The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Why, Paul, when you get her home, you can influence her to do anything: get rid of it. She’ll cry a bit and then she’ll be glad. With aboulic impairment, and passivity of gestation, your male reiteration will blaze a trail through clogged nerves, and suggestion’s impact will startle compliant impulsions to desired end: the vagrant illusion is fled, you have battled with and vanquished the constant faun of married women’s dreams, the young lover, you don domestic felicity once more like a wool chlamys.’ He giggled. ‘The satiric paranymph won’t even ask your thanks; his jubilations and hallelujahs for his old friend will even be concealed beneath habitual sardonic mask—which you alone, friend, did not see—you saw clear through to my real man. I’ll just be glad to see you reunited—“blest office of the epicene,” what!’

  ‘You’re perfectly right about Elvira,’ murmured Paul.

  ‘Or we can get the prefecture to put Oliver out instead.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to do that; Elvira’s my concern, not this student.’

  ‘Well, think it over: I must run to my chess club.’

  They had come back to the house in the rue Thouin. Paul shook hands:

  ‘You’re really a good friend. Come and see me, anyhow, in London.’

  ‘I will. By the way, your cousin—what a dear girl! So faithful! Where is she to-night?’

  ‘At the hotel, I think. She wouldn’t come to the rue Thouin. She has an idea Elvira resents her being here. Women are moody, you know. Elvira is so sensitive, too.’

  ‘Of course; why not? Well, ring me to-morrow at the Fuseaux place, if you have anything to say. You know!’ He nodded. Paul looked up at the lighted windows in the house but took a turn around the Panthéon, before he could make up his mind to go up. He finally went to a near-by café, wrote a note, and taking it to the maid-of-all-work in the house, asked her to deliver it upstairs. Then he walked for hours through the streets of Paris.

  Elvira opened the note and read:

  DEAR ELVIRA,—I must return to London to-morrow morning: we are catching the nine o’clock train. I don’t suppose you will be able to get up to the station. Then, good-bye. Write to me what you want me to do and I will make arrangements for you. I hope we will soon meet again in pleasanter circumstances. I must regard our marriage as dead now. I do not speak of any pain I may feel myself. I know quite well you have not been happy and that you have had to take your courage in both hands to do what has been done. I can only counsel one thing: if you love this young man and intend to be his wife, do it boldly; don’t waste any more time in hesitations. Build up a new life, which, I hope and will always hope, will be happy and complete.—As ever,

  PAUL.

  Elvira collapsed, cried and groaned, ‘What have I done to all of you? What is such a life worth? Let me throw myself out of the window, and end two miserable lives.’

  Adam presently tired of comforting her and left for home, saying, ‘I will ask Paul to give me the money to take you away for a few days, until you are rested. I am sure your mind is not made up. How would you like to go to Barbizon? I’ve never seen it.’

  He went off. Elvira was tired, went to bed, and was soon sleeping soundly.

  When Marpurgo got to his chess club he could not find his opponent. He was fatigued, and sat at a table over a black coffee, humming to himself for a while, and perusing the latest copy of the Revue Critique, from which he got curt, workmanlike criticisms of all the latest in philosophy, history and letters. Presently he stuffed it in his pocket and went off to Paul’s hotel, where he went upstairs and listened at Sara’s door. He took on a serious expression and knocked at the door with his stick.

  ‘Who’s there?’ said a muffled voice.

  He named himself, and the door was presently opened. Sara had been crying and had ink on her finger. Marpurgo looked round the room, nodded at Sara and shut the door carefully.

  ‘May I sit down?’

  Sara put the inkwell over a sheet of paper written on two sides. Marpurgo, leaning on his stick, looked at her kindly and penetratingly.

  ‘You’re unhappy, Sara.’

  ‘Why should I be?’

  ‘Who knows why we should all be unhappy? We nearly all are: happiness comes too late, or too early, or not at all.’ He looked at her closely. ‘Sometimes it comes, but we cannot seize it because we are too honest.’

  ‘How can you be happy if you do harm to someone else?’

  He nodded. ‘Some don’t let that trouble them.’

  She was silent, her face full of emotion. He said softly:

  ‘You know, I think Elvira’s behaved very badly. To-night’s a fatal night. More lives than Paul’s, Oliver’s and hers hang in the balance.’ She said nothing, looking at him with the steadiness which precedes a silent one’s confession. Marpurgo laid down his stick and sighed to himself. He said gravely: ‘I see things better than most people, perhaps: first, because I’m not afraid to admit any hypothesis: second, because I know many suffer who don’t yammer, and I look for clues in faces, in silent, good, self-sacrificing lives.’ He looked at her with admiration. ‘Third, I suppose, because I’m a very sick man…You were writing a letter?’ …She was lumpish and he skimmed on: ‘You are the woman he should have had: you would give him rest. Thou shalt give him rest who stayeth his trust in thee. He trusts you. Men are slow, blind and faithful too long to the dead—dead years, dead youth, dead emotions, dead souls, my dear!’

  Her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘I think what you say is true, but I have no right to interfere in their lives. It is their life. He told me his first duty is to her: she is helpless, alone in the world—perhaps she needs both of us. I told him to do whatever is necessary.’

  He looked around the room and saw her valise packed, the letter on the table. He pointed to it.

  ‘Seneca says, When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil. It’s not true of you. You are going to give him up, even your friendship. Woman, woman! The son of Sirach said: There are three things in nature, the tongue, an ecclesiastic and a woman, which know no moderation in goodness or vice, and when they exceed the bound of their condition they reach the lowest depths of goodness and vice…’ He smiled at her. ‘Do you count me your friend?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You are right. I am. Count on me. If you ever want advice or help, write to me. I am on your side.’

  She looked at him curiously: she was not used to effusion. Paul, for example, was as quiet and long-suffering as herself. When he went, she looked out of the window. It was warm, and children still cried out in the streets. On a street bench a mother was knitting a yellow sweater for her baby boy. The trees were in early leaf, so that a gentle, faint colour rose through the lamp-lighted branches, like the olive fluorescence of a brunette. Sara, looking at the people standing at the bus-stop and on the boulevard seats, and at those visible through the glass screen of the café, thought she saw the scatterings of a population of Saint-Sebastians, of twisting torsos, slightly agonised, with briars twining round them. In the dark of the griping thorax, each carried a little aromatic pot of heart, from whose glossy thick leaves blood dripped. They were lonely, as she was: they were perhaps nearly all just losing their lovers, or longing for one hopelessly, alone in the world, feeling they were missing everything. How can a whole world miss everything? She had no idea. Elvira took everything, and people said how helpless she was, how she needed help…

  She thought she would go down to the café herself. She was afraid to stop and listen, day or night, to the importunate knocking in her breast. How musically the old night waves cockled round the dyke. If the dyke broke, there would just be an unromantic, rheumatic wading ankle-deep through mud for the rest of her life. She did not know anyone who was sinful, had run away and had an illicit love. When Paul returned he would explain to her calmly what preparations he had made. She would explain to him calmly that she would travel back alone: he and Elvira could get off whenever they liked to England.

  When she got ba
ck to the hotel a light was burning in Paul’s room. She went to her room and lay down on the divan, her heart beating heavily. She heard his steps in the corridor, and his knock. She looked at him breathless. Paul took her hand and looked at her with a faint, resolute smile.

  ‘I am going to divorce her and they will be married. We go home to-morrow.’

  ‘Oh, Paul!’

  ‘No, no: I am glad. And she is right. So few of us are ever truly happy. Don’t think hardly of her.’ He added: ‘You have been worried about me, I know.’ She smiled. ‘I want you to help me. Elvira wants you to pack up all her things, linen, silver, music, and send them on. She always loved her own things, she loves property.’ He laughed. ‘We must put them all in, mind you, every little rag, every doyley: she knows to a stitch what she owns and she’s quite impassioned about it. There is not to be one single duster of hers trailing round the house. She was much more explicit and emotional about the teacloths than about Oliver, upon my soul.’ He slapped his powerful thigh, and laughed as if at a kitten. ‘And the minute we get home!’ He laughed again.

  Sara’s voice said firmly: ‘I’ll do it: she needn’t worry.’

  He took her hand.

  ‘Good-night, Sara. I’m going to have a good sleep. I need it, so do you. I told the boy to call us at seven in the morning.’

  Oliver surprised himself by saying joyfully at the Archives the next day, to a student friend:

  ‘I am going to be married!’

  ‘Beautiful, young, rich?’

  ‘Twenty thousand francs a year rente,’ translated Oliver. ‘Two hundred pounds a year.’

  The student shrugged his shoulders. ‘I will find someone who can keep me till I become professor.’

  ‘It’s better than nothing,’ deprecated Oliver.

  ‘Scarcely,’ shrugged the student, whose shoes were run down and socks run up. ‘It would be better to get a widow—a bigger dowry and more complaisance.’

  ‘She is—a—widow,’ faltered Oliver, in spite of himself.

  The student stared at him, and one could see what he was thinking.

  ‘A crazy foreigner—but completely crazy, oh, la-la!’ He shrugged his shoulders, muttering: ‘If I had an angel-mug like yours, I’d make my fortune, old thing.’ He looked several times at Oliver, shrugging and muttering to himself.

  Oliver told Elvira the story when he got home, only leaving out the ‘widow.’ Elvira did not laugh, but said, like an old woman, with a pinched face:

  ‘Here all is money: even the young men sell themselves,’ she quavered. ‘If I’d known that art myself—but I was an idealist. I believed in ideal love, spiritual affinities. What a fool a young girl is. Now I know it’s just pleasant habit, compromise, indolence, self-deception. Isn’t it?’ She tickled his temple, at his grave look. They both roared. She tried to get out of him exactly how he had described her to the Archives fossicker.

  Marpurgo went to the train to see Paul, Adam and Sara off. But Adam was not going. He had persuaded Paul to let him take Elvira to Barbizon, for the air, as soon as her little operation was over. ‘She has promised faithfully to go through with it, and I’ll see she does,’ said Adam. At the last moment Paul said to him: ‘If you’re—er—in Paris, and see Elvira, would you mind dropping me a line at my address to let me know how it’s going? It’s all over, you know: but she’s been my wife for so long. I don’t want her to be unhappy. She can always call on me.’

  ‘And on me,’ said Marpurgo. ‘I’m your friend, Paul: there are sympathies and antipathies outside malevolence and benevolence.’ His eye wandered to Adam. ‘People hate me to whom I’ve done nothing but good. I’ve never harmed a human being, but I’m convinced that some of my friends would stick to me even if I stole their wives. Their bank-rolls—that’s another question: there I answer for no man.’ He stared at Adam, trying to calculate what Paul had given him for Elvira’s holiday. He twinkled good-bye, and his little hunched back trundled him down the station. Paul looked affectionately at him.

  ‘A strange fellow, lives in intimacies: admits those emotions we all feel but won’t admit.’

  ‘A soft-shell egotist,’ cried Adam, helping Sara on to the train. ‘Get aboard, Paul.’

  Marpurgo went towards the office, self-engrossed, his lips moving. Georges called:

  ‘I thought you were coming in early this morning.’

  Marpurgo coughed and shrank together.

  ‘I can’t get up early, even in this fine spring weather. Humidity height is bad for the lesion: I was born for the nocturnes, the chiaroscuro, but a soggy lung makes indwelling constant, for relief, sustenance, it insists on the dry fresco of midday.’ He sighed. Georges impatiently showed him an account.

  ‘I say, who did you send all those telegrams to in Calais and Lyon? Do you keep a harem or are you running a race-tout business?’

  Marpurgo waved them away.

  ‘Have you ever heard the delightful little English word, perquisites? Love me, love my perquisites. What are you going to do? If you don’t like it, Georgie, take it as a valedictory. I’m a man with the tastes of an anchoret Sultan, put it that I drink the Circean cup and keep my eyes clear and throat clean.’

  Georges steadfastly presented the account-sheets to him.

  ‘If you want more salary, ask Tony for it, not me: or work for commissions. That’s not the way to do it.’ He threw the sheets on the table and turned to some other work. Marpurgo seized the sheets, tore them, threw them on the carpet and stamped on them.

  ‘Shadows of covetousness and jealousy poorly concealed. If Tony has any objections he can state them—not you!’

  ‘I can get younger and cheaper men,’ cried Georges in a rare fit of rage. He recalled himself, ‘All right, let’s talk business.’

  Marpurgo was drawn with spite: ‘Oh, our young friend! I thought Endymion’s smile would work a rapprochement with Jove’s assistant, whose inferiority complex festers! So Glintchick charmed Dogamanger! Once more avaricious taciturnity is mulcted by freehanded urbanity. Oh, wonderful, wonderful!’

  ‘Let’s get down to something I can understand,’ said Georges. Marpurgo picked up his hat: ‘I’m not well. The sepsis of hate halts phagocytosis. I must breathe: I am choking!’ He rushed out. An hour later he hailed Antoine from a near-by café and drew him in for a coffee. After discussing some business matters, ridiculing Severin, telling a few anecdotes and giving important opinions on the political situation, Marpurgo said: ‘Personal antipathy, detestable animal malice, which works half-unconsciously, will destroy me yet.’ He coughed. Antoine said: ‘Oh, you mean Georges? Oh, how many times have I to tell you he’s just a grouch, Annibale? I never listen to a goddamn word he says. Don’t worry. You’re safe with us. Take the day off, Marpurgo; you’re jittery.’ He laughed, sprang up and left. He came back with a frown: ‘Oh, by the way, if you are feeling better this afternoon, drop in. I’ve got the plans from that young inventor, you know: drop in. We’ll look them through. The poor sap is willing to sell them right out now, to get a couple of guilders, poor devil. You see, Marpurgo, where you’d be if you didn’t have a nose for money? This chap’s got brains as good as yours and mine probably. But no knowledge of men.’

  Marpurgo sneered pleasantly into his cigar-smoke behind Antoine’s back. Antoine had a violent quarrel with Georges as soon as he got in, about Marpurgo’s expenses. He pretended to throw the expense-sheets into the wastepaper basket. However, in the afternoon, he shut his door and went carefully through the items.

  CHAPTER VI

  Everyone was back from the Whitsun week-end. The air was full of excitement. The journalists in the cafés sat divinely alone, and scribbled and wrote, came and went, bought the newspapers and telephoned. Blanche, in the d’Harcourt, parodied, to the general applause, the Folies star Mistinguett. The old jokes circulated about her and Cécile Sorel, Marie Marquet and Josephine Baker. Andrew Fulton had only drunk part of his first Pernod and was still querulous. He told a mean story about two frequente
rs of the café, music-lovers: it was a shotgun marriage, he said, and they never paid for the gramophone records they made such a display of. Septennat, Blanche’s elderly but still imposing sweetheart, put in, ‘What’s happened to the pretty little dark woman with the broad cheekbones and hips, the runaway wife?’

  ‘They went away for the Whitsun week.’

  ‘Babyface wanted to take her away from—All This.’ parodied Andrew Fulton. ‘We’re not good enough for her. She’s an innocent Englishwoman. When she comes back she’s going to have—by the way, that reminds me of something. What became of the five hundred francs she deposited with you, Blanche, for the little affair? What’s your rate of interest? Can you believe the Western woman gave Blanche five hundred francs to arrange a little business for her? Satan finds some suckers still for idle Blanche to do.’

  Blanche opened her purse and got out her powder-puff.

  ‘I ordered this powder-puff at the Galeries Lafayette, une vraie occase—thirty francs. I told them to send it the very day before, and I hadn’t a sou to pay for it. In the evening she gave me her five hundred francs. One hundred francs was my split in any case, although she’s rather foggy, you know; she wasn’t very clear about that, neither was the sage-femme. It began that way: then one thing and another came along. I had to get a new costume for the act Levasseur got me. (My little Blanche knows Madame’s daughter: they are taking their first communion together. It’s quite a little family affair.) Did you see me, by the way, Septennat? What a filth thou art, thou art as faithless as a dog. I work for my living: it’s more than this Western woman does, the dear little thing. You sit here and ogle her, I believe.’ Blanche was never more engaging than when spilling her scurrilities: her long lips and eyes curved with pixie charm while her tongue was black and bitter. Septennat seemed wounded; he passed a thick silk handkerchief over his colossal bald dome.

  ‘My dear friend, I was there the first night: I took you to a champagne supper after and took you home. You bumped into the taxi door and had a bump the size of a pigeon’s egg on that lovely right temple. You were as drunk as Queen Victoria. I’m a father to you. I really get no thanks, but I’m not one to complain.’