The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  When they woke in the morning she wished still to lie and stretch, but Oliver got up, rang the bell, poured out her coffee, arranged her pillow, brought her her dressing-gown, eventually pulled her out of bed and made her dress.

  The bells of Paris rang nine o’clock as they set out. It was cold in the frosty March air, the snow lay in the corners, groins and niches, on the turrets and cornices, and hung on the breasts and noses of the statues in the Tuileries. In the garden of the Beaux-Arts a shivering dove with feathers blown the wrong way sat on the neck of a dirty, mossy torso with snow on its back. Elvira’s eyes hurt, her colourless cheeks reddened, she was cross at being waked so early and having coffee poured into her and being dragged out by the scruff of the neck, and being rushed along at this pace to see a romantic commonplace like the Latin Quarter. It was there before: it had been there since Abelard: it would be there this afternoon. There were no bounds to Oliver’s enthusiasm. She thought, I hope he won’t be like this all the time and completely spoil the town for me.

  He showed her the engravings and bookbindings on the Quai Voltaire, and half-sang as he went. ‘When I was here, when we were here, the chaps and I, two years ago, in June, Alec Bute was leaving the Beaux-Arts; they always give them a send-off and they go singing round the streets at midnight and breaking a few glasses in the cafés: it’s the regular thing, it’s permitted…we had a grand time. Gee, I wish you’d been there. We drank a lovely soft Chambertin here—there they make an entrecôte Bercy—oo, la, la!—we ate like kings: there always used to stand a middle-aged prostitute with one leg. We used to chivvy her and stand her drinks. There a motherly old soul, with a black apron and crocheted shawl, left off drinking a mug of bread-soup to sell me a copy of Brantôme’s Gay Ladies at thirty francs, the crook. A lot she cared what was in it: she saw a young forny fool!’

  His gay laughter rang on the air. He saw that she was cold and took her to a bar where they stood up at the zinc counter and had coffee. He got into a halting conversation with a workman speaking atrocious slang on the subject of German rearmament and the funeral of a young workman killed in an encounter with the police; he was in agreement with him, with everyone: he was outrageously, indecently merry. ‘And all on account of me,’ thought Elvira, ‘because he slept with me last night: aren’t men childish? I slept with him, am I giving war-whoops?’ She widened her united brows, made her semi-mongol face candid and austere, cast a wistful glance from her china eyes up at the moulding of the ceiling. Oliver was recalled by her silence and the infolding of her beauties from his boyish gallopading: he became silent, his hand crept down and found hers. He ordered another glass of coffee and drank it, with a wary eye on her, and without a word. Then they went on—bookshops, schools, famous old streets, gardens, the École de Droit, the Luxembourg, Montparnasse. To please him she submitted to it, hanging on to his arm until eleven-thirty, and then peevishly quit and sat down on a café terrace. He was all solicitude. ‘What a stupid child I am! I have no consideration, to drag you like that: I’m used to hoofing it about with great hulking students. It shows I haven’t squired too many ladies, at least…’ He chattered and looked brightly into her face for approval.

  She smiled and said, when they had ordered another coffee to set them up: ‘What about the concierge the time you fell asleep in the street?’

  ‘Oh, what a memory! I’ll have to watch my step.’

  ‘I remember everything you’ve ever said,’ she volunteered. ‘Do you remember the day you asked me if I’d ever had a lover and said that to take one was as hard a step for a chaste married woman as for a virgin, and required as much persuasion?’

  He blushed.

  ‘You were so anxious to find out.’

  ‘I always knew you hadn’t,’ he said seriously. ‘You can always tell, you know.’

  She cast him a silky look. ‘Is that so? And then I remember the day we went out tramping. I had on my oldest hat and coat and was terribly ashamed you met me like that. And just when we were going past the glass in the door of the baker’s shop you said you had dreamed about me the night before and dreamed I was the madonna.’

  Oliver had a guilty look. ‘I say,’ he protested. ‘I’ll never tell you anything after this; you’ve got a prize memory.’

  ‘For conversations,’ she emended.

  By chattering she endeavoured to keep him there, but presently his dragoman passion got the better of him and he was careering off again, showing her a hundred things. She thought, in despair, ‘I’ll never be able to keep this up. After all, he’s five years younger than me, and strong as a horse, coming from that working-class family.’ Towards five o’clock she was ready to cry, when, unexpectedly, he took her towards home. She was ready to cry from relief when she saw the Opéra in the distance. The taxi deposited them in a few minutes at the hotel. They went upstairs, and then Oliver, surprisingly, said he would go out to the barber’s. She thought, ‘I’ll take a bath: otherwise I’ll never get through the evening.’ She loved taking baths of all sorts, hot-water baths, Turkish baths, sunbaths. She lived through her skin and would have liked to have slaves to massage her and roll her in oils and powders. Oliver came back presently and asked eagerly, ‘Did anyone call?’

  ‘No. Did you expect someone?’

  ‘No, no: I just—I thought I heard someone asking for Madame Fenton when I was going out.’

  She looked at him doubtfully. ‘Who would be here asking for me as Madame Fenton?’

  ‘How do I know?’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps I had the name in my head.’ He gave her a strange look. ‘I was no sooner out than I longed to be back: I saw at least ten women like you on the boulevard: you are a European type.’ She stood in the shadow of the brocaded curtain, against the wall, looking at him. He came nearer. ‘Elvira, you missed me too. I can tell by the look in your eyes, a man can always tell.’

  She put her hands on his breast. ‘Oliver, let’s go away from Paris: I’m tired of Marpurgo. Let’s be alone, in a forest, or something. You spoke of Fontainebleau in London. Let’s go there, away from Paris and all its scenes and love-episodes. It makes me feel cheap, and I’m not cheap. I don’t want Annibale hanging round noting how we get on.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I want to. I thought you liked Paris. Let’s go.’

  She smiled. ‘Let’s go.’

  He gave her another strange look. She murmured: ‘It’s too restless here. Let’s get away where we can get to know each other.’

  He swayed towards her. ‘I’m going to love you every minute of the day, all your life—not just affection but active, creative love. I used to be a selfish bastard—with you I’ve got someone to live for and care for myself, for I don’t care if you impose on me. I’ll like it. I want someone’s foot on my neck.’

  She said, ‘Paul—Oliver, kiss me!’

  She had a prosaic, experienced, brutal behaviour that Oliver had never met before and that fired him: he had thought her a cool, gentle creature.

  CHAPTER II

  A puff of heat and the smell of roasting chestnuts welcomed Marpurgo as he turned down the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, one of the busiest streets in Paris. His gaudy, busy, populace-loving soul rejoiced as he thrust through the small-shouldered crowd, past the glass doors and nickel bars of cafés serving late breakfasts of coffee, beef extract, white wine and little breads, past the loafers standing in the doors of bag-shops, shoe-shops and theatres, of passport-photographers, erotic underwear manufacturers, past pimps, pickpockets, unemployed workmen and theatrical artists, girls with shiny bags and high heels, restaurants and every brand of little commerce. The cold straked sky meandered down the street between the irregular chimney-pots. Poor men went past with their hands in their pockets and the collars of their faded purplish suits turned up: pouter-pigeon girls from the cheap hotels of iron bedsteads and honeycomb quilts down that way, strutted by, marking time with their heels, with high colour but stomachs empty, pulling short coatees of imitation karakul about their waists. A peddler selling pencils
pulled out some obscene photographs under the flap of his torn coat and showed them to Marpurgo. A woman with a baby in a shawl begged: ‘I haven’t eaten since yesterday, sir; give me six sous for milk.’ Marpurgo passed on wilfully with his eyes on the ground. Farther along a man lay in a doorway with his hat over his red whiskers. Marpurgo waked him up to put two francs into his hand. As he did so, a voice said:

  ‘Good morning, philanthropist!’

  Marpurgo turned suspiciously and said hastily:

  ‘This is my propitiatory for the day. There were two others offering, one sold cheap heart’s-ease, the other cheap heartache: I’m an ascetic; I like to go down two turnings and up an alley for sensual enjoyment, and official gratitude is heartburn to me: so I waked up a chap who wasn’t looking for it, and wondered what the devil I wanted with him.’

  ‘Well, as long as he got it,’ said the speaker, a business and café friend, ‘and you’re happy. How are you? My wife wants you to come to dinner—say this day next week? She sent a special message when she heard you were expected back, that she will keep the evening just for you. She got that history of music you suggested and has been studying ever since: I haven’t seen her so serious since she left school. We’ve positively had nothing for dinner but truites à la Bach and soufflé à la Offenbach since you left.’

  The cold wind still blew, but Marpurgo went on his way cheered. ‘The offering worked,’ he said to himself. ‘I’ll have a lucky day.’ He turned into an old mansion used now as a commercial house. He treadled up the wide, worn axial staircase and pushed open the great black door on the first floor. On it was a board: ‘Fuseaux & Cie: Tulles et Dentelles.’ A clerk worked at a sloping desk by the courtyard window with a cardboard shade over his eyes. A typist clicked in an adjoining office overlooking the street. She called out with affection, ‘Good morning, Monsieur Marpurgo. They are both there. They expect you.’ He crept in towards her to have a private word, when a clear, lazily exasperated voice came from another office, saying:

  ‘Listen, what’s the use of you trying to kid me? You didn’t send them the cheque. I know you, Georgie; you always delay cheques two days and cash payments three days to a week. You hoped there’d be a war or a moratorium last night or this morning, so that you wouldn’t have to pay. You’ve been doing it the fifteen years you’ve been in business: I suppose one of these days you’ll be right. In the meantime, it’s irritating.’

  Marpurgo said very low, to the typist:

  ‘It injures the credit of the firm.’

  From the other office a voice graver, but very like the other, replied sharply:

  ‘You save a day’s interest—that’s the way you make money. If one of us throws it away, one of us has got to save it. We owe him the money, don’t we? Why should we be in a hurry? Let him be in a hurry. I told Mlle Rose to send it off yesterday. She forgot.’

  The girl whispered:

  ‘He told me to keep it till to-day.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ nodded Marpurgo. ‘Have you got any letters for me?’

  ‘I kept them,’ deplored the girl, ‘but Monsieur Georges went through my desk one Saturday afternoon after I had gone and found them all. He told me I should give them all mail. Afterwards I could only keep one. Here it is.’

  Marpurgo looked at the Swiss postmark.

  ‘From my wife.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I kept it.’

  He tapped Mlle Rose on the hand with an air of complicity by way of thanks and said, as he slipped it into his pocket:

  ‘Kings crash, banks close, wars are declared, presidents fail to be re-elected, soldiers die in battle and workmen on the picket line, prize-fighters perish, but fragile Clara Marpurgo, tottering along life’s slippery course, who was supposed to take the final leap before the age of sixteen, prophecy of an outspoken mitral murmur, still persists and is a lady and has a psyche withal. They tell me she blooms there like a flower, surrounded by pitying friends, whom she entertains with sour-sweet Christian tales of her husband who fears so much for her health and lives in Paris. She never could love me because of her heart: that was a relief for me: she married me to provide sick comforts. Her father had just died of heart disease and her mother taught the piano to keep them both. Clara was to die at sixteen, and she stopped growing at twelve. When I first saw her I was fascinated by her sickness, her airs, her parasitism. ‘There is the wife for me,’ I thought,’ a purely selfish, childish, undeveloped Dresden china soul, who will never have a thought for me, will never make me a home, never bind me to domesticity, who will make life a dream, keep the house shaded and tranquil, and irritate me into action.’

  ‘You really thought that at the time?’ asked Mlle Rose.

  ‘Yes: I was a very young man and I wanted to be a philosopher, but not an academic philosopher. I left school at fourteen to learn men before I formulated any theories.’

  ‘Why are you in the lace business?’ asked Mlle Rose.

  ‘Men of genius usually ruin themselves for some fantasy, or for their families, that’s why there are so few that succeed. There are really hundreds of thousands of men of genius in the world. Well, my wife was my ruinous fantasy and my bloodsucking family in one. And, like most men, my need for spiritual intercourse increased as old age approached. Now I bitterly regret and hate my flowerlike parasite.’

  ‘You are not old,’ deprecated Mlle Rose.

  ‘Thank you, but I am nearly forty: I have already reached my autumn. I was a man at fourteen, I am in decay at forty: I am in dissolution. I doubt, hate, despise, ridicule, embroil, slander. The disease helps,’ he struck his breast. ‘If I had actually married a healthy woman who would have had her way and had children, I should be better off now: I’d take sun and blood from my sons. I should have had such sons…’ He laughed. ‘No doubt they would have been loose-knit slubber-degullions, something monstrous and gawky with inflexible ideas—sons are usually a failure too.’ He patted her wrist. ‘You’re young: don’t take any notice of me. It’s a comfort to talk to you: I think you like me a little.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I do, and I wish you were happy.’

  He knocked softly at the door and put his head through as he slowly opened it, laughing with a peaked smile and cracked voice.

  ‘Ah, the man himself,’ cried Antoine Fuseaux, getting up and shaking Marpurgo’s hand. ‘Hullo, Marpurgo, how have you been? Some of those job-lots were grand stuff: I don’t know whether we’ll get them all off, but they’re certainly high quality.’

  ‘Some of them have been on the shelves for five years: did you notice those fine Vals? Raguse hated to see them go as job-lots, but I guess the million francs were welcome. He’s practically closed down.’

  ‘A million francs of back-numbers,’ said Georges. ‘Raguse must have got the impression that we’d gone in for philanthropy on a large scale. We bought out his old stock in Calais and we’ll certainly have to give it away this end, it’s so out of date.’

  ‘Where are your eyes, Georges? It’s exquisite lace.’

  ‘At thirty francs a metre, they’ll probably be putting it on their beach pyjamas next summer,’ drawled Georges.

  ‘How are you feeling, though, Georges? Is your rheumatism better? Did you get away to Deauville?’

  ‘I don’t get away, you know that, Marpurgo: there’s too much work—someone’s got to stay here. Otherwise the clients’ll think the firm’s changed hands and they’ll expect to see on the door, “Mlle Rose and Albert Porteplume, Tulles et Dentelles.” ’

  ‘Monsieur Raguse sent his kindest compliments to you both,’ said Marpurgo politely. ‘What a sweet man! He particularly said he hoped Monsieur Antoine would soon be going to Calais.’

  ‘Certainly, he doesn’t like me. I sometimes remember I’m in business,’ interjected Georges. ‘Certainly, tell him Antoine’ll go up there to have dinner with him any time. That’s all he’s got to do. We’re not in business: we’re running a greeters’ club.’

  Marpurgo continued nonchalantly
to Antoine:

  ‘Poor fellow. He has one winder, one spinner, two men only, the oldest with him, on the Jacquard machines, one designer instead of a dozen, and a man who comes in occasionally to punch the Jacquard cards. It is miserable. He’d shut up shop and save money if it were not for his name, Raguse, which is linked with the history of Calais. I remember when the whole building used to tremble with the machines; now the courtyard is grown with weeds and the two machines work fitfully on little stock Valenciennes.’

  Antoine, leaning back in his swivel-chair, with his hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the map of France, babbled:

  ‘I like old Raguse; he’s a lovely man, but he’s history. He’s history, he’s a monument. That’s just the trouble with him, that he’s tied up with the history of Calais…’

  ‘You can’t make lace out of knotted thread,’ scolded Georges. Antoine talked on: ‘…Raguse is a gentleman manufacturer. We’re not in the candlestick age: we don’t wear knee-breeches and ruffles. He ought to wake up and realise lace is proletarian now. What you want is pretentious, embossed, cheap, washable flowing stuff to put on cheap voile nighties. You don’t want a design, because it gets hacked up anyway. And then you’re competing with rayon. It’s no go. You can’t be a what-d’ye-callum minnesinger to-day. To-day you’ve got to be a cheap-jack, a thug, a bastard. You’ve got to forget art and steal your competitor’s best selling designs. Like Boutdelaize. It’s the age of vandals. You got to be like the chaps that followed what-d’ye-callum—Marpurgo, you’re the learned mug round here, you know the name of the chap—’