Music Hall Sketches

Two Episodes of Life with a French Road Company by a Former Trouper

COLETTE

EDITOR'S NOTE: Colette is one of the foremost contemporary French writers of fiction. Several sketches by her hand have appeared in Vanity Fair. Like her own heroine in her two greatest novels. La Vagabonde and L'Entrave, Colette was, herself, an actress who knew well the picturesque life of the travelling theatrical troupe and the world of the dressing room. The two sketches on this page are vignettes of the third-rate, transportable theatre

THE STOPOVER

A JOLTING and leisurely train abandoned a sleepy, yawning, and whimpering crew, at Fon a bright, crisp spring afternoon. The blue sky was barely flecked with light clouds. It was a day fragrant with half-opened lilacs.

The fresh wind stung our checks and made our eyes smart, for they were as sensitive as the eyes of convalescents who have ventured out too soon.

The train that we were to take from that point would not leave for two hours and a half.

Two hours and a half! Whatever should we do?

"Let's send some post cards!"

"No, let's go and have some coffee and sandwiches."

"Let's play cards."

"How about doing a little sight-seeing?"

The manager of the troupe suggested that we visit the park; for then he could go to sleep in the buffet with his chin hidden away in his upturned collar without being obliged to listen to the complaints of his disgruntled troupe.

"Come on, then. To the park!"

Outside of the station, we felt all around us the hostile stares of the townspeople.

"These people have never seen anything in their lives," said the little ingenue, aggressively. ''Towns where they don't have shows are always full of boobs."

"So are the ones where they do have them," observed the duenna cynically.

WE WERE ugly, graceless, and arrogant: pale from fatigue or flushed from a hasty breakfast. The rain at Douai, the sun at Nimcs, the salty wind of Biarritz, had turned green and rusty those terrible travelling cloaks, cove re rs of a multitude of sins, to which an English style still lingered. Moreover, we had slept all over France in our shapeless hats, all of us, that is—except the old soubrette who balanced three funereal plumes on a plateau of dusty velvet, a relic of another day.

I looked at those hearse-like trappings and at the woman beneath them as if I had never seen them before.

In this town in which "they don't have shows," she seemed out of place, with her too striking profile. "I don't know why it is, but every one says that I look just like Sarah Bernhardt," she would say. "What do you think'" A little breeze blew our skirts about as we came into a public square and undulated the bleached hair of the ingenue. She cried out and clung to her hat; and I could see between her hair and her eyebrows a smear of rouge carelessly left on. It was the rouge of the night before last.

Why couldn't I turn away my eyes when the breeze disclosed the underpinnings of the duenna? And shall I ever forget the dirty, greyish-white collar of the leading man with a yellow line of perspiration at the top, the juicy pipe of the comic, the cigar butt of the assistant manager, the soiled lavender necktie of the property man, the discoloured and greasy beard of the noble father? What magic moving screen of plants and flowers could hide them from me! Oh, how they looked in that "town where they don't have shows"!

And as for myself; I could not get by the window of the clockmaker fast enough not to sec in his mirror that my hair was dry and dull; that there were dark circles under my eyes; that my lips were parched and cracked with thirst; that my figure had slumped in its crumpled dress.

I looked for all the world like a discouraged insect beaten by the rain in a springtime drizzle. I looked like a plucked fowl! I looked like a governess in distress! I looked—my God. I looked like a road company actress—And what more can I say than that!

There, at last, was the premised park. It was well worth the long walk from the railroad station on feet made tender by wearing shoes eighteen hours a day. I here was a thick grove, a sleeping chateau, with every blind closed, in the middle of a smooth lawn, long avenues of trees with their sparse tender foliage just budding out, wild hyacinth and cuckoos! One trembles a little in spite of himself when one feels in his hot lingers a living flower, cool in the shadows filled with a delicate new life. A softened light, kind to our ruined visages, imposed silence. A lively breeze dropped from the tree tops and ran down the path, bending the branches before it and disappearing like a mischievous phantom.

We were silent—but not for long! "Oh, the country!" sighed the ingenue. "Yes. Let's sit down," said the duenna. "My legs are giving way under me."

At the foot of a beech, we sat down—wanderers without grace or beauty. Fhe men smoked; and the women looked down the path to where, against the blue, burned a clump of rhododendron.

"Fhe country makes me sleepy," said the comic, yawning.

"Yes, but it's a healthy fatigue," decreed the duenna.

"Healthy! You make me sweat!" said the ingenue, shrugging her plump shoulders. "Nothing ages a woman like living in the country."

THE assistant manager took out his pipe, spat, and began: "An impression of melancholy, which is not without a certain grandeur, exudes—"

"Shut up!" growled the leading man under his breath, looking at his watch as if he were afraid of missing an entrance cue.

A tall fellow, limp and pale, who helped with scenery, watched a beetle clad in an armour of blue steel and teased it with a straw.

I inhaled diligently in order to find and recall forgotten odours that came to me as if from a deep well. There were some that escaped me and of which I no longer knew the names.

None of us laughed; and it the big soubrette hummed a little it was a very broken and sad little air. We were not at our ease. It was too beauti ful.

A friendly peacock appeared at the end of the path; and behind his spread tail we saw that the sky was rosy. Evening was upon us. 'Fhe peacock walked slowly in front of us like a courteous attendant ordered to show us out. Mv companions were almost running.

"Come on. We must allow plenty of time to get to the train."

We knew that we would not be late, but we fled from the beautiful garden, from the silence, the peace, the noble leisure, of which we were not worthy. We ran from the hotel, for the stuflv dressing room, for the blinding footlights. Babbling incoherently, we ran toward the illusion of living fast and furiously, of working hard, of having no time to think c > that we might bear away with us neither regrets, nor remorse, nor remembrance.

THE ENGLISH DANCER

As she is young and frail and blonde and blue-eyed, she exactly fulfills all the known requirements of a little English dancer. She talks a little French in a kind of vigorous quack and, in order to get out a few words, expends so much energy that her cheeks grow red and her eyes burn.

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(Continued front page 67)

When she leaves the dressing room, next to mine, which she uses with the rest of her companions, and goes down to the stage, all made up and in costume, I can scarcely distinguish her from the other "girls", for she strives to be only an impersonal and agreeable little English chorus girl. The first one who goes down, the second, the third, and every one, in fact, up to the ninth, gives me the same little smile and the same nod of the curly, blond wig over a pink face. The nine faces are all painted the same colour and darkened skillfully around the eyes; while each eyelash has such a heavy bead of black on it that all subtleties of expression are lost.

But when they leave at ten minutes after twelve—having wiped off the rouge on a corner of a towel anil substituted powder, but with their eyes still grotesquely enlarged—or when they return at one o'clock in the afternoon for a matinee, I recognize immediately the little Gloria, with her authentic blondness, nestling inside her mop of yellow hair and her atrocious hat like a bird in an old basket. Two slightly projecting upper teeth give a tilt to her upper lip j and in repose her mouth looks as if she were allowing a sugar plum to dissolve in it.

I don't know why I have noticed her so much. She's not as pretty as Daisy, that little brown-haired minx, always in tears or in a rage, dancing like a demon, or perched on the stairs swearing good round English oaths. She is less amusing than the sly Edith, -who exaggerates her accent in order to make us laugh and offers us very naively, in French, improprieties of which she understands the meaning perfectly.

But Gloria, who is dancing for the first time in France, holds my attention. She is strangely sweet and appealing. She has never called the ballet-master "damne fou" and her name has never been posted for fines. To be sure, she screams on the stairway, but only mechanically like the others. Because they change costume four times between nine o'clock and midnight, they could hardly be expected to go up and down stairs without spilling rouge. Gloria adds her voice to the weird shrieks of warning and holds her own as well in the big dressing room next door, separated from mine by a very thin partition.

These strolling "girls" have made out of their rectangular cell a gypsies' encampment. Red and black make-up sticks roll around among powder puffs which are wrapped in a torn towel, or a bit of paper. A breath of air blows away post cards which have been pinned up on the wall. The box of rouge, the lipstick, the powder puff, these will be carried off in a handkerchief; and the little girls, who will disappear in two months, will leave less trace behind them than a bivouac of romanies, who mark their trail with the scorched circle of their camp fires.

"K'you," says Gloria in an elegant voice.

"The pleasure is mine," replies Marcel politely. Marcel is actually a tenor, but changes to a dancer one month or a tragedian the next.

As if by chance, Marcel is waiting on the landing for the tumultuous passing of the girls; and also, as if by chance, Gloria is the last and pauses long enough to fumble with a graceful awkwardness in the bag of hard candy that our comrade offers her.

I watch the slow progress of the romance. He is young, ardent, greedy —resembling in spite of his bored manner and his boutonniere a handsome workman. But Gloria disconcerts him with her little foreign ways. With a typical little chorus girl he would have known his ground. She would or she would not—that was all —but this little English girl—he couldn't understand. The fact that she is leaving the stage all rumpled and dishevelled and that she is unbuttoning her corsage in her haste, that does not keep her from composing her features when she reaches the landing and accepting a bon bon and saying "k'you," with as much dignity as if she were wearing a train.

She attracts him; she piques him. Sometimes I have seen him shrug his shoulders as she left him; but I knew that it was himself that he mocked. The other day he threw into her enormous hat, which she was swinging by the ribbons, a half dozen bon bons, which the horde of blond barbarians fell upon and tore with their nails. The thought of the long wooing before her yielding irked the little Frenchman considerably.

Little by little she becomes a girl in love. She calls Marcel by his first name, "Mass'l", and has given him her picture, not the one in which she looks like a doll, nor the comic one in pants, oh, no! the most gorgeous one which shows Gloria as a lady of the middle ages with a towering headdress, absolutely regal.

They don't seem to be abashed because they can't talk together. The clever boy pretends reverence and awe. I have seen him bend and kiss the thin little hand, roughened by cold water anil liquid soap; but I have seen him at other times stare at her covetously and insistently. She, from behind the door of her dressing room, sings so that he may overhear her and tosses him his name as if she were throwing him flowers.

Things go well—in short, too well. The idyll, mute, as it were, develops, like a pantomime. No other music than the happy voice of Gloria and scarcely any other words than this "Mass'l" in every inflection of love.

After the "Mass'l", triumphant and joyous, and a little nasal, comes the "Mass'l" softer, more coaxing, more caressing; and, at last, one day,, a "Mass'l" trembling, despairing,, which begs and pleads—

This evening, I hear it, I think, for the last time; for at the very top of the stairs I find a little Gloria all alone, her wig awry, whose tears, stream down over her make-up and who repeats softly over and over again, "Mass'l!"