The Beauties and Furies
Page 21
“Well, bring your traps over now: I’ll get a boy to help you.”
He was much too grand to carry anything himself.
“Who told you I was coming?”
André darkened and stepped up to her.
“You must come now: I’m expecting you.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I wanted love. I won’t be your victim. You’re good-looking, caressing when you want to be, and I was weak, as girls are. I don’t mind telling you I was weak, because now I’ve thought out what I must do. You are a servile soul, and I am a free soul. I will never love a base man; I can only love a noble man, and when I find one I’ll marry him. I can’t smirch myself with ignoble amours.”
André took his hands out of his pockets.
“You’ve been reading some novelette. Wake up, canary-brained woman: put yourself in my hands, little darling, and you’ll have a great future. You’re an ambitious girl. There’s nothing you can’t do. And I know women.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her to him. Her forehead only reached the V of his waistcoat still: he caressed her.
“There, you’re going to be André’s girl. I’ll buy you a pretty dress to-morrow: you won’t know yourself. I’ll mould you from the beginning: you come to me fresh. That’s real luck for you.”
She laughed stridently as she drew away.
“You’re ridiculous, André. You only know the flimsy sort of girl. You’d better start on your way. Mine’s in the opposite direction. I’m just glad I knew you, that’s all: it’s a warning. You’re a signpost, tall enough to be one. I don’t want to quarrel with you, André. In me there’s something that likes you very much: when I think of you I think of your fine skin, your shapely naked arms full of muscles, and your naked chest, like a bronze shield. I dreamed one night we were kissing each other naked, leaning against a balustrade overlooking a dark pool under an immensely high and dark dome, in which one beam of light dropped slow drops into the pool. I’ve loved you ever since. But I know you don’t ever feel as you did in my dream. So I’m going to take my time and look around until I find someone who does, even if it isn’t you.”
He threw away the cigarette he had started to smoke.
“I do feel like that. I’m crazy about women: I go mad nearly when I see a beautiful woman I can’t get near and talk to. I dream about them, too: marvellous dreams. I only go to sleep to dream about them. But I don’t dream about them in the daytime. They’re not so good-looking then, and then I have my work to do. You’re throwing away a good chance. You think you’ll get on: but you’ll stay here drudging for Turnèbe: one day he’ll get you, or some other trash; and then you’re done for. You’ll think of me with regret. But I don’t ask girls twice. I’ve bothered too much about you. Your head’s turned. You know my address.”
He went off. The next day she was walking along the Cours de l’Intendance at lunch-time. Everything was shut, the restaurants smelt of gras-double, the streets were an oven, all was blanched. She was crying over André, when she saw walking before her a tall, bare-headed youth in a long black Spanish mantle. With him was a white-haired man, elegantly dressed, who seemed to be his companion or tutor. She thought, “A Spanish prince.” She crossed the street to look at the youth, whose cloak was fastened with a jewelled buckle, and whose small, bloodless, emaciated face, with its indifferent eyes, curling lip, and faint sneer of vanity, was, as it were, buckled with a prepossessing Roman nose. The old man kept talking and using his hands with restrained, fragile gestures, and looked on the ground as he walked. The youth kept up a supercilious inattention, and took in thousands of details of the street, sky, shops, people they passed, it seemed, with his pale eye: it looked as if he was bent on making an inventory of Bordeaux and was perfectly deaf to the older man.
Cecilia, with a splendid walk, which she had spent years developing, her bust always carried in advance, her eyes and nostrils throwing darts at the couple, kept up an even pace on the opposite pavement. The youth presently made her a sign to drop behind them, and after a quarter of an hour gave his tutor the slip, while he was in a vespasienne. He took her to a café Cecilia had never seen, and made an appointment with her for ten o’clock on the same evening down by the docks. He was an expert, hurried, but more gallant than André. In his overcoat and felt hat he looked no different from the thin pale youths of the town; but he had an exceedingly elegant French accent, that assumed by the nobility and extra-rich, which sounds foreign, and is intended to make them foreigners, indeed, to the common people. They walked a little way under the dull sky, and then turned up towards the residential district. The youth murmured, “I have a friend who will lend me his apartment: there is a side-door. Let’s go quickly.”
Cecilia recited a line of Racine:
“Dans quel trouble, Seigneur, jetez-vous mon esprit!”
The boy glanced at her with authority.
“You know me, then?”
She laughed again and recited:
“Rien ne peut-il, Seigneur, changer votre entreprise?”
“What are you talking about?” asked the boy haughtily. “Although a prince, I’m not rich: I have a mean allowance. Let’s drop the milord: it’s bad for pleasure, bad for friendship, bad for settling accounts. For all you know, I’m a poor Bourse-runner spending the evening with the first Venus of the streets. Come, dear little chicken, give me a good time: I’ve had a wretched day. My tutor talking all day, my head aching, neuralgia everywhere, lying down all the afternoon because my medicine upset me: it’s against anaemia and ten times too strong. I’m delicate. Come, be kind to me. To-morrow, if I can get off, and if you have a pretty dress, I’ll take you to a charming restaurant, full of fun. You’ll regret nothing.”
She freed her arm and ran her fingers through the black hair that the river breeze had loosened. “I believe you’re a prince incognito: you look like one. You must believe me: I look like what I am. I am a virgin, and I go to no little room. I will go to the restaurant with you to-morrow, and if you can win me you can have me. But you must really make love to me. I want it so badly, to have someone really make love to me. And I am worth it! Look at my form! I know Racine! I am going to Paris. You are like Andre, but better than him, although not so handsome. You are rich, elegant, and you are a prince. Will you do it? But I won’t yield unless you do well: unless you have so much fire that I turn to wax.”
The youth had stopped in the street, and was looking her over in confusion. He half-turned to leave her.
She began to recite again:
“Ah! Ciel! quel adieu! quel langage!
Prince, vous vous troublez et changez de visage!”
He turned back again, with decision.
“All right: I think you’re a little hothead, and I don’t know that I can trust you, but if you like play-acting, we’ll play-act. How many nights must I work at this?”
“It will be as short as your compliments are long.”
He took her hand and placed it over his heart, breathing unequally.
“Feel how it beats! I can’t stand much excitement. I am delicate: I am of blood too refined: be kind to me.”
He escaped night after night to meet her, and, to meet her play-acting pose, was himself fantastic. One night he brought her a pair of black morocco buskins, his long cloak and a parcel of gross-false pearls, at two francs a string, the whole stock of a peddler. When she had put them on he took a taxi and drove to the deserted banks on the other side of the Garonne: when the wind blew the cloak she was one of the jagged moony clouds that thickened the whole sky that night. They drifted along the river-bank together, exalted with the long whetting of their desires. In the taxi she threw herself round his neck in a frenzy of excitement, but he sat upright moodily, smoothing her hair. Then he said:
“My tutor has wind of an affair: I have to go to Paris tomorrow.”
“Don’t go: I can’t bear it.”
“You must come after me: I’ll manage to send you two hundred francs tomorrow
and give you an address. You must come to Paris. You want to, anyhow.”
The next day a young man entered the shop, bought the hamadryad, paid for it, slipping the girl two hundred francs too much, and addressed the parcel to a Paris address, which the girl copied.
Her fleeting notions of a splendid life with a rich and romantic lover were dissipated during her first few days in Paris. She walked all over the city on foot, and found that although the youthful opulence of her southern beauty attracted attention, she was only one of thousands of beauties. She went to the address named, was not admitted, wrote a note with her address, but in guarded terms, and the next day received the hamadryad with the receipted bill, on the back of which were the words “This business is concluded.” After crying her eyes out and looking sombrely at the Seine for a night, she took the statue to Monsieur Laminche, who was then, as now, in the rue Jacob. He bought it, took her into his service, ended by marrying her. Father saw her when she was much younger, about fifteen years ago, and fell in love with her. Mother discovered the amourette through her maid, and they had to end their friendship. But she gave him the hamadryad, saying that he was her only true love.
She got into touch with André again about five years ago. He appeared to be courting her for a while. The husband, old Laminche, was trying to spy on their conversation one day as they stood outside the shop discussing the arrangement of the window. He fell out of the window, broke his head and died. Since then, Madame Cecilia carries on the business most successfully herself, and as a thriving side-line has gone into the white-slave trade to Buenos Ayres with André. They are making plenty of money. She’s in all that shady sort of business. The profits are big, but the hand-outs are big too. Imagine that she tried to inveigle me into joining one of her little ocean trips! Her mind’s a bit unsettled now, and she is unreasonably jealous of mother. I suppose she and father really loved each other. Mother is madly jealous of the hamadryad, and long ago took out its green eyes, which she had secreted.’
They had come back to the rue Jacob. Oliver stood looking up at the dark-shuttered shop and at the curled clouds over the eaves.
‘Romance justifies us,’ he said. ‘Otherwise our friendship would seem lunatic.’
‘Nothing is lunatic in this world: everything happens,’ said Coromandel. The belfries rang out ten o’clock. As they were saying good-night, a window opened upstairs and someone called Coromandel. They looked up and saw her mother, with her hair in a two-horned coiffe, leaning out of a third-floor window.
‘Coro! Coro!’ said the surcharged, slow voice. ‘Bring him up: I wish to see your friend.’
‘Come up,’ said Coro, ‘just for a minute. You have no idea how persistent she is. You don’t mind?’
When Coro opened the door the mother was already there, standing in the salon, in a blue velvet dress with a silver-tasselled girdle. She looked at Oliver, with a slow, pleased parting of the lips, and at her daughter.
‘I like you, young man: you may come again. I know character, I know character. If it had been left to me to pick, I should never have picked the wrong one.’ She smiled with ceremonial sweetness, and put out her blanched hand. ‘Come to tea: at five—one day. Just knock at the door and come to see me in my apartment.’ She nodded graciously to them and went out.
‘Take no notice: she will forget by to-morrow,’ said Coromandel, as she shut the door.
Oliver, fresh with his adventure, went merrily to the Latin Quarter, his poems under his arm. If there were any constraint he would read the blessed poems and oust any memories of Paul. But he found Marpurgo there, playing his game, and Paul and Adam at hand. Elvira explained: ‘They all came to take us out. Paul is going to-morrow. They’ve gone to telephone Sara.’ Marpurgo chaffed Elvira.
‘Still wavering, but deeper in quality, still melancholy but with more rhythmus, still quaquaversal but swinging more and more due north, our lady Aeneas, perfidious but pious to herself!’ He lifted his pear-shaped hand in an unconscious gesture of worship, the worship of such a wonderful subject for his biped analysis. ‘If you wait one more night, Oliver, the lady will be with you.’
Oliver struck the table with medium violence.
‘Another night—again!’
Her soft voice developed in the warm air.
‘I’m not very well. I have to have my mind at rest. There is so much to go over with Paul. After all, we were married ten years; you can’t cut the tissues so fast. You have to beware of gangrene.’
Oliver sank on to the divan, stupefied: ‘Elvira, you’re not real! Do you care so much for Paul’s feelings and not for mine?’
‘You are going to have me always,’ she reproved him. ‘Paul is innocent.’
Marpurgo’s giggle: ‘And the cousin is still there.’
She looked at him, smiling bitterly over her cigarette smoke.
‘Marpurgo, you’re so damned clever that someone will murder you one day.’
He whinnied, and his blue eyes opened with a flash of light: his eyes were as sapphires secreted in the crevices between dark brow and high cheekbone. He rocked to and fro slightly for a moment, as if getting up an interior incantation, and with a pointed smile, cried in his cracked voice:
‘Eh! Eh! The unconscious wish. Hi! Hi! She’s a jelly of sour passions: make her burn, Oliver, and she’ll regenerate.’ He leaned forward and said almost in a whisper: ‘You know, she is wonderful, the uncanny stirring silence of the zero hour. This is a crucial night for you both.’ He lifted his finger ‘To-night she makes a decision, and the rest of your days follow. Be kind, Elvira: no, I must call you Melanchtha.’ Elvira laughed from the depths of her flattered content. ‘You see,’ continued Marpurgo, ‘lambent melancholy, a living body of melaphyre, that is black-curtained porphyry.’ He began to sing:
‘She is cold fire like the moon,
In reeking spirals his wits turn:
They will marry very soon—
Will she smother or he burn?’
He rapped smartly on the table with his signet-ring and straightened his back, smiling at them with the first human expression of the evening. His performance was over. He finished his brandy: ‘Enjoy yourselves, children.’ He leaned over, smiling with bonhomie. ‘Avoid Paul altogether: Paul is the rocky spit which separates the sweet confluent salt of the waves: they bite at it until they are high enough to leap over. The tide’s in now, isn’t it?’ He nodded, nodded. ‘Now, I’m leaving you. Be unkind to Paul and kind to everyone: it’s the last unkind action you’ll ever have to do. Now, I’m to my club: I must beat that Russian girl.’
‘So that’s what you’ve been working yourself up for?’ There was the usual disdain in Elvira’s voice.
‘Practising cabala at the caballine spring within.’
He raised his hat with affectation and hoppled away. Outside he met Paul and Adam. He shook hands warmly, and coming in close to their waistcoats, advised:
‘Gunther, go yourself and snatch Brunhild from the flames of Siegfried-adulterous.’ He coughed violently till they both looked concerned. He gasped: ‘I’ve been trying on Elvira that sub-innuendo which women work themselves and understand. The little pulmonary lesion is not second sight, but it’s often the eye of subtlety: women themselves suffer from a perpetual little lesion in morale, essential to race-perpetuation. I like to do my little good deed, even if it’s apopemptic. Take her back and save her a lot of trouble.’ He saluted them and plip-plapped off, remarking as he passed Adam: ‘Adam Cupid, I see.’
‘That man’s a genius,’ said Paul earnestly. ‘Or else it’s the fever of his complaint. I’ve never seen such a subtle man. You can always tell by the eyes—that glitter.’
‘Fever, malice and play-acting; that’s the long and short of him,’ was Adam’s conclusion.
He turned to go into the house and found Marpurgo back at his elbow. Marpurgo smiled brightly at him and said, ‘Do you mind, Adam? I want to say a few words to Paul.’
‘What is it?’ asked Paul.
‘Paul, it’s not my nature to interfere with other people’s misfortunes. I make it a life-principle not to give advice to husband or wife, but I felt such a thread of kin with you (my soul of dervish or hermit colluding with your translambent probity, the inebriety of my intelligence enjoying the fantasy of your honesty) that I mentioned your case to my old friend Antoine Fuseaux…’
Paul drew away and was about to protest.
‘No, Paul, make no mistake, names were not named. But I have a scheme, suggested by dear friend Antoine Fuseaux, as cunning as the seraphim, he! He is hand-in-glove with a certain high personage at the British Embassy and he has friends at the prefecture of police. He says, If your wife can’t make up her mind, you really want her back and you think it’s worth while, he’ll have her expelled overnight. Simple! Doesn’t she sometimes go to red meetings with our young infantile left?’
Paul went on, walking slowly.
‘It’s far-fetched, but not bad. But Elvira couldn’t stand the shock and the shame, especially as she is now. She would never forgive me, if she ever came to know. Her self-respect is everything to her, and she likes to be on the right side of the law and of the proprieties. You see how she calls herself Mrs. Fenton now?’
Marpurgo thrust his face into Paul’s breast; his voice rising higher, laughing in treble.
‘Then simply shanghai her, my dear fellow! Take her for a taxi-drive, land her at the Gare du Nord, get her aboard the train and keep her there till it starts. You know what she is! She’ll accept it as fate and be glad to have the “problem” as she calls it, settled.’
Paul laughed in a troubled way.
‘You’re perfectly right. But perhaps she loves this—boy: and what about his child?’
Marpurgo’s cracked laugh was shocking.