The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  Frightened out of his wits, Oliver started forward and put his arms clumsily round her. Immediately, she bent herself in the shape of a bow and fought him off with her hands and knees.

  ‘Go away, get away, don’t touch me, don’t dare touch me!’

  She flung him off and sprang up: he fell back with dangling hands. She went into the bathroom. Presently her sobs rose loud enough for him to hear. He went in, sat down beside her and began speaking to her without touching her.

  ‘My dear, dear…I had no idea you felt like that about it: how clumsy I am, how stupid I am! Oh, why couldn’t I see? I’m a man, but you’re a woman. You’re a woman,’ he said thoughtfully; ‘the most obvious things are the things we ignore.’ He kissed her. ‘You were meant to have children. You shall have it, I’ll find a way.’ He said it with a tender regret. She let him console her and take her out to supper. They were very quiet all the evening, looking at each other with wood-violet eyes, occasionally touching hands. They walked along the street: it was a fine soft spring night, with the buds and stars out. They went home late.

  When he got home the next afternoon he found a note telling him to meet Elvira and Blanche in the usual café. Blanche said to him, frankly:

  ‘Elvira didn’t want to go to the sage-femme to-day: she told me she got upset last night—so perhaps it’s better to wait a day or two. She’s still got time to decide.’ Blanche was excessively friendly and introduced them to one of the journalists, one of the small rentiers, and a tenor. When Oliver and Elvira had gone off to supper, Blanche said to the men in her practised tone of camaraderie:

  ‘She’s in a condition—you know—he doesn’t want any such thing: of course not. A student—with not even a sure situation in view: foolish of them—but with new lovers these things usually happen. I offered to take her to a sage-femme: she can’t make up her mind: it’s natural, with the other she was barren. He just worships her. Of course, she’s quite right to take the step; these little accidents kill a man’s love. You’re such selfish brutes, a real pack of brutes—go along! And they’re not married. I told her, My little one, don’t be foolish: wait till he’s regularised the situation: that is, if you’re really going to stay with him. Remember, my dear, I told her, you are not yet divorced: your husband is kind to you. Think, I told her. I don’t like to see a woman like that get into a mess: they’re so helpless…’

  ‘She’s a pretty woman,’ said the little rentier. ‘Pretty eyes, and those brows that meet—they curdle your blood when they turn on you…’

  ‘A sort of domesticated charm,’ said one of the journalists. ‘But no fire—like a moonstone…’

  ‘It’s a scrub-chinned love-affair,’ said the second journalist.

  Blanche shook her head. ‘She’ll never keep him: she doesn’t really want to keep a man: considering she’s a beauty, that’s quite a quality, you know.’

  ‘She’ll keep him,’ said the little rentier, ‘because she’s so moony, moody, down-sitting, broad-bottomed: her world wags round her basin. She’s always got the look of a pregnant woman. She’s one of those female women, a sluice-gate, you know. They always get men; we need that sort.’ He smiled a lecherous, impotent smile.

  The setting sun, falling through the rich lace curtains, sent its fire through the curling green milk of his Pernod. His eyes were little and red-rimmed at the moment, his red mouth was wet with drunkenness and sluggish desire: three other saucers stood beside him. He had the satisfaction of being the only one in their circle who could drink four Pernods without falling like a log, or being carried home raving drunk in a cab. Now he was frightfully drunk, as he knew; but they only thought he was slightly tipsy. They always said of him: ‘I saw Andrew with his Pernod at the d’Harcourt,’ or ‘It was so early in the morning that there was no one on the terrace but Andrew and his Pernod.’ He sometimes wrote letters to friends in Germany, France or England: never to America, where he came from. He knew the look of a letter containing a cheque, and gave it to Blanche or one of the others to open. They gave him the cheque, read the letter themselves and then tore it up. He had at home scores of letters from America, all unopened. Sometimes, in a fretful sober moment, he shoved a handful of them into the hand of some friend, said, ‘Read them and then tear them up: don’t tell me anything about them.’ The gentle wastrel had a large circle of café friends: he did not care for any others. If he had a friend too close, he would not have been able to backbite him. He was very happy, with his unopened letters, his smooth-shaved chin, his well-cut old suit, his Pernod and his backbiting: he told friends, in moments of tender drunkenness, that he had the art of living. No one but him and the old Greeks, and some few beachcombers, he said, had the art of living so well. His name was Andrew Fulton. He liked Elvira and Elvira liked him. He then walked with her and had lunch with her, cracking a few jokes about Oliver, at which they both laughed. When she joined them this evening he said, ‘Get rid of the kid; have some fun while you’re young.’

  She showed him the letter from Paul, and Andrew said: ‘I don’t see why you three can’t live together.’

  ‘I could do it; I’m really a liberal,’ she said, putting her hand on his arm and smiling faintly into his face.

  ‘You’re a girl for two boys,’ said Fulton lewdly. She laughed. When Oliver walked in, Fulton cried: ‘I am sorry to see this pretty woman suffering the penalty of your lust.’ They all laughed but Oliver, and a peculiar smile of satisfaction grew out of Elvira’s face.

  At supper Oliver asked her if she had written to Paul.

  ‘Not yet; when I tell him he’ll come over.’

  He was nervous again. ‘It’s you who has to decide, you’re the mother.’

  She answered:

  ‘I can’t see Paul if I’m in bed: he would be upset if he saw me in bed.’

  She looked at him defiantly. He fondled her hand:

  ‘And wouldn’t I be upset?’

  She laughed drily: ‘Oh, you! You’re the cause of all: ab ovo. Ha!’

  ‘My wife! I could never leave you now.’

  ‘Ah! Now?’

  ‘Don’t quibble, don’t pick at every word I say: you know very well how I feel about you.’

  She softened. ‘I know; excuse me! I have been so nervous with trying to make up my mind. You ought to decide; it’s your responsibility.’

  He grew graver. She went on: ‘All day I was thinking of the girls who are abandoned and who commit suicide.’

  He said, trying to catch her thoughts:

  ‘Isn’t it strange, when they say the maternal instinct towards life is so strong?’

  She looked straight at him. ‘It’s not that; it’s the money. Where would I be now if I didn’t have Paul or you to look after me?’ She had a slightly contemptuous satisfaction at seeing the thoughts in his face.

  ‘Well, I’ll desert you, then,’ he said, shaking his shoulders, with a joke. ‘I’ll just leave you flat and see how you can swim.’

  ‘Good of you. Do what you like: I don’t give tuppence.’

  They both laughed, and breathed a little irregularly. He urged her to eat.

  ‘Have some Petit Suisse? Some Gruyère? A fruit-tart, surely?’

  He ate gluttonously himself, like a man just come from work. He thought she should write to Paul, but she went to bed without doing so.

  For a week their indecisions went on. Oliver got to the café a few minutes before Elvira one day, and found Blanche d’Anizy installed. Blanche had drunk two ports and was just warming up. She made room for Oliver beside her ‘until Elvira comes,’ and he began to twit her: she had a way with her, she knew men inside out, no question. He teased her about her outrageous enamelled face, asked her if the barber gave her the best in his line and if in payment she gave him of her best. She tapped his hand: he took it and gave her a parody love-kiss. This she resented with a charming dignity. ‘What are you thinking of? Elvira will be here in a moment. I am her friend.’

  Oliver was impressed and called to mind t
he stories he had read, the old, trite stories, of the friendship of whores. It was true, then: they had wonderful hearts: wonderful the sisterhood of women. Sturdy—something beyond mere social status. As with men, for instance: he felt a real kinship with the workmen taking their black coffees and white wines at the zinc. Communism would come, because it was such a natural principle. He began to explain all this to her, and she listened and replied seriously. It was a gag she had heard when she was quite young, and had almost forgotten: a reminder to resuscitate it. She commented with her old adage, ‘A woman can learn something new from every man.’

  She let a silence fall and then sighed. ‘We understand each other’s troubles,’ she murmured; ‘we can’t tell them to men; men regard us as instruments, that’s all.’

  He was up in arms. ‘I certainly don’t. I respect women as I respect men. I’m one of the few men who doesn’t instinctively feel any difference between men and women.’

  Her pose and expression were beautiful and interesting.

  ‘What is it?’ he persisted: ‘a love-affair?’

  ‘Don’t press me,’ she said. ‘Why should I tell you depressing things? You have your life to live. To you love is joy, to me, since I was sixteen, it is all sorrow. I never think I will love again, and then I do. I love men; I cannot help it, they attract me and then I suffer for it. They mean well and then they cool off…If only they did not leave me debts in their train and bills to pay.’

  He suffered a slight deception to know it was about bills, but he pressed her still. She said at length, as if taking a resolution:

  ‘Well, the clothes you see me in are all I have to my name. The hotel-keeper, the dirty dog, is keeping my bags because I could not pay. And why? Because he has another mistress. Oh, he will come back to me. I know his other girl, a shopgirl—younger than me, that’s all. In the meantime I have to pay the hotel-bill for the room he engaged. He comes back to see me occasionally, when he is tired of her schoolgirl stuff, I suppose.’ She smiled beautifully at him. ‘There was a time, when I was a young girl, in the country, when I would have stayed awake all night in horror if I had even read in a tale of the existence of such a woman as I have come to be. And yet, it has all happened so easily: I feel the same, I feel innocent.’

  He looked at her regretful, naïve expression, and was sincerely touched. He said: ‘You are innocent. Innocence! What is it? You have never murdered anyone.’ He looked doubtful for a moment, and added: ‘Even if you had, you would still be innocent. You are one of those born like that: unconscious of evil, pure from the heart.’ He mused, and laughed a silvery, low, boyish laugh. ‘A year ago I would have regularly snarled if anyone had said such a thing. Pah! Pouf! What a slob I was a year ago. I knew absolutely nothing about women and nothing about men, can you beat that? At twenty-three.’ He smiled confidingly at her.

  It ended in him lending her a hundred francs and promising never to tell Elvira, because she did not ‘want to spoil their friendship.’

  Elvira came in. She had been sleeping since lunch-time, when she had drunk a heavy red wine, and had a pink complexion like a newborn baby. Blanche soon left them, asking as she left if Elvira wished to go with her to the sage-femme soon. Elvira said airily: ‘I still have time: there’s no hurry: I’ll see.’

  Blanche smiled, and went off to sit in the corner by herself. Soon a plump sardonic blond fellow in a blond raincoat stalked in, threw down his yellow journalist’s satchel beside her with a grand air, and smiled a simple smile which was intended to be mocking. He sat opposite her, and Blanche immediately forgot all that had gone before, and the crowded café, to plunge into that passionate attention and those deft expressions and loving smiles that Latin women have for their lovers. Elvira said:

  ‘That’s Septennat, Blanche’s permanent. They’ve been with each other off and on since she divorced her husband. She knew him when he was a haughty, disagreeable fledgling in an embassy here. He was transferred to Poland and she lost him. When he came back for holidays they lived together. He went to Berlin and she lost him. They made it up again. He lost his job through some leakage of commercial doings to a journalist. He came back here, and she kept him till he got a job himself as journalist: it wasn’t long, of course, two or three months. They were really on their uppers then, living on the fourth floor in the rue du Roi de Sicile, but she says they were never so happy.’

  ‘Looking back,’ mused Oliver, ‘how the dickens did she manage to fit so many lives into one? She’s only twenty-eight now.’

  ‘In between she had plenty of others, but she told me she really loved them all. She would do nothing for money: that is, unless she loves a man. She says she always has a tissue of growing affections and declining loves…’

  ‘And only from them she takes money?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘So she says.’

  ‘Perhaps she loves money wherever it grows,’ suggested Oliver.

  ‘Oh no, Oliver. An Indian prince offered to marry her, and she refused until she had lived with him to see if she really had an affection for him. She would accept nothing from him, and he came to see her in her little flat in Passy. She asked nothing and she got nothing, and after the second time he did not say he would marry her. She is quite quixotic, too.’

  ‘He gave her nothing?’

  ‘No: he told her he was glad there were women in the world who did not sell themselves but knew the charm of a pure friendship.’

  ‘And so—good-bye. In the meantime, who paid for the flat?’

  ‘Oh, at that time she was starring at the Folies. She had plenty of attention. She is beautiful now, when she makes up, Oliver. I saw her the other night when she was going to the new cabaret in the Champs Elysées, where Maugrebon the entrepreneur, her friend, got her a place. You wouldn’t have known her: she looked like the firebird. I should like to go and see her. She is strange made-up—a dream,’ said Elvira. ‘She had to sell her evening-dresses to live in the drought since her last engagement: I lent her my new evening-dress, the black tulle over gold lamé: it has a dancing skirt. Do you like me in it?’

  ‘It suits you wonderfully,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes, I look nice in it. Well, Blanche looked—a firebird. I suddenly realised I was a dowdy little domesticated bird, like a silver wyandotte, say.’ She laughed. ‘I am appealing,’ she concluded, ‘almost always, but some days she’s downright ugly and the other days she’s so seductive that men follow her everywhere. Think that the Minister of the Interior last year tried to rape her in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I don’t blame them or her. Plenty of actresses are like that.’

  He began to tell her about his day’s work in the Archives.

  ‘Aren’t you nearly finished, Oliver? Perhaps we should return to England now and try to settle down. I’d like you to get a position. You see, I’ve almost decided to keep the infant.’

  He tapped on the table with his pencil, his eyes lowered. She said:

  ‘I’ve never felt so well in my life as now: I know now what was wrong with me. I was always so wretched and futile: now I feel wholesome, like new bread. That was what was wrong with me. I must keep my child, Oliver. It’s Fate. It’s ours. It’s the fruit of our adventure. It was meant to be so.’

  He raised his eyes from his tapping, his eyes quiet.

  ‘Very well, dear. Then I’ll get ready and we’ll go back and I’ll look for a job. Just give me a month more, will you? I can get something impressive ready by then, I think. I must make a good impression if I have to ask the professors to recommend me straight away. I’ll think it out. If you want me to do that, I’ll do it. I’ll put myself in your hands. You know my principle, I’ll try anything once, and no growling, eh?’

  She looked at him dubiously. He nodded at her.

  ‘Of course, if we could put it off, just for a few months, it would give me a better chance to get something: we know we love each other, we know we can have children: we’re both young. That’s all we need to know. I want to see you in our home first
, Elvira.’

  She looked at him steadily, the father and enemy of the child.

  She said: ‘Of course, if you feel like that, and you think it would make a bad impression on your friends, I’ll go home and stay with Paul till it’s all over. He’ll shelter me.’

  Oliver’s eyes were lowered as he traced earnestly on the table.

  ‘I have been a student: I’m relatively fond of the little nippers, but not like you are, Elvira. It doesn’t mean the same to me. I can wait a bit, and I think we would be happier if we did.’

  She suddenly began to cry softly, so that the tears just stood in her eyes.

  ‘You don’t want my child; you don’t want it.’

  He shook his head to himself, and called the waiter for the bill. He helped her on with her coat and they went out, unnoticed by Blanche, deep in her emotions with her lover. Outside on the pavement, in the fine evening, holding to his arm, she looked at his well-set profile, his fatigued, deep eyes, and thought of the evenings at home, when Paul was at his meetings, that she had seen him thus, looking melancholy into the fire. She said low: ‘It’s degrading to be a woman, to have to bother about what people think, not to be able to provide for your child, to be dependent on men. If I’d kept on being secretary in that hospital, I should have been free, I should have had my job: now, he’s taken me out of it, I’ve become a plaything; I’m no good. I can’t even have my own child when I want it: it has to wait on circumstances. Do you think I like to pretend to be your wife when I’m not?’

  Oliver walked along pressing her arm and shaking his head.

  She said, ‘Oh, I feel so bitter when I think that, even though I give up my old life of wifehood, there is no freedom for me, a middle-class woman without a profession. They should give me a street-walker’s card. I regret it, I regret it,’ she said violently. ‘I made a mistake to listen to you. I’m five years older: I can’t start out afresh with a young man. I’ve done that already with Paul. I want something else now. It was only the need of a child driving me on, and now—I can’t have it. Oh, I hate society, I hate the burdens it places on women.’