Julius Read online

  ‘I’m going to England, Elsa; I’m going to make my fortune,’ he would say, lying stretched out on her bed, his hands beneath his head, drumming his feet on the rail, watching her face for the effect of his words. She would sit up and shiver, glancing at him with scared eyes - eyes as large as saucers, and then pull at her kimono to wrap round her shoulders. ‘I shall go with you,’ she said, and struck at him with her nails when he laughed.

  ‘I don’t want anyone,’ he told her;‘a man cannot saddle himself with a woman in a big town. It means another mouth to feed. Besides, if I wanted girls there are plenty in London. Smart, too, and clever.’

  He hid his smile as he saw the tears come into her eyes.

  ‘I suppose I must seem very ignorant to you,’ she whispered, her head low. ‘I’d learn soon, though. I’d work like a slave if you took me with you. I’m not a child; I’m fourteen.’

  ‘Pooh! That’s nothing,’ scoffed Julius. ‘I can remember back in Paris girls of your age played with dolls. It’s the same in all civilised places. You mustn’t go by Africa; it’s only a country of savages.’

  The shoulders of Elsa began to shake, and her head bent lower and lower. Julius had to cover his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from laughing. He had discovered a new thing, of hurting people he liked. It gave him an extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to know that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting. In a way it was like the desire to make love. The two longings were very close together. To say something bitter and cruel, to watch the smile fade from Elsa’s lips and the shadows come into her eyes, to taunt her until she put her hands over her face, it made his heart beat and his blood race the same as when he held her and loved her. To change swiftly too was good. To follow the stinging blow with a caress, to kiss the tears he had summoned, until Elsa did not know where she was, and would peer into his eyes to learn the truth. Sometimes she would lose her patience, fighting with him like a little animal, using her nails and her teeth, but he won in the end by saying how different she was to Nanette, how skinny and immature and ignorant; then she would lay her cheek against his shoulder and ask to be forgiven. He would strain his muscles to keep a straight face. Not that he cared how she felt, whether she was humble or proud, but he liked to see her crawl. It was a definite pleasure; and the fact that he was fond of her added to this pleasure. It did not affect him with a sense of power when other people gave way to him. He despised them, seeing them as fools.

  In his opinion Martin Fletcher, the English pastor, was rapidly approaching senility.

  ‘Why don’t you make your home with me, Julius?’ he would say. ‘Are things always going to continue like this between us? Sometimes I feel you are keeping something back from me, we haven’t the real intimacy I would wish,’ sweeping his thin grey hair with his nervous hands, his eager chin thrust forward, the whole of him, pointed nose and ears, suggesting some monstrous hungry bird. Until Julius was aware of a profound dislike for this man who had taught him perfect English, who offered him comfort and security, and the longing grew keen within him to say or do something incredibly violent or coarse, so that Martin Fletcher should be shocked and disgusted and wounded. He would like to bring Nanette to the house of the pastor and lie with her on the floor before his very eyes, and then to say, ‘What do you mean by intimacy? This? It’s a question of take it or leave it.’

  No, he was finished with Martin Fletcher; he had learnt the English language and that was all he had needed.

  He ceased abruptly his visits to Mustapha, and the little notes that reached him at the house of Oudà the cobbler - his false address - were unopened and used as paper spills. ‘Why, Julius, is this a deliberate action on your part, this breaking up of our friendship? What has come between us? Is it a woman? If only you will believe in me and trust me, I shall be able to cure you.’ Word upon word in neat spidery handwriting that Julius could not even bring himself to decipher. Besides, he was too busy now counting his store of money put by day by day since he had first come to live with Moïse Metzger as a child of eleven. He was not going to let himself starve and go in rags in London, not he.

  So Julius let the months pass and still remained under the Rabbin’s roof. ‘I am past nineteen and shall play for the last time; at least I will have my summer,’ he said to himself. And the Rabbin asked him no questions, but allowed him to go his own way, knowing that the Temple was lost to Julius now and that his very presence in the house would endure but a little longer. And it was a good summer, with the preparations ready for slipping away in the first days of autumn; no need to worry with money and plans put by and close to hand, long weeks of laughter and loving under a burning sky, no prayers in the Temple, no English lessons up in Mustapha, but the life of a Blançard who would squeeze in utmost pleasure and joy and sensation out of this place Alger, forgetting everything but his body; money, power, property, profit gone to the winds till he should have need of them again. Every moment was to be grasped because it would not happen again. ‘This I have had, and this, and this,’ to taste life and smell it and grasp it, to have it even if he could not hold it, knowing that he was aged and wise beyond his years, for ‘When I am twenty I shall be old and then I shan’t want these things,’ said Julius. And every song he sang was an adieu, and every movement a gesture of farewell. He sought exhaustion in all its forms, deliberately he made a fetish of sensation and the enjoyment of unbounding health became a sensuous experience. ‘If I do everything when I am nineteen I shan’t want to do anything later,’ he thought. If he had never known what it was to be a child, at least he would know how a boy should live; and while he plunged headlong into every folly of mischief and adventure and vice, it was as though part of him stood aside, watching the figure of himself with his hands to his lips, waving good-bye to his own boyhood.

  The autumn came suddenly with a storm and a wind overnight, the heavy rains falling from a blown sky bringing up all the moss-scents from the ground, the great trees in Mustapha bent backwards with the change, the clustered foliage shivering and drooping to the rich earth that sucked at the roots of the trees like a streaming sponge. The oranges and lemons had lost their beauty, and the eucalyptus stood stripped of its bark, naked and pale.

  The white dust was scattered in the streets, rivulets forming in the dry gutters and running from the hills. An angry turbulent sea broke on the far shore where yesterday the beaches had been golden and the water blue. People lifted their faces to the rain and were thankful after the parched months with nothing but a burning sun in a burning sky, but Julius knew that his play-time was over and Alger was dead to him.

  One moment he had been in a café with Toto, the last of his friends to retain some instinct of boyishness, the pair of them worn out after a long night in the closed houses of the Kasbah, Julius with his head pillowed in his hands, the ghost of a smile on his lips, and the next moment autumn had come and the day had broken, and Toto was only a curly-haired little coiffeur snapping his tongs over a flame, an apron round his waist, and Julius was down by the docks paying money for a third-class passage in the steamship Timgad, sniffing the wind, his nose turned to the north. Good-bye to Alger, where he had come as a child over eight years ago; good-bye without a regret and without a tear. Nanette, who had taught him how to make love, was like a coat he had outgrown, was a game left to rot in a play-box.

  ‘I’m going to England, Nounounne,’ but she was not impressed. She laughed at him over her wash-tub; she flashed a smile and waved her hand. And it came to him with a pang of fear and a thwarted inexplicable sense of frustration that never again would he have what she had given him, that he had known at fifteen what many crave in vain during a lifetime. However much he sought and whatever women it should be his chance to know, they could not equal her, his first, a lazy, good-for-nothing coloured washerwoman. No one would escape comparison; they would be judged by her standard and fall like pitiful lifeless toys of no value, so much so tha
t as he climbed from her window for the last time it seemed to his merciless judgment that one part of his future was doomed to be sterile and empty, that nothing further in this sense existed for him, and he found himself bareheaded in the street watching the chink of light behind the shutters, and he was thinking: ‘She has spoilt all that for me; I have had it too young.’

  The parting with Elsa was trifling after Nanette.The memory of the older woman was still with him. The child plied him with questions which he answered at random, smoking a cigarette scarcely listening to her words, and it was only when he had left Ahèmed’s house that he realised with sudden surprise Elsa had neither wept nor clung to him. Perhaps she had not understood that he was leaving Alger for good; she would weep tears enough when she knew. He dismissed her from his thoughts, easy to him at all times about all people, and he ate his last supper under the roof of Moïse Metzger, his teacher and his guardian, wondering at the peace and deep wisdom that lay behind the eyes of the old Rabbin, wondering at his calm happiness and sense of security.

  He went up to his room to pack his few things into a bundle, after bidding Moïse Metzger good night without a word of his departure, feeling no sorrow and no shadow of distress.

  He pushed Père’s flute amongst the clothes in his bundle and, ‘What do I care?’ he thought. ‘Père was a miserable specimen who couldn’t tell ten sous from twenty, who died without a rag to his back’; and he laughed at the memory of Paul Lévy as he had laughed as a child pointing a derisive finger to his nose in imitation of Jean Blançard, but he climbed from the window hastily, without looking back, suddenly filled with the longing to be rid of the old phantoms of childhood and boyhood that might cling to him if he stayed; and he ran away from the house, crouching in the shadow of a wall - like a thief, afraid of the darkness.

  The Timgad was due to sail soon after midnight. Loose scurrying clouds blew across the dark sky, and an ill moon showed her face from time to time behind the black edges of a gaping hand. The wind came strong from the north-east, the waters of the port were ruffled and angry, while outside a tufted, high-crested sea swept towards the shore. The Timgad, one of the new steam-ships, iron-built, wet and uncomfortable, groaned and creaked at the side of the quay.

  The little crowd of passengers shivered by the gangway, reluctant to leave the firm ground for this grey prison that awaited them, but Julius found his way on board at once and down to his cramped third-class quarters, where he must bend his head to the low bulkhead and steady himself against the cheap mahogany-coloured wainscoting - already the floor sloping to the roll of the ship, and the close atmosphere breathing of coal-dust from the furnaces and grease and fried fat from the cooking quarters.

  Even so, this was luxury compared with the square patch of deck in the open air reserved for the steerage passengers that Julius could remember eight years before. Now he was a person of status, with his ticket in his breast pocket, no longer a tramp or a poor half-starved refugee. ‘I am Julius Lévy, travelling to London on business,’ he said to himself, and he stood with his arms folded against the rail of the ship watching the lights of Alger rising above each other on the hills, no feeling of regret in his heart for this city he was leaving and the people he would not see again, as calm and unmoved as when he had left Paris, and his mother dead in the house of the Rue des Petits Champs.

  An old fellow stood by his side with tears in his eyes as they drew slowly away from the coast of Africa, and a woman, a half-caste, probably, with dark colouring, put her shawl up to her mouth and cried.

  ‘They mind because Alger is their home,’ thought Julius; and he wondered at them as though they were strange curiosities of nature interesting to the observation; but he knew he could never feel what they were feeling because he had no country and no home and these things were not part of him.

  He thought of Moïse Metzger now asleep in his bed, his last prayer on his lips, and Martin Fletcher pacing the floor of his library or turning nervously the leaves of a book, Oudà drugged with hashish, Nanette rocking in her chair, her heavy lids closing over her eyes. Little Elsa in the arms of some Arab shopkeeper; Toto, Marcel and the other boys drinking in some café: he would remember them, perhaps, but they would not matter to him.

  He wondered if he would always be like this, making use of men and women for his own purpose, but sufficient unto himself and definitely alone.

  He was turning to go below to his own quarters when a steward touched him on the arm.

  ‘Monsieur Lévy, third class?’

  ‘Yes - that is my name.’

  ‘There is somebody enquiring for you in the steerage, monsieur. A young fellow.’

  ‘Impossible, there must be some mistake. I don’t know anybody on the ship.’

  ‘As you wish.’ The steward shrugged his shoulders. After all, a third-class passenger was little better than steerage.

  Julius hesitated. There might be another Lévy on the Timgad, and the message would be for him. All the same, it was strange. He gave in to his curiosity and found his way across the deck to the railed-off steerage. Already the ship was rolling abominably, and a sea had left some of itself behind. A terrified old woman was praying out loud, and three little children were crying, huddled against their mother. It was something of pleasure to Julius to see them suffer, and to know that he too had suffered once but was now superior to them. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and blew on his hands.

  ‘Cold on deck,’ he said loudly to a passing sailor. ‘I guess I’m better off in the warm saloon below.’ He cupped his hands and lit a cigarette, his back to the wind. A steerage passenger gazed at him with mingled hatred and envy. Julius laughed and threw away his match. Poor devils, condemned to a passage in this weather; but he did not care. Somebody put his hands over the barrier and clutched at him. A boy, with a cap pulled down over his eyes. Was this the lad who had been asking for him? Only one of the street urchins from the port?

  ‘Here - what do you want? Leave me alone, can’t you?’

  But the hands would not let him go, and the boy peered up into his face.

  ‘Julius - don’t be angry with me.’

  He looked closer into the boy’s eyes, great eyes like saucers in a thin face, but the hair cropped short, the lips free of paint.

  It was Elsa. For a moment Julius was too astonished to speak, and then he said: ‘You damned little fool; what on earth are you doing here?’

  She shrank as though he had hit her.

  ‘I had to follow you; I couldn’t let you go without me.’

  He whistled irritably, glancing to right and left.

  ‘You know what’ll happen if they find you out? You’ll be put into prison or sent back.’

  ‘Not if you take me with you; you can say I am your brother.’

  ‘You must be mad, Elsa. Why should I burden myself with you?’ He had never heard such nonsense.

  ‘Oh! Julius, dear Julius, please don’t be so cruel to me. I can’t help loving you. I’ve always loved you. I don’t mind how you treat me; you can scold me and beat me and kick me, but please let me stay with you.’

  She clasped her hands pitifully; she looked a child in her boy’s clothes. Julius frowned; he longed to be brutal to her.

  ‘I don’t want you, you whining little idiot.You ought to have known that. You’ll be sorry for this. A steerage passage is more like hell than anything on earth. It’s your own fault, and now you’ll have to lump it.’

  The ship lurched violently. Elsa turned very pale and he saw she would be sick.

  ‘Well, good-bye, I’m going below,’ he said carelessly, and watched the misery in her pinched face.

  ‘No - you can’t leave me,’ she cried, her hands pressed against her small stomach. ‘Oh! Julius, I feel so ill, and I’m cold . . . What am I going to do? I’m afraid.’

  ‘Your fault, you shouldn’t have come. What did you think I would do, anyway?’ he asked.

  She shivered, crouched against the barrier, and glanced away fr
om him ashamed. He waited while she was sick, and then, as she fumbled for a handkerchief, he said:

  ‘Well, what did you think I should do? I can’t wait here all night.’

  ‘I thought we would be together,’ she whimpered.

  He pretended to lose his temper.

  ‘D’you think I have the money to buy you a third-class ticket?’ he shouted. ‘It’s as much as I can afford to keep myself. What colossal impudence. Not likely. I’m going straight to tell the captain the whole story. He’ll have you put in the hold in irons.’

  He walked swiftly back across the deck, shaking with laughter, leaving her crumpled up in the steerage. What a strange thing that she should care for him as much as this. He would not have believed it possible. Should he take her or leave her? It was a question of whether she should prove expensive. It was a nuisance to have to buy her a ticket. Perhaps if she shared his bunk they would be charged less. Her sex must not be discovered, though. Funny Elsa, she looked attractive, unhappy and ill in her boy’s clothes. After all, he could not go for ever without a woman, and if she was with him there would be nothing to pay. She must make her own clothes, and she needn’t eat much. If she became dear he could send her away. She would not starve; she had been a prostitute since she was ten.

  So Julius bought another ticket for Elsa, and spun a story about a young runaway brother. Then he went back to the steerage to fetch her. She was so weak from sea-sickness now that he had to carry her in his arms, and he dumped her down like a sack of potatoes in his bunk, shoving her up to the side to make room for himself. The atmosphere in the cabin was appalling, nor was it improved by the presence of the eight other passengers who shared it, all in various stages of sickness and undress.

  ‘My young brother is very ill,’ said Julius, pinching Elsa in the arm not to give herself away; but as nobody listened to him, he decided they were safe for that night, anyway, and he closed his eyes and prepared himself for sleep.