The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Did you like my act, my dear friend?’

  ‘You’re a witch on the stage, Blanche.’

  ‘But not off?’

  ‘Everyone knows you have already brought down my grey hairs in sorrow—not one left!’

  ‘Oh, and the little flower of Étampes?’

  Septennat laughed roguishly. He had been seen coming back from Étampes in a third-class carriage, with a robust negroid beauty of seventeen, sulky with surfeit.

  Andrew, slightly more fuddled, said to Blanche:

  ‘And there is that pathetic story of the young medical student from Brittany now in Charenton on your account.’

  At this reference to an unspeakably scandalous story, they all laughed. Septennat lifted his glass to her, grandly drained it dry. Septennat alone had his brain clear. He had a satirical column to write before midnight. Blanche, drunk, cried:

  ‘Stop looking like Henri IV, Septennat: you’ve worn off your pimento.’

  ‘At least I was cradled in a shield.’

  ‘The shield that shields nothing,’ murmured Andrew, now reaching good-humour.

  ‘A vacuum,’ commented someone else.

  ‘Never a vacuum when I’m there,’ amended Septennat cheerfully.

  There entered, through the open door, the tall satiric blond man with the blond satchel, Blanche’s friend. He ran a news and statistics service. He had the sour insouciance of a pedigreed dyspeptic. He smiled at them all but one, a sudden, unexpectedly charming, weak smile, a confiding, timid smile with the corners turned up to ape superiority. To Septennat, his rival with Blanche, he gave a grave bow full of ironic pretensions. He was removed from Blanche by two men, and pretended to be indifferent to her. He moved forward a chair to put his satchel on, and roughly slammed it against Septennat’s leg.

  ‘Well, Herriot split the socialists at Clermont-Ferrand, and Léon Blum by a volte-face is reuniting the extreme left: Lebrun and Doumergue can congratulate themselves on their statesmanship.’

  ‘Tournefeuille will beat volte-face,’ remarked Septennat. ‘Not that the two chiefs are any more than Guignol figures, but because Barthou is foreign minister, Germany is becoming presumptuous, and with a show of large-minded diplomacy in foreign affairs we can encourage a chauvin reaction.’

  ‘I admire Tardieu,’ said Blanche. ‘What vigour. He is the secret power behind the ministry.’

  Septennat shook his wise head that had seen many ministries and many careers.

  ‘Like most of his profession, he overreaches himself. The Stavisky cheque will sink him.’

  ‘It’s a frame-up, a maffia,’ cried Blanche, quite drunk. She went on to talk about all the canards she had picked up that day from friends of hers, from Lemesurier, a deputy she knew intimately (‘she and Arlette, Madame Lemesurier, were intimate friends’), from her brother Fred, in the Ministère de la Guerre.

  Blanche had had at various times the idea of making a career for herself and swaying ministries as the ‘good friend’ of a great political or industrial careerist. But her brains were superficial, her looks were going and she lived hard.

  To these warm-hearted friends Oliver entered, now, alone.

  ‘Here’s the lover,’ Blanche whispered.

  He had a serious, tired look. He had got a little plumper and lost some of his rosy colour. He glanced round the café, saw them, and came towards them in a lack-lustre way.

  ‘He looks as if he has been making love all the afternoon,’ said Blanche’s blond lover, who instinctively detested him. ‘Just look at the sloppy shuffle.’

  ‘No, I was shopping with his lady,’ volunteered Blanche.

  ‘No obstacle.’ Andrew now pleasantly dripped with Pernod and moustache. He grinned at Oliver and gave him his hand: ‘Hullo, pal; how are you doing?’ Oliver sat down beside him, ordered a drink and credulously asked Blanche what Lemesurier thought of Léon Blum’s ‘common front’ agitation.

  Blanche spluttered, ‘Léon Blum is a dirty Jew: the Government is rotten because it’s full of dirty Jews and freemasons.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said the blond satchel coldly. ‘It’s half full of Tartarins.’

  ‘Méridionaux are not Frenchmen,’ cried Blanche. ‘They are loud-mouthed dirtiness from the south.’

  ‘It has pure Normans and Bretons,’ laughed blond satchel.

  ‘Bretons are Celts and Normans are Scandinavians, they are not Frenchmen,’ cried Blanche.

  ‘And the only Frenchmen come from Château d’Anizy.’ They all laughed at her.

  ‘Ah, Oliver, thou art my only true friend,’ she said good-humouredly. ‘Thou comest from such a little land which yet is split into many nations. Canst thou understand a Somerset man, a Lancashire man? Thou hast told me, not at all. After all,’ she told the group, ‘in a monarchy individuality still exists, they do not try to boil everyone into a common equality, a vulgar republicanism.’

  One by one they dropped away as seven o’clock approached. Presently, Septennat took himself off, after kissing her hand, and Maurice Blane, the blond satchel, remained with Oliver. She asked him with disdainful verve:

  ‘And you, little one, dine with your family to-night?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, m’dear: some friends of my dear wife Suzanne’s from Prague, a honeymoon tour, I can’t miss them. Suzanne’s brother has turned up too. Suzanne is as suspicious as a burglar-alarm, and I believe wrote to him.’

  ‘Then go,’ said Blanche. ‘I know these brothers. One knows them. The gimlet eyes of Freudian lovers.’

  She had once been an intimate friend of Suzanne, too.

  Maurice stalked out, from the door smiled a liverish blond smile, and waved a lank, manicured hand stained with recent ink. Blanche snickered:

  ‘This Suzanne makes herself ridiculous with her suspicions; and he—a mollycoddle. I have never been more than a good friend of his, out of pity. When he was down and out I fed him. Underneath he’s kind and soft.’

  ‘Ça se voit,’ grinned Oliver. ‘But why isn’t he more explicit? I’m tired of Berl’s bourgeois onions of refinement. Take off layer after layer and you find the real man. It’s only eventually good for the bodysnatcher who’ll sell him to the med. school after death.’

  Blanche leaned back:

  ‘Buy me some Gaulois, Olivair. Are you dining with this charming Elvira to-night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I thought not; in fact, she told me so!’ She laughed. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s in bed: she said she’d been shopping all the afternoon and felt tired. She’d ordered her dinner and sent me out. I got your pneu. when I came downstairs.’

  She spoke through her cigarette and the smoke.

  ‘You don’t know why?’

  ‘By Jove, is it—she didn’t go to the sage-femme? I am sorry, I didn’t realise! what a blundering thickhead I am—I ought to go home.’

  Blanche called the waiter and muttered through her cigarette again:

  ‘Keep calm: she’s better off for the moment alone, and I want to tell you what to do. She knows nothing and neither do you.’

  ‘Gee, you’re the best of friends, Blanche.’

  His eyes were moist with gratitude. ‘She’s an odd girl: she didn’t hint a word to me.’

  ‘She only decided this afternoon. She got tired shopping; she felt sick and she suddenly said, “Oh, I can’t go through with it,” so I popped her into a taxi and off to the nurse’s before she could regret. She hesitated at least ten minutes in the street below the surgery, as it was, until I said, “Well, here you are, you may as well go through with it: be a sport,” and she said, “What’s the odds, I’ll do it.” And there you are, mon ami. Do I get a vote of thanks or not?’

  ‘It is rather a relief,’ said Oliver. ‘You know…’

  ‘I know, I know. And now, let’s celebrate! And will you take me to dinner as a reward?’

  ‘Ten dinners.’

  She called the waiter: ‘Another Campari for me, a Pernod for Monsieur.’

&n
bsp; ‘A brandy,’ corrected Oliver.

  ‘What a vile habit!’

  Blanche explained with her nervous hands: ‘You know, she is sweet, your Elvira. I should never like to see her in trouble. I love her like a sister. I love you two. And I do not want to see you make mistakes. The mistakes—I know them all. Oh, la-la! I told her this very afternoon, Oliver is a beautiful, eligible young man, brilliant and a careerist: and yet faithful and true. He could have any woman at all, I told her, you foolish woman: realise how lucky you are. You know this little woman! She said, “I wouldn’t move hand or foot to hold any man: he’ll stay with me if he loves me. I’m an idealist about love. It comes to you. You can’t call it: you can’t recall it.” She said that. It is touching, I think. But I said to her, “Love is a tête-à-tête: a third person spoils it: a child is a third person. It is the woman’s fault. She loves the child more than the father.” “I should never do that,” said she: “there are lover-women and mother-women—I am the first sort.” We said all this in the street under the nurse’s window. I do not want your lives to be spoiled.’ Her fine, painted eyes misted with alcoholic sentiment.

  ‘You’re a great friend, Madame d’Anizy!’

  ‘No, Blanche! Yes, I feel we will be great friends. But you must be careful of me. I have a great weakness. I spend money. I am sorry to say I spent almost all of that first five hundred francs Elvira gave me. I was in despair, they were going to throw me into the street. Then I have been owing a doctor’s bill for two years. He has gone on treating me, but after all he is a poor man. He is old, seventy-two, with a darling old wife and three grown children. The usual history, all the money of the family invested in the eldest son, to make him a career. He is a doctor. There are so many, alas! He makes what an ordinary shopkeeper would make. They could have saved the University and initial expenses. The most comic little salon you ever saw. You would worship it! For a student of periods! Sèvres china, bits of wedding silver, a souvenir pearl-handled knife, a real lace-mat, all in a cabinet, old recovered Empire chairs with dust-covers, a picture of an anatomy lesson, a picture of a butterfly-collector with his specimens, two long tapestry curtains.’ Blanche was feverishly garrulous, a spindle of theatrical graces.

  ‘Poor fellow: when he comes to see me, he takes off his two celluloid cuffs, puts them on the table, and afterwards dusts them and puts them on again. A man could not attend a woman with more delicacy and modesty. I know he has spent almost all the money he had saved establishing his son as a doctor: that son is a no-good and still lives on the old people. Then their daughter married, and they gave a small dowry—twenty thousand francs—pitiable. Since then the two old people have been living on bread and franc-a-litre wine, and he still goes running out at seventy-eight! When I first developed my cough and thought it was bronchitis I went to him. He told me to be careful. How could I be careful? My husband had just left me: I had the child! I sang until I could only sing husky and parlando: I went on the stage naked: I undressed for the men who took me home. What do you expect? To earn one’s living and keep a child in Paris! And I am resolved to give my little girl a dowry: she will live bourgeois. Bourgeois! They can laugh: it is very pleasant to know you will have the same roof over your head ten years hence and will have bread and meat in the larder, wine in your cellar. I see nothing wrong with it. At any rate, ma petite Blanche will have it. And money to get the right sort of husband when she grows up. She will go to a convent finishing-school, too. For that, you see, I need money.’

  ‘I thought you had a dead little boy,’ said Oliver.

  ‘No, no, that was before I married,’ she hurried on. She smiled a gentle, rueful smile at him.

  ‘I was married,’ she said. ‘He left me: he began by sending me a hundred francs a week, then fifty, then nothing. I could have forced him to send more, if I had had the money. Then I thought, It is my child: I will provide for her. Now I have this piece of land I am buying near Château d’Anizy. She will live there in her holidays. Hein? I live for Blanche.’

  He murmured: ‘You’re a brave woman.’

  ‘I know what they all say about me: but a woman does not live an irregular life for nothing. One must know the reason, hein?’

  ‘You are quite right. This chattering café crowd make me tired with their scandal-mongering. You feel they know all about people but the truth.’

  ‘I hate them,’ confided Blanche. ‘But I must meet people, and especially people like these who know managers and who take me to cabarets and restaurants. There I can perhaps pick up a backer or get a better job. It’s business.’

  ‘It’s a tough life for you.’

  ‘If you hadn’t taken me to dinner to-night, I should simply have gone hungry,’ said Blanche cheerfully. ‘Oh, don’t say anything, I’m used to it. I have a pretty figure that way, eh? I haven’t a sou, to tell the truth. But no matter. Perhaps to-morrow I’ll find something. Elvira is very sweet. She bought me a pair of steel-grey silk stockings: otherwise I should have been up against it for to-morrow night when I dance at my new place. You must come and see me, dearie,’ she said, burlesquing, affectionate, charming, suddenly changing her play. He laughed, blushing a little, flattered.

  ‘You bet I will: you’re a pretty woman, Blanche. You’ve got dash, verve—er, what do they call it?—you know, éclat!’

  She smiled and half shut her long-fringed eyes:

  ‘I am glad you think I am a pretty woman, Olivair, because I like you. You are not like English I have seen, lanky like a skeleton, with hollows in their temples and cheeks, with bad complexions, water-coloured eyes and teeth in the wind: you are quite different. I did not know there were English like you.’

  ‘There are lots of ’em,’ laughed Oliver. ‘Haven’t you heard the old tale about the Celtic strain underneath? I’m it. Elvira too.’

  ‘You are of one race with our Bretons, then? Oh, how curious! I had a very dear friend, a Breton: he could hardly speak French. He was an artist and I lived in his atelier two years with him and my little baby. I was never so happy before or after. His name was Hervé. Poor Hervé! He was very strange. You know there is much insanity in the Bretons, nearly as much as in Angleterre. At last he went mad completely. Now he is in the madhouse.’ She nodded. ‘I loved him: I was furiously in love with him. The Celtic race has fire—and charm—and wit: and also a childlike quality which is endearing in a man.’

  Oliver leaned back in his chair and detailed her charms with shining, narrowed eyes. At last, she said, taking her fur and bag abruptly:

  ‘Olivair, allons diner: I am dying of hunger.’

  ‘Where you lead, I’ll follow,’ answered he prosaically, tramping out behind her, his shoulders swayed back curiously, with a cocklike swagger. On the pavement he took her arm: ‘I hope your Maurice doesn’t shoot straight.’

  In the semi-darkness all her charms came out, her tendrilly hair drawn back, her long-laid fringed eye, her pencilled brows and scarlet lips; she murmured, provoking, ‘Maurice doesn’t shoot, he justs gets shicker: they say also that the English don’t stab, they go to law: is that so?’ The lovely face of a bird of prey glinted at him. ‘But you’re Celtic: unpredictable.’

  He puffed his chest and laughed: ‘Who knows? I’ve only made one bad break in my life, and that astounded the populace.’

  ‘You mean Elvira?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But she’s a beauty: men will do anything for beauty.’ Her stage accent appeared: ‘It is a lampe; you arr moss (moths); you broil yourselves in ze lampe. It is a poison; you arr but ratis; you eat ze poison.’ He looked at her in admiration, for she was reciting in a low passionate voice a verse of Baudelaire:

  ‘Je serai ton cercueil, aimable pestilence!

  Le témoin de ta force et de ta virulence,

  Cher poison, préparé par les anges! Liqueur

  Qui me ronge. Ô la vie et la mort de mon coeur!’

  She translated, ‘I will be thy coffin, sweet pestilence! The witness of thy strength
and virulence, dear poison, prepared by the angels! Liqueur that gnaws me. O, life and death of my heart!’ The evening air was still fresh. Oliver shivered.

  ‘It is impressive! The poison is passion!’

  ‘And syphilis,’ she said in a husky whisper. ‘He died of syphilis.’ After a moment, she added: ‘But for most of them it is one and the same. Who can escape it? My husband poisoned me, Maurice has it, Andrew is falling to pieces with it.’ Oliver’s arm stiffened, but he made an effort and did not withdraw it. ‘No one can escape,’ said Blanche, drunk and sibylline.

  They walked through the narrow old streets round the Marché des Quatre Vents, where the mediaeval houses belly out at the first storey, towards the giant side of Saint-Sulpice. Oliver shook himself and laughed.

  ‘You exaggerate.’

  She said: ‘My life is different from yours: who can say I exaggerate? I see differently. Men have killed themselves for me. One man left his wife and children for me. The artist, the Breton, went to the madhouse. Eh, après tout, pourquoi ce triste Hervé? Ils sont tous fous à lier. Zey arr oll a shingle shott.’

  He was silent.

  She went on playing a part: ‘I damn men, and I love on-ly ze débris, les épaves, les âmes damnées, ze dreunken bomss. I laike zose oo av soffer, oo av chagrin, I embrace a such man wiz passion, I av secret embraces forr im.’ She laughed: ‘Parbleu! I forgot it was you for a moment, Oliver. I don’t want to lead you astray—Dieu m’en garde! I love this little Elvira.’

  ‘We’re both drunk,’ giggled Oliver.

  A fourteenth-century house stood out on the street. They came round it into a corner. Oliver seized her arm and kissed her.

  ‘Now, enough, no more,’ said she. She continued: ‘My nights are full of flame, and terror: I must always sleep with a man, any man, to know a still midnight. A new man is better than an old friend, for his contentment and surprise is better: I know all the methods, all the tricks, all the profane kisses and embraces. Then he is intoxicated with me till I have shown him all: then he tires of me. But until then, I have peace.’