ii
Transition
The Polytechnic was different from school in every way, it had a different atmosphere, both emotional and actual. It occupied Julia all the autumn and winter, but it was not her life in the way that school had been. Life hung oddly in air, the days were suffused with the feeling of waiting for the approach of something for which all this was but a preparation. She was beginning to learn her trade, which, though not a lofty one, had, or would have, a marketable value, which is more than can be said for education as Julia had known it. Certain values which bore some relationship towards life as it had to be lived, began to make themselves known. For Julia had a receptive mind, its misfortune was that it was too receptive and had, of necessity, absorbed all the useless things. The journeys of Saint Paul are a poor substitute for the discipline of religion; the novels of Marion Crawford, Seton Merriman and Stanley Weyman, may enlarge the horizons of a dweller in Hammersmith, but they narrow down the pattern of life to a romantic assumption that is translated into truth for very few, and those few either exceptionally lucky or—not so exceptionally—undiscerning. Even the sonnets of Shakespeare cease to be of value to one who has merely made use of them to crystallise a passing emotion.
For the love called up by Miss Tracey had passed, slipped naturally into the attic for forgotten things. She herself had accepted the headmistress-ship of a school for daughters of clergy in the Midlands, and, anyway, Julia was now busy at the Polytechnic. A few letters came and went, then the essential unreality of the relationship caused the correspondence to fade away. Another difference between school and the Polytechnic was that at the latter Julia was no longer the most brilliant figure. For the first time she was humbled by the realisation that there were in life ideals, the existence of which had never crossed her mind. “Fashions” were not considered “art” at all by those who drew from the nude and “did oils,” Her fashion-drawing did improve; she learned several tricks by which she could always be trusted to give them a professional instead of an amateurish air, but the important thing that happened to her was the realisation of a certain strange something for which a few chosen people strove and which could never be hers; something so different from her own facile cleverness and shrewdness that she could never have part or lot in its attainment. It was a bitter lesson, and the self-love natural to every human being, particularly to the very vital, tried so hard to throw it off that, in a certain measure, she succeeded in forgetting it … yet it persisted as a standard, dim but never entirely lost.
“Vertige” came down from the bedroom wall, and its place was taken by a coloured reproduction of Greiffenhagen’s “Idyll.” Julia liked to lie in bed and look at that glamorous moon, those burning poppies, and the white, swooning face of the girl, languorous beneath the kisses of the young shepherd.
The class she enjoyed most at the Polytechnic was the French class. The teacher, Monsieur Durand, a haggard, elderly, dark-moustached Frenchman, was much more interesting than poor Mademoiselle had been. He had a habit of slipping his arm in a fatherly fashion about the shoulders of the girl pupils while he was overlooking an exercise, which made each girl feel he took a special interest in her as well as in her work. There was never anything you could actually object to or make a fuss about, you were just certain that he was aware that you were a charming young woman.
One warm autumn evening, Julia and her mother were walking through the Park on the way back from the station, when they met Monsieur Durand walking with the rather faded-looking woman who was his wife. Julia was wearing what she called her new “costume,” a plain dark blue, with the scarlet blouse and a dark-blue felt hat, with a scarlet quill stuck athwart it. She had natural good taste, and everything she wore she put on after a fashion more often found in a Frenchwoman than in an Englishwoman. Julia’s usually pale skin was flushed with walking, her eyes were bright after the afternoon “up West,” her hair, recently knotted on the nape of her neck, gleamed beneath the dark-blue felt. That feeling of being peculiarly alive which was hers after contact with new places and people, had lit her to the illusion of beauty that she could sometimes give. She gave the awkward little bow that was all her inexperience had yet mastered, and Monsieur Durand swept off his romantic-looking black felt hat. But it was quite evident that for the first moment he didn’t know whom he was saluting. Then recognition and something else leapt into his eyes—the tribute of an unexpected admiration. Julia felt the colour flood over her face in that absurd way that she could never learn to control. The whole encounter was over in a moment, but it was one of those flashes that imparted fresh life to Julia.
Mrs. Almond looked at her with the quick half-jealous suspicion of the elderly woman who has never been admired by men, and now is not observed at all, and said something sharp to the effect what need was there to go as red as a turkey-cock at meeting a dirty-looking foreigner like that. … Julia couldn’t explain that it wasn’t meeting with Monsieur Durand, but meeting with life for one fleeting moment, that had brought the blood to her cheeks. She was as little interested in Durand as she could be in any human being. He was married, which ruled him off the slate, just as the same condition caused Mr. Starling not to exist as a male. Neither as a human being did he exist. Julia had never even wondered about Durand’s private life, he was merely the French teacher, and only existed at all as a touchstone.
How could Julia explain all this when she did not know it herself? Let alone to her mother—because what did mothers know anyway? Or fathers? Julia’s sensitive mind shrunk away from the fact that her father and mother had ever had any sexual connection. She knew—if she had let herself think about it—that they must have done so, but that was not anything to do with love. … The golden thing, the answer to the great problem of life, which lay in front of Julia, had nothing, could have nothing, to do with anything that occurred between her parents, which must, of necessity, be entirely different. They don’t know, they can’t ever have known. … In the history of the world it is only we—we who are young now—who are going really to know about life.
The Almonds could not afford to go on indefinitely with the education of a daughter. As it was, Julia had had two “extras”—Fashion-drawing and French, which they considered should equip her for the battle of life. Fashion-drawing had an affinity with dressmaking, and so, if you came to think of it, had French, so Julia, at sixteen and a half, began to look about her for a job.
A job. The life of everyone born in Julia’s class is of necessity intermingled with the idea of a job. It is at once escape and fulfilment.
She did not want to be apprenticed to an ordinary dressmaker; not the sort who made up “ladies’ own materials.” Neither did she want to go in a big shop, though she felt sure that if she did so she would eventually become head of her department, or even a Paris buyer. Julia had often and often stood at gaze before the windows of the one or two tiny smart shops that had been started “up West”; shops in which one hat perched rakishly upon a stand, and a necklace and a bottle of scent counterbalanced one wispy frock draped casually in the opposite corner. Now there really was something to a shop like that. …
As the spring drew on and the end of her time at the Polytechnic was only a couple of weeks away, Julia often went up West, just as often as she could coax the necessary fares out of her father. She would walk round Hanover Square and down Bond Street, stopping at each shop window, absorbing the curious sense of intimacy that it gave one. Is this where I shall be? Or perhaps this one?
There was a girl at the Polytechnic whose elder sister was in just such a shop, and from her Julia had learned much. There were two ways to attain the desired goal. You could go as a “matcher,” which was rather a common thing to do. You ran messages, and went round to the big shops trying to match small bits of material which bored young men cut off for you. You were despised by the other girls, and if by any chance you were a “matcher” to a tailor, you were called a “trotter.” In
wholesale silk houses where the matchers had a room apart, they often indulged in free fights.
“They are a very rough class indeed,” said Miss Clarkson, who was herself very refined, “and of course the pater would never have allowed Lily to be a matcher. She’s an apprentice.”
Julia gathered that apprentices led a dog’s life, nevertheless. Apparently the refined Lily had spent the first few months in floods of tears, but however, the position was a good one and could lead to anything. Of course, you got nothing to begin with, and then only six or eight shillings a week, but it was increased every three months. Then, of course, there were other alternatives—to be a model girl, or a showroom girl—but Julia had an uneasy notion that her father and mother would have deep moral doubts about the profession of a model girl, and one would be extraordinarily lucky and have to have a lot of influence to begin as a showroom girl—you only worked up to that after a long time as apprentice.
Julia followed the adventures of Lily Clarkson as retailed to her sister with breathless interest. Lily was expecting to become a junior showroom girl quite soon. “Tell you what,” said Miss Clarkson one day, while they were putting away their pencils and water-colour paints after class, under the blank enquiring eyes of the gods and heroes of Ancient Greece who, white and stately, stood majestic and aloof, down each side of the big classroom, “you’d better come to tea and meet Lily.”
Julia was thrilled. How wonderful it would be if the great Lily could somehow find her a job, and she could go home in triumph announcing that her father need not worry any more lest the money he had spent on her education should after all prove wasted, a gloomy notion to which he had given utterance fairly often of late.
The tea-party took place, and Julia was rather impressed by Lily, though at the back of her mind a little voice kept telling her that she herself would have put up a much better show after a year in surroundings such as the elder girl had known. The Clarksons’ house was a little bright-red brick villa in West Kensington; Mr. Clarkson was head of a department in a big grocer’s store in Piccadilly. His wife was dead, and the eldest girl, Ada, round of face and shiny of complexion, hopelessly dowdy but amiable, ran the house and tried to keep an anxious eye upon her younger sisters. Lily was smart, Julia had to allow that. She wore a little jam-pot hat with an imitation egret in it, and a long fur stole twisted round her and thrown over one shoulder, and such a tight skirt she could hardly put one foot in front of another. Julia wondered how on earth she managed to get on and off buses without being killed, and yet … Julia’s sure instinct told her that Lily not only was not quite the real thing, but could never become the real thing. She would always say “Moddom,” but she was a good-natured girl for all her airs and graces, and she seemed struck by Julia, which was a virtue in her.
“I tell you what, dear,” said Lily, “if I hear of anything I’ll let you know. I’ll take you along to a friend of mine, see? If I say you’re all right, they’ll look twice at you. Don’t thank me, dear, it’s a pleasure, I’m sure.”
And to do her justice, Lily was as good as her word. The day came when she sent a message through the youngest Miss Clarkson to tell Julia to call for her at her shop during the luncheon hour the following day. It was one of those days when Julia should have been at her French class at the Polytechnic, but that did not matter. Half-way during the class when Monsieur Durand, in making his rounds, had come to her and was leaning over her exercise, she glanced up at him. “Monsieur, do you mind if I go now? I’ve an appointment up in town.” He looked at her with his sad, quizzical eyes; she had never observed them so closely before, and now she noted the heavy pouches beneath them. “But certainly, Mademoiselle,” he said, still with one long thin hand resting on the exercise book, the other held against his heavy, dark moustache. She could see the tiny lift of amusement, not movement enough to be a smile, behind those fingers. “It is a luncheon appointment, I presume? My felicitations to your companion.”
It was not in Julia to deny the implication. An amused look came into her own eyes to meet the quizzical expression in his. “Well, I don’t want to be late for it,” she said, and then in her best French which would always be hopelessly British, but which was at least fairly fluent: “Les messieurs n’aiment pas qu’on les fait attendre.”
“N’aiment pas qu’on les fasse attendre,” corrected Monsieur Durand mechanically, and then became intimate again suddenly. “Keep him waiting, Mademoiselle, it does us good.”
Julia went off in a little glow of pleasure. Durand had at once jumped to the conclusion that there was some man who wanted to give her lunch! She was, as a matter of fact, a little too early at the shop in Bruton Street, and she had to walk up and down for about ten minutes before the smart form of Lily Clarkson, jam-pot hat, fur stole and all, came briskly out from the door at the side of the shop.
“Ah, there you are, dear,” said Lily; “well, come along at once. I know Miss Lestrange doesn’t go out to lunch till half-past one. These people very seldom do.”
“What people?” Julia, with her free, easy stride, had to restrain herself to keep pace with the pattering steps of Lily in her long tube skirt. “Society people,” explained Lily. “I’m taking you to see Miss Lestrange, the Honourable Marian Lestrange. She’s a friend of our old woman’s. She’s starting a shop just off Hanover Square, and I know she wants to get hold of a good class of girl, if you know what I mean, dear. So I spoke up and said: ‘There’s a young friend of mine, Moddom, whom I think might just suit you. No experience, but what you might call savwar faire,’ and she said, ‘Well, Miss Clarkson, it will be very kind of you if you will bring her along to see me any day before half-past one.’ So I thought I’d let you know at once, because that sort of people so soon forget what they’ve said.”
Julia’s heart beat high, and she tried to catch a glimpse of herself in every mirror in the shop windows that they passed. She had on her dark blue whipcord. The skirt was nearly as tight as Lily Clarkson’s, though somehow Julia moved in it with a greater effect of ease. She wore her big dark-blue hat and a fresh white blouse, but she wished now that she had borrowed her mother’s fur. Her clothes that had looked so right to her on starting out now looked all wrong. Not only the mirrors in the shop windows, but the clothes in the shop windows told her how wrong she looked. As they neared George Street her spirits sank lower and lower. She wondered how she could ever have thought that she looked nice that morning. Even the memory of Durand’s sad, admiring monkey eyes failed to cheer her. He probably looked like that at every girl. She had heard that Frenchmen did.
“There it is,” said Miss Clarkson. “Doesn’t it look smart? Of course, they are still in an awful mess, but it’ll look lovely when it’s finished, don’t you think?”
As a matter of fact it was rather difficult to see the shop at all, because it was still covered, as by a gigantic cat’s cradle, with poles, planks and ladders. Further down the road the workmen were lounging and smoking, having finished their midday meal. Large pots of paint still stood about on the planks. Still, it was possible to see that all the woodwork of the shop was being painted a brilliant green, and that above the window was written in flowing letters the word “l’Etrangère.” There were, of course, no goods displayed in the window, but it was impossible to see into the shop, for already the curtains of mouse-grey velvet hung upon a rail at the back of the window.
Lily went, with an extraordinary air of importance, up to the shop door and pushed it open. An electric buzzer sounded, and she entered, followed by Julia. The two girls stood there while nothing happened at all. Sounds of talking and laughter came from behind more curtains of grey velvet at the far end of the shop, but Lily, for all her air of importance—which seemed to be becoming less—made no movement towards it.
Julia stood looking about her. Yes, this was the sort of shop she wanted. The walls were painted a paler grey than the curtains, and the ceiling was silver. There were long mi
rrors in silver frames with garlands of brightly painted fruit, carved in wood, festooned across the top. It was all very modern, far more modern than Art Nouveau, which Julia suddenly realised was out of date. She had heard of this sort of decoration though she had never seen it. Somebody called Poiret did it, so she had heard.
The minutes went on, and Julia whispered, as fresh peals of laughter came from behind the curtains: “Can’t you go and tell them we’re here?”
Lily looked horrified. “Oh, I shouldn’t like to do that,” she murmured; “you can never tell with these people.” She gave a little refined cough, but it passed unnoticed. Julia suddenly lost patience, and going to the door, opened and shut it rather loudly. The buzzer sounded again. Lily looked at her with round eyes of affright beneath the tiny brim of the jam-pot hat. “You have been and gone and done it!” she whispered, and indeed Julia had.
The laughter ceased. A languid voice called out: “Who’s there?” and then remarked perfectly audibly to some unseen person, “Oh, a traveller, I suppose. I’d better see who it is.” The grey velvet curtains parted and a young lady, clad in a black frock, so tight that the skirt looked like one trouser leg, and with a sort of black skull-cap swathed round her head, came towards them. Julia knew in a moment beyond a doubt that her own clothes were all wrong. Her big full hat, her big knot of hair, everything. The girl was perhaps only twenty-two or three, but she was a woman of the world. She looked oddly like a pierrot, with her perfectly pale face, thin, faint, long eyebrows, and faint, thin, long mouth, slightly curved up at the ends. On each hollow cheek a tiny little curl of ashen fair hair seemed to be pasted—afterwards, Julia found each curl was fastened on a long pin—so closely did it follow the line of the cheek-bone, curving up towards the eyes, as the corners of the mouth and the eyes themselves and the eyebrows all curved up. She had a long graceful neck and an incredibly thin and graceful body, and long thin hands. She was not good-looking but nobody could have passed her without noticing her. She was extremely elegant; the first really elegant person Julia had ever met. She was alarming, too, with the cold, still, terrifying quality of ice or of a steel blade.
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