With loads of flow’rs for you!
Don’t you know my knock?
Can’t you tell my cock—
A-doodle-doo?
The experienced professional who wrote this “Lily-of-the-Valley Waltz” skillfully left a smutty pause between the last two lines . . .
“So, we’re hitting the road in four days?” the little comic suddenly asks, raising his head.
“Yes, in four days . . . I liked it fine here.
It’s so peaceful . . . ”
“Yes, so peaceful!” Bouty protests skeptically. “There are places even more peaceful.
You won’t have any trouble finding a better spot.
I’m not saying anything against our audience, but you must admit they’re rather a bunch of roughnecks . . .
I’m well aware,” he says in response to my gesture of indifference, “that people can behave correctly anywhere. But all the same . . . There! Hear them yelling?
Do you imagine that a woman, I mean a thoughtless young woman whose mind is on nothing but laughs and parties, can acquire the habit of behaving correctly in a place like this? . . . I mean a dizzy dame, a party girl like Jadin, for example . . . ”
Oh, little Bouty, in whom love awakens a sudden aristocracy and contempt for this audience that applauds you, you’re seeking and finding an excuse for Jadin, and all on your own you’ve invented the theory of the influence exerted by one’s environment . . . which I don’t subscribe to!
The Russian dancers have left,
“Grand Duke” Antoniev and his dogs have left.
Where to?
No one knows.
None of us has had enough curiosity to inquire.
Other acts have come to take their place, some booked for a week, some for only four days—because the revue will be on soon; backstage and in the corridor I run across new faces, with whom I exchange a ghost of a smile or a raising of the eyebrows, by way of a discreet friendly greeting . . .
From the former program, they’ve kept only us, Jadin (who’ll create roles in the revue, heaven help us!), and Bouty . . .
We have melancholy chats at night, like veterans of the Empyree-Clichy forgotten by a departing young regiment . . .
Where will I meet again those I’ve met here?
In Paris, Lyons, Vienna, or Berlin? . . .
Maybe never, maybe nowhere.
The office of our agent Salomon will reunite us for five minutes, with shouts of greeting and hammy handshakes, jut long enough to learn we still exist, and to utter the indispensable
“How have you been doing?” and to find out whether “things are cooking” or “things could be better.”
Things could be better . . . With that vague expression my wandering colleagues disguise failure, unwanted unemployment, shortage of funds, poverty . . . They never admit the truth, puffed up and sustained as they are by that heroic vanity which makes them dear to me . . .
A few of them, when pushed to the wall, accept a small part in a real play, but, oddly enough, they don’t boast about it.
There, in patient obscurity, they await the return of their luck, a vaudeville booking, that blessed hour which will find them once more in their spangled skirts or dress coats smelling of benzine, once again facing the glare of the spotlights, “in their repertoire”!
“Yes, things could be better,” a few will tell me, and they’ll add: “It’s back to the flicks for me.”
The movies, which had threatened the humble vaudevillians with ruin, is now saving them.
There they bend their backs to an anonymous, unsung labor, which they don’t like, which upsets their habits, changes the hours when they eat, loaf, and work.
Hundreds of them live off the movies when they’re laid off, and several remain there.
But when the flicks are chock-full of extras and stars, what are they to do?
“Things could be better . . . decidedly, things could be better . . . ”
They toss off the phrase in a manner that’s nonchalant and serious at the same time, never emphatically, never tearfully; their hands are swinging a hat or a pair of old gloves.
They swagger, their waists clamped into a long-skirted coat that’s been out of style for years, because the essential, indispensable thing isn’t possessing a clean suit, it’s possessing a fairly “decent” overcoat that conceals everything else: the threadbare vest, the shapeless jacket, the trousers yellowed at the knees—an eye-catching, terrific overcoat that will impress a manager or a booking agent, one that, in short, will allow them to state jauntily, as if they had an independent income: “Things could be better!”
Where will we be next month? . . .
At night Bouty prowls helplessly in the dressing-room corridor, coughing, until I open my door partway and invite him to sit down in my room for a minute.
He parks his rump, like a skinny dog’s, on a frail chair from which the white paint is peeling, and draws his feet under him so as not to disturb my coming and going.
Brague comes and joins us, squatting like a Gypsy, his behind warm, on the radiator pipe.
Standing between them, I finish dressing, and my red skirt, embroidered with yellow patterns, fans them as I go by . . . We don’t feel like talking, but we chat, fighting a vague need to keep quiet, huddling together and melting our hearts . . .
It’s Brague who’s best at retaining his lucid curiosity, his businesslike appetite for the future.
As for me, wherever the future takes me . . . My belated taste, a somewhat artificial acquisition, for moving and travel is well suited to my middle-class fatalism, fundamental and calm.
I’m a Gypsy now, it’s true, whom tours have led from city to city, but an orderly Gypsy who conscientiously sews and brushes her duds; a Gypsy who almost always carries her tiny fortune on her person—but in the little doeskin bag, the coppers are on one side, the silver coins on the other, and the gold coins are carefully hidden in a secret pocket . . .
A vagabond, yes, but one who’s resigned to rotate on one spot, like these comrades and brothers of mine . . . Departures sadden and intoxicate me, it’s true, and some part of me is always left hanging on the places I travel through—new countries, clear or cloudy skies, oceans in the pearly-gray rain—it’s left clinging so passionately that I feel as if I’m leaving behind me a thousand little ghosts that look like me, rolling in the waves, rocking on the leaves, scattered in the clouds . . . But doesn’t one last little ghost, the one most like me, remain seated by my fireplace corner, dreamy and well-behaved, stooped over a book that she’s forgetting to read? . . . .
Part Two
“W,HAT A LOVELY intimate nook!
How hard it is to understand your life in vaudeville when I see you here, between this pink lamp and this vase of carnations!”