The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Madam! You sit there as if invisible nightingales sang in your ears. I am a designer myself. May I say that you are a fine artist, better than I shall ever be?’

  She answered with scarcely a glance sideways:

  ‘I am a little drunk, but I knew it was you singing. I also saw the design of a lace-making métier. I am drunk enough to believe that the invisible fauna of the sightless waving woods, yew, sycamore and elm, follow you in your tracks. What are you, a poet, engraver? How do you know I draw? My get-up? I know I am a little crazy.’ She called the waiter. ‘Waiter, the bill, please.’

  ‘Wait,’ begged Marpurgo. ‘Take another coffee, please.’

  ‘You’re really mistaken,’ answered Coromandel. ‘Why should I wait for you? I don’t know you. If I’m not mistaken, you trod on my toes in the street just now—aren’t you the clumsy fellow?’

  ‘You should have been a lamp to my feet: should you blame the lamp or the feet?’

  She looked at him curiously; then, as she remembered her legend, with a sparkling wonder. He was in a joyful riot of mystification.

  ‘I have thought of you as fair in a fair dress and sandalled feet, on a yellow shore, with azure eyes, in the cloudless air, gathering up a belt of sapphires by a blue sea. I thought of you, too, a virgin with a white snood of your own hair, amidst stars and jack o’ lanterns, your feet treading the margin scum of a rushy lake. I dreamed I went through the rooms of a fine castle, with seven wings and seven towers, that belonged to me, the white sun lay on the naked floors, pale-flowered spikes and racemes, grasses with their silver beards blew on the lawns!’

  The waiter had long ago brought the bill. Coromandel motioned him near.

  ‘Another black coffee.’

  She looked at herself in the mirror, and then, tracing on the tablecloth, said quietly:

  ‘Are you reciting something, or did you make that up?’

  ‘I am telling you how, as a lamp swung to and fro in a gateway, I meditated.’

  She laughed and tapped with her finger-nail.

  ‘I suppose you fly through the air with the greatest of ease, towards the fire mountain and over the seas. You know that chapter of Zarathustra? I have an illustration to it. He is like you. I had difficulty with it: an earthy man looks so ridiculous standing upright in the air. But now I have it, he should limp forward a little, with a macabre swirl of coat-tails, a cabbalistic bright tie, a soft hat. Towards the coasts of tigers, water-rats, sampans and mosquitoes.’

  He laughed.

  ‘The Coromandel coast?’

  Without more mise-en-scène he produced from his pocket-book the folded drawing of the lamp in the gateway, and flattened it on the corner of the table.

  ‘I found it in the rue de l’Université—one evening.’

  ‘Did I lose it? I have so many papers in my studio. Thank you.’

  ‘Why no, it’s mine.’

  ‘Take it, then: I’ve got lots of others.’

  ‘What is purloined she gives freely; to encourage tradesmen skeely: thief’s advice is, show more thrift, lest outsiders catch your drift.’

  Coromandel turned to him frankly and laughed.

  ‘Well-timed breaths, notes writ ideally, make good catches—it’s a gift.’

  Marpurgo edged closer and leaned towards the other table, the lucent epidermis of his face pallid with excitement and self-intoxication; he had reached the rare corybantic hour that he struggled for, his low voice was splintered by the stridor of sorcery, he trembled with the internal dithyrambs of megalomania.

  ‘Creation is rearrangement, choice out of chaos: we who are droppings of the winds only get joy in symmetry, rhythmus, isotropes and figments of perfection. We have no god but Ieros Logos. I used to dream of writing a treatise on universal harmony, you know—

  “In harmony, in heavenly harmony,

  This universal frame began…”

  now, like Nicomachus of Gerase, I would write it for a lady who is the crystalline pith of divine proportion, the egg that floated on the waters. Eros—’ His voice wavered; he raised his finger. ‘I started with Pythagoras. I am like, am, Luca Pacioli, the monk “drunk with beauty,” friend of Leonardo, that Protean son of genius…’

  Coromandel murmured: ‘You are the monk of beauty and I am the canon of Polycletus—is that the idea?’

  ‘You are not, but are the orchestra for platonic symphonies.’ He shied away from this personal line again. ‘This is Greek to you and me: we are Latins, we understand, we are Goths, drunk with eurhythmus, only joyful when we find the golden section, only at peace when we know the point in the circle that in the square and triangle stands. Why have mathematics and architecture always been deposited in sworn bosoms and protected by rites and the death-danger? Because they betray the excellence of the human body, they are founded on our microcosm: we learn first to count five on our fingers, eh? But it would be to teach the worship of the body and physical nature to the vulgar to teach them this proportion. Therefore for the mob a vile mysticism is invented, ridiculed by men of genius, by the elect and robust. To me there is nothing beyond the physical, I distil the rarest perfumes of abstraction from the correspondences of the flesh. I followed through, for years, the forest of religions, the labyrinths of symbols, the gardens of temptations that titillate and defeat the desirous soul by rapt analogy. I coldly profited by ecstasies and calentures, fought with my superiors and inferiors, dabbled in every art, left a sickness untended, did both good and evil to see things in their true perspective, to find the point of the circle that stands in the square and triangle. Do you know it? All is well. Is it unknown to you? Then your fabric is only moonshine. This simple secret, jealously guarded, is the power of science; its withholding a means of keeping down the people.

  ‘I was born with a hump on my back, and from the first day my eyes distinguished day from night I wanted to find out the secret of oppression. You see millions toiling for three; the Egyptian secret that enslaved Coptic millions became the secret of Chartres and Fontainebleau. The liberation of men is the death of the intellectual as such. When everyone can construct his pantheon from the polyhedron with 72 faces which Pacioli recommends to us (all architects, we) for harmonic meditations, the priest, the sorcerer, the poet is dead. For my sake we ought to return to the barbaric rhythms of Beowulf, the primitive improvisations of Daniel Arnault.

  ‘Yes, the triumph of the people is the death of the esoteric. What is more beautiful than the regrets in Ecclesiasticus, the cries of Job? The lament of the old over the follies of the young, of the decadent over the crudities of the newly-risen? You and I belong to a world that is: we are in the autumnal shades, our world still seems populous to us, as the banks and brooks of Vallombrosa in the fall of the year…’

  Coromandel, who had not followed, nor would have been able to follow, half the learned farrago, was enchanted by the recurrence of names and themes, the strange commanding tone he had recited all this in.

  He seized his moment: ‘Let’s go, shall we? What do you do now? I usually play chess, but to-night—I suppose you have enchanted nights, but for me to-night is something that will only come once or twice in a lifetime. Let’s walk in this old suburb you know so well. There’s no imprudence in that. You were born here, doubtless. I feel I was born here too, though actually I saw the light many miles away—in another Latin country—in Turin. I became English, it should have been French.’

  ‘Why should a man change his nationality? Didn’t you like being Italian?’

  ‘Ah—my country is no longer my country: she has wedded a tyrant. I renounced her, like a faithless wife, a harlot-daughter.’

  ‘You should have fought for your country, even in its prisons. I should do that.’

  ‘My country rejected me: I was proscribed.’

  ‘A socialist?’

  He smiled.

  ‘I believe in dictatorship beyond democracy, in the revolution that springs from the loins of evolution.’

  ‘You mean a commu
nist? Are you? It’s interesting. I know a few—my father saw the rise of the labour movement in Calais, without belonging to it—he has the weakness of thinking an artisan must remain apart, “must not be regimented,” but he’s an ardent radical. I’m almost persuaded by the communists, their certainty of ultimate victory, their fires and intellects. For the doctrine, I am just reading Bukharin’s Historical Materialism.’

  He archly started. ‘Really? And you like it? You should read—this and this—Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum himself.’ He became feline. ‘You’re a singular young woman, aren’t you? When you get farther along, I should recommend you to start from Marx’s and Engel’s starting-point and study Hegel himself: you can draw your own conclusions about historical materialism from the Hegelian dialectic…’ He rattled on, saw that she was listening with less attention, and began to chant, suddenly:

  ‘Wise men are of one same sort, pianaviva, pacevalee,

  Philosophers all men exhort, pensafonda, penetralee,

  Teachers mummer, all amort, parvalibra, pecunalee,

  Judges stummer in their court, prolegmagra, premittalee,

  Glappering barristers consort, paucacrimna, picayanee,

  Rentiers with nose in port, privapatria, primestralee,

  Officers on their nags cavort, prijovepravo, pulcheralee,

  Little men speak ever short, picvapecva pukulalee.’

  Each line was recited with a different pose, accent and intonation to mimic the men described. Marpurgo was an actor in a small way, a resourceful mountebank.

  ‘You are the most original of men!’

  He didn’t answer, but started like a high-bred horse which has been flicked.

  ‘No, but one with your fantasy should read Joseph Popper—Lenin worshipped him—his stories, not his philosophy. He has a story about a boy listening to a nightingale in the night. I know nothing that so recalls to me my early years, the years one is in the pulsating zentrum and dreams he is but in the penumbra, when ciliate rainbows strew his path like rushes…’ He sighed. ‘Do you want to walk a little? I’m alone, if you can spare an hour to a lonely man: when the dry corn meets the flame, it burns high although it perishes that way. Or should I say, you are the embroidered screen on whose four panels, in an abstracted moment, man man’s fate sees suddenly. A Coromandel screen.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  He spoke gently, with admiration it seemed. ‘Of course, Coromandel Paindebled; you have had my respectful homage since the first day. I am Annibale Marpurgo.’

  ‘Marpurgo,’ said Coro rising to her feet and looking at him. ‘I must have known: it seemed to me I knew you. All you said was like the faint echo of a bell!’

  ‘You know me,’ said the gentleman, flattered and surprised.

  ‘I should have known it was you if I had had the brains to think of it. I love a magical coincidence, an improbable guess falling on its feet.’

  ‘I met you often before, too, but it wasn’t you,’ said Marpurgo coyly.

  ‘This is no real magic—you’re Oliver’s friend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, Oliver Fenton, of course!’ His sallowness and fatigue became apparent. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Out of town for a few days: he’s looking up some town records in a library in—I don’t believe now he told me where.’

  ‘Let’s forget him,’ rapped out Marpurgo. Then slily, ‘Or would you rather talk of him? When he comes back, I must see him. He’s looking for a job in England, isn’t he? I want to help him.’

  Coromandel smiled. ‘Why—no!’ She covered her mistake: ‘But perhaps he is. I don’t think he’s serious yet…I love him, I mean lightly, you know. But I’ve always thought I should really love an older man.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Or a young man very old for his years. He is not like that.’

  ‘You want to be the vine climbing through the hair of the oak, so that when one is green, both are green.’

  ‘Most young men are impulsive, simple-minded, like myself: I’d like to live with someone with a cloisonné mind: a sage, a cryptic man.’ She stopped. ‘I told you I was crazy. Everyone says I am.’

  ‘The zephyr is so fresh and single-minded, let’s stroll,’ said Marpurgo. ‘If all this is true—look at the dolphin-black heavens, and the spray—it’s the one night in a thousand years, for me: I’d like to stay up all night to see it through. I drank not wine and water, but Aganippe and Hippocrene to-night; I see I am now in a world of enchanters and angelic women. I am just holding you here by the arm, do you see, so that you can’t go. Oh, what shall I do when the morning breaks greyly and your night-clouded shape is not there? I shall want to drink up every thick pond to reach the sweet slime of the one-rooted lily, I shall climb lamp-posts to sup off the blond lights, I shall be rustling in the orange-headed trees at sunset, I shall fall into the river wrestling with the long chrysoberyl rays. They will certainly take me off to Charenton this week if you don’t vigil with me a little.’

  ‘No,’ she said nervously, ‘don’t let me go away: if the enchanter can fall in love with smoke, what about the poor female face he brought in out of the air for his minute, that looks into the brawling broth and sees its wreathed beauty and then looks and sees his startling, starting, fearful, frightened, self-indulged beauty, his cheeks that were red, all pale with reading so late at night, and his violet eyes glinting with pride, conflict, desire, diamond-sharp like a glass-cutter? Tears—whether she loves him or not she regrets him ever after. He should not have called her up for nothing, for an hour, for his own conceit.’

  ‘You are too observant,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘I ought to go home: this is painful,’ said Coromandel, and shivered.

  ‘Don’t go: let’s stop somewhere else, and I’ll sing you into a better frame of mind.’

  ‘I’m afraid of your songs: it’s like the old-fashioned X-ray bulb that comes close to your skin till you feel as if you’ll burst, and begins to sing in its supernatural mauve incandescence. And while it sings it takes a ghastly picture of your skeleton.’

  ‘I have never loved anyone. I think I—at any rate, when I think of you I think of the skeleton within. That must be the same thing. I first saw you in your father’s shop, on the stairway, then at the window. To-night I followed you. All the time, when I think of you I think of that shadowy scaffolding that holds up the dissolving flesh, as a scarecrow old sun-blanched jeans.’

  She laughed.

  ‘When I was a young girl, I used to see people’s brains secreting their funny thoughts and odd impulses up there in the dark of the loft.’ She touched her head. ‘Come to my father’s shop in the rue Jacob. Look in and there you’ll see my mother, the old nurse, and myself at some time of the day.’

  ‘You want to see me by daylight.’

  ‘Are you visible then or not? I have seen you as I have seen you: you can never surprise me, never change. When I saw your pure, good, gentle face—’

  Marpurgo passed his hand over his face, to hide his startled eyes.

  ‘I knew you quite well,’ confessed Coromandel innocently.

  ‘You don’t know me at all: I’m not what you think. I’ll take you home. I’ll sing you a song translated out of the Persian. This is how I got it. A dark and handsome young man came into my office in London one day: he said he was a dethroned Persian prince, and showed me a manuscript book of songs and poems of his own. He wished only to get them printed so that he could begin a literary career and earn his bread humbly by “singing,” he said. He looked hungry, but I did not dare offer such an elegant, delicate and sensitive boy money. The next day he came back and borrowed £1. I was quite confused, and yet I half expected to wake up next morning bound and mocked, fed and clothed in the palace of Haroun. The next day he was arrested for some pathetic little affairs of begging. He was actually heir to a dethronement. I’ll improvise the Music to one.

  ‘The silver hind her leafy sky

  And cool cloud-showing streams

  De
serted for a field near by—

  A lettuce-patch she deems

  More succulent than forest grass:

  Now is she fenced around;

  Deer is she still, and yet an ass

  To leave home for no ground.’

  ‘That’s poor enough, it’s threadbare verse: he beggared your Barmecide, this Persian.’

  ‘Oh, I paid him his pound really for the following,’ sneered Marpurgo:

  ‘Women are by nature light,

  So we need them in the night:

  Women are by nature sweet,

  So we take them after meat:

  Women have a mother wit,

  And we like to father it.’

  Coromandel stamped impatiently, and cried:

  ‘Women go by fits and starts,

  So go tailors, verses, hearts…’

  ‘I can rhyme like that all day. With me, you must rhyme better, Marpurgo. I am a woman and lighter, ergo, you must dazzle me. Flourish, flash in your finale, outdo me, outshine me, Annibale!’

  His lips murmured, as if dry; his head nodded like a sea-bud on its shrunk stalk; he replied in the voice that had the squall of strings:

  ‘I’m hoarse, I’m old, I’m an odd-job man. I shouldn’t be bothering you. I can see you think I’m ridiculous.’