The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘You annoy me with that line. Let’s go home. The evening’s ended.’

  ‘It’s not ended for those who are going to bed to dream, for insomniacs, coughers, those who sit up bolstered by a cushion and look at the wheeling stars wondering if Andromeda or they will first touch the horizon: not for those who have bills falling due to-morrow, or need the rent, or those with a police-cordon round the house, or for mothers with babies being born, or for women to be married to-morrow, or for the old who keep a lamp on all night, fearing to trust in the eternity of stars, fearing death’s black smother: not for new lovers either, or men who have just found out their lives have been wasted, or men who have just found a new cause. For almost no one the night is ended. Is it for you and me?’

  ‘Do you always tell the truth?’ asked Coromandel.

  ‘Always when it’s unpleasant. I always suppress a pleasant truth. It makes people think the path of virtue is easy. On the other hand, I like to flatter, especially when there is no reason for it, or basis for the compliment. It is such a pure fantasy.’

  ‘No wonder you did not marry,’ said Coromandel. ‘Women like a surer man. You’re such a simple man: why do you have all this tin armour-plate of shrewdness? You talk all the time about autumnal shades and I don’t know what else. You’re green still. You want to suck out the world and you’re angry; you double up your fists and want to kill everyone just because pap isn’t free.’

  ‘I’m yellow now with wishing I had married the right woman: and because you’re so silken, topaz and red.’

  ‘You aren’t married?’

  ‘No: I have no wife.’

  They walked along slowly. The black Seine, with her long lights rolling in the new breeze, said nothing. A body covered in a tarpaulin lay on the ramp waiting to be taken up by the water-police.

  ‘A dead man,’ said Coromandel.

  They looked over the stone coping on to the quays: the lights were dispersed by the rustling trees. The fresh damp air blew up. Someone walked below, looking up at them with a patch-blue face.

  Marpurgo put his hand on her arm to move her along.

  ‘To-night will be short, although I am in a fever, with thinking over all that has happened to us, and making up songs to sing to you: it will be like Christmas Eve when I was a little boy, when bands were playing carols far and near all over the district. The bed rustles at the foot as your mother puts parcels in your stocking. Soon the early light will come and you can get up: all night you lie, start up, dream and wake again in the lovely joy of expectation. Early in the morning the band plays at your great gate, at the end of the drive. They made angelic music all night and in the morning you are surprised to see their ordinary faces, like the milkman and the postman. The night has been too short for all the expectation. So much too short this night will be for me. I can see in the north star winged trees in a leafy wood, spathe-palms and the tufty coroneted cycads, flamingoes take roots, pelicans grow in strelitzias, phoenixes take root, cannons of hexagonal crystal shoot puffs of light across a smoky pavement where a peacock pecks, all in a solitary yellow hill. Across a single bridge in a folded chapel you stand looking down, obstinately frowning, remote because I dream. So I will wake all night, not to be too far away from the reality, in dream…’

  Coromandel said sharply: ‘Doesn’t Mercutio say, “I hate a dreamer, he lies so.”’ She pointed to the quays. ‘It’s a dead man: isn’t it horrible? To think that you are alive there, so full of images, breeding, talking about death and decay—but there is the truth. I must get to know more people. I believe everyone’s story about themselves. And by everything, I’m swayed. When I see the melancholy creature down there, I despise us both, you know? I wish you would advise me how to study, Marpurgo. You know people’s dilemmas so well.’

  Marpurgo said timidly, stooping:

  ‘You see too much in me.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Some day this week, come and see my father. He likes to talk to you.’

  Alone, she clasped her hands round her breast and said with joy:

  ‘Marpurgo! The man outdoes his description. What will Oliver say to this? And when he hears how he spread himself for me! Oliver—Marpurgo? Which of them?’ She fell asleep overcome by the excitement of the conversation. It was a hot night with a small wind. She dreamed of Marpurgo as a smoky spiral of mystic blue, neatly bowing his way out of a snuff-jar.

  ‘Marpurgo!’ she called. His head nodded like a sea-bud on its sea-swirled palsied stalk, his leverine eyebrows and violet eyes twinkled. He called back unintelligibly in his inhuman stridulous tone. She woke up and repeated calmly a song she had just seen written on a livid sky in blue neon lights:

  ‘Landscip’s murky, grisly stars,

  Lone mastaba’s ululation

  And the tintinnabulation

  Of cracked bell beneath horizon

  Ringing hissing dead’s oríson;

  (Pizzicato, spiritoso!

  Pluck the marrowbones and cleavers,

  Auribus arrectis! Weavers

  Dreadful, destined, three deceivers,

  Wind, bind, snip us. Groan, oboes, so.)’

  Marpurgo stood gaping in a corner of her dream, his mouth his lung’s lesion, his finger was pointed at her, he spat at her in despite, in jealousy: ‘Should Zana do what Kubla can?’

  She cast her eyes to the vitreous roof mantled by the cloth above, and saw the blond flaunting sun fall bleached mellow into the chamber’s pearly lack-lustre obscurity. She remembered the visions and bodily fires of her embraces with Oliver in that room. The floating light rose and flowed about the walls with the lactescent murex of great magnolia flowers.

  Now she was planted in a bubbly incandescent pool: she smoked, she calcined, she sweated rivers to quench the fires that melt rocks: she froze with such resolution that she seemed lank as an icicle: she blushed, she became dingy-white as death. Through Marpurgo she was in love. On one side crouching, whispering, chanting, dark, wicked, divine, stood Marpurgo. She began to pity Oliver’s crudeness a little and disdain it. Not that Coro for a moment thought of poor Marpurgo as a lover, but as the lonely sphinx may have regarded an earlier and less successful Oedipus. She was in love. Only by imagining hyperbolic and hyperborean scenes of licence, folly and luxury, throngs of splendid women, sybaritic men, courts, staircases, frescoes, tapestries, plate, porcelain, jewels, wild-hued cheeks, eyes flashing with zodiacal light, spilled wines, lips smeared with sherbets, serpented arms, agate-nailed hands, small snowy feet, like doves, medusan locks, and angelican skies and the scattered roses of blood and the ascending spirals of mystic purple, and the wild, white-browed, dark-locked faunish youth, and old age paunched or shrivelled with white body-hair, lazily leering with dead-fish eyes, like almonds slit through three green and pasty rinds, and purple mouths ending in folds and ranges of lofty noses, whiter and snottier than the jutting Tyrol, and love, bestial and divine, to excess—only by these dreams could she forget her love, fever, and the insufficiency of men.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Mr. Paindebled sat in the folds of a Persian rug at the back of the shop reading with anxious attention, in the dusk, the evening paper. There had been a special vacation vote of aerial and military credits for fortifying the eastern frontier and strengthening the air forces. His taxes had been increased that year and he had done almost no business. He wondered whether it would pay him to sell his shop and move out to Versailles in retirement. Coromandel could work even better out in that quiet town, and he would not spend the money in business taxes that could go to her dowry. The spasmodic young man courting her, the English student, did not seem eligible, even though Mr. Paindebled came from Calais, the most English of French towns. On the other hand, an Englishman did not expect a dowry. But Coromandel’s son would be an Englishman, and she herself would lose her birthright. A new law had just been passed, and rigorous regulations were now in force against foreigners residing and working in France. Mr. Paindebled could not take such a so
n-in-law into his business unless he became French. And if he became French, he would be called up in the next war, which appeared rather close at hand, in view of the various military credits being voted. Then, it seemed, this young man imagined he was a communist. It was, naturally, a student’s caprice, at the same time it might show an unruly radical kink. He was radical himself, God knew, he was the son of three revolutions, but three revolutions are enough.

  Mr. Paindebled watched, through the laces, handles, incrustations of silver jugs, piercings of marble, ivory and jade, the evening people who went past in tatters. The evening was grey and windy; the late-setting sun flattened to two dimensions the roofs of the opposite houses, and a tardy gleam lighted on the shoulder of a Chinese jar just where it was chipped. Opposite the antiquary, above his head, in a cupboard, were some new fragments of Spanish lace. He wondered if his new friend, Mr. Marpurgo, would really buy any lace for his collection. He wondered intensely about the collection of Mr. Marpurgo. Marpurgo was a shuttle, void of guts, spinning out his thread endlessly. One could never really cotton on to foreigners, even intelligent ones, and even Latins of another breed. The Italians are always charming, windy, fretful, untrustworthy. The Spanish too, are untrustworthy. So are the English. And Marpurgo was English and Italian. Coro had teased about Annibale Marpurgo, who it appears was a friend of this Oliver also. She rhymed

  ‘L’ltalien anglicé,—

  Deux fous, un satané!’

  His thoughts flew to the salon above, where the splendid lace umbrella-cover, the stuff of dreams, hung against the wall, facing the green-eyed hamadryad. If his taxes were not so heavy, his life would be perfect. He now was lucidly awaiting Marpurgo, whose stealthy complex mind he imagined as full of anastomosing threads, a lace-mind, one which he liked to induce to self-embroidery, seeing the shuttles flying in the dark, hearing the click of the battalions of threads, always advancing, watching the Jacquard cards unfold and refold. A same design but a long one, an old design but a stock one.

  Sometimes people stopped before the window, wavering, to fill in the slow hour to dinner, or to fill a gap in their minds—and went on. He knew how many people to expect in a day, a week, a year. Only Marpurgo had come in at the wrong time and unexpectedly, but Marpurgo was a comet. Paindebled sat there, leaning against the tallboy, feeling through the thin skin of his fingertips the texture of the Persian rug. Marpurgo’s slight stoop and overcoat, which fell about him like an Arab blanket, darkened the obscure doorway. ‘Obscurum per obscurius.’

  Marpurgo looked about him, picked out Coro’s father, and with his young breaking voice that would soon become senile, spoke.

  ‘I have something, something which I hope you will let me give your charming daughter, Mlle Coromandel, a hand-painted, hand-illustrated and hand-bound book.’ He produced a folio-sized package from his coat. ‘If you will permit me; perhaps you yourself will be so good—no doubt she is out with her young friends.’

  ‘She is upstairs: she will have dinner with us to-night. You are very kind indeed. My wife is ill to-night. My daughter must keep to the house. My wife demands her.’

  ‘I regret very much that your wife is unwell. She is not in bed?’

  ‘No. I have mounted the umbrella-piece.’

  He turned on the light. ‘Let me take your hat and coat. Look at this Spanish lace: what do you think of it? Meantime I will put up the shutters: it is seven.’

  ‘Marvellous, exquisite,’ murmured Marpurgo. ‘I was at the auctions yesterday. Fortunate for us that everyone is so poor, and veritable masterpieces go for very little. Personally, also, I am against these multiplications to infinity of the value of goods: they cannot be worth it. Can they be worth more than he can pay who made it? Should they?’

  ‘An oyster makes a pearl; can he pay for it?’

  ‘A pearl is just lumbago to an oyster.’

  Paindebled closed the front door. ‘Let’s go upstairs now.’ He rang, and the old servant brought them port in a blue set of Bohemian glass. They had drunk two glasses each when the door opened behind Marpurgo’s back, and he heard Paindebled exclaim:

  ‘Well, thou here, Amélie! Thou art better now?’

  A woman stood in the doorway, a tall, strongly-built middle-aged woman, with long, silken blond hair parted and dressed in a horn on each side of a high forehead, with plump hands carrying rings, and wrists circleted with old-fashioned bracelets, and two falling cuffs of fine hand-embroidered Malines. Her hands were clasped in front of a velvet jacket while she stood calmly looking, not at her husband, but at Marpurgo. Marpurgo rose:

  ‘Madame.’

  ‘Monsieur Marpurgo, dear friend; my wife, Monsieur Marpurgo.’

  Marpurgo raised her hand to his lips. Clusters of beautiful artificial rosebuds hung from each horn of the dressed hair, a beautiful black Spanish mantilla, in a pansy design, was folded round her shoulders. Her shoulders were exposed under the mantilla, and her velvet jacket was folded very low in front to show a bosom of mediocre grain and colour. The shoulders had a fine curve, rolling in towards the bosom, the waist was rather slender: oval eyes lay broad apart in a large oval face of peasant strain. In this eccentric lady it was easy to recognise Coromandel’s mother. The husband had taken her hand and held it with a delicate firmness.

  She kept looking at Marpurgo with a droop of the eyes and mouth and a faint smile, like the unconscious sick smile of a very young baby. The husband chided: ‘Amélie! I am glad to see you are feeling a little better.’

  The woman’s unwrinkled calm face broke into a timid smile.

  ‘I am enchanted that you visit our too-quiet home, Monsieur.’

  The husband dropped her hand and tried to guide her gently to the door. She stood like a Noah’s Ark dame, aspiring, one would have said, Marpurgo’s atmosphere. She awoke again and said, in her flat broken voice, between two registers: ‘I have been a little ill: I have been ill for years.’

  The brows, edged with dark gold hair, were beautifully full, the mouth a Mona Lisa mouth, if it had not been unpleasantly compressed in the centre under a drooping nose-point. She glanced down at her shawl, smiled to herself, and looked up to see if they had noticed it.

  ‘I shall stay,’ she said to Paindebled. ‘You see, I got dressed for the evening. I heard you had come,’ she said to Marpurgo; ‘my daughter told me your name. She heard much of you through a little friend, a young friend.’

  The husband had crossed the room to ring the bell. She said in a confidential tone: ‘I have not been myself for a long time. It is pleasant to see friends. I was not really ill: a sort of house-fever, a mental low-fever, as you get when you are too much in your own universe.’ The golden-tinged skin was awakening, intelligence gathered over the different features in gleams, and joining, fell upon the whole mask like a light. She seemed equally to be gathering grace from her nerves, the fibres in remote points of her system, and began showering them on him with love.

  ‘You are an expert in laces, I hear. Do you like these cuffs?’ She proffered her hand, placing it on the back of Marpurgo’s hand so that he could see the lace, while with the other hand she laid it out and displayed it. Marpurgo took her hand by the tips of the fingers and gently laid it on the couch, spreading out the lace on the dark blue background of the rug. Her hands were pretty, rather plump at the base on a thick wrist, with small slender tapering fingers and a broad thumb. The line from the little finger to the wrist was the shape of an odalisque’s leg from waist to little toe. One side of the face was broader than the other, and was beautiful, mild and fresh as the face of a white calf; the other side of the face, the left side, narrower, was more shadowed, more marked by passion, and of a grave sensual seduction. The lady attracted the eye again and again for the various eccentric beauties of her face and body. Marpurgo’s face was lifted to her again and again. He withdrew his eye to remember the symbolism of what he had just noted, as her shoulder under the lace-shawl, her asymmetrical face, the downward sweep of the faintly coloured mouth,
curling like a kriss, the hand, the thick silken blond hair, the fantastic roses in it. The lady sat coolly, without speaking, but seemed delighted with his scrutiny. The husband, who had been speaking to a servant, came back and said:

  ‘Coro is waiting for you, Amélie.’

  The lady rose sedately, giving Marpurgo her hand.

  ‘Please forgive me: my daughter has something to say to me. I will send her out to see you: she is a pretty child: not as I am. You will see her: you must tell me if you think she will grow to be a real beauty.’

  ‘I will tell you,’ said Marpurgo, bowing and smiling.

  The lady went out with an air, much pleased with herself and him. As she went out of the door, she half-turned, and showed him the seductive, the left side of her face: something in the set of the shoulders suggested Coromandel. Marpurgo’s heart went plop! The father took his arm and led him to the umbrella-cover, now spread out: long tapering clusters of flowers and leaves wheeled into the centre from the deep border, which was a fairy surf of strings of forget-me-nots, shell-like leaves, crescents of openwork. A ring of little birds fluttered round the border over this surf. The tulle was machine-made, but all the design was made by hand. Marpurgo examined it closely, and began to praise it: keeping an eye on it, the father discoursed rapidly and wittily on a dozen other subjects.

  Presently he asked: ‘Did you notice the scarf my wife was wearing? A hand-made mantilla: it was my wedding-present to her. She is proud and fond of it. I was most surprised to see her wearing it. My wife is a little eccentric. But she was a fine lace-designer. That was how I met her. At first she used to work with me. Then a curious change began in her: she began to be eaten up by ambition. She worked days and nights without a break for weeks on end, to finish a design. But she could only do uncommercial things! She worked for a whole year once, and at the end, on my name day—my name is Jacques—she gave me a magnificent design that she had worked out ready for putting on the Jacquard machine—six scenes, the history of my life, in lace!’ He looked at Marpurgo with a quizzical expression. ‘After that she lost heart a little: Coromandel was born. She made lace herself for Coro’s clothing. Then the fever got her again, but she frittered away her time, fevered and impuissant. She said she would not become a dabbler in other arts, like the bohemian sort that she hates. She gave up music, of which she is fond, and only once or twice a year tinkles on the piano: for years she has done nothing but study odd things—medicine, zoology, economics, on and off, and whenever she starts a new subject she starts a new piece of embroidery, something vast, a bedspread, a curtain; the embroidery is to give her something to do when she tires of the book.