‘What shall I do? I had no idea he was like this. He’s just a drunk. Oh! Marpurgo. You missed your train through him, too.’
‘Go home,’ urged Marpurgo gently. ‘Go home, go back to Paul. I can’t befriend you much longer. I am a dying man: my death will be hastened by—but I can’t tell you that in this hour. I will stand by you till you make your arrangements. I’ll see you through. There, my dear: this is enough. Go to Paul. I’ll see him to-morrow. What will I tell him?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ moaned Elvira. ‘I can’t make up my mind. I must hear what Oliver has to say. You see, he’s giving up his academic career for me. I’ll write to Paul. I’m all alone. Oh, dear.’
‘Christ, I’ve got a hang-over,’ cried Oliver, awaking the next morning.
‘I think you owe me an explanation,’ said Elvira coldly, looking up from a letter she was writing and scratching out. ‘All night I stayed awake thinking about our future. Do you get intellectual satisfaction out of a jug? You’re a complete man: you can read and riot. That’s wonderful. You get a sexual fulfilment out of humiliating a woman. Paul, at least, never did that.’
Oliver said, ‘Give me an aspirin, will you?’
She went on writing and consulting Paul’s letter.
CHAPTER XI
They had breakfast in the café. Oliver felt ill, and they quarrelled. Elvira said:
‘Paul hopes we are happy.’
‘He’s very kind, I’m sure.’
‘You’d rather he wished we were unhappy?’
‘Not at all: I’m not malicious.’
Elvira held her tongue. Then she said childishly:
‘You see that Lesbian over there? She tried to make me the other day, before you came in: she’s been looking at me ever since we came here. I pretended to play her game, and when you came in, I said, “So sorry, but there comes my husband!” The girl I met yesterday is a queer sort too, ambivalent, I’d say. She gave me such looks. I suppose that after the war Frenchwomen got used to sharing a man, or to each other.’
‘Frenchwomen? Why not Englishwomen? You’ve always been gallophobe.’
She looked at him idly.
‘You’re paying for your disgusting spree last night. Imagine poor Marpurgo having to miss his train.’
‘Poor Marpurgo! I thought woman’s intuition always taught her her enemies. He hates us like poison.’
She teased him:
‘It amuses me so much when I am here waiting for you sometimes, that some of the men try to catch my eye. I look like a little broody hen to them, they want to give me some fun. So kind. By my indifference I pretend to be interested.’ She glanced over at the men on the opposite but distant bench—a dark, middle-aged Bulgarian who assailed his small world with ideas for magazines, some friends of Blanche’s, a sedate clean senility with a white stock-tie who read all the newspapers of every political colour from morn till eve.
‘I like a café,’ she said. ‘It’s like a cinema, like a ballet. Isn’t it wonderful how one can pass the time? Imagine if we had spent all the hours we have been in this café studying something—we could have learned a new language.’
‘We could.’
‘It’s funny: here we are, two respectable people, but you sit round like a wastrel, sick from a drunk, and I sit waiting for men like a prostitute.’
‘It’s funny, all right.’
‘After all, we’re both in the same game, in the end. You’re living on what you can get by retailing a sort of scholastic small-talk, and I’m living by yessing men. I’m luckier than they are, that’s all. That’s why the marriage system holds up under all the attacks. The profits are better than free love. That’s why the bourgeois system holds out. That’s why it will hold out.’
‘My, how you inspire me!’
‘But I prefer one man to a lot,’ concluded Elvira. ‘It is safer and there is something in it, an affection which gets wider and makes you more sensitive. I used not to care for anything in the world before I was married. You don’t know till you’re married. Now I feel for myself and for you too. For no one else.’
‘Are you sorry for Paul, perhaps?’
‘No, not really: men can look after themselves.’
‘You’re better than you make out, Elvira. I remember many kind things you’ve done. Those children you used to send shirts to, the servant to whom you gave an extra month’s pay, the sick woman in the shop.’
‘Yes, well, you have to do those things for women. But I really didn’t care for their sufferings. I’ve been under an anaesthetic all my life. It’s easier.’
‘One ought to be less attached to others and crueller to oneself,’ murmured Oliver dolefully.
‘I only believe in cruelty towards others.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Oliver. ‘I must go down town. I had a rotten time with Marpurgo last night. He found out all about the changes. I’m going to tell Georges Fuseaux it’s all off. He made me feel such a rotter, I want to commit suicide even now.’
‘That’s your hang-over.’
He walked away. Elvira went placidly shopping for some trinkets, like a bee gathering honey. Oliver said to himself: ‘I haven’t a friend in the world to confide in.’ He walked some time under the flaky sky, his heart palpitating. ‘Oh, Elvira, you sunken river, with drowned lamps silting down, do you wish to engulf me too?’
His work was finished: he had no heart to buckle down and get it in order. He hated the final upgrade pull of knocking the thing into presentable shape. He had been sick as a dog when he got up. He wanted love, some sort of ministration. She had left him lying on the divan until he grew tired of the game and got up. He had said: ‘I know I’m a pig, but you ought to be sorry for me.’
‘Why should I? You made yourself sick. I’ve got too much to think about. I have my own troubles. I never imagined you would let me down like this.’
‘Don’t take it so seriously. You’re the only girl in the world who’d take a bend so dramatically, gloomily.’
‘It’s true: I’m always melancholy.’
‘Oh, don’t say that again, Elvira! You’ve said it a thousand times.’
‘You must bear with me, I’m always melancholy. I can’t help it! If you turn against me, I have no one. I’m all alone in the world. I had a husband, you separated me from him. I had a child—where is it?’
He had started to tell her, pretending to laugh, about Marpurgo’s attacks of the preceding night, and she had protested:
‘I don’t want to hear it, really, Oliver, I have so much to think of this morning. I know Marpurgo is what you say: I knew before you. He would have told me all his troubles, too, if I’d encouraged him. I stopped that, and now he only tells me the positive side of his life. It does look pretty dirty, what you’ve done down at the Fuseaux. I know it’s not your fault. I suppose men’s world is different from mine.’ Then she had been silent and morbidly satisfied. Presently she had peeped again:
‘I suppose a woman, to be completely rounded, should taste a lot of men’s individualities: in a way I believe in free love.’
‘For men too?’
‘Men have it anyhow.’
‘Well, one of these days perhaps I’ll present you with a co-wife.’
‘I wouldn’t ever do that, if I were you,’ Elvira had said with the air of a prim, proud little girl.
‘Solemn Melanchtha!’
She had repeated Melanchtha! in a tone of surprise and had fallen into reverie.
Oliver now thought he would call upon Coromandel: she would give him a drink and she would console him. She very nearly worshipped him, although she was so high-spirited.
She opened the door to him with a smooth manner, and when he attempted to kiss her, she suddenly shouted at him ‘Nonsense!’ clapped her hands in his face, and puffed like Boreas with fat red-and-white cheeks. ‘I don’t want to see you, Mr. Western,’ she said, ‘Oliver, imagine you deceiving me! I ought to be cast down, and I’m not, and yet I’m horribly cast down. Oh—“J�
��ai du génie enfin—pourquoi mourir.” Vingt-dieux! Western, get out of here!’
Oliver said: ‘I’m not Western: I’m not married to her. Let me explain.’
The door shut and Oliver went. He was far too sick to go and see Georges. He wrote him a note, told him that Marpurgo had blackguarded him all the evening, and that he thought he ought, in honour, to give up the job. He was too sick to sit in a restaurant for lunch. He took a taxi and went out to Blanche’s flat in the Champ de Mars. Blanche was in bed, but got up, made him some more breakfast, and treated him for biliousness. In his misery he told her all his troubles, about Elvira, Coromandel, Marpurgo and Georges Fuseaux. Blanche laughed gently.
‘I knew it all, darling! All. Don’t you trust that Marpurgo. He got me to bring the two girls together yesterday so that they would find it all out and you would have a domestic volcano. But it seems it didn’t work. He hates you, darling. He hates everyone. He promised to give me a thousand francs for doing it; and he gave me three hundred. I hope he loses his job.’
Oliver opened his weary eyes.
‘Christ! It’s Satan’s invisible world revealed.’
‘You go back to England as quickly as you can, darling. This dirty little world, that I hate, is getting you. You are a fine young man, you are full of promise: you are eloquent, you love mankind, you have genius, I know. You go back to England with that dear little Elvira and make her happy. Unless you don’t think it works so well as it did before.’
‘She’s so aimless.’
‘She is a dear little thing, and she loves you both: that’s what’s the matter. Now, you sleep, Oliver, and I will come back after my act and make you early supper: then you can go home cured, and you won’t feel so bad about anything.’
Elvira received a pneumatique when she got back from lunch, saying:
DEAR MADAM,—I have a friend working in the Archives, Mr. Oliver Fenton. It cannot be that he is a friend of your husband, Mr. Oliver Western?—C. PAINDEBLED.
Elvira sat at home and ate olives and chocolates alternately. She also wound herself, slow, cold, beautifully-diamonded, as a snake, round the problem, and colder and more forbidding grew her brow. She began to smoke, and was presently smoking the chamber full of her resentment, desolation and increasing resolution.
‘What a damned traitor!’ she cried, beside herself with impatience. Her smoke-trails, as she paced about, were like wraiths waiting about the ceiling to topple on Oliver’s much-cursed and oft-coddled black topknot. (You sinful, swart, shallow skull, you oval nut with dark shrivelled juicy sweetmeat inside, already consumed by too much passion and irregularity!)
‘He’s a failure,’ cried Elvira aloud. ‘A failure, that’s all. Paul isn’t really, after all. He has a position, he’s respected: he doesn’t chase every skirt he sees. He sees too many of them, that’s a comfort. Oh, how debasing!’
She bit her fingers, and presently her mouth trembled, her chin wrinkled and she cried. When Oliver came back, rested and reassured, he said to Elvira, sitting there with her ash-trays and dish of olives, half-read book and empty box with gilt paper:
‘Ellie, I’m a-weary to-night.’
Elvira lowered her lids and remained obstinately cool.
‘Ellie, I feel sort of cheerless, without much faith in the future. A man has not those strong roots in life a woman has.’
This speech by fear generally roused her, but she remained unmoved.
‘Ellie! My dear! You must confess me. I am afraid I am a sort of perpetual wanderer through life, no pillar of fire or even of cloud is in front of me, not even a will-o’-the-wisp, nothing but some wreathy wraith of hope that in the end I shall find something worth living for, or be worthy of the only cause worth mentioning, the people’s cause.’
Elvira studied her lap through long lashes charmingly close to her soft-paste cheek.
‘What’s the matter?’
She looked up at him with almond eyes and an alien look. She said, dropping the words as if they were pearls from her small mouth, that was often incapable of speech:
‘Then, if you lose ambition here, you’ll find it with some other woman. Like all men.’
Oliver’s heart went ker-flop.
‘We’ll go to England soon, and then you’ll be happy. I’ve written to Fuseaux refusing the job.’
‘And does the blonde young lady go too? Your mistress, I mean?’
She began to turn over a magazine, but seeing that her hand was shaking, she closed it again.
Oliver replied low: ‘You met her yesterday? Why do you call her that? You are inventing a whole story.’
‘Did you promise to marry her?’
‘Certainly not. Did she say so?’
‘Not exactly. She just sent me this.’ She handed him the pneumatique.
‘Well, you seem to know all there is to know. That is all there is to know. And she just kicked me out.’
‘I wish I had her guts.’
‘Yes. I wish you had, Elvira. I wish I had. I suppose I have.’
‘Everyone’s the same. We’re all caught. Look at Marpurgo. You know he has a wife? She’s an invalid, and lives at Geneva or some such place. I suppose he’s got some girl on the side, he keeps it so quiet. Oh, we’re all the same. I wish I could die. I’m useless to anyone, even myself. So are you.’
‘I won’t believe it’s true. I’ve gone astray, but I’ll come back. I’ll crush back the vast sensuality and lethargy that has invaded me lately.’
‘Yes, you. Only you! I know you lived with her.’
‘Elvira!’
‘She wrote to me—that French girl, your Coromandel. She had no fear to write me that impertinent note. That told me all.’ She turned her eyes, now like rolling, dark, retributive floods, on her lover. ‘You can’t stay here with me to-night. You’d better go to her.’
‘I love you.’
‘You love me the more for deserting me and betraying me. Leave me now again. Go to her, so that you can have more pleasure out of the thought of me sitting here alone, waiting for you.’
‘She will never see me again.’
‘Well turned. She won’t see you, otherwise…’
‘Listen…’
‘You bring me into shame and then disgrace me with another woman…’
‘Into shame! Elvira, listen…’
‘I am listening,’ said Elvira suddenly. ‘What explanation have you to offer? I should be pleased to hear it.’ But she began to tremble violently again. She listened, nevertheless, with bitterness and a sudden jibing shrewish wit. She rose and began to pace the room. Oliver followed her.
‘Elvira, dear, sit down.’
She refused, and her small mouth, round and purplish, sank, almost invisible in her face, as she compressed her lips.
‘You’re not worth her, even. I believe you told her you’d marry her.’
He looked tenderly and reproachfully out of his soft untruthful eyes.
‘You took me from Paul to this poisoned atmosphere of treason, hate, insecurity. I have no home, no future, nowhere to go, no friends. Look at Blanche! I’m everyone’s footstool. I haven’t even you, for who knows now when you won’t go off like the miserable gipsy you are, and leave me, your old woman, and old discarded mistress,’ she shuddered and stopped, ‘your old woman, haggish, peaked, yearning, lonely, deserted, ridiculous. How do I know you won’t marry Coromandel or any flimsy that flutters in your eyes some scraps of book-learning? Because you worship that, you pedant. If you had hated me you couldn’t have acted otherwise. But no, you’re my lover, a fine lover, a lover! Did you ever care anything for me but lust? Don’t make that face. I call a spade a spade. I know you get up from our bed, almost from my arms, in the middle of the night, and run through the streets after that woman, half-dressed even, with your hair ruffled with sleep and lust, lust! the one helping out the other with a film of charm: you come home pale, wan, tired—your work was hard! You go to working-men’s meetings in the evenings, the Salle Bullier, the Vel
d’Hiv;—oh, how I’ve been fooled—and how do you return? Full of anecdotes, new arguments, stories about men, vulgar jokes, like you used to in London? No, you straggle home late, without a word, washed-out, idle, like some jellyfish waiting for the next high-tide, and then in the morning you begin to sparkle up with high-sounding new phrases, not your sort at all, poetic, snobbish. And the worst is—are they original? No, you get them from her. You imitate everything: pick up everything. You haven’t a spark of originality. You’re just a grubber. She is your Ligeia.’ Elvira hesitated, searching Oliver’s face, fearing she had used the wrong word. She took up dubiously. ‘Your nymph in the grove. I’ve been nothing all these months but a poor wife at home, sitting silent and catching flies while you go over there, a few yards away—she was careful to put her address, wasn’t she?—and listen to her bragging. That’s a pretty picture. A pretty picture! You’re a painter, you paint me in ridicule. Go, go! I hate you. Oh, I am so alone! You have ruined me. Go and try to ruin her. But she’s too independent. That’s how she got you. You’re weak. You can’t resist a bold woman.’ She sat down on a stool in the corner, sobbing, moaning. ‘I’m all alone. I have no one in the world.’ Her voice rose, and she began to shriek. ‘I, God, what shall I do? I’m all alone. I’ll die! I’ll die! Who cares for me?’
He sat there disconsolate, saying from time to time: ‘Hush, Elvira, they’ll hear you!’ She only answered: ‘I’ve ruined my life.’
He rose. ‘You want me to go?’
She said nothing. He moved towards the door, dragging his feet. Before he laid his hand on the doorhandle, she moaned: ‘Don’t leave me! How can I stay alone and think of all this? The people next door must have heard us. What will they think? Don’t leave me.’
He said wearily: ‘I’ll stay if you want me to; but Elvira, you’ve invented all this, every bit of it. You women are wonderful at drama. You’re all Siddonses, all poets.’ He kissed her. She pushed him away, but with pats, petting and kisses he persuaded her into his arms, and she soon fell asleep from exhaustion.
The Beauties and Furies Page 36