The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Witty concretisation,’ commented Marpurgo.

  ‘Elvira got her M.A. with honours,’ confirmed Paul.

  ‘And you came to some arrangement?’

  ‘She is coming to stay in the hotel to-night, in order to make up her mind,’ said Paul doubtfully. ‘She has to make arrangements with—this boy. It’s only fair, I suppose. She didn’t tell me about him. I suppose she was afraid to hurt me too much.’

  ‘It must have been rather a shock to you?’

  ‘Several times my letters to her were returned, which surprised me. I should have guessed. Yet—why? She never looked at another man. She was so chaste: infolded. She told me she would rather think of me as her brother than her husband.’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ submitted Marpurgo.

  ‘I am afraid it must be.’

  Adam came lounging back.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else. After all, we’re not in Paris every day of our lives. Marpurgo, you know this metropolis of sin. You look like the father of lies himself. Let’s explore.’

  Marpurgo ignored him.

  ‘Did they—she—tell you anything about—their life here?’

  ‘Very little. It seems he works in the Archives and reads her the political news, and she does nothing at all. She sits in cafés. I am still getting over the shock. What else is there?’

  ‘Well,’ demurred Marpurgo. ‘Well, you must not take it that we are close friends. I met Mrs. Western on the train coming here, by hazard of contiguity. I always assume that fate has a joker in every pack she deals. I worship derivation of drama, the genetics of intimacy, at heart a boy, though through flaws in God’s fabric a misanthrope—the pterodactyl Death overshadowing me seems to poke his transparent digit at the core of every man. This notwithstanding—no, because of this, I chafe those abrasions of the spiritual cutex we call chance acquaintance. Thus I met your wife. But early recognised the lady was no hand-fed one-girl harem, one of those psychological stalagmites formed by slow calcareous drippings in the windless caverns the bourgeois call homes. I saw an unusual woman, in an unusual situation. I saw a genteel woman startled by her own coup-de-tête.’

  ‘I wish I could see people as you can,’ complained Paul. ‘I do not know human beings. When I try to imagine what they are thinking, I see nothing but the brain-structure. Their impulsions, decisions, all their psychological make-up just seem to me thick smoke blown by black magic through the nerves. The brain to me is not part of the organism: it is a cancer.’

  Adam whistled. ‘Paul, Paris suits you. You’ll be struck off the B.M.A. yet through getting a new idea.’

  Paul laughed uncomfortably. ‘With Peter Bell the third, it was dullness for fifteen miles round; with Mr. Marpurgo it is cerebration for fifteen miles round—even my rheumatic brain-box.’ He lowered his head and shoulders boyishly over the table to laugh convulsively.

  ‘Western.’ Marpurgo’s voice was decided, metallic. ‘You’re too fine a man—and it is true you do not understand people. You should not be deceived.’

  ‘I surround myself with simple people,’ said Paul humbly.

  ‘They did not tell you that Elvira is enceinte,’ Marpurgo’s voice struck across the table.

  ‘No!’

  ‘This is serious,’ began Adam with importance. ‘Paul, you can’t handle this. You had better leave it to me. You can understand,’ he hurried on, before Marpurgo could speak, ‘that Mrs. Western hesitated to tell her husband such a thing. I am glad you told us: it puts a weapon in our hands…’

  ‘I don’t want a weapon,’ protested Paul.

  ‘We will demand the truth to-night, and perhaps it is not too late…’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’ cried Paul.

  ‘If she returns, would you bring up another man’s child?’ cried Adam. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I certainly should,’ said Paul. ‘If it is Elvira’s, it is mine. I must beg you, Adam, to restrain yourself and leave this to the two of us. You are a very young man. Especially now we must be careful what we say.’

  ‘What? This is really decisive!’ cried Adam. ‘She must be got away somewhere to think her position over before it is too late. Paul, I am her brother. Let me take care of her, then she is influenced by neither of you.’ Paul flinched. ‘And she can make a decision that will not be fatally foolish.’

  ‘It’s early yet,’ remarked Paul. ‘Marpurgo, would you take us somewhere else? The air is rather thick here.’

  When they came out they heard the familiar cry: ‘Intran: Fourth Edition—Proposals of Monsieur Barthou.’

  They ended at the Mosque, where Marpurgo set the Arab singers off by chanting one or two of their songs which he had heard in Tangier. The singers went on chanting their improvised drooling arabesques, anacreontics illustrated by their mean, downtrodden, lustful eyes. Paul was more manly than he had been all the afternoon: he relished the thick coffee. Adam, who took a liqueur whenever it was offered to him, began to recite his own poetic drivel in vers libre, imitations of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence with a dash of Walt Whitman, a squeamish cocktail. He favoured them with a sonnet he had written to a girl at Leeds University ‘doing chemistry and bacteriology—I can only go to bed with an intelligence: I like to woo in the images of Donne and Carew.’

  ‘Your parents spent a lot of money so that you could get hot in words of more than one syllable,’ remarked Marpurgo roughly.

  Adam retired for the night.

  Marpurgo was up till nearly morning, all his misdeeds forgotten, singing desert songs to himself under his breath, composing pages of a never-written novel which would epitomise the age. He looked at his drawing of a lamp. He believed in signs and tokens. He fell asleep saying ‘A lamp, thou art a lamp unto my feet, the lamp of life,’ and so on, weaving the lovely father and visionary daughter into an impassioned legend. When he fell asleep, he woke again several times with a fevered head, thumping heart, and a host of extravagant dreams retreating from his pillow.

  Elvira had sent a note to the Madison saying she could not join them that night.

  Adam dramatically said:

  ‘An idea! You go to bed, Paul: I’m going to walk a bit.’

  ‘Do you want some money?’

  ‘No, nothing: ten francs if you’ve got it. I came away so hurriedly that I forgot to draw from the bank.’

  Paul gave him a hundred-franc note. ‘Don’t be too wild—the family’s not as rich as it was!’ He laughed pleasantly, patting the young man on the shoulder.

  ‘Oh, you’re mistaken. My expedition is philanthropic—I might take a coffee, that’s all. It’s for your good: the family good.’

  Paul laughed. ‘That’s a name for it: do be careful.’

  Adam came down to breakfast in the Deux Magots with a telegram: he showed it to Paul.

  ‘Leaving eleven this morning. Meet me.—SARA.’

  ‘What on earth is that?’ expostulated Paul.

  Adam grinned. ‘I telegraphed Sara from the all-night bureau in the rue de Grenelle last night. This is a situation for a woman to handle. Elvira always wrote to Sara, you know: her only correspondent. I admit it’s rather like a corroboree of the whole caravanserai celebrating a rite of passage, isn’t it? Still, I want you both to be happy, and I want to see that centripetal bastard flouted.’

  ‘I have a headache this morning,’ said Paul. ‘I didn’t sleep much last night. This thing has got to be settled. Perhaps you did the right thing. It looks cruel to go off and leave Elvira to her tergiversations, but I’ve got my patients to think of. It’s strange: I always experience the same thing: I trust Vice-Brown, and yet I worry about my patients every minute I’m away. I had an appointment at ten this morning with Penn, quite important, and one at three this afternoon with poor Fanning. You don’t know him, Adam. A tumour on the brain and a Xantippe wife. It’s ten now, isn’t it? I got up this morning at seven as usual and went for a walk. You must excuse me: inactivity makes me irritable. Do you notice the woman there with one dilated pupil,
the left? A scar of childhood chicken-pox, doubtless. There’s another mark just above the mole on the left eyebrow. Vice-Brown had such a case and diagnosed it as paresis, drove the poor woman into a hysterical state until the Wassermann came through. Vice-Brown is too young, and romantic. Why do I distrust romance so much? I’m a leaden fellow.’

  Adam was doing the crossword puzzle in the American newspaper.

  ‘Here comes Elvira,’ remarked Paul shortly. ‘I’m glad, this sitting about makes my skin creep.’

  ‘Don’t get nervous,’ advised Adam.

  Elvira came up with welling eyes, sorry for herself.

  ‘I feel sickish; it’s the heat,’ said she. ‘Ask for a vermouth, Paul.’

  ‘You oughtn’t to have it in your…’ He flushed.

  Adam laughed.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Adam?’ She called the waiter and expertly gave her order. When she had finished, ‘Let’s take a walk,’ Paul said, ‘if you feel like it, Elvira.’

  ‘Why not?’

  They left Adam to make up to an American girl he had been eyeing for some time.

  Oliver was at the Archives trying to work, puzzled, nervous, half-inclined to laugh at them all, including himself.

  ‘With all the instruments in the orchestra, I have to pick out the triangle.’

  The day passed in irresolution. Elvira spent hours with Paul reviewing the whole of their past life. She was mournful, and yet this cataloguing, adjustment of claim and blame, self-revelation, unearthing of symbols and unrecognised prophecies, the eternal game of hide-and-seek she played with all men, satisfied her ruminating mind. She remembered incidents, completely forgotten by Paul, which had occurred in their earliest married days; she resented delays, absences, forgetfulnesses which he could not even recall and certainly never intended. He said once or twice in sorry amazement:

  ‘But, Elvira, how can you possibly remember so much against me? How can you hoard up these things? You know me. I never meant to wound you in my life.’

  ‘An unconscious intention reveals itself in little things. You are not fine in the fine things of life.’

  ‘No, I am not; I never have been, I know it.’

  When evening came, he told her that Sara had now arrived and would have dinner with them.

  ‘How revolting!’ she cried. ‘Why must you make this private thing so public? Are you so weak that you have to call in all these auxiliaries? You’re ridiculous, Paul.’

  He felt ridiculous.

  ‘Adam sent for her without my knowledge.’

  ‘I simply don’t believe it: Adam is too selfish to think of such a thing.’

  ‘Adam loves you: he wants me to let him take you to Fontainebleau or the south for a while till you—Elvira, have you told me everything? You must get us all out of this frightful situation.’

  She began to cry, as they sat in the garden.

  ‘Oh, I can’t stand it: you all buzz round me! I have to decide, it is my fault, I have ruined everyone’s comfort, I am the selfish one. I’m alone in the world, I have no friends. My husband blames me, my lover is suspicious of me, and unhappy. Adam is rough. Sara, even Sara, has to come and act the big sister. I can’t stand it. Why don’t you all go and leave me if I’m such a nuisance to everyone?’

  ‘Elvira, don’t, don’t…’

  ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘I know, I know. Why don’t you confide in me?’

  She put her head on his shoulder.

  ‘Paul, I’ve never been so miserable in all my life. I’m going to have a baby. What shall I do? You tell me.’

  They were more cheerful and arranged to have dinner alone together. Adam could take Sara to the pictures or show her Paris.

  In the end she insisted on going home to her hotel room with Oliver: it was only fair to talk it over with him. She had a childish compulsion to lay her plans and her worries at everyone’s feet. He let her go bitterly, saying: ‘Elvira, you must grow up. Think of me: I have patients waiting for me.’

  ‘I’m a sick woman, mentally, morally and physically sick,’ she stormed. ‘Call me a taxi, I’m going home. At least Oliver doesn’t tell me to bustle because his career’s waiting.’

  ‘Good-night, Elvira.’

  She slammed the taxi door.

  Returning to his hotel much later, Paul went along softly and knocked at Sara’s door. She got up and opened the door to him. She was a Yorkshire woman, with Irish blood, tall, rosy, hazel-haired, handsome in a yellow silk dressing-gown with a cord, strongly built, round-bosomed, full of simple friendship and innocent gentleness. She was a distant cousin of Paul, who had come in to London during Elvira’s absence.

  ‘Is she with you?’

  He shook his head. They were sitting on the divan in the corner of the room.

  ‘She went after dinner to the young fellow and I passed the evening with friends. I will wait to-morrow and the next day, and then I’ll go back.’

  She looked at him calmly, waiting for him to explain something she didn’t understand.

  ‘If I go back, Sara, do you want to go back with me? Or would you like me to leave you here a few days, to look at Paris?’

  ‘If Elvira comes back, I will wait a few days and see how they run their lunch-rooms: if you go back by yourself, I will come with you. If you want me.’

  There was a silence. Paul sighed. ‘I do not think she will come back. She is pregnant. She cannot make up her mind what to do. She never can. You know her.’

  ‘Oh, Paul: then she can’t come back?’

  ‘She is not sure she wants the baby either.’

  She was timid and awkward in her virgin’s inexperience. Paul explained to her all he had felt during the afternoon.

  ‘I sat there dumbly, trying to be fair and not show the intense aversion I feel for the young fellow, his blatancy, his puppyishness, pretending to be a revolutionary: he spent a long time telling us why he was not a Leninist, or a Stalinist, or a Marxist, and not a Trotskyist either, but some shade of opinion of his own he has worked out here in between cafés and scribbling in his Archives. He was so much more serious in London.’

  ‘He’s just a boy, isn’t he?’

  ‘A brilliant boy, though, a false genius, pretty and witty. I kept saying to myself, Perhaps Elvira sees something in him I don’t see, because of my prejudice.’

  ‘That’s possible.’

  ‘We see so little in life, I don’t like a sweeping opinion. We go through life erratically like a drunk motor-car turning its headlights this way and that, getting snatches of foliage. The true portrait of a person should be built up as a painter builds it, with hints from everyone, brush-strokes, thousands of little touches. I even looked at Oliver and tried to think how I would have felt if he had been my son. I should be proud of him for being such a peacock, lovable, ingenious, mentally soft and crooked, but so much more charming than myself. It is only because he stole Elvira, he came between us—that I hate him. Why do these things happen? We could love each other so much. Even against Elvira I feel so much resentment sometimes. And it isn’t fair: people have a right to choose their own lives.’

  He looked at her with his sad brown eyes. She said, ‘Paul, Paul!’ They sat half-turned towards each other. After a silence, he went on: ‘You’re a very pretty woman, Sara, and I feel such goodness in you.’

  ‘People always say I am quite like you,’ she laughed.

  ‘Yes, you are like me.’

  She had clear expressions that had never been soiled by jealousy, hate or bitterness, the complexion of an empty sea-pool in a sandstone rock. Some memories flickered in her face, rippling the pool.

  ‘Do you remember, Paul, when we first met? When you were at the University? We could never look at each other without smiling, and yet we hardly ever said anything to each other?’

  He laughed now, laughing at her laugh.

  ‘Yes.’

  He paused over her face.

  ‘Sara, why did you never marry?’

/>   Her face fell shyly.

  ‘I don’t know: I always thought I should, but no one ever came my way. I’m too old now. There was only Lind, and he was married.’

  He said regretfully: ‘A young man only cares for a physical beauty. His pleasure drives him to marriage; it’s not his mind or even his heart, but his—’ He stopped, looking at Sara’s fearing, clouded eyes. He got up and took a step up and down the room. ‘My girl, my girl—’ He stopped abruptly and said: ‘Well, I’m dog-tired, and it’ll be a couple of days before we get out of this. Good-night, Sara, sleep well.’

  She smiled. ‘Good-night.’

  He went out vigorously without looking back. She sat for some time, leaning forward, in her yellow dressing-gown, looking at the closed door and then letting her eyes fall to the floor. She presently got up, turned off the light, took off her gown and got into bed, moving like a sleep-walker. She sighed several times, and to shake off her sober mood began to think of the lunchroom she ran in York. Miss Sara Steele. Paul. ‘If I had had any experience, I should be able to try to help you, but I am helpless,’ she had said to Paul when she came to London and found him alone. ‘I should try to help you, Paul; I would do anything to help you in trouble, Paul.’ His hand a bunch of veins, like his old mother’s. He was getting more like her as his eyes sagged and the veins came out on his temples. His face was thicker-clothed than before; white hairs were stuck in irregularly all over his head. He smiled at her with his dark ivory eyeballs, agate pupils, and the candid smile of the young University boy was still there like a fine sheen. She wanted to cry without knowing why. It was a strange and unexpected adventure that had come to her, when she took the train to London. She thought how you hesitated about making a step, for years, and how, once you took it, you found yourself being hurried on, jostled along somewhere. If one had taken that step long years ago, something beautiful might have happened. She went to sleep and had the impression all through her dreams that something marvellous had happened.

  The midnight hours clanked in sordine from the belfries of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève; the senile chimes limped out across the air with toothless infelicity and secular spleen, and yet, because of their inhuman age, passed with the austerity of a passing bell. Elvira listened to them and to Oliver’s trustful breathing in the dark. When Paul had asked her if she wanted to stay with Oliver she had said yes, partly out of fright at being cast on her own resources, partly out of pique, partly out of boredom too. She awoke early to look at the fine sunlight falling through the windows and to hear the birds chattering. All her previous life in London, even the last three months here, seemed washed out in flowing water, so that gold dust remained in the pan. With a young man, she was young. She would give up the child. They would start again, children, hand in hand: they would give each other pure glances untouched by mutual blame or regret.