The Collected Stories of Colette (106 page)

Madame Suzanne did everything possible to satisfy my keen and slightly cowardly desire to leave Bella-Vista that very day. She did not forget Pati’s ticket and insisted on accompanying me to the train. Dressed in tight-fitting black, she sat beside me on the back seat, and all through the drive, she preserved a stiffness which was equally suitable to a well-to-do businesswoman or a proud creature going to the scaffold. In front of us was Madame Ruby’s erect, T-shaped torso and her handsome head with its rakishly tilted beret.

At the station, I managed to persuade Madame Suzanne to stay in the car. My last sight of her was behind the windows misted with fine rain. It was Madame Ruby who carried my heaviest suitcase, bought me papers, and settled me in my carriage with the greatest possible friendliness.

But I received these attentions somewhat ungraciously. I had an unjust feeling which refused to admit that this easy assurance quite caught the manner of a masculine female, adept at making women blush under her searching glances. I was on the verge of reproaching myself for ever having been taken in by this tough fellow whose walk, whose whole appearance was that of an old Irish sergeant who had dressed himself up as a woman for a joke on St. Patrick’s Day.

[
Translated by Antonia White
]

“Count again,” ordered Vinca. “That makes nine. You made a mistake.”

Phil sighed, and then raised his lustrous eyebrows in weariness.

“The two Viénots, Maria and her brother, La Folle and her little dog . . .”

Vinca chewed on her pencil anxiously, turning her blue eyes up toward the denser blue of a spring storm which was raining down a soft and ephemeral snow of plum blossoms and hazelnut-tree caterpillars, blown down from an invisible garden in Auteuil.

“Will the dog follow along?”

“No, he doesn’t follow. She puts him in a strawberry basket attached to the handlebars, nestled in a Basque beret and slipped into the sleeve of an old sweater. He loves it.”

“Well, it’s fine with me . . . We said six, including us, the three Lapins-Géants-des-Flandres, nine. That’s all.”

“Worse than a wedding,” said Phil scornfully.

“The hard-boiled eggs, the pâté, the roast beef, and the ham . . .”

“. . . Thirteen,” said Philippe. “Miscount.”

Vinca burst out laughing, once again behaving like the fifteen-year-old girl she was, and Phil deigned to smile. He dark, she blond and rosy, they looked vaguely alike from having lived near one another since they were born and having loved one another in the aggressive way of adolescents.

“Viénot Henri says he’s bringing some Calvados and some . . . kümmel.”

Phil raised his head from the back of the wicker chair.

“Oh, yeah? Viénot Henri can do whatever he wants. We’re not touching any liquor, if you don’t mind! Viénot Henri has the manners of a boor!”

Vinca blushed and did not reply. With Philippe, she would accept authority and rebelled only when teased. She raised her generous face toward him, the face of a blossoming young girl with glowing cheeks. She had glistening, decidedly blue eyes, straight blond hair, and between her slightly chapped lips, teeth that were strong, white, and rounded at the edges.

“You know, Phil, I have a rack on my bike. I can take whatever might get in your way.”

“Nothing’ll get in my way,” said Phil roguishly. “Nothing except our caravan, all the others . . . I’d like for us to go by car, you and me . . .”

“Yes, but since we don’t have a car, Phil . . .”

He felt ashamed of himself, as he did whenever Vinca accepted her situation as a young girl without means and without money, taught to ride a bike as well as do the laundry, adept at beating and folding an omelette, at shampooing her little sister Lisette’s hair and ironing her father’s pants. Tall for her age, long-legged and lanky, she was nonetheless exactly like a woman and often anxious.

“Phil, does your mother know about the roast beef? Tell her she should only get enough for six, meat is so overpriced . . .”

She broke off to listen to the pearly rippling of a hailstorm and Phil snickered, pointing to the low sky.

“A week from today . . .” said Vinca hopefully.

And already her eyes were the color of clear blue skies.

And so it was that the weather did in fact change.

The next day, around the church in Auteuil, Palm Sunday gave forth its odor of tomcat and flowers. Vinca opened the window facing the street, one of the last village streets left in Auteuil, to watch for Philippe and his parents, who were coming for lunch. She leaned out to wonder at the spent lilacs and the mahonia with leaves the color of reddish iron, squeezed in between the gate and the front of the house.

“When we’re married, this is where I’ll wait for Philippe . . .”

She belonged to that sweet, tenacious, hardy race, oblivious to progress, with no desire either to change or to perish.

Nine bicycles passed through the gate of the park of St.-Cloud in the early-morning sun of Holy Saturday. Pedaling hard up the wide road leading toward Marnes, the nine bicyclists registered without a word the complete image of the motorists who passed them by, and pricked up their ears to the muffled
putt-putt-putt
of the new motorcycles. None of them was satisfied with his lot, or his age, and none had any burning desire to exchange secrets with the others. Only Philippe and Vinca the Periwinkle shared a past as old as their own sixteen years, rich in tender fraternity and silence.

Most of the nine bicyclists were the children of poor, small-scale Parisian business, cut off from costly pleasures, accustomed to curbing and nourishing their longings in secret. All they lacked was a little simplicity in their way of being poor. So one of the boys, upon reaching Marnes, deliberately tore a hole in the elbow of his threadbare pullover, made one of his socks fall down around his ankle, and gathered magpie feathers, which he stuck in his hair. But his ragamuffin getup did not make anyone laugh. La Folle with the big eyes sped through Marnes, letting out her war cry, and was first to arrive at the woods of Fausses-Reposes, where her tiny dog decided to make a hygienic stop. Out of courtesy, her eight companions dismounted and stood off to the side of the road, in a clearing where the peacefulness of the morning retook possession of the woods with the steady, strong murmuring of the breeze and the birds and the little leaves. Philippe stroked the satiny trunk of a wild-cherry tree; looking up, he saw that the tree bore all its flowers in full bloom. Whenever he felt happy, he appealed, with words and gestures, to Vinca. She tilted back her head to gaze up at the tree and her blue eyes filled with splendor. Nothing more was needed for them to feel bound to each other and withdrawn into that secret place where their tenderness regained its strength and self-awareness.

Back on the road, they took over the lead, wheel to wheel. The steep hill, leading out of Versailles, seemed long to them. The boys stripped; one took off his sweater, one the jacket of his ready-made plus fours. All of them already had wind-whipped cheeks, red eyes, and the happy expression of comforted children with tear-stained faces. They did not even glance at the romantic pond at Voisins-Bretonneux, but at long intervals they shouted out startling truths about temperature, perspiration, and speed. The bitter northwest wind and the biting April sun made them shout out without thinking from time to time, and from the top of its strawberry basket the tiny little dog would respond.

“Peach trees in bloom! . . . Wild daffodils! I saw some daffodils! I’m stopping!” yelped Maria, dark and curly-haired.

“Quiet!” ordered her twin brother, curly-haired and dark. “We can get them on the way back.”

“There won’t be any left for us! I’m stopping!”

She jumped to the ground, twisted her ankle, and screamed. One of the Viénots yelled out a nasty remark, sharply picked up on by the twin, and La Folle, turning back so as not to miss out on any of the altercation, blocked a car from getting by.

Philippe lost his patience, any desire to wait for his comrades; and the sound of their voices, their choice of insults, made the blood rise in his cheeks.

“C’mon,” he said to Vinca. “They’ll catch up soon enough. Because of all this it’s already eleven-thirty.”

The two set off again, relieved, enjoying their solitude and their reawakened good mood. Spring still bathed in the translucent yellow which precedes the universal green. The yellow primroses in the meadows, the honeyed catkins of the willows, the leaves of the poplars which are born pink and golden, enchanted Vinca and Phil only from the moment they felt themselves alone. On the thorny blackthorn hedges, the belated flowering held up round pearls white as hail.

Before passing though Dampierre, the two friends slackened their pace at the Seventeen Turns.

“I only count fourteen,” said Vinca at the bottom of the hill.

“What a child you are,” said Phil indulgently.

But he too had counted, and he could not keep from breaking into a fit of laughter, which brought tears to his eyes. Winded, sweating, his forehead hot beneath his hair, and his ears cold, he breathed in large gulps, prey to a somewhat exhausted, drained, and contented sense of well-being, as if he had just thrown up some indigestible food.

“Ah!” he sighed as he got off his bike, “that’s better . . .”

Under the noonday sun, they climbed the last hill before Les Vaux, between the sparse woods starred with wild anemones.

“Come on, Vinca, let’s take a rest.”

She was already following him, guiding her bicycle onto a narrow path between low oaks and delicately leaved birch trees.

“Listen . . .” said Vinca. “That’s a cuckoo. When the cuckoo sings, it means the wild violets have lost their fragrance.”

Philippe had stopped short, his shoulder against Vinca’s shoulder. Closer than the two notes of the cuckoo he could hear Vinca breathing. Her eyes, raised toward the tops of the copse, were sparkling with a blue which he believed he had discovered, flecked with slate, speckled with mauve . . . She held her red cracked lips half open, and Philippe suddenly shivered, imagining the coldness of the strong, beautiful teeth.

“Come on, Vinca . . .”

“Where?”

“There . . . over there . . .”

He pointed to a spot that was unfamiliar to him, off the path, a place he imagined as mossy, or blanketed with white sand, or grassy like a June meadow. He came upon it as in a dream. White with sand, green with finely spiked forest grass, mossy at the foot of a beech tree, and frighteningly narrow . . . At the same moment, he nearly stumbled over what he had neither imagined nor seen: a couple, lying spent and motionless on the ground, who did not move under their gaze. The outstretched woman merely closed her eyes and pressed closer to the man.

Turning his bike around, Philippe almost knocked Vinca down. She stumbled and did not say a word.

“Go on, turn around, we made a mistake,” he said in a loud, forced voice.

He pushed her inconsiderately toward the road. “Move it, go on, move it! You have lead in your legs today?”

He wished she had not seen the couple lying there. He wanted her, having seen them, to run away, embarrassed and revolted.

“Move, little girl, move . . .”

“It’s a bramble, Phil . . . It’s caught in my spokes . . .”

He did not help her, and left her to pull free from the fierce old brambles herself, giving her a hard look. She did not ask him for either help or an explanation, and once back on the road she was content to lick her stinging hand.

“Back it up, Vinca . . . Your wheel’s sticking out . . . a little farther and that maniac would have mowed you down.”

“Yes . . .”

“Twelve-twenty! . . . If they’re not here in two minutes, we’re leaving.”

“Whatever you say . . .”

“You have to say one thing for her, she does what she’s told,” he thought. “What if, back there in the woods, I’d told her to . . .”

From down in the little valley came shouts and the shrill barking of the little dog. Philippe raised his arms and called back, “Hey, up here!” in a loud voice. When the main body of riders reached the rise, he jumped onto his bicycle and, with a kind of thankfulness, mingled in among his companions.

[
Translated by Matthew Ward
]