Jacqueline, standing on tiptoe, rang grandpapa’s bell and waited beside Colette until she heard the door being unlatched on the inside, when she kissed Colette and ran off.
The door opened a crack and Madame Gaboreau’s suspicious nose appeared at the aperture. But only for a moment. As soon as Madame Gaboreau’s nose communicated to her brain that Colette was there the door swung wide open and the whole of Madame Gaboreau’s substantial person, swelling and creaking with welcome, was exposed to view. Madame Gaboreau was not a nice person, but she liked Colette, and Colette, giving love for love, liked her. Kneeling down she pressed the little girl to the sequins on her bosom and received in exchange a warm, dewy kiss, full on her nasty, thin, rather cruel mouth.
Colette, on these occasions, did not see grandpapa till lunch time, for after breakfast he went out to see a few patients, and during breakfast his temper and language were so deplorable that he could not endure the presence of even Colette, and was obliged to swear at his eggs and bacon and curse into his coffee in complete privacy. Colette, however, was usually perfectly happy in Madame Gaboreau’s sitting room, looking at photograph albums full of her horrible relations; or better still, she liked to go shopping with Madame Gaboreau, carrying the basket and scurrying along beside her like a yellow chicken bouncing after an old black hen. But to-day, no sooner had she arrived than a scurry of rain blew up with the wind and Madame Gaboreau decided that it was too stormy for her to go shopping.
“But I have two pairs of shoes,” said Colette.
“No,” said Madame Gaboreau, “children always walk in puddles out of mischief.”
“I will not walk in any puddles, please M’dame Gaboreau,” pleaded Colette, but Madame Gaboreau was adamant, and departed alone beneath an immense green umbrella, leaving Collette to the albums of relations.
She sat beside the fire in her white pinafore, on the very edge of a hard chair stuffed with horsehair and covered with shiny black cloth. Nasty hard horsehair prickles pushed their points through the cloth into the soft place behind her knees, that oasis between her socks and her knickers that all the gnats and prickles in the world always seemed to find. Open on her knee was an album and she turned the pages solemnly, one by one, giving polite attention to all the whiskered and crinolined Gaboreaus who confronted her. Usually this occupation, so different from anything she ever did at home, gave her a feeling of novelty and pleasure, and the Gaboreaus, most of them fat, and all of them self-satisfied, were so unlike mother and father that they interested her, but to-day, somehow, she did not feel quite happy. The rain, whispering down the window panes, did not seem quite happy either, and the wind in the chimney was definitely crying. The wallpaper and curtains of the room were of a mottled maroon and the mantelpiece was of black marble. There were no ornaments in the room except two funereal-looking vases filled with faded paper roses. The room, as the December storm thickened outside, was very dark. . . . Colette began to feel a little funny. She had inherited her mother’s love of flowers and now, attracted by the pinkness of the roses in the dreary room, she slipped off her chair and ran across to look at them. She touched them with her finger, but they had none of the softness of the Bon Repos roses in June, they were prickly like the chairs, and they had a nasty dirty papery smell. . . . They were not what they seemed.
Until now Colette had thought the world a safe and happy place where everything that looked nice was as nice as it looked, but to-day she wondered. She had turned six last week and with every step that she took away from babyhood’s downy nest a tiny little feeling of insecurity, that had been born in her when she fell downstairs for the first time, gathered strength.
Now, looking round this rather nasty room, the expression of Madame Gaboreau’s personality, she felt afraid. She did not understand what she felt but she was, for the first time in her life, sensing that underworld of sin and misery that spreads its filth under the fair covering of outward things. This beautiful handsome house of grandpapa’s, smooth and sleek as the green treacherous weeds on top of muddy ponds . . . what lay beneath its shining surface? She was too much of a baby consciously to ask this question, but that little feeling of insecurity inside her was voicelessly asking it of the long years of life that still lay before her. Colette’s conscious mind only knew that she was frightened and that she would run down to the kitchen and stay with the maids until Madame Gaboreau came back.
She pushed open the door, glancing rather fearfully behind her as though she expected a sarregouset to jump out at her from behind the window curtains, and began to descend the stairs. She went down them with the utmost caution, lowering herself on to the right foot first and holding on to the banisters.
When she was halfway down the dining-room door opened and grandpapa came out on his way from breakfast to consult his case book in the library. He did not see Colette, so that the look of affection that his face always wore when she was there was absent from it. His eyes, unlit by the sight of her, were like cold pebbles set in the heavy pouches of his cheeks, his mouth was sagging at the corners in a bitter loose sort of way, and he was muttering to himself. . . . He looked nasty.
After the library door had closed behind him Colette stood quite still. Was this grandpapa? Kind, laughing grandpapa who told her stories and chucked her under the chin? No, it wasn’t. There must be two grandpapas, and she was frightened of this other one. Abandoning caution she descended the rest of the stairs in a rush, and pushed open the green baize door at their foot that led to the back stairs.
Here it was very dark and smelly, for the kitchens were basement ones, and no light came to them except down the area in the front. Colette, groping in the dark, had to go down very, very slowly, and so she had time to hear the sounds that came up to her from below. There were all the usual sounds—cook carrying on cheerfully with the butcher, a kettle boiling, the cat mewing, the odd man whistling as he polished grandpapa’s boots—but beside these there was something else, the sound of sobbing. She felt perfectly dreadful. She had, of course, heard people cry before. The others roared like bulls when they were in tempers, and she had herself wept drops the size of marbles when she hurt herself, and had been interested to find, when she licked them off the end of her nose, that they tasted salt, but it had been nothing like this. This was something quite different. The sobs did not make much noise and there was a short gasping interval between them, as though they were twisted out of a throat and breast almost too weak and tortured to give them passage. Every now and then they were drowned by the swish of water and the clatter of crockery. Colette realized that they came from the scullery on her right, on the opposite side of the passage from the kitchen. The door was ajar. She pushed it open and went in.
The scullery was very dark and more like a condemned cell than anything else—not one of the comfortable modern prison apartments but a cell of the Middle Ages. Its one little window was very high up and covered with wire netting, its walls, painted a dirty mud colour, were peeling with damp, and its stone floor, do what you would, was always wet, with little pools in the crevasses, as though it were a live thing weeping. At night it was absolutely alive with black beetles and even in the day they were not absent. The whole place smelt of damp and cabbages and defective drains, and was bitterly cold.
Colette, when she pushed open the door, found herself staring at the back of Toinette, the scullery maid, who was standing at the sink sobbing those terrible tearing sobs and washing up a perfect mountain of dirty dishes. Absorbed in her grief she did not hear the door open, and Colette had plenty of time to look at her back view.
It was a very thin back view. Toinette was even thinner than Peronelle and her shoulders were bowed in a way that Peronelle’s were not, as though she had spent all her life in stooping and carrying things. A very skimpy, thin little print frock, covering apparently nothing in the way of warm petticoats, clung to her so tightly that it only accentuated her thinness and a dirty apron, two sizes
too large, was wrapped round her like a winding sheet and secured at the back by a large black safety-pin. Her stockings lay in folds about her incredibly thin ankles, and her shoes had tramped so many miles on stone floors that the heels had given up in despair and fallen off. Her hair was twisted into a tight knot at the back of her head and secured with three hairpins the size of kitchen skewers.
Colette looked for a moment at the thin heaving shoulders and then ran forward to the sink.
“Toinette,” she whispered.
Toinette started and looked down. The skin of her face was blue with cold and patchy with crying, and seemed stretched too tightly over her bones. Her eyelids were so swollen that Colette could hardly see her little black eyes, bewildered and desolate like a lost dog’s.
“What do you ’ere, zen, Mamzelle Colette?” she asked hoarsely. She was a child of the Island and had only exchanged her patois for broken English when she took up her sojourn in grandpapa’s house. Colette, standing solidly beside her at the sink, would have been none the wiser if she had been told that Toinette was a waif from La Rue Clubin. She knew nothing yet of the poverty and kicks and bruises in the midst of which Toinette’s life had struggled into bud, nor of the toil and ill-treatment that had made flowering impossible, yet she felt the difference between them, and it made her feel bad.
“Toinette,” she whispered, “must you wash all that?”
Toinette, taking another dish from the appalling pile, nodded and plunged it into the greasy water in the sink. She never paused for a single moment in her washing up, she went on and on as though she were a machine.
“There is t’ree days of it ’ere,” she said, and her voice was caught up by another of those horrible sobs.
Colette’s eyes grew round.
“Sophie,” she said, “washes up every day.”
“I ’ave been to my ’ome because my mother she died, Mamzelle,” said Toinette, “and when I come back I find that they leave me t’ree days washing to do.”
The atmosphere of tragedy in the scullery was so thick that Colette felt miserable. Then she remembered that people who died went to heaven, and felt happier again.
“Did you see your mother go to heaven, Toinette?” she asked, “did she have wings?”
Toinette stared bleakly.
“They put ’er in a black box an’ buried ’er,” she said. “Mère Tangrouille paid for ze coffin—mozzer an’ I ’ad not ze money. She is good, Mère Tangrouille, très bonne. Ze gentleman zat come to see ’er gave ’er ze money.”
A black box. Colette had always understood one went to heaven. She stared with her goggle eyes at the damp stains on the wall and felt worse and worse. What if they put mother in a black box?
“Toinette,” she said suddenly, “your father has not gone to heaven, has he?”
“Never ’ad one,” said Toinette, rubbing desperately at a dish whose egg stains were three days old and apparently immovable.
No father? Colette thought everyone had fathers. The uprising of pity in her chest was almost too much for her. She leant against Toinette and burrowed her head against her as she did against Rachell when Rachell had a headache.
“Do not do so, Mamzelle,” gasped Toinette, “you ’ave ’urt my arm.”
Colette raised her head and looked at Toinette’s arm. It was all blue and bruised.
“Did you fall down the stairs?” she asked, painful memories coming to her.
Toinette dropped her voice even lower and glanced round with something like terror.
“M’dame Gaboreau,” she said, “did it to me. She told me to wash ze dishes last night before I went to my bed but I could not, I ’ad ze ’eadache very bad. Zis morning, when she found I ’ad not washed, she—” A heavy step was heard on the stairs. Toinette stopped and the terror that had been in her glance flamed out all over her face in a way that was terrible to see. Her washing up became the feverish action of one desperately trying to placate the revengeful gods.
Madame Gaboreau pushed open the door and entered. Her face, before she saw Colette, wore an expression of cruelty that Colette had never seen before. Toinette’s sobs, choked by terror, ceased.
“If those dishes are not done in half an hour,” she began harshly, and then saw Colette. “Good heavens, child, what are you doing here?” She pounced on Colette, gripped her wrist and led her sternly from the room.
“If you can’t get through your work, Toinette, you’ll be dismissed,” she called over her shoulder as she shut the door.
“Where will Toinette go if you send her away?” asked Colette as they climbed the stairs.
“Goodness knows,” replied Madame Gaboreau indifferently.
“Her mother is dead,” whispered Colette.
“Good riddance,” said Madame Gaboreau. “You must not go to the kitchen, Colette. Your mother would have a fit if she could see you.”
“Why?” asked Colette.
“You should not associate with the lower orders,” said Madame Gaboreau. Colette did not know what she meant, but the word “lower” stuck in her mind. Upstairs in grandpapa’s house everything was nice and comfy, but down below there were dark basements and people crying. Her lovely world had suddenly cracked at her feet and she had looked down into the crack and seen another hideous world below. Her baby mind recoiled. She wanted to go home to Rachell, but it was only the middle of the morning and she could not go home yet. She had to sit with Madame Gaboreau in her sitting room, full now of nameless terrors, and play spillikins with her. This had always been a delight before and Madame to-day was as kind to her as ever, but she kept thinking of the blue marks on Toinette’s arm where Madame Gaboreau had hurt her, and she wondered whether, if she was very naughty, Madame Gaboreau would do the same to her. She was very frightened. She had never been frightened before. All her life long she was to remember this morning when fear was first born in her, and all her life long the word “underworld” was to give her a little feeling of sick horror.
At one o’clock things got better, for she was washed and brushed, and sent down to have lunch with grandpapa. When she came in at the dining-room door, her curls shining and her pinafore spotless, she was just a little frightened in case that other grandpapa whom she had seen in the hall should be there, but he wasn’t. The man who picked her up and hugged her, pleasure and affection written large all over his face, was her very own grandpapa, not that other man. It was all right. The other one had gone away. In her delight at being with grandpapa she forgot all about him.
“Come to have lunch with the old man, has she?” chortled grandpapa, poking her in the ribs in a way that brought tears of delight to her eyes. “What? What? Bless my soul, what a dumpling! You eat too much, that’s what it is. Image of your great aunt Augusta. Died of apoplexy. Barker, a chair for Mamzelle Colette. Now then, up with you.”
Barker, grandpapa’s English butler, heaved Colette up on to a chair piled with cushions and wheeled it in beside grandpapa’s. Then he opened her napkin with a flourish and obligingly tucked it in beneath her chin, or rather chins, for she had three.
“Could your ladyship toy with a bit of chicken, what?” asked grandpapa.
Colette giggled. It was one of their jokes that grandpapa should treat her as a delicate lady of fashion with a fastidious appetite. Grandpapa, after placing a large slab of chicken on her plate, turned to Barker. “Give her ladyship a little vegetable,” he said, “a mere soupçon. Just to tempt the jaded palate, what?”
Barker, twinkling, piled Colette’s plate and the meal began.
Colette was too engrossed in slowly and solemnly absorbing her lovely food to talk very much, but grandpapa chatted away, telling her little stories about the funny things he had seen and done as he went about the Island, and she listened delightedly, every now and then, when he was particularly amusing, laying down her knife and fork and giving her soda-water syphon laugh.
When she did this grandpapa felt as elated as a man at a dinner party who has won a smile from the reigning beauty.
Barker, standing behind grandpapa’s chair, marvelled at the transformation wrought by Colette. “When that child is ’ere,” he said later, to cook in the kitchen, “the old devil’s a different creature. You’d hardly know ’im. Pity she don’t come more often, that’s what I say. It would be pleasanter for all.”
“Ah,” said cook darkly.
All through the chicken course Colette felt perfectly happy. This was the world she knew, the safe happy world where everyone was kind and loving. It was not till she was halfway through her helping of apple tart that she suddenly remembered the existence of that other world. She laid down her spoon and fork.
“What is it?” asked grandpapa, “full up to the back teeth? What?”
“Is Toinette having apple tart and cream?” asked Colette.
“Who the d—humph—and who is Toinette?” asked grandpapa.
“She lives downstairs where the black beetles are,” said Colette.
Barker coughed discreetly. Grandpapa swung round on him. “Don’t cough, speak out,” he demanded.
“Toinette, sir,” said Barker, “is the young person who assists cook. The scullery maid, sir.”
“Scullery maid?” said grandpapa, “is the scullery maid having cream? Good God, no! Do you think I’m made of money?” His face became so congested that Barker hastily poured him out a glass of water.
“Her mother’s dead,” continued Colette, “they put her in a black box.”
“What?” said grandpapa, “well, I can’t help that. Humph. Course of nature.”
Barker coughed again.
“Get out, Barker,” said grandpapa. Barker got.
“Have you been in the kitchen with the servants, my young lady?” asked grandpapa rather sternly when Barker had gone.