The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘She doesn’t seem like that to you?’

  ‘I’m not interested in her: therefore I can see, without self-reproach, that she has the single-mindedness of a one-way street—enter without return—and the selfish foresight of a pampered girl. But she has one weakness: she loves her habits and she loves to create new comfortable ones. She is weaving you into her cocoon. Don’t break in on her weaving: she’ll be hurt and she’ll hate you. Her strength in weaving is such that she’ll build up your life for you.’

  ‘My head’s bad. What are you talking about, Marpurgo? Let’s go and eat.’

  ‘Delighted. But you ring your lady first, I want to talk to you alone.’

  Over dinner Marpurgo made Oliver steadily drunk: his backbone and skull were tingling: he sat up straight and felt exhilarated, serious: his eyes and ears were wide open.

  ‘How the devil did I get so intimate with you, Marpurgo?’ he asked, rollicking. ‘You come in like a demoniac old grandmother, bandying our fates, giving advice, diabolically near the truth, pestilentially impertinent. No one has any privacy with you around. You’re a vulture picking the eyes out of romance, baring a man’s brains before he’s dead. You’re moody, cloudy, terrifying, cryptic, and full of assorted tags as a crystal-gazer.’

  As they came over the sill of the restaurant, Marpurgo replied between his teeth, softly: ‘Yes, but you’re easy to see through, Oliver: immodestly easy.’

  ‘You despise me! Oh, Christ! That’s funny. I’ve always been the admired coxcomb. Why? Is it because I’m dirt or you’re superior to everyone in general?’

  Marpurgo’s tone of hate broke in on his hilarity.

  ‘You’re an oscillating hedonist, a Cyrenaic: your haunches pull you back towards your chair and your stomach pulls you forward towards your dinner: hence you develop the requisite amount of rhythmic motion necessary for physical happiness. You’re a pure physical function, docile to your moons, appetites, secretions: you think to give your brain the little bit of exercise for which it was, by Lamarckian generations, fitted. Religiously, you’re a eudaemonist: in economics, a utilitarian, I’m sure: Marxism is just the newer label for a smart young man who must be up to date. You’re a coward, not because you’re anaemic, but because you don’t want your sweet tick-tock disturbed: you’re the summit of well-bred nonentity, as is a patched Great Dane. Elvira will gently but consummately henpeck you: don’t worry, so will every other woman who can keep you. Coromandel would…’

  ‘So you do know…’ said Oliver.

  ‘I know nothing: you told me the name just now.’

  ‘I must be frightfully drunk,’ murmured Oliver. ‘But you’re quite right: this girl is a hectoring kind: splendid but overbearing, and even Elvira, although she’s timid, easily led, and hardly has an opinion of her own, she manages me: I am a softy.’ He laughed. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘How can you live like a slob, talk piffle, write plapper, posture, take the easy road, when you have ability?’ nagged Marpurgo. ‘You run round to workmen’s meetings, so as to be in the swim: people tell you you’re generous, kind, simple, and you let yourself be persuaded; but I know you for what you yourself know, when you’re stocktaking—an inkpot-valiant…’

  ‘Hold your horses, Marpurgo: I have some news that ought to please you. I’ve been offered a job in business.’

  ‘In France?’

  ‘In England.’

  ‘Take it, then.’

  ‘Thanks; I will.’

  ‘And who has Georges Fuseaux picked for your new boss? When the fungus joins hands with the kernel-worm, some interesting work is afoot. I’ll be charmed to see what you two make of it.’

  ‘Marpurgo, I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Really! I know your type, Oliver! I know how with your half-feminine manner you get your way in scholarship as well as in life. The completely, coldly egotistic wiles of a woman. You care for no one in the world but yourself; you are wormy in head, heart and body—in soul, if there is a soul. You will regret this. No one has crossed my track but has been struck down—not by me, but by retribution. I lie with putrefaction every night: but putrefaction is my friend, and in return slowly dissolves the vertebrae of my enemies.’

  Oliver grinned.

  ‘But, I say, Marpurgo, you are coming it strong. Everyone dies without your aid, I think.’

  Marpurgo wheezed with laughter.

  ‘Oh, you’ve got courage, when you’re drunk!’ They had got up. Marpurgo said: ‘You’ll even get on for a certain time, but you can’t go too far with that fake-learning of yours. The world may be full of arrivistes like you, but their age is past. You’re somnambulists walking in a world of phantoms: you’re shadows.’

  Oliver laughed drunkenly.

  ‘Marpurgo, you’re the king of shadows. Why are you bothering me? I’ve done you no harm. I only kept it a secret so as not to annoy you. Besides, I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘That doesn’t interest me: the less said about the Georges-scab the better. I’m not a specialist in skin diseases. He’s an ignorant, turbid Goth, with the antipathy of the clod for anyone who can put two ideas together. I’ve often thought of fumigating out the place: why do you suppose I smoke these big cigars? But he doesn’t interest me, that bigoted bastard. You interest me, the prairie flower of the intellect. Would you like to know how you appear to me?’

  They were walking rapidly down the sordid rue du Roi de Sicile and turned into the rue de Rivoli, here known to its poor Jewish tradesmen and costers as ‘Rivolagass.’ It is a streaming thoroughfare. Oliver was burning to deliver himself as rapidly and rashly as he could of his new ideas. His whole life was gathered together for this great spring into a world formerly closed to him and which he perceived he must die in, or soon quit again for the calm orderly academic one which suited him best. He had to stop and breathe a little once, leaning heavily on Marpurgo’s arm. His breathing could be heard, and sweat beaded his forehead. Marpurgo was solicitous, he coughed intermittently, and replied to Oliver’s remarks with the quick intuition and soft flattery of a woman.

  He conversed continually with Marpurgo, but his thoughts were towards the river. If he could gain the leafy quays, he felt his trouble would be calmed for a time. It was getting dark. He had migraine, and was too drunk. Other voices seemed to join in the responses of Marpurgo: his sense reeled: scenes which he had seen long ago, and strange fancies, and reminiscences of old romances floated before him through the dark, momentarily: he thought a pack of wolves ran at his side, while the largest, with white fangs and lolling tongue and dripping mouth, ran on before him; he thought an army rising out of the dust swarmed up a dark hill topped with ancient white stones; he thought a lizard as large as a crocodile lay across a dry river-bed, and the engulfed water from the river ran back along the ooze and the roots of the nympheas; he dreamed he saw a pallid globe in the sky, a balloon which suddenly expanded like a Chinese cup carved in six sections of walnut wood, and from whose silver interior burst brilliant fireworks; he thought he observed at one side of the street a host of squat dark hairy creatures waddling fast after a buxom woman with large larval eyes.

  Marpurgo said to him, plucking his sleeve, ‘Faster,’ and he strode on. Suddenly, with a groan, he slipped, and a woman with a loud cry ran past him: she had suddenly ducked up from a garbage-bin she had been examining and had struck her elbow in his diaphragm. Marpurgo picked him up, and when he recovered his senses he discovered that he had reached the Pont-Neuf. But all elation had left him: he leaned against a rail with Marpurgo, scarcely aware of his presence, and watched the lights rolling round him, conscious of cruel fatigue. But he said to Marpurgo:

  ‘I never had such a night as to-night. I am not myself. Literally.’

  ‘Go home now,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘Come with me!’

  ‘Yes, I intended to.’

  Halfway up the Boulevard St. Michel, Oliver said, ‘I’m faint,’ and they went into La Source, a gay students’ café, full o
f mid- and eastern-Europeans. There was a great clatter, so that conversation here was as private as in a desert. Oliver sat down with Marpurgo, and having recovered a little, said whimsically: ‘Annibale, what am I?’

  Marpurgo leaned forward, on the arms of the armchair, gathered into himself.

  ‘A somnambulist; you fell off a wall. You’ll pick yourself up and go on sleep-walking. Never fear. She’s a somnambulist too. You all are. And your talk is the talk of sleepers. One day you’ll all be burned alive in your houses. You and even I belong to the club.’

  ‘What club is it?’

  ‘The Somnambulists’ Club.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand!’

  Marpurgo started with the usual claptrap, but swaying, worked himself into a paroxysm.

  ‘Life is a dream: we are trying to wake out of it. Science of ordinary life is lunacy to us, vice versa. Who knows when the intellectual paroxysms and wild excess cerebrations called philosophy, which has nothing to do with true symbolic thought, will be turned over into the content of some new Budget of Paradoxes? I prefer to be a somnambulist. I walk on the edge of precipices safely. Awake, I tremble and run back to the skylight, enter the little attic room, never accomplish the journey, remain all day crouched over the books. At night one rambles. Have you ever seen a city asleep? If you took off the roofs of the city, what do you think you would see? Logs, stones, congelations, corpses? No, you see fits and starts and groans and convulsions, grimaces and clutches, twitchings and hoppings, staring eyes and working throats, rolling eyeballs, murmuring mouths. That is what we call sleep! Now the somnambulists deny this horrible sleep. We sleep in the daytime: at night we live under the guidance of the soul, which is always trying to break the bonds of those hag-ridden slumberers! With the Somnambulists you will see men really awake—or Lunatics!’

  ‘I have never seen these wakers, perhaps, before,’ said Oliver calmly, but neither his drink nor the busy scene around could prevent him from shuddering slightly. Upon Marpurgo’s face appeared the rapt, strange and lost expression of a man communing with his own angels. He had a large nose which seemed to point the way for him and to be symbolic, like a great wing of fantastic flight, or of resolution arising not from Oliver’s mind but from the Verb presiding over the breath that first blew into his clay. How strange it is, thought Oliver, to see an ordinary human being suddenly transformed by the insanity which lurks in him: transformed into Disorder, apart from all restraints and conveniences, taking his place with Evil (that is, what is strange, hostile, and unknown, and foreign): to pass at our side mute but speaking endlessly to himself in his own symbols which have served him, unconscious as he is of it, since his birth: how rare he seems and how awful. Is that what I am now? Transformed by an accident.

  When Marpurgo began to speak again, it was with the voice of internal enquiry of a person speaking to himself: he questioned and never stopped for a reply: he submitted his own replies and elaborated, and retraced his steps and made references to things that Oliver had no knowledge of: he spoke of the instant flash of sanity in the dark night of the mind, he spoke of the glistening back of the dolphin cleaving for a moment the dark waters of the ocean. There was a constant reference to some white object appearing for a moment in tumult and multitude.

  Oliver felt himself getting rather drowsy. He roused himself and broke in on Marpurgo’s soliloquy.

  ‘You know, you no longer fear a thing you understand, in the same degree? For instance, ever since my earliest days, I have feared a pale living corpse lying on the floor beside me as I lay dreaming in bed, a silent shadow-man—death or my thin soul. When I try to recall him, all sorts of memories circulate, such as the house where we first lived, a vacant lot beside it, my father creeping into the room late at night, my father tired but boringly sanguine. The Polish baker who had ulcers, with a rag round his hair, had that face, a ghoul, a skull. In the daytime the sight of a person with one of these deformed faces is the one thing that puts me into the primitive state of terror: I am sure I am going to die. At night, it is somehow no longer so terrible. Because in the day he is a lurking danger, at night he promenades with the rest of the phantoms, and with myself. Who is he? Some poor wretch I saw long ago? Ever since my earliest days I have feared the deaths of poverty, ulcerated stomachs, cancerous mouths, skinny skulls with absent eyes, stringy veins, rasping breaths, the horrors of old age and disease when their foul breaths must collide with your own. I can’t stand them. They are a crowd of ghouls on my track sure to get me in the end. I finally invented means of waking up and of staying awake while still reposing, such as counting, breathing deep, saying my name, and so forth. Thus I managed to “stay awake” or preserve my sanity, while still in the bonds of sleep. I invented the means of trying to envisage my phantoms. At first when they escaped me I almost screamed with terror: since, when I manage to see them clearly, I am better off. At last I met him—two years ago. A strange creature who hung round coffee-dives in my old town. A deathly creature with the “hippocratic facies,” the skull face. I don’t know his real name. They used to call him “Jean-Jaurès.” The first time I met him, my heart gave a thump. Love, real love, as I know it now, has exactly the same effect on me. The old phantom, feared, in the flesh.’

  ‘The Somnambulists’ Club, of which you are a member, you uneasy soul, is full of such phantoms. You know, with your ambition, Oliver, you are only trying to force the door of a dead-house. We are dead but not disintegrating. We are so recently dead that day-old memories of us walk the earth in our recent footsteps. Our footprints are still in the dust of streets, they have not been swept out of buildings. Our voices are still in the air, like the voice of someone I heard recently somewhere, I forget now, perhaps Dr. Western’s. You have heard of Munchausen’s “frozen sounds.” It is like that, preserved. Living people still think we are speaking. Our hands are still at cross-roads, pointing one way and another. A hand has a strange effect on us, we are impelled to obey it. I always remember the hands of people as separate from their bodies: it seems such an active, useful, demonstrating and helpful member. A person with folded hands—like Elvira, Oliver—there is no help from them.’

  Oliver looked puzzled, half-enticed. He said: ‘Tell me about your club, that I am trying to gate-crash, it seems.’

  ‘You are a dead soul, Oliver. You are fooling yourself with all these ideas of revolutions and these friendships with revolutionaries. It doesn’t fool anyone but you.’ His hate whistled through his teeth. ‘You are corrupt like me. You can’t be the workers’ friend: you’d deceive them as you deceived your other friend—Dr. Western. You’ve got to be like me. You’ve got to be a mealymouth.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Oliver, leaning his heavy head on his hand.

  ‘Look,’ said Marpurgo cunningly. ‘You will see a quiet dark suburban street. Your future home with the dark lady, say. A light burns in the front room of one of the semi-detached villas, or up-to-date apartments under the orthodox gable or cornice. Go in at the front door, and hang up your hat and coat. Push open the door. I am with you. We are there. There are about twenty persons we know, in ordinary dark clothes, with their hats off. Their physiognomies are various, but a Chinaman would not be able to distinguish them. Their ages vary, their colourings and status are the same. For you they are all living cancers: for me, well, my particular fright.

  ‘You have been there often, do you remember? On the mantelpiece is a clock, with, on one side, an ikon of St. Vitus, and on the other, one of St. Columban, the one the representative, in the heavenly third estate, of dancers possessed, and the other of the weak-minded, both saints elsewhere without votaries.’

  ‘The lamp,’ said Oliver politely, ‘which is in the shape of a crescent moon, undoubtedly indicates lunacy?’

  ‘What,’ said Marpurgo, ‘how can you think so? Is not the moon the best regulated, the fittest and most easily observed of all heavenly bodies? Is it not itself the regulator of tides, clocks, calendars and maladies? Does it not theref
ore march mankind on its road better than any other dragooner in the world? No innovator, the moon: no burner of hides and addler of brains, like the sun: it takes the sun’s fierce unmoderated light and strains it through its fine cool net. Is there anywhere else a finer symbol of wisdom? How calm its face: its character, modest but bright! Then its benefits—how should humanity get about at night but for the light of the moon? It is well known that the sun only shines in the day, when there is no need of light! Also, all creatures that live by the light of the moon are, as I said, figures of wisdom: the owl, the bat, and the moth, the symbol of the soul.’ The loiterers in the café were looking at Marpurgo, whose voice had risen.

  ‘Why, I humbly beg pardon of the learned assembly,’ said Oliver, seeing that the members looked at him suspiciously. ‘The fact is I am somewhat fatigued: walked far, had no supper! Have you a carafe of water? I am not quite myself!’

  One of the members, who was small, lean, furrowed, with white hair and waiter’s clothing, rose and said disagreeably: ‘Have you introduced somebody who did not go to bed to-night?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Marpurgo hastily. ‘Here,’ he said to Oliver, ‘drink,’ and he handed him a glass containing a dark liquid, purple red against the light.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Oliver, hesitating.

  ‘You don’t have to drink it,’ said Marpurgo. ‘You please yourself. It has this quality; if you drink of it with a person, you become confused with him, and you do not know which of you it is until the insobriety wears off. It is the devil’s elixir, got out of the Pierian Spring. Some of the members find it helps their theories, if they mix their brains with other people’s for a night.’

  ‘I shall drink—with myself,’ said Oliver. ‘Thus I mingle my blood with the same noble strain, like the Ptolemys.’

  He drank all the wine (for such it was, a sort of heavy sweet Palestine wine, with sherbet) at a gulp. He did not notice any great change: he observed things as always with vivacity. Voices struck his tympani with such a delicate trembling that they even seemed to have a separate being, apart from throats and air: they wended their own way lightfoot over the stepping-stones through the labyrinthine canals, they laughed in his brain.