‘He’s not going to make it pay, he’ll go smash in a year,’ said the doubtful ones. ‘You can’t run a place on those lines and put by a fortune,’ but he did make it pay, and he did not go smash, and he made more money in two years than anybody dreamed.
One man had believed in Julius Lévy since his star had first risen on the horizon. Rupert Hartmann, a director of the Central Bank, had had his eye on that Strand site, before anybody had heard of Julius Lévy, and it was while he was in Berlin on another affair that the younger man walked in and captured his market. Hartmann was disappointed, but he could afford to be magnanimous, and he found himself definitely interested in someone who had seen the advantages of that site beside himself and who had had the wisdom to buy at the psychological moment.
‘Who is this chap?’ he asked, and everywhere met the same reply:‘Nobody knows; bit of a mystery. Keeps himself very much to himself.’
The banker was determined to unravel the mystery. He realised that Lévy would one day be a big proposition, and besides this he was keenly interested in his fellow men. He ran his quarry to earth in the Holborn café, where he found him living like a pauper in a couple of rooms at the very top of the building. He had imagined the typical Jew, sleek, round-bellied, immensely pleased with himself and his works, risen from the gutter and splashing his new wealth to the world by wearing a diamond ring on his middle finger, probably surrounded by a plump wife and a host of children.
He was considerably intrigued to discover a young man a little over thirty, very tall, very thin, who did not look as though he had enough to eat, whose black eyes stared strangely from a pale face, who, while he talked with the wisdom of fifty years, tapped with his fingers restlessly on the table before him, and who suddenly confessed, with the candid smile of a child, that lately he had found it very difficult to sleep.
Hartmann glanced about the room, bare and shabby, the sort of room that even a clerk earning three pounds a week would despise, the window shut for all the summer weather, dust on the floor, solitary, no sign of a woman.
‘What’s the idea in this?’ he asked bluntly; he enjoyed breaking in upon people’s private lives. ‘Are you trying to be eccentric or what? The hermit of finance, eh?’
Julius Lévy looked surprised.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said.
‘Well - everything,’ laughed Hartmann; ‘a common shoeblack would be ashamed to live here. I shouldn’t think a penny has been spent on this room for years.’
‘I can’t afford to live anywhere else,’ said Lévy, and it seemed to the banker that this reply came from his lips like a sentence from a parrot; it was mechanical, it was something learnt by heart.
‘Can’t afford it?’ repeated the banker in astonishment. ‘Why, good heavens, man, you must be making about twenty thousand a year since you opened the Strand café.’
Julius Lévy was silent. He went on tapping with his fingers on the table, and his face was expressionless. Hartmann wondered whether he was mad.
‘What are you going to do with your money?’ he asked, watching his eyes - what an extraordinary fellow this was - and the younger man shrugged his shoulders. He refused to be drawn.
‘Well, I suppose you’ve got everything all planned out ahead?’ said Hartmann.
‘Yes.’ Still only monosyllables.
‘You’re a bit of a fanatic, Lévy, that’s what’s the matter with you. I’m not sure whether you are a devil or a saint. Tell me - to satisfy an old man’s curiosity - did you have all this in your mind as a youngster?’
This time Julius Lévy laughed. He became human for a moment, and then he looked out of the window, a shadow on his face, baffling, inscrutable, as though he had reached for a secret and found it gone.
‘No,’ he said. ‘As a boy I wanted to be a Rabbin and chant in the Temple. I wanted to make music.’
On an impulse he opened a drawer in the table and brought out a flute.
‘My father used to play this,’ he said; ‘he never had a sou in his pockets, but I think he was happy. I’ve tried to play it, too, but I can’t. Even if I had lessons it would be no good. I haven’t the gift. So I build cafés instead.’ Then he put the flute back in the drawer.
Rupert Hartmann felt uncomfortable. It seemed to him suddenly that he was an intruder; he had no right to be there. There was something about Lévy that he did not understand, something fatal, sinister, a quality of sadness that was strangely inhuman, that called at once upon your pity and your horror, and yet there he was with a smile on his face, a young fellow, likeable, charming, a brilliant creature who did not know what to do with his money.
The banker held out his hand.
‘This isn’t the time or the place to talk business,’ he said, ‘but I think we can be useful to one another in many ways. I admire your mind and I want to know you. If you’ve nothing better to do I’ll be very pleased if you would have luncheon with me to-morrow, one-thirty at the Langham.’
Julius went to the Langham the following day, and that lunch was the beginning of a friendship between the two men. Hartmann had spoken sincerely when he said he admired Julius’s mind; it was wild and untutored in many respects, but it was definite and it was exciting, and it was a mind that would never be controlled by another.
Hartmann was a widower, and although he had a host of friends, was exceedingly popular and went everywhere, in some respects he was a lonely man. He became attached to Julius Lévy, not only because of his brain and his brilliance, which brought harmony to their business relationship, but because of his personality, and because he fancied he saw in the younger man a remote loneliness that he could understand. In his way Julius grew fond of the elderly banker, too; for the first time in his life he had met with someone whose mind and sense were not inferior to his own, and they could think alike and speak the same language. Besides, Hartmann was a Jew, he was one of his own people. Something racial, something primitive and deep drew them together. Hartmann was cultured, a connoisseur in art, literature and music. The things that Julius had hitherto passed by were now shown to him, and his own natural instinct bade him appreciate the value of such knowledge.
‘I’m going to show you; I’m going to take you about,’ warned Hartmann.‘This hermit nonsense of yours has got to be stopped. You’ve been allowed to go your own way too long. You can’t conquer the world unless you live in it. Didn’t your own sense ever tell you that?’
At first the task was a difficult one. Julius was used to his own company; he liked being alone. He did not care to move out of the lonely, cheap rooms in Holborn where he sat with himself and his dreams; dreams that were never idle fancies but that came true with a swift suddenness that might have frightened another man less sure, less certain of his own destiny.
‘You don’t understand, Hartmann,’ Julius would say. ‘I’ve got to work - that’s my life. I’ve got to scheme and plan and think out problems. Whether it’s words with some fellow and coming to an agreement, I the winner, he the loser; whether it’s a new idea for the restaurant, whether it’s merely looking ahead and covering a sheet of paper with figures, it’s work to me, it’s absorbing - it’s my life. I don’t ask for anything else. I’m not young, I don’t want to be amused. I tell you I’ve had all that.’
The banker shook his head. ‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty-two - thirty-three; what does it matter?’
‘My dear Lévy, it’s absurd to talk like that at your age. Had everything! Why, I’m double your years and every day I come across something fresh, something new. Books, pictures, men and women, the opera. I tell you I couldn’t exist without interests of this sort. Making money doesn’t amount to much in the long run after all. Don’t you want to search and look about you?’
Julius made a gesture with his hands, and across his face came that same shadow of longing that Hartmann had discovered before.
‘Look about,’ he said, ‘search. I’m always searching - how can you know? I tell you I’m twenty, thi
rty times more passionately interested in life than you have ever been. Search . . .’ he broke off abruptly and lit a cigarette, and when he spoke again it was on another subject, the rise of certain shares in a new company, and whether Hartmann knew if they were worth anything. The banker took his cue, nor did he attempt to reopen the conversation; but he was more determined than ever to bring Julius Lévy out of his shell into the glare of public life.
Slowly and surely he had his way. It started with moving Julius from the sordid uncomfortable lodgings over the café in Holborn to a suite of rooms in the Adelphi.
He chose the decorations, he chose the furniture, he chose the respectable capable housekeeper and her husband the quiet, discreet valet. He arranged the whole apartment as one eminently suited to a bachelor of considerable means, and all Julius had to do was to get into a hansom in Holborn and drive there, the latch-key in his pocket.
Julius was a little disturbed by this first experience of luxury. Flash and show were needful to the success of his cafés, but he was unaccustomed to it about his person.These long, low rooms, this soft carpet, the shaded lamps, the quiet, instead of the racket in Holborn, and then the valet who laid out suits of new clothes on his bed and hardly talked above a whisper.
The peasant in Julius, the simplicity and the carelessness of living that was Jean Blançard, made him uncomfortable. He was expected to bath once a day, to change his linen, to clean his finger-nails, all surely very unnecessary and a great waste of time.
The valet put him out a clean shirt each morning, the collar of the last one hardly soiled; his laundry bills would be ruinous if this continued.
Julius was at his worst with servants; he did not know how to talk to them.
This valet was a superior fellow. He had some education and would have scorned the company of a light-hearted, drunken peasant who sold cheese in a market-place, and yet here he was waiting for orders from Julius Lévy, soft-voiced, his hands behind him: ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘Very good, sir.’
Julius could not strike the right manner. He could only be boisterously familiar and a little vulgar or switch to the opposite extreme and become over-bearing, absurdly high-handed and something of a bully.
‘Treat them as you do your employees in the cafés,’ said Hartmann tactfully. ‘Be natural, be yourself.’
‘That’s different,’ frowned Julius.‘I can manage my café crowd. But here - I don’t know, this man gets on my nerves.’
‘He doesn’t like the way you speak to him,’ said Hartmann. ‘You order him about as though he were a galley-slave one moment, and the next you chaff him as if you both slept with the same woman.’
‘Why couldn’t you leave me alone?’ said Julius.
‘Because once you get used to this sort of thing you won’t want to go back - it will get into your blood, and keep you. We’re going to the opera to-night and you’ll meet some charming people, pretty women, intelligent men.’
‘My dear Hartmann, why the opera? And I detest the English aristocracy: they’re snobs, they bore me. If you want me to have an amusing evening let us dine in my own Strand café, drink a great deal more than we need, and then go and find a couple of women at the Empire. That’s the only sort of amusement I understand. Personally, I should be perfectly content to stay here and do some work.’
But Rupert Hartmann would not be moved.
‘There’s a strain of vulgarity in you that has got to be cured,’ he smiled; ‘those hands of yours - they show breeding. But don’t bite your nails. And I would rather die than be seen dining in your café. No, come with me to the opera and to Lady Foulke’s party afterwards. People are excited about you and want to meet you. I promise you you won’t be bored.’
And Julius thought of Grandpère Blançard after a fair in Neuilly, lying on the floor of his cart with a woman while the wheels rattled over the cobbled stones to Puteaux, breathless and laughing under a drunken moon; and it seemed to him that for all his racial sympathy and his quick brain Rupert Hartmann and himself were poles apart from one another.
He went to the opera though and to the party that followed; half against his will he found himself accepting other invitations, meeting new people, and having once taken the plunge it was difficult to draw back.
Hartmann managed his introductions judiciously; he took care that Julius Lévy should meet people with some definite appeal, financiers, politicians, men whose conversation would not be of the heavy English type spoken of so contemptuously by Julius, and women possessing the maximum of charm, intelligence and breeding.
Julius was still a little scornful of what he termed the English aristocracy. He said he did not understand them, he had no use for them, and Hartmann very wisely did not press him on this point, guessing that in time Julius Lévy’s fortune and attainments would bring him in contact with just that very set he affected to despise.
Meanwhile, he was more at ease amongst those he called his own people, men who had obtained some position in the world through their own endeavour. He met some of the big important Jewish families - all of them friends and some of them connections of Hartmann - and with these Julius felt that he was on his own ground; he was never looked upon as a foreigner or an interloper, because they were all members of the same race, and any country could belong to them. Here again, as with Hartmann, he moved amongst men and women who spoke the same language; they held in some queer indefinable fashion his great rapacity towards life, his hunger and his thirst, they did not rest in their lives, but leant out to seize the world with their hands, never satisfied, never appeased, and hiding in the core of their being a seed of loneliness and of frustration, a faint far shadow of melancholy madness. It was from his own people that he learnt to appreciate the sense of culture, beauty in the form of a painting, a statue, or a bar of music; if it was not his own he learnt the compelling necessity of possessing judgment and good taste. This was right, that other was wrong, that picture was dead and here was the art of the future; he was told that these things were of eminent importance and because of his flare of understanding and a little gem of brilliance within him that was genius, Julius learnt quickly and made few mistakes - but somewhere the ghost of Jean Blançard winked at him, his tongue in his cheek, cynical, calculating, and exquisitely French.
So when Julius Lévy was in the company of Max Lowensteen the picture dealer, or Jacob Glück the pianist, and one or the other turned to him, their eyes bright with enthusiasm, their warm Jewish sentiment delighted at some rare and very beautiful thing, Julius would agree with them, his head a little on one side, murmuring: ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’ But he would be thinking:‘Ugly or beautiful, what’s it going to be worth in twenty years’ time?’
It was about this time that Julius began to attend synagogue once more. He wanted if possible to recapture his mood of the old days and to climb the dizzy pinnacle of joy with the voice of the singer. He found it was impossible. He would sit still, his chin in his hands, cold and unmoved. Perhaps it was the difference in the English arrangement of the service; the rule of worship was not as Moïse Metzger had held it, and the pale-face Rabbin in Paris was far from this minister who sang through his nose and mumbled in his beard. Here in London there was no sense of worship, no bewilderment, no pain, no reaching for the clouds, but only an atmosphere of black clothes, of fustiness, of old men peering at their books, and the irritating rustle of paper from some woman in the gallery. One Friday evening in April he went to the synagogue because he happened to be in the quarter. During the sermon he sat back comfortably in his seat, tilted his hat, and prepared to pass the time by watching the faces of the women. During the fifteen minutes that the Rabbi spoke Julius never took his eyes off one face, and one face only. There was nothing particularly beautiful about her, but it was her air of aloofness setting her apart from the rest of the women, that and the serious devout attention she gave to the droning words of the Rabbi, that caught his fancy. It was a grave face, a pretty face, the face of somebody who was probably rather
distant and cold even with her closest friends. She was perhaps extremely intelligent, she would speak several languages, she would do everything rather well and never look out of place. Difficult to know, he judged, intriguing and definitely exciting to wake, but hopeless and quite impossible to tease.
Then he thought: ‘I should like to make her smile’; and he went on watching her, idly, half amused, but concentrating that the pretty, serious face should be turned down in his direction from the gallery. He won. His gaze must have come to her subconsciously, for she became aware of him suddenly and flushed. She turned to her book. ‘She’ll look again in a minute,’ thought Julius, and she did.
This time he smiled deliberately, raising one eyebrow and pulling a face at her, she flushed all over her face and frowned, biting her lip in confusion. He never withdrew his gaze, and she was aware of this; she moved in her seat, she fidgeted with the gloves on her lap. During the rest of the service it was impossible for her to be natural, his impertinent stare had destroyed her serene poise and her composure.
Afterwards, as the people filed from the Oratory, he saw her step into a brougham that was drawn up at the side of the kerb. He made a step forward and when the coachman’s back was turned he laughed at her, flourishing his hat in the air; and because his bad manners deserved some return, and because she was angry, and because she knew she would never see him again, the serious aloof young lady of the synagogue deliberately put out her tongue through the window of the brougham.
Julius, of course, was delighted; he laughed, and he wondered how old she was. Twenty-four or twenty-five perhaps, not less.
Then he dismissed her from his mind.
It was some weeks later that Hartmann told him Walter Dreyfus wanted to meet him, and they were both invited to dinner at his house. ‘Not a large party,’ he said, when Julius yawned, ‘only the family and one or two others. You’ll like Dreyfus, he’s diamonds you know, but he’s lost a lot of money lately. Things are being difficult for him in South Africa, and of course he’s a regular Boer. He says we’ll have a war in a couple of years or so, but you must get him to tell you himself. Charming wife. I don’t know the children.’