The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘There is Marpurgo peering at us: he prides himself on being a psychological detective. He can never guess what I was saying. To him I’m just zero.’

  Marpurgo was rather distrait, though, and greeted them with more normal obtuseness than usual. However, he roused himself to enquire, satirically:

  ‘How is the work going?’

  ‘I didn’t work all day,’ said Oliver.

  ‘He needs the whip: you’ll have to get him a job.’

  ‘If you get me a job, I’ll take it,’ supplemented Oliver. ‘Study is beginning to look unreal. They keep us at our books too long. The youth of man is stretching farther and farther out towards middle-age.’

  He flung his rather plump body into the easy-chair.

  Marpurgo smiled. ‘Haeckel divided the life of man into two sharp divisions: the idealist, before marriage, the realist, after marriage.’

  They sat silent, and Marpurgo kept his eyes running from one to the other.

  ‘Are you going to the concert to-night?’ he asked. He did not say which concert. There was an assumption between them that, as intellectuals, they always knew the musical programmes and which was the most important aesthetically of the various concerts offered.

  ‘Do you want to go, Elvira?’ asked Oliver with the proper amount of eagerness.

  She looked helplessly at them both.

  ‘No?’ he laughed and pressed her hand. ‘Our little lowbrow does not want to go to the concert.’

  Marpurgo picked up an olive, with crooked little finger.

  ‘She is honest: few women will admit they have little ear. To tell the truth, you’re missing nothing. Only Mengelberg can conduct this symphony. It’s a waste of time to hear anyone else.’

  None of them wanted to go to the concert.

  ‘Well, do you think the franc’s going off: what’s your odds?’

  Marpurgo drawled: ‘I’ve got a ten-to-one bargain with the chief that it won’t go off before December 31, 1934, midnight.’

  ‘You’ll win,’ said Oliver. ‘They think they can get away with anything at present. Lagny and Stavisky nearly brought the state down: the coup of the 6th February was nicely managed to make people forget all about both. They are as wise in their way as the British in their own particular brand of politics: only here it’s a firebrand, touch-and-go, derring-do kind. An attempted coup d’état always routs other questions in the French mind. The Irish have orange v. green, the Indians Hindu v. Mohammedan, the English labour v. conservative, the French Paris v. the provinces, when things get so bad that the ministers have to talk about “spiritual uncleanliness in high places.” But the situation got a little out of hand this time. I wrote you about it.’ He turned to Elvira. ‘Oh, I was praying you’d come a couple of weeks earlier. I wanted you to see the true Paris, cloth-capped Paris, flowing down from Ménilmontant. The bourgeois ran home and stayed behind shut doors.’

  ‘We heard the city was armed: we thought a revolution was coming,’ said Elvira. ‘I don’t know what Paul will be thinking now. I am sure he imagines me sitting in streets bristling with machine-guns.’

  ‘If I hadn’t been a foreigner, and been so anxious to finish my essay,’ said Oliver, ‘I would have been down in the streets again with them. After one night the workers had the streets to themselves: the fils de papa who come out with billies for a lark after supper only ventured into areas well protected with police after that night, and after a little scuffle got themselves safely locked up until two o’clock in the morning, rowdying in the police-station and singing “We must have a king!” The police were lenient although they got sick of the game after a few nights. They began to come out with weary faces and black-ringed sleepless eyes. They then forgot to see the fun of it all. They found they were proletarians after all. That’s the virtue of even a French cop: he asks “For what?” when he’s kicked out of his material comfort. After all, he’s just a natural loafer and snooper, overpaid for hitting his brother on the head. When trouble comes and he has to work and go into the firing-line, he’s a worker like the rest of them, and his practical mind works it out in terms of francs and centimes. “I’m likely to get my head knocked in—for what? For four pounds a week? So that Chiappe can get the kudos and sit in the Municipal Council.” When he gets to that point, they have to call out the Republican Guard and the negro regiments.’ He said indignantly to Elvira, ‘They actually had two coloured regiments here in Paris during the riots. The old Roman way: suppress the Romans with provincials, the barbarians with Romans.’ He saw her eyes sparkling, and smiled. ‘You like this crazy world, don’t you? You were built for life, not death. This is slightly different from Mecklenburgh Square!’

  ‘Paul doped me: I’ve been under a drug for eight years,’ exclaimed Elvira: ‘this is really life.’ She confided to Marpurgo: ‘When I was at school I always tried to get the socialist side in debates: or rather, the liberal side. It was conservative as only a persevering lower middle-class school for young ladies can be. I wanted to be a lawyer or run for Parliament every time I won a debate.’ She laughed ruefully. ‘Now look at me: a pumpkin-wife.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve left your kitchen-garden,’ said Oliver hurriedly. ‘I’ll say to Marpurgo what Lenin said to Wells—Come back in ten years! You won’t recognise her.’

  Elvira giggled: ‘Oh, I knew it was coming.’ She bent archly to Marpurgo. ‘He is dying to make me an honest woman—politically—and sartorially—and every other way. In ten years I’ll be the perfect woman. You know, Oliver, you’re losing me a job. I’d never get my job back with Paul with all these embellishments. I’d frighten him. Consider what you’re doing.’

  Oliver stared at her passionately, without speaking. Marpurgo impatiently crushed out the end of his cigar and took them to dinner. Oliver was obsessed with the woman all through dinner.

  ‘Have we ever known women? I love to think of a state in which women will be perfectly free. The women we know are inchoate…the seed of our passion is only a thread of foam threading in and out of their dark atlantic of storms and mists: Aphrodite is not yet born.’

  Marpurgo bent over the table:

  ‘To get to know another person takes as long as a degree in medicine: lots get pipped.’ He bobbed up and down like a cork between the carafes of wine and water.

  ‘I think you see best with your first eye,’ drawled Elvira. ‘Afterwards you just read into the person everything you want to: like a woman who thinks a man means “I love you madly” when he says “We are friends.” I always take an outsider’s view of anybody I know too well.’

  ‘A cynic, I see,’ trifled Marpurgo.

  He and Elvira spent some minutes in persiflage. Oliver watched them, flushed, in increasing gloom. Marpurgo turned to him, questioning. Oliver said, ‘If you want to, Elvira, I think we’ll make that trip to Fontainebleau to-morrow: the air should be sweeter out there. Paris is so close, without winds; we live in a perpetual bath of our own sweats here.’

  Marpurgo slid in. ‘It should be against the law to sweat in another’s presence: as Herodotus says of the Persians, that they denied the right to spit or make water in another’s presence.’

  ‘Fine advice for a road-mender, for example,’ laughed Elvira. ‘In the Russian pictures what I love most is the way the rich-muscled oudarniks sweat and shine. A non-sweating man is not a man.’

  ‘I sweat at night,’ said Marpurgo softly. ‘All my deeds seem then like sins against myself: I am convinced that ill-health is the only sin and alone, the path to knowledge.’

  Elvira laughed: ‘Either you’re born right or wrong: if you’re born clumsy nothing will ever go right. It’s just a matter of disposition. People love you that you do nothing for, and hate you that you do everything for. Look at my brother Bennie, spoiled, drunk, a waster. All the family has to keep him, mother just worships him: and he damns the whole family.’ She pushed out the end of her cigarette and began putting on her gloves. ‘I always think—take what you want: either you get it or you
don’t get it. It depends on your nature, not on what you deserve.’ Her soft drawl stopped; she looked brightly and cunningly at the two men: ‘Let’s go: I’m bored stiff. Where to, for you, Marpurgo?’

  ‘My chess-club, I think: I’m playing with a woman this evening: a Soviet press reporter. She’s cleaning up the club, and I’ll spend half an hour walking there, plunging into a triple-bottom of melancholy, the only way to match her new-world optimism: with every displacement in space you can see she is aware of the multiple play of threads in future time, which is her present: how can I match her except by opposing to her the bag of bad tripe we all are? If we once abolish property, and free women, men will be reduced to cards and cadging: natural materialists in a materialist world. A second paradise-lost—the last great Cabbalist falling slimewards before the matriarchate.’ He looked up sideways at them with self-delighted smile. ‘Women cook in pots and men work out by mathematics the one-sixtieth impurity of pure pot.’

  Elvira, whose secret glamour was spread out under the desirous looks of men passing, moved a step away from Oliver and made him break up the conversation. Marpurgo turned round upon himself and footed it down the avenue without turning round. The last glance he gave her was satiric. Elvira looked at Oliver.

  ‘If we’re going to fiddle every evening away with that man, I’m going to get another feller.’

  Oliver was delighted. ‘I should have thought of it before I brought you here: every woman comes into her natural rights in Paris, her sexual rights.’

  She had a contralto laugh this evening. He flaunted her along the boulevard, till she marched into a café terrace; he sat down excited at her side, but when he had had two café-cognacs, he flushed and began to talk again, because he saw two Russian women, handsome and expensive Aphrodites, near them on the terrace. They could see on the building near them the title of the royalist Russian paper, Vozrozhdyony (renaissance).

  He waved his hand: ‘They say, What is the complete vozrajenie (repartee) to Stalinist bureaucracy? The advent of Fascism in Germany. Socialist mankind betrayed by the phrase-mongering and opportunist diplomacy of a clique-elected Barras—they complain of social-democracy! Let them sweep their own house clean first.’ The two women started to look Oliver over, coolly and guilefully, smiling, ignoring Elvira. Elvira murmured:

  ‘A lot they care for your Russian—it’s probably wrong. You’re a trick, aren’t you? I’ve noticed before the actor in you: you have to have an audience.’

  ‘I wasn’t acting,’ said Oliver earnestly. ‘I didn’t notice those women till you pointed them out.’

  ‘They seem to think differently.’

  ‘Everyone in Paris cares about politics—it’s the currency of the country. A girl will pretend to be anything you like, but won’t change the shade of her politics to please you: in that they’ll quarrel with their best clients. In England you go to Whig hotels, in France to S.F.I.O. whores.’

  Elvira pulled his sleeve; the women seemed indifferent, although more polished than before. They were talking quietly to each other and eyeing some rich men entering the café with the cool air of great ladies. Oliver, rosily drunk, took out his pocket-book and pretended to light upon a paper there.

  ‘Hello, I’d forgotten this!’ He laughed. ‘Listen to this, Elvira, some of my lucubrations: tell me if you can’t stand it, it’s pretty raw in some spots.’ He unfolded it and read:

  ‘On the Magdalenian stone

  In their glyptic, cryptic tongue,

  Palæolithic bard, engraver,

  Yearning gave her

  Name and pigment, flesh and bone,

  The steatopygous one:

  They to graving-bone are gone,

  None stay, save her,

  Fresher than yesterday’s scrawl

  On latrine wall.

  We wail at wall, bawl—

  Hail, outlived stale,

  Stupendous frail!

  Shadowfall, waterfall, deathfall,

  Have not served us at all, at all:

  You persist with your lids of anemone

  In the dead men’s agapemone;

  You remain with your bullocks and red men

  Down among the dead men;

  Alone alive, flesh-sucking, succulent, lusting saprophyte,

  Sallow angel of the night.

  You are she with diamond-pointed eyes

  In her grottoed catalepsis

  From her infundibular prison

  Carved her mystic harmonies

  On my eyes: I sit and yawn

  While through my blood and marrow creeps the sepsis

  And a fever-heat has risen.

  I sit and gape and yawn and I say, some night, some dawn

  Have seen her eyebuds slowly flower,

  The dark-sheeted, pale almond-buds with germinating centres:

  Centaur, satyr, ape; Kalang, Cro-Magnón!

  In the power of an hour,

  The shelter of a summer-shower:

  I shall be the same as the past experimenters—

  Food for dust—that is all!’

  His clarion voice, for which the vowels of the verse had been carefully chosen, had risen during the reading, and now not only the Russian women, but the other clients, the waiters on the terrace, and the cashier at the desk inside, were staring. The manager said, ‘Shh! Shh!’ Elvira’s face had a rare flush: she said in a strained whisper: ‘I thought Paris was fond of the arts,’ and cast a timid, would-be indignant glance at the head-waiter. She pulled Oliver’s sleeve as he looked at another sheet of writing.

  ‘Let’s go home, Oliver: you can read it to me there.’

  He was delighted.

  ‘You like it? It wasn’t too strong for you? You know to whom I am referring?’ She nodded and flushed again. He said:

  ‘I know, I know. When I first met you I thought, I want that woman always to talk to, to inspire me, to hear me out. You used to sit there all those evenings listening to those dull discussions of business and stupid personal philosophy, listening so well, winding the men out of their own hearts; and when you let some remark drop, it was always rounded, perfect, put with wisdom.’

  She pulled on her furred gloves.

  ‘Dear, I had no idea I was so dull. I’ve been a slowpoke all my life. You can make me over that way, too.’

  Elvira, who knew only high-school French, thought she heard the maid say to the valet, ‘It is a honeymoon, but they are not married,’ and when Oliver came back from buying a newspaper, eager to tell her the political news, he found her standing in a brown study between the curtains. She swayed towards him and he took a step towards her; they looked at each other in a blind way for a moment, and then Oliver held out the paper to her. She took it and sat down in the arm-chair, elaborately turning the pages. Oliver sat looking at her. It was only the fourth day of their passion.

  She suddenly laughed. ‘Why, I might be in my armchair at home by the fire, as I was five days ago!’

  Oliver laughed and waved his hand at the panelling, the curtains, the cornices of opposite houses, and then, leaning forward with darkening eyes, at himself. In the evening they dined in a Norwegian restaurant, and Elvira, after studying for some time the painted wall above them, with a picture of Vikings and the legend ‘Rolf Landgang i Frankrike,’ laid down her fork and murmured, ‘Oliver, I ought to write to Paul: he doesn’t even know where I am: he will worry.’

  Oliver laid his hand on hers. ‘He won’t worry yet: he knows you’re with me.’

  ‘I ought to let him know.’

  Oliver sighed and shook his dark young head, but he said kindly, ‘Then why don’t you telephone him?’

  Elvira brightened: ‘I’ll telephone him at home when we get back to the hotel.’

  In the hotel, after dinner, Oliver lay on the bed while she got her London call, and heard her explaining herself to her abandoned husband in a sad, intimate way. She did not even mention him. She said, ‘No, no, I’m not lonely, Paul; I am trying to find a way out.’ His heart
was beating to suffocation. He had dreamed for months of being her lover, and yet he could not be her lover in that strange room, in that strange city with the false telephone on the wall.

  In the morning he persuaded her to go to the Forest of Fontainebleau, and there they went before lunch and took a room in the Hotel of the Black Eagle (that is, Napoleon) which is near the Palace. In the freezing sunshine they went through the bare grounds where the blue and sepia forest, tall, thick and old, melted into the luminous alleys, and at hand a white swan swam half-congealed by the high clipped birches, and the falling fountain, suddenly frozen, glittered with its stalactites over the great frozen central basin. Not a blade of grass moved and not a bird flew down the perspective of the great water, but under thickety trees, officers and children skated with coloured cloaks and gloves over a pond. Beyond, dazzling and enchanted, lay the leafless forest. In it the pines alone were green. They drove through the forest, and from an eminence, for the first time, looked far north-east to the sullen, rolling boundaries of Burgundy. They skirted a stony, shallow valley, treeless, red and yellow, and arrived quietly in the ancient town of Moret, lying around its ruined abbey and beside the still pooly reaches of a fat river over which hang willows and the balconies and turrets of improbably romantic houses. Beyond a weir and the abbey it runs through the channels of the laundries and down under a great viaduct where lie the barges. Overhead in the blue sky passed the Blue Train, bound for the Mediterranean coast. They looked up at it, with linked arms, and smiled into each other’s eyes. Ever farther, farther south, seemed the promise and hope of romance. At midday nothing moved, and time alone went ambling ragged and in sabots, an idiot spectacle in that ancient village street, and passed unhailed by the wineshop and out of sight beyond the tumbling gate.

  They were so in love that afternoon that they returned from Moret by taxi and pulled down the blinds to stop even the winter sun from coming into their room. A year ago, in London, Oliver leaning over her ear in a room full of people, had murmured, ‘Last night I dreamed I heard you cry with love for me.’ She had often thought since that she would please him by an artifice, invent a little scene for him. This afternoon, when she awakened from a profound dream, she found Oliver looking at her in ecstasy, kissing her forehead and silky tangled hair and saying: