The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  ‘You won’t have any more trouble—in your life! Think of that: here’s someone who loves you dearer than all the world. Put your head on my shoulder…’

  It gave her a crick in the neck. She seized the first opportunity to sit up and look out.

  ‘Oh, aren’t the fountains pretty?’

  ‘They don’t play yet: it’s too cold. That’s the Régence where Napoleon played chess—Alekhine too, the champion. This is the Louvre. Look at the Tuileries, like the Garden of Eden at night: that double chain of jewels is the Champs Elysées: those two great bland clockfaces are the Gare d’Orsay. Look, look at the silky, sulky Seine…’ He laughed, rollicked, triumphed.

  ‘Oliver, where are we going?’

  ‘Don’t ask. You’ll see!’

  ‘A hotel?’

  ‘Yes, an old-fashioned hotel, with high, grand, elegant rooms, long brocade curtains. You’ll like it.’

  ‘Do we have to show our passports in the hotel?’

  ‘No, I just fill in a sheet—Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. Don’t worry, darling: even if they knew they wouldn’t say anything. The French are human on human relationships. All they ask is, Do you pay your bills? If you do, you pass.’

  She breathed freely. ‘That’s—capitalism, isn’t it?’ She wanted to please him.

  ‘Yes: but when the relation is expressed in such simple terms, it is the easier to break down a system. In England it is just the opposite.’

  ‘Yes, and then in England the people have a sense of humour: they don’t take every little thing as a serious issue. They are more sophisticated.’

  ‘Paul says…’ Oliver gibed gently.

  ‘Paul believes in England: he is a patriot. Whatever his personal faults, he is faithful to his principles.’

  ‘That is, he has no sense of humour’—Oliver peered into her face, grinning—‘when it comes to business. Don’t you realise he sells his conservatism; it excuses English medicine’s being in a backwater.’

  After a while, she said, uncomfortably, ‘In a way.’

  There were few clients in the hotel. The room, on the first floor, twenty feet high, with long French windows, looked through blue brocaded curtains into the rue de l’Odéon. When the boy had left the bags and gone with Oliver’s excessive tip, Oliver rushed over to her.

  ‘Look around, Elvira: this is our first home.’

  She withdrew her hands and went into the bathroom.

  ‘It is rather nice, isn’t it?’

  While she was powdering her uncoloured face, Oliver came and looked over her shoulder.

  ‘What a perfect couple we are! Aren’t we made for each other? Two darkies, eh?’

  When she had first seen him in London she had been shocked and repelled by his great beauty, his small, dark-red mouth, his long thick black lashes curling on a red and white cheek. She smiled at his vanity now.

  ‘Your mother must have been a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Oh, when she was eighteen, she was the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley! But when I knew her she was already thick and podgy with an immense, immense bosom dressed in frills of speckled voile.’

  ‘Freudians can’t accuse you of an Oedipus complex, then. I must seem thin to you.’

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, ‘but you don’t know how to dress. A French woman built like you would build up her bosom. I’ll take you to a dressmaker who will study your style and bring out your femininity. You must go, the very first thing, to the Printemps, or to Antoine, and have your hair done too. Oh, you’ll spend fortunes on yourself before you’ve been in Paris long. You’ll be quite a different woman. You can dress, you know. You’ll be splendid when you’re dressed like a French woman. Everyone will say, How adaptable she is.’

  She gave him a long surprised look and began to laugh.

  ‘Oliver, so I don’t suit you? You brought me over to make me a French woman. You’re an incredible chauvinist.’

  ‘I love you and I love France: I want to be happy with the two together.’

  ‘Let’s go down. We don’t want to be staying here.’

  ‘What does it matter if they think we’re honeymooners? They like it here: they’re sympathetic.’

  ‘Oh—let’s go down.’

  She swept out of the door.

  In the lounge Marpurgo was sitting with a sheaf of papers. Oliver nodded to him. He started up towards them.

  ‘Madame! Please forgive me. I seem to be sleuthing you. I went to the Royal-Haussmann. A person went ahead of me through the revolving door that I must not on any account meet—that is, if I am to have peace. I was flustered, quite flustered, and got into the taxi again. I am tired of my old hotel in the rue du Bac, and every other hotel in Paris went out of my head. I said to the driver, “Anywhere you like!” and I found myself here. I didn’t know till I got inside that it was your hotel. He no doubt heard your directions and assumed we were friends! Nadir of indiscretion.’ He smiled at Elvira. ‘Intention usurps coincidence in my system! You see, I believe in affinities, in fatality, and that only fate can force its own hand. However, fate bows to neighbourliness. It’s only till to-morrow, till I can regain my senses.’ He laughed. ‘This person was not a lady, no, no: I have no “buried life and Paris in the spring,” but the old anchoret has spiritual foes…’ He bowed himself back to his chair and fell at once to his reading. He had some Perrier water in front of him.

  Oliver said: ‘That’s an idea. Let’s go into the bar. Yes! Now, yes. We’re going to do everything to-night, have all the fun, because to-night’s my wedding-night.’

  ‘And so we go into the bar? What about the three Amer-Picons?’

  ‘No cracks: I’m going to boss you from now on. You’re going to find out what you’ve been missing all your life. You’ve been a nice lady: I’m going to make you into a grand girl.’

  She laughed. ‘Dress doesn’t suit, airs don’t suit; thanks very much. What a terrible fellow you are! Do you think you’ll recognise me when you’ve finished making me over?’

  ‘Nothing could alter the you that I love.’

  ‘I’m glad of that.’

  When they sat down on the plump leather seats and he had turned on the light in the unfrequented bar, he seized her hands and leaned forward, looking starrily, dizzily, with extravagant romance, into her eyes.

  ‘Do you like being with me, Elvira? How does it feel?’

  ‘Look, here’s the waiter.’

  ‘Garçon, deux portos! We’ll have dinner in a restaurant in the Place de l’Odéon, the “Sucking-Pig” is its name, but in French, and then we’ll take coffee on the boulevards, perhaps in the Boul’ Mich’, that’s short for the Boulevard St. Michel, the students’ boulevard, the Latin Quarter, if you like. Now, Elvira, I want you to look at everything without prejudice. I want you to get Paris into your blood. Forget everything you’ve seen up to now, forget everything you’ve read, heard, imagined, and just look. I want to see you soak up Paris. I won’t tell you much: I’m likely to influence you. I want you to get your impression. Afterwards, we’ll go to a nine-o’clock theatre—they have them here: it gives you time to have dinner in a civilised fashion; or the pictures—you’ll see pictures here, despite the censorship, that never get to England at all; or a long drive to the Bois de Boulogne. Haven’t you dreamed ever since you were a girl at school of driving in the Bois de Boulogne? You remember the pictures of the drags, the gay old boys in grey bell-toppers: remember Guy de Maupassant? It’s not like that now, of course, infinitely more decorous. But you’ll see it yourself. Perhaps you’re tired.’

  ‘I’m a little tired, Oliver. Let’s rest here, have dinner and just walk a little.’

  ‘Just whatever you like, darling. This is your night.’

  ‘Listen to that fool,’ exclaimed Elvira angrily.

  The Italian was arguing with the bell-boy. The bell-boy said in broken English:

  ‘We not ’ave the Humanité, sir, we ’ave the Intransigeant and Paris-soir.’

  ‘No,�
� said Marpurgo, ‘I want the Humanité. It has a good name—Humanity it means, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I like its name; I want that paper. Order it for me to-morrow.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The bell-boy lunged off, with his tip. Presently the dignified porter appeared, saluting:

  ‘Excuse, sir, the boy tell you want the Humanité: you will not like that paper, sir. Will I order the Matin?’

  ‘No, I want the Humanité. I like the name. Humanity is a lovely word, and here you believe in liberty, equality, fraternity, don’t you? You even have it up over your prisons, don’t you? The French are admirable people, a great revolutionary people: I come here because I admire their free spirit. I want to get your paper about humanity.’

  The porter looked cautiously, heavily at him. ‘Je vous demande pardon, Monsieur, but it is not about humanity: it is about politique. It is for working-people.’

  ‘Well, I work, you work: get it: get it in the morning.’

  The porter cried in desperation: ‘Monsieur, you don’t understand; it is the journal of the reds.’

  Elvira said impatiently, ‘Oh, can’t the porter see that man is making a fool of him! What fun is there in it? Imitation Mark Twain! Marpurgo seems to like acting to mystify waiters and so on. He was doing it in the train. It’s cheap snobbery.’

  Oliver laughed. ‘That Italian is a card: do you hear his accent? He speaks perfect French, the rascal. I’m going to send the bell-boy upstairs for my Humanité. That will shock ’em.’

  ‘Oliver, please don’t.’

  ‘Oh, Elvira: where’s your sense of humour? He’s real fun, that man. I’m surprised you had the brains to pick him up.’ He twinkled engagingly and went off. The Italian bowed to her again, and they stood laughing. Presently the bell-boy, amused because of the tip, appeared with Oliver’s paper. The two men came over to Elvira.

  ‘I was only pretending ignorance, of course, to teach them a lesson. I did it in my last lush hotel, but they were more cunning; they agreed at once and forgot it every morning.’

  Elvira looked unsmiling into her drink.

  ‘I’m sure you think that’s childish, Madame!’

  ‘Yes, rather.’

  ‘We are: we do our best to remain young to match the eternal youth of women.’ Elvira flashed an insolent look at him, thinking, ‘He knows already that I am older than Oliver: what is the use of trying to conceal anything from this gumshoe?’ Marpurgo was bending over in a debile pose, looking at his small, pointed, polished shoes.

  ‘You have never been in Paris before?’ he said politely to Elvira. ‘And you?’ he asked Oliver, ignoring Elvira. Oliver told him he had been there two years before when he was an undergraduate, during the summer vacation, staying in the apartment of a friend, a student at the Beaux-Arts. Elvira said, ‘Alec Bute, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that dear fellow; a painter,’ explained Oliver to Marpurgo with a puzzled smile, conscious of some antagonism between the other two; ‘but it was only for ten days. We only saw a bit of Paris and then ran out to Chartres, where he was doing some painting in an old street. Then my cash ran out. My uncle put me through the University,’ he added: ‘I have a scholarship the last two years.’

  Marpurgo nodded. ‘I was a student here when twenty. I spent half a year and then the war broke out. I went through the war and came back to Paris at twenty-five, but my academic career was finished. I couldn’t go back and study at that age—or thought I couldn’t. Now I regret it. But my father’s health was failing. I went into the business. Then—my, er, politics are not popular in Italy. I naturalised in England, without changing my name always. But the year I spent here at twenty’—he bent towards them, gathering them both into his lap, as it were, like a fowl with drooping wing running after her family—‘here,’ he repeated slowly, thoughtfully, looking at the red port he had consented to take, as an exceptional thing, ‘in the land of enchantment where the glasses are full of dissolved pearl, jasper, sard, ruby, topaz, curling cornelian, where there are more false diamonds and false eyelashes than anywhere else, where the gowns are more elegant, the complexions more enamelled, laces finer, shoes smaller, heels higher, the gait more billowy, the fans better painted and the breasts set more to advantage than in all the world; where that violent liquor love concealed in the heart’s smoky hard jewel, is finer strained and thicker distilled, more adulterated and oftener aspersed, the blood flows wilder in passion and revolt, the beds are oftener stained with blood and love and the river oftener thickened with blood and tears: the garden of lovers, joy of youth, nest of revolution, city of the thrice-fired blood!’

  Oliver sat back in his chair watching with dark, jealous, appreciative eyes. Elvira smiled faintly. She occasionally cast a glance over Marpurgo from head to foot, sizing him up, his thin body, cold, bright eyes and dark fluty mouth. Marpurgo acknowledged one of these glances and smiled: he said in a lower key, hurriedly, to Elvira:

  ‘I hurry away and hurry back—the cornices, the river, the soft sky—it makes me restless.’ He turned his insistent sapphire disks upon them both, leaning forward on his stick, his shoulders rounded.

  ‘It is impossible to rest here. You must get up and go, walk, talk, write, spend, speculate, invent: I don’t know whether it was so before the revolution, but it is so now. And yet we spend a whole life here uncreative and go away, regretting the glorious years spent in Paris, and die sniffing the dry scent of those weeds we sowed here and carefully cut and pressed. I read in my history book when I was at school that, in the beginning of the ninth century, the “king and his nobles vegetated in Paris.” I suppose the climate was the same. When you are here you have your place in the sun.’

  ‘Then Paris has simply got you,’ said Elvira with her habitual quiet disdain: ‘but it would not get me: you are like that, that is all. You like this kind of life, busily frittered away.’

  Still bending on his stick, with his eyes on the floor, serious, he said:

  ‘I don’t know why, really, I didn’t become French instead of English. First, because I didn’t want to be conscripted, second because I am afraid of frittering away my time here: I am fated to it, knit by numerous threads to it, but I have never done well by it and yet I feel I will be fulfilled here, one day. You have the same feeling about a marvellously beautiful woman when you sit beside her—you have not done well by her, knit her nimbly into all your minutes of life. Every slow word she lets fall, every recalcitrant charm that somehow escapes though she sulks, every small curve is perfectly sensual and stirring: you have not seized all those particles, you have let them drop, float away in the air—others have caught them, strange eyes of louts and gentlemen, wine in glasses, mirrors, plate-glass windows: she is busy making herself up already, preparing, restless, getting on her gloves, settling her furs to go to another rendezvous…even when she is shooting off some sibilant insolence at you, she is thinking of being somewhere else. Only her mirror possesses her in plenitude…’

  His eyes were appealing to Elvira. Oliver, watching Marpurgo, said to himself, ‘He is an ascetic, he despises women and yet he is lonely, he tries to net them with eloquence, and then he lets them fly free again; when he has amused her now he will tire of her and give her to me…’

  Marpurgo drained his glass and lifted his right hand, dark, softly muscular, supplicating them to hear him out:

  ‘When I stand in the Place de la Concorde, I think of when I will be dead and in the Elysian fields. I say, Rise not before me, Paris, when I am dead, to disturb my shadow walking. I hope your rushing wheels and glittering spokes, orchestras, first violins and barkers, ten-o’clock theatres and singers on the Tertre, screams, klaxons in E flat major, your “Arise, damned of the earth,” tramping feet and dramas of the rue de la Goutte d’Or, the sprouting of leaves, lapping of waves, jingling of your praetorian guard, clinking of glasses, scraping of palettes and tapping of typewriters, will not penetrate the earth too deep. I should like to live shabbily
a little while, undisturbed by the dreams both gay and miserable which I dreamed in your coverlet. And the joy and hope here would discontent me with death, I should want to live again. In the myriad discontents here is the gestation of the new world, that dawn is the only peace for the wild, wicked, selfish, unsmiling, lonely human heart…The streets here are patined with the days of man’s life.’

  Marpurgo closed his eyes for a minute, and opened them wide, serious.

  ‘A song of the lovers of Paris to the lovers in Paris; but why Paris? She should have been called Hellene…For her good patriots desert their fatherlands…Another vermouth? No? Can I take you to dinner? The Capucines is on the Grands Boulevards, very good—you can see the Baron de Rothschild there sometimes—if you like a filet mignon—but you’ll see: wonderful cigars. The last is very important, spiritually, for spiritual adventures! Do you smoke, Mr. Fenton?’

  Oliver said with a touch of bad humour:

  ‘I am not yet in the stage of spiritual adventures.’

  ‘Some never reach them, lying becalmed off Cytherea.’ Marpurgo laughed to himself. ‘But that’s not for you. Well, let’s walk a bit—to the Seine, and then a taxi if you like: otherwise, we can keep walking.’ He wrapped his loose French coat round him and sent Elvira forward with a bright gnomish courtesy, his face wrinkled in a smile: he followed after them both with his head planted forward in his shoulders, his shoulders bowed, his feet put forward firmly, splayed; he seemed to limp slightly. He folded the Humanité into his pocket and paddled out, nodding to the bell-boy and porter as if they were in his own mansion, speaking to all and sundry in fluent French. He saw them through the revolving door holding hands covertly. When he got out he said: ‘We will have dinner and then I’ll let you off, while I avoid spiritual adventures in my chess-club. You honour me by spending your first evening in Paris with me, and I don’t want to take advantage of your goodness. I will go and play chess at the “Regence”—you know it? There is a good orchestra there, a café orchestra, but good: the first violinist is a Hungarian, I sometimes get him to play the real thing for me. If you want to go there later for coffee, you will like it. But if you intend to go to the theatre or the pictures,’ he waved his hand at the billposts announcing the beginning of a Beethoven cycle and turned to Oliver deferentially. ‘Did you get in to hear the Leners last year? I was at the Queen’s Hall, heard Maple Wood conducting the Brahms second in D Major, he blurred the delicious second subject in the usual way—there are after all only two conductors who can do that, Stokowski and Mengelberg—’