Read The Collected Stories of Colette for Free Online Page A

feminine chin. He knits his eyebrows over his eyes, which are too dark to be seen.
    Léa does not cry out. She sits on the edge of the bed and, with instinctive modesty, merely arranges the short braids she has fixed her hair in for the night.
    “I was afraid it was you,” she says at last.
    He looks thinner to her, he seems even more surly. He is wearing a suit beneath his open overcoat; his hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his trousers, and with his tousled hair and rumpled shirt he resembles a drunken best man.
    “What do you want, my dear? Where did you come from? This is no way to make an entrance,” she observes calmly.
    He takes two or three sharp breaths and lets his stiff, raised shoulders fall, as if beginning to melt in the warmth of the room; he smiles vaguely, letting his extreme youthfulness show on his face, and sighs softly.
    “Hello . . .”
    “Hello . . .” says Léa in the same tone. “So, what brings you here? Has something happened? Where are you coming from?”
    “From my wife’s, of course.”
    He says “my wife’s” awkwardly, with excessive vanity in his voice.
    “It’s late to be going out,” remarks Léa discreetly.
    “And it’s too late to go back there!” shouts Chéri. “That’s one place you’ll never see me again!”
    He throws off his overcoat as if ready to fight and falls dumbstruck into an armchair near the bed. “You know, Léa, I . . . don’t you . . .” He says nothing more and shakes his head, sulking.
    “Of course I know,” says Léa indulgently.
    She leans over and runs her hand over his tousled head, enhancing its disorder and his anger. She knows very well that Chéri does not speak easily and that he does not take great pains in choosing his words. She also knows that what he has to tell her could be summed up in three phrases: it is the story of his four months of marriage and travel in close quarters with a little girl, young like himself, rich like himself, and who perhaps resembles Chéri like one half-tame colt resembles another . . .
    Under the familiar caress, Chéri leans his head back, closes his eyes, and his nostrils flare as if he was on the verge of crying.
    “Nounoune . . .” he whispers despite himself.
    He fights back his tears with the spiteful pride of a child, and Léa helps calm him. “There, there, Chéri.”
    Until his magnificent, moist eyes open again with a burst of laughter. “Can you imagine the look on their faces?”
    “Whose?”
    “Why, Mama’s! This’ll give the old girl a shock! And everybody else, too!”
    “And . . . your wife?”
    “Oh, this’ll be the last straw for her!”
    Léa shakes her head angrily. “But will she be upset?”
    Chéri jumps furiously to his feet. “Upset? Of course she’ll be upset! That’s all she ever is—upset! For the last four months . . .”
    He tears off his jacket and tie, which he throws on the dressing table. “You don’t know what kind of life I’ve been living for the last four months! A child like that who isn’t even twenty-one years old! Who doesn’t know anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t understand anything! She’s bored, she’s afraid to be alone, she cries if I say anything, she hides under the table if I yell . . . I’m not a nursemaid!”
    “Neither is she, unfortunately,” thinks Léa.
    “So, you see, it’s not working out for me. And then always hanging on me, despite all that, saying I’m handsome and that she loves me! Do I even know her? I’m telling you, I’ve had it! Up to here!”
    He kneels down beside the bed and rolls his head in the cool sheets. Seeing him, one would think it was the return of a smitten lover. But Léa does not fool herself. She understands the mysterious power of habit; she understands even better Chéri’s closed heart, hard and belated like the buds of the oak . . . He had smiled at the fragrant bedroom; he had fallen, relieved, into the familiar armchair. A caress that