The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  The next day Elvira, who was out of sorts with the excitement and change, lay down after lunch, and Oliver, instead of going back to the Archives, went to the address in the rue du Faubourg Montmartre where Marpurgo worked. He met Antoine and Georges Fuseaux, found Antoine disarming and Georges sulky, but he got into a bitter discussion with Antoine about whether the Russians abroad took commissions, and won the respect of Georges by saying that every young man nowadays should go into business to learn what the world is like.

  ‘Most of our economists, even our best theoretical Marxians,’ said Oliver, ‘even those who write most intelligently about politics and human nature, write irritating polemic platitudes when it comes to business, because they have never been in it. Business-men are not mannequins of the class-war, and individual businesses are not patterns of the decline of capitalism.’

  Georges retired into the washroom and did not come out till the voluble and charming Oliver had gone out again. Then he came forth and said darkly to Antoine:

  ‘That kid Marpurgo brought in has good business-instincts: he’d make money if he went into commerce. I wish we had one or two like him instead of some of the fancy ladida huggermugger medicine-men we’ve got eating holes in the pay-roll.’

  ‘He’s an intellectual: he thinks they’re angels in Russia; he’s an arm-chair revolutionary: he doesn’t know what’s in the back of the heads of fellows,’ Antoine shot off, with a wave of the hand. ‘Don’t bother me with sucklings: they’re likely to get diarrhoea in their diapers any time they’re in a jam.’ He looked with irritation at Georges, and then burst into a merry laugh. ‘Go on, Georgie: you’ve got your angels and I’ve got mine, and while I’m running this place only my angels will get a chance. Hard luck on you and yours. You run the accounts and see I don’t overstep the mark: that’s all you’ve got to do. You’re no judge of men, Georgie. Leave that to me.’

  Georges half smiled.

  ‘According to you anyone with a clean collar, pearl studs and a cissy accent is a genius!’

  ‘You’re an ass, Georges.’ Antoine with good-humoured petulance piloted his young brother to the door. ‘Tell Mlle Rose to come here: I want to write a letter.’

  ‘If it’s to that Lanafil chap I wish you’d let me see it before it goes out,’ was Georges’s parting provocation.

  ‘You never mind me: mind your end of the business.’

  Oliver rang Georges and asked him to dinner. Georges said:

  ‘You come out with me; you come to dinner with me, that’s the best. Listen, do you know the Hôtel Pyramides in the rue des Pyramides? It’s a wonderful restaurant. Do you want to meet me there at seven o’clock to-night? I’ve got nothing else to do. We can go for a little spin and have a coffee and liqueur somewhere afterwards.’

  ‘Good, at the Restaurant Pyramides.’

  Oliver walked straight from the telephone booth to the rue des Pyramides and looked at the hotel. The restaurant card was outside the great arched stone doorway. Oliver’s heart sank when he saw the prices, but his hopes rose. However, Georges paid for them both, took Oliver in his car along a route which circled about the Place des Vosges and the Archives, since Oliver had to direct him, and they ended the evening in a long session at the café called ‘La Duchesse.’ Georges paid for the four brandies that Oliver had, in order to have his company, and both went home well pleased. Georges concealed this outing from Antoine and Marpurgo. Oliver had confided his plans to him, told him, when half-drunk, how he went round the curiosity-shops of Paris looking at laces, and Georges told him about the nutty fellow who collected laces, Paindebled, and his highbrow blonde who went to the Sorbonne and who ought to marry a professor.

  He said: ‘She’s a knockout on looks and she has a dowry. You’re not thinking of marrying a French girl, are you?’

  ‘That’s not likely.’

  ‘Some other little complication?’ asked Georges knowingly.

  ‘Haven’t we all?’

  Oliver went home drunk and laughing, and retailed the whole thing to Elvira, a very Silenus of laughter.

  He said privately to Marpurgo much later: ‘The captain’s lady and Judy O’Grady are Ninon de l’Enclos under the skin: my dear chap, I see my dear moult, and under the glassy skin is a new creature preparing to put on another instar. You see the tender creative blood pulsing, the soft flesh: sweet creatures that create so many miracles out of mere brown dust.’

  ‘A woman is famous for her moults,’ said Marpurgo.

  ‘My lady of metamorphosis.’

  ‘The Spanish fly,’ murmured Marpurgo. ‘Cantharis mated to Kantharos, cup of Dionysus; no sound is more maddening than the buzz of a beetle in a brass cup.’

  Oliver flushed, not ill-pleased. ‘Cantankerous old chip! I won’t confide in you any more. At any rate, we’re going to Fontainebleau again for a week at least.’

  ‘I’m going south to Lyon for a time,’ said Marpurgo. ‘You’ll love Fontainebleau. Very wise of you to go; be happy while you can. If you’re going into business you’ll have few such jaunts.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m not married: I’m Mr. Walker, the man that wears highways threadbare, the firm of Ready, Set, Go in person, the sinister character without fire or hire; when you hear my steps in the night, does not each one lift his head and say, Whither goeth the thief? (From Nietzsche, my master, that.) I am Footman Moth, but you are the Spanish Fly and you have a weary hour to beat out yet, waiting on doormats and dancing attendance on Judy O’Grady before you find you’re not so fly.’

  Oliver tried to embarrass him with innocent frankness.

  ‘Marpurgo, why are you out to get me? Why don’t you like me?’

  ‘I’m as fond of you as I should be of my own son.’

  ‘Knowing you for a Freudian, I get the delicate innuendo.’

  They shook hands and parted, arranging to meet each other when both returned to Paris.

  CHAPTER IV

  It was late May: cool weather persisted but the first trees were out. They had their breakfast every morning in the Café d’Harcourt at an hour when the first apéritif-drinkers were already there. When Oliver had taken his black French hat and gone off to the Archives, Elvira took out a thin letter and slit the envelope. Her head drooped more as she read it. A woman sitting near, drinking a porto, saw tears in her eyes and her mouth loose with discouragement. She read and re-read the letter and presently sat with it folded in her hand, looking out through the heavy-meshed curtain, her lips moving slightly.

  ‘…your brother told me yesterday that business is slow: there is business in gold shares which means that other shares should go down. He asked for your address and said he might rejoin you. I told him you were travelling. Archie Penn came to me for a consultation yesterday. He has gallstones, as I thought. He asked after you. I still have not the courage to tell anyone that you have left me. I haven’t the energy to answer their questions. The usual Wednesday night crowd was here yesterday, with Giles Gaunt playing the fool as usual. I had a good laugh, which I needed. Since you went I have been able to realise that time has passed since we married: before, it all seemed to me just one day. My cousin Sara is coming to London, tired of her Birmingham, to see if she can open a Snack Bar in the Fleet Street or Mansion House area. I am afraid the rents are too high…’

  A husbandly letter. She saw Paul’s great athletic body, fattened, hunched in the arm-chair opposite hers at home, his hands, veined like a river-delta, lifting and falling sketchily, sweeping as he made a point, the large nails polished like alabaster. She heard his embarrassed baritone humming tunes from weary old operas, saw him beat time to a line of music on the dark upholstered arm where his ash-tray hung. Sara had sent that ash-tray for his birthday years ago. Elvira wished she had thrown the rubbed old thing out before she left home. She saw his dark ivory lid close over his agate eye when he was tired at the end of the day, while he smoothed back his smooth black greased hair, plucked out his handkerchief and wiped his face: he fumb
led and perspired out of nervousness when he thought she was cross with him. Her heart closed round the dark image as a glove on a hand. She was so used to him. In the first years of their marriage she could never get used to him, and her heart used to throb passionately every time she saw him coming towards her or standing in a doorway, every time she saw his tall head bending towards her. To look into his eyes had given her a pleasant swimming nausea. She pushed the glass of coffee away and thought how bad it was for the high price they charged: the milk had skins on it which revolted her. She felt weak. The Paris air did not suit her. In the second page Paul had written:

  ‘Naturally these three months have been difficult for me. I do not know whether we were happy or unhappy before. I am definitely unhappy now—and lost. The system of marriage is wrong when it parts out of weariness and boredom two who loved each other as much as we did.’

  It was a sober letter. He was good, patient: too good, too patient—that was how their life had become so stiflingly dull: and she herself was naturally lethargic. She should have married a live-wire. A large tear rolled down her face. She pitied herself. In the last paragraph he went on repeating himself:

  ‘I always loved you dearly, and I used to think that if anything happened to you I could not live, but I have lived without you these three months, and I shall go on living. Everyone who comes into my consulting-room has troubles worse than mine. If you want a divorce you can have it, when the law allows. In the meantime I am your husband, and you can always come to me if you are in trouble or need anything. You sound so uncertain, but that is rather like you. You stay away three months, and still give no reason, nor describe how you are living. What persuaded you to take such a step? It isn’t in your character. I sometimes even imagine that there must be someone else with a stronger will than yours who enticed you. Or was it the result of years of pent-up irresolutions? Perhaps circumstances will decide for you and me, again? Keep in touch with me. I enclose the money you ask for.’

  Circumstances had decided already. She half-smiled as she imagined Paul’s thunderstruck expression if she wrote: ‘I am living with another man and am going to have a child by him.’ She could not make up her mind whether to tell Oliver and watch his reactions, or to go where she could make sure that the child would not come yet to make hay of their amorous painlessness. When she first knew of the child she said to herself: ‘Before this I have been a larva, an ephebe: my life has been one long yawn of boredom: now I shall never be bored again.’ A week after, the idea was not so new. The divorce would take a long time. She would be saddled with a child and a roving young man. Her hair would turn grey early, she knew: her mother had gone grey at thirty-two. Another tear rolled down her face. She would be sick for nine months and nursing for nine months—until eighteen months the child would be crying in the night. She saw, rapidly, Oliver’s rosy cheeks, drab with fatigue and irritation. Could Oliver love her through all that? Of course not. This second marriage would be even worse than the first, because she had to cope with a brilliant young man’s impatience and disappointment. She said to herself babyishly:

  ‘I want a baby and a comfortable home: I don’t want to belong to the intelligentsia.’

  The tears rolled quickly down her face. She shielded her face with her hand while she wiped her eyes. When that was done she clinked her glass and called the waiter.

  ‘Waiter, take this away and bring me a vermouth. Your coffee is moche this morning.’

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle.’

  The insolent fellow. She would usually lip her apéritif like a gourmet, before lunch. This morning she could not be bothered finishing that either. She kept the glass before her, taking small drops to keep her occupied, while she turned Paul’s letter over in her head. A dull, comforting, melancholy rumination settled on her. ‘I’m a woman with two husbands and don’t get much joy out of either. How many women this very minute would give their very souls for even one man?’ She looked round. Opposite her, the observant port-drinker went on piling up saucers and watching her. Elvira had often seen her. She had a regular oval face, large hazel eyes, black hair bound on each side of the head, like a ballet-dancer, nails painted gold. She was made up brilliantly in a very finished style, and seemed to have used three colours of powder, yellow, purple, ochre. Elvira swept her over with two casual glances and, in doing so, met the eyes of the woman, friendly eyes introducing themselves. ‘An actress, of course,’ she went on thinking, ‘two husbands: I suppose it’s easy to get a man if you actually think about that sort of thing all the time. As a young girl I was farouche—I always thought I’d marry a man about ten years older than myself, and I did.’ A pleasant thought plumped her soft high oval cheeks. ‘At seventeen I thought I should never marry—no one had come after me, I thought. I was so shy. Now I think that friend of father’s, the architect,’ she laughed to herself, ‘Teasdale Fortescue, who wrote poetry in the local paper about fishing trips—he was so prompt, mild, tender and avuncular—but married, of course. That was why he told me that time that he always slept alone on the back verandah. Funny. I knew nothing.’ She became aware that her lip was moving slightly, and her enquiring eye swept the café again, and again met the eye of the young actress, who smiled and said in a perfectly-pitched whisper:

  ‘You have dropped your gloves, Madame!’

  Elvira thanked her, and as she stooped to pick them up, blushed. The actress nodded and murmured politely ‘Il n’y a pas de quoi’ a little louder. Still studying Elvira’s face, she said: ‘May I bring my apéritif to the next table, Madame?’

  ‘Why not, Madame?’ said Elvira.

  The actress sat on the leather bench beside her. Elvira noticed that in profile she had a long nose like a blade and high round cheekbones, long-lying eyes alive with lashes, a slightly defective chin. She suggested something Elvira was too sluggish to place, a fox, a silver pheasant, perhaps. The actress began to speak to her in a fluent English with a pretty French accent. Her voice was full of unexpected broken notes of music, her words dry, intelligent, flattering, but she began with ominous fluency. Elvira drank vermouth, and before she knew it began to talk about herself under the influence of these charmed, coquettish, manhunting eyes.

  ‘I am an artiste,’ said the actress. ‘When I was younger I sang and danced at the Folies Bergère; now I am too thin to dance naked, and I sing and dance in little cabarets in evening-dress. My name is Blanche d’Anizy, and it is not even a stage-name! I come from near Château d’Anizy. When I have earned enough I will buy some land there and go and cultivate it with my brother. He has land there. My brother is in the Ministère de la Guerre.’

  Elvira said: ‘I went the other night to the Folies Bergère: we saw a beautiful young girl there, naked, in a green aquarium light, like the dream a woman has when she dreams she is beautiful. There was also a stageful of beautiful naked young girls, dark, with nipples like raspberries, and blonde and pale—it satisfied you, like a good French dinner.’

  ‘They look beautiful like that, in the green and flesh lights, but young girls, no, they are not!’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ cried Elvira, unreasonably contentious. ‘Why does everyone assume that a dancer is immoral?’

  Blanche tapped her foot with irritation. ‘Est-ce possible? Non, mais vraiment, you are naïve, Madame, really innocente. Do you think it is possible? They are all catins, all. They could not live otherwise: they must be.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Elvira made a little severe mouth.

  Blanche laughed richly. ‘You are amusing! One always hears that the English are naïfs, and it is true. You are charming,’ she finished with a fresh note of irritation. ‘But listen, I have been through the mill and I know, and you know nothing, you were a well brought-up young girl and then you got married, hein?’

  Elvira nodded. Blanche called the garçon and repeated her order, saying aside:

  ‘And you too, Madame?’

  ‘No, not now.’

  ‘Ah, you are waitin
g for someone, of course. Before I was sixteen, I knew the whole of life. I was making my living off men. Why not? Les hommes, quels mufles! she said rapidly; ‘ce sont tous des voyous.’ Her English accent deteriorated into a stage-caricature. ‘Zey arr oll keds, I av no taime forr zem…’

  ‘Well, the sort of man who hangs round a stage-door is not the best kind of man…’ Elvira lighted a cigarette.

  Blanche d’Anizy flashed back in an exasperated tone: ‘I was married, Madame, when I was sixteen. I ran away from home because I had no freedom, and went into the Folies Bergère. At fourteen already I did not know how to sleep at night. The Latin races have hot blood. Not like your cool northern girls.’

  ‘Indeed,’ began Elvira.

  ‘I got tired of zem and I married to un étranger, an Englishman. J’ai eu tout de suite un petit garçon, mort-né, eh, pourquoi en parlerais-je? Enfin, a dead little boy, I say, e gave me and then e flew away, e abandonne me wizout ze sou. Non, mais il m’a encore donné quelque chose, e gave me also syphilis. I went into ospital. I was cured. My family would never see me again. Only my brother who was in the Ministère de la Guerre took me in, and he and his mistress looked after me. Now, Madame, I take them, they pay my rent, but,’ again the stage-accent, ‘I het zem.’

  Blanche drank her port and said interestedly in quite a different tone:

  ‘I have seen you, Madame, with your husband. I have seen you this morning crying over a letter. I hope no bad news?’

  Elvira smiled slightly, and looking down at Blanche’s gold nails, answered:

  ‘That letter I was crying over was from my husband. I left him. I left him for another man. He wants me to go back to him. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I ave seen you with another young man, very beautiful, which I thought was your husband.’