The Collected Stories of Colette by Colette
“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 lad
“The back of the seat is all wet,” said Madame Debove. “I’m going home. What are your plans for tomorrow? Are you going in to say goodbye to Armande? She’s expecting you to, you know.”
“She hasn’t invited me.”
“You mean you daren’t go on your own? You may as well admit it, that girl’s thoroughly got you down!”
“I do admit it,” said Maxime, so mildly that his sister stopped cruelly teasing him.
They walked in silence till they reached the Grand Central Pharmacy.
“You’ll lunch with us tomorrow, of course. Hector would have a fit if you didn’t have your last meal with him. Your parcel of ampoules will be all ready. No one can say when we’ll be able to get those particular serums again. Well, shall I ring up Armande and say you’ll be coming over to say goodbye to her? But I needn’t say definitely you’re not coming?”
She was fumbling endlessly with a bunch of keys. Maxime lent her the aid of his flashlight and its beam fell full on Jeanne Debove’s mischievous face and its expression of mixed satisfaction and disapproval.
“She wants me to marry Armande. She’s thinking of the money, of the fine, rich house, of ‘the excellent effect,’ of my career, as she says. But she’d also like me to marry Armande without being overenthusiastic about her. Everything’s perfectly normal. Everything except myself, because I can’t endure the idea that she, Armande, could marry me without being in love with me.”
He hurried back to his hotel. The town was asleep but the hotel, close by the station, resounded with all the noises that are hostile to sleep and blazed with lights that aggravate human tiredness. Hobnailed boots, shuddering ceiling lights, uncarpeted floors, the gates of the elevator, the whinnyings of hydraulic pressure, the rhythmic clatter of plates flung into a sink in the basement, the intermittent trilling of a bell never stopped outraging the need for silence that had driven Maxime to his bedroom. Unable to stand any more, he added his own contribution to the selfish human concert, dropped his shoes on the wooden floor, carried them out into the corridor, and shut his door with a loud slam.
He drenched himself with cold water, dried himself carelessly, and got into bed quite naked, after having studied himself in the looking glass. “Big bones, big muscles, and four complete limbs, after all, that’s not too bad, in these days. A large nose, large eyes, a cap of hair as thick as a motorcyclist’s helmet, girls who weren’t Mademoiselle Fauconnier have found all that very much to their taste. I don’t see Mademoiselle Fauconnier sleeping with this naked, black-haired chap . . .”
On the contrary, he saw her only too well. Irritated by fretful desire, he waited for the hotel to become quiet. When—save for a sound of barking, a garage door, the departure of a motorcar—silence was at last established, a breeze sprang up, swept away the last insults inflicted by man on the night, and came in through the open window like a reward.
“Tomorrow,” Maxime vowed to himself. It was a muddled vow that concerned the conquest of Armande quite as much as the return to professional life and the daily, necessary triumph of forced activity over fundamental listlessness.
He reiterated “Tomorrow,” flung away his pillow, rolled over on his stomach, and fell asleep with his head between his folded arms in the same attitude as a small intimidated boy of long ago who used to dream of an Armande with long black curls. Later on, another Maxime had slept like that, the adolescent who had plucked up courage to invite “those Fauconnier ladies,” as they were coming out from High Mass, to have lemon ices at Peyrol’s. “Really, Maxime, one doesn’t eat lemon ices at quarter to twelve in the morning!” Armande had said. In that one word “really” what a number of reproofs she could convey! “Really, Maxime, you needn’t always stand right in front of the window, you shut out the daylight. Maxime, really! You’ve gone and returned a ball again when it was ‘out.’”
But when a particular period was over, there had been no more “reallys” and no more reproaches showered on his head. Still not properly asleep, Maxime Degouthe groped around a memory, around a moment that had restored a little confidence to his twenty-five-year-old self and had marked the end of Armande’s gracious condescension. That day, he had arrived with Jeanne at the foot of the steps, just as Armande was opening the silvered wrought-iron door to go out. They had not seen each other for a very long time — “Hullo, fancy seeing! — Yes, my sister insisted on bringing me with her, perhaps you’d rather I hadn’t come. —Now, really, you’re joking. —A friend of mine in Paris gave me a lift in his car and dropped me here this morning. —How awfully nice! Are you going to be here for some time? —No, the same friend’s picking me up tomorrow after lunch and driving me back. —Well, that is a short stay.” In fact, such trivialities as to make either of them blush had either of them paid any attention to what they were saying. From the height of five or six steps, a wide, startled, offended gaze fell on Maxime. He also caught, at the level of his knees, the brush of a skirt hem and a handbag which Armande had dropped and which he retrieved.
After a gloomy game of ping-pong, a tea composed entirely of sugary things, a handshake—a strong, swift, but promptly withdrawn hand had clasped his own—he had left Armande once again, and on the way back, Jeanne had given her cynical opinion of the situation: “You know, you could have the fair Armande as easy as pie. And I know what I’m talking about.” She added: “You don’t know the right way to go about it.” But those had been the remarks of a twenty-year-old, the infallibility of one girl judging another girl.
He thought he was only half asleep and fell into deep but restless dreams. A nightmare tortured him with the shaming illusion that he was dressing old Queny’s incurable foot on the steps leading up to the Fauconniers’ house and that Armande was enthroned, impassive, at the top of them. Didn’t she owe part of her prestige to those eight broad steps, almost like a series of terraces, that were famous throughout the town? “The Fauconniers’ flight of front steps is so impressive. Without these front steps, the Fauconniers’ house wouldn’t have nearly such a grand air . . .” As if insulted, the sleeper sat up with a start. “Grand air, indeed! That cube! That block with its cast-iron balconies and bands of tiles!” He woke up completely and once again the Fauconnier home inspired him with the old awed respect. The Fauconnier heliotropes, the Fauconnier polygonums, the Fauconnier lobelias recovered their status of flowers adorning the altar where he worshipped. So, to send himself to sleep again, Maxime soberly envisaged the duties that awaited him the next day, the day after, and all the rest of his life, in the guise of the faces of old Queny, of the elder Madame Cauvain, of her father Monsieur Enfert, of “young” Mademoiselle Philippon, the one who was only seventy-two . . . For old people do not die off in wartime. He swallowed half his bottle of mineral water at one gulp and fell heavily asleep again, insensible to the mosquitoes coming up from the shrunken river and the noises of the pale dawn.
“My last day of idle luxury.” He had his breakfast in bed, feeling slightly ashamed, and ordered a bath, for which he had to wait a considerable time. “My last bath . . . I’m not going to get up till I’ve had my bath! I’m not leaving without my bath!” As a matter of fact, he preferred a very stiff shower or the chance plunges he had taken, straight into rivers and canals, these last months between April and August.
With some caution he made use of a toilet water invented by his brother-in-law, the red-haired chemist. “Hector’s perfumes, when they don’t smell of squashed ants, smell of bad cognac.” He chose his bluest shirt and his spotted foulard tie. “I wish I were handsome. And all I am is just so-so. Ah, how I wish I were handsome!” he kept thinking over and over again as he plastered down his brilliantined hair. But it was coarse, intractable, wavy hair, a vigorous
He packed his suitcase with the care and dexterity of a man accustomed to use his hands for manipulating living substance, stopping the flow of blood, applying and pinning bandages. The September morning, with its flies and its warm yellow light, came in fresh through the open window; at the end of a narrow street a dancing shimmer showed where the river lay. “I shan’t go and say goodbye to Armande,” Maxime Degouthe decided. “For one thing, lunch is always late at Jeanne’s; for another, I’ve got my case of medical supplies to fill up at the last moment, and if I’m to have time to get a bite of food before the train goes, it’ll be impossible, yes, physically impossible.”
At four o’clock, he opened the front gate, marched up the gravel path of the Fauconniers’ garden, climbed the flight of steps, and rang the bell. A second time, he pressed his finger long and vainly on the bell button, sunk in a rosette of white marble. No one came and the blood rushed up into Maxime’s ears. “She’s probably gone out. But where are her two lazy sluts of servants and the gardener who looks like a drunk?” He rang again, restraining himself with difficulty from giving the door a kick. At last he heard steps in the garden and saw Armande running toward him. She stopped in front of him, exclaiming “Ah!” and he smiled at seeing her wearing a big blue apron with a bib that completely enveloped her. She swiftly untied the apron and flung it on a rosebush.