Her face was serious, but she watched him carefully. He looked unspeakably crafty.
‘Who was this Chevalier?’
‘Not Maurice,’ he teetered, ‘he’s too old for you to know, you child. He was the faithful lover of Manon Lescaut.’
‘Is that your impression of Oliver?’
‘Yes, some might think him an easy prey for women—his soft cheek, lustrous eye, dimpled chin, you know, the old wives’ indicia!—but I think he’s a splendid fellow, splendid.’
‘He may be a splendid fellow and still run after women. I know that means nothing to men. They are all masonic brothers when it comes to that. But as for Oliver, he’s a boy. I think I know him well enough to know if he ever trifled. He could not keep anything from me—yet.’
‘After all,’ said Marpurgo, laughing heartily, ‘you are a woman of experience, and gifted with everything needed to make a woman delightful. I am sure you can twist us all round your little finger.’
After a moment’s thought, she said, after unconsciously examining her little finger with care:
‘I’m used to speaking frankly. I think nothing is gained by skirmishing. I believe you came here this afternoon to tell me something, or give me some advice. I’ll ask you for it. What do you think yourself I should do?’
‘Advice is never taken, I never give it.’ Marpurgo was prompt. The child’s method she used, of facing him down, was easy play for him. ‘No, no: you love Oliver, Oliver loves you: that’s all there is for you to think about at present. Paul must plead for himself. I came to see how you both are. I am going to London on Wednesday next, and would be of service if I can do anything for you—or Oliver, of course. I thought of calling on Paul: he asked me to. I took to him immediately. I imagine everyone does. I’m going straight from here to the home of a friend of mine, Monsieur Paindebled—funny name, Paindebled, Wheatbread, isn’t it, really?—who is interested in laces. He has the strangest possible household—most curious. A half-mad wife, who dresses up like portraits by Ingres, a talented, beautiful daughter who is a good designer, also slightly touched, if I’m any judge. The father is an affinity. Mademoiselle Coromandel, that’s the daughter, is as blonde as you are brunette, like a corn-tassel, a brilliant intellectual girl. She speaks English very well. In fact, she is rather interested in some English student here, I believe, a student of economics—one of those things everyone studies in his post-graduate pre-professor year. I never asked his name. He works at the Archives. No doubt Oliver knows him. There can’t be too many English students down there—even though Paris is the dream of the English race!’
‘Oh, I hate it here,’ she said passionately. ‘It’s no home for us. The French have closed family circles, and unless your situation is regular and you can come out in the open, you sit with a lot of Anglo-Saxon loafers and drink aperitives.’
‘Well, I had better be going if Oliver is coming. I hope you and he will soon be settled. You see too little of each other now, don’t you? He works so hard; and these political discussions in cafés which keep him out…a woman must hate men for their politics! May I come and take you both out—a little party before I leave—on Monday? We’ll go to the Bois: just afternoon sports-dress—everyone wears it now. We can pick Oliver up anywhere just as he is. Ask him if there is anything I can do for him in England. You can’t just drop there out of the blue, can you? You have your friends to make all over again. And you have both so much to think of and decide upon.’
‘I’ll give you a letter for Paul,’ said Elvira. ‘Don’t tell Oliver. It irritates him. Good-bye. You’re not a real friend, Annibale: you’re always playing some game, but I can work in with one of your moves, and so I will.’
He kissed her hand: ‘I really worship you, Elvira.’
The concierge knocked at the door just after he left with a pneumatique from Oliver saying that he would not be in for lunch: he had gone to see Georges Fuseaux. Georges had located a new, elegant and moribund café with expensive food and bad service, and was trying to convert one or two bosom friends to it. In order to get Oliver to his café for lunch, he had promised to speak to Antoine about him as soon as Antoine had come back from his projected holiday.
‘I want to get you in to learn the work: Marpurgo may decide to pension himself off. We’ll give him twelve months’ salary, but we don’t have to see his mug round the place as well as pay him.’
‘You’re getting rid of Marpurgo?’
‘Oh, I suppose he can talk himself into another job. I hear he’s been canvassing for one with a promoter here, I forget his name, who’s trying to develop a French news service linked up with some New York stock-pools. It isn’t that he’s interested in stocks, but he likes to get round and talk to people; he likes to have two strings to his bow, and he can’t bear to play a straight game with anyone.’
‘You’re not prejudiced against him, by any chance?’
‘I know him. Don’t worry: I’m always the grouch, but I know a duplicit man when I see one. That goof just hates even to take his liquor straight. It’s a wonder he doesn’t have his hair curled.’
In the afternoon, Oliver, whose work was practically finished, and who was taking a ‘holiday,’ wandered over to Coromandel’s studio. He cast a beggarly thought for a moment in Elvira’s direction, but he thought, ‘She loves tea, and no doubt Blanche will be in as usual to borrow some shoes or safety-pins or twenty francs.’
Coromandel made him sit still while she worked on a cartoon she was going to send in to Le Canard Enchaîné.
Oliver lay back on the couch and grinned to remember his quarrel with Elvira in the morning. She had said:
‘The day’s so long for me: there’s nothing to do.’
‘Study your French. I thought you were going to get a teacher’s diploma?’
‘I’m not a schoolgirl and not a dabbler. I like to do a thing thoroughly, full-time. That course is no use. I’m just wasting time. I need an interest in life. If you have a settled life, a home, you are organised, but if you’re a hobo, you need something internal to organise you.’
‘I can just see our laundress across the road worrying about that.’
‘Men have made me what I am. I was born into a social setting. You talk like a schoolboy, full of maxims. Get work! That’s your innuendo, isn’t it? Well, why should I? I can live parasitically and I will. If you don’t like it, you can marry a laundress.’
She had been, as always, half-mocking. He had lunged round the room: when he came near her, she pushed him impatiently. ‘Oh, go and study your lesson-books. You bore me.’
When he had softly opened the front-door of the flat, after closing it loudly, and peeped in, she had been sitting dismal before her looking-glass, her soft lips shaping soundless words. He murmured, ‘The darling!’
‘What did you say?’ Coromandel looked vaguely over her shoulder and went on working.
‘I said, You darling!’
She went on drawing.
Four o’clock arrived, they went out and took a stroll. It was a moth’s-wing evening with liquescent lights, a cool air blowing. Already the people who live in attics had returned and turned on their twinkling lights. Meanwhile Elvira, returned from afternoon tea, waited for her lover Oliver. From the roof-terrace she saw the great gold lunar plate rising over the Luxembourg, through the fine dust and the air thickened with the corollas and pollen of the trees at the riverside and the Lycée garden. She gave a resounding sneeze. The birds, scared, in dozens rose, made their metallic noises, wheeled, settled, only to rise once more in a knot and settle farther off, and so to rise again and cry. A bat flew back and forth in the dusk of the street; under her window two swallows swooped from their seat. The dark began to grow in the sky in sudden pulsations of deep blue, as if pumped through a vast, invisible, arterial system above, or as flocks of reindeers going to pasture at a distance over the hills. The night in the garden thickened, the birds fell asleep at last, and the traffic rolled up and down in swift, hooded binocu
lar streams. Elvira, sitting by the open window, breathed out of the air the rarest kind of perfumes, and saw in the sky streams of small blue flowers, and clouds of honey and a perpetual dry but redolent rain of delights clustered around her and stuck to her like bees. She had the impression that the stars, so small in the unmargined sky, were reflected in her hair, which she polished nightly with a silk cloth. She had been a beauty when a girl, and now, after a happy afternoon browsing over the tea-cups with her professor of French who, she saw, had warmed to her, she felt the full intoxication of beauty sure of its empire. Poor Oliver was walking the streets, miserable because she had sent him out: he did not return, so that he need not wait in an empty house until she came back. At the same time, she might have taken him with her: she could have said he was a student at the Archives, a friend of Paul’s. It was true, too. How lovely the evening! How Oliver had worshipped her when he first was with her alone: how she ensnared him with her practised married wiles, frankness, tender brutality of speech, the little armoury of pet names and expressions she had slowly woven with Paul, the caresses, and savant libertinism. To her he was a child: he could never escape her if she wanted him. She almost fell asleep in the balmy air. She was not sure that small animals did not keep popping their wild, docile heads incorporeally out of the thick air and that white, dun or black creatures of strange heraldic forms did not walk along the air on various planes.
When he came home she was surprised to see how cool he was. He asked about the professor, and did not seem at all jealous or hurt. She asked him where he had been and got a vague answer. She pondered on that. They had dinner in a students’ restaurant and then walked towards Notre-Dame. The moon was above them sucking the life out of everything, yet still bloodless like an old man: its avaricious eye watched the round-limbed river and tried to dance in its sight.
‘That’s lovely, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, lovely.’
‘Once a girl told me that love was like a night-sky, with stars. Then I did not know, but now I know she was right. She loved me, poor wench. This air is intoxicating.’
‘It is spring lingering.’
‘In the spring, eh?’ He murmured, ‘“In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” I’m so happy to-night that even that sounds like poetry.’
‘It’s as good as any other poetry: it’s true.’
‘Yes, poetry is true. Gee, that’s a discovery for me, Elvira. Poetry is true. To-day, walking along the quays, I found a chap with a whole stack of English books. There was Thomas Carew. I looked in and turned at once by chance to a poem which began:
Let fools great Cupid’s yoke disdain,
Loving their own wild freedom better;
Whilst, proud of my triumphant chain,
I sit and court my beauteous fetter.
I bought the book. One is always so sure one’s right. When I think of the people I laughed at for their love-affairs, and realise now that I was simply on the other side of the fence, that was all! Elvira, my dear, you are so beautiful, no wonder I went back on my whole philosophy in a single hour, when I knew you. The strange thing is that even when I first heard of you, I was moved. There is in the same book another poem with the line—that is all I remember—
Question: Whence springs love? Answer: From beauty.
Your beauty was a fact so evident that all my foolish arguments collapsed like a house of cards. Beauty spreads its atmosphere far and wide, far beyond the range of sight.’ She leaned on his arm. ‘But that is hard on me: I am not beautiful: I am nothing but a poor scholar.’
She answered softly: ‘I like that. You are so young and honest: you question everything. You could lead me. I need someone to lead me. I am helpless by myself.’
‘Darling, when you speak like that, I—I simply go wild. I never knew what it was to love a woman, a real woman. Oh, you mean everything to me. Say you love me?’
‘I love you, Oliver. My life was dead before you came. I had nothing to look forward to. Now I am starting life with a young man with ambition. We will go to a new country.’
‘Then you are decided? Oh, you put new life into me. I have everything to live for. I will work for you: all my life will be something to lay at your feet.’
‘It won’t always be like this,’ said Elvira. ‘We will have to go back to normal life, we’ll have to get a proper apartment and settle down. Paul will have to divorce me. It won’t matter; we’re going so far away. Anyhow, I don’t mind about that, do you? That doesn’t mean anything to us?’
‘No,’ said Oliver heartily, thinking with dismay that if there were a scandal he could never get a position in a university, college or in extension work. The smaller the college and the university, the pettier their restrictions.
‘Can you get a position easily if you’re mentioned as co-respondent?’ asked Elvira.
‘H’m, well, that’s another question,’ said Oliver, grinning and looking into her face, which was on a level with his. ‘There’s the rub. But we’ll manage somehow. If the hypocrites won’t take me, or if the ’varsity kicks me out, I’ll do something else. I’ll be a clerk, or I’ll go somewhere where we’re not known. Don’t worry. We’d have to scrape along for a few years till I got my footing. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?’
‘Oh, I’d love it: to start afresh. I don’t mind working.’ Her soft-skinned face had a look of innocent enthusiasm. He stopped on the Quai d’Anjou where they found themselves, and, lifting her chin, kissed her with passion.
‘You don’t know what you do to me, Elvira! To think that the night I walked into your dining-room, I walked into the arms of fate.’
‘Don’t we always?’ she said thoughtfully.
As they walked on, he could tell that she was thinking over the evenings in Mecklenburgh Square and wondering how the house was going now that she was away, whether they were even now at this hour gathered round the fire, talking, devising. They both sensed that with her gone, they would talk about their professions, politics, markets, the sciences, all the more to rouse Paul from his sorrows. The picture of Paul sorrowful appeared to them both. When they got home Oliver noticed that Elvira looked in the letter-box. He smiled.
‘Expecting a letter?’
‘Oh, no, old habit!’
Before they went to bed, she said: ‘I really ought to write to Paul: after all, we are amusing ourselves and he is worrying over there. It’s only kind.’
‘Yes, it’s only kind.’
After several moments of darkness, during which he was thinking, ‘I suppose at some point in the road, one would throw away a bag of gold for the sake of walking free,’ he began to chafe with a rising passion. He had practically no money left. He thought: ‘By Jings, if I had a bag of gold—’
Elvira, with that telepathic appropriateness common in marriage, murmured in the dark:
‘We can’t go to the pictures again this week, Oliver, really. You spend so much on books and pamphlets. It goes out in five and ten-franc pieces. We don’t notice it.’
Oliver bit his lip and thought of the opulence and riotous furnishings of Coromandel’s studio-floor. He had said to her that afternoon:
‘You wouldn’t marry a skunk-cabbage like me.’
‘Who knows?’
He had been surprised at how near he had come to a proposal. He thought now: ‘I had better watch my step.’ At one moment he wanted to throw himself into her arms and leave Elvira to pick her way home, the next he thought: ‘Bind myself to this authoritative young woman—she might go crazy like her mother!’ Coromandel had watched him with impatience and bitten her lip. So she, too, wanted to marry him. Surely they inoculated all girls with the idea of marriage to get them as single-minded and uniform as that? Elvira said in the dark:
‘Then our washing cost thirty francs this week, and we pay four francs fifty centimes to the femme de ménage, that’s because we’re foreigners. In our own country we could live on much less.’
‘Elvira, darl
ing, don’t let’s talk about money now. I hate money. I want to love you. I don’t want to talk about the washing. I never want to discuss money with you.’
‘No, you leave all that to me, of course. I can’t count on a scholarship to keep me while I write peptonised socialism.’ He recognised his own phrase.
‘Well, a man who emits poison-gas against himself deserves to be scorched.’
‘We won’t get anywhere with your wisecracks. I do wish you’d be serious. You said you’d abide by my ideas: you’d do anything to make me happy. You really haven’t done a thing. You’re always thinking of yourself. To you I’m just a necessity, like bread or meat.’
He was silent, and then murmured: ‘Really, is it as bad as that?’
‘Oh, what a wild-goose chase! How do I know what you do all day long?’
He flung himself over on his side. ‘Jesus!’
She began to cry. He sulkily took no notice, till he heard harsh breathing. He turned on the light and was scared to see her stretched out as if in a fit, hands clenched, eyes rolling, lips bitten. He spent an hour in the greatest distress before she fell into a sleep, broken by shudderings. He lay back in the dark with staring eyes, a terrible fear and aimlessness in him. But presently he slept calmly.
The next day Elvira was cold to him, and yet had so surely a trace of tears that he felt half water himself. He took no notice of her, however, and left the apartment abruptly after the traditional kiss. He wanted to wound her badly, but couldn’t think of an excuse. He didn’t think she would go back to Paul now—everyone has some shame, he repeated—and if she does? He set his face in a disagreeable expression. He went to the Bois de Boulogne, and walked there, looking at the shallow brooks, feeling affection for the sparrows and the varieties of fungi on the tree-trunks. He had lunch, smiled at the girls, sat on an urbane café chair planted in the midst of the forest, calculated a sparrow’s life was not worth living because of the fearful way it looked round when trying to take a little sip of water from a runnel.
The Beauties and Furies Page 29