The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  The sun declined, his heart began to beat, and tears to rise from his heart. He walked faster and faster through the woods, examining the opalescent skies between the leaves, leaning sentimentally over lakes and observing the foolish dignity of the swans. A male swan deployed its feathers and swam boldly about to attract the attention of a very dirty, and quite indifferent, female on the bank. A male pigeon, heavily banded, glossy, and apparently the hero of the band, unsuccessfully chased a number of females, with whom much more modest gentlemen were later successful. Oliver followed the repulsed hero several rods, and threw a twig at him as he walked off.

  A number of passing women reminded him of Elvira. He thought of her, so gentle, so tender, so faithful. He was inexpressibly touched. He wished she were there so that he could press her hand, take her head on his breast, her dark head, so shapely, so girlish. He would protect her from this time till their old age. He imagined them having children. He desired Elvira’s presence and unimaginative propositions. His arms ached and his feet impetuously took every turn that the path offered them, as if round the next corner he would find, immaterial but complete, the object of his delusions. With nightfall this need became so great that it shot up within him like a beanstalk, and his spiritual powers increased. So profound was his passion that everything unrelated to it seemed puny. Coromandel he derided, Paul he disdained, he wondered how he had ever been able to desert the apartment with Elvira there, his jewel, his salvation. With impetuous speed, his hat in his hand, he rushed along the path now thick with twilight and with the rich amorous perfumes of the laden boughs and with the twitterings of sparrows, until a taxi overtook him, when with breathless voice he gave the address of the apartment in the rue Thouin and threw himself on the cushions, his heart beating fast, his head reeling with desire, his hands clasped, his eyes closed. He ascended to the apartment and clasped Elvira to him. She had forgiven him.

  ‘Elvira,’ he said,’ I was walking in the Bois just now. The swans’ feathers are arranged in octaves, the spurting leaves in trinities, the clouds fly through the interstices, one, two, three, and then a flock—like sheep threading a rank meadow; the birds sit side by side, in twos; there before me the path stretches like the stem of a tree branching alternately, one, pause, two, a pause, and so forth; and the branches beginning with one, soon wind and gyrate into their high complexity and finish at the apex, many multitudinous threads woven round one distaff, and so woven and so shuttled across the warped sky as to make a seamless damask issued from a master loom. The grass sprang in its families, the earthworms laboriously emerged with regular gyrations from their burrows, the motor cars rushed past, shells of mystery, but in reality most wearily constructed bodies whose very source of life was purchasable at the next pump station. I thought—suppose I should know your body with the same accuracy, suppose your pattern and our ecstasies were manufactured at so many thousands a day!—and I wished it were so, so that the imperfections in us would have never existed, and our joys might be perfected from the first day and increase in a mathematical proportion of wildness, velocity and climax. I loved you with arithmetic, for if the animals love by sensation, I don’t see why we should not go to the heart of the matter and love mathematically. For that’s how the world appears to me. You know when I clasp you to me, I think of the teeming cells of your body, of the unthreaded labyrinths. I count your heartbeats; all that’s numerable seems to me an exquisite and exciting mystery, all that’s mysterious seems to me poor and worthless. I know the slow responses of the mammary glands, the tremendous pulse of the matrix, the head turning from side to side, the hair falling equally on each side of the elliptical brows, the black-centred eyes rolling rhythmically, the surging breathing. When I stand in the wood, so built up with complex tissues, and so enervated, so articulated with its limbs, the light pours through its bodies and through yours, showing the green and red fluids; exquisite amphorae of musky wine.’

  Elvira listened silently, and when the spring seemed to have dried up, she said tranquilly: ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Oliver, more fiercely than she had ever heard it.

  ‘Why do you leave me so long alone? I am so lonely.’

  ‘I know. I feel your loneliness, I suffer with you. I exult in your loneliness which makes you cling so close to me. When I am away from you, and I know you are waiting for me, I love you so ardently that I am rooted to the spot with pain, my soles burn the grass. I wish to enjoy our common loneliness for a while, so that we can be closer united.’

  Elvira drew slowly away from him, and put her face in her hands.

  ‘What is it, Elvira? Now, tell me, beloved.’

  ‘You don’t care if I am lonely as long as you can think about it and amuse yourself with my being in love with you.’

  ‘Elvira!’

  ‘You don’t, you don’t.’

  He endeavoured to soothe her, but an extensive, if yet light, shadow of fear was rising over her apprehensive heart. She began to watch, calculate, divine, fear, construe, suspect. He would leave her when his spiritual ambition demanded some other object of passion, or some sacrifice, or some austerity. She couldn’t keep him. For the first time in her life she knew the cruel feeling of helpless abandonment. She had no faith in his talk about mathematical love. While she turned all things into the substance of love, he turned even the strongest passion into something abstract. The same evening he looked at her with a dark liquid look, something too sentimental, and said:

  ‘You are a strange, passionless negative, Elvira. I am a positive. Conclusion—together we make nothing.’

  ‘Why do you say nothing? I somehow can’t bear to hear you say nothing.’

  ‘No, nothing is a beautiful idea—it avoids conflict, it avoids responsibilities, it has no past, no future; it does not struggle, or lament, it just lives in the instantaneous present and contemplates its tranquil nullity.’

  ‘Yes, I am nothing,’ said Elvira in a depressed voice. ‘Who knows, who knows, what will come to us, where we will be this time next year—no, a month from now?’

  ‘Don’t cast a spell upon us, Elvira!’

  ‘I’m not superstitious. You are. Men pretend to be reasonable, but they are very superstitious. Everything is an omen.’

  The evening passed sadly, like many. Oliver found himself bathing in this dark air with a relish, as if he were tasting a thing he soon would be deprived of.

  Elvira became more apathetic, disconsolate and pessimistic. One day she said:

  ‘You look at all the women on the boulevard!’

  ‘I like them.’

  ‘You don’t look at the men.’

  ‘The women have something the men haven’t.’

  ‘Men are always looking women over as if they were chattels.’

  ‘These ladies don’t seem to mind.’

  ‘All men are the same,’ said Elvira, petulantly. ‘Even if a woman does everything for them, they look out of the corners of their eyes at every other woman.’

  ‘Ocular infidelity no cause for divorce,’ said Oliver shortly.

  When he came into the room from the bathroom, she sat thoughtfully on the sea-trunk, which stood in front of the windows. Her long brows drooped to her very cheekbones and, rising like a bow over the eye, dropped to the nose where they met. He drew her up to him, kissed the centre of her low forehead, smooth and oval like a stone rubbed on the shore, looked affectionately into her eyes. He quizzed her. She shrugged her shoulders and then placed her cool moist mouth on his forehead. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Elvira!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Never leave me!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You are all I have in the world. I have no country, no friends, no religion, and if you fail me, no ambition.’

  She said nothing. At last he heard a cool voice saying: ‘You should be ambitious yourself. You should have an internal fire.’

  He replied: ‘I haven’t. It wasn’t put in me.’

  ‘What
is the matter with you? Sometimes you have so much to say. Other times, you say you have no future. No man has a future who talks like that.’

  ‘I need a constant. You are that. Your brows are two arrows, with them I shoot straight.’

  She wrote a letter to Paul that evening:

  ‘I miss you and our home: it is not so easy to break up a marriage, is it? I don’t know what to do. He depends so much on me, I am his whole life outside his work. It does not seem fair to him, nor to you either. You seem so far from me, but when you are near I don’t feel as if anything has happened: I feel as if we are still married. I suppose we always will be in one sense. I don’t suppose I will ever come as close to Oliver as I was to you. He will never understand me as well; I will never again have that feeling that we have eaten the same bread and salt. I had it with you. What have I done? Messed up three lives? God help me. None of us is happy. A friend will bring you a letter from me in a few days. You remember Marpurgo. Be careful what you say to him. Don’t trust him too much. He is always paddling his own canoe. He hates Oliver. Male jealousy, I suppose. He pretends he is going to look for a flat for us, but we’re not so settled as that.’

  She wrote a note to her brother, Adam:

  ‘Marpurgo is going to England on Wednesday next. Call in at our house and find out when he’s visiting Paul. Find out what his game is. He’s got something up his sleeve. Find out how Paul feels too. I am worried about him. I suppose I still love him in a way. I cannot say that I am not so happy now as I was before, only I didn’t think about all these things before. Do you need any money? If—I’m not sure what our plans are—but if we get a flat in London, you could come and see us in the week-ends, couldn’t you? I wouldn’t want to be all alone when I first land there. I hope you are well. Does Sara look after Paul properly? I think often about him. Has she found her snack-bar yet? She’s an enterprising girl. I wish I had some of that enterprise in me. I’d get on better. A girl can have men without marrying, God knows.’

  She went to bed completely rested and satisfied, and the next day, Sunday, was as cheerful as a groundlark from morning to evening. They went out and walked about with hands clasped, Elvira loosing the cool pearls of contemplative wisdom she felt fertile of. She satisfied her passion a hundred times that day by small touches, accidental contacts and remarks about his person. They avoided both of their habitual cafés and walked into the thirteenth arrondissement where Oliver had some workmen friends. He liked to walk along the streets where fighting had taken place, to look up the headquarters of the International Labour Defence, the revolutionary locales of each quarter, find the co-operatives, praise the workmen and workwomen, philosophise about the French character, and say that if he had not been born an Englishman he would certainly become a naturalised Frenchman.

  ‘You can fight for this country: it is always in danger, but always worth spilling your blood for.’

  ‘Why France in particular, and not any native land?’ she asked. ‘You’re Gaul-bitten.’

  ‘What a lovely evening!’

  ‘Every evening is a lovely evening in summer.’

  ‘How bright these new coffee-bars are! Look at that merry Latin woman chaffing the men. Aren’t they all comrades!’

  ‘Yes, but they’re all the same, and I don’t pretend to like what’s proletarian. They have a very coarse, fleshy beauty. That’s typically French. They’re sensualists and materialists. What do the French call a fat woman? Une belle femme, Une riche nature.’

  ‘I like a fat woman myself. I suppose that’s the mother-love coming out in me! Wait till you see mother!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to. She’ll never forgive me. She’ll think I’m a baby-snatcher. Mothers always think their sons are at least ten years younger than they are, anyhow. Do we have to go through this family-introduction business? Can’t we just be ourselves? You say yourself the family is breaking up. Don’t let’s go back into the tribal game. We’ll just meet once or twice and that’s all. I couldn’t bear a mother-in-law. Paul’s mother died when he was fourteen. And mine is too busy with her other children to bother about me.’

  ‘I never thought of all that. I’m sure you may be right. Gosh, see that boy and girl right ahead of us? They can’t leave off kissing. Are they happy?’

  ‘They can hardly wait to get home.’

  ‘Kiss me, darling.’

  ‘It’s so horrible to kiss in public. It makes love cheap.’

  ‘All right, oddity. Old-fashioned puzzle-head. Balmy muff. What an impulsive creature it is! Saying a word of affection to you is like dropping a match in a gas-tank.’

  She was greatly flattered and soothed. When they had supper she said:

  ‘To-morrow we have to go to dinner with that old Man of Gotham.’

  ‘Old nuisance. Wait till he finds out that he’s getting the sack. He’ll put arsenic in my coffee.’

  ‘He’s too subtle for that. He’d think of something better.’

  ‘I’m glad he’s going to England. I don’t like it. Georges has a grudge against him, although there’s justice to his side.’

  ‘Well, Marpurgo’s got another job, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Jobs as grand vizier to Chu Chin Chow aren’t so hot! And that’s all this great financier is. Besides, great financiers are lying low at present in France. Everyone’s beginning to suspect that Stavisky didn’t blow up because he was the biggest fraud of the year, but because he was the smallest. He wasn’t the pape, but a soupape.’

  She had to go to dinner with the family of a professor who was Paul’s friend. They did not know anything about Oliver and he had to spend the evening alone. He sat gloomily in the d’Harcourt irritated at the indignity. Then Blanche dropped in and picked him up and, after she had retailed all the scandal she and the boulevards could invent about the ministers, judges, juries and functionaries of the state, she took Oliver home to eat with her. There, without enchantment or poetry, they fell into each other’s arms. Oliver got home at three in the morning with an aching head and told Elvira he had been drinking because she left him alone. She rather liked the idea.

  CHAPTER IX

  To Marpurgo, nervously and guilefully waiting for Oliver and Elvira, Coromandel’s mother in retrospect had the aspect of a South American parrot, gawdy, beaked, talkative, idiotically malign, peering through the clotted leaves, and behind, an atmosphere of bloody sun, fever heat, misanthropic snakes, and blood-diving mosquitoes: the climate of Coromandel, in other words. He fanned his brow with his handkerchief, called for ice. He had dreamed about snakes the night before. He had dreamed about a boa-constrictor last time in Calais before he met Boutdelaize. That had put him on his guard, and he had not been taken in by Boutdelaize. Last night, Marpurgo dreamed he was going through a swampy copse, and from every branch hung and swayed serpents. He had had a most unhappy, wretched day. Antoine Fuseaux had left for his holiday on Saturday, and Georges had made divers unfriendly hints. Georges hates me, whispered Marpurgo. He wished he had not been so free with Coromandel’s mother; he saw now much clearer than then the danger of doing so, saw the storms that would arise when Coromandel’s mother found out that he liked the daughter.

  ‘Is it worth it? For a soul-friendship? I put Clara off till after I come back from London, but she’ll be here then, and I can’t leave her alone when she’s here. Is it worth while starting anything with Coromandel? She’s above mere dangling for marriage: she understands life like a man. But not Clara. I’ve missed everything in life.’

  Oliver came into the café, quickly looking for Marpurgo, and came gaily across the room holding out his hand.

  ‘How are you? Elvira says will you excuse her? Andrew Fulton’s girl is sick in bed and Elvira felt she ought to go and see her. Fulton’s girl was awfully good to Elvira when she was in bed herself. Fulton’s taking her to supper. Will you forgive her? Shall we just take a bite round here, or will you let me take you to the Bois? You’ve been our host so often.’

  ‘As you like. Let’
s stay in the city then for supper, and go to the great boulevards after supper: men about town, for once. What will you have?’

  ‘Anything. A Pernod. I’m becoming hardened.’

  ‘In all ways. The way you look at pretty girls now makes my blood run cold.’

  ‘Purely Platonic. Do you remember a night over a month ago, when Paul and Adam were here and you left me to my fate?’

  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘Ha, ha. I saw you run off with a young lady, you gay Lothario. It appears you secretly go walking with young ladies bien élevées, all unknown to the family, as I suppose. You’re a secret chap, aren’t you? Or is it just immaterial sentiment? “Still is the night, the street is deserted,” a Heine nostalgia? You old fraud. And you pull a long nose at me. I’m interested because I had a sort of velléité for the young lady who lives in the house you stopped before. Those things come and go, you know—you know, of course. She’s a friend of mine and an engaging girl—cultivates the intellect (“Don’t trouble yourself,” he begged himself, “our friend here knows very well what you are talking about”). Well, at various times I thought I was in love with her—with both, you know. When I saw you there I was in a state, although I hardly think—however…My head was whirling, and when I saw you paddling off up the street I could have punched you.’ He drained his Pernod. ‘Then I thought, If the lady prefers Marpurgo, it’s a good hand skinned for naught. I stayed away from her for a bit as if she had betrayed me. Men are irrational. Elvira was somewhere: I had dinner with Blanche one night: she left me flat. I went off in a calenture. I was just passing through the tropic of Capricorn at the moment. I am a moody, temperamental person. Suddenly out of a doorway, on a quiet side-street, cooling my aches and pains like magic, I heard a pretty murmur—some lines of Baudelaire’s being murmured in a woman’s voice.’ He looked at Marpurgo with burning eyes. ‘She was a beautiful whore, take my word for it. She told me all the girls in Paris learn bits of poetry and read the political news, to be able to talk to men like human beings and not like bowls of dough.’