Rather melancholy words, she thought. Was it true the lovely part of love only lasted a moment and the sorrow went on for a lifetime? Still, it was just a song, and sentimental at that; real life was probably very different. However much one read and talked about love, one couldn’t possibly know really what it was like until one was - well - married, and all that. People said it was marvellous and one felt utterly different. She used to think any sort of physical business must be hateful and disgusting. She didn’t know how people could; she always wished men and women would just be content talking about books and music and things. But lately, she didn’t know why exactly, she felt she must have thought prudishly and stupidly over various things. After all, if one was fond of a person, and he was gentle and at the same time rather overwhelming, if he took care of one and saw that one wasn’t embarrassed, it ought to be more or less bearable, almost, perhaps, rather lovely.
Rachel sat at the piano, strumming with one finger in great abstraction, her eyes anywhere but on her music and her thoughts lost in some fancy, and then the door opened and Mr Lévy was announced.
Oh dear! - and she hadn’t arranged her hair or her dress. What a time to call! ‘Bring tea, please, Symonds, at once.’ And
‘Good afternoon, Julius; nobody appears to be in but me. I was just practising - come and sit down - what a lovely day.’ The rush of words served, she hoped, to cover her confusion, because she felt that it must be obvious in her face that she had been thinking about him.
Julius took no notice, however; he was apparently in a hurry and slightly irritated over something.
‘I was over at the new building in Kensington,’ he began, striding up and down the room, ‘and I suddenly realised it was the tenth of May. I’ve been so infernally busy this last week that the date has passed me by, confound it!’
‘Why should it matter?’ asked Rachel very surprised. ‘Is it anybody’s birthday?’
‘No - but it was a month ago on the 7th that I first met you at dinner. That makes two days over the four weeks. Damn! Hartmann will win his bet.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what all this is about,’ said Rachel, after a pause.
‘I tell you what,’ said Julius; ‘will you pretend that it was arranged on the 7th, only we kept it secret? That’s easy enough. I’m damned if I’m going to lose that bet. Splendid. What an idea. Will you do that for me?’
‘Do what? I wish you’d explain yourself.’
‘Tell Hartmann that I asked you on Tuesday instead of today. It’s perfectly fair. I would have asked you Tuesday, but this business has been holding me up. I bought the ring days ago, anyway, as I know to my cost. Here - see if it fits.’
He threw a small package into her lap and went on pacing the room.
‘What time will your father be back? I don’t think I can wait if he’s not home by five. I suppose it wouldn’t be the thing if you told him. Ridiculous red tape over these affairs always. Well, what do you think of the stone? I had to get a good one; your father knows too much about diamonds.’
Rachel, twisting in her fingers probably the clearest-cut diamond she had ever seen, was realising with a sense of stupendous bewilderment that Julius had made her a proposal of marriage. No, it wasn’t even a proposal; he hadn’t even attempted to ask her, he was merely assuming the fact that she had accepted him. She had never imagined a proposal would be like this. He ought to be trembling, he ought to be on his knees - and all he had done was to throw a ring on her lap and complain of the cost. For a moment she wanted to throw it back in his face, she was so angry, and then it came to her suddenly, the understanding of what had happened. Julius had asked her to marry him; he loved her. It was true all the time, he had not been making fun of her. Julius and herself - Rachel Lévy. ‘This is my wife . . . Mr Julius Lévy . . . Darling, I love you . . . Father and Mother, Julius and I are going to be married . . . I say, have you heard about Rachel? . . . The bride, all in white, stood at the top of the steps, her hand on her husband’s arm, smiled down, radiantly lovely ... The Italian lakes . . . How beautiful you are, Rachel; do you know you belong to me, yes, all of you; this, and that, and those ...’
She looked up at Julius out of a dream and she said to him haughtily, rather stiffly: ‘You’re taking me very much for granted, aren’t you? I’ve never said I would marry you.’
Then he laughed. He put his hand under her chin: ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I wish to God I had taken you, it would have saved me a great deal of trouble. Don’t be absurd, though, and unnecessarily English. I’ve decided we’ll be married in September; it gives you time for trousseaux and all that. We shall have to find a house - there’ll be heaps for you to do, however; no need to go into it now. What’s this coming in - tea? I don’t want any tea. Absurd meal. What a time your father is. I shall have to go; I can’t wait for him. What are you looking so prim about, with your lips pursed? Give me a kiss.’ He laughed again, bending down to her, but she pushed him away.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’
‘I hate you,’ she said; ‘so overbearing and conceited - treating everything as settled - I don’t like things like that - there’s heaps to be discussed - and you behave to me as though I were anyone, a sort of girl to be kissed . . . Symonds must have seen.’
He whistled, coarsely she considered, his hands in his pockets, his head on one side.
‘Ever been kissed before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, flushing. ‘A cousin tried once, very impertinently. I - I hate all that.’
‘Do you?’ he said. ‘Then you can take it from me you’re wrong.’ And he put his arms round her and lifted her on to the sofa, and proceeded to kiss her and make love to her there for about five minutes, after which he glanced at his watch and saw that now he would be possibly a few moments late for his appointment.
‘You need a lot of that sort of thing,’ he said, ‘but I can’t stop now. You must wait until September. By the way, that’s all settled, isn’t it? We’ll be married the second week, roughly the fifteenth. I can’t manage it before. All right?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Happy?’
‘Yes.’
He raised one eyebrow and looked down at her, lying flushed and slightly dishevelled on the sofa.
‘So you damn well ought to be,’ he said, and he flung open the door on to the landing and shouted down the stairs to Symonds to call him a cab.
Julius and Rachel were married on the fourteenth of September, in the year ’94.
The wedding was held at the big Oratory in Great Portland Street, and a reception followed at Portland Place.
Walter Dreyfus was a well-known man with many friends, and the marriage of his daughter was therefore something of a function.
Nobody knew very much about the bridegroom Julius Lévy. He was vaguely French and rather mysterious, but heaps of money, they said, and extraordinarily ambitious and would do big things, so that everyone considered Rachel Dreyfus had done well for herself.
Her family were delighted, and Walter Dreyfus was secretly relieved that this daughter of his should be provided for, he being considerably worried financially these days. Julius Lévy was perhaps a little unconventional for a son-in-law, but he was wealthy and was going to take care of Rachel; that was all that mattered.
Once she was married, Rachel was certain she would be able to take Julius in hand and improve him.
‘He needs me to look after him - he’s so funny and foreign in lots of ways,’ she told herself, and already she began to feel rather experienced and mature, as though she were a woman because he had kissed her. The wedding was a disappointment to her, but she would have died rather than admit it to herself. It rained for one thing, spoiling her dress as she stepped from the synagogue into the carriage, and the brilliance of the reception shone a little false.
Her father seemed depressed behind his smile, and Julius was obviously so impatient at the whole affair, so wanting to be gone and away from it all, that she had scarcely time to see her friends and smile upon them and cut the cake, before he was making signs for her to go upstairs and change.
‘I won’t be hurried,’ she said to herself, and took great pains over her toilet, closeted in her bedroom with her mother and an aunt. When she came downstairs, looking very dignified and stately in her new furs and her large that - really married now she felt - she found many of the guests had slipped away; and there was Julius, very flushed and boisterous, with some of his slightly common business friends waiting in the hall to applaud her appearance, but they had all been drinking too much champagne.
‘
Enfin
,’ shouted Julius. ‘We were wondering if you’d gone to bed,’ and there was a great burst of laughter. How dreadful, how horrible, she thought - and one of his tipsy friends, the worst type of Jew, vulgar and fat, sang the first line of a popular song in a high falsetto voice, and Julius said something in French which she knew to be disgusting.
It was Rupert Hartmann who came to the rescue - dear Rupert Hartmann - and he kept Rachel away from the noisy crowd and saw her safe to the cab, and bundled Julius into it after her, telling him he ought to be ashamed of himself, and had he the tickets ready for Liverpool Street?
Then Julius sang French songs all the way to the station; she was thankful the cabman could not understand. As it was, he overtipped the man when they drew up at Liverpool Street and winked at him and said: ‘We’ve just been married’ - so unnecessary and coarse.
Luckily they had a carriage to themselves all the way to Harwich - the honeymoon was to be spent in Germany, doing the castles of the Rhine, her choice - but Julius spoilt all the beauty and romance of being a bride by wanting to pull down the blinds and make love to her directly the train drew out of Liverpool Street. Nothing could be more undignified or distressing; she was nearly in tears, and then when the uncomfortable, ridiculous performance was over, and she wanted to be kissed and comforted, he sat in one corner with his feet propped up on the opposite seat taking no notice of her at all, but jotting down calculations on a piece of paper.
Happily for Rachel the honeymoon, in spite of its disastrous beginning, proved a great success. Germany was wonderful, the Rhine castles all she had ever imagined; the tour was luxuriously planned, and she discovered that being loved by Julius was, after the first few attempts, a glorious, shameless experience that made the world seem more worth while than it had been before.
She returned to London and the new house in Hans Crescent, hardly wiser than when she left but considerably more human, sympathetic and indulgent, her body healthy, her mind contented, expecting neither mystery nor excitement out of life, but looking forward to a normal, regular existence as Rachel Lévy, however much the fundamental Rachel Dreyfus might be unaltered and intact.
Strangely enough it was to Julius rather than to Rachel that married life brought changes. Rachel herself was no revelation to him; he found her much as he had expected, and he had no cause for complaint. He had chosen her, she was his wife, she would do. The discovery he made was that the sensation of owning a wife, and a house, and a staff of servants, was a pleasurable one; that to order and be obeyed in his own home, to know he was master here as well as in his cafés, to entertain guests and be aware of their covetous glances at his goods, and his woman, was a thrill of keen intensity new and extremely satisfying.
It was good to watch people eat at his table and praise him to his face, people who ten years before would not have lowered themselves to glance at him in the street, they who possessed birth and breeding and he who possessed nothing at that time but incalculable ambition, a baker in Holborn. It was good to see how they hung upon his words, how they clustered round him with their eager hands and their chinless, vacuous faces: butterflies and moths swarming round a candle burning bright, and their chitter of empty voices.‘My dear Lévy,’‘My dear Julius,’ ‘But of course you must come tonight; no party is a success without you,’ ‘Rachel, insist that this brilliant husband of yours stops working for once.’
He knew that it was his money that had bought them. It was his money that drew them about his person like a cluster of flies, and because his star had risen, because he was winning, because he was a success; and he knew that their words were meaningless little bleatings in the air; they did not like him, they were afraid of him. Privately they gossiped about him in their fear and called him vulgar, an upstart, a foreigner, a Jew. He knew all this and he laughed, and he invited them to his house so that he could despise them. He remembered that they had been carefully nurtured and handled from the day of their birth; they had never known hunger or cold or poverty; and he remembered with a glimmer of exquisite pain how he had starved and frozen and suffered in the streets of Paris. It seemed to him that with every penny he made he was at the same time taking the blood and the life from the pockets of these people, that as his wealth increased so would their span of idleness and leisure dwindle and be lost to them. When he had grown to the height of his prosperity, he would have helped to smash down their class of false superiority that had lived too long.
So he sat, Julius Lévy, at the head of the long table in his dining-room, the lights from the twelve silver candlesticks reflecting the faces of those around it. He looked down at the mass of fruit piled high in the centre, peaches with a soft, luscious baby’s skin, fat white grapes, the hard, prickly pineapple; he was aware of the tinkle of the cut-glass fruit-bowls, the ripeness of dessert mingled with the scent of the woman on his right, the clamour of conversation, the murmur of the butler at his elbow, the pale brown taste of brandy. He leant back in his chair and watched the faces of these people, the white soft hands of his neighbour, her fingers manicured, a single diamond bracelet on her wrist; and he smiled at her voice in his ear, the smart nasal voice he hated: ‘Julius Lévy, how terribly thrilling to be your wife; how I envy her those pearls . . .’ Poor fool, poor whore, thinking with her cheap pure-bred beauty she could please him, so exciting to be kept by him; and he looked at the strained harried face of another guest, an earl, who next morning would be signing a contract with him, making over to Julius a great site on his property in the West End for building purposes - another café to add to the number. And this fellow glanced up and caught the eye of his host and raised his glass, smiling anxiously, as though even yet some untoward accident should prevent the deal and he be penniless.