The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘You wouldn’t be pleased if I said you were the first.’

  ‘No. Tell me about the others.’

  He teased her, telling innumerable tales of flirtations, crushes, adorations, student friendships, casual unions. She listened to him with more tenderness and respect than before.

  ‘And is that all? You can’t think of just another little one or two? It’s such a few, a mere twenty or so.’

  ‘That’s all, and now fidelity, world without end, amen.’

  ‘And you’ve said that before!’

  ‘I may have said it before.’

  ‘Well—after all—Paul kept himself pure, as he said, till he married me. Imagine it!’ she said with spite. ‘He promised his mother. She died when he was fourteen. That’s why he’s so clumsy. Imagine a sawbones’ apprentice with those ideals!’ She lay back across the bed, and shrieked with laughter. She got up, saying: ‘Look, why should I write letters? I hate writing letters about a dead horse: I’ll go to Paul’s hotel now and see him and tell him to send me all those things. I’ll tell Sara to see to the packing of them. She’ll see that she won’t walk into my slippers.’ She was putting on the rouge Oliver had bought her. ‘Gosh, don’t I look waxy? And I feel so sick. I think I’ll drop in and see Blanche on the way back. You don’t mind if I’m not home to supper, do you? You have something to eat somewhere, and after meet me at home, at ten o’clock. We’ll go to bed early. I’m dead tired.’

  ‘As long as you really come home,’ said Oliver with some bitterness.

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘You were with Paul last night?’

  ‘I was. I had to make up my mind. But I did, didn’t I? This is the last time. You’ll do that, Oliver, for me. Now I must go and see her: I want to frighten her. I can’t bear the thought of her sleeping even one night in my sheets.’

  ‘Hold your horses,’ protested Oliver. ‘You’re miles ahead of the procession.’

  ‘Then if she has any delicacy, she’ll lie on the floor rather than use them,’ concluded Elvira. ‘As for you, I have a nose, Oliver. I’m quiet, but the bystander sees most of the fun. Leave it to me. Good-bye.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘Ten o’clock at home. They’re catching the night train: they’ll be gone by then. Then,’ she said, unconsciously repeating one of his frequent phrases, ‘our life begins.’

  She moved out with the dignity of her yet-distant embonpoint. He darted after her, drew her face backwards and kissed the swelling lips.

  ‘That’s right, dearest: see Blanche. I want you to be well a little while yet. Then, when we get back to England, we start everything right.’ She had a ringing laugh. ‘Everything seems so easy now.’

  He went back to unpacking his books, and loitered over his pile of manuscripts and his manuscript book of poems—

  John Slob, Tom Nod, Bert Snub, Gabriel Grad,

  Formed in antenatal mud,

  Four fleshes, four ideas incarned,

  Flipflop, hobnob, snipsnap, gidgad.

  or ‘Imitation of Eliot imitating Laforgue with Morgue’—

  AM I HAMLET?

  Avete una guida delle strade per Roma e suoi dintorni?

  (Italian.)

  The empty tables stood, for never guests

  Came there, except the bankrupts whom distress

  Spurr’d on. (Pharonnida, B. iv. c. iii. p. 53.)

  Pois, sunt turnet Baivier e Aleman

  E Peitevin e Bretun e Norman.

  Sur tuz les altres l’unt otriet li Franc

  Que Guenes moerget par verveillus ahan.

  (Chanson de Roland, cccxix. l. 3960.)

  O, Todd! Ich kenns, das ist mein Famulus.

  (Der Urfaust, l. 168.)

  Debitor non praesumitur donare! (Latin.)

  The poem (enfin!):

  The gelignite and marmorite, Blest office of the Hippocrene,

  Invaletudinarians roll, Their double spheres across the green.

  The hippocratic surrogate, Neat’s-leather neat, and black cravat,

  Walks from the hips, and often lifts, With simple elegance his hat.

  Oliver could no longer contain himself, and set out hotfoot, manuscripts and all in a roll, for Coromandel’s house. He went up to the third floor as before, and was instantly admitted by a small good-looking maid. When Coromandel appeared, they went straight to the chart-room, which, it seemed agreed, was their playroom, and seating her on the divan beside him, he began reading the most sonorous and luscious of his poems, occasionally putting a hand on her leg, saying: ‘Now I don’t know whether you can take this…Tell me if it’s too much for you:

  ‘Weailala! Weailala! Wawa, quack, quack:

  The splashing couriers of war,

  Through thirteen bloody floods a year

  Bring fainting victory on their back:…’

  Coromandel grinned faintly as he read on. He stopped suddenly, panting for praise.

  ‘What did you think of it? Some of it was a bit forcible, eh?’ He swallowed her praises, sensitive to all her qualifications. He said pettishly: ‘Not one word of it means anything to Elvira.’

  ‘Elvira?’

  ‘A woman I know in England.’

  ‘Oh!’ She didn’t believe him. It didn’t matter to either of them. ‘Let’s go out,’ she said later. ‘It’s night.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘I have to be home at ten. A chap…’

  ‘All right, but somewhere over near the Halles: I don’t know that quarter: I’ve spent the whole time on the Left Bank.’

  Coromandel went down wearing a large hat which obtruded her pose upon Oliver. She repelled him by her mannerisms, dominated him by her wilfulness.

  They walked towards the rue Dauphiné, reached the banks of the river again, and so on across the river and across the court of Notre-Dame de Paris. It was now full night: out of one of the smoking turrets of that hill of stones rose a white moon, baleful, full of sorcery, turning into a fabulous ruin the columns and flying buttresses. They passed behind this ruin, the garden of the fountain and the débris of gargoyles: so to the Île Saint-Louis and back by the new bridge of Sainte-Geneviève, past the wine market to the ancient seat of the University of Paris. Oliver drew closer irresistibly to the rue Thouin, in which his apartment with Elvira was. He looked up from rue Thouin and saw a light in their apartment. At the same moment Elvira came to the open window, and behind her Paul: they were waiting for him. What now? Oliver laughed low, rebelliously, clutched Coromandel’s arm. They turned about and walked down by the École Polytechnique to the river again. Coromandel said:

  ‘The couples in furnished rooms on a hot night filling an hour or two with talk till they can go to bed together—it’s romantic, isn’t it? I like these warm nights, when all these intimacies flower along the footpaths, don’t you? I like love, I like to see it: I feel happy every time I see a woman embraced.’

  Oliver was silent. She looked at him in surprise.

  The criss-crossing bridges between the islands were dark, silent, cool, and often traversed by soft-footed, low-voiced lovers enlaced and stopping to kiss every few footfalls. In a grand house at the apex of the lie Saint-Louis, where they came once more, two negresses from the southern states of the U.S.A., turbanned, dressed in red and blue, sang from the window of the servants’ room. In another room, the masters picked small bones off porcelain under candles too rare for the old-fashioned space of the eight walls; shadows chased each other over the painted clouds on the ceiling. The willows meditated over the river; the water sounded on the moored barges. They looked back to the lights of central Paris and at the Louvre, a great forecastle sliding across the lights of the Place de la Concorde. They passed the ‘street of the Woman without a Head’ (now the ‘rue Le Regrattier’). Oliver’s voice began in the living dark, peopled by street lamps and high walls as they passed palaces and hotels made foetid by the traffic of centuries; his voice was dry and crackling.

  ‘Every woman is the headless woman: we love the Venus withou
t an arm, the leaf-winged hamadryad, the mermaid with only a tail, a torso without any limbs or head, but never without breasts. We are suckling babes, in fact: the bosom is everything. In that respect, you are the perfection of woman.’

  Coromandel drooped.

  ‘You treasure yourself as a sculptor his model: every muscle you have ripples towards the perfecting of your body.’

  She withdrew her hand angrily from him. ‘I don’t care for my body.’

  She laughed. ‘You men! We suffer universally from an unbearable ambition. That’s all. You’re so smug, smirking there,’ she flung at him violently.

  Oliver looked pale. ‘Then why haven’t they ever done anything in the world’s history? You can’t explain that away.’

  She caught hold of him. ‘Oh, I could break your arm, I could choke you. Look at the vanity! Why hasn’t the plebs done anything in the world’s history? Because they’re weak, vain, and sensual too, I suppose.’

  Oliver was silent and uneasy. Then curiosity overtook him again. He said:

  ‘You said you would tell me about your mother and the hamadryad and the rest.’

  ‘My mother has lived for at least ten years in the double room behind the chart-room which overlooks the rue Cardinale. She looks all the evening out of one of the windows, gibbering to herself in a querulous way about us all, about old friends we have never known, probably about people she only dreams about. You hear all day and half the night that she is having a conversation with herself, a sibilant complaint. “She—she—she said—what does she know?—what do they know about anything?—what is it all about?—he—he—he runs and acts and shows and sells and arranges—what does he know?—what will they do next?—when will she marry?—she is stuck-up!—he is a fool!—I said to them, It’s very nice for a daughter to visit on Sundays—a little servant, a butler with good manners—some people are rich, some poor, so the world is, no justice done: some people work, some people swindle, if I’d had sense I should have swindled too and had a country house with servants—here I sit alone and she—she and he—he…” So she murmurs to herself all day. There is a balcony along the street. She has been dying to have a balcony like that for years, and made the architects come once. She wants to have a window-garden and water the flowers, to be seen by the street, busy watering her flowers. Isn’t it pathetic, odd? She is always dressing her hair, getting herself up; she’s ingenious too, can produce whole historical characters out of a veil, a ribbon, an ear-ring and a swathed silk curtain. She works embroideries for herself at the open windows, all dressed up with posies in her looped hair. She often has a sort of dazed beauty of preoccupied insanity and simplicity, like a very young girl, dreaming of Mimi or Manon Lescaut. She has a little allowance of her own, and cooks her own food, convinced that we would try to poison her or palm off second-rate bits on her, mask bad food with sauces and so forth. And the old woman you saw, my nurse, has to eat with her. The only person who can put up with her rigmaroles, and who visits her, is an old oil-painter who can never finish a picture. He has been working and working ever since we’ve known him, but he’s never sold anything but sketches that friends have stolen from him and sold for him. He cries when anything is taken from him: that if they had only left it a day more he would have put the finishing touch to it, or removed some blemish. If anyone writes to congratulate him, he recoils, in anger, thinks their compliments are taunts and that they are really gloating over the faults in the picture. A most uneasy professional conscience, a little weakness. Otherwise he is quite sane, and he is very sorry for my mother. My mother’s will is in his favour! Oh, it’s very little: we wouldn’t even contest it. Mother’s convinced that if she had met this painter before father she would have been happy all her life. She often murmurs to herself, “If only I had met him when I was a young girl! Oh, miserable, miserable my life has been! I met him too late!” She’s mistaken, of course: father’s always been good to her, but she doesn’t recognise it.

  ‘She says I’m not her daughter. You should see her at close quarters: she is quite like me! During a girlhood illness she read one of Gautier’s tales, and she now pretends that father begot me with the hamadryad in the salon. It is true my father has a great love for the statue; but it is beautiful. There’s another reason too: she always wanted a daughter who would darn stockings with her, and tell her jokes and scandals and count the nine-months of all the pregnant women with her. She hates brains: she calls them “snobbery.” She just looks at my father and me and mutters, “Yes, yes, I’m always wrong. I’m never right: other people are always right.” When I was a little girl she used to cry, and tell father and me to go and live by ourselves: we didn’t want her, she was in the way. Then she began living apart in the same house. But she’s really a gentle, timid woman, and the real reason is quite another one.’

  The Story of the Hamadryad

  ‘Have you seen the antiquities shop in the rue Jacob, a little way along from the rue de Furstemberg—it specialises in Chinese jade, ebony, lacquer, silks, ivories? It’s kept by an old friend of father’s, Madame Cecilia Laminche. She was born in the rue de l’Esprit des Lois, in Bordeaux, that bizarre city set down among sand-dunes under a tomato sun, where the squat fantastic water-line, with barges, bridges, bonds, quays and quincuncial gardens, bears against thick neutral skies the colours of a faded tapestry. The stinking gutters of its aged streets, joined to the sweat of citizens and wine-barrels, sends a vast heady incense into the nostrils of the long-whiskered sun. The steaming town blackens your skin and cures your heart, so that it hangs afterwards like a redolent ham in your breast, nostalgic, penetrated with Bordeaux. Cecilia lived there, a dark brown, stout-built, inquisitive little girl, with an inflamed love of the theatre of life, domestic dramas, the mass, the street, the quays, the theatre, Paris. She dreamed of three things principally, her first communion, a lover, her first appearance on the stage of the Bordeaux Opera as Carmen. She was a Carmen. She looked like fifteen at eleven, and the men ran after her. At thirteen she kept shop and helped cook for a middle-aged widower, a second-hand dealer. At night she went to her grandmother’s home, a room in the eaves of a fourteenth-century house. Mosquitoes went mad with their singing in the rafters. She leaned out of the unglassed window and looked down at the whole city to the south with her enraptured, romantic, but experienced eyes. When her grandmother died, and she was fourteen, she slept at her work, in a closet where rats ran amongst packing-cases, cloths and papers. The old brocanteur tried to make love to her, but took his defeat in good part.

  In the shop was that very hamadryad you saw. Cecilia admired it wonderfully, with its green eyes, and used to press her bosom into its hard chest with passion. In her mind there was quite a long history of daily passions, intercourse and domestic discussion between her and the various beautiful objects in the shop: but for the hamadryad she had that homosexual passion, filled with pure and divine fire, that young girls often have at that age. In the evenings, between seven and eight, when the brocanteur was supping, she would often run down to a bar near at hand for a glass of coffee, a coffee cognac or a glass of white wine, which the proprietor gave her, exceptionally—a sort of investment. He hoped she would leave the second-hand dealer and come and work in his shop. There was a little dance-hall behind the shop where poor workers, sailors, petty criminals and youths looking for a pick-up danced with poor work-girls and whores for ten centimes a person, per dance. Cecilia, working there, would bring in business and keep up the tone of the place, because she was straight as well as handsome. One of the waiters in the café was a very tall, very beautiful southern brunet, who, in between his hours of service, was to be seen, smartly and flashily turned out, on the streets, watching the girls who worked for him. He was not at all lazy: he was a smart waiter, if a little too proud, and he kept four or five pretty, smart, young girls working for him on the streets. He was kind but firm with them, and never forgave lost business, stupidity or slack dressing. When they got older he turned them out. He got
them customers in the café, and, it was said, had his savings in Government bonds. He hoped to marry, buy a house of rendezvous, run it up, and gradually accumulate a lot of money.

  He had his eye on Cecilia, but treated her with the utmost indifference: scarcely seemed to see her. He was very much run after by ambitious girls with “class.” He always let the girl make the first step. She used to stand there joking every night with the boss and his wife, with the other waiter and the customers, making tart or sweet replies, her centipede tongue never still. One night, after a clever retort, André turned and looked her over particularly. She slapped his face. “I am too fine a fish for you! I am going to have a career—in Paris, for example.” He stared still with his dominant stare, and then faintly shrugged one shoulder. The next day they crossed each other, walking sprightly in opposite directions. He was polite to her. She said, smiling: “I like you, André: I always did. But I’m going to make a good marriage and go on the stage: you’re no good to me.”

  “You’ll come round to me!”

  “Never. I’m going to strike some good luck one day.”

  “You’re well-made and pretty: but the trees are full of such birds. To bring a good price, they have to be caught and put up for sale.”

  She read books of poetry and learned passages of Racine by heart, and declaimed them to herself over her work. André even courted her by hanging about the shop with a disdainful air, and walking past her with one or other of the prettiest of his girls. She began to fall in love with him, and was wretched. Then he asked her to go and live with him in the couple of rooms he had. The next day, one of André’s girls came and told her she would throw vitriol over her if she dared to go and live with him. Cecilia wanted a lover badly, but she realised that she would be on a footing with these girls and have to work for him. She found him outside the shop when they put up the shutters at mid-day for the usual siesta.