Julius (15 page)

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 from 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.

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.