten the last leafy fingers off the chestnut trees.

Under a cold sickle of moon they will go off together, no longer a fraternal couple of sleeping and sparring partners, but passionate enemies transformed by love. He is compact of new cunning and bloodthirsty coquettishness, while she is all falsehood and tragic cries, equally ready for flight or for sly reprisals. The mysteriously appointed hour has but to sound, and old lovers and bored friends though they are, each will taste the intoxication of becoming for the other the Unknown.

[
Translated by Enid McLéod
]

“That girl? But, good heavens, she adores you! What’s more, she’s never done anything else for ten whole years. All the time you were on active service, she kept finding excuses for dropping in at the pharmacy and asking if I’d had a letter.”

“Did she?”

“She wouldn’t leave the shop until she’d managed to slip in her ‘How’s your brother?’ She used to wait. And while she was waiting, she’d buy aspirin, cough lozenges, tubes of lanolin, toilet water, tincture of iodine.”

“So naturally, you saw to it she was kept waiting?”

“Well, after all, why not? When I finally did tell her I’d news of you, off she went. But never till I had. You know what she’s like.”

“Yes . . . No, to be honest, I
don’t
know what she’s like.”

“What do you expect, my poor pet? You made everything so complicated for yourself, you’re wearing yourself out with all these absurd scruples. Armande is a very well-educated girl, we all know that. She takes her position as a comfortably rich orphan a shade too seriously. I grant you it’s none too easy a one in a subprefecture like this. But just because of that, to let her put it over on you to that extent,
you
, Maxime, of all people! Look out, this is the new pavement. At least one can walk without getting one’s feet wet now.”

The September sky, black and moonless, glittered with stars that twinkled large in the damp air. The invisible river lapped against the single arch of the bridge. Maxime stopped and leaned on the parapet.

“The parapet’s new too,” he said.

“Yes. It was put up by the local tradesmen, with the consent of the Town Council. You know they did tremendously well here out of food and clothing, what with all the troops going through and the exodus.”

“Out of food, clothes, footwear, medical supplies, and everything else. I also know that people talk about ‘the exodus’ as they do about “the agricultural show’ and ‘the gala horse show and gymkhana.’”

“Anyway, they wanted to make a great sacrifice.”

Madame Debove heard Maxime laugh under his breath at the word “sacrifice” and she prudently left her sentence unfinished to revert to Armande Fauconnier.

“In any case, she didn’t let you down too badly during the war; she wrote to you, didn’t she?”

“Postcards.”

“She sent you food parcels and a marvelous pullover.”

“To hell with her food parcels and her woollies,” said Maxime Degouthe violently, “
and
her postcards! I’ve never begged charity from her, as far as I know.”

“Good gracious, what a savage character you are . . . Don’t spoil your last evening here, Maxime! Admit it was a charming party tonight. Armande is a very good hostess. All the Fauconniers have always been good hosts. Armande knows how to efface herself. There was no chance of the conversation getting on to that children’s clinic that Armande supports entirely out of her own money.”

“Who hasn’t organized something in the way of a children’s clinic during the war?” growled Maxime.

“Why, heaps of people, I assure you! In the first place, you’ve got to have the means.
She
really has got the means.”

Maxime made no reply. He hated it when his sister talked of Armande’s “means.”

“The river’s low,” he said, after a moment or two.

“You’ve got good eyes!”

“It’s not a question of eyes, it’s a question of smell. When the water’s low, it always smells of musk here. It’s the mud, probably.”

He suddenly remembered that, last year, he had said the very same words, on the very same spot, to Armande. She had wrinkled her nose in disgust and made an ugly grimace with her mouth. “As if
she
knew what mud was . . . Mud, that pearl-gray clay, so soft to the bare toes, so mysteriously musky,
she
imagines it’s the same as excrement. She never misses an occasion of shrinking away from anything that can be tasted or touched or smelled.”

Dancing owlet moths almost obscured the luminous globes at either end of the bridge. Maxime heard his sister yawn.

“Come on, let’s go. What on earth are we doing here?”

“I’m asking
you
!” sighed Madame Debove. “Do you hear? Eleven o’clock! Hector’s sure to have gone to bed without waiting up for me.”

“Let him sleep. There’s no need for us to hurry.”

“Oh, yes, there is, old thing! I’m sleepy, I am.”

He took his sister’s arm under his own, as he used to in the old days when they were students, sharing the same illusions, in that halcyon period when a brother and sister believe, quite genuinely, that they are perfectly content with being a chaste imitation of a pair of lovers. “Then a big, ginger-headed youth comes along and the devoted little sister goes off with him, for the pleasure and the advantages of marrying the Grand Central Pharmacy. After all, she did the right thing.”

A passer-by stepped off the pavement to make room for them and bowed to Jeanne.

“Good evening, Merle. Stopped having those pains of yours?”

“It’s as if he’d said, Madame Debove. Good evening, Madame Debove.”

“He’s a customer,” explained Jeanne.

“Good Lord, I might have guessed that,” said her brother ironically. “When you put on your professional chemist’s wife voice.”

“What about you when you put on your professional quack’s voice? Just listen, am I exaggerating one bit? ‘Above all, dear lady, endeavor as far as possible to control your nerves. The improvement is noticeable, I will even go so far as to say remarkable, but for the time being, we must continue to be very firm about avoiding all forms of meat,’ and I preach to you and instruct you and I drench you with awful warnings.”

Maxime laughed wholeheartedly, the imitation of his slightly pontifical manner was so true to life.

“All women are monkeys, they’re only interested in our absurdities and our love affairs and our illnesses. The other one can’t be so very different from this one.”

He could see her, the other one, as she had looked when he left her just now, standing at the top flight of steps that led up to the Fauconniers’ house. The lighted chandelier in the hall behind her gave her a nimbus of blue glass convolvulus flowers and chromium hoops. “Goodbye, Armande.” She had answered only with a nod. “You might call her a miser with words! If I had her in my arms, one day, between four walls or in the corner of a wood, I’d make her scream, and for good reason!” But he had never met Armande in the corner of a wood. As to his aggressive instincts, he lost all hope of gratifying them the moment he was in Armande’s presence.

Eleven o’clock struck from the hospital, then from a small low church jostled by new buildings, last of all, in shrill, crystalline strokes from a dark ground-floor room whose window was open. As they crossed the Place d’Armes, Maxime sat down on one of the benches.

“Just for one minute, Jeanne! Let me relax my nerves. It’s nice out of doors.”

Jeanne Debove consented sulkily.

“You ought to have worked them off on Armande, those nerves of yours. But you haven’t got the guts!”

He did not protest and she burst into a malicious laugh. He wondered why sexual shyness, which excites dissolute women, arouses the contempt of decent ones.

“She overawes you, that’s it. Yes, she overawes you. I simply can’t get over it!”

She elaborated her inability to get over it by inundating him with various scoffing remarks, accompanied now by a neighing laugh, now by a spurt of giggles.

“After all, you’re not in your very,
very
first youth. You’re not a greenhorn. Or a neurotic. Nor, thank heaven, physically deformed.”

She enumerated all the things her brother was not and he was glad she omitted to mention the one quite simple thing he was—a man who had been in love for a very long time.

Maxime Degouthe’s long-persisting love, though it preserved him from debauchery, turned into mere habit when he was away from Armande for a few months. When he was away from her, a kind of conjugal fidelity allowed him to amuse himself as much as he liked and even to forget her for a spell. So much so that, when he had finished his medical studies, he had been paralyzed to find himself faced with a grown-up Armande Fauconnier when the Armande he remembered was a gawky, sharp-shouldered, overgrown adolescent, at once clumsy and noble like a bony filly full of promise.

Every time he saw her again, she completely took possession of him. His feeling for her was violent and suppressed, like a gardener’s son’s for the “young lady up at the big house.” He would have liked to be rather brutal to this beautiful tall girl whom he admired from head to foot, who was just sufficiently dark, just sufficiently white, and as smooth as a pear. “But I shouldn’t dare. No, I daren’t,” he fumed to himself, every time he left.