Julius (28 page)

‘Father’s shot himself,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a cab waiting outside.’

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘Oh! Andy’ - and the flowers fell out of her hands, the wet stalks dirtying her dress, and she put one hand on to the banister to hold it tightly because it was a tearing momentary comfort to her, a friend, a supporter, and she looked at her brother’s white face without seeing it.

‘Oh! Andy,’ she said. Then it was no more a passing hideous nightmare, but the blank truth and she said: ‘I must come to mother at once’; and her hat and coat were found, and she was holding her brother’s arm in the cab while the tears rolled down her cheeks, and he was telling her:

‘He didn’t come home last night.We didn’t worry, we thought you’d be putting him up, and he was found this morning, down in the City office, shot - Rachel - through the heart. I’ve seen him - I shan’t ever forget it.’

‘I didn’t kiss him good night,’ she said.‘I’ll never forgive myself that - I didn’t kiss him good night. Julius let him out, it was about eleven. Oh! Andy, what are we all going to do?’

‘What did Julius talk to him about? Did you ask him?’ said her brother.

‘No - we went straight up to bed after he left. Julius said father was tired.And I never kissed him good night.Andy darling, he must have gone straight down to the City ...’

‘It’s not your fault, Rachel, don’t cry - you make me cry too, and it hurts so damnably ... We’ve got to pull ourselves together, because of mother.’

‘Where’s Walter?’

‘He’s down at the office. I left him there to come to you. Aunt Naomi is with mother. There are all the papers to go through - the firm has crashed, you know. Walter and I knew. I think it must have broken father’s heart - he thought he couldn’t face us all.’

‘But we’d have helped, Andy - there was no need. Why, he’d only to ask Julius and everything would have been all right.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Andrew.

Somebody had sent for Julius Lévy at his Strand offices. He was waiting in Portland Place when they arrived. Rachel ran to him at once.

‘Oh! darling,’ she cried, ‘this is so terrible, why did it have to happen? - he was with us last, he must have gone straight down and - all alone like that - oh! why, why, didn’t we do something then? ...’

‘You’d better go up to your mother,’ said Julius.‘Hullo,Andrew. I’ll come down with you to the City right away. No use hanging about here.’

They got into the cab. ‘I shouldn’t have thought your father would do this,’ said Julius; ‘thought he had more pluck.’

‘Doesn’t it require pluck to put a bullet through one’s heart, alone, in the night?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Julius. ‘Not after a bottle of whisky, anyway.’

‘I respected my father more than anyone in the world, Julius - this has knocked me sideways. Why did he do it, that’s what I don’t understand?’

‘I suppose he had his reasons, or thought he had.’

‘Did he ask you for help last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you refused?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suspected that. I kept it to myself, because of Rachel. Do you realise that it is you who have killed my father, Julius, and nobody else?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Andrew. A man holds his destiny in his own hands.’

‘I don’t know anything about destiny - all I know is that father is dead because of you. I wish I could kill you - and I can’t because of Rachel.’

He began to cry, miserably, silently, the tears scalding his mouth as he stared out of the window of the cab. ‘I’ll have to tell Walter this,’ he said.

Julius shrugged his shoulders.

‘It doesn’t matter to me if you tell the whole world,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s my affair.Your father should have managed his life more wisely.’

‘You’re inhuman - God! - Rachel is his daughter, didn’t you think of her at all?’

‘One of the first things I told Rachel was this - “I’m marrying you and not your family; remember that always.” Supposing you take a cigarette, Andrew, and pull yourself in shape. This conversation won’t help you. Nothing under the sun will bring your father back now.’

The crash of the Dreyfus firm and the suicide of the founder caused a mild flutter on the Stock Exchange, and a certain amount of interest in society. The crash, of course, accounted for the suicide. Nobody suspected that it might have been avoided. The two brothers, out of a strange blind loyalty to their sister, kept silence on the subject; but inevitably with the death of Walter Dreyfus the family drifted apart. Andrew went out to South Africa ten days after the funeral. He joined a Boer regiment as a private soldier and was killed at Paardeberg in February. This second blow turned Martha Dreyfus into an old woman. The home in Portland Place had been sold, and she retired to the country where she lived in seclusion with an unmarried sister.

Young Walter Dreyfus sailed to New York, went into a large shipping firm, and eventually married and settled in America for good.

These ties gone from her Rachel Lévy clung more closely to her husband and child. Her home was the centre of her life, to act hostess, to bring up Gabriel, to serve as that serene and charming background which Julius needed for his life.

It seemed to him that she belonged more to him since her family had disbanded. She and Gabriel were more definitely and finally his than they had been before, and he was pleased with this because possession was dear to him.

He thought of Walter Dreyfus with his heart torn from him, lying still and horrible before his desk in the office, and Martha Dreyfus a sad, solitary old woman, mooning over little flowers in a wet garden; and young Andrew hacked to pieces on a plain in Africa, and young Walter among strangers in a new land; and he thought, as he drew up an agreement for a new café, how strange it was that in his life things always turned to his advantage.

 

Now came the close of the century and the death of the Queen, followed soon by peace in South Africa, and these things also served as a milestone in the life of Julius Lévy. They marked the end of an era showing him the path to greater prosperity than he had as yet achieved. It was the beginning of a new age - the age of progress and speed and efficiency that he had long foreseen and the dawn of mechanism in all things, electricity, motor-cars and soon flying-machines in the air. The spirit abroad was one that he understood, the demon of restlessness unsatisfied stretching hungry fingers to the skies in a superhuman effort to conquer insatiable hunger, a spirit of rapacity and greed and excitement burning like a living flame.

In this bright world that travelled too fast Julius Lévy prospered. Success lay in a touch of his hands, wheresoever he trod; whatever he seized for himself became like particles of gold to add to his splendour, and nothing escaped him and nothing was lost.

Over twenty years ago he had arrived in England, a shabby, pale-faced Jew, who had no country and no friends; who shivered in a sordid attic of a lodging-house denying himself food and clothing, and now he was forty-two, Julius Lévy risen from obscurity, admired and envied, and sought after and praised.

The sentiments he inspired by his fortune and success were the sentiments he craved, not affection, not loyalty nor trust, for these could pass him by, these were worthless anæmic qualities, but envy and angry admiration and hatred at times and fear.

It was good to be envied by men, it was good to be feared, it was good to experience deeply the sensation of power by wealth, the power of money tossed to and fro lightly in his hands like a little god obedient as a slave. The voices around him were warm and thrilling to his heart because of their envy. He knew the meaning of the whispers and the glances. ‘Julius Lévy . . . there’s Julius Lévy.’

Voices, and eyes, and fingers directed towards him; wherever he walked he would be aware of them, and it was meat and it was drink to him, it was life, and lust, and glory, and desire.

Now that he had launched his cafés upon London, there were other paths that beckoned him - the lovely hidden roads of finance. He could juggle with the markets of the world, he could buy and he could sell, and his intuition was like a streak of lightning that comes before the thunder. He was first in all things; he was ready two seconds before his opponents. It was as though he calculated upon the hesitation of his fellow men, he allowed in his mind for those two seconds of caution and reconsideration, and in that time he was away from them, he had cast his fly, he had won.

There was a fascination in this business that seized upon him with the itch of a fever in midsummer. It excited him, it tore at him, it would not leave him alone. There was adventure here and danger, and the cafés were safe, solid foundations that spread themselves and developed into mountains of success.There were Lévy cafés in all the London districts with the building in the Strand and the new building in Oxford Street rearing their white façades and their triumphant golden signs high above the traffic and the passers-by. They were the fountain heads and the mark of fame. While in the provinces rose others no less prosperous, no less carefully considered, each one planned and planted in firm ground by the mind and the hand of their creator.

Soon there would surely not be a town in England that did not boast its Lévy café. Each building especially adapted to the needs and peculiarities of its local population which must first be studied, but all of them bearing the style and fabric of the fountain heads, all with white walls, white floors, white-coated assistants, and the slick smart service of a meal despatched in half an hour at a fixed popular price, with orchestra and flowers thrown in, and no gratuities.

‘Lévy’s for Service,’ ‘Lévy’s for Speed,’ ‘Eat more and spend less,’ slogans and catchwords that caught the eye and were placarded on hoardings, in newspapers, on omnibuses, spreading even to music-hall refrains and then becoming a sure gag to a low comedian.

‘The Lévy Pies,’ ‘The Lévy Chocolates,’ ‘The Lévy Cakes,’ articles in common use in every household, because they were cheap and because the name and the brand had caught the fancy of the middle-class purchaser.

They were rich in experience these years of achievement. They brought an ever-increasing knowledge of life, and adventure and sensation, of men and of women; and these experiences came to him without expenditure, without affecting physically or mentally any particle of his health, his vigour, his personality or his fortune, so that somewhere within him was still the laughing spirit of the incorrigible boy who rubbed his hands and chuckled to himself: ‘Something for nothing - something for nothing.’

Apart from the passionate chase after money and profit and ‘nothing to pay’ that was the current and the main stream of his life, there were backwaters and branches to explore, there were hidden creeks, and undiscovered channels. There was existence in the home, there was Rachel and the child.

The house in Hans Crescent was a dwelling of the past, that had been the comfortable establishment of a rising man who had married the daughter of a small diamond merchant, Walter Dreyfus.

Since then they had moved to Bryanston Square, with a ‘shake-down, ’ as Julius expressed it, at Maidenhead because Rachel expressed a fondness for the river; and now they had moved again, this time to the big house on the corner of Grosvenor Square, absurdly extensive for two persons and a child, but built and furnished obviously for entertaining on a lavish scale, which was what Julius intended to do. And though Rachel clung out of sentimentality to the small house at Maidenhead, there was a new house down at Hove, for the summer months - a splash of modernity on the front with gay window boxes and coloured blinds. Here part of July, August and September could be spent, and perhaps weeks now and again during the autumn and winter to escape fogs and because sea air was good for the child; but the season must never be missed in London, nor the early spring, nor the weeks before Christmas.

The Lévys went everywhere, they knew everybody, and even if he was a Jew, and a foreigner, and had made all that money out of those vulgar cafés, surely it did not matter so very much if he were willing to entertain, and to spend that money. And besides, he was so very intelligent and brilliant, and mysterious and dangerous, and his parties were marvellous affairs, and his wife was really charming - and there it was, he was powerful, he was successful, he was Julius Lévy.

Rachel was an admirable hostess, Julius had always known she would be; and her taste was good, and her clothes were good. Yes, he knew what was said of her: ‘Rachel Lévy always seems to wear the latest thing a month before anybody else,’ and ‘that house, my dear, quite overwhelming, positively magnificent, ’ and ‘their food, their servants, their wine ... O God! - to be as rich as that ...’

Why was it, people wondered, that Carlo the pianist should refuse to play at their houses and yet perform when Julius Lévy asked him? Why should Chequita, the world-famous
prima donna
, lift up her voice with naïve informality after supper in Julius Lévy’s drawing-room and nowhere else? Why was it that Rachel Lévy, wearing one string of pearls, should make other women look shabby and cheap in their diamonds?

Why did they have the telephone in every room when many of the guests had not yet installed one in their hall? Why did they possess two motor-cars before anyone had properly realised that cars were vehicles at all?

Why - why - why—They resented Julius Lévy and his wealth, they protested, and they disapproved, but they clamoured for invitations to his dinners, they flocked like herds of geese to his parties, they followed him to Ascot, to Goodwood, to Henley - a familiar figure everywhere with his hat a little on one side and his inevitable cigar. Women flustered, twittering, longing to catch his eye, and men eager, suffused, knowing that to be acquainted with Lévy might lead in some small measure to prosperity on their own account, with a handshake here, a nod there, and a word dropped carelessly at a City luncheon.