The Collected Stories of Colette (57 page)

[
Translated by Una Vicenzo Troubridge and Enid McLéod
]

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, Achille, my half-brother by blood—but wholly and entirely my brother by affection, choice, and likeness—was extremely handsome. Little by little, he became less so as a result of leading the hard life of a country doctor in the old days; a life which lacked all comfort and repose. He wore out his boot soles as much as the shoes of his gray mare; he went out by day and he went out by night, going to bed too tired to want any supper. In the night he would be woken up by the call of a peasant banging his fists on the outer door and pulling the bell. Then he would get up, put on his woolen pants, and his great plaid-lined overcoat, and Charles, the man-of-all-work, would harness the gray mare, another remarkable creature.

I have never known anything so proud and so willing as that gray mare. In the stable, by the light of the lantern, my brother would always find her standing up and ready for the worst. Her short, lively, well-set ears would inquire: “Châteauvieux? Montrenard? The big climb up the hill? Seventeen kilometers to get there and as many on the way back?” She would set off a little stiffly, her head lowered. During the examination, the confinement, the amputation, or dressing, she leaned her little forehead against the farmhouse doors so as to hear better what
He
was saying. I could swear that she knew by heart the bits of
Le Roi d’Ys
and the Pastoral Symphony, the scraps of operas and the Schubert songs
He
sang to keep himself company.

Isolated, sacrificed to his profession, this twenty-six-year-old doctor of half a century ago had only one resource. Gradually he had to forge himself a spirit which hoped for nothing except to live and enable his family to live too. Happily, his professional curiosity never left him. Neither did that other curiosity which both of us inherited from our mother. When, in my teens, I used to accompany him on his rounds, the two of us would often stop and get out to pick a bunch of bluebells or to gather mushrooms. Sometimes we would watch a wheeling buzzard or upset the dignity of a little lizard by touching it with a finger: the lizard would draw up its neck like an offended lady and give a lisping hiss, rather like a child who has lost its first front teeth. We would carefully detach butterfly chrysalises from branches and holes in walls and put them in little boxes of fine sand to await the miracle of the metamorphosis.

The profession of country doctor demanded a great deal of a man about half a century ago. Fresh from medical school in Paris, my brother confronted his first patient: a well-sinker who had just had one leg blown off by an explosion of dynamite. The brand-new surgeon came out of this difficult ordeal with honor but white-lipped, trembling all over, and considerably thinner from the amount he had sweated. He pulled himself together by diving into the canal between the tall clumps of flowering rushes.

Achille taught me to fill and to stick together the two halves of antipyrine capsules, to use the delicate scales with the weights which were mere thin slips of copper. In those days, the country doctor had a license to sell certain pharmaceutical products outside a four-kilometer radius of the town. Meager profits, if one considers that a “consultation” cost the consultant three francs plus twenty sous a kilometer. From time to time, the doctor pulled out a tooth, also for three francs. And what little money there was came in slowly and sometimes not at all.

“Why not sue them?” demanded the chemist. “What’s the law for?”

Whatever it was for, it was not for his patients. My brother made no reply but turned his greenish-blue eyes away toward the flat horizon. My eyes are the same color but not so beautiful and not so deeply set.

I was fifteen or sixteen; the age of great devotions, of vocations. I wanted to become a woman doctor. My brother would summon me for a split lip or a deep, bleeding cut and have recourse to my slender girl’s fingers. Eagerly, I would set to work to knot the threads of the stitches in the blood which leaped so impetuously out of the vein. In the morning, Achille set off too early for me to be able to accompany him. But in the afternoon I would sit on his left in the trap and hold the mare’s reins. Every month he had the duty of inspecting all the babies in the region and he tried to drop in unexpectedly on their wet or dry nurses. Those expeditions used to ruin his appetite. How many babies we found alone in an empty house, tied to their fetid cradles with handkerchiefs and safety pins, while their heedless guardians worked in the fields. Some of them would see the trap in the distance and come running up, out of breath.

“I was only away for a moment.” “I was changing the goat’s picket.” “I was chasing the cow who’d broken loose.”

Hard as his life was, Achille held out for more than twenty-five years, seeking rest for his spirit only in music. In his youth he was surprised when he first came up against the peaceful immorality of country life, the desire which is born and satisfied in the depths of the ripe grass or between the warm flanks of sleeping cattle. Paris and the Latin Quarter had not prepared him for so much amorous knowledge, secrecy, and variety. But impudence was not lacking either, at least in the case of the girls who came boldly to his weekly surgery declaring that they had not “seen” since they got their feet wet two months ago, pulling a drowned hen out of a pond.

“That’s fine!” my brother would say, after his examination. “I’m going to give you a prescription.”

He watched for the look of pleasure and contempt and the joyful reddening of the cheek and wrote out the prescription agreed between doctor and chemist: “
Mica panis
, two pills to be taken after each meal.” The remedy might avert or, at least, delay the intervention of “the woman who knew about herbs.”

One day, long before his marriage, he had an adventure which was only one of many. With a basket on one arm and an umbrella on the other, a young woman almost as tall as himself (he was nearly six foot two) walked into his consulting room. He found himself looking at someone like a living statue of the young Republic; a fresh, magnificently built girl with a low brow, statuesque features, and a calm, severe expression.

“Doctor,” she said, without a smile or a shuffle, “I think I’m three months pregnant.”

“Do you feel ill, Madame?”

“Mademoiselle. I’m eighteen. And I feel perfectly all right in every way.”

“Well, then, Mademoiselle! You won’t be needing me for another six months.”

“Pardon, Doctor. I’d like to be sure. I don’t want to do anything foolish. Will you please examine me?”

Throwing off the skirt, the shawl, and the cotton chemise that came down to her ankles, she displayed a body so majestic, so firm, so smoothly sheathed in its skin that my brother never saw another to compare with it. He saw too that this young girl, so eager to accuse herself, was a virgin. But she vehemently refused to remain one any longer and went off victorious, her head high, her basket on her arm, and her woolen shawl knotted once more over her breasts. The most she would admit was that, when she was digging potatoes on her father’s land over by the Hardon road, she had waited often and often to see the gray mare and its driver go past and had said “Good day” with her hand to call him, but in vain.

She returned for “consultation.” But far more often, my brother went and joined her in her field. She would watch him coming from afar, put down her hoe, and stooping, make her way under the branches of a little plantation of pine trees. From these almost silent encounters, a very beautiful child was born. And I admit that I should be glad to see, even now, what his face is like. For Sido confided to me, in very few words, one of those secrets in which she was so rich.

“You know the child of that beautiful girl over at Hardon?” she said.

“Yes.”

“She boasts about him to everyone. She’s crazy with pride. She’s a most unusual girl. A character. I’ve seen the child. Just once.”

“What’s he like?”

She made the gesture of rumpling a child’s hair.

“Beautiful, of course. Such curls, such eyes. And such a mouth.”

She coughed and pushed away the invisible curly head with both hands.

“The mouth most of all. Ah! I just couldn’t. I went away. Otherwise I should have taken him.”

However, everything in our neighborhood was not so simple as this warm idyll, cradled on its bed of pine needles, and these silent lovers who took no notice of the autumn mists or a little rain, for the gray mare lent them her blanket.

There is another episode of which I have a vivid and less touching memory. We used to refer to it as “The Monsieur Binard Story.” It goes without saying that I have changed the name of the robust, grizzled father of a family who came over on his bicycle at dusk, some forty-eight years ago, to ask my brother to go to his daughter’s bedside.

“It’s urgent,” said the man, panting as he spoke. His breath reeked of red wine. “I am Monsieur Binard, of X.”

He made a sham exit, then thrust his head around the half-shut door and declared: “In my opinion, it’ll be a boy.”

My brother took his instrument case and the servant harnessed the gray mare.

It turned out indeed to be a boy and a remarkably fine and well-made one. But my brother’s care and attention were mainly for the far too young mother, a dark girl with eyes like an antelope. She was very brave and kept crying loudly, almost excitedly, like a child. Around the bed bustled three slightly older antelopes, while in the inglenook, the impassive Monsieur Binard superintended the mulling of some red wine flavored with cinnamon. In a dark corner of the clean, well-polished room, my brother noticed a wicker cradle with clean starched curtains. Monsieur Binard only left the fire and the copper basin to examine the newborn child as soon as it had been washed.

“It’s a very fine child,” Achille assured him.

“I’ve seen finer,” said Monsieur Binard in a lordly way.

“Oh, Papa!” cried the three older antelopes.

“I know what I’m talking about,” retorted Binard.

He raised a curtain of the cradle which my brother presumed empty but which was now shown to be entirely filled by a large child who had slept calmly through all the noise and bustle. One of the antelopes came over and tenderly drew the curtain down again.

His mission over, my brother drank the warm wine which he had well and truly earned and which the little newly confined mother was sipping too. Already she was gay and laughing. Then he bowed to the entire long-eyed troop and went out, puzzled and worried. The earth was steaming with damp, but above the low fog, the bright dancing fire of the first stars announced the coming frost.

“Your daughter seems extremely young,” said my brother. “Luckily, she’s come through it well.”

“She’s strong. You needn’t be afraid,” said Monsieur Binard.

“How old is she?”

“Fifteen in four months’ time.”

“Fifteen! She was taking a big risk. What girls are! Do you know the . . . the creature who . . .”

Monsieur Binard made no reply other than slapping the hindquarters of the gray mare with the flat of his hand, but he lifted his chin with such an obvious, such an intolerable expression of fatuity that my brother hastened his departure.

“If she has any fever, let me know.”

“She won’t,” Monsieur Binard assured him with great dignity.

“So you know more about these things than I do?”

“No. But I know my daughters. I’ve four of them and you must have seen for yourself that there’s not much wrong with them. I know them.”

He said no more and ran his hand over his mustache. He waited till the gray mare had adroitly turned in the narrow courtyard, then he went back into his house.

Sido, my mother, did not like this story, which she often turned over in her mind. Sometimes she spoke violently about Monsieur Binard, calling him bitterly “the corrupt widower,” sometimes she let herself go off into commentaries for which afterward she would blush.

“Their house is very well kept. The child of the youngest one has eyelashes as long as
that
. I saw her the other day, she was suckling her baby on the doorstep, it was enchanting. Whatever am I saying? It was abominable, of course, when one knows the facts.”

She went off into a dream, impatiently untwisting the entangled steel chain and black cord from which hung her two pairs of spectacles.

“After all,” she began again, “the ancient patriarchs . . .”

But she suddenly became aware that I was only fifteen and a half and she went no further.

[
Translated by Antonia White
]