The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  He stopped, maliciously. ‘Are you a musician, Mrs. Western?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said in her soft metallic voice, ‘no, I just learned music, with geography, fancy-work and painting, in the ordinary way, for five or six years, but I have no real talent for it: we learned painting from an R.A. and music from a composer, I forget his name: when I’m lonely I play Chopin’s Nocturnes, the Moonlight Sonata—’

  ‘—in C sharp minor, Op. 27, no. 2,’ murmured Marpurgo.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Elvira. ‘I don’t know that the name matters.’

  Oliver, who had been dreaming, only said:

  ‘I love to hear a woman playing in a house: it’s always been a dream of mine, a woman’s hand wandering over the ivories—when I have a house—a woman, a soft, reluctant voice, music, flowers.’ He turned and smiled into Elvira’s eyes.

  She took her hand from his arm with irritation, looking for her powder-puff in her purse. ‘A woman is a human being, not an aesthetic gratification.’ There was silence: Marpurgo smiled.

  The advertisements in red, blue and green neon tubes bloomed softly in and out, crowds passed along the grisette boulevards, the boulevards with open lap, decked out and beckoning. The broad, blue-crayoned streets were full of hoots, horns and wind instruments of motorcars, hurried animals hailing as they passed. The rue Laffitte thundered, the cafés were full, their terraces, glassed-in against the cold, were planted with clients, like conservatories with pot-plants, the stoves burned bright. The gutters were frozen black, heaps of snow still lay under the trees. Friends let out of work met each other and hurried by, men with evening papers, girls with neat belted waists, streamed along. Marpurgo expanded, sniffing up a thousand details with the animal delight of a dog reconnoitring fenceposts. He made them sit down in a small bar in the rue du 4 Septembre opposite a great bank, saying if they were not going to the theatre, they had plenty of time, it was best not to eat till eight o’clock. He ordered two drinks for them, but himself took Perrier water, and described the profession, character and intentions of various persons who passed, old sleuth and boulevardier.

  Oliver lent himself joyfully to the game, but Marpurgo sniffed at his conclusions. ‘It takes years, Fenton, to get the right mixture of malice, melodrama, sentimentality, ethnology, psychology; when you get it right, you shake together, toss it off and immediately the people under your eyes become translucent: drunkenness of the human cocktail.’

  Elvira looked the women over and sipped her drink.

  ‘There’s no one to check you up.’

  Marpurgo cackled, and in a moment, ‘Look there,’ he said.

  A thin middle-aged man on the second floor of the bank building, between the undrawn curtains, was imitating a ballet-dancer to amuse some person whose thin saffron hand grasped one of the sand-coloured velvet curtains. The dancer looked fawnishly out of the lozenge-paned windows at the thinning boulevard to see if he was observed, and then resumed his ballet with a coquettish expression, his face sharpened like a lead-pencil, pallid, with receding hair and small head; now high, now low, he went, advancing and retreating, patting the air with outstretched hand, marking different heights as he rose from a stooping pirouette. Suddenly, he stopped, clapped his hands softly, bowed a number of times, then, with a twirl, smiled, blew a kiss and retired behind the other curtain. The small hand which he entertained disappeared. The dancer reappeared, talking rapidly, gesticulating, shrugging his shoulders, shaping with his hands a pair of legs of enormous size, tapering down to a pair of svelte ankles. He retired beyond the chandelier.

  ‘Well?’ said Marpurgo.

  Elvira admitted:

  ‘Luck is with you.’

  ‘It always is,’ said Marpurgo, ‘always. I am a Parisian.’

  Oliver stopped grinning to say:

  ‘Lots of funny things happen to you. When I was here last, I got blotto one evening. The next day I was sleepy; as I came along to the bus-stop Sèvres-Babylone, I found myself zigzagging on the pavement with my head doddling on my breast. I went into the nearest doorway and sank down on the two steps in the entry. When I woke up I was in the concierge’s loge, on her sofa with a warm black hair rug over me. A woman was singing in the kitchen with a noise of pots. I heard the gas flaring and the canary chirping—heavy filet lace curtains with crocheted bunches of grapes hung on the glass door, on the wall the traditional engraving “The Last Roll-call of the Girondins in the Conciergerie.” The concierge came in: she was a pretty young woman with dark hair and a new pink jumper. She came close to look at me and asked me if I was sick. I lay looking up at her for a while, not wanting to speak at all: then I said no, and she came a little closer to peer at me, and put her hand on my forehead. It was twilight: an extraordinary psychic event took place, I took her hand, kissed it violently and drew her into my arms.’ He laughed. ‘She slapped my face, called me a filthy young thing, opened the door and turned me out. On my honour, I don’t know to this day what possessed me.’

  ‘You got slapped for a psychic event,’ said Elvira coolly.

  Marpurgo remarked: ‘There are hours when we expect the human race to act naturally, ideally—we usually get slapped for our pains: akin to the hour when you are afraid you will be impelled to get up and dance in church. Come, children, we must eat: then I am off to the field of battle. I go to the Régence for preference because I have refused money to every sponger there for years, and now they let me alone.’

  He gave them a fine dinner, himself eating little and taking long over it, nibbling luxuriously. When the filtered coffee came he called round the cigars with importance and bought four Corona-coronas. Through the blue smoke he entertained them with a story of dispute between master and men in a progressive lacehouse; the designs executed on the Jacquard lace-machines are controlled through pierced cardboards hinged together which pass over a roller, in the manner of a player-piano. The cards are pierced either by hand or by an automatic card-piercing machine, operated with a keyboard, like a linotype machine. The débris from the piercing usually belongs to the operator; he sells it, and the few centimes it produces are his. The owner of the progressive factory considered that the débris was his and commandeered it for the sake of the few centimes. Marpurgo described the man, Monsieur Boutdelaize, a gay, inventive man, a great whoremaster and buyer-out of bankrupt inventors; he rarely made a fine lace, specialised in commonplace commercial designs and threads, was full of sharp practice, skimped on thread, showed old lace for new, was out to break the trade-unions and ruin all leaders of the men. He thought the world would get poorer and poorer and its wealth be concentrated in the hands of men like himself, crafty, inventive, unscrupulous men. He was a high-class engineer and chemist himself.

  Oliver said:

  ‘Taking the short view, he is right; money is only made at present by men who combine the technician and financier, the old-fashioned man of the métier is ruined.’

  ‘What is the subject of your essay?’ asked Marpurgo.

  ‘The French Workers’ Movement from the Commune to the Amsterdam Congress of 1904,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Why 1904?’

  ‘I can’t get at the Archives much later than that,’ explained Oliver. ‘They’re not open, you know, till a generation has passed. That makes all investigation safe for the existing order.’

  ‘You don’t have to depend on the Archives; you can use newspaper files, you can go to the provincial newspapers,’ suggested Marpurgo.

  ‘I don’t want to press it too hard: I want to look like a socialist who knows the amenities,’ gibed Oliver. ‘I want to get a job, in other words Elvira doesn’t want to be the mother of revolutions!’ He laughed at her sitting there with her critical, indolent, mute eyes. ‘I don’t want to cut up,’ said Oliver. ‘My family are bakers and poor working-class people. I know what it is to be suburban, believe what’s in the newspapers and admire the family life of the King and Queen. I’ll be a labour educator. I’ll edit books of essays on social problems—I’ve
done my bit in doing that. I know the working-class, you must gradually foment their revolt. They revolt, not us: we’re the bourgeoisie. We can’t do anything: their revolt will come in its time. The hour is no longer with blanquistes.’

  He drank his liqueur: his gestures were becoming frequent, his eyes more fiery, his sidelong smiles to Elvira more silky: he was getting drunk. Marpurgo permitted some of his spite to creep through, seeing it would not be noticed; he said abruptly:

  ‘Why not do the English workers’ movement?’

  Oliver giggled.

  ‘The old question! Opportunism, pure and simple, dear boy: I must get a position before I can spout fire: the “fool-red fury of the Seine” has been accepted as a weakness of the French character, not as a stage in the dialectics of history: it can get past the examining body as a piece of exotic learning, like the quaint customs of the Aruntas. I doubt if I could be sufficiently patronising about the English workers to have the same effect on my superiors. After, after!’

  Marpurgo sneered. ‘After, when you are well-established, you will go foot-loose among the intellectuals, dazzling them and the masses but well removed by a pretty line of footlights. You have talent, but you’re an arriviste!’

  Oliver waved his hand. ‘As Lenin calls it, I am being seduced by the “refined corruption of the petty-bourgeois state!” Not at all: look at G. B. S.! Has he been a fount of criticism or not? Is it better to be a bad little black Shetland pony curried and favour-curried, fed and silk-fed, finally disrupting the family through the Freudian dreams of the wife and daughter, or a hardheaded mule, kicking against the brick wall of the stable and getting nothing but turnip-peel and the stick? I shall disrupt them through their dreams! Like G. B. S. Like all the slink-eyed, bristle-backed darlings the petty-bourgeois take into their lap: to deceive and be deceived.’

  ‘To be honest is a poor man’s folly,’ sneered Marpurgo.

  ‘Fortunately I have the folly in me through my father and mother: in the meantime I have to do better than them, or I will have to sweat like them and never get a moment to think. I have to be my own Alma Mater.’ His brow puckered and darkened, he brought his hand down flat on the table.

  Marpurgo looked at him with curiosity and said finally: ‘I know a few of the professors at the School of Economics through Lensky. But I also know Edwards and Jamieson, leading brokers in Throgmorton Street and Austin Friars, respectively: if you ever think of going into business, let me know. You would make a very successful business-man.’

  Oliver flushed. ‘I’d like to go into business! I’d like to deal with something real. My father always said to me, “I’m dealing with real things, bread: people can live on bread alone.” He isn’t at all impressed with my scholarship and success: he just says, “I do real work, I make and sell bread. People can live for bread alone.” For the majority, it is all they hope to get. He is right.’ He looked at Marpurgo merrily, appealingly. ‘Get me a job, in lace, in anything: I’ll take it at once.’

  Elvira looked interested. ‘It’s not a bad idea: you can’t be king of a chat-parlour all your life! Unless you have the divine flame, you know, that makes a man a bookworm, it’s better to do something else. And a man like you, Oliver, so lively and so taking, and so—’ she laughed and blew her cigarette-smoke into the air and did not speak for a minute, slewing her gelatinous eyes roguishly on him, ‘—such a natural two-timer,’ she finished, ‘you’d be a wonderful business-man.’

  ‘When I was thirteen, I won my first scholarship,’ lamented Oliver: ‘I saw it as a way out of the baking business: I took it. Since then it has been nothing but essays. The boys I went to school with were clerks, counter-jumpers, insurance-salesmen, weavers, coal-miners, long ago: married, have children, are getting the dole and belong to labour-unions, and I’ve never faced one of the issues of life. I’m still a schoolboy.’ He hiccoughed. He put his shapely small hand on Marpurgo’s coat. ‘You get me a job, Marpurgo, and I’ll take it at once. I’m keen to do some work.’

  Marpurgo laughed paternally, satisfied with his work.

  ‘I’ll introduce you to my firm here, Georges and Antoine Fuseaux: I know a house in Calais also, cotton importers, who need a bright young man, and I’ll ask in Nottingham when I’m there in a few months. But you had better finish your essay and get your doctor’s degree first: a doctor’s degree goes well, even in business: then consider, there are so many graduates who are waiters and chauffeurs now. You can’t allow yourself to be less educated than the “hideous proletariat,” an expression of Paul Bourget, you that have come so far and will undoubtedly go farther.’

  ‘I’ll take anything that offers, even so,’ said Oliver impetuously, looking languorously, the next moment, at Elvira.

  Elvira, getting sleepier and more numb with the good food, warmth, cigar smoke and voices of men, spread her charms around, gave them the benefit of her eyes, thought of her body, knowing by experience that that made her an enchantress. She smiled deeply to herself with the full realisation of her female powers. Marpurgo watched her putting out her flowers: they went on talking of politics and Oliver’s essay, but lazily linking one expected remark to another. The misanthrope in Marpurgo came out, rubbed his hands and stretched. He left them very readily after dinner, treadling away through the thinned crowds down the Avenue de l’Opéra.

  ‘A misanthropic dervish, a thwarted play-actor,’ crowed Oliver, following Marpurgo’s back, with enchanted eyes.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t adopt us,’ murmured Elvira. ‘He will want to show us all Paris. He bores me with his speeches. It’s a city like others, isn’t it? People work in it!’

  ‘It’s not workaday Paris for us to-night: he knows it—and then, didn’t he say he likes to sit next to a beautiful woman?’

  Oliver looked at her thoughtful face and unreadable eyes and lifted her hand to his lips as they walked. Elvira went walking straight ahead, leaning on him, swaying a little, a buddhist expression, which he took for content, on her broad, still features. Their room looked on to the steps of the Odéon. The people were just streaming out, the women with long robes like nightdresses under their cloaks.

  Elvira turned into the room, took in the yellow-plated bedstead, the wallpaper covered with red palm-leaves, the red carpet, the red and grey chairs, and murmured, dashed: ‘It’s so trite, isn’t it? It depresses me so: couldn’t we have found something not so much like a hotel bedroom?’ She laughed. ‘Think of all the couples who have slept here before us! They make it stale, don’t they?’ She lifted china eyes to Oliver. ‘Life’s a pattern, and we’re just shuttles rushing in and out thinking we are making jerks up and down freely.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘When Paul divorces me, this room and this night will be mentioned in the evidence.’

  Oliver rushed over, took both her hands and looked into her eyes. ‘Oh, what is it? Remorse? No, no. You’re tired. We should not have gone with that pestiferous Italian: we should have spent this evening, our evening, alone quietly. I blame myself…’

  ‘I wonder at myself; I wouldn’t have come away unless I had done it in a rush: all the way to Paris I was concentrating on you, to forget about Paul, and now I am exhausted, morally exhausted.’

  Oliver, stroking her smooth sable hair, smiled to himself.

  ‘You need someone to look after you, and you’ve got him now. I thought this was a beautiful room! Remember my digs in Brunswick Square? You went there—once—you remember?—that evening I knew—’ He kissed her forehead. ‘Well, we’ll move if you don’t like this room to-morrow. Now, shall I unpack for you?’

  ‘If you like.’ He dragged her cases about, full of love, dived his hands into her clothes, let the water run for her bath. Soon she was cheerful again, finding it a huge joke that she had packed one stocking in one case and one in another. When Elvira came from her bath she had on the mandarin robe Paul had bought her in Greek Street, three years ago. She had never worn it. It was of transparent net, but heavily encrusted with gold thread. She he
ard Oliver draw in his breath sharply and walked softly about the room for a while pretending to unpack: all the lights were on and Oliver had taken out a new red, grey and black silk dressing-gown: they looked like a couple of butterflies. She reclined on her pillow while Oliver was bathing, her hair scented, smelling the fresh linen, and thought she had never felt so easy since she was a girl at boarding-school. She had been happy with all her life arranged for her. Oliver heard her laugh.

  ‘Oliver! I’m laughing because I’m glad I ran away.’ He hurried to rejoin her: she was stretching her arms. ‘I should like to wear this robe all night, I feel so grand in it.’ He stood, like a robed priest, looking at her intently.

  ‘Elvira, you’re lovelier now than I’ve ever seen you! You have a secret beauty, a bloom that only comes out when you’re in the house: and now it is brightest of all.’

  She laughed softly. ‘Oh, I shall sleep so well to-night: I am rosy with sleep. Yes, I will sleep all night in this mandarin robe, to celebrate my adventure. You must lie still as a stone all night, or you will crush it.’ She laughed to herself gutturally.

  ‘No, Elvira: it’s harsh, it’ll hurt your skin.’

  ‘Yes, I say.’

  ‘Perversity!’

  She opened her eyes wide and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘I am bitter and perverse: no one wants me when they know me; and I am egotistic, too. I like to spend money, I like to eat chocolates, I like to waste time. Now you know me: there’s no more to me! ‘She laughed provocatively. She would have liked, though, to sleep all night alone wrapped in her gold-embroidered coat, with Oliver in another bed, but near: it was appropriate to the dark and glorious turrets of the Louvre, the coronet of the Champs Elysées, the great translucent clocks of the Gare d’Orsay, the neon tubes. She was so tired that she wished Oliver had not been there and she had been able to sleep all night alone wrapped in glory, an immured citadel busy with the traffic of dreams. A sleepy glutton, doped with foretaste, she would have put off the moment of joy. She wanted so to keep him enslaved, not to gratify him.