The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Yes, it isn’t fair: women are not really free,’ said Oliver.

  ‘The real thought of the middle-class woman,’ complained Elvira, ‘is the problem of economic freedom and sexual freedom: they can’t be attained at the same time. We are not free. The slave of the kitchen and bedroom. Even if you have a maid you’re supposed to be thinking about the cooking and linen. It ought to be done by people who make a job of it and leave the women with a good education free.’

  ‘There are plenty of women in laboratories, and in business, now.’

  ‘I’ve always been idle and useless,’ mourned Elvira. ‘It’s true, I could have gone on to do something. I came first in things often at school. I got my B.A. What good did it do? I was born that way. Other women would have gone on and made a career. When Paul came along, I wanted him to love me but I didn’t want to marry: I wanted to be myself, not a wife, with children. I wanted to do something creative: something—perhaps writing. I didn’t want just to turn into a bad incubator. I didn’t want to marry him, I just wanted to live platonically with him. But he wouldn’t. It gave me a shock: I thought it was so gross of him. Afterwards, of course, I felt differently. I was a bad wife to him. Yes, I was. Everything I have ever done was bad and inefficient. I never had anything out of life that I should have had. I’m pretty, and I didn’t have a good time. I’m intelligent, and I never did anything. I married, and I didn’t even have a proper home with children. I ran away with a lover, and I’m miserable. And it’s all my doing.’ She was crying: Oliver felt the tears on his hand now. ‘I am good for nothing,’ she said in a lamentable tone. ‘I might as well commit suicide. You wouldn’t miss me after a month. Paul doesn’t miss me now. Sara is going to keep house for him.’

  ‘Elvira, I can’t bear to hear you talk like that. You don’t mean it. You know that Paul loved you and I love you. And you have plenty of time to make a career and have children if you want them.’ He laughed, rousing her. ‘Cheer up; what’s all this? You’re depressed: it’s the—child perhaps.’

  ‘I suppose so, and I’ve been thinking what to do: I don’t know what to do. It’s that that upsets me so much. I’d rather decide to do anything than be like this, between wind and water. Somehow, though, I always seem to get into a sort of jam where I have to decide something momentous, and it tortures me. I was happy when I knew about the baby, because it seemed to have decided something by itself. But then, I began to think about you and the money and it all started again. Like a toothache. You’re lucky. You’re creating something. It sounds easy to you. But I never found self-expression. Perhaps I could have been a musician. But I haven’t got it. It’s something.’

  ‘I love you. Doesn’t that mean something to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ doubtfully.

  ‘It will work out all right in a little while, then. All those troubles you mentioned, even the disappointment in life you have, will disappear when our love grows and we settle down. We’ll have a fine life together.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She scanned the faces and get-up of every mother with a child, thinking, ‘I will be something like that.’ She saw this evening that they were dusty, drawn, violently fatigued and acid faces: the children looked like blobs of flesh, their clothing rubbishy. ‘Oh, not for me,’ she thought, and a slight nausea began in her. She thought of her eight long quiet home-years since she married Paul, her polished floors, washed carpets, recovered chairs, her new bed-linen which felt like silk, her underclothing of silk and lawn all put away in piles, her curtains, silver dressing-table ware, vases, doyleys, the olive, yellow and smoke-blue bedroom, the red and walnut dining-room, her work-basket with an olive silk bag. She thought of her soaps and cleansing materials always in stock, and her dusters neatly arranged, the coats hanging in their entry, the shawled trees waving against the sky in summer, the Adam window on the stairs through which she looked, whenever the stairs were untrafficked, dreaming like a child, watching the birds fly up beyond the curve. If she had a baby, she would have to have a home at least as large, a nurse who would sleep with it in a separate room, and look after the washing, the bottles. She could not have it in a hotel, with Oliver without a position. Her face suddenly grew firmer. She determined to go back to Paul, if he would have her, with the baby. It would be different at home then, and Oliver—Oliver would become a patient loving friend, coming to see them, taking her for walks. Sometimes she would go to his rooms, in memory of old times. He might marry, on the rebound—but he would come back: their friendship could not be broken that way. But if he married she could not see him as before. ‘Women have enough troubles,’ she said to herself. ‘I wouldn’t bother another married woman. Even Blanche, I wouldn’t take a man away from her. They know it instinctively, besides: that’s why they like me.’

  Oliver turned to her, smiling, patting her hand.

  ‘Wool-gathering, Elvira? Dreams for the future?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ she drawled, ‘thinking about us, about everything.’

  They went to the pictures that night. There was a moving picture of the well-worn prodigal wife pattern. Oliver wanted to leave half-way through it, when the erring wife showed signs of returning to her husband, but Elvira was absorbed. She came out elevated, convinced by the coincidence. Oliver began his usual raillery: ‘Gee, why don’t they think up a new story? I believe they have three since the wild west died, the sentimental hurdle-race, the repentant gold-digger, and historical heroics.’

  They went to a café for coffee, as they couldn’t get it at the hotel at that time of night. Since they were at Montparnasse and it was late, there were numbers of male and female prostitutes about. They sat opposite one and began a fuddled conversation about these unfortunate people, whether they began through hatred of work, or excessive sexuality, or early incest.

  ‘Exploited labour, that’s how I look at them,’ said Oliver. ‘I never could go to them, any more than I could sweat a workman.’

  ‘It’s all a formula,’ proposed Elvira. ‘You could exploit a woman in a house, making her wait on you and cook for you, turning her into an idiot with ideas about mouseholes and curtain-rods, while you wrote essays on labour-unions. It’s just the same, I see no difference.’

  ‘You’re right. Lord, how we adhere to our patterns! We gibber like marionettes in trite situations. All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor. There’s nothing new on earth—and how well you know it, life-sick child! What’s the matter with you, Elvira? Isn’t there anything that gives you hope?’

  ‘Human nature’s the same all over the world, if you aren’t taken in by poinsettias in the tropics and rainbows in the north to think it’s different.’

  After a silence, Oliver said: ‘In a way, you were happy at home, Elvira, weren’t you? You slept and had grey-footed dreams. And yet why did you come to me? Did you love me?’

  ‘I am a dead soul; life is too heavy for me to lift. I thought perhaps I just had to shrug it off as a snake shrugs off his old skin. Since I bore life in me I feel a will growing in me. But the will is the infant. When he is born, he will just leave me like an old skin. I shall be the same as before, limp, aimless. Why was I ever born? My mother fell down a trap-door in a cellar before I was born, and nearly miscarried. I wish she had. Then Paul would have found a simpler, more extrovert wife, and your student’s life wouldn’t have been spoiled. You could have had women who didn’t ask for too much: you could have lived cheerfully your selfish men’s lives. You hate responsibilities, and I am nothing but a responsibility. I ask for too much. None of you is as generous as he’d have to be with me.’

  Oliver looked down at her. ‘Dearest, you only lack something, that is all: you are pretty, a true woman, often witty and gay. You lack an aim. We’ll give you one. You’ll have your baby.’

  ‘Oh, I have no will,’ she murmured.

  He did not ask her about her o
wn affairs, and for a week she said nothing. But she was turning her disappointments over in her mind. Every night they walked out till late, and he discoursed about his essay, his discoveries in the Archives, and his plans when the essay was handed in. One evening she said nothing the whole evening, but he kept seeing her bitter, white, contained face under the lamps: another evening, she suddenly put her hand on his lips when they were a quarter of a mile from home, and said:

  ‘Now, don’t say a word until I tell you,’ and then had laughed, in childish hysteria.

  The last evening she suddenly cried: ‘You talk all the time and never think of me. I’ll go mad with your journeymen and rates of pay. What the devil does it mean to women? Then and now it’s just the same, the world isn’t made for them. Why don’t we all kill ourselves? Amuse yourselves with ephebes. Men used to like ephebes: they still do. Look at the way you admire those schoolgirls with breasts just starting and cropped hair. A passion for women before they become women, that is, for boys. You were talking aloud all through dinner to attract the attention of that little schoolgirl who can’t comb her hair properly. I don’t know what to do with myself. Let me go home; don’t follow me: let me go home.’

  Oliver took her arm, but she shook herself free, passionately.

  ‘Don’t dare follow me or I’ll scream: you’re not my husband, are you?’ She planted Oliver on the descending pavement of the Boulevard Raspail. He sat on a seat and watched her little hunched back go striding furiously until it was lost to sight half a mile down.

  Men and women going past looked at the beautiful youth with dejected face: he got up and walked towards a café at the corner, one where they were not known. Inside, the walls were covered with mirrors and oil-paintings, left for sale by struggling artists. He thought, ‘There are so many other and better troubles in the world than hers and mine: how the deuce do we get into this situation? It’s not a situation. It’s just nervousness. I have no experience.’

  A young woman beside him looked at him steadily. When he had drunk two half-litres of beer he felt more cheerful and began to scrutinise the café. A fair young girl was sitting alone, looking timid and lonely, reading intently to keep off the attentions of men sitting round. Oliver thought resentfully:

  ‘Elvira kicks me out: I’d get a better reception from that young thing: Elvira doesn’t know when she’s well off.’

  He laughed to himself. The young woman beside him struck up a conversation. They had a friendly hour sitting there, and when he got up to walk home, he laughed to himself all the way home at the way in which he would conquer Elvira’s melancholy and solve all their troubles. She was lying with wide eyes in the dark: she turned them on him without a word. He went to her and buried his head in the counterpane at her side.

  CHAPTER V

  Oliver returned from the great United Front meeting at the Mur des Fédérés on May 27 on foot, with a group of French workmen. He had been called ‘camarade’ so often during the day, had seen so many red flags and so many sinewy arms lifted into the air, had heard the ‘Internationale’ and ‘The Young Guard’ so often, that he was no longer himself, a piecemeal student grubbing on collegiate benches, but a glorious foot-soldier in an army millions strong, sure of battery, but sure of victory.

  He left the workmen near the Pont des Arts, and stood there in the cool breeze for a while, his cheeks burning and his chestnut hair on end. The sun setting gilded the windows of the Louvre; the dark chlorophyll had now filtered through all the trees of the Tuileries: the polished automobiles budged quickly towards the Champs Elysées like hard-shelled plant-bugs. Some of the trees along the Seine were thickly tapestried, and the air was full of floating pollen and small blown fluffs: the boulevard trees were all lace. The Île de la Cité, an enchanted city, with bastions and bridges, barges and shallops, called soundlessly downstream. On the brick quays men were still fishing for the Seine’s small fry, rust-trousered unemployed were bivouacking with small fires, an artist was painting the river-scene, and a dark-haired woman in her thirties was suckling a child. Oliver leaned over the bridge in a dream. His eyes wandered from the dome of the Académie Française to the enchanted isle, to the flittering fires, the oleaginous hues of the tide, and rested on the sand-coloured breast of the woman. ‘A woman is the least individual of creatures,’ he thought to himself. ‘To think, in the winter I shall have a child!’ He smiled to himself at the idea that if he took a boat then and there, and skipped to any South American port, to Canada or the South Seas, to Majorca or Egypt, he was free to go. ‘The solutions are so easy and we can’t take them. Fear, pride or indecision?’ He thought: ‘She takes it just as if it were natural, but for me it’s a new universe: so, I am sending my seed from generation unto generation, a man full of humility.’

  He was in his oldest clothes, striding with the tough easy stride of thousands of miles of walking, walking all through his life, to save money, for the pleasure of it, to school and back, to the University and back, to the houses of students he tutored and back, hiking in the week-ends. He thought: ‘I’d like to take a rucksack now and bum for two years. I’d come back a changed man. You can’t learn in libraries, you can only learn through men. To-day I’m a changed man. Can I go back to this fusty setting after this afternoon? What can I do with a house and a position? I’ll take a cattle-boat to Canada and go across the provinces in the summer: I’ll get across to the U.S.A. at Niagara and ride goods-waggons across to California, then down, Mexico and south. I’ll get mixed up in some good old South American fight and have a good time—perhaps get shot, but have a good time. Elvira will sit at home and nurse my child.’ He thought that the child would have dark eyes like his own and hers. ‘With those eyes,’ he thought, ‘she can get away with anything—she’ll never want for a home. Look how everyone befriends her, is sorry for her, runs around doing messages for her. It’s a gift. Paul will be her faithful slave till death—the big, tender, kind mug.’

  He leaned over the stone parapet of the quay again, under the rustling new leaves. In the distance the Seine curled by the Great Palace and the Trocadero towers towards the open green country beyond Saint-Cloud. ‘I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me: the reason I fled with a woman already married, bonded, was, I believe, an unconscious reasoning for liberty. A nous la liberté!’ He went on, whistling. The familiar café-terrace was planted with all the familiar heads, like red-flushed cabbages. He sat down to wait for Elvira, who had told him she had a late rendezvous with the hairdresser. Folded up in one corner, talking with an air of complicity to someone unknown, was a familiar form: he looked twice and recognised Marpurgo. When he tinkled on the sugar-basin to get service, the chisel-point eyes were fixed on him. Marpurgo came over.

  ‘Hullo, Fenton: I have a message from Mrs. Western. I went up to your room because the maid told me your key was not on the board. I met Mrs. Western coming down with two men. She introduced me to Mr. Paul Western’—his eyes questioned—‘and Mr. Adam Cinips. Cinips was Mrs. Western’s maiden name, I gather—her brother, it seems. She asked me to tell you that they had all gone to Mr. Western’s hotel, the Madison, to discuss personal matters.’

  He scanned Oliver’s face carnivorously. Oliver was so exalted that he could say joyously, although his heart had begun to pump hard:

  ‘Thanks very much. Will they come here after? Oh—won’t you sit down?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs. Western will meet you at the rue des Canettes restaurant alone, at 7.30 p.m.’

  ‘I see. What will you drink? Perrier?’

  ‘A brandy—I feel rather weak to-day. I was terribly excited over the United Front meeting. I walked miles and miles.’ He looked down, waiting to draw Oliver. ‘I’m afraid we Trotskyists proved to be good prophets: how is the United Front for temporising? Where is the pure revolutionary party now, the enemies of the social democrats? You’ll have another Germany yet in France, everyone a socialist, everyone confused, everyone, even the police chiefs and the post officials, communist
s, as in Bremen in 1844, and in a few years, hey presto! a Nazi paradise. I’m afraid we’re turning out to be the only true Left party.’

  Oliver, angry with the bearer of evil news, exploded with indignation.

  ‘Isn’t it better to have socialists and communists a majority in the parliament and the city council than to have a majority of foul Chiappe and his gangsters? We’re gerrymandered out of power. Paris is eighty per cent. red, but the boodle-barons swing the gavel. You pretend to be a socialist, even more Left than the Lefts, and that doesn’t appeal to you! I wish you had been where I’ve been to-day! That burning flood of enthusiasm, those red flags and red wreaths, like dripping blood at the trench where lie buried the thirty thousand dead of the Paris commune, would have sweetened the most acid misanthrope, and converted the most enraged traitor to the cause of the working class.’

  When he said the word ‘traitor’ he looked straight into Marpurgo’s eyes. Then he said more softly: ‘It makes you pass over all your own preoccupations, you forget your own silly little troubles, and ambitions, your own life with its single strand. I wish I had taken Elvira—but she felt sick.’

  Marpurgo changed the position of his chair slightly, sipped his brandy, and leaned forward on his snakewood gold-monogrammed stick, coughing. After he had refolded his silk handkerchief, also monogrammed, he said:

  ‘Curious what women will do! H’m. No shillyshallying, although we men accuse them of having no minds of their own. They go straight to the point. Jettison useless baggage, situations, men—they know their own business, the receipts and security business.’

  ‘Instinct of self-preservation and race-preservation,’ said Oliver.