Elsa wrapped herself against him, whimpering softly to herself, and he put his arm round her and held her tight, content suddenly with the warmth she brought to him. It was as though he were reminded of something long ago in his childhood, something that had loved him and warmed him in this fashion, curled next to him for company. He searched back in his mind to discover what it should be, and as he did so he ran his hands up and down her body in a caress that came naturally to him, that was suggested by some subconscious instinct, a caress that belonged only to this thing who clung to him and breathed against his cheek.
When she stirred it broke the wandering train of thought that would have solved his riddle, and ‘Go to sleep, can’t you?’ he said, but she whispered in his ear: ‘I want to tell you something. ’
‘Well, what is it?’ he said, and she came closer to him, touching him with her fingers, her hair brushing his chin.
‘All this time in Ahémed’s house I’ve never had anyone but you,’ she said. ‘You thought I went with men like the other girls, but it wasn’t true. I only danced for them. You were the first - there will never be anyone but you.’
He grunted; he was too sleepy to answer.
‘Aren’t you glad? Tell me you are glad,’ she said.
He undid her clothes and felt for her, this warmth that he knew now and understood; and ‘Fancy,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, of course I’m glad; go to sleep.’ But he was thinking: ‘As if I care whether she’s been with a hundred men; it’s all the same to me.’
But as they slept locked in each other, two children at rest, it came to his mind in a dream that it was not Elsa the dancing girl in the Kasbah who curled upon him, but his own little Mimitte who had been lost to him so long, his own little drowned cat with her soft fur and her smooth paws, sleeping once more her heart against his heart.
Clifford Street was but one of the tangle of slum streets to be found branching away from the Euston Road. Number thirty-three was every whit as shabby as its neighbours, dirty area steps continually fouled by the droppings of cats and dogs, drab lace curtains in the front windows never opened, a dingy passage and narrow stairway covered with strips of torn oilcloth leading to the floors above. A smell clung to the house that not even the rapid opening and shutting of the front door could relieve, nor the bitter draught of cold November fog: a smell of undusted furniture, of stale food, of families herded together, of unclean lavatories. This smell had its foundation in the basement, where the landlady lived with her crippled son and her three cats, and the feel of these things would float upwards to pervade the staircase and the other rooms, even as far as the little back room on the top floor. Perhaps the smell crept through the cracks - the door being ill-fitting and shaking from moment to moment in the lock; but however it came, it took possession and mingled comfortably with the musty close atmosphere of the little back room itself. The window would be kept tightly closed night and day, because once opened it would swell with the damp and could not be shifted, and then the air blew coldly down upon the creaking bed against the wall. That the chimney smoked without ceasing, covering the scanty furniture with great flakes of soot, was something more easily to be borne, and it was not really difficult to become accustomed to the lingering smoky taste that pervaded with great intensity every particle of food, from tea to the scraggy meat bones. The one fault of the fire was its lack of heating power; it could smoke most gloriously and cook after its fashion, but any warmth it would gather to itself and expend far up the chimney, so that not even its sooty flavour nor the firmly closed window could keep the November fog outside the walls. The cold air would make its way unobtrusively but unmistakably, and lay a clammy hand upon the walls and the strip of threadbare carpet on the floor.
To Elsa, all her life accustomed to the warm and subtropical temperature of a southern climate, this cold was like some gigantic force of unbearable brutality; she wilted and shrivelled like a little plant.
Julius was sorry for her, but he could not understand the measure of her suffering.Amazed at his own generosity, he bought her a woollen coat during the first hard days after they had landed, but when this did not seem proof against the cold, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed her as incurable.
‘Why, in Paris,’ he said, half vexed at her stupidity and disagreeably surprised at his own concern for her. ‘Why, in Paris that was a different matter altogether.You could say it was cold there. I’ve seen folk die of it in the streets during the siege, their lips turning blue and their hands and feet numbed like stone. I lived in a garret, and the snow came in through the cracked panes. That was cold, I tell you. But this isn’t much; you ought to feel lucky. Haven’t you a decent room, and a fireplace, and a proper bed to sleep in?’ She huddled nearer to the smoking fire, raking at the cheap coal with a poker.
‘I’m not saying anything,’ she said, her head low, hiding herself from him. ‘It’s you who keep on nagging me and questioning me - I can’t keep from shivering; it’s a sort of nervousness now, and I see you get irritated because of it, and then you make me worse.’
He stared at her sulkily.Yes, she was shivering now; he could see the back of her shoulders.
‘It serves you right,’ he said harshly. ‘I never asked you to come with me, did I?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you stay behind in Alger?’
She answered nothing, but he saw by the lowering of her head he had hurt her. Something pricked in his heart, like a stab of pain, and he liked it and went on:
‘Don’t I pay five shillings a week for this room? Had I been alone I wouldn’t be spending half that sum. I could fit in anywhere. Our food too. There’s not everyone would eat meat every day as we do. But I have to buy meat for you because you’re so thin. Your shoes, too - I’ve noticed they let in the damp. I shall have to buy you a new pair, of course. God knows what they are going to cost.’
She looked up at him swiftly, biting her lip. ‘I don’t need them,’ she began. ‘I can put paper inside these.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, and then go creeping about like a martyred thing, resentful of me, making out in your silence how badly I treat you. Do you think I treat you badly? What would you do if I beat you, eh? Go on, answer me. It would do you good to be beaten.’
She turned away, flushing, ashamed that he knew her so well.
‘You know you can do anything you like with me. I love you,’ she said.
That was it, of course. If he threw a brick at her head she would only wince and bleed and then come to him for comfort. He wondered idly how many times he had wounded her with words and she had put her arms about him.
The tedious journey on the boat, the hours of sickness she had gone through, shutting herself away from him lest he should hate her for the sight, the horror and turmoil of the ultimate landing, registration papers, the word ‘Alien,’ medical inspection and lies, and argument and explanation with officials, and Julius using all his wits to enable them to land while she clung like a little shadow to his arm, wide-eyed, frightened, half crazy with the cold and the rain.
He could not remember one gesture of tenderness he had given her, neither at the beginning, nor then, nor now, nor at any time.
He accepted, but did not understand it, this feeling of hers for him, all he knew was that it pleased and angered him at the same time and he had no wish to put her from him.
Still, she was a tie and a drag upon him for all that. Here they were in England only to find a London that was very different from the scholastic city painted by the Reverend Martin Fletcher, a London of poverty and hardship and general squalor, the English language a medley of confusing sounds harsh to their ears, and Julius himself not so fluent as he had believed himself to be.
For again he must take every burden upon himself, Elsa had never a word but French and Kasbah patter; and he must even buy a wedding ring for her third finger before the lodging-houses opened their doors to him, and then these English shunned them and looked down their noses.
He realised he would have to depend
upon himself alone in this country and expect no help from man or woman, nor did this deter him or weaken him in any way, believing as he did in himself and his own power. He would rise above these people who sneered and laughed at him; one day he would make use of them, but he would always despise them.
Little brains they had and little minds. Quickly he put his value upon them, catching snatches of their conversation from behind their doors, from the streets, from the public-houses. These men were lumbering fellows with receding chins and vacant grins, who worked because they must and with no hope of rising, who fuddled themselves with beer and pored over horse-racing accounts in newspapers.
The women, idling too, leaning over area rails and spitting malice about their neighbours, droning over some question that could not matter to them, and then inexplicably shrieking their ugly laughter at a child or a dog - this English humour and lack of serious purpose that he could not understand. Yes, he hated them from the beginning, but he would make his money out of them, and they could laugh and jibe at him as they pleased; they could peer at Elsa with greedy eyes and strictly pursed mouths, unhealthy in their conception of immorality.
Julius had not bargained for this distrust shown to aliens, and work was harder to find than he had expected. That first winter was fraught with much anxiety and distress. Elsa continually with either chill or cold hardly stirred from the cheerless room in the lodging-house, while he tramped the streets for work, turned away by many a shopkeeper and salesman because of his sharp nose and his foreign accent.
‘Oh! we never employ aliens; there are too many of our own people out of work’; or else, ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ and a slight hesitation. ‘No, I’m afraid I have nothing for you.’
‘Times are very hard, these days,’ another told him. ‘I expect you’ll find it nearly impossible to make your living here. A foreigner, too. Why didn’t you stop in your own country?’
And Julius smiled politely and shrugged his shoulders. Useless to explain that he belonged nowhere and that he had no country. A cold winter, too, for all his denial, he stamping the pavement with collar turned up and hands deep in pockets. He saved money midday by queueing up outside a soup kitchen and waiting his turn, but there was little satisfaction in soup to his belly, and Elsa would be waiting alone in Clifford Street going hungry rather than face the cold.
In the evenings he would pore over advertisements in a cheap newspaper, straining his eyes by light of a gas-jet, and there would be announcements to clerks, accountants, bank assistants, positions he knew he would be able to hold with the minimum of taxation to his brain, but because he was an alien it would be useless to apply for them, and he must turn the page to the humbler columns, for apprentices, errand boys, ironmongers, shoe-blacks, any form of employment. He bent over the dirty, well-thumbed paper, seated in the corner of a public-house, and the shouting and laughter of the men around the bar was loathsome to him, but he must suffer their presence because there was some warmth in the smoke-laden atmosphere and he could not return to Elsa and her white face before he had put some drink inside him and could bluff her with the lies that he was doing well.
When he became errand boy, cleaner and general slave-of-all-work to the surly baker, Grundy, in Holborn, he did not tell Elsa at first for fear she should think less of him. And when she saw that his hours away from her were long, from very early morning until late in the evening, he explained as carelessly as he could that he had found work, excellent work, connected with flour and bread-making; and when she would come to visit him in the day, proud of him, he told her that this business was far away in the City and she would not be able to find it alone. She supposed that he was making good money, and he answered her that his pay, though moderate at first, would eventually be generous; nor when she enquired excitedly the exact amount he gained a day did he attempt to turn the sum into francs, putting her off with: ‘Don’t bother me, little plague.’
So Julius, sweeping the crumbs from the floor of the shop, putting back the shutters, setting forth with a basket on his arm, leaning with rolled sleeves and dripping face over the bakery fires, shouted at and cursed by Grundy who, tortured by rheumatism, possessed the shortest of tempers, showed never a sign of impatience or anger, but answered: ‘Certainly, Mr Grundy,’ ‘No, Mr Grundy,’ ‘Coming immediately, sir,’ ‘What can I do for you, madam?’ softly, obsequiously, a smile on his face, but thinking: ‘This is not for long - one day, one day ...’
He would be tired, yes, but never mind about that, he did the work of three men and he had a commission on the new clients who bought bread and a percentage on the weekly orders. He possessed the quality of looking ahead, though no one might understand him. It was busy and central, that thoroughfare of Holborn; traffic would increase with the years, property would double its value, and this shop of Grundy’s where he toiled as underpaid assistant adjoined other shops and other premises, buildings that could be bought or demolished, or built upon; and this fellow Grundy was an old man with no son to carry on his business, he’d be glad enough to be rid of it in a year or so. To watch something spread itself and develop under your own eyes, reaching out tentacles here and there, gathering other things into its power, and growing day after day, year after year - a business that became a concern, and a concern that made a profit, and a profit that made a fortune, and a fortune that bought power, there was a dream and a thing of beauty, a dream that held the promise of reality.
To Julius Lévy there was ecstasy in this secret life of his; the knowledge that he could not fail was like a hidden jewel worn against his skin, to be touched and caressed in the darkness with warm sensuous fingers; nor would he share the brilliance of his secret with anyone in the world. These English people were pawns in the game. Old Grundy, who called to him: ‘Lévy - I want you here,’ ‘Lévy - do this, do that . . .’ - he was like some poor old blustering fowl running hither and thither in his little span of existence.
They were nothing and no one, thought Julius, these people he jostled on the crowded pavements when the day’s work was done, these lumbering carts, these plodding omnibuses with their tired horses, these mud-splashed hansoms cloppoting towards the West End with the blazing lamps and the theatre crowds. He stood amongst them, the sound of the traffic in his ears, the sharp cries of a little newsboy running forward with a late edition, this was London and he was part of it, but it could not control him; he would rise above it and use it as he wished.
‘You never talk to me,’ complained Elsa, stroking the back of his shoulder. ‘You are always so silent nowadays when you come back. There you go, thinking, watching - what are you thinking about?’
‘But leave me alone, can’t you?’ he would say, and throwing open the window of their poky room in Clifford Street, he would lean out far into the street, his head lifted as though there were music in the air, and a smile upon his face that was secretive and strange.
He was queer, this Julius of hers, for there was nothing beyond the open window but the ugly grey roofs and chimney pots stretching in endless vista as far as the eye could reach, the hum and throb of traffic, the rumble of wheels, the whistles of trains, the noisy, cockney screams of children playing in the street, the hideous trill of a barrel-organ mingled with the scraping finger scales played on the piano of the house opposite.
The tumult and misery of this dwelling-place would seem to her sometimes like a weight upon her heart, and she would close her eyes and summon in one breath the sweet smells and the distant cries of the Kasbah, the amber and spice and the crushed petals of bougainvillea flowers that would never be hers again, and ‘Where are we going?’ she thought. ‘Why must this happen to us?’
The open window drove smoke down the chimney and the cold air rushed into the room; nor did he mind, bareheaded, sleeves rolled up, lost in his dreams. She shivered, and coughed, her hand to her throat.
‘Shut the window.’ But he did not answer; he waited a moment, and then turned to her, smiling, the same strange smil
e upon his lips, and he said to her:
‘Listen - can you hear it? - listen.’
He held out his arm and she went to him, and together they leant out of the little window to the street below, and all she could hear was this continuation of the hum of traffic, the ugly sound that must haunt her now for ever, and - ‘What do you mean? I can’t hear anything,’ she said.
He took no notice of this, but drew her close against his side, and he said to her: ‘Someone should make music out of this.’ She leant her cheek against his.
‘I don’t like to think about it,’ she told him. ‘It’s too big for me. It makes me seem such a little wretched thing. I’m only a speck amongst all this, with no will; it makes me wonder why I believe in God.’
When she said this, shyly, as though it were dragged from her, he let her go from him, and he laughed and spread out his hands as though he could gather the atoms that floated as particles of dust upon the air.
‘God!’ he said. ‘Believe in God? Why, I tell you that all of this belongs to me and I can give it to you.’
She stared at him, half frightened, half unsure of what he had said; it was as though he had shouted his words until they had found an echo in her heart, and he stood there with his eyes blazing, demoniacal and cruel, his hands opening and shutting as one who grasps a treasure; he towered above her sinister and strange.
She backed away, startled at the change in him, the strength and the pallor of his face.
‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Don’t talk in that way - I don’t like it; you look different, you frighten me. I don’t want you to be like that.’
He stood over her, blocking the light from the window. He would not take his eyes from her face; he was terrible, he was changed, like someone who talks in his sleep.
‘Yes, all of this is mine,’ he repeated. ‘I shall give it to you. Anything you want. It will belong to me.’