The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘Is our brother in nubibus pleasing to you now?’ enquired Oliver of the ferrety gentleman.

  ‘Yes,’ said he, irritably. ‘So pleasing—so charming—I fear—I fear, I don’t know what, he has the charm of the veritable effugator daemonum.’

  The company said ‘Hist!’ and drew their coat collars round their necks.

  Oliver began talking to various persons, to appease the company, so he went to the irritable man who had made the remark and shook hands with him. Or so he dreamed.

  A great many of the persons present seemed to be interested in heavenly bodies.

  ‘And why not?’ said Marpurgo. ‘The heavens can be sounded with the imagination, but the earth only with infinite patience and labour.’

  One man asserted that the sun was made of ice, since a piece of ice produced the same result as a burning-glass; but beside him sat a lean, infatuated man who continually warned his hearers that he was a teacher of mathematics, better informed than his opponent, and that he had discovered that the sun was an electric space from which the planets sucked their nutriment. Another member said that comets were the spawn of volcanoes, spat out of their bellies, and that they fell back like the devils into the belly of the infernal Porteress, only to be spat out again. He had an opponent who cried out that he was a false scientist and an immoral rogue, for he (the speaker) had shown him a thousand times that comets always appeared in certain conjunctions with certain signs of the zodiac, and that their appearances marked the days of Creation (since the extent of the Days had never been told), that they would finally appear to announce the Sabbatical Jubilee: ‘The ancients, who were wiser than we—for we talk of the youth of the world, but it is we who are in the young age of the world—believed that comets foretold some august event, the death of a mighty prince, the fall of a people, of a false faith.’ The comets, he said, were not bodies, but were the lights flashed from a crystal mirror by the Lord, who wished to warn us: we were blind, but he was busy working out the secret semaphore. Another warned his hearers solemnly against the Scarlet Lady, the Great Incubus, Genf, and wished to debate whether this latest abomination was due to the spells and conjurations of secret warlocks and vile covens of sedition throughout this present world, or the malevolent influence of celestial bodies in unhappy conjunction, or indeed only from the wickedness of men themselves: whether Genf herself had not been conceived, in her unnatural beauty, by the coition of devils, and prinked out to seduce and entice humble men, by the artifices of such parents. He was answered that Genf was sick to death for her sins, but would be reborn again, as he knew by a secret revelation. But on all sides was strife and dissension, some people calling Blasphemy, some Shame.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked Marpurgo.

  ‘I am thinking,’ said Marpurgo, ‘that bees never live singly, but in swarms, and if they choose to live in a bonnet, they make honey there, no doubt.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said the cometic prophet: ‘a great mind: he talks in the symbolic language.’

  ‘Talking of symbols,’ said a sandy fellow, of about fifty, and over six feet in height, ‘I am a countryman, so I look at these things with a fresh mind. It seemed to me, when I first went to college, that the philosophers just sit there spinning words…’

  ‘Certainly, boundless ruffians, infinite lying blackguards…’ said one of the fellows.

  ‘No, no,’ said the first speaker,’ they’re quite innocent, they don’t know it themselves: so I thought, to help everyone out, and to get down to clear thought, say, as in algebra…’

  ‘Certainly, as in algebra…’ agreed the listeners.

  ‘One should use not words but symbols in philosophy; viz. for God a triangle, for infinity the mathematical symbol, for Man a bifurcated symbol like, for the soul §, for acquisitiveness % and so forth.’

  ‘Pah!’ said one of the assembly, ‘why bother about earthly philosophy when I have a direct revelation from God? I understand that language which our brother is trying to concoct from his comets. It is simply a compound of Sanskrit, Greek and Aztec with some interpolations of Yiddish, but I can’t give away the secret. I have sealed it up, and if the State will not buy it from me, it will go as a legacy to my daughter. The only thing is, that to punish men for their blindness and deafness to the word of the Lord, I have arranged the language alphabetically, and each time the State refuses to pay me my price, I destroy one whole letter of the alphabet. What is left becomes therefore infinitely more precious. My daughter will have an inestimable treasure.’

  ‘Tell us one word,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘Timeviol,’ said the man.

  ‘Which means?’

  The man leaned forward and whispered through his hands: ‘The sacred word for temple! Hush!’

  Marpurgo learned that one member had gone to an observatory and begged to see the Red Planet which he was sure was the Hell of the system; he thought Jupiter one of the gates of Paradise. He believed that the new planets being discovered were not really there before, but had lately been put there by God, as he created new souls. One man affirmed that the moon was not a solid body but was the image of the earth ‘refracted’ in the ether, and its face was the shadow of the Himalayas. Another said the stars were the heads of angels and the milky way the chief road to heaven. Still another asserted that the binary stars were married and produced offspring, which were the comets and falling stars: others were certain that the planets and all the heavenly bodies were inhabited in one manner or another, and offered proofs thereof. The gentleman next to Marpurgo explained ardently that atoms themselves were worlds, and had other worlds within themselves, and that each and all of these microcosms were inhabited, and that, indeed, we ourselves were but the atom of an atom in a giant molecule, that we might be disintegrated some day by a curious Titan: our only salvation lay in the companionship of like myriads. When people died, he believed that they had simply been disintegrated in some enormous chemical laboratory, and could very well be integrated again in some other part of the universe. But his neighbour, while inclining to a belief in the habitation of atoms, asserted that innumerable forms of life existed, and that no single atom was like to any other atom, nor was its (presumed) astronomy, geometry, politics or natural science anything like that of any other body in the universe. From a purely spatial standpoint, how could it be?

  ‘Ah, deary me,’ said Marpurgo, holding his head, long ago slightly streaked by long nights of study, ‘and is there so much more to be learned by the curious? And is it all nothing after all, and likely to be put out of joint by some slight effervescence in some awful retort?’

  He looked so lugubrious that a gentleman of the cloth with snuff in his beard took him aside and promised to explain to him his infallible system for beating the wheel at Monte Carlo:

  ‘It is true that it is weighted,’ he said, ‘but I have calculated the chances upon that too. Also I have very secret information about the internal structure of the Company! That is much more important, believe me! Look for the Hand of the S.J.! Yes, it belongs to the Pope, and no Protestant can win and certainly no atheist. This is quite well known at Monte Carlo, but the people go on playing. By fascination: they are there against their will: ah, ah, yes. Somebody has an anti-Christian power. Somebody is in league with his Infernal Majesty. There they sit: you can see they have a secret foreboding of their end. They fix the banker at the table with their haunted eyes, as if he were some demon ordered to fry their livers: yes, sir, and they mumble as if reciting some holy mumbo-jumbo, but a lot it helps them. They work out their little systems, graphs, tables and progressions, but I know the weighting of the wheel: none of them can win. Except—you know who! After all, in this age of mathematics, figures talk: this is conclusive: it is no mere chance that non-Catholics have lost consistently over a series of years! My own observations.’

  ‘And Jews?’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I have reached another Machiavellian trick practised on mankind: the Jews are th
emselves secret adherents of Rome! You may look surprised, but I have found this out. I began by working on the position of the Great Pyramid.’

  Marpurgo felt uncomfortable with this man, who seemed to have far less of his wits than the others, although he had noticed before that the mere thought of the Great Pyramid usually knocked a man off his base: he stood on his head to look at its base. He looked about the room: everyone seemed to direct themselves eventually at Oliver, who appeared somewhat flustered. Apart from the others sat three gentlemen of severe demeanour. Marpurgo asked who they were, and was told that they were newcomers. One founded the whole history and mystery of the world on ‘internal rhythms’ which included heartbeats, dances, calendars and millenniums; another had discovered the Fourth Dimension and accused Professor Einstein of cribbing his theories, being a very embittered and cantankerous fellow, therefore, and hard to talk with; and the third denied the existence of mind, thought that art, governments and inventions were the communications of demons through human automata, and thought he was the head demon. Everybody had a demon, but demons were rare, and sometimes one demon was given possession of several thousand or several hundred thousand bodies, which he moved like a skilful marionettist. Other demons had all they could do to work one body: Lenin and Einstein had one demon each.

  Oliver moved over to Marpurgo and said: ‘What, after all, is the purpose of this assembly? Their opinions are not really remarkable. Any score of persons you pick up in the street any day have opinions and beliefs more unaccountable. There are countries where this is state policy. This is but cuckoo lore.’

  ‘They have foisted themselves upon us, ever since we started the club: they tyrannise over us—and you haven’t seen half. Hardly any of my intimates, the ones I founded the club with, are here to-night. But you must excuse me: seven o’clock approaches: I have to deliver an address and the members are in a heckling mood. I hate to speak to them on a night like this.’

  Oliver found a seat. Rats ran about in the upper storey, bats squeaked in the garret, and shingle fell off the roof. Marpurgo opened a walnut concealed in his hand, wherein were his notes concealed on a chain of silk-paper. There were two carafes, one containing ego and the other nego. Marpurgo drank from one and the other indifferently to revive himself during his discourse, for he was dark, insubstantial, trembling and truculent as an affronted ghost. The carafe of wine filled again of itself. After rustling like dry leaves, they settled themselves. He spoke.

  Discourse on the Immateriality of the Earth and the Reality of the Beyond

  ‘Pagans, heterodocts, nonjurors, calvinists, catholics, sciolists, smatterers, dabblers, obscurantists, state-co-ordinaters, you who make a domiciliary visit of hearts, beds, purses, ballotboxes, you thumb-wrenches, tax-screws, conscience-purges, spruikers, lickhaunches, parademen, truncheoners, gunmen, sabremen, tarrers, tiaras, featherers and fezes, you cowls, masks and sacred aprons, nose-thumbers, treble-singers, double-facers, monomaniacs, you smutsnickerers, sluthavers, pillars of all orders, bridegrooms of paralogy, asses, racists, ignoramuses, erotics, exotics and obscure poets, flower of the fanatic world, now yours, soon lost; I know very well that you will accept without proof my argument that the world is insubstantial and inane, a big-swollen nihility, air compressed by the devil into a borrowed and delusive form; but there is a man here who is not quite sure of it. He comes from another land, a very coarse materialist place where they hardly believe in metaphysics at all, but where I am glad to say the astral planes are getting a good hold. Still he is consanguineous, or at least a fosterchild of our father: he came here a stultiloquent knight-errant determined to find out that the substance was a shadow, but he goes the wrong way about it. Still he is on the limen of our world. Perpend, then, and learn that with us the world is a shadow cast by the moon across the nightly road of the stars, and if you, tarnished stardust, can come easily to the knowledge, it is because your parents made you superstitious, you worship your mother, you live by taboos, your coddling Alma Mater, learned in many a cantrip and cabala, milled a he-goat into a sieve and fed you with the milk, and you are now devoured with a wonderful matriotism for capricious folly.

  ‘Come, cheer up, you deadbones. When were ever the humanities more widely diffused; yet was ever spell-casting, crystal-gazing, table-rapping and evangelism more fashionable than now?’

  (The audience cried, ‘No, no: bless you, go on: Amen. Bless you, Amen!’)

  ‘Amongst us, I mean, of course. The Church, which used to be material, and have proper pursers, and fabricate its stories out of the whole cloth, and never care a rap, has become meticulous, fearful and scientific. Was ever such a paradox? The earth is overflowing with grain, and more people are starving than ever before, the intelligentsia are denying the intellect and crying for death in battle, grain that was never planted makes men rich in the fields and poor on the exchanges, schoolmasters deny the rod, women marriage, librarians silverfish, financiers gold. Now, if there were a world, were such things possible? No. Therefore, Oliver, there is no world and we are phantoms.’

  (‘It is true; how true! Go on: Amen. Bless you, bless you,’ called the Somnambulists.)

  ‘Yes, such a world were impossible, unless it was watered by rivers of lightning, ruled by Prester John, colonised by Atlantides, its roads straddled by Don Quixote and its seas by the Flying Dutchman. Only in those conditions could it exist, and if you contend that it exists, it must be in those conditions.’

  But the audience was displeased, murmuring: ‘What, after all, we exist! And my great masterpiece, better than Rubens’, is it nothing?’

  ‘And my empire, greater than Prester John’s, composed of freemen working in slave-camps, and using for currency bellows which can be inflated and deflated at will?’

  ‘What? and my theory of astral planets?’

  ‘Nothing: my theory of frozen stars?’

  ‘Nothing: me, the Galileo of the creative erg?’

  They swayed towards Marpurgo. At the same time, certain objects in the chamber, having become persuaded that they were of the same creation as the philosophers, made remarks. The clock said: ‘Rhythm is the solution of the riddle of the universe: flux and reflux: there is no eternity but pedantic measured feet. By listening to the tick-tick of my pendulum you will guide your lives happily and suitably to a satisfactory stop: then the watchmaker of the world will pull you to pieces, rub you up, take out the fluff and start you off again, or put your best spring into some other clock: what of that? Who wants to live too long counting out days and minutes, days and minutes? And don’t think,’ he said severely, ‘that I am a mere pendulum: I have my morality, which is strict. Keep your face bright and clear so that all men can read there your conclusions: keep your hands in clear view, and no man will fear you: go neither too fast nor too slow, and no one will overtake you, and no one will see your backparts and so ridicule you: and as for innovations—I have one based on commonsense: let all counting be done in twelves, a pox on the stupid metric system!’

  The spittoon called out lazily and satirically: ‘Well, well, old pissface, if you have no posterior, you must have a queer front: I prefer not to think of such an anatomy! Or I should say I have such notions floating round in my head as I cannot show to the present company. I am all for ejaculation, for my head swarms, yes, literally swarms with ideas, and every one of them pregnant. I understand the very guts of every man, and if I gave my advice (but why should I? I don’t care and you wouldn’t heed), your apothecaries and your sawbones would go to the devil in a week, and your proctors and sublunatic doctors would get dizzy with gripes from absence of dinner—a very strange item, not included in their traumata. But a lot of greybeard loons, ineradicable poxes, insupportable windbags like you…’

  The spittoon was suppressed, and they then heard the carpet speaking in a deep worn humble bass: ‘The attention he receives has given him a swollen idea of himself, I am afraid. Spit on me instead, I have no objection: I submit to anything, I raise no questions: I
am even willing, for your convenience, to have my very beautiful false Aubusson design masked with dirt and expectorations: for, after all, in my humility I support all things, the furniture, your bodies. I stand insult from you, but I support you, it is my mission. I keep you warm: I am kind to others besides you, although you don’t know it: I harbour fleas and slaters: I am much appreciated by dogs: but I say nothing, I lie here quiet and the darkness floats about me: so I sink into forgetfulness.’

  A footnote in one of the books on the bookshelf began to speak in a precise, whimsical voice, with the most erudite diction: he cited thousands of authors, he told anecdotes, he went back and made corrections on himself: he spoke a very queer language for the most part, which sounded like sucking and spitting and seemed like: ‘Cf. q.v. et seq. pp. etc. ib. id. e.g.’ Everybody found him insupportable. The members began to call out: ‘What’s the matter with you? You’ve disorganised the whole club: you’ve upset the whole system of things. Out upon you! Order! No order here! We’re free! Who is it that’s the Jonah? Walpurgis: Fenton!’

  The moon-lamp swung out impertinently and touched Oliver on the nose so that he started back burnt. The audience laughed. They swayed towards Oliver, tried to prick him, pull him by the taggy ends of his clothes. Marpurgo’s whinny sounded from the peaked top of a giant shadow. Oliver tried to think of Marpurgo’s name, but it wouldn’t come. He was afraid to fall into the gulf of that giant shadow: his stomach whirled, all whirled about him: his head danced with the waltz of giant spindles. Suddenly he found Marpurgo’s name: it was MANARAGO BLUREPIN! The dancing ceased. A cold silence fell. Oliver fell asleep in the arms of a corpse, he thought.

  Elvira, who had helped Marpurgo to bring him in, put a coverlet on the floor and covered him with a dressing-gown. Then she burst into tears, put her hands over her face and turned her back to Marpurgo.