The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  He kept her company every evening for seven days, bought her books of poems which he grandiloquently read, instructed her on market-prices, got right through his library notes, and had done a fair section of Ulysses when Blanche arrived and long-suffering Elvira sent him out for the evening. He had not been out for a week. He had had no idea that the world was so beautiful in the evening. He bought the papers eagerly. At Bucharest the three foreign ministers of the members of the Little Entente, Titulesco, Yevtitch and Benes, were confirming their solidarity with France and her politics. The hot summer was drawing near, and the air was humming with the usual French political swarm of conjectures. Oliver felt at home. After supper, which he took in the Corsican restaurant Blanche had introduced him to, he walked under the mallow-leaf sky. He came past the mouth of the rue des Quatre Vents. Girls kept speaking to him: the streets swarmed with them, as the air with pollen. He passed under the lamps, and his ripe youth shone out in the dirty vulgar street like the visit of an angel; his well-cut clothes, fancy tie and polished shoes were apparent too. At a doorway standing above a step, he started back. A girl was harbouring there, silk legs glistening under a short frock. Her thick, short, bronze hair was brushed in curls around a beret, her milky skin was brushed with artificial colour, the moving iris of each eye glowed in the filtered light, her varnished feet tapped as she hummed. He had seen that in a glance, and was passing, when a voice came out of the doorway:

  ‘Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,

  Et mon sein, où chacun s’est meurtri tour à tour

  Est fait pour inspirer au poête un amour—’

  She stopped murmuring this chant of beauty as he came closer.

  ‘Have you a rendezvous with someone?’ he questioned.

  ‘With everyone,’ she answered, looking at him with scorn. She had green eyes. He said softly: ‘I am lonely.’

  ‘You have no lady-friends?’

  ‘Three. What was that you just recited?’

  She laughed, flattered.

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘It is beautiful.’

  ‘It is Baudelaire,’ she said.

  Oliver started.

  ‘Baudelaire! That’s strange. I heard another woman recite Baudelaire to me a week ago.’

  ‘A woman like me, doubtless.’

  He smiled. ‘Do you all do it? Is it part of the ritual?’

  ‘You are a student? Yes: I can see it.’

  He was enchanted. ‘But do you all learn poetry?’

  She said: ‘I am hungry, my darling: buy me some supper and I will tell you about the poetry.’ They walked to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, and on a café terrace, where she saluted two or three other girls and spoke to the waiter affectionately by name, she told him: ‘Baudelaire loved us, girls like us, and in return we sometimes learn one of his poems as a bait—a bait,’ and she took a large bite of steak, ‘a bait for men. And after all, he was right. Am I beautiful?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver.

  ‘I am beautiful,’ she took up, still eating. ‘I am without a fault, you will see, if you are nice to me: the young girls without a spot, brought up in their schools, are beautiful often, no doubt, fed on milk and roses, but how many would be beautiful walking the streets every night, eating the filth I eat, living as I live? How many? Not many. It is right that poets should write for those women who shine even in the slush of the streets!’

  She finished her dinner, smiled at him, took her glass of wine and leaned back, rounding the double curve of her side and stretching her little foot in its cheap high-heeled shoe: under the long, black-pencilled eyebrows, her clear green eyes moved roving over his face, enamelled with youth, with satisfaction.

  ‘We make a nice couple,’ she said contentedly. ‘When I am so young, I hate to appear on the streets with an old fellow.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  He smiled at her and was happier in her company than he had been with Elvira, Coromandel or Blanche. On the way home he said gallantly: ‘You are more beautiful than all the honest women I have ever known.’

  ‘And as honest as all the beautiful women you have known.’

  ‘And as witty as any,’ he said.

  Her metallic, impudent, assured laugh tailed him up. ‘I have much more spirit than body, but it is not so beautiful: fie, it is hideous, my spirit: I am glad you can see the body and not the spirit. I have seen horrors: my life is hideous: I will end up—can you think how? There is not a dog’s body floating down the Seine that will end up worse than me. I will end there too.’

  He asked lightly, selfishly, to stop this talk: ‘I thought all you girls saved money and then retired to a little farm?’

  ‘Not me: I live and die with my beauty. Should I give a child this body and this ugly mind I have? Should I bring a little boy or girl up on a farm in the country on milk and fresh meat and vegetables, and then, with its wicked twisted soul, drop into the mud of Paris? No, no, a thousand times no; no, no. I know it all, my friend: no. Ah!’ She stamped her foot. In a minute it had passed over and she was at his side again, the graces shuttling over her members, her face, speech, and form a tissue of seduction. She said:

  ‘Dear friend, will you stay with me all night? it is a lovely night, and we are such a nice couple.’

  He grew troubled.

  ‘I would, but I must go home: someone expects me.’

  ‘You are not married already?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, how foolish! What, she was rich?’

  ‘No: just pretty and kind.’

  ‘H’m: a bourgeois woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she lets you out at night?’

  ‘She is sick.’ He explained the affair.

  Happily, she took him along her accustomed beat to show him to her friends and sisters. In the dark of their way sometimes soft ironic or harsh sardonic voices called. ‘Is he handsome, though?’ ‘You have picked up a novice?’ ‘A fat one!’

  They reached the tiny hotel. She trotted in ahead of him with a businesslike tapping, swaying her hips: she said a word to the gentle, curly-headed proprietor reading the political news of the evening paper, and nodded to his wife, who returned her greeting pleasantly: the proprietor looked quite like Paul. The window surveying the stairs was clean and prettily hung with a lace curtain. She preceded him up the stairs. At the top of the stairs he came face to face with Adam Cinips on his way down. Neither acknowledged the other.

  Blanche had run away early to a rendezvous, and Elvira lay expecting Oliver to return. Suddenly impatient, she got up, dressed and went out. She walked as far as the Odéon, looked at its billboards, stood in a queue to buy a ticket, and felt so weak that she walked home again. On the way she stopped at a bar for coffee. A big, drunk German artist tried to make her. She stumbled home. Oliver was not there.

  Elvira lay upstairs listening to the noises of the hotel, slow to go to sleep. The young man next door brought home a woman: they kept making familiar sounds for an hour or so, then the door opened and the girl crept downstairs. An American girl, resident in the hotel for long months, brought home an American friend but could not induce him inside the door: some acoustic freak brought their words, carried on mostly in an undertone, through the opened window to Elvira’s ears:

  ‘You don’t care a rap for me: I just suit your purpose.’

  ‘That’s not true; we’ve always been good friends.’

  ‘Friends! I don’t hear from you for a week, and then when you want to have a good time you come and pick me up.’

  ‘Hush, I’ve got to work: I can’t come every night.’

  ‘You use me and then you won’t even give me the money for my room. You know I’m broke.’

  Some people coming down the street reduced the young man to a frenzy of pleading, and in a minute Elvira heard the soft sound of money changing hands. The door opened and shut, and someone came upstairs. In her fright, and helplessness, El
vira began to imagine Oliver in a brawl, gone to a communist meeting and locked up, run over, drunk and insulting the police, run off with another woman, anything. New pains, a spasm coming every ten minutes, had begun early in the evening and were now intense: the back of her head throbbed, her heart beat heavily and she was fevered. The hot-water bottle bought by Blanche (Blanche had not given her the change) was cold at her feet. The sleeping-tablet Blanche had got her had not sent her to sleep. The people who lived upstairs and always came in last in the house, now came in. She heard the loud panting of their great Dane, and in a minute the unruly thumping as it jumped about the floor. She heard them soothing it and then it gave no further sound. They must have tied it in the bathroom. They were lovers. She heard the sound of their steps, their subdued laughter.

  She only was alone. She was like the American girl. She was alone and disgraced here. Suppose Oliver did not come all night? What would they think of her downstairs? She blushed, and cried in her fever. She could see the sullen sky with its lack-lustre powdered stars. Never had she seen so high, so ominous and still a night. Now, she felt sure, Oliver was with another woman. She turned, cried into the pillow, pressed her hand to her forehead: ran her fingers through her hair hanging in lank sweaty ringlets. Unable to bear it any more, she began to groan softly. Then the hotel, suddenly grown quiet and gone to sleep, frightened her. She got up, put on her dressing-gown, took out a French grammar-book and began to read.

  ‘Quelques adjectifs perdent le son nasal dans la liaison. Ex.: Divi(n)-nenfant,’ etc.

  She looked up at the still, breeding night, the soundless, close-wrapped night, and imagined it full of a thousand bedded loves, millions of murmurs in the dark of rooms, square miles of tumbled pillows, and somewhere amongst them Oliver’s seraphic white smile, which could be seen in the dark, smiling into someone else’s knotted hair and little ear. Pure tears of suffering fell down her face. She got back into bed shivering somewhat in her fever. When she got back to bed the torments of the bedridden and helpless returned to her. She thought, ‘As soon as I can get up I return to London. I won’t stay at the mercy of an irresponsible young man. Paul would never have left me in this pass.’ She sobbed a long time out of pain and self-pity, and became quiet again, listening to the steps in the street. She thought: ‘He has met with an accident: he will be torturing himself over me.’ Her pains eased a little after a few hours, and she fell half-asleep. She did not hear him ring.

  She woke to see an easily-recognised dark shape in the opening door.

  ‘Oliver! Oh, Oliver!’

  He held her closely without a word; then exclaimed: ‘Darling, you are burning.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver, where have you been? I was nearly out of my mind with fright.’

  He told her a history: an accident, two taxis colliding in the Boulevard Raspail at the corner of the rue de Rennes: there had been a man seriously wounded and he had had to go to the station and give evidence: then he had thought the man dying and gone to the hospital with him. His story was convincing: he had actually seen a car graze another car at the corner of the rue de Rennes.

  ‘I am in such pain,’ she moaned. ‘You were away when I was in trouble.’

  He looked at her, haggard: ‘How can I be such a fool—so unkind? I ruin everything. I should have thought of you before all else.’

  But he was too tired. He became fretful. ‘My dear, how could I know? You know I didn’t know.’

  He got into bed and they both fell thankfully asleep. Her last thought was, ‘I cannot leave him even so.’ She had never felt so close or dear to him.

  Her escapade brought her pain, fever and impatience. She had the metritis that Blanche had warned her of. She had recovered sufficiently in a fortnight to go out for an automobile ride to the Bois de Boulogne with the contrite Oliver. Oliver was all aflame on account of the marked rapprochement between France and Russia at this period. He also talked continually of the Saar plebiscite, to take place in the following year, which had already begun to loom in all political columns. Elvira tried to rouse her estival mind to these problems, but as they drove through the splendours of the Bois and Oliver clamoured and rejoiced, she put out a gloved hand.

  ‘Oliver, this is our only summer: let’s forget the world and politics.’

  He tried to please her. She dreamed and smiled her slow smile when the sun glinted or children played.

  ‘I feel so young, Oliver dear. I feel like sixteen. The rich grass smell brings it all back. Oh, you’re happy when you’re young and know nothing.’

  ‘You know nothing now.’

  When they got home they found a telephone message from Georges Fuseaux asking them to dinner, at the Pyramides. After the usual automobile ride they ended at the Duchesse café. Georges was embarrassed by the presence of Elvira, whom he had already condemned as ‘just an ordinary housewife with high-school ideas in her head,’ and awkwardly offered Oliver a small position in the firm to learn the business, help with the accounts, and eventually become a junior buyer.

  ‘Think it over, think it over,’ urged Georges.

  ‘Did Marpurgo say anything about me?’ Oliver could not help asking.

  ‘Don’t talk about that spongehead,’ groaned Georges. ‘No, he doesn’t know, and please don’t mention it to him. Otherwise the proposition is off. This is my business. God, that fellow would like to think it’s his. It’s just to counterbalance his influence with my brother—we want some other blood in the firm. A two-man firm is no good: you need strangers, new blood. We need new blood. Now, I don’t want Marpurgo to discuss this till it’s all settled. Antoine does the hiring and firing, but he likes you.’

  They went home jubilant. Oliver laughed.

  On the doorstep, in the street, they found Adam, very dashed.

  Elvira flew to kiss him. ‘Adam, when did you get to Paris?’

  Adam eyed Oliver and then answered sulkily, ‘I’ve never left Paris. I had some money saved up and I blewed it all. I’m hungry,’ he added plaintively, ‘and I haven’t paid my hotel bill. Can you take me in?’

  Elvira was all concern and Adam was their guest for two weeks. At the end of that time, Elvira got tired of him and telegraphed Paul to send her some money, ‘an advance on her quarter.’ When she got it, she bought Adam’s ticket and sent him home.

  CHAPTER VII

  Marpurgo one evening, perambulating round the rue Jacob, thoughtful, with his hands behind his back and his mind full of the unpleasant news he had heard of Oliver Fenton’s success with Georges Fuseaux, nearly ran into a pretty young woman, raised his hat to apologise, and started. It was Coromandel. She looked at him without apology, with the insolence of the Paris woman, saw nothing in the twilight but a stooping small man: her right foot as it touched the pavement stamped with impatience. He heard her accent, with its pampered ring, lisp and clip, still on the balmy air.

  ‘But—look where you’re going, I beg you!’

  ‘What a racy style! A woman of race,’ he muttered. He followed her at a distance. She certainly had not recognised him.

  ‘As an ardent student of character I must follow her and discover her. If I ever wrote down my studies I should be known as the naturalist of men—the modern Theophrastus.’

  He was more bowed and wrung his hands once, his heart pumping, his tongue outside his teeth, like a miser trying to make up his mind to go into an exchange office and buy a gold coin.

  ‘Hey! If my wife could see me now, she’d swear she was not surprised! Marpurgo in a new rôle, that of woman-chaser.’ He saw his features in a shop-mirror and composed his face. ‘I look detestably senile. Is this interest in the purely abstract parts of men and women, their characters, their puerilities, their foibles, a sign of old-age’s malice and impotence?’ He looked at his smoothed-out face in the next shop-mirror: ‘Nonsense, I’ve always been a gnomic philosopher, one of the dark beings. Paracelsus condemned me to pass easily through earth; fire, water and air denied me.’ He shuddered. ‘Earthy, guardian of
the barren, glittering mines, unglittering where they lie, not a good spirit of the mulch—in other words a miser. I feel cold this evening, and I’m hungry. I’ll have a good meal and a liqueur. Bless the French for warming the soul of man, his stomach. There she goes. Now is she eating alone? It’s queer.’

  Coromandel had entered a slightly expensive restaurant on the quay at the corner of the rue des Saints-Pères—Lafon’s. He went in and sat at the next table. She glanced at him casually and did not recognise him. She had a book of Albrecht Dürer’s designs and pictures, and was lightly drawing in in geometrical forms the composition of ‘the Flight into Egypt.’ When her hors-d’oeuvres came she closed the book and ate thoughtfully, perfectly oblivious of the restaurant and its scattered clients. The owner, old Lafon, and the waiters seemed to know her well, and called her ‘Mademoiselle Paindebled.’

  Marpurgo ordered an apéritif before his dinner and engaged the waiter in conversation about the diplomacy of Monsieur Barthou, then in London over the proposed Eastern pact. The waiter said pessimistically: ‘He is only a cat’s-paw, he is making a great fuss about external politics to draw the fires from internal mix-ups. They will presently get rid of him. We will have another change, you’ll see.’

  Marpurgo shook his head and his eyes roved from table to table.

  ‘No, he is your best politician, as good as Poincaré or Clemenceau.’

  ‘He is a friend of Poincaré,’ said the waiter, taking Marpurgo’s glass negligently.

  ‘But not of you, the workers,’ slid in Marpurgo.

  ‘Ah, that, that is another matter,’ said the waiter. ‘We have no friends but ourselves. It is a friendship not of philanthropy but of necessity: that lasts!’

  Marpurgo laughed appreciatively; the waiter went cheerfully to get his order. Marpurgo took out of his pocket the latest publication of the Éditions du Carrefour. He did not understand it well, but he was a slave of symbols, and this was a symbol of ‘culture.’ Coromandel looked at him for a moment and met his glance: he smiled. She withdrew self-communing eyes and stared at herself in the mirror. Marpurgo unwrapped a brown-paper roll he carried, and took out a pencil-lithograph of a lace-making métier, not a Leavers but another. Coromandel did not even look at his table. He put the roll beside him and pretended to fall into a brown study. Coromandel, who had taken a full carafe of wine, was now faintly flushed and scribbling faces on the back cover of the book of designs. Her black coffee came, and she lounged against the back of the upholstered bench as she drank it. Marpurgo, with a busy air, took a fountain-pen and a paper out of his pocket, and began to itemise some notes, a, b, c, d. He hummed a revolutionary tune softly as he did so. The waiter arrived with his coffee and liqueur. He lighted a cigar. As soon as the intoxicant loosed his tongue and changed the colour of the air, he leaned forward to Coromandel.