The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  Yesterday evening, I went to the Salle Bullier to a protest meeting about the Scottsboro’ boys. There was a free-for-all. (She skipped half a page.) A dick eyed me: I eyed him. Afterwards, they kept off me, because I was well dressed. I saw His Nibs standing offside fingering his pockets, while three husky cops set on some undersized workmen singing out ‘Down with all tyrants! Down with the cops!’ Gods, I was glad I was amateur lightweight champ. at college. I was taken up with the rest but released at the station—because of my clothes…

  When I think of you there, a doctor’s wife, Elvira, sitting with those stodgy women who go to your church and think Mr. Baldwin is such a nice man, I can’t believe it’s you, the woman I love. I know it isn’t. Oh, do wake up, come to life before it is too late: before the thorns interlock and crib you for ever. Will you go on doing that till you are forty, fifty, old? Paul is thirty-eight already; he has no right to make you old too…Can’t you be young, enjoy the youth and young love you never had…I love you, you love me, we both love each other: you be good to me and I will be good to you: that is the beginning of a Polish wedding-song…How can you resist me?…You are buried alive. Wake up, Elvira, come to me, come to me…I think of you day and night: my whole life is yours, I’ll breathe my whole life into you. I worship you: I only breathe to make you happy. You know me, I am not a boy: I am serious beyond my years, ambitious, my heart is a flame, I have no mental rheumatism, and I only love you. Now and for ever, Yours,

  OLIVER FENTON.

  Elvira once more caught the curious, friendly glance of the Italian. She looked indifferently along the car where the cloths were now being laid for lunch. A very old Anglican clergyman shook his wattled chin at two young officers going out to Bombay:

  ‘Indubitably a don, pronounced them Ahoy! Foo Gah Kaze. I suppose to you young men I am almost prehistoric; indeed it is fifty years since old Brown, my tutor, murmured them with perhaps a touch of more than donnish melancholy…I assure you gentlemen that this novel accent resembled to me more the inebriate hail of some strayed Celestials seeking their junk along the sombre quays than those melancholy-sweet sounds that Horace himself murmured when he first wrote down this little lament: “Eheu, fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni…” I was at Sir Charles Mopoke’s the other evening for supper: you know Sir Charles, of course, one of the few remaining in the tradition of Lord Grey—and found his son there, Lester, fresh from Oxford. I asked him whether there, or at that other place where such matters are said to be dealt with less conservatively, these chinoiseries are allowed in the pure Augustan. “Well,” he said, “I’ve known much quality short on quantity, but the sign of a true liberal is conservatism in his Latin, homespun is often classic, but what you have there is modern shoddy.” Very apt, I thought. But of course another tongue beguiles your frontier nights? O, a little Sanskrit, Pushtu…’

  Elvira heard a clear, malicious cantillation:

  ‘The fleeting years glide by, alas,

  The civilising tax-collector,

  With the latest range-detector,

  Remains to watch the Khyber pass.’

  Elvira looked at the Italian a moment. The husband of the rouged blonde said:

  ‘The cuckoo should come early this year, he has a five-year cycle. I shall miss him. What a pity! I know by instinct the night before he comes for the first time. I told Rudges when he comes to do the garden to note the date and, if possible, the hour, in chalk or charcoal on the coalshed.’

  Elvira heard the malicious voice of the Italian:

  ‘Cuckoo-lore! Hedge-sparrow scholars! Pipeclay artists! Couturiers of the woad epoch! The women no hips and the men all haws! The women—I am not speaking of your race, Madame. You have Celtic blood, I think.’

  ‘I have Welsh blood,’ said Elvira Western, with a fashionable drawl. ‘As for the cuckoo-lore, as you call it, I rather admire it. When you think that they call us a nation of shopkeepers, and on the train, amongst officers and gentlemen, you can hear about nothing but charades and Horace and…’

  ‘Wordsworth loved the earth of England,’ stated the old clergyman to the young officers.

  ‘—Wordsworth,’ said Elvira.

  ‘To think that the English navy is worse off than at any time since the Armada and the fate of 450,000,000 people, their bread, their civilisation, depend on it…’ said a bronzed and whitehaired old man.

  ‘—and when you think that a tiny little island rules 450,000,000 people,’ continued Elvira, ‘I think it shows a great deal of sangfroid, don’t you?’

  ‘It shows a race built for Empire,’ agreed the Italian.

  ‘Brown Jack is the best of his breed,’ said a voice.

  ‘A horse-race,’ concluded the Italian.

  ‘Of sea-horses,’ Elvira reproved.

  ‘Hi, hi, very good.’

  ‘Are you and Madame having lunch?’ asked the waiter.

  ‘I am having lunch,’ corrected Elvira.

  ‘And so will I,’ said the Italian.

  He apologised for the bad manners of waiters on international trains. ‘I resent this habit of assuming that every woman will let a man pay for her food,’ he said brutally.

  ‘Because they live on tips themselves,’ said Elvira.

  ‘An excellent observation: men think naturally in economic classes.’

  She sighed. ‘We all live by somebody’s favour.’

  At lunch he divided his wine with her. His name was Annibale Marpurgo. He was a lace-buyer and had just come from Calais, where he had been inspecting new designs and buying job-lots of last season’s goods. She found an opportunity to say:

  ‘My friends will be waiting at the other end.’

  Marpurgo smiled. ‘And with impatience!’

  She looked at him in fright, thinking, ‘Do I give myself away so easily?’ She got out her cigarettes, offered him one. He called the waiter, speaking good French, with excessive unction, flattered him in a commanding tone, almost pawed him, almost pushed him, using his hands on which his nails and two rings glittered, discussing at length the quality of the cigars in stock. Elvira, looking at his glittering tiepin through the cigarette-smoke, began to recollect how she had scurried round that very morning, early in foggy London, getting her two bags downstairs. She had lain awake nearly all night thinking of the note she would write to Paul: ‘…you say yourself we are unhappy, we might as well be divorced the way we live. I am going away for a little while to see whether we will feel differently. Perhaps it is all over: our love is dead. Perhaps we never really loved each other. I am taking my freedom; you always say I am free…’ After writing it and putting it in place, first in front of the clock, next on his desk, she had fallen asleep. She had had to walk to Theobald’s Road to get a taxi, so early in the morning. Now, at the other end, Oliver waited. ‘No one can say I don’t take chances!’ She smiled to herself through the smoke.

  The sun was setting as they sped through the high dark woods of Chantilly, an express half-hour from Paris. The sky was clearing still, there was a blowy sunset with gold surf and dark-blotted clouds. As they drew nearer to Paris, she began to talk to Marpurgo again. He came out from a French review, La Revue Historique, ostentatiously held, to tell her that his brother, a painter, had died in Paris, years ago. He had been to Paris himself to study, when he was twenty: he had not known whether to study art, law or medicine, equally called: ‘I had velléités—one should have in life one clear call.’

  ‘Who has?’ asked Elvira. ‘My husband meant to be a broker: and he’s a doctor.’

  She blushed. Marpurgo went on after a moment.

  ‘I design my own commercial designs, in collaboration with the house-designers. The beautiful laces lie on the shelves for years, the meisterstück of most designers is never sold—it’s too dear. I sometimes buy a small piece for my own collection. It is my only vice. I am—a lonely man. Paris is Klingsor’s garden, to me. I wander round, torn by all the curiosity-shops: there are pieces there from the prime-time of laces, when h
undreds of thousands of francs went into cobwebs. My collection is of no mean value…’ The clumsy idiom came trippingly off his tongue. Elvira thought, ‘He has taken great pains to make himself an Englishman.’ She said:

  ‘I don’t wear lace. I like hemstitched and hand-embroidered things. When I was at school they did not allow us to wear lace: the headmistress thought it was unladylike. Hand-drawn lawn and hand-embroidery.’ She giggled. ‘There were two wards there of the richest woman in the kingdom: they had the plainest clothes of all, to prevent them from becoming giddy.’

  He smiled.

  ‘You would never wear what is not delicate and fine, by instinct. You are all that is woman. I should like to show you some of the pieces in my collection. You would change your mind about lace then. It was created for beauties, and you are one,’ he added in a lower tone.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘A beauty who has never reigned,’ he said harshly.

  She was frightened, looking at the ugly poverty-stricken suburb announcing the Gare du Nord. She got out of the train in trepidation, not noticing that she had dropped her gloves. In a flash she saw a dazzling white, smiling face running towards her through the crowd. Oliver’s hat was in his hand, and he did not notice the people who turned to stare and smile at him. Like a clap of thunder she was enfolded tightly, almost lifted off her feet.

  People smiled. He said, ‘I knew you would come. O my darling!’

  She stood still as a stone trying to keep her feet, feeling her hat tipping to one side. He kissed her cheeks, neck and hands. She was glad that Oliver was such a handsome youth. Then, she took the gloves that Marpurgo apologetically held out to her and said timidly, ‘Oliver, this is Mr. Marpurgo: we met on the train. Mr. Fenton.’

  Their porters, the bags shouldered, waited with bored impatience at a little distance.

  ‘Let’s be going,’ exclaimed Oliver: ‘look how he taps his foot!’ He said something to the porter and added: ‘Gods, aren’t they different from the milk-meek English, with their yessir-ing. You can see that this country has had a revolution…’

  ‘—three,’ proffered Marpurgo.

  ‘—three. Didn’t you notice a difference as soon as you struck Calais, Elvira? Oh, how I wanted to make the journey with you, to see your reactions! To see the expressions on your face as you saw France! Aren’t they men! Look at my porter! Do you see how he looks back at me exclaiming with that indifferent mockery! It’s a pleasure to meet workmen who feel their equality with you. How do you like being in France, Elvira?’

  She did not have time to reply to his rejoicing, she had only smiled in a flustered fashion, when Marpurgo said: ‘I have that feeling: I’m an old French chauvinist. Whether the men are actually as intelligent and free as their verbal facility makes them seem, I don’t know, but truth or illusion, it’s pleasant. I’m glad you’re a francophile.’

  ‘I always was, by instinct,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Why be francophile, or the opposite?’ queried Elvira. ‘It is best to say what you see. Prejudice irritates me.’

  Oliver looked at her delightedly. ‘And did you have a good crossing? I was so afraid of you, that you might change your mind at the last moment. What should I have done? I was awake all night!’ He looked into her face hotly, ignoring Marpurgo. She shut her eyes for a second.

  Marpurgo, peering, said to Oliver:

  ‘I see you have La Vérité under your arm: are you a Trotskyist?’

  ‘No; are you?’

  ‘Not wholly, but the man is a genius, and you can’t dismiss him with the consecrated name, counter-revolutionist. After all, he’s the greatest general of the century.’

  ‘Oliver loves politics,’ explained Elvira.

  Oliver was looking at her profoundly and did not seem to hear.

  Marpurgo, with an air of collusion, like someone slipping in the password of a secret society, rapped out:

  ‘I believe perpetual revolution is the only cure for thermidorian degeneration.’

  ‘We must remember that a general has a professional interest in war and can’t shine in engineering,’ remarked Oliver.

  ‘We’ll have no 9th Thermidor because we have no Robespierre,’ Marpurgo plodded along regretfully.

  Oliver caught the ball: ‘We won’t see communism until we see it in France.’

  Elvira began to laugh. ‘Oh, Oliver, I had almost forgotten your litanies: have you been doing this ever since I last saw you?’

  Oliver threw her a loving look. Marpurgo insinuated, with acid pleasantness:

  ‘Isn’t she wonderful? There is something divine in women: without dialectic, without knowledge of the subject, they divine our weaknesses. They have unconscious perception of form, litany-form, incantation-form. But then, they are helped by the conviction that all men of talent are merely medicine-men, leaping, painted, howling, a kitchen-conviction of the cooks’ union that flesh is veal-cutlet but talent is just a game we get up amongst ourselves when we’re fed. And for the most part, it’s true of course. There’s too much priest in all of us. Word-drunk, the woman leads us home to table.’

  Oliver laughed, his face flaming towards Elvira.

  ‘I’ve been waiting an hour in the café opposite, Elvira. I couldn’t keep down-town. I had to be up here near the station. If telepathy existed, you should have got here ever so much sooner: I was trying to make the engine-driver outstrip his schedule. I drank three Amer-Picons! And I’m perfectly sober.’

  ‘I made her drink a little wine,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘Can I drop you somewhere?’ asked Oliver. ‘Where do you stop, right or left bank?’

  ‘Many thanks indeed. No. I’ll drop off at some hotel along the Boulevard Haussmann: that’s nearer my business. May I call for you and take you out to dinner one night?’

  ‘We’re at the Royal Odéon for a few days. Thanks very much for taking care of Mrs. Western. You know my name—Fenton?’

  ‘Oh, we’re sure to meet some time,’ smiled Marpurgo. ‘Brother marxists usually do—and brother fantasts.’ He twinkled at Oliver. ‘We’re both cabbalist fantastics. I sense it: we’re serious artificers of form, but jocund about content.’

  Oliver from the window of the taxi exclaimed:

  ‘Dialectics, being flexible, is a rigid discipline.’

  ‘I must discuss that with you,’ twinkled Marpurgo: ‘if you’ll discuss it with a business-man. But I’m a sort of fabulist, the Arabian Nights is my natural background, and I don’t know whether you have noticed how skeletally economic the concepts of those Arabian Knights are. Definitely hegelian concepts!’

  The last they saw of him was his slender white hand waving out of a black taxi window; his mockery, dandyism, strange accent, half Mile End Road and half Piccadilly, remained with them in the air for some moments. Then Oliver took Elvira’s hands and covered them with kisses. A shop which had just lighted up blazed with the bizarre word ‘Quincaillerie.’ The taxi slid down the slippery street in contrary direction from all the working-people hurrying heel and toe, flat arch and muddy heel, towards the suburban trains of the Gare du Nord. Oliver looked out at the stream and sighed.

  ‘To think that such a people, intelligent, class-conscious, revolutionary, should support a capitalist class—it’s incredible. There are some things I can’t understand at all,’ he explained to Elvira. ‘Look at them, look at them, the sanest people on earth: why do they go on with their burdens? They only have to lay them down and they are free. Why do they go on?’

  Elvira’s impatient voice came from the corner:

  ‘Why? Because they’re hungry and tired and their wives won’t let them leave their jobs.’

  ‘There aren’t so many like you, free, willing to take a chance. How I admire you, and worship you! You’ll never know how much. I live for you.’

  A street-lamp lighted her banded brows and dilated eyes. He said:

  ‘When I got your telegram on Saturday, I thought I had gone queer with waiting and was seeing things. I h
ad to tack it up on my bedroom wall and I kept looking at it all the evening before I believed it. I didn’t sleep that night, or Sunday night—until nearly morning, and then I fell into a golden, happy sleep. To-night is Monday night—to-night I will sleep…’ After a silence he said with emotion, ‘Why did you make me wait all the week-end? Where is Paul? What did he say?’

  ‘Paul’s in the country, on an estate near Luton: he was invited out by a patient of his, Sir Frédérick Charles, or Sir Charles Frédérick, I don’t know what. A bachelor week-end. These men love to get each other off into stag huddles in the week-ends: they get crushes on each other—his patients are in the City, and the City is a sort of stag-party. I was nearly mad with trying to decide what to do after I got your letter. I thought if Paul goes away this week-end, I go: if he stays, I stay. He went. Before he went, we had a scene, of course. I couldn’t help asking him why he went and left me alone. He knows I hate to be alone. When he comes back to-day, he’ll get a jolt,’ she ended bitterly, shrugging her shoulders.