“Frightful,” said the Darling, “but I suppose it will have its compensations. I don’t really remember much about the Boer War; do you? Except that people mafficked or did something, and nurse wouldn’t let us out because she said it wasn’t safe.”
“That’s about all I remember,” Marian said. “You ought to wear that hat a little further forward, darling.”
“Should I?” The vision looked at her young smooth face, and gave the hat a little tweak.
It seemed odd, thought Julia, that the assassination of anybody might perhaps plunge the whole continent into war. The thing seemed to her practical mind out of all proportion. She read another “bit” in one of the illustrated weeklies: “Bigger issues are involved in this heart-breaking catastrophe of two noble lives and of the fragrant romance which encompassed them.” Yes, but why were bigger issues involved? It was all very sad, of course, especially for the poor little children of the romantic couple, but why all this talk of war?
Even at Two Beresford, when Mr. Starling dropped in for a drink, the conversation was serious. Dad and Mr. Starling took different points of view, but both were gloomy.
“The City’s in a ghastly mess,” Mr. Starling would say. “No movement anywhere. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’ll be the end of all trade if we go to war.”
“We can’t go to war,” retorted Dad, “the nation won’t stand for it. Why, I think there’d be a revolution rather than that. You can’t make war without money, and where’s the money going to come from? You say yourself that trade will be at a standstill. I pin my faith on the Liberal Government.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Herbert Starling, gloomily, “and I’ll tell you why. We had a Manchester man down at our shop yesterday—the traveller from Marlow & Smith’s, where the old man buys his shirts—and he told us that one of the biggest cotton mills in Bolton has stopped the delivery orders of their German customers. He says they mightn’t have done that, in spite of feeling uneasy, if the Germans hadn’t wired trebling their orders, and that made them sit up and think. The manager was going to comply, but the chairman called a meeting and decided he wouldn’t send anything at all, even the original orders. They always had stuff on the water in transit to Germany, but they stopped the stuff that had only got as far as Grimsby. This traveller knew the manager. He said it was pathetic to see him. He went about muttering to himself, couldn’t believe that a German cheque might be valueless. But there it is, as I told you, one of the biggest firms in Bolton, and they’ve stopped delivery.”
Dad was a bit shaken, you could see that; newspapers and politics and anecdotes were one thing, but cotton goods were trade, and really meant something.
“You’ll see,” went on Herbert Starling gloomily, “we shan’t be able to keep out of it.”
A few days later even Marian was grave and perturbed. It was odd, thought Julia, to come from Two Beresford, where Mr. Almond insisted that the English nation had too much sense to go to war, and that Asquith and Lloyd George, to say nothing of Morley and John Burns, wouldn’t hear of such a thing, into the feminine, scented little shop where people seemed to talk quite differently, and did not, apparently, get their information from the newspapers.
There was very little business transacted nowadays in the shop, and the only customer who bought anything amounting to a trousseau was a very high-souled lady, who declared war was impossible, because the dear Germans were the most Christian of all the nations. She bought three or four summer frocks to take with her to Germany on her holiday.
“Yes, and you know why,” laughed Marian to Gipsy, when the customer had left, “she’s having an affair with a German officer she met when her husband was attaché at Berlin. Any nation where you’ve had your first successful adultery must be Christian.”
Julia, not for the first time since she had come to l’Etrangère’s, was shocked. In her class one didn’t talk lightly of adultery. One even had great difficulty in committing it, owing to the exigencies of shallow purses and small houses. This hard compulsion of the respectable poor resulted in a certain standard of morality which Julia had always accepted.
“Winston’s all for war,” said one of the Darlings a few days later in rather a troubled voice to Marian, and Marian nodded.
“I know, but Father has great hopes of Grey. They say he’s doing wonders; but Billy came home from Ulster yesterday and I don’t think he’d have done that unless he thought there was more chance of getting into a fight over here. He was full of hints at Pamela’s party last night.”
The door buzzer sounded, and another Darling entered in a state of high excitement.
“Hello, Marian, darling. I want something I can walk straight into for to-night. I haven’t a thing to wear. Hello, Susie, darling. I say, what do you think? They say Asquith went and got the King out of bed in the small hours of this morning, and they sat and talked and talked. Jack says that the thing’s a certainty now. Mustn’t it have been fun; the King in his dressing-gown, just like Queen Victoria when they fetched her down out of her bed to tell her she was a Queen.”
Julia listened to all this talk of “Billys” and “Jacks,” and of fathers who were high up in the councils of the nation, and then went home to find life really going on very much as usual, and Mrs. Almond chiefly exercised over the misdeeds of the “half-daily woman.”
When Julia reached home on the evening of the third of August, Mr. Almond was moaning over Sir Edward Grey’s speech in the House of Commons; but Marian, who went to hear it, had come back to the shop before closing time with her eyes bright, and a colour in her usually pale cheeks. It had been wonderful, she said.
The next day was the fourth of August, and the whole world seemed a little different to Julia as she went to work. People stood about and talked in the streets, and yet there seemed a queer hush over everything. A customer who came in said that Mr. Asquith had told somebody, who had told her, how every day going to the House he was cheered by people in the streets who ran along beside him. It was true they were mostly holidaymakers and unemployed, but it just showed the spirit of the nation.
That morning the groups of people in the streets were larger, it seemed the whole of London was out of doors, marching, or walking about or talking. It was war. … Oh, if you’d only seen the crowds outside the Palace last night—and the King coming on to the balcony—and all. And the cheering. …
It was most undoubtedly war. The cleaner at l’Etrangère, a Frenchman who had married an English wife, had already left for France, and Julia was horrified to find that one of the girls was expected to clean the brasswork outside the shop. When she saw Gipsy quite calmly go out with her sleeves rolled up and start to do it herself, she thought differently about it. It wasn’t, after all, like cleaning the steps at Two Beresford had been, at that awful time when they had had no daily woman. Apparently, people like Marian and Gipsy didn’t mind what they did, and so Julia smiled and rolled up her sleeves, and firmly took the polishing rag away from Gipsy.
“I’ll do that, Mrs. Danvers,” she said brightly. “Your hands matter more than mine.” And Gipsy, thanking her, mentally chalked up a good mark against Julia’s name.
As a matter of fact, Julia quite enjoyed herself, for at the tiny but smart jeweller’s shop opposite, the two elegant young salesmen were employed at exactly the same job, for their cleaners had been men who were on the reserve. The world had apparently gone mad, but it seemed to be an amusing form of madness.
There was no work done in the shop that day; everywhere there was a curious mingling of emotions. Excitement, a strange excitement that could not be denied, held them all together. Business men were in the depths of gloom, youths were exalted, clever young men in newspaper offices sat and wrote like mad the stuff that the great machines were to transmute into that voice of the Press, which is supposed to be the voice of the people. Soldiers and sailors felt that their chance had come at
last, men of imagination looked forward with a sickening knowledge of disaster to the time when wife and children would have to be left behind, and everything they had lived for and built up thrown upon a hazard. Wives and mothers, and young women in love, alternated between a knowledge that nothing could happen to their own particular man—God couldn’t be so cruel—and the dire knowledge that it was just that one valued life that would be exacted. All over Europe men prayed to God to ensure the victory for the right.
At first it seemed, as Mr. Starling had gloomily predicted, that trade was ruined, especially the luxury trades. People had yet to learn, so long was it since a great war, that nothing stimulates the spending of money as much as the fact of wholesale death. Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die, was not written by someone who knew nothing of the human heart.
Just as business was at its worst, Marian decided to marry her Ulster enthusiast, Billy Embury, who was always in and out of the shop looking, Julia thought, very fascinating in his khaki, although nobody could have called him handsome. Marian said casually of him one day that he had a streamline head, and it was perfectly true. Everything was narrow, fine, and cut away as though to offer the least wind resistance, and it seemed somehow not at all surprising that he had joined the Royal Flying Corps.
Marian seemed to become less casual about him, and her voice lost the icy quality that had made it cut so coldly when Julia had overheard the quarrel about Carson. When Marian mentioned that she was going to marry him in a fortnight’s time, and that everybody would have to hurry up to make her frock, the shop was profoundly excited. Even Flossie ran out for patterns of white satin with some slight show of enthusiasm.
Julia was thrilled, but also slightly surprised. It was so obvious that Billy Embury was a far simpler human being than Marian. Many people were marrying in the intoxication of the moment, but how could one apply such an unbalanced term to Marian Lestrange? My goodness! thought Julia, she’s letting herself in for something. After all, marriage is for the rest of your life, unless, of course, he gets killed, which he probably will, because aeroplanes are so dangerous. Julia didn’t realise that Marian never envisaged marriage as necessarily being for life. A woman of Marian’s class could take divorce in her stride, she would have the “right people” to back her. In Julia’s class divorce was as unknown and difficult a luxury as a private aeroplane.
Marian was attracted by Billy, and she was content to let the present pay for itself; the future was unsure enough just now to cease to exist as a definite menace. She was oddly unsettled for one so poised, and having decided to marry Billy one evening when his streamline head looked more attractive than usual, she was determined not to go back on her word. She might as well marry Billy and see how it turned out.
Billy Embury’s state of mind was quite different—he simply thought she was the most wonderful girl, what? and that it was up to everyone to go and blot out these beastly Germans who were making such a mess of a perfectly good world, what? and that he was damn lucky if he could get a bit of a good time before they blotted him out, what? Marian, bless her! was prepared to risk it, and at the worst she would have his pension and his small private income.
So Marian became Mrs. Embury at what she called “the shop opposite,” by which she meant St. George’s, Hanover Square, and Julia went to the wedding and drank champagne for the first time in her life, in company with Miss Smythe, both standing modestly in the shade of a potted palm tree in the hotel where the reception was held.
The actual ceremony was supposed to be “very quiet because of the war,” but to Julia it was wonderful. She felt her heart beat as though it would choke when Marian, the oyster satin that Julia had helped to make, swathed round her, drifted up the nave. It didn’t seem possible, thought Julia, that Marian could be as cool and unconcerned as she looked, and as a matter of fact she was right. Marian, with a queer little sick feeling, was wondering if she hadn’t, after all, made a fool of herself, and dismissing the thought with the comfortable reflection that she could always do something about it even if she had.
There was only a week’s honeymoon, as Billy was due to go to the Front, and Marian arrived back at the shop when it was over as though nothing had happened. Julia looked at her furtively; she somehow expected her to look different. Surely marriage, love, whatever you liked to call it, was the greatest experience of life? How could it leave Marian as calm, cool, and amused as before?
However, it did, to all outward seeming, and word went round that it was etiquette in the shop to address her as Miss Lestrange, just as if she had never been married at all.
Poor Billy, thought Julia, loving Marian, thinking of her, yet leaving so little impression upon her body or her mind. Marian would hurt Billy, but Billy would never be able to hurt Marian.
Everyone settled down to the war. Redmond and Carson had agreed to postpone the Irish question; Mrs. Pankhurst had called off her Amazons; and people like Julia and her relations, who could not afford to do war work, struggled to get along with the business of living. “Tipperary” became woven into Julia’s mind as the Indian Love Lyrics or Humoresque had never succeeded in being. The whole of life seemed set to the tune. Every band played it, it was heard in every cinema. The events of the war were set against this background of sound. And so the lovely burnished autumn slowly bled to death.
That was a wet and gloomy winter. Julia had a succession of sore throats, and felt that soon her employers would begin to lose patience with her. The first tragedy with which the shop was intimately connected came with the death of Gipsy’s husband in H.M.S. Formidable, torpedoed in the Channel with the loss of between five and six hundred lives. Gipsy only stayed away two days, but when she came back she was oddly different. She looked, thought Julia, as though a sponge had passed over her, wiping out the bright colours of her personality and leaving only the bare black outlines. She made no reference to what had happened, but worked with a sort of grim intensity. Julia rather wondered that she didn’t leave a business which, after all, was a luxury trade, and try and forget herself in war work, but one day she learned why. The first and last customer had gone, and Julia, putting away stock in the shop, heard an unwonted sound from the room behind. She went softly to the curtains and peeped through.
Gipsy was sitting at the brightly painted desk, her dark head buried on her outflung arms, her body shaken by the hard sobs that Julia had heard. Leaning against the wall, looking down at her with a troubled face, was Marian. Presently Marian put out her pale, long hand and touched Gipsy’s shoulder tentatively, without speaking. Gipsy made a great effort, and the sobs ceased. She raised her own plump, capable hand and patted Marian’s.
“Sorry,” she said.
“That’s all right,” said Marian laconically. Then, after a moment’s pause—“Look here, Gipsy, wouldn’t it be better for you to clear out of here? Do some war work, or something?”
Gipsy shook her head wearily.
“I can’t do that, there wouldn’t be enough money in it. I know the business is going through a bad time now, but it’ll look up later. People will begin to spend more money than ever, I’m sure of that. And there’s little John. I must make all the money I can for him. He’s got to go to Dartmouth when the time comes. John would have expected that. They’ve always been in the Service.”
“Of course,” assented Marian.
Odd, thought Julia. It seemed to her that if you loved your husband and he was torpedoed, you wouldn’t want your only son to go and run the risk of the same thing, but Miss Lestrange evidently accepted the notion as something you’d expect.
Gipsy straightened herself, and blew her funny little turned-up nose till it was pink.
“As long as you can bear with me, Marian, I won’t do it again.”
“Don’t be a fool,” said Marian, with a sort of rough gentleness.
Odd people … no kisses … not even the usual “darlings” … neit
her of them in trouble would have said anything to Julia about it, yet they didn’t mind in the least if she saw and heard them. … She might have been a piece of the modern painted furniture for all they cared. Julia suddenly felt very lonely. These people all had their place in life ready for them, and it was the sort of place that would enable them to feel at home wherever they went. Julia was at home nowhere. Two Beresford … her aunt’s house at Dulwich, which was another Two Beresford; her cousin Elsa, who was supposed to be “such a nice little girl,” and whom she despised … the girls at school whom now she never saw, and never wished to see … there was no place for her anywhere. … But there should be, there must be. She would make herself invaluable at the shop, and later on there would be love. … Some wonderful soldier would come into l’Etrangère’s one day with his mother or sister, and would fall in love with the quiet, distinguished girl, who looked so much more interesting than the women she served …
Julia often day-dreamed of this remarkable soldier when she went back and forth in bus and train. He was tall and dark, with one of those attractive little moustaches, and hair beginning to go white at the temples, not because he was old, but because of all he had been through. “Your lovely youth has given me back mine,” he would say to Julia.
More and more she was, of necessity, beginning to lead two lives. The life that everyone saw, the life that was led by Julia Almond, who left home early in the morning and came back tired in the evening; the same Miss Almond who ran about London on last-minute errands, dusted and cleaned and answered the telephone with that soft manner that increases the wrath of customers. And the life of this other Julia Almond, the lovely and beloved; a Julia who could hold the gorgeous West End in fee; the Julia who was entirely different from anyone else who had ever lived, because this was the only time in the history of the world that there had been that Julia Almond. This was the Julia who was asked to enter the Secret Service, who won the prize for fancy-dress at big charity balls, who married the wonderful soldier with the hair gone grey at the temples. Everywhere was sorrow, but everywhere there was also that tension that makes people more aware of life. There was something in the air that made life and death better worth while than ever before, and that something was uncertainty.
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