The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  He cackled.

  ‘You old devil,’ said Oliver. ‘Don’t you hate young men!’

  ‘I did, even when I was young, because I counted the years until I should be old and despised, and found them few.’

  Oliver dreamed. ‘How was the home-coming? I can’t very well imagine it.’

  ‘She told me in her candid way, “I don’t suppose it meant much to Oliver when I went. Men don’t die too easily. When I came home—well, Paul was very quiet. I felt like someone coming back from the dead. No wild enthusiasm either on his part or Sara’s, you know. I know my life is finished. They expect me to settle back at home, and be sorry for what I’ve done. Chastened. They don’t know me.” She was beautiful, then, Oliver; all her beauty came back, more vivid than ever. She said, “Oh, I often wish I could die in the middle of the night. There’s nothing to do. Everyone says to you, What you want is something to do, to take a resolution, to resolve your spiritual problems. You take a step, and what then? It’s degrading to a spirit to find itself a woman. You have to think what your husband is thinking of you, what his friends think. Just because one’s not socially independent. It’s hateful being a bourgeois. I really went with Oliver because I didn’t think he was a bourgeois. But he’s just the new bourgeois, the nervous, shying one who has to talk sham-socialism.” Funny little woman! But you know her, Oliver, better than I do. She was quite herself. She said, “Life is so humiliating: I can’t bear the humiliations of everyday life. What did Oliver do to me? Really, he just humiliated me.” Your Elvira is quite a quiddity. She said, “Oliver can rebuild his life, and of course he’ll soon see me as a drab little creature.” Then she laughed and made me tea. She had a young cousin there, come from some part of London.’

  ‘You mean a young man,’ said Oliver, bitterly searching out Marpurgo’s face.

  ‘Oh, of course. He was young, and fearfully attracted by her pessimism. She’s strangely old in her point of view. Something like myself. Not like you, really, Oliver. We Europeans are so pessimistic: it’s the old blood. Old blood that has soaked itself in and out of its native soil for centuries, thinks by itself. Knows about its million death-hours. Has to struggle up again. We were saying that. The young chap was quite fascinated, I could see. He loves Paul, too.’

  Oliver’s lips and eyes smiled in gentle satire.

  ‘He must be a very young pup: poor pup.’

  ‘And there’s always the physical fact at the bottom of all these things,’ philosophised Marpurgo. ‘She’s going to study German with him.’

  ‘She got nothing out of it,’ Oliver said with regret. ‘I was just mad about her. After she left, I lived with her more intensely than at any time when she was with me. How I dreamed!’ He laughed and raised up both hands: ‘Oh, lawdy! Marpurgo, I’m not the same man. There was one night during my—season, with Blanche. I fell asleep completely exhausted. She’s full of poetry, that girl, too—Blanche, I mean: she had set my head going. In a way she was fertile: she started me up again. I thought I came to a wall of glassy rock which enclosed a forest petrified but not carbonised. Clouds of gas passed through the branches, and I could hear no sound but of some underground water running down to the impermeable strata. The clouds curdled and straked, as dreams do in a crystal before a medium’s eyes. In the glass were single bones, translucent, which were held in suspension at some parts like a darning in the tissue, and the dark passage I trod was carpeted with rustling dry fossil bones, small as if from humming-birds. Then I felt the paths of my brain were paved with such delicate fossil bones, as if all delicate things had died in me, and as if my shadowy self were articulated with such delicate broochy bones. Through the glass I saw a Bach-blue, and over that a light spume with hooded wanderers in the mountain rhyming ancient runes over polar bones and behemoths entombed. Floating far down in these subterranean depths I saw enchanted islands covered with phosphates, kitchen-middens, barrows, fossils; there was the stark north and the lardy south, all floating without chain and root, through a whalebone arch, through the whalegate of wind-blown baleine.

  ‘Beneath them all, flowing lucidly, was the body of a woman, crowned with flowing dark ringlets, which entered into the crevices like poisonous roots of trees, into the coal-seams, the deposits of ore, and worked their way downwards to the centre of the earth. Imprisoned by her marauding hair she lay, and turned dark, silent eyes upon me. Her small forehead looked large as her eyes rolled, her hair flowing from either side encased but did not cover her naked body. Sometimes she shivered, and blue lights played under her flesh. I dug my nails at the glassy wall. Her dark eyes, passive and animal, did not entreat me, but looked at me so long that I was drawn towards her irresistibly. She began to rise towards me in delicious perfumes, which presently became intoxicating, and even foul and oppressive, so that my head turned. Her pale skin became rosy and rosy, touched with golden shadows and white reflections. Her bosom rose towards me, her belly was decked with small black lilies arising from spotted green bracts which had a rich, fleshy smell. In her hair these same flowers wreathed themselves alternately with tiger lilies, and from the lobes of her ears and round her eyelids small blue flowers sprang. I saw she lay on a bed of precious stones swarming like ants, and over these her hair flowed ceaselessly. Her hands did not move, and her mouth lay still as in death and slightly parted.

  ‘I found myself falling towards her a long way into the bowels of the earth, till I thought, so dark and peaceful it was, so the blue flowers seemed to grow round me, I must be lying enveloped in her hair. I looked suddenly before me, and saw her awful, uncomprehending eyes below me, but large and threatening like the crab rising through the sea. Her hair writhed upon her forehead. I cast myself upon her mouth. In an instant she was cold and I was grasping a stone, no, less, it had no form, it was the glass wall, no longer transparent, but changed to rock-wall. I dreamed that. Now she lies there under all, silent, entreating, without recognition, enthralled, living, tearing at my heart day and night.

  ‘If the miner works there long with pick and shovel, will he burst open the seam in which she is imprisoned, will he root out the matrix of that awful jewel? Or will he not rather drive his pick right through her body and so kill her and leave her to rot, rotting eternally, and spreading putrefaction through the whole earth; sprouting tendrils and spotted lilies and thick-fleshed spikes of dusky bells nodding frequently as they turn and rise to obscure the sun and blue heaven?

  ‘You see,’ he concluded, ‘I am brought to a standstill and headed once more in a circle by this phantom, and this phantom which is my life, buried in the earth under me: my feet circle round and round the spot where it lies.’

  Marpurgo looked at him steadily, his blue eyes and yellowed skin drawing in till he looked like a wise man from under the earth. Outside in the street workmen toiled in the drains with a clink-clonk of picks and the roar and flame of the oxy-acetylene lamp; but they only heard it through the wall. The forests of dreams were waving overhead, with long plumed cypresses, pines, poplars, and yews, among whose branches the stars twinkled, the neighing of nightmares grew louder, hippic accoutrements jingled, hounds and hunters parted the low boughs, a woman dropped tears into the well. Oliver and Marpurgo listened for a space.

  Marpurgo nodded at him. ‘You became quite a lover.’

  Oliver smiled. ‘As soon as I met Elvira I dropped all my theories, attitudes, you know, about despising women; I had to get near to her. I suddenly saw that romantic men weren’t such fools as I thought. It was a game to play. Then I found I was in love!’

  Marpurgo laughed. ‘So you went into the business once and for all?’

  Oliver said earnestly: ‘Yes, like I do everything. It is an experience, too. I thought, I will try anything once. So I let myself go…Last night I lay peacefully, it seemed, somewhere on the lower slopes of the Tyrol. Nothing breathes upon my bed but the breeze lifting its face from the enamelled meadows. Above are the stars, small and numerous, clustering more thickly on a distant spur. Th
en I see her walking a long way from me, but of heavenly stature, veiled, walking through the starry night, with bare olive feet and bare round arms braceleted, and dark young Slavic face cast down, thoughtfully but archly. The wind does not disturb her hieratic curls, her feet do not disturb the grasses, but they rebound after her; sometimes she leaves a shining track across a hillside with silver footprints like a snail, around her is a light mist, and at intervals small white waterbirds paddle delicately in the dew and, among sedgy five-fingered tufts, make a mincing step or so in a half-circle round her. But there she goes, in some brilliant colour she surely never wore, under the sepia sky, veiled and downcast and all the night, with comets. I follow her with my eyes, recumbent, and wonder what she thinks of, and what she looks for in the flowery fields and marshy meadows. When the dawn comes she vanishes, and the restless day comes telling me I am a fool and must get up, be myself, wash my face and go to work. A workaday man, if there ever was one. She has a function: she is sucking all the dreams out of me. All, all. I am empty. I feel like a blown-out egg. I suppose it is cleansing. I am not so sure. Perhaps a jog doesn’t pay in any sense.’

  Oliver’s voice, which had been sweet in the first part of his recital, had at the last sentence become harsh again and dejected.

  Marpurgo plaited his fingers on the table. He said sibilantly:

  ‘She was just a spell of blessed self-forgetfulness for an academic drudge. It relieves, to spin from the zentrum to the periphery. That’s why men go mad, too.’

  ‘It’s true, in a way. I don’t know that I love her in the ordinary way. I’m just bound to her. There she burns, the cold fire in my polar season, and the northern lights dance round her icy brow and the luminous fish in her inky currents. Sometimes she is the mother of earth, sometimes a witch-maiden, sometimes the immobile, infertile, perfect image that floats in the subterranean caverns of the hearts of men, sometimes a child, sometimes herself, a woman imperfectly-heated, imperfectly-loving, querulous, necessitous. In other words, I have been in love.’

  ‘Do you want to see her again?’

  ‘Never—never.’

  ‘And now what?’

  ‘I’d go back if I had the money. I’m ashamed to write to my father. I told him I was making notes for a book of my own, the Uneven Development of Capitalism.’

  ‘Come and stay with me at my hotel,’ urged Marpurgo.

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘I’ll try to arrange everything for you. I’m doing some business for a brilliant financier here—he’ll certainly be heard of. They’ll soon get over their Stavisky scare, and the venality will start up again—it’ll be our opportunity if we get in first. The judges and clerks of the court must be behind with their rent: they haven’t been able to touch a thing during all this.’ He looked indescribably crafty and delighted. ‘At any rate, this fellow will make me an advance if I tell him what it’s for. Like many scoundrels, he admires the intellect. That’s been my racket, my dear Oliver: in a greater or less measure, it’s yours—only you’re not quite so corrupt as I am, less honest, that is, with yourself. I’m alone here. Lonely and ailing. Come and keep me company.”

  Oliver chuckled sardonically.

  ‘I couldn’t, unless I were what I am sure you are, and could make one in the imponderable legions that ride the shadowy air of night. Oh, you imperfect villain! All you see, do, desire, say, is discoloured by your discontent. I am hopeful. You’ll only try on me another Somnambulists’ Club. You walked away with that. Not now. I’m not the fat puker I was then.’

  Marpurgo wrinkled up his eyes joyously.

  ‘You love to dramatise me!’

  Oliver cried with enthusiasm: ‘What a sunset tonight! smoke in the heavy air, thunderous clouds pouring into the sun, like sheep into the dip, and coming out red, rays, spray, smoke, fire scattered to all parts of the sky above the Venetian blue!’

  Marpurgo was heavy with his dolour.

  ‘I wonder what it will seem to me when I turn a somersault over the sun? Oliver, I feel that I am dying, and that the time will be brief and wretched. Just now I am becalmed, but in an hour or so, as it were, the wind will catch my black sails already unfurled, and I will go scudding over the horizon into the new continent of death. Even now I seem to have that sick lucidity. It comes and goes. My hour’s not yet, but soon. What a strange thing, to be alive to-day and dead to-morrow! Alive yesterday and dead to-day! How can I die? I feel as if I will be standing quietly somewhere aside, and laughing quietly in my sleeve over my rotting body. It will decay, this hand will corrupt and fall into parts—what horror, what inevitability! The bloodhounds are after me, of death, I mean—here,’ he cried, throwing out his hands, ‘I’ll distribute the morsels myself: what, they don’t fall off, they don’t scatter, my juices are not leaving a trail behind me! How strange; not to-day, but to-morrow, faster than thought they will dissolve, because I happen to fall asleep and be no longer on the watch. These ears which will hear no more scandal, reproach, nor idle beguiling words, this mouth which will drink wormwood no more nor utter bitterness, nor laugh, nor quiver, this lofty forehead behind which madness has no more home, but must now fly shamed and gibbering away, and these feet, most of all, which need not wander nor hurry at the approach of night, nor foul themselves nor be broken with fatigue…’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Marpurgo!’

  ‘You’ve been one of my grave-diggers: you may as well hear the plaint.’

  ‘Marpurgo, that business with Fuseaux wasn’t my fault—really. I was quite unaware of the trouble you were going to have through it. I’m fond of you, Marpurgo.’

  ‘Yes, you love me like a grave-digger. You’re a modern young mind: it’s your duty and pleasure to tear down old wrecks like me, to expose shams like me. Of course you like me. I’m easy to dissect. Not so easy as you think, but you’ll never know the difference. What’s your address? I’ll see that you get the money to go home. I’m your phantom. You bury me and go home. I’ll get you the money!’

  ‘No, I can’t let you do that!’

  ‘I’ll manage it easily: I have wide-open credit in lots of places. I have friends. Meet me to-morrow in the Café de la Paix.’

  In the morning Oliver found Marpurgo looking quite well, cheerily cracking jokes with some beetle-browed Rumanians who, he said, were plotting against the reigning king. Marpurgo was on his high-horse again, and explained to Oliver, with apt satire but hazy details, some vast scheme that Severin was mounting.

  ‘I haven’t the money here,’ said Marpurgo; ‘but you’ll get it by to-morrow at your hotel. When you get it let me know what train you’re catching.’

  The following day Oliver received five hundred francs at his hotel, in an envelope with an English postmark. He did not stop to think about this, but packed everything, and telegraphed Marpurgo that he was leaving for England by the Dieppe route that evening at seven and would entertain him at dinner. They had rather a pleasant meal, with Marpurgo singing and aphoristic. He went to the train with Oliver, and as it moved out, called:

  ‘Oh, you should know, by the way, that I telegraphed Paul about you, saying I was broke, and he telephoned me and sent you the money—five hundred francs, wasn’t it? What a generous heart is buried there!’

  The train slid out faster and faster, leaving Marpurgo’s strange giggle and bright blue eyes behind.

  With the money Oliver had bought the newest issue of Under the Marxist Banner, and he settled down with a pleasant sigh to read. He looked out at the frozen grey suburbs they were sliding through and his heart kicked with joy: even as he sat in the train, even as he left them, they could not escape him. They could not say to him, We are ice-bound, diseased, verminous, rotten: we are something you can’t grasp, we threaten you, we have no money to pay you, we reject you. He read in his book and a warmth grew round his heart. The intellect was his business and reason was his tool. In the country the ponds were stiff, the kitchen doors closed: smoke froze over the chimneys, the dried beans
hung under the thatch. Oliver’s eyes began to dream over the empty view. The girl opposite closed her eyes and stretched out a silken leg to touch his foot by accident. The man next to Oliver began a gurgling snore which grew louder with every breath. The girl’s disgusted eyes opened. Oliver shook the man, ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’ He awakened, looked sheepish, and went out into the corridor. ‘Thank you,’ said the girl. She was a beautiful young creature, about eighteen, with a face the shape of an old-fashioned shield, and thick, uncurled, wild black hair. Deepest blue eyes flew all over Oliver’s person. She leaned back impulsively and then leaned forward impulsively to ask him about himself. She was a composer, and sang him there and then some songs, written by herself in the style of Hugo Wolf, to lyrics written by men in a workers’ literature class in Newcastle-on-Tyne, her home town. Oliver dropped his book and his eyes were brilliant and wet with enthusiasm.

  ‘That’s original,’ cried Oliver.

  ‘This is the most brilliant age the world has ever seen,’ said the musician: ‘who can help but be original?’ She looked at him critically.

  ‘There are a lot of resuscitated anachronisms about,’ he laughed.

  ‘Not you or me,’ cried the girl, shaking her black hair like a filly.

  ‘How sure you are! Tell me your name?’

  ‘Rosetta!’

  ‘I’ve got some poems in my bag,’ said Oliver. ‘Do you think you could put one of them to music? I’ll read a couple to you. Do you want to hear? Though I don’t know whether you can stand them: they refer to experiences, many experiences which will have no meaning for you, I suppose.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I don’t know.’

  As the train rumbled along he read his poems, and she tapped the rhythms.