The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Now you have opened your eyes at last! I have never been so happy in my life as this last hour.’

  ‘I must have fallen asleep!’

  He shook his head and continued to contemplate her. They were as united as twins that suck at the same breast. He said often, ‘Now I know what had to be,’ or ‘If I had not met you it would have had to be another like you.’

  They could only stay in Fontainebleau a week. They heard that Trotsky was living incognito in Barbizon. This displeased Oliver, and the brown twiggy forest road, along which amazons sometimes rode, heard his partisan acerbities.

  One day she put her hand to his lips. ‘I hate politics, Oliver.’

  He pointed with a grim smile to the Palace, in whose grounds they walked. ‘You are different from me: that nonpareil recalls to me the ruined people that built it. I look at nothing without asking, whence, why, whither?’

  ‘Under socialism, you’d never have a thing as beautiful as that,’ said the woman. ‘Life would be robbed of beauty. You would have everywhere clinics for consumption and workmen’s accidents. I prefer it this way. Look how lovely it all is! See how happy we are! Could we be so happy in a planned city with hospitals, factories, laboratories and playgrounds, and people everywhere? How beautiful is this silence, even this melancholy isolation! I love the decay of this palace, this tomb closed on so many rowdy centuries. The sunrise and sunset are the only fires these panes that glitter now see…I love decay,’ she cried restlessly, with tears in her eyes. ‘I hate that athletic, gymnasium world of oudarniks you want to build.’

  ‘And I couldn’t be bothered working at all if I didn’t believe in the edification of socialism. I am a man, I want to join the front ranks of the first men of our time: I want to work marvels and see the future.’

  ‘Over the top of a barricade,’ sneered Elvira. ‘Oh, you are a boy still, Oliver. Over the top of a barricade you only look into the ends of the rifles of the republican guard. Pop goes the weasand! A lot of good you’ve done for yourself and the rest of—humanity! You say socialism must come, don’t you?’

  ‘It must come.’

  ‘If it must come, why should you bother about it? And if it won’t come now, what’s the use of your messing your life up? No one will thank you for it, and you’ll only get your family into trouble. Your family sent you to the university: you ought to think of them too.’

  ‘I paid for my own way with scholarships and tutoring,’ said Oliver with pride.

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t help to keep them.’

  He bit his lip. ‘If you must know, Elvira, I used to do what I could, too. It’s only this last year that I’ve blossomed out a bit. I earned more—and,’ he fawned on her, suddenly brimming with love, ‘I wanted to get you.’

  ‘So you’re not so inflexible and heroic,’ she laughed.

  ‘Not when you’re concerned.’

  ‘Heavens, I’m glad. I’m not at all heroic, you know: I like marshmallows and ice-cream sodas. I wouldn’t give up my afternoon porto for the proletariat. And neither would you.’

  He kissed the tips of her fingers. ‘You’re such an idiot, I have to love you. I’m going to have to give you a strenuous study course.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she cried. ‘Again! I only ask one thing: promise it.’

  ‘When I hear it.’

  ‘Promise you’ll give up being my Messiah.’

  He laughed frankly. ‘All right, I promise to let you go on being your own little dud self—for a while.’

  They returned to Paris. The sun shone everywhere with promise of an early spring. The year before had been hopeful and fine, but this year had begun with a tempest of political troubles and accidents: the clouds had broken about Christmas, and still there were showers, thunder and lightning. The funeral of Vuillemin, the communist youth killed in a fight with the police, took place with many thousands of mourners in fighting mood. Oliver was on tenterhooks. He was late getting home, and Elvira was always frightened that he had got into a fight or been taken to a police-station by the police to have his papers examined. If they made enquiries about his home-address they would find out about her. She had no courage at all. As it was they looked at her curiously. She had telegraphed Paul her address and kept receiving anxious telegrams from him. ‘Are you safe? ‘Is there fighting in your quarter?’ ‘Don’t you think you should get out of Paris?’ ‘How can you stay there alone? Come home.’

  Paul had not understood that she was with Oliver Fenton. She was alternately pleased and piqued to learn this. Meanwhile Oliver was calculating that Paul would divorce her and that they would be married, say, within a year, at any rate, before he would have to take a position. Paul might like to spare her, establish domicile in Paris and divorce her there in secret.

  ‘Even if Paul gets bitter and makes a public affair out of it,’ said Oliver to Elvira, ‘we will stand together. I will get a job myself. I will take a clerk’s job—anything. We’ll get along. I’ve never feared the future, and with you behind me all will be well. Love has a first option on our lives. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of going to see the Fuseaux brothers, Marpurgo’s bosses. I’d like to get in there, but I suspect a little psychological difficulty…’ He smiled.

  ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘A little: I’m as good at Marpurgo’s game as he is. He doesn’t want me to get too close to the brothers.’

  Elvira looked happy and urged him to take Marpurgo out to dinner by himself. They walked along the streets, looking into the antique-shops, at the old lace. Oliver bought a book on mechanical tulles and laces. He said, ‘It’s of immense help to me in my essay, too. I’ll bring in the struggles and early disorganisation of the Lyonnais and Calais workers.’ He pressed her arm. ‘I should never have thought of this without you, and, do you know, I believe I’m on the right path. What plums do the academic woods promise to young men to-day? You’ve got to be conformist to earn your salary, and conformity is stultifying. In business no one asks questions: you can believe what you like as long as you bring in a profit.’

  That seemed an ideal solution of the question to Elvira. She told him for the first time that she was happy she had come to Paris.

  They often rose at twelve or two in the afternoon. On the next Sunday they walked down from the little hotel on the Boulevard St. Germain, to the Île de la Cité, through the bird market where was a crowd looking at the birds, fish and kittens, and some poor householders, unemployed boys and old women with grey hair and black aprons trying to sell their pet cats or canaries in cages. Single goldfish hung artificially in bowls as big as tennis-balls. They remarked that the French resembled the Chinese in a variety of ways: economy of space, time, money, the first three and the fourth and fifth dimensions, respectively, in their neighbourliness, love of clipped gardens, formal music, polished prose, manners, and making of silk and embroideries. It was a fine cloudy cool afternoon, with the twigs swelling now at their tips, but no one yet out and the river grey, windblown, swollen but now free of ice. Notre-Dame stood vigorous and burgherly in the clean square, its sculpture purple, yellow and bronze in the fresh river airs.

  Round the empty central markets the many small shuttered streets, with barred cellars and store-rooms smelling of cheeses, fish and vegetables, and littered pavements, sent the air careering to the rain-washed sky. The sun came out more brilliantly, and the prostitutes who had the good fortune to have their regular beat on the sunny side of the streets loosened their furs with gratitude and became more nonchalant. In the shadow a corpulent one-legged girl with a cotton stocking propped herself on her crutches against a greengrocer’s door, a few steps from her hotel in a cold, blasty passage. When they looked back, the girl was tapping down the street with a man, while her whole and satined sisters tapped their high heels impatiently in the sun. It was damp underfoot and cold. Elvira was drowsy. They passed a young white-skinned prostitute, and Oliver said, ‘Did you notice that girl? She must have begun at fourteen: how young she is!’ />
  ‘They all begin at fourteen, or twelve, or younger,’ drawled Elvira. ‘Why not? To be thirteen and to know men must be a pleasure, whatever comes after.’

  He smiled down at her—he was only an inch taller. ‘You would have liked that? Yes, you are sorry you weren’t married at fourteen.’ He held her arm, hand in his, and she felt his muscles tightening. Her laugh dropped out like ruby liquid from a glass.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, how you must have regretted having to wait for Paul till you were twenty-one,’ insinuated Oliver.

  She said with feeling: ‘Oh, I did.’

  ‘You must be sorry for all those years when every night might have been a loving-night,’ he insisted.

  She said nothing.

  ‘How many nights? From fourteen to twenty-one—7 × 365, you were born in 1905, 20 was a leap year, 1924 also, 2,557 nights, that is plus two leap-year nights. Oh, and to think of all the girls lonely in their beds all those same years and all the other years, so many thousand years of lost nights! What a calculation for a bachelor, for a half-fledged boy groaning over his homework, for a country boy snuffing in the rich odours of the paddocks! For a boy slouching along the pavements and wondering if he can bear to go without supper so that he can buy that young street-girl on Friday night!’

  Elvira laughed now again: ‘Don’t talk about it: I don’t want to think about it.’

  Oliver went on: ‘To count all the days of our lives in which we are robbed of one desire or another? A lifetime of fulfilment can’t make up for a lifetime of such repression. Every time I have a desire, I know I have been cheated all my life: every time I am satisfied, I am afraid of the next moment which will bring me back to desirous discontent.’

  She pulled his sleeve petulantly. ‘I don’t want to walk any more, Oliver: I’m not as young as you, don’t forget: don’t forget you’re five years my junior!’

  He touched his head, taking off his hat. ‘And those grey hairs?’

  They sat down in a café in the Boulevard de Sébastopol and drank a vermouth. In the gutter a man cooked chestnuts in a stove. At hand, within the glass shelters, the café stoves with their perforated ostrich necks sent veins of heat through the cold air of the passages. An old Jew in a greenish cap with metal visor, clad in a torn overcoat bought in some rag fair, which he wore with the same fold and stoop as his cassock in Poland lately discarded, stood for some minutes, humbly, merrily obtrusive beside the stove and joked with the smart-tongued young waiter.

  ‘Spring is coming,’ said Oliver. ‘Can you believe that spring will not be coming for ever? Can you believe that spring will come, summer too, autumn and winter? We will have to go away from here eventually! And never return.’

  ‘Why think about it, now?’ asked Elvira. ‘I’ll have another vermouth. Garçon! La même chose.’

  Oliver looked at her with admiration: in a few days she had learned all the tricks of the café, how to ring with her spoon, how to call out an order across the terrace without being loud, the right phrases, even the right intonation—at least for drinks.

  ‘You’re a smart girl, Elvira,’ he said.

  She spoke over the lip of the amber-filled glass: ‘Does that surprise you? Am I different now from what I was?’

  His long dark lips and little new dark moustache curled round his white teeth. ‘No: only—more than I ever knew you were. Oh, I got the great prize in the lottery.’

  ‘You said that before!’

  ‘Yes: it is in a German tale called Immensee, I read at school.’

  She teased: ‘All you know is from school.’

  He drooped his head: ‘I am only a scholar: there is plenty of wastepaper in my existence.’

  She began to triumph, and raised her round chin.

  ‘I hate the sight of ink, it is so stale with all the platitudes it has written, and yet I only feel really myself when I have a pen and ink in hand and am scribbling, scribbling over reams: that was—till I met you. Then I changed.’

  Her full lower lip drooped insolently. ‘We don’t change.’

  He caught her tone, hurriedly. ‘With you, I will change. I will look back to this great spring all my life: when we first joined hands and began to walk along the crazy pavement with flowers and moss coming through all the cracks.’

  ‘How suburban!’ cried Elvira. ‘I was in Hampstead the other day: in front of one of the richest houses was a crazy pavement: they paid about £35 for it, doubtless. The man who would have done it best was in an asylum: he would have done it for nothing, happy to do it. They employed a sane man to do it, and the more there is of it, the more dull and plain it looks, just an expanse of conventional craziness, looking as stupid as a neanderthal skull. That’s the suburbs all over. That’s what we are, you see: suburban, however wild we run. You know quite well, in yourself, don’t you, two people like us can’t go wild? Still it’s nice to pretend to, for a while.’

  ‘For a while,’ he echoed, and going a little pale. ‘Why, you strange woman: as if you were playing in a play!’

  ‘So we all are, people like us,’ she repeated with dull contentment. ‘We are not fire and dew.’ She laughed. ‘I’m getting a little squiffy, I believe: fire and dew. From me.’

  He began speaking rapidly. ‘Elvira, you are a little squiffy, and I hope you remain that way. Oh, you’ve been sewed up in household dusters, and frozen up in cold and sooted up in that dark London house of yours. You’re a mummy. I’ll have to dig and dig till I find the crooked secret passage to your soul, and then I’ll dig it out and carry you all off, jewels too. This is your spring, this spring, this is your feast of life beginning, your new adolescence, you will not miss any nights now: every one will be gemmy with bright lights and loving eyes and stars and kisses: you’ll know what you ought to have been. You are such a beautiful woman, but you act as if your beauty were only a mask over some embalmed body, like the painted faces over the sleeping princesses in their mummy-cases.’

  She saw he was not looking at her but talking himself into a mood. Her large eyes searched every lineament in his face, as if she would extract all the truth and conviction she could from him now he had roused her. He looked and found tears in her eyes.

  ‘Dear girl.’

  ‘I am alone in the world.’

  ‘What do you say? What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t deceive myself.’

  ‘If you left me, I’d die. I couldn’t bear it. It’s I who am alone.’

  ‘Men don’t commit suicide from love.’ She laughed cruelly.

  A handsome dude, strolling in with an independent air, looked her over coolly and murmured, ‘Oh, the beauty!’ as he passed, too low for Oliver to hear.

  She flushed with beauty.

  ‘Oliver, I think I’ll have another vermouth. It’s so pleasant here. I like the café-life, don’t you? Why don’t we have them in London? Garçon! Encore un vermouth!’

  He was happy.

  ‘You like Paris, then? You’re not sorry you came? Don’t you remember how I had to persuade you to come, and how frightened you were that people would look at us, or that we would meet someone we knew! Now, what do you think?’

  His dark face, his young brown eyes, now bent upon her, made her smile; drinking her third vermouth, she said with a sudden warm slippery speech, as if she had found her tongue for the first time in her life:

  ‘Oliver, I like you because you’re so naïve: you really don’t know what life is like, and you never will.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not showing you what life is like? A little child shall lead them. The pleasure of innocence! Oh, what would Paul say if he knew we were so innocent?’

  She nodded her head like a mandarin. ‘Paul is the real innocent: he would say nothing. He is so good that I am sure he expects to win everything by kindness. Do you think there are people who believe that? Paul does. He expects to get me back by kindness: he expects to shame you by kindness. Oh dear, dear, and you’re so cruel!’

&nb
sp; Oliver suddenly put his hand in his pocket and hailed the waiter. They walked out on to the pavement, and after a few paces got into a perambulating taxi. In the taxi Oliver squeezed her hand, put her head on his shoulder, and said, ‘You are quite drunk, my dear.’

  She gave a bubbling laugh: ‘I never felt so gay in all my life: light-headed as if a vent’l—ventilating shaft went up through my head: a flock of doves could carry me off through the air on a net. Oh dear, I am drunk. What would Paul say?’ She kept laughing all the way home and saying, ‘Oliver, can you imagine what Paul would say? Oh dear, can you imagine me coming home drunk in Mecklenburgh Square?’

  When she was lying on the divan in their room, Oliver went downstairs to get the evening papers. He rubbed shoulders for a while with the quick-walking crowds on the boulevards, going home from work, and for a moment thought, ‘What a lazy beggar I am! But what the hell—I’ll only be in Paris once.’ He walked up the rue de Rennes towards Montparnasse station and back again. He stopped at a bar and drank another vermouth, only his second. He walked more slowly, looking up at the rose-aproned sky. A great joy seemed to be nesting in his heart: it rose up and shook out its feathers as evening advanced; he even heard the cheeping of the newly-hatched egglings. ‘What a happy man, that ever this should have come to me!’ He realised his lips were moving: a woman passing looked at him. He smiled at her, full of love for all women. She had a black shopping-bag with a piece of pumpkin and an onion in it. He thought: ‘When Elvira is running my house, we will be happy.’ A young girl went past with make-up on; he thought: ‘I must get Elvira to use a little rouge when she is pale.’ He suddenly realised that he must go to the Bank in the morning. It was time they settled down. If Paul was coming to Paris, too, he should have a dovecote for Elvira’s soft-bosomed heart. He sat down in a café and wrote to a friend in London to ask if he could get reviews, or a Paris letter, and offered him the usual commission, 10 per cent on articles he placed for him. He took home the rouge and watched Elvira making herself up.