The Beauties and Furies

by Christina Stead

  They got up late in the morning, and Elvira made coffee in the light-flooded kitchen which looked over the gardens of the Lycée Henri IV. The fine, large, she-eyed breeze came stirring the trees of the college, and two elder boys came leaping through the kitchen-garden and looked up at her, leaning through the barred window with a spoon in her hand: they stopped and looked at her in her Chinese robe timorously, curiously, like startled wood animals, attracted and ready to fly. Afterwards she and Oliver walked down the boulevards with linked arms. Elvira was a little depressed: she had expected a pneumatique from Paul. Over breakfast she said in a flat voice:

  ‘Oliver, I must see Paul for lunch. He has his cousin Sara with him: he brought her over to look after me. He has been so kind and he is so unhappy.’

  ‘You’ll see him for supper, too, I suppose?’

  ‘He’s still my husband, Oliver: and it may be for the last time.’

  ‘You are right.’

  ‘We are visiting some friends of his this afternoon for afternoon tea: naturally they do not know there is anything wrong. They think a lot of Paul: so I will go.’

  ‘Then I will meet you at home late to-night.’

  ‘That’s it. You go to bed. Don’t mind how late I get in: Paul and I must talk things over. He is perfectly fair: he wants me to choose for myself. He says if one of us is happy it is better than neither of us being happy. Naturally we have a lot to talk over and decide. Also, I think—that until everything is all settled we may as well be circumspect.’

  ‘Why not?’ Oliver began to whistle.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Aren’t we going to spend the rest of our lives after to-day together?’

  ‘You’re so sure. You don’t know the conflict in my mind. I have to consider others besides myself. I must see this distant cousin of his, Sara, and find out why he brought her over: what he said to her. If you like, though, we can meet you for the apéritif before dinner.’

  ‘And then I go off to dinner alone? No: I’ll take the day off and roam round, to pick up what fun I can. Here is a taxi-rank. Where to, now?’

  She stopped on the pavement, pathetically.

  ‘Now you are hurt. I can’t leave you hurt. Oh, what have I done? I make no one happy.’

  He took her arm and hurried her across the road to a taxi.

  ‘There you are, darling. Now tell me what address, and I’ll send you off. Enjoy yourself.’

  He had lunch in a new café near the Luxembourg, drank half a litre of wine and felt powerful. Plenty of women made eyes at him. He walked along the old streets of the Left Bank beyond the Boulevard Saint-Germain towards the Seine. As he passed the Deux Magots he saw Elvira, Adam, Paul and a mature young woman sitting on the terrace. He waved gaily to them, and going by the Abbey, soon came into the rue Jacob. He remembered the direction of Georges Fuseaux and wanted to see Paindebled’s laces.

  He saw through the window of the first floor, across the court, a charming interior, where a diffused light rested low on the waxed surface of an antique inlaid chiffonier, on a copper warming-pan hung on a rich dark tapestry paper, and on several large glazed snuff-jars and Chinese vases, the latter being inlaid with gold, bronze, silver, and the painted dragons and flowers in ivory, green, red and sepia enamels. Oliver stopped, pleasantly dazed, and looked in. The chamber was ceiled in wood, small beams chiselled and painted in red, blue and gold crossing at short intervals to divide the ceiling into squares. Underneath was one of those old shops selling antiquities and objets de vertu which are so frequent in the neighbourhood.

  As Oliver stood sucking in the gloss and sparkle of the objects displayed in the living-room upstairs, a fair young woman appeared at the window between the words ‘Autographs’ and ‘Engravings.’ She placed both hands on the sill, looked up at the linen-blue sky, and down at Oliver. It was a perfectly clear day, and they could discern each other’s features plainly. Oliver thought of the ‘flax-haired maid.’ They looked at each other boldly. Oliver’s supine heart, for months in pretended chains, had risen like a lion since he had left Elvira to her finicking. He laughed to himself, rolled voluptuously on his hips. He had passed two or three remarkable-looking persons, and in the rue Jacob itself, as he lingered before a shop of illuminated MSS., a real lion had crossed him, a youth with a look of Goethe beatified, with the carriage of a toreador, with thick curled hair and eyes like amethysts, who strode past on the air, with the grand showmanship and unintentioned glory of a genius which knows its prodigies in youth. These manifestations out of the air of the divine intentions of nature towards him filled Oliver’s cramped bosom, puffed away the meagre joys of the Archives and carried him lighter than Ixion into the Junoesque air.

  The youthful Juno smiled at him. She put her hands together round her mouth and said, rather low:

  ‘Hullo, young man: are you going to steal something?’

  ‘It’s not safe to steal a masterpiece: that’s the only reason I hang back.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m just a cartoon: but you’re a charming gouache. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a student of history.’

  ‘And I—a designer.’

  Oliver stood there laughing, but a little awkward. The young woman said:

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Oliver.’

  She lowered her voice, which was always soft but penetrating, and called:

  ‘You could come up for just a little while if you like. For tea.’

  ‘Thanks very much. I’d love to. Which door?’

  The staircase was broad, the doors polished, with large panels. A triangular red plush seat filled the corner of each landing. No names or initials marked the dignified anonymity of these portals. The girl opened the door to him. She was young, softly nurtured, thriving. She had a pale rose flush at the moment, and a fine waxy bloom. She was singular in proportion: upon the short and elegant waist of a young girl rose a broad, arching, sculptured bosom, and, without a fault or mole, a long, full, columnar neck. She inclined towards him the whole of her bust, which was encircled, rather than dressed, in a deep net frill. On the tall stalk of her neck, her small fair head, broader at the top than at the base, with hair parted equally and ears revealed, nodded a little. Oliver instantly perceived that all her attentions, and apparently those of her parents or guardians, were devoted to her unique bosom. Her eyes rolled slowly upon Oliver. They were oval, with long dark lashes, and of a splendid transparent blue. She retired from the door and admitted him, who noted that her dress was shorter than he liked, and her feet in low-heeled shoes. There was a combination of all that he disliked with an unusual charm, of repulsive vanity with innocence and fragility. As he looked at her profile, he saw that she resembled closely a China pompadour bust, upon a small stele, and that no Dresden shepherdess ever bore a whiter, deeper, or more noble bosom, or a smaller head. When she had leaned out of the window, she had wrapped her almost naked shoulders in a dark scarf, which she had now discarded. Oliver wondered what she could be, so shameless with such dignity, so conscious without affront. She returned towards Oliver, leaning forward as ever from the waist, smiled at him hesitating at the door, and, saying ‘Take care, the floor is so highly polished!’ placed her finger-tips on his hand. The girl might be seventeen or twenty-two—the same disproportion existed in her bearing as in her body, a wide and perfected experience grew in a youthful mind. Oliver felt that she had not had an ordinary education, and an opposition grew in his mind between his thirsty desire to know her individuality and the fear of a strangely-endowed woman.

  The large salon into which she led him looked out on the courtyard, the opposite walls and windows of which were now obscure and bluish. The room was divided by display cabinets containing MSS., engravings and varied documents. At the far end, set in white panelling, were two large frescoes in the type of Boucher. A splendid bronze-gilt candelabra, with sixty sockets bearing upright candle bulbs of small size, hung low under a painted ceiling representing a rose-covered marb
le balustrade looking upon a rosy-clouded blue sky in which cherubim disported themselves.

  Oliver busied himself for a few minutes examining the Chinese vases, and the young woman went on to point out to him some lacquer vases, a carved pearwood reliquary on a silver and enamel stand, a white jade snuff-jar and other objects. When he glanced carelessly at the mirror in front of him, he observed at the other end of the room, the one by which he had entered, something which made him turn quickly to make sure he was not deceived. The girl smiled. On a stele stood a hamadryad, from whose small smooth waist sprang a noble bosom partially wrapped in bark. She had no arms. Upon her smooth long neck a small oval face was balanced, inclined downwards and towards the left shoulder. The eyes were incrusted in greenstone.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ cried Oliver.

  The girl laughed. The laugh was surprising, clear, cold, falling from her mouth like a broken strand of glass beads on a marble table, falling and rolling on the floor.

  ‘You are laconic: therefore you are English,’ she said to Oliver, sitting on the table.

  ‘I’m afraid to ask too much of good-fortune,’ he countered. ‘I hardly believe in her. I came to see her closer. I have heard of mirages. And the mysteries of Paris. You are one of her mysteries.’

  She mocked. ‘Not at all. Don’t take it so seriously. It’s just a lark on my part. I’m a designer, an artist, you know. I get stiff in the imagination, working up in the atelier all by myself. And then I sort of talk to my creations all day. I get in the habit of addressing strange creatures. Life is a wood and you are all fauns.’

  ‘And hamadryads,’ he pointed. ‘It’s ridiculous, of course, but it resembles you, I think.’

  They sauntered about the room. He looked at her, his beautiful face and white smile close to hers.

  ‘This is really jolly. We all feel so much more friendly than we pretend, and almost no one in the world has the courage to make a bosom friend in an instant. But I have, and you have. It’s wonderful.’

  At the word ‘bosom’ his eyes dropped and rose again above a sudden flush.

  She was pleased.

  ‘Do have an apéritif, or coffee or something. Have you had lunch?’

  ‘I’d like a coffee: I got up early, walked a long way, had some bad bistrot coffee, and spent the morning eating my blood.’

  She went out and shortly returned, while Oliver speculated and smiled patronisingly at himself in the glass. He was looking at the famous lace umbrella-cover when she came in. He had not noticed it before. He was not a great lover of possessions, however beautiful. She was explaining it to him, and he was explaining his interest in the lace-workers of Saint-Pierre and Calais and in the Fuseaux, when a buxom old woman in black, with a peasant cap, came in with coffee and a china service.

  ‘Tell me frankly,’ said Oliver, while drinking, ‘why did you call me up? I mean, why me, in particular? There was a marvellous fellow, a regular Greek god, went down the street ahead of me, crossed me rather. Why not him? It’s so unconventional, anyhow, especially in a French girl. Or is all that ancient history now? My…I know a French girl here whose brother runs the whole family. She has to explain all her absences, they give her a bare margin to catch the earliest train from work, and she’s never out after eight. A working-class family.’

  She paid no attention to this. Presently she said:

  ‘If a strange-looking old lady comes in here, take no notice. It’s my mother. She wanders a little. It’s quite a history—connected with that hamadryad, by the way—I’ll tell you one of these days. If she comes, you tell her that you came to see father. What is his friend’s name? Oh, Georges, Georges Fusil, no, Fuseaux? Say Georges Fuseaux sent you. He did, didn’t he? Some other time I’ll tell you the history of that hamadryad.’

  They were inexplicably happy to be with each other. He said:

  ‘I’m so glad you know we’ll see each other again.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Presently she moved to show him some of her father’s peasant bonnets and fichus in lace.

  She led him through a door of inlaid tulipwood into a chamber both lofty and large, in which a gallery was divided off by a row of thin painted pillars, red and blue with yellow and blue frets and silver notches. Bays in this gallery, under a roof of sloping glass, contained glazed cases. In the chamber itself stood a couch on which lay several rolls of parchment and linen upon a Persian rug, and to one side of the median line of the chamber stood two large antique globes, representing the celestial and terraqueous spheres. Round the equatorial line of each appeared the signs of the zodiac and the rising and setting of the sun and of the constellations. They were finely painted and polished, and about thirty-six inches in diameter. The globes were of the sixteenth century. Between them a carved monolith stand supported a compass opening in two halves, like an eggshell, the compass within being surrounded with garnets and topazes, the outer skin or shell being painted with the signs of the constellations. It still pointed to the north, and although it had been made in the early eighteenth century, earlier copies had been found even in antiquity, and the same appears in ancient drawings, on the forehead of Venus Anadyomene. Round the walls hung very large maps of the world, of different countries, and of different epochs of geographical science, the finest of their kind and epoch. The latest ones printed in delicate colours and minutely circumstantial; the earlier ones with broad names, legendary seas, imaginary lines, were of a splendid mandarin ivory colour. The floor was of polished wood, with a map of the Ptolemaic world inlaid; the ceiling was of glass, divided into squares. The glass roof evidently served as floor to another chamber, for a dim light penetrated the glass on all sides, marking off in the centre the contour of a rug or cloth lying upon it. Standard lights illumined this chamber. At the farther end six deeply folded curtains of plush, two emerald, two peach-coloured, two of cloth of Chile gold, covered the wall: they were so large that their ends were gathered up on the floor as an imperial train is gathered, wound and splayed. Coromandel said:

  ‘My mother’s apartment is beyond there, and she has a private stairway to the library above. I will show you the library one day, when my mother is sleeping. She wakes at night and only falls asleep at four o’clock or so in the morning, awaking with nightfall.’

  Coromandel seemed to have grown in beauty and dignity since they entered this chamber: her amber skin took the colour of the delicately varnished maps, her cheeks their flush, her forms were those of the legendary queens of the galaxies, her eyes the colour of the seas, her uncovered bosom displayed hemispheres comparable with the others, except that she had not had them tattooed to further the resemblance. She extinguished the standard lamps, with a sudden movement, and Oliver found himself in a strange universe of floating worlds, and ghostly countries, and islands visible in the upper air. Coromandel also seemed to have lost touch with the floor. Waves of solace and satisfaction invaded his body, and he stood half dreaming, prepared to touch any of the floating worlds if they should swim through chaos in his direction. Her pointed nails had a greenish opalescent lustre.

  In the centre of the two globes, the egg of the compass floated on the dark floods softly luminous from the roof’s obscure rays, and displayed more clearly a minute crystal Eros at the sign of the north, which had scarcely stood out before. Coromandel was silent. Oliver looked up and observed that the roof, being paved, as observed, with squares of glass, was also engraved with white lines in designs similar to those appearing in the first chamber, but relating to the phenomena of sunrise and sunset in the legendary personages of the ancients; twenty-four panels surrounded the dark cloth in the centre; the large one inset on the eastern side was engraved with the symbols of sunrise, then each of the hours was inscribed until sunset, and thereafter were the eleven dark hours. The thick translucent glass floated upon their darkness.

  ‘I suppose there is some design in the centre of all this also,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl.

  �
�The designs are not very clear,’ said Oliver.

  ‘They are when the sun rises,’ said the girl. ‘The sun falls directly on this glass roof through a skylight of clear glass.’

  ‘It must be magnificently light here then,’ said Oliver.

  ‘It is.’

  Oliver said, ‘Put on the light,’ and she put on the light; and Oliver, looking quickly at her, was struck again by the similarity of her skin to the yellowed tissues surrounding her. He said to her: ‘You fit very well in this room, like a—topaz in a soft gold setting.’

  She laughed and said: ‘I have the skin of a mandarin.’ She leaned her perfumed body towards Oliver, with her habit of proffering herself with each gesture. Oliver suddenly blushed, and went about the room on his toes, looking at the objects exposed and saying: ‘I am amazed. I have never seen anything like this. You know the old houses of Paris are most deceptive: one would never suppose, when looking at the exterior, that these treasures were within.’

  ‘No, no,’ she assured him. ‘Treasurers don’t tell their tale in the market.’

  After a silence, she said: ‘Treasurers and women.’

  A clock struck eleven in the adjoining room, slowly, as if considering between each stroke, and then making the count of the hours with weighted decision.