The Collected Stories of Colette (90 page)

“Look at her!” she exclaimed. “Look at her, the middle-aged lady who debauches warmhearted and cultured lieutenants!”

With the little oil lamp in her hand, she preceded Paul Masson.

“I shan’t see you at all this week,” she told me. “I’ve got two pieces of homework to do: the chariot race and the Christians in the lions’ pit.”

“Haven’t I already read something of the kind somewhere?” put in Masson.

“I sincerely hope you have,” retorted Marco. “If it hadn’t been done over and over again, where should I get my documentation?”

The following week, Masson bought a copy of the paper and with his hard, corrugated nail pointed out three lines in the Agony Column: “Alex 2 implores author delicious letter beginning ‘What presumption’ to give address. Secrecy scrupulously honored.”

“Marco,” he said, “you’ve won not only the box of Gianduja but also a booby prize in the shape of a first-class mug.”

Marco shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s cruel, what you’ve made me do. He’s sure to think he’s been made fun of, poor boy.”

Masson screwed up his eyes to their smallest and most inquisitorial.

“Sorry for him already, dear?”

These memories are distant, but precise. They rise out of the fog that inevitably drowns the long days of that particular time, the monotonous amusements of dress rehearsals and suppers at Pousset’s, my alternations between animal gaiety and confused unhappiness, the split in my nature between a wild, frightened creature and one with a vast capacity for illusion. But it is a fog that leaves the faces of my friends intact and shining clear.

It was also on a rainy night, in late October or early November, that Marco came to keep me company one night; I remember the anthracite smell of the waterproof cape. She kissed me. Her soft nose was wet, she sighed with pleasure at the sight of the glowing stove. She opened her satchel.

“Here, read this,” she said. “Don’t you think he’s got a charming turn of phrase, this . . . this ruffianly soldier?”

If, after reading it, I had allowed myself a criticism, I should have said: too charming. A letter worked over and recopied; one draft, two drafts thrown into the wastepaper basket. The letter of a shy man, with a touch of the poet, like everyone else.

“Marco, you mean you actually wrote to him?”

The virtuous Marco laughed in my face.

“One can’t hide anything from you, charming daughter of Monsieur de La Palisse! Written? Written more than once, even! Crime gives me an appetite. You haven’t got a cake? Or an apple?”

While she nibbled delicately, I showed off my ideas on the subject of graphology.

“Look, Marco, how carefully your ‘ruffianly soldier’ has covered up a word he’s begun so as to make it illegible. Sign of gumption, also of touchiness. The writer, as Crépieux-Jamin says, doesn’t like people to laugh at him.”

Marco agreed, absentmindedly. I noticed she was looking pretty and animated. She studied herself in the glass, clenching her teeth and parting her lips, a grimace few women can resist making in front of a mirror when they have white teeth.

“Whatever’s the name of that toothpaste that reddens the gums, Colette?”

“Cherry something or other.”

“Thanks, I’ve got it now. Cherry Dentifrice. Will you do me a favor? Don’t tell Paul Masson about my epistolary escapades. He’d never stop teasing me. I shan’t keep up my relations with the regular army long enough to make myself ridiculous. Oh, I forgot to tell you. My husband has sent me another fifteen thousand francs.”

“Mercy me, be I a-hearing right? as they say where I come from. And you just simply
forgot
that bit of news?”

“Yes, really,” said Marco. “I just forgot.”

She raised her eyebrows with an air of surprise to remind me delicately that money is always a subject of minor importance.

From that moment, it seemed to me that everything moved very fast for Marco. Perhaps that was due to distance. One of my moves—the first—took me from the rue Jacob to the top of the rue de Courcelles, from a dark little cubbyhole to a studio whose great window let in cold, heat, and an excess of light. I wanted to show my sophistication, to satisfy my newly born—and modest—cravings for luxury: I bought white goatskins, and a folding shower bath from Chaboche’s.

Marco, who felt at home in dim rooms and in the atmosphere of the Left Bank and of libraries, blinked her lovely eyes under the studio skylight, stared at the white divans that suggested polar bears, and did not like the new way I did my hair. I wore it piled up above my forehead and twisted into a high chignon; this new “helmet” fashion had swept the hair up from the most modest and retiring napes.

Such a minor domestic upheaval would not have been worth mentioning, did it not make it understandable that, for some time, I only had rapid glimpses of Marco. My pictures of her succeeded each other jerkily like the pictures in those children’s books that, as you turn the pages fast, give the illusion of continuous movement. When she brought me the second letter from the romantic lieutenant, I had crossed the intervening gulf. As Marco walked into my new, light flat, I saw that she was definitely prettier than she had been the year before. The slender foot she thrust out below the hem of her skirt rejoiced in the kind of shoe it deserved. Through the veil stretched taut over the little cleft at the tip of her nose she stared, now at her gloved hand, now at each unknown room, but she seemed to see neither the one nor the other clearly. With bright patience she endured my arranging and rearranging the curtains: she admired the folding shower bath, which, when erected, vaguely suggested a vertical coffin.

She was so patient and so absentminded that in the end I noticed it and asked her crudely: “By the way, Marco, how’s the ruffianly soldier?”

Her eyes, softened by makeup and shortsightedness, looked into mine.

“As it happens, he’s very well. His letters are charming—decidedly so.”

“Decidedly so? How many have you had?”

“Three in all. I’m beginning to think it’s enough. Don’t you agree?”

“No, since they’re charming—and they amuse you.”

“I don’t care for the atmosphere of the
poste restante
 . . . It’s a horrid hole. Everyone there has a guilty look. Here, if you’re interested . . .”

She threw a letter into my lap; it had been there ready all the time, folded up in her gloved hand. I read it rather slowly, I was so preoccupied with its serious tone, devoid of the faintest trace of humor.

“What a remarkable lieutenant you’ve come across, Marco! I’m sure that if he weren’t restrained by his shyness . . .”

“His shyness?” protested Marco. “He’s already got to the point of hoping that we shall exchange less impersonal letters! What cheek! For a shy man . . .”

She broke off to raise her veil which was overheating her coarse-grained skin and flushing up those uneven red patches on her cheeks. But nowadays she knew how to apply her powder cleverly, how to brighten the color of her mouth. Instead of a discouraged woman of forty-five, I saw before me a smart woman of forty, her chin held high above the boned collar that hid the secrets of the neck. Once again, because of her very beautiful eyes, I forgot the deterioration of all the rest of her face and sighed inwardly: “What a pity . . .”

Our respective moves took us away from our old surroundings and I did not see Marco quite so often. But she was very much in my mind. The polarity of affection between two women friends that gives one authority and the other pleasure in being advised turned me into a peremptory young guide. I decided that Marco ought to wear shorter skirts and more nipped-in waistlines. I sternly rejected braid, which made her look old, colors that dated her, and, most of all, certain hats that, when Marco put them on, mysteriously sentenced her beyond hope of appeal. She allowed herself to be persuaded, though she would hesitate for a moment: “You think so? You’re quite sure?” and glance at me out of the corner of her beautiful eye.

We liked meeting each other in a little tearoom at the corner of the rue de l’Echelle and the rue d’Argenteuil, a warm, poky “British,” saturated with the bitter smell of Ceylon tea. We “partook of tea,” like other sweet-toothed ladies of those far-off days, and hot buttered toast followed by quantities of cakes. I liked my tea very black, with a thick white layer of cream and plenty of sugar. I believed I was learning English when I asked the waitress: “Edith, please, a little more milk, and butter.”

It was at the little “British” that I perceived such a change in Marco that I could not have been more startled if, since our last meeting, she had dyed her hair peroxide or taken to drugs. I feared some danger, I imagined that the wretch of a husband had frightened her into his clutches again. But if she was frightened, she would not have had that blank flickering gaze that wandered from the table to the walls and was profoundly indifferent to everything it glanced at.

“Marco? Marco?”

“Darling?”

“Marco, what on earth’s happened? Have other treasure galLéons arrived? Or what?”

She smiled at me as if I were a stranger.

“GalLéons? Oh, no.”

She emptied her cup in one gulp and said almost in a whisper: “Oh, how stupid of me, I’ve burned myself.”

Consciousness and affection slowly returned to her gaze. She saw that mine was astonished and she blushed, clumsily and unevenly, as she always did.

“Forgive me,” she said, laying her little hand on mine.

She sighed and relaxed.

“Oh!” she said. “What luck there isn’t anyone here. I’m a little . . . how can I put it? . . . queasy.”

“More tea? Drink it very hot.”

“No, no. I think it’s that glass of port I had before I came here. No, nothing, thanks.”

She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She was wearing her newest suit, a little oval brooch of the “family heirloom” type was pinned at the base of the high boned collar of her cream blouse. The next moment she had revived and was completely herself, consulting the mirror in her new handbag and feverishly anticipating my questions.

“Ah, I’m better now! It was that port, I’m sure it was. Yes, my dear, port! And in the company of Lieutenant Alexis Trallard, son of General Trallard.”

“Ah!” I exclaimed with relief, “is
that
all? You quite frightened me. So you’ve actually seen the ruffianly soldier? What’s he like? Is he like his letters? Does he stammer? Has he got a lisp? Is he bald? Has he a port-wine mark on his nose?”

These and similar idiotic suggestions were intended to make Marco laugh. But she listened to me with a dreamy, refined expression as she nibbled at a piece of buttered toast that had gone cold.

“My dear,” she said at last. “If you’ll let me get a word in edgewise, I might inform you that Lieutenant Trallard is neither an invalid nor a monster. Incidentally, I’ve known this ever since last week, because he enclosed a photograph in one of his letters.”

She took my hand.

“Don’t be cross. I didn’t dare mention it to you. I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of you, darling, of being teased a little. And . . . well . . . just simply afraid!”

“But why
afraid
?”

She made an apologetic gesture of ignorance, clutching her arms against her breast.

“Here’s the Object,” she said, opening her handbag. “Of course, it’s a very bad snapshot.”

“He’s much better looking than the photo . . . of course?”

“Better looking . . . good heavens, he’s totally
different
. Especially his expression.”

As I bent over the photograph, she bent over it too, as if to protect it from too harsh a judgment.

“Lieutenant Trallard hasn’t got that shadow like a saber cut on his cheek. Besides, his nose isn’t so long. He’s got light brown hair and his mustache is almost golden.

After a silence, Marco added shyly: “He’s tall.”

I realized it was my turn to say something.

“But he’s very good-looking! But he looks exactly as a lieutenant should! But what an enchanting story, Marco! And his eyes? What are his eyes like?”

“Light brown like his hair,” said Marco eagerly.

She pulled herself together.

“I mean, that was my general impression. I didn’t look very closely.”

I hid my astonishment at being confronted with a Marco whose words, whose embarrassment, whose naïveté surpassed the reactions of the greenest girl to being stood a glass of port by a lieutenant. I could never have believed that this middle-aged married woman, inured to living among bohemians, was at heart a timorous novice. I restrained myself from letting Marco see, but I think she guessed my thoughts, for she tried to turn her encounter, her “queasiness,” and her lieutenant into a joke. I helped her as best I could.

“And when are you going to see Lieutenant Trallard again, Marco?”

“Not for a good while, I think.”

“Why?”

“Why, because he must be left to wear his nerves to shreds in suspense! Left to simmer!” declared Marco, raising a learned forefinger. “Simmer! That’s my principle!”

We laughed at last; laughed a great deal and rather idiotically. That hour seems to me, in retrospect, like the last halt, the last landing on which my friend Marco stopped to regain her breath. During the days that followed I have a vision of myself writing (I did not sign my work either) on the thin, crackly American paper I liked best of all, and Marco was busy working too, at one sou a line. One afternoon, she came to see me again.

“Good news of the ruffianly soldier, Marco?”

She archly indicated “
Yes
” with her chin and her eyes, because Monsieur Willy was on the other side of the glass-topped door. She submitted a sample of dress material which she would not dream of buying without my approval. She was buoyant and I thought that, like a sensible woman, she had reduced Lieutenant Alexis Trallard to his proper status. But when we were all alone in my bedroom, that refuge hung with rush matting that smelled of damp reeds, she held out a letter, without saying a word, and without saying a word, I read it and gave it back to her. For the accents of love inspire only silence and the letter I had read was full of love. Full of serious, vernal love. Why did one question, the very one I should have repressed, escape me? I asked—thinking of the freshness of the words I had just read, of the respect that permeated them—I asked indiscreetly: “How old is he?”