The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  Oliver laughed boyishly.

  ‘The seven deadly sins! When I used to go to Sunday school, they seemed like stale dead crusts: I thought a mean ratlike tribe of thin-blooded moral self-polluters went in for them. I never saw them as they are—in their majesty—whew!’ He laughed again. ‘You Circe! How you French women know how to talk! There isn’t a woman of my nation living who knows how to talk like that. If they did, would it suit them? They haven’t the diablerie. Whereas you, light or dark, innocent or—sinful—you all have the magic line.’

  Her nostrils spread, she looked round quickly with her kestrel-face:

  ‘All? Then you know some others?’

  He laughed proudly, a sort of dove’s cooing in his throat.

  ‘I know one other.’

  ‘Ah! Your mistress?’

  ‘No. Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.’

  ‘Ah! The hidden fire: I knew it,’ she exclaimed. ‘A friend of Elvira’s?’

  His gay laugh came again.

  ‘No: aren’t you a woman, though! Curiosity killed the cat. There is no other woman. I said that to make you bite.’

  ‘I take leave to doubt it,’ she said, but dropped the subject. ‘Look, here is a little Corsican restaurant, not dear, where they make excellent cutlets and have good cheap red wine: I often go here. You are a student. I won’t let you spend money on me.’

  Through dinner he got her to recite some more Baudelaire to him; she recited when it came to the coffee:

  ‘Quoique tes sourcils méchants

  Te donnent un air étrange

  Qui n’est pas celui d’un ange…

  ‘Although thy wicked brows give thee a strange air which is that of no angel, sorceress with provoking eyes, I adore thee, O my frivolous, my terrible passion! With the devotion of the priest for his idol. The desert and the forest perfume thy wild tresses, thy head has the attitudes of the enigma and the secret. Round thy flesh the perfume prowls as round a censer: thou charmest as the evening, nymph warm and tenebrous.’

  She finished and laughed at him, showing her white teeth.

  ‘Tell me, what do you think of me? Not pretty at all, eh?’

  ‘Not pretty,’ he said, rather hoarsely. ‘But I can imagine that you can be maddening. You are a clever woman,’ he continued as if unwillingly; ‘you know how to call up a sort of cramp and rage inside a man.’

  She laughed, and said with the most charming of accents: ‘I will let you alone, though, for the sake of Elvira, whom I love. She is a sweet woman, Elvira, and not like me: good.’

  He said umbrageously: ‘Who said I wanted to be left alone?’

  ‘I insist. You must stay in your character. If you sank into vice, you would never get up again; it is not the breath of your nostrils. You must live and die respectable. A respectable man gone wrong is not amusing at all: you would bore me, or any other woman.’

  She pulled on her fur rather coldly, and with it her airs of ‘grande dame.’ She said, when she got out, ‘Now you must go home and wait on Elvira: you must not keep her waiting: she is so dependent on you. Neither you nor she know anything about adventure.’

  He said: ‘You have a rendezvous, in other words.’

  She shook his hand graciously, friendly again.

  ‘There, let us remain comrades. It would not be safe for me to spend much time with you; I should get to like you too much. There is Elvira, and we are friends. And then, I am glad she is there. Otherwise, I should sleep with you one night or another and that would be the beginning of a passion for me and the end of our friendship. I must avoid true passions as much as possible.’

  He stood still, unwilling to let go of her hand.

  ‘Blanche, how many women like you are there in the world? I don’t belong to myself any more: the ground is slipping from under my feet: are you what you seem? Or do I seem very naïve to you? I wish I had got to know women when I was a boy.’

  She smiled and almost whispered: ‘I wish I had been thy first: if I had known thee early, I would have been kind to thee and thou wouldst have had nothing but joy in thy youth.’

  ‘Let us say you are the first—to-night.’

  She laughed provokingly:

  ‘No, you couldn’t stand me: I am wine too strong: je porte à la tête; I have been the mistress of Paris’ most celebrated libertines; I have been through four-day orgies and never slept, never stopped drinking, never stopped loving, and never tired.’ She laughed at him: ‘Will the little brazier take heat to the volcano!’

  ‘You’re teasing me, Blanche, and you know what you’re doing. Don’t be cruel!’

  ‘Shh! it’s for your own good. You know the Frog Princess? In the daytime, when you have seen me, I am only an ugly frog, ugh! At night you have never seen me. I know better than you that it would turn your head. Stay tranquil, go back to your gentle dream. I am a nymphomaniac. I drained Hervé to his last drop of blood: I sent him to Charenton. There! that is the truth. I tell you for your own good. Now, you can only hate me! You must never tell Elvira: she cannot conceive a woman like me: she is snow, I would not mark her with the tiniest spot.’

  Oliver leaned his head on her arm for a minute.

  ‘I must do this, my head is whirling. If you want to send me to Charenton, you are going the right way about it. Blanche, you are tormenting me: I don’t believe you care twopence for Elvira. How can you, a woman like you, rich with love, passion and experience? Why, beside you she is a Sunday school miss.’

  Blanche answered with guttural satisfaction:

  ‘Nonsense, she is a good woman: she is my friend. Now go to her.’

  ‘I can’t. I must go with you, Blanche. This evening I am madly in love with you only.’

  She became businesslike. ‘No: what do you think of me, my God! with that poor dear at home waiting for you.’

  Oliver took off his hat abruptly:

  ‘Well, good-night; you have another rendezvous.’

  She laughed: ‘Good-night, cher ami: I have another rendezvous—but one of these nights I will be yours—yes, I think so.’

  ‘Blanche!’

  ‘Yes, not yet, love like wine must mature. Different vintages have different maturities. Not yet. Soon.’

  He shook hands once more, and went on his way, very excited. He thought, Blanche, Coromandel, Elvira: Lord, I am like thistledown in their breaths: when one says Come, I come, or Go, come I still.’ He wondered about her age: ‘She must be thirty-one, Elvira is twenty-eight: Coro only is my age, and less—twenty-one.’ Like a breath from a brazier, a thought burned his cheeks and inflamed him. ‘Blanche would let me be her lover if I insisted: she would, I am sure.’ He moved on and left this thought where he found it: but in the night, he dreamed he was straining Blanche to him in a great and unearthly joyful passion. Elvira was cool, sorrowful. Next morning he waited till a girl-friend came, then left. He went to see Coromandel, took her to lunch at the Quatrième République, where he and Elvira never went, and spent the afternoon with her wandering along the Seine. He told her his plans, discussed his essay, asked her opinion about his going into business. He described Marpurgo at length. He left Coromandel at her house, and as they approached saw a smallish familiar figure walking slowly up the street with its back to them. ‘Tiens, there is Marpurgo,’ cried Oliver. He thought Coromandel started. ‘Didn’t you see that man who just turned the corner? We met him most curiously on the way over. Here he comes back again. Funny wanderer. He spends whole nights walking round the streets of this quarter, I have heard. He is lonely…’ He turned to look and found the door closing on Coromandel: ‘Coro, heigh!’ The door shut. He looked round and saw Marpurgo on the other side of the street, looking at him. Each raised his hat. He crossed over: ‘Hullo: where have you been? Is this one of your stamping-grounds?’

  ‘How is your work getting on?’ asked Marpurgo.

  ‘I’ve finished the reference work.’

  ‘You’ll be going home soon, then?’

  ‘I suppose so�
�; he sighed without thinking.

  ‘It’s hard to leave Paris, eh? She has many beauties—and furies,’ said Marpurgo in a melancholy, thoughtful way: then, ‘I thought I saw you speaking to someone in the street.’

  ‘A young lady: a student—I met by accident on the way home,’ improvised Oliver.

  Marpurgo was thoughtful: Oliver grew alarmed. At last Marpurgo said:

  ‘And how is—your lady?’

  ‘All right; with friends: so I took a walk.’

  ‘Where are you for?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  Marpurgo said: ‘Let’s go to a new district—since you’re free. I am free, till evening.’

  His voice was intent. Oliver thought, ‘He is on his high horse: he is going to open for me his pack of secrets, the strange old peddler.’ He looked sideways at Marpurgo’s thin face. They walked in silence for a time. Evening thickened; the long lights stretched across the polished macadam: the obscured Paris star-sky glimmered, the leaves blew with the noise of declining waves, the taxis passed, lurking, prowling, the long cross-streets of the Left Bank wandered away with their high pale façades and chinks of light through curtains.

  Presently Oliver heard Marpurgo say philosophically, as if reasoning with himself:

  ‘One has to be bred in the north, and dream of the lightnings of the thick low-lying sky, and the northern lights, and arise with one foot planted in the northern marshes, in a land of canals, grey rivers, soaked meadows, short summers, foggy winters, to love for ever and to death that soft, sooty, tender, distant landscape. The clear light of a rainless grey day, the terracotta furrows and raisin-brown fields, the chrome clay, iron-filled sand, the black loam and blown flats, the brick-pits filled with water, the long morasses, the floury cement cuttings and deep fields of rank grass, teach a thousand muted shades to the native eye: dun, dull, grimy-white, olive, lavender, smoke-blue, spring-yellow, burnt-sienna, horizon-blue—these are the brightest of their shades. The nights sooty, the evenings livid, the midday linen, the mornings pale; what a land of water and mist is that. And the woman who is like that, brown like their winter woods, dusky like the four-o’clock winter twilight, melancholy, restful, dreamy-cold as their leafless woods. There are men who will ruin their lives for her, and men who, finding in her what is not in themselves, will wrestle to win her and then be disappointed.’

  He was silent, then said: ‘Oliver, what a profound starry night it is! It is a long time till morning, and every hour weighs heavily if you have regret on a night like this. It is a close, poisoned Paris night. There will be many this summer. France is electric.’

  Oliver said, ‘Do you want a bock? Let’s sit down. I’m suddenly tired: it’s the air.’

  ‘If you like.’

  They sat down. ‘I have been wanting to see you,’ began Oliver nervously, but in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I have almost all my notes from the Archives. It is about the assemblage, the collation. I want to know whether you would treat it in a purely serial fashion, or as essays, topical, the development of the different branches of proletarian thought, and whether you would close with rectifications or strew them throughout the errors which now appear in history books. I am beginning to think that my ambition is to write a semi-honest history book and get it accepted by the schools.’

  Marpurgo sipped the aerated water he had ordered.

  ‘If you show me what you have, I can give you some idea,’ he said. ‘Of course, the easiest thing would be for me to write it for you. I’m a wow at that sort of thing. But if I write it for someone else, a young student, they generally don’t do so well; they get the remark, “You might have read Oldtimer & Weatherall’s manual with profit,” or, “It is impertinent to theorise before you know the groundwork of the subject,” and so forth. But then you’re a M.A. already, of course. That makes a vast difference.’

  Oliver looked up, amused. ‘That sounds like a dirty crack.’

  ‘It wasn’t intended so. You’re an academic type. You’ll get on.’

  ‘I must. I have no fairy godmother.’

  Marpurgo sneered into his aerated water: ‘Paul was a gold medallist too.’ He looked at Oliver. ‘If I’m not mistaken, I saw you taking a young lady home in a very friendly manner: a friend of Elvira’s?’

  ‘A friend of mine: unknown to Elvira; any harm in that—in Paris?’

  ‘Coromandel Paindebled, I think?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘No. I know her father’s shop. He has old laces; I am a lace-buyer. When I was there buying the other day, she came down to call him and he told me her name—Coromandel. Strange name. Have you known her long?’

  ‘A chance acquaintance.’ He grinned maliciously. ‘One of those romances of your city of light and love.’ He fired. ‘But, by james, it was a strange story from beginning to end. No one would believe it.’

  ‘She is a strange girl, it seems.’

  ‘Unique.’

  ‘You do well with women.’

  He put on a naïve voice. ‘Strange, you know: I used to be so gauche: now, I find I have a certain something. The French women bring it out in you. Any beautiful woman does, but the French women especially. I almost wish I’d been born French. Perhaps I was. There are people born out of their country who feel like a fish out of water all their lives.’. He glinted darkly in the half-light, inwardly pluming himself and thinking: ‘With this fellow I must be careful: he’s capable of going to Elvira and making trouble.’

  ‘Have some more beer,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘I can’t: Elvira must be home by this. I must taxi there: let’s go there.’

  ‘I’ll share the taxi with you: then I have a rendezvous—perhaps only with false-seeming.’ His meditative pipe kept to its old themes. ‘I have an intuition—we live in a hall of mirrors. We crook our little fingers, and distorted wraithy gestures answer us.’

  When they passed the café no one was there except Maurice, all pale discordant shades of a hang-over, drearily getting drunk again in a corner and studying his private news-sheet. ‘Maurice is not a man, but a reflection in a demie-blonde,’ said Marpurgo giggling.

  ‘I dislike that fellow.’

  ‘That means Blanche has gone off with Septennat or one of her other enchanted swine.’

  ‘The café should pay her as allumeuse.’

  Marpurgo looked at him in the lamplight, his pale pinched face and eyes dodging sickeningly in his infirm malice.

  ‘I’ll let you go home to your beloved,’ Marpurgo said with false tenderness.

  ‘Good-night, when shall I see you again? About the essay?’

  ‘I’ll play chess with you here to-morrow, if you can get away.’

  ‘Good, cheerio.’

  Marpurgo watched him walk away and then made off rapidly across the open place and down the rue de l’Abbaye. He never looked round. Oliver followed him. He presently reached the Paindebleds’ shop, and stood on the opposite side of the street, looking up and down the house. The shutters and panes were all open, but no lights were visible. Marpurgo took a few steps up and down in front of the house, looking at the tulip-bloom of heaven peppered with star-dust, looking down at his boots, well-polished, and at his long nails, always rimmed with dirt.

  ‘He’s wormy,’ whispered Oliver. ‘He’s just a breeding-ground of nostalgias. Coromandel is another one, fine lace is another.’

  He went and left Marpurgo mounting guard there.

  ‘I’m a fool,’ he said to himself pleasantly. ‘Coromandel’s unattached, and she likes me: she’d make a good wife. Poor Elvira! I won’t read her my essay to-night, at any rate: I’ll have that much self-control.’

  When he got home Blanche had just put Elvira to bed. Oliver could not resist saying to Elvira:

  ‘You are always lovelier at night than in the daytime: your great underbrush eyes—when I make money I’m going to buy coloured sheets and pillow-slips for you to lie on, black, cream, damask.’

  Blanche watched them eagerly, and then left, say
ing: ‘Now, look after her; amuse her!’

  ‘Oh, I will.’

  He read her the scene in the lying-in hospital in James Joyce’s Ulysses, then some of his poems; then he said, ‘Now we’re going to set up house soon. I was looking at all the prices of things to-day, since you’re going to be here for a couple of weeks and I’ll have to go shopping.’ He turned over the paper and found the market page, began guffawing. ‘Listen to this! Are you all right? Do you like this? Does it amuse you? Tell me when you’re tired!’ He read out, with the same rapid sonorous eloquence. Her eyes opened wider and wider, her face set, her nostrils moved. Presently tears rolled out of her eyes, but he took no notice, he went on reading. After a column he broke out:

  ‘There, how’s that for an evening’s entertainment? Anything else, ma’am? anything else I can show you, ma’am? Anything you say done free and obliging. How’s that for a faithful, loving husband? Why, by james—you’re crying, Elvira? Are you in pain?’

  ‘No.’ She bit her lip and began to sob.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘There is something.’

  ‘You get me here, you batten me down and you shout at me: you enjoy yourself. I’m in pain,’ she said indignantly.

  He was all gentle rebukes, explanations and apologies. At the end she smiled and rubbed her fingers through his curls.

  ‘I’m mean to you: you’re too young. Only a solemn old fellow like Paul should have all this trouble.’

  She laughed maternally at him.

  ‘I asked Paul if, supposing I went back to him, he would get you a good job in the City. He knows all sorts of business-men who are his clients. Now, I only said “supposing.”’

  ‘How cold-blooded you are!’

  ‘E-eh, wait a minute! There, now. I had a letter from him to-day: you can read it. He and Sara have packed all my things, and they are in the cellar awaiting my instructions. That sounds final, eh?’

  ‘I wrote to the Dean to-day telling him how much longer I expected to take, and telling him I did not want to compete for the second scholarship. I want either to be made lecturer in London or in a provincial University. So after some preliminary tacking, the good ship E. & O. will soon be scudding before a fair breeze.’