Colette

Colette

The Little One

A smell of crushed grass hangs over the unmown lawn, where the lush new blades lie trodden in all directions by the children’s games, as if laid flat by a heavy shower of hail. Fierce little heels have dug into the paths and scattered gravel over the flower beds; a skipping-rope dangles from the pump handle; dolls’ plates the size of marguerites star the grass; and a long feline wail of boredom heralds the close of day, the cats’ awakening and the approach of dinner-time.

The Little One’s playmates have only just left her. Disdaining the door, they have jumped over the railing at the bottom of the garden, hurling their final frenzied yells into the deserted Rue des Vignes, screaming their childish oaths with uncouth shrugs of the shoulders, straddling, contorting their features into diabolical squints and froglike grimaces, and putting out their tongues stained with violet ink. On the other side of the wall, the Little One — otherwise known as Minet-Cheri — has mustered her remaining stock of heavy mockery, loud laughter and country slang to hurl in pursuit of them. The voices of these little girls had been hoarse, their eyes and cheeks ablaze, as though they had been given some intoxicant to drink. Now they have gone away exhausted, as though this whole afternoon devoted to games had debased them. There was neither idleness nor boredom to ennoble in some sort the overlong and degrading pursuit of pleasure, which left the Little One looking sick and plainer than usual.

Sundays are sometimes empty days of idle dreaming: white shoes and starched dresses are not conducive to the wilder forms of frenzy. But Thursday, with its rabble of unemployed, on strike in black pinafores and hobnailed boots, Thursday permits of all and everything. For nearly five hours these children have tasted the full licence of Thursday. One of them has played at being the invalid, another has sold coffee to a third, a horse-dealer, who in return has sold her a cow. “Thirty louis and a gift at that! Swine to you if you say it isn’t!” Jeanne has got inside the skin of Grandpapa Gruel, the dealer in tripe and rabbit-skins, while Yvonne has impersonated his lean daughter, a wretched and dissolute hag Scire and his wife. Gruel’s neighbours, have looked out through the eyes of Gabrielle and Sandrine, and all the filth of a squalid village street has poured forth from six childish mouths. Hideous tittle-tattle of rascally and low love-life has disfigured lips, stained with cherry juice, on which a trace of teatime honey still glistened.

One of them pulled a pack of cards from her pocket and cries broke out. And had not three of the six little girls already learned to cheat, adepts at licking their thumbs in pot-house style and slamming down a trump on the table with a: “Trumpety-trump! You’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel and you haven’t scored a single trick!” Not a single event of village life that they have not declaimed and mimicked with passionate intensity! This Thursday has been one of those shunned by Minet-Cheri’s mother, who has retreated fearfully into the house, as though before an invading army.

And now all is silence in the garden. First one cat, then two more, stretch and yawn before extending a doubtful paw to test the gravel path, just is they do after a storm. They set off towards the house, and the Little One, having started to follow them, pauses: she does not feel worthy.

She will wait until her normal pallor, like an inner dawn that celebrates the departure of evil demons, rises again into her hot cheeks still dark with over-excitement. She opens her wide mouth for a final shout, showing her recently cut eye-teeth. She opens her eyes to the full, wrinkles her forehead, gives vent to a ‘"pouf” of exhaustion, and wipes her nose on the back of her hand.

A school pinafore envelops her like a sack from neck to knees, and her hair, after the fashion of poor children, is looped in two plaits behind her ears. What will become of her hands, clawed and scratched by cats and brambles, or of her feet laced into boots of light brown kid? There are days when they say that the Little One will be pretty later on. To-day she is ugly, and feels upon her the passing ugliness of her perspiration, the marks of dirty fingers on her cheek and, above all, the successive mimicries that have linked her with Jeanne, with Sandrine, with Aline, the daily dressmaker, with the chemist’s wife and the postmaster’s daughter. For the children had crowned the afternoon’s sport with a long game of ‘ ‘What shall we be when we’re grown up?”

“When I’m grown up, I shall..."

Though such skilled mimics, they lack imagination. A sort of resigned wisdom, the peasant terror of adventure and distant travel, already keeps them all — the clock-maker’s child, the grocer’s little girl and the offspring of the butcher and the laundress — chained to their parents’ shops.

It is true that Jeanne roundly announced, “I shall be a tart!”

“But that sort of thing,” Minet-Cheri reflects contemptuously, “is simply childish nonsense.”

Having no special wish when her turn came, she had thrown out with a certain contempt, “I? Oh, I shall be a sailor!” And that was simply because she sometimes dreamed of being a boy, and wearing trousers and a blue beret. The sea, of which Minet-Cheri knows nothing, the ship breasting a wave, the golden island and the gleaming fruit, all that only surged up much later, to serve as a background to the blue blouse and the cap with a pompom.

“I shall be a sailor, and on my voyages I’ll…”

She sits down on the grass to rest and reflect. Travel? Adventure? For a child who, twice a year, at the periods of the great spring and winter provisioning, leaves the confines of her district, and drives in a victoria to her county town, such words have neither force nor value. They evoke only the printed page, the coloured picture. The Little One, now very tired, repeats the words

‘‘When I go round the world… automatically, just as she would say, “When I go gathering chestnuts…”

In the house a lamp behind the sitting-room window suddenly glows red and the Little One shivers. All that had looked green up to the moment before, now turns blue around this motionless red flame. The child’s hand, trailing in the grass, is suddenly aware of the evening damp. It is the hour of lamps. Leaves rustle together with a sound like the plash of running water and the door of the hayloft flaps against the wall as it does in a winter gale. The garden, grown suddenly hostile, menaces a now sobered little girl with the cold leaves of its laurels, the raised sabres of its yuccas, and the barbed caterpillars of its monkey-puzzle tree. A roar like the ocean comes from the direction of Moutiers where the wind, unchecked, runs in flurries over the tossing tree-tops. The Little One, sitting on the grass, keeps her eyes fixed on the lamp, veiled for a moment by a brief eclipse. A hand has passed in front of the flame, a hand wearing a shining thimble. At the mere sight of this hand the Little One starts to her feet, pale, gentle now, trembling slightly as a child must who for the first time ceases to be the happy little vampire that unconsciously drains the maternal heart; trembling slightly at the conscious realisation that this hand and this flame, and the bent, anxious head beside the lamp, are the centre and the secret birthplace whence radiate in ripples ever less perceptible, in circles ever more and more remote from the essential light and its vibrations, the warm sitting-room with its flora of cut branches and its fauna of peaceful creatures; the echoing house, dry, warm and crackling as a newly-baked loaf; the garden, the village.... Beyond these all is danger, all is loneliness.

She walks with faltering steps, ventures upon terra firma and makes for the house, turning her back on an enormous yellow moon, just rising. Adventure? Travels? The enterprise that makes the emigrant? With her eyes glued to the shining thimble, to the hand that passes to and fro before the flame, Minet-Cheri savours the delicious contrition of being — like the clockmaker’s child, like the little girls of the laundress and the baker — a child of her village, hostile alike to colonist and barbarian, one of those whose universe is bounded by the limits of a field, by the entrance of a shop, by the circle of light spreading beneath a lamp and crossed at intervals by a well-loved hand drawing a thread and wearing a silver thimble.