The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘That is Oliver, the young man I ran away with,’ explained Elvira.

  Blanche approved. ‘He is marvellously handsome: and your husband, not so good-looking, I suppose?’

  ‘But you must not tell anyone. I don’t know why I told you. I am upset. We pretend to be husband and wife.’

  ‘Naturellement,’ approved Blanche.

  After Blanche had drawn out all there was to know of Elvira’s story, and saw Elvira beginning to regret it acutely, she changed the subject.

  When Oliver came back for lunch, mad with enthusiasm about the United Front meeting at the Mur des Fédérés, to take place a few days later, on the 27th, Blanche took another apéritif at his invitation and, while attributing to Tardieu political and financial genius and proclaiming herself a good Catholic and a good Royalist, parbleu, if the king ever returned (which she thought improbable), caricatured richly Chiappe, ‘this little Napoleon of the garbage-tins of the city council’; on the other hand, she excused the pranks of the rioting Royalist students on the ground that ‘these are only children, one does not lock up children,’ and detested the young working men of Ménilmontant and Sébastopol, ‘these rascals, blackguards, jealous impotents. Are we not in a republic,’ she cried, ‘where every man has his chance? More’s the pity. One sees dirty types in the Government. One sees reds, Jews and freemasons.’

  Oliver argued with her good-humouredly, and she was presently reduced to saying:

  ‘Well, old thing, it will be a long time before the reds produce a Velasquez: propaganda has nothing to do with art.’

  Oliver laughed, and when she said she could stand a bite, they all went off to the restaurant des Marronniers, near the Ministère, where Blanche’s brother met her for lunch every day. The brother was a lively little fellow with bright brown eyes and a moustache, full of cheap puns and a merry giggle. He treated Blanche with the greatest courtesy, and they rolled their eyes at each other amorously at every joke he made. His name was Frédéric. She called him ‘Fred’ in English, to be chic. He was excessively formal with Elvira and said ‘Madame’ at every second sentence. He seemed to think Oliver a good joke. He had the mind, manners, vivacity and spitfire good-humour of a public-gardens sparrow. Although he was a poor clerk, he had saved up enough money to buy two properties in the rue de la Goutte-d’Or, a slum street under the Sacré-Coeur. He was a freemason, and laughed at priests and at the miracles at Lourdes in which Blanche professed to believe. They wrangled good-humouredly about it during lunch. Blanche ended by saying:

  ‘Happily my little Blanche is not here: thou wouldst be ashamed to say such filth in her presence.’

  ‘Fred’ giggled:

  ‘Ah, the little Blanche is a belle: one would not talk religion with her: one might think of giving her her “first communion.”’

  ‘Ah, thou hast no shame!’

  After lunch Blanche accompanied Elvira back to her hotel, with the familiarity of an old friend. Oliver went off to his books again. Blanche went upstairs with Elvira, took a bath in her bathroom and made her tell her all about her husband Paul, what he looked like, how much he earned and what their home was like in London. When she heard that he was a doctor and that Elvira had £200 a year income, she became more intimate than ever, held Elvira’s hand and said:

  ‘Really, you are romantic! And Oliver did not hesitate to break up your home? But it suits him very well to have a—friend—with an income! But I see now. Will you marry him, your Oliver?’

  ‘I suppose I have to, anyhow.’

  Elvira had presently told her about her infant, too. Blanche held up her hands in horror.

  ‘But, my little one, that cannot be! Not yet. You are not sure. Never make the mistake of letting a thing like that decide you. Never, never! Life is too serious and too short. If you soon find you want to go home to your husband, you cannot ask him to accept this Oliver’s child. A respectable woman cannot do that.’

  ‘But Paul is different.’

  ‘No man is different. You would lose him entirely. He would hate you and it and take a mistress. I know—a friend of mine—…’

  ‘What am I to do?’

  Blanche made some suggestions. They arranged to meet again the next day before lunch. Elvira said impulsively:

  ‘I’m glad I met you: French women are so human. I was in such a tangle. I really didn’t know what to do next.’

  Blanche laughed and kissed her, calling her ‘my darling.’

  When Oliver met her in the café that afternoon, Elvira was full of enthusiasm about her new friend. To please her, Oliver said:

  ‘Demimondaines are not ashamed of themselves here, are they? I walked with Frédéric to the Ministère. He was telling me about a tenant of his on the sixth floor, the attic of one of his buildings. She’s a whore. He tells me the concierge is a friend of hers and was telling him last time he was there: “This poor dove is nearly starving: she is doing no business at all owing to unemployment: I took her some soup the other evening.” By God, at any rate it shows a deep humanity that no winter of cruel respectability freezes. She’s a human being, isn’t she? Good, then she needs soup if she’s cold and hungry. And to think that my own aunt, a good, kind woman, a working-woman, turned a servant of hers out into the winter when she found she was pregnant. And she’s a Christian woman, famous throughout the neighbourhood for the help she gives to people.’ Oliver almost spat. ‘Where there’s an aristocracy, we all become aristocrats and let our neighbour be damned if he doesn’t suit.’

  ‘At the same time,’ said Elvira, ‘the married woman has here a status she has nowhere else on earth. You wear black, you talk gruffly and rudely, you know how to order red and white wine for a dinner, and you’re queen of the earth. I call that status with a vengeance. Why? Because they bring their husbands little bits of property. Well—this is the place for me. I’ll let it be known I have £200 a year, and they’ll respect me. The servants in the hotel are quite rude: on account of the riots, I suppose. Did I do them any harm? I’m a bourgeois, but can I help it? They can’t blame me for the money my father made by his hard work. Isn’t it their ideal to have a little rente? Even Blanche d’Anizy only dreams of that. That chambermaid this morning was quite impertinent. I hate it. You’d think they knew we weren’t married.’

  Oliver laughed. ‘You wear a wedding-ring, but you don’t run an apartment and you have no furniture. That’s the European ideal. Blanche d’Anizy can be ten times the whore—they will respect her more if she has an apartment and furniture, than you, were you ten times married. Oh, you funny little bourgeois bunch of forget-me-nots. You cling ferociously to respectability, you won’t climb down a millimetre, and yet you’re wickedly delinquent.’ He laughed at her consumedly while Elvira got red.

  ‘I hate their money-philosophy,’ grumbled Elvira.

  Oliver laughed still. ‘I like it: it’s frank. You know where you stand. The class struggle is expressed in one simple common denominator: no chance of fooling them. Every revolution has come after a levy. Make the poor figure their resources, and then they revolt.’

  Elvira scolded. ‘No one would think you were born in Nottingham. You ought to have been born in Ménilmontant. You’re a blessed expatriate.’

  ‘You think I’m naïve, don’t you?’

  ‘Very.’

  Oliver grasped her hand and kissed it. They sat looking into each other’s eyes and the waiter took care not to come near them. Presently Oliver called a taxi as if they could not wait to get home. In the taxi Elvira said: ‘You’re right. Let’s take a furnished apartment. I suffer under this disrespect.’

  Light-spindles from the lacquered automobiles rolling past outside ran round in a half-circle: a golden reflection, an inch broad, fell between the drawn curtains and moved drowsily over the furniture, dusting it with gold. In the cool of the evening they came down again and sat on the terrace of the Café d’Harcourt, looking at the first olive tatters of the trees. They soon walked on again, shawled in the delicious tis
sues of the air.

  Blanche d’Anizy was sitting on the terrace when they passed, with a pretty young American girl with auburn hair and five men, whose professions, in Elvira’s haunting of the café, she had learned, but whose names were unknown to them—three journalists, a young American rentier, a gynaecologist of sixty who looked like, and was, a fearful rake. Blanche waved to them casually and immediately bent forward to talk to her group in French: as they turned the corner, they saw the heads turn their way.

  ‘I didn’t see her lover there,’ said Oliver with interest.

  Elvira smiled satirically: ‘Oh, one just pays her rent: the others just try to get her places, write up Press notices for her, buy her apéritifs and see that she gets regular meals…the dress-man, hat-man and lingerie-man are not there—or else they’ve lost their jobs and she’s looking for others.’

  Oliver stared at her. ‘Gee, Elvira: you’re a woman after all. That’s the first time I’ve heard you say a catty thing: I always told myself I had never heard you say or seen you do a mean or unrefined thing.’

  ‘And now you have!’

  ‘Of course not. She obliged with her life-history. It doesn’t seem to be a secret. I suppose it’s quite true.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true.’

  He was silent for a while; ‘Elvira, I oughtn’t to get you into company like that: you ought to have friends of your own sort…’

  ‘She’s a woman and she’s got sense. I admire the way she battles through. You sound a bit narrow.’

  He admitted humbly: ‘I did sound rather narrow; it’s just old prejudice.’ He added after a moment: ‘All the same, she’s out for herself. I wouldn’t like her to bother you, Elvira.’

  ‘I’d like to see her,’ said Elvira.

  He stared at her again. ‘Bravo! If that isn’t applied democracy! You mean to say you don’t feel any difference between her and you?’

  ‘Why should I? Because she lives off men? Don’t I? Paul, my father first, then you if we get married…’

  His eyes darkened. ‘If? When. It’s wicked of us, it destroys the freedom of your sex, but it is such a pleasure to work for a woman you love: no wonder women live on men. I never knew why: I was a hard-headed, cutting, cruel rationalist when I was a boy. I was a boy till I met you…’

  She tightened her hold on his arm to make him stop speaking: she continued… ‘You like a person irrespective of where or how you find them: you can perhaps make a friend of your washerwoman and hate your own cousin.’ Her brow darkened while she made this oracular statement: Oliver peered at her, said nothing, but took her small oval hand in its grey kid glove. They arrived at a little café newly-installed, the Cosmos, and sat down to sample the springing of its red leatherette benches and glass inlaid tables.

  ‘Two Campari with grenadine.’

  They both got warmly, gaily, and definitely fuddled on this strong drink, and presently went to the cheap little restaurant in the rue des Canettes. Half-way through, Oliver, loving, pressing, smirking, got out of his coat pocket a sheaf of papers—copies of proclamations which he had copied down at the Archives that day.

  ‘What do you think of this?’

  She read it: the first formation of a tulle-makers’ union in Calais. With glee he pointed out the mayor’s proclamation preparing for riots, the formation of a voluntary militia by the local worthies. She read the papers with the patience of a good girl-scholar and then gently put them down.

  ‘It’s very interesting. I’ll read them, Oliver, when I finish this. I’m afraid it’ll get cold.’

  After dessert, during coffee, he forced them on her again. She read the first page obediently, found it prolix, skimmed the next few pages, picked out a passage to praise and please him. She suddenly thought that in his half-drunk irresponsibility he had let his secret out—he wanted to impress her with his scholarship, show her that his scholastic future would make him the equal of Paul, if not his superior. His radical speeches, more frequent than necessary, were to offset Paul’s old-fashioned conservative Liberalism. He vaunted his youth because Paul was fifteen years his senior. He said, ‘We young ones, we of the new world, we of the post-war world, we who were at school when the war was on, we who never knew what it was to worship a Fabian…of course, I was five when the war broke out…’ The last time, yet unconscious of his reason for saying this, she had impatiently replied, ‘Don’t forget I was ten then, and a big girl: it makes a gulf between us.’ Since then he had dropped that set of references. Then her deduction was correct. She thought scornfully: ‘I can’t go living all my life with Paul—by negatives…’ Her eye roamed over his impassioned face and beaming eyes, and she relented. ‘He doesn’t know my doubts: he’s mine: poor boy, dear boy…’ She let him take her hand under the table. He said ardently, although the eye of the cashier was on them: ‘Do you love me, darling?’

  ‘Yes, Oliver.’

  ‘Oh, my dear.’

  ‘Shh, behave: she’s looking at us.’

  ‘Let her look: she’ll know we’re lovers.’

  Elvira flushed and withdrew her hand. ‘No, no don’t.’

  When they got home she showed him Paul’s letter. He read it a long time, in silence, and said sadly:

  ‘He loves you, Elvira.’

  ‘If you call that love: I suppose it is, though.’

  ‘What does he mean by circumstances? Er—you haven’t told him about me yet?’

  ‘No: why start trouble? It’ll come soon enough. When he gets used to my being away I’ll tell him.’

  Oliver moodily unfolded his evening paper, the Journal des Débats; presently, with his usual brightness, he showed her a literary criticism.

  ‘Gods, you’ve got to admit their literary style is the first in Europe.’

  She looked at him for a few seconds and seemed to fall into a contemplation: she was drowsy and could hardly sit upright. A voice came from her mouth by itself.

  ‘I shall have to tell him soon.’

  A startled voice exclaimed:

  ‘Why will you have to?’

  Her dreamy voice went on:

  ‘Oliver, it would be fearfully inconvenient if we had a baby, wouldn’t it?’

  He flushed slowly and came forward, examining her. He sat down beside her and took her hands.

  ‘My dear!’

  He kissed her hair, forehead, ears, eyes, hands, knelt beside her and buried his head on her knee. ‘I have never known what it is to love you till this minute.’

  He kept looking at her as if he were seeing her in a becoming new dress that flattered her shape, as they moved about the room getting ready for bed. He said: ‘I can hardly believe it, it is like a dream. I sit in the library, fiddling with matters four generations old, and you are here making the new generation.’

  He began to ponder. When she saw that, her face fell and she nodded to herself. When the light was out, she murmured:

  ‘It would be foolish to have a baby now.’

  He drew her close to him. ‘Although we can’t have it now, it makes no difference; it only means that henceforward you are more to me than a beloved woman—you are a mother: you can bear me children.’ She was so quiet that he thought she had already fallen asleep.

  Two days later, when they were reckoning up their accounts, she said:

  ‘This morning I asked Blanche d’Anizy’s advice: she is going to find me a first-class sage-femme. So you don’t have to worry. She is going to tell her that I am a student here and haven’t much money. It will cost about 500 francs. Paul sent me a thousand in his letter.’

  ‘Why did you ask Blanche d’Anizy?’

  ‘What other friend have I here? She knows all about these things: in such things I could not find a better friend.’

  ‘All right: but be sure she finds a good woman: I can’t let anything happen to you,’ he said helplessly.

  She sat with bowed shoulders, looking darkly at the window curtains.

  ‘We must arrange for meals to be brought to me: I am go
ing tomorrow, with Blanche. I’ve already given her the 500 francs to give to the woman. It is illegal: they all risk gaol sentences: you have to be secret. They won’t do it if a witness is there, a man, for instance.’

  She looked at him with a faintly-curling lip. She told him all that would have to be done. He looked a little crushed. She said with a childish, pathetic pride: ‘When you come home from the Archives tomorrow, come upstairs: I shall be in bed.’

  ‘Poor love: how long will it be, three days?’

  ‘A month.’

  He started. ‘No! Does it have to be like that?’

  ‘It’s their method: an easy one, they say.’

  He looked quite nervous. She looked round the room, tormented, and cried out:

  ‘Oh, Oliver, how can I stay in this miserable gloomy room a month? I feel now as if the four walls were pressing down on me: I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’ She ended in a moan. He comforted her: in the dark of his shoulder she sobbed again: ‘I’m all alone in the world: Paul doesn’t want me now, you don’t want my child.’

  He drew her away from his shoulder, looked at her. ‘It’s yours: you can have it if you want to: whatever is yours, I’ll cherish.’

  She began to pace up and down the room; she finally sat down in a chair where she could look at him from a distance. A smile crept round the corners of her mouth, she began to smile, to laugh, her shoulders began to shake, and she said in a low, rippling voice:

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, it’s so funny.’ She went on giggling.

  He stared at her. ‘What’s funny, Elvira?’

  ‘Oh dear, I just remembered that dream you had, when you dreamed I was the Madonna: oh dear, and you found it came true. Oh dear!…’ She held her chest, catching for breath, writhing in her chair, her muscles snapping like a sparking wire, leaning over in her lap and dropping tears of hilarity, her mouth disfigured, her eyes beginning to widen, her soft dun brow flushing, her hair entangled. Oliver stared at her leaning forward, on his hands ready to spring up.

  ‘Elvira, don’t: you’re hysterical.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!…’ she managed to say. ‘Oh, it’s too funny: I can just see your face…Oh, oh, oh!…your dream…come…true…’ She began to be shaken by spasms of laughter, more like electric shocks than laughs: her face was drawn now, now merry, her mouth dribbled, her wide open eyes were full of tears: she gaped and grinned.