The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘I’ve an evil foreboding,’ said Oliver. His heart beat hard all night and he had bad dreams. In the morning Coromandel calmly drove him back to town. He felt humbled, and yet more peaceful for the night in the country. It was very early. All was grey above, the sky the colour of a dove’s breast. When they arrived in Paris there was a crayon light, with the same flights of doves in heaven to colour the sky faint blue. The youthful and elegant town shook her bracelets, the garden ruffled her loaded canopies. The Place de l’Opéra was like quicksands and undertows with regiments of all ages and kinds drifting back and forth across the roads as the circular traffic stayed and went. There stood the solid cavernous sepia Opera-house, and down the Boulevard de la Madeleine the thick old rich Chinese pavilioned and lanterned scene, with the stuff of boughs above. There was Lancel’s corner-shop, with a large inverted lily in its glass bed, the first sun on the windows of the Grande Maison de Blanc. The people tapped to work. The sky was now the colour of a clear pool paved with pale smoked faience. High above the mansards were the thin filaments of night-signs—Fumez-les-Gitanes, Marivaux, Pathé-Polydor, Eversharp, Le Touquet-Paris-Plage. Oliver had been distrait. They had breakfast in the Café de la Paix, enticing with gold columns, twined red roses and painted ceilings. Some touts and conspirators were taking coffee there already.

  ‘I’m going to leave Paris,’ said Oliver quietly. ‘I can’t bear it. I’ll mourn for Paris all my life. I’ll hate to see it in the News of the World. Paris is the country of the heart. You are lucky to be a Frenchwoman.’

  ‘I am,’ said Coromandel: ‘I should never be anything else.’

  ‘There is much unrest here; no one is tranquil here, but I would spill my blood a thousand times to defend France.’

  ‘So would I,’ said Coromandel.

  ‘You don’t believe in glory, and yet everything you do is glorious.’

  ‘A man should love his own country.’

  ‘My country has no people, or so few with a birthright, that is what I mean.’

  ‘They must get their birthright.’

  ‘Yes. I wish we could have married, Coromandel.’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Did you love Marpurgo at all?’

  ‘A little. I love lots of people.’

  ‘You’re not upset to find out we’ve both deceived you?’

  ‘How did you deceive me?’ she asked with unslaked pride. ‘I live and learn, that’s all. I love living, I love learning: nothing will ever abate me.’

  When he got home, he found the apartment empty and Elvira’s trunks gone. There was no letter. He flung himself into a chair. He sat there for several hours. Then he went out and found Blanche. Blanche said:

  ‘Chérie, you will come and stay in my apartment. Do you care? I do not care. We will be brother and sister. Don’t go back there. I’ll go and get your clothes. I’ll leave the address for your letters to be sent on here. Don’t see that miserable café crowd, either. I love you, Oliver: I’ll take care of you, till you’re better.’

  On Saturday she brought home some champagne, tinned food, sausages and cakes. They did not leave the house until Wednesday morning. Anyone who came to the door found it locked, and they answered no knocks. The concierge, versed in Blanche’s ways, did not raise the alarm either: she just went to the door and listened from time to time. She hoped this last young gentleman of Mme Blanche was rich.

  On Wednesday Oliver tried to get his papers together. He typed, nursed himself, typed, and lay on the sofa all day. Blanche did not return till one o’clock in the morning, and then she scolded him because he had not gone to the bank. He went next morning. A fortnight later he had no money left at all, and was reduced to selling his pigskin case, gift of University friends. Two days later, Blanche found him a room in a very cheap hotel, ‘quite near.’ It was in Grenelle. He did not hear from Blanche for three days. One evening he walked over, and when there was no response to his knock, he went round to the courtyard to look in. The lights were on inside, and Blanche was having a party with two amiable gentlemen of colour. Oliver walked up and down along the Seine. Then he went back and asked the concierge if there was any mail for him. The lights were out in Blanche’s apartment. There was no mail.

  CHAPTER XII

  His father sent him some money to return to England. Oliver moved to the Panthéon quarter again. The saucers on his table multiplied: it presently became a necessity and not a whim for Oliver to wait for one of his acquaintances. The contents of the café whirled as if in a heavy swell. ‘A heavy swell,’ said Oliver meticulously, and at that identical moment one appeared in the doorway. Oliver hailed him. It was Andrew Fulton, looking extremely cocksure and somewhat defiant. He summed up Oliver’s flushed cheeks and moist eye before he shook hands. Good fortune had hit Andrew in a tender spot: his mother had died and left him $12,000. Andrew gossiped about wines, theatres, vaudeville, politics, fashions and low squib-romances. ‘I understood you and Mlle Blanche were…’

  ‘Oh, that’s all over: she consoled me, wiped me out and then threw me out.’

  ‘Do you want another pretty? There’s a charming little Scandinavian girl I know…’

  ‘No, no more women.’

  Andrew had lost a thousand francs at Auteuil although he had studied form for a week. He had a millionaire American woman ‘interested’ in his poetry. He began to laugh, and told Oliver a splendid joke. He had just assisted home a young English girl who had run wild. She was dead drunk: she would never know. Would Oliver like to go upstairs and see her? He had just taken another chap. Oliver quarrelled pettily but hotly with Andrew, and they parted in a huff.

  Oliver found a couple of students to coach in French: the father was willing to pay a tutor’s fees to have the younger boy, aged seventeen, off his hands in Paris. The boy was stupid. At times Oliver felt like sending the young fool into a stupor that would hold him for three days, or of plastering him up with some girl, but he could not do it. He was not Andrew Fulton. He was lonely, too. He had met Blanche several times, but they were both broke and had no money for each other, and so no time. He spent the idlest and poorest life, and daily said, ‘I must go back to England at once,’ as if returning to England would set him on his feet. He had hoped at first to hear from Elvira, but she had sunk wordlessly into his past. The months went on, the term began, Oliver had heard nothing from his University. He was ashamed of his essay now, and began to make notes for a new one on the Uneven Development of Capitalism. He went to all the meetings he could to try to pump enthusiasm into himself. But he still hung on to his notion of a career.

  It was now winter, and as his hotel was insufficiently heated, and his clothing was greatly reduced, Oliver spent most of his day on the terrace of the same café in the Boulevard St. Michel. The terrace was enclosed with glass and warmed with braziers.

  The weather was growing colder. His pupil was talking of taking a trip to Corsica to get a little warmth. Oliver half hoped to be invited, although he was tired of the miserable boy, and half feared he would be torn away from his agreeable café terrace and his morning journals. His world was as far removed from commercial and scholastic life as possible. A few of the younger persons in the café attended the Beaux-Arts. One of the older men was a journalist: many of the French habitués were indeed business men and doctors and lawyers, but Oliver did not know them. All the people in his circle were virtually fainéants: yet for the sake of being in the swim they discussed the movements of the stock exchanges and racial riots and so forth in a hole-in-the-corner way. None of them had that grip on the hard world realised by a ten-year-old newsboy. Oliver was older in experience than most of them, and was poorer, and this mordant and snarling world which squirmed in his feeble grip took a great deal of his attention from their paradoxical discourses of nothinglets.

  He moved again to poorer lodgings. Oliver had to warm his hands in the lukewarm water in his room before dressing in the morning. The landlady pitied him and gave him an old red coverlet to wra
p round his feet when he read in the evenings: he never entered till late, and then he went straight to bed without washing, for he feared the cold so much. Some mornings were so cold that he did not wash till midday when he returned. He noted with shame that his personal habits grew less fastidious: he attributed it to lack of morale, thus doing the work of the furies with the pleasure of supererogation, but it was due to lack of food. His pupil left without paying him for the last month’s tuition. This was to be paid upon his return. Oliver wished he could hibernate as forest animals do; it would save in every way, and he cared for nothing but sleep. He sat for hours now, without saying a word, staring, somewhat owlishly and slightly fuddled, at the passers-by. He had no more money to buy pamphlets.

  The morning of the first fall of snow, he felt giddy when he came downstairs. He frequently felt giddy in these days, but the attack that morning was serious. Incipient pains made themselves felt in different parts of his body. Christmas was approaching. One day Oliver lifted his troubled eyes and saw Marpurgo coming towards him between the tables. Oliver frowned. At the same moment, due to his excitement, he became giddy again, so that he was comforted when Marpurgo shook his hand, smiled kindly and sat down.

  ‘Will you have a coffee?’ Marpurgo invited.

  Oliver was glad to see him.

  ‘You should go back to work,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘Work! That means more archives and essays. I was so happy when I got the scholarships. I saw years of freedom ahead. Now, I see no bird ever walked more cockily into a trap.’

  ‘Every profession is a trap unless you get to the top. You sowed your wild oats.’

  ‘Domesticated oats, but they took root in me.’

  ‘I was there,’ murmured Marpurgo. ‘Paul regards me as a friend: she—as usual—is suspicious, uncertain, and lives for the moment. She had just got her linen up from the cellar and was going through it. Sara had long gone north to her sandwich-shop in York. I think there was a minor tragedy there.’

  He ruminated: ‘There is always someone who suffers in this kind of story. In every grouping, there is the untold tale.’

  Oliver said nothing: his cheeks had lost the rose, his eyes were less glossy, his lips blacker.

  ‘And you, Marpurgo, are you better?’

  ‘My comrade is still the worm. My wife could not stand Paris, and I found we were better apart. She is back in Como and—dying, they tell me. I must go to see her. My finances have taken a precipitous decline. The Fuseaux brothers, of course, are desolated, but my pride prevents me from accepting their offers. They’re not doing so well, of course: a firm run on those principles—better for you that Antoine didn’t take to you. Antoine is a sweet fellow, he likes you or he doesn’t, though. He likes me, but I can’t live at a man’s pleasure. Reminiscent of the harem. I don’t want a tenderloin steak in the business. Eh? You, by the way, would do better that way, the way you’re built. Eh? Well, my wife is dying, and I suppose I’ll soon be a real, not a grass widower. Meantime, I am in touch with some friends—something rather secret for the—relations in high places: I’ve always been pro-British, you know, and I’d be glad to serve them. I have certain capacities. I sing my song, I dance my mental hula-hula. Some people think, An old luxurious ham-sitter—just the man to do certain things. You may also have heard of Severin. In the meantime, he helps out through a thin period. This confidential Government stuff (Foreign Office, of course, but never mentioned in the affair: non-committal nonentity, Mr. B. Jabez, private Iraqi interests, that sort of thing, you know how the British work) suits me: if I’d had money, and not been side-tracked by airy loves, arts, philosophy, I should have gone that way. There’s none so crooked and clever as the English: a remarkable race. History’s three enigmas—the rise of a minor Essene-heresy which became the Christian religion: the rise of science in the dirt-hovels of the Goths against the congelation of the superb Mandarin culture: the rise of a miserable, cold, infertile island in the German Ocean, half-barren hills, populated by a mixed race, often invaded, surrounded by enemies, the Scottish, the Welsh, the Irish, the French, the Dutch, to its position as balancer of Europe’s powers, the first of the Empires. What a people! What accounts for it? I am proud to be a Briton.’ His voice had risen, he looked round furtively, lowered his voice, tried to look Secret-Service.

  Oliver finally said: ‘Elvira—how is she? Does she look well? Did she ask you anything about me?’

  ‘No. She looks very well.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it? I suppose petty daily habits dominate our lives more than the great passions of fame and romance.’

  Marpurgo bent on his walking-stick to hide the amusement and raillery in his eyes.

  ‘It’s written, Some women are foxes, some vixen, some birds and some field mice. St. Bernard says that their face is a burning wind and their voice the hissing of serpents.’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ said Oliver. ‘He should have had a look at one once in his life. You know, I always imagined her surrounded by little animals, yet she hated animals. When she was here—you know we disagreed in a matrimonial way—we were really married, I take it. I can’t forget her. I used to lie awake in paroxysms of regret, think of all I’d done and said. I could have managed everything so differently. I’d throw myself on the bed and hold the cushion, a hundred times call it Elvira. I felt the grain of the skin or smelt the natural oils. I walked up and down till the whole room and the house and that dirty court of Blanche’s and everything wrapped itself round me. I yearned after dark thick sour-forests, deep in humus, where I could hold the rough bark and put my head in the hollows of roots, so that they could plant their claws in me and their adventitious roots would descend to bind me, out of the air. Even my head burst and bounced like the rock on the side of the ravine, sundered by a tender fossicking root, and its specks of gold in the quartz veins are revealed. I am all naked like the skeleton on the trees which points in the direction of the buried treasure. In my forehead is ambergris. I scent out the room and ascend among the tree-tops in clouds of steam and venom; I am striated like the python, red and yellow like the daubs of savage races; I am all fevered as fruitful earths touched by the careless savage male sun and becoming pregnant. I float over the forests of the earth, and the ascending poisons and descending rays pierce me, and rains and humours pour from the vents of my body in my misery. Look, how I sweat! For days I have sweated as easily! There she stands, drooping, lurking, gentle, dark, innocent, culpable, in the undergrowth of some thicket: she casts her eyes upon me and thinks, What a lout! he didn’t even know how to win me. It’s true; I never won her, I never won anyone. I’m a dull, thick-headed and thick-handed plodder.’

  Marpurgo put his hand on his temple.

  ‘You’re in a fever, you’d better take care of yourself. Have you eaten to-day?’

  ‘No, I didn’t care to. I’ve made such a mess of things, I haven’t any interest in eating. I wouldn’t care if I passed out right now.’

  Marpurgo put his hand on his wrist.

  ‘Well, you’re going to eat now; and then home. You get your doctor’s degree and you strike out afresh. You’ll feel better when you leave this hotel. Flats, cities, streets are the death of man.’ While Oliver was putting on his coat, Marpurgo smiled his pointed smile and intoned: ‘And I have found a woman more hitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net and her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her, but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her.’

  Oliver shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘When he says her heart is a net, he must mean the inscrutable malice and avarice and glacial cold which reigns in her heart: it’s from birth, it’s unconscious. Next time (and there will be a next time, because now I want to be married, I must live with a woman) I’ll choose a woman who is no woman, just an easy-going comrade, one with no wiles, who can manage me. I’m tired of struggling.’

  A bead of saliva appeared between Marpurgo’s lips. He put his hand to his chest as if stifling. />
  ‘Are you ill?’ said Oliver.

  ‘Naturally. I would become ill if I were not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what makes me so intelligent.’

  ‘Rubbish. You’re the fox that lost his tail. An old fox! How is Elvira? Is she well?’

  ‘Yes, but not happy. She took up her life with Paul exactly where she laid it down. She harasses him, is restless. A Dr. Penn now hangs around in a pitiable way. Apparently a suitor.

  Oliver lay back and laughed to himself.

  ‘Alma Mater! She changes not though everything else changes: she changes everyone, but changes not. She’s lovely—but she wants everything and she’s never satisfied. I thought I was going to pass out one night. I saw Elvira as clear as crystal…I wouldn’t say the time has been wasted. I see now. Andrew Fulton tried to get me with the old farrago the other day: now that crowd to me is just a parade of struggling tentacular ghosts. When I got through with Blanche I got through with them. I should never have gone near them, anyhow, if it hadn’t been for Elvira. Impassive, she congeals; dependent, she dominates. If I were face to face with her, I’d fall again, I believe, but it’s the easiest thing in the world for me to stay away from her.’

  ‘She’s just an ordinary little house-woman, with some foolish social and personal pretensions,’ sneered Marpurgo. ‘Like every proud, ambitious young hot-belly, you have to pretend there’s a world of delicacy and difference in the girl you pick out. Old women pretend the potatoes they buy are the best in the market, the town, the world, and are only got by superior cunning.’