Julius (27 page)

For an age, every minute seeming an eternity, he held Rachel’s hands while she pulled and struggled, paying no attention to her cries.

The doctors had not yet arrived, he looked round for the nurse, she was standing tight-lipped and aghast in the background.

‘Get some cloths or something,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to do this thing ourselves.’

He bent down to Rachel. ‘All right,’ he smiled, ‘don’t be afraid. I’m going to go on helping you.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘fight for the last time - and let go of my hands ...’

And so it was that twenty minutes later, exactly five and a half minutes before the two doctors and Mrs Dreyfus opened the door of the room, Julius Lévy brought his own daughter into the world, with Rachel stretched across the bed, exhausted, but alive. It was, to Martha Dreyfus, the strangest, and perhaps most terrible sight she had ever seen; this first swift vision of Rachel, torn and broken, and Julius standing above, a tall dark figure in the half light, the lamp shining upon his face, his black hair tumbled over his eyes - and he was holding in his hands something that kicked and cried, and he was laughing.

 

Rachel lived, and so did the baby. They probably both owed their lives to the efforts of Julius, but his methods, though successful, were undoubtedly brutal, and it was many weeks before his wife regained any measure of strength. The girl, a great healthy child, weighing over ten pounds at birth, was nursed with a patent food and thrived well.

Rachel was disappointed that she wasn’t a boy. So, apparently, were the grandparents.

‘What a pity,’ everyone said to Julius, ‘that it isn’t a son. You ought to have had a boy.’

It mattered very little to Julius what sex his child should be. She made enough noise for two, she had nearly killed her mother, and she had given him the most exhausting devilish hour he had ever spent in his life. He would look down at her in her cradle as she snorted and dribbled in her sleep; when she wasn’t sleeping she was yelling for food, and there was something sensual and satisfying in her hunger and contentment, in the full pouting mouth, the flat nose, and Julius laughed at her, pinching her nose till she screamed.

‘Who brought you into the world?’ he said.

‘I hope she’ll be pretty when she gets a little older,’ sighed Rachel. ‘I’m afraid she’s rather a lump at the moment. Baby girls ought to be pretty. Oh! dear, why wasn’t she a boy?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ yawned Julius; ‘she’s all right. All babies are funny little beasts and look like nothing on earth.’

Poor Rachel, rather a shame she should be disappointed after that appalling tussle. She would have to make the most of this baby. From what the doctors had told him privately he gathered that there was very little chance of her ever having another. This had mucked up her inside, or else it was his own unskilled hands that had done it. However, there it was. No more children. Julius was very glad, he didn’t much fancy going through the business again. Besides, who wanted children anyway?

It was, he considered, a good thing that this had happened. Rachel was religious over these matters, she didn’t believe in prevention. She would, in her obstinacy, have gone on producing babies year after year rather than do as he told her. It was the one point on which she would never give way. Yes, it was a lucky solution to what would have become a very difficult problem. Meanwhile, this only child helped to make up the pattern of his background, she was a necessary ornament to his private domestic life. There was something pleasing about the possession of a wife and child, they formed another link in a chain of power.

A son would have grown up - proved difficult. A son was hard to control, and lived all the time in the hopes of inheriting money and position. There need be none of this trouble with a daughter. Daughters could be managed, all they had to do in life was to look attractive.

He could not understand the minds of those men - another English characteristic, he supposed - who laboured for the inheritance of their sons. Property, wealth handed down from one generation to another with some strange instinct of pride. Fellows who, misty-eyed, showed you a portrait of their great-great-grandfather; fellows who lived like servants in one wing of an old mansion so that the place could be kept up in some sort of repair for their boy when they should die.

Possession - yes, possess the whole earth if you wanted, but keep it for yourself. What should it matter to you how your things were scattered to the winds - after you were dead? There was only one life that mattered in this world and that was your own. Even Walter Dreyfus, his father-in-law, seemed to look upon this baby as a continuation of a long line of Dreyfuses and Lévys, something solid and unbreakable in the history of two families. He did not see her as Julius did, an animal born of another animal, to eat and drink and make love in its turn, and die.

‘Pity she isn’t a boy,’ he said like the rest and Julius shrugged his shoulders and did not answer, this preoccupation over a small child was not interesting to him.

Gabriel would, of course, as she grew older have everything she wanted. His daughter would not be restricted in any way. He would see that Rachel made it her business to bring up the child more successfully than anybody else’s child. She should be better dressed, better cared for, more completely educated. She should shine more, know more, charm more than other girls of her own age, so that when she came into a room people would be aware of her at once, they would turn their heads and whisper, they would say: ‘Yes - that’s Julius Lévy’s daughter.’

Thus it happened that from the earliest moments of her life the small Gabriel was concentrated upon that she might develop into one of her father’s most successful productions. London was combed for a nurse more specially trained than other nurses, so that the child should be reared with the greatest care, receiving the best of everything and the maximum of attention. Later, this nurse would be changed or set aside for governesses of superior intellect. Gabriel should speak French perfectly, German perfectly, Italian perfectly. She would have masters to teach her to play and to sing, masters to teach her to draw and to paint, she must learn how to carry herself, how to walk, how to speak, how to amuse, she would have to grow up into something finished and flawless, something so perfect that Julius Lévy would be able to say with truth: ‘I made her - I brought her into the world.’

He saw her, in his mind, as a business proposition, she was another of his cafés, raw as yet and undeveloped, but when the time came she would be as he wanted her. He would be the director, he would point her the way she must go, but at the moment she was Rachel’s job, the nurses’ job, women were necessary in the early stages.

Yes, he liked his background, he liked his house in Hans Crescent, the white paint, the geraniums in the bright window-boxes. He liked to be pleasantly aware of Moon, his butler, waiting in the hall to receive his coat and hat, the flourish with which he opened the front door; and then the smart blue pram in its corner beneath the wide staircase; a glance at letters waiting for him on a silver salver, turning them over in his hand, then questioning Moon, without looking at him - ‘Is Mrs Lévy in the drawing-room?’

‘I think she has just gone upstairs to change. I sounded the dressing-gong five minutes ago, sir.’

‘Right. You can tell them to keep back dinner, not to serve it until a quarter past. I want a bath before changing.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The swiftness of orders carried out within the second, finding his man waiting in his dressing-room, his things laid out, and the rush of hot water in the bathroom, the steam rising, the smell of bath salts.Walking into their bedroom and seeing Rachel sitting before her dressing-table, a shawl or jacket round her shoulders, and the maid brushing her hair while she polished her nails.

‘That you, dear?’ she asked.‘You’re rather late; were you kept?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘they called me down to Holborn after six, the manager’s having trouble with the new lighting we’ve just put in. I’ll have to have it changed. I’ve told Moon to keep back dinner. That’s all right, isn’t it? We’re alone to-night.’

‘Yes. Have your bath, you must be tired. I’ve had a busy day too. Shopping all the morning and then mother and granny to lunch. This afternoon such a large party at the Solomans’ - crowds of people one knew. They’re dining here Thursday, and the Goldings as well.’

‘Have you arranged anything for Saturday?’

‘Yes - Hector Strauss wants us at Richmond. It’s a big affair. I don’t see how we can get out of it. Lehmann is going to sing. Mr Hartmann said something about driving down with us if we had room in the brougham.’

‘I don’t believe I shall get away in time. I shall be lunching with Worthing; he’s coming up purposely from Manchester. However, we’ll see.’

Lying back in the bath, the hot water up to his neck, stretching his legs and watching the soapy froth collect on the surface, then covering himself with a great heavy towel, rubbing his body dry; and the luxurious touch of cool linen upon his warm flesh, well dressed, well shod, the sound of the gong clanging through the house. Hot soup tasting of pheasant, and Moon at his elbow with the sherry decanter, the two tastes mingling and merging into one. Rachel leaning forward in her chair, her low-cut dress showing the curve of her breasts, her long throat slim and white with its single row of pearls - she had filled out a little since the birth of the baby; she was sure of herself, she was mature, she was a woman. A log split on the fire suddenly, throwing a leaping red flame that danced and quivered behind the heavy closed curtains. A shower of autumn rain spattering on the windows, and loud and clear in the silence of the dining-room, broken only by the calm, monotonous soup noise, the gold clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour. Julius fingered the thin stem of his sherry glass, he watched the light from the silver candlestick play upon the signet ring on his left hand, and half consciously he closed his eyes the better to smell the atmosphere of this room, to breathe it deeply, to be intensely and sensuously aware of it. Hartmann was right, once you were used to this you did not want to go back, it got into your blood and kept you - this voice of luxury folding and wrapping you with soft caressing fingers.

It was smooth and warm like the texture of velvet, it was cool and soothing like a linen sheet, it shone white and still like the pearls Rachel wore, and slowly, cunningly, with infinite subtlety it wove a web around your hands and feet, it cast a chain about your neck.

 

With the outbreak of the Boer War went the remnants of Walter Dreyfus’s fortune. He lost every penny he possessed. He had been born in South Africa, his interests and his wealth had been centred there, and now at last the smash had come, finally and irrevocably. With ruin staring at him face to face, he went at once to his son-in-law. Surely, if one man in the world could help him, it would be his daughter’s husband, Julius Lévy. Already the effect of the blow had been to age him ten, fifteen years. He looked bent, frail, his eyes wandered restlessly about the room and he stumbled in his speech, he could not find the right words. He kept making little ineffectual gestures with his hands. He hesitated, he searched for his phrases, the innate courtesy that was so great a part of his nature made him plead poorly in his own cause. As he watched Julius’s face, pale and expressionless, it seemed to him that he had never known Rachel’s husband, that it was a stranger who sat listening so impassively to his words, one hand tap-tapping on the desk before him.

It was a stranger who rose from his chair when the story was concluded, a stranger who announced briefly and firmly that he helped no one.

‘I stand alone,’ he said, ‘I carry no burdens. If people make mistakes it is their own concern. I am sorry for you.’

He stood up, he crossed over to the window and it was as though everything had been said that he could say, that the subject henceforward would be closed to him. He waited in patience until Walter Dreyfus should recover himself. He lit a cigar and tapped his fingers on the window-pane while the older man gripped the arms of his chair and gazed at the irregular pattern on the screen.

Then Walter Dreyfus drew himself up, he stood uncertainly a moment, like a sleep-walker, dazed and stunned, and he held out his hand.

‘Forgive me,’ he said; ‘it was very wrong of me to have asked you,’ and then he made some conventional little remark about the lateness of the hour, and how he was keeping Julius up. No, he did not want Julius to tell Moon to call him a cab, he would start walking, and pick one up later.

‘I don’t think I’ll disturb Rachel,’ he said, ‘but would you kiss her good night for me? Apologise for my silence at dinner, tell her I was tired.’

He went down the steps of the house, his cape flung over his shoulders, his hat in his hand, and was swallowed up in the darkness; and Julius shivered a little because the night was cold. He rubbed his hands in the pleasant warmth of the hall, and he heard the solemn comforting chime of the grandfather clock striking eleven as he went upstairs to his wife and the blazing drawing-room fire.

‘Father was looking seedy,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m so worried about him. Is it really true he’s lost all this money? I can’t get a word of sense out of mother. Did he talk about it to you?’

‘He said a little.’

‘Of course it’s absurd of him to take things to heart. Heaps of his friends are losing because of this war. He’s not the only one. Besides, he knows he has only to come to us ...’

‘Shall I put another log on the fire or shall we go up to bed?’

‘Bed, love. I’m sleepy. Oh! dear, poor father, I wish I’d gone down and seen him off and kissed him good night.’

‘Kiss me instead, Rache. D’you know, you’re looking very handsome to-night.’

 

When Andrew Dreyfus came round in the morning Rachel had her arms full of flowers for the drawing-room, she stood at the head of the stairs looking down at him. ‘Why, Andy!’ she said, ‘how lovely to see you - wait a minute while I put these in water.’