One day a tall, clean-shaven, blue-eyed man called in to take Gipsy to lunch, and he proved to be her husband, Commander Danvers. Gipsy seemed as fluttered and pleased as a young girl, and after they had left the shop together, Julia stared after them enviously.
Miss Smythe, who combined the duties of junior showroom girl and junior saleswoman, was taking a last look at herself in the mirror before going out, and smiled at Julia.
“It does one good to see them, doesn’t it?” she said; “as poor as church mice. I believe he’s got nothing much but his pay. Of course, you can see he’s frightfully good family and all that. Got a sweet little kid, too; she brought him in here one day. That’s why she works so hard to try and help things out a bit. They both think the world of that kid and of each other. It isn’t often you see married people like that, that’s what I say.”
Julia, whose notions of what she vaguely called “Society” consisted largely of the belief that all the women had lovers, and all the men mistresses, had to readjust herself to this new possibility.
A few days later a considerably younger man came in and asked for Miss Lestrange. He wasn’t as good-looking as Commander Danvers; he had a long, narrow jaw, and narrow head, but a very delightful smile. Hilda Smythe was ready with her information when he departed, having failed to get Marian to go to lunch with him.
“That was Billy Embury,” she told Julia, as they peeped from behind the curtain of the fitting-room and saw his straight back disappearing down George Street. “He’s mad about Miss Lestrange, but she treats him just anyhow.”
Marian did indeed treat Mr. Embury just anyhow. Julia, tidying the stock in the shop, once heard what almost amounted to a quarrel between them in the back room.
“Of course I know,” said Marian in a low icy voice, “that you’ll do exactly what you choose. If you want to go and join up in Carson’s ridiculous army, you will; but I warn you that Father will make a frightful row if I ever have anything to do with you afterwards. Father says if Ulster fights anything may happen. It may be the signal for a European war or civil war. He foams at the mouth if anybody mentions Carson.”
“I can’t help your father’s troubles,” said Billy. “I’m an Ulsterman, and I’m not going to be dictated to by Lloyd George and his gang. I’m awfully sorry, Marian, if you feel I’ve let you down, but there it is, I’ve got to go now. God knows I’ve put it off until I’m ashamed, as it is.”
Julia could almost hear the shrug of the shoulders in Marian’s reply.
“Just as you like, Billy, although it’s very tiresome of you just as we’ve really begun to tango well together. Oh, well, I expect I can pick up another partner. Goodbye, Billy, and mind the step, as they say in certain circles, I believe.”
Billy banged out of the shop, evidently in a bad temper. What exciting lives these people lead, thought Julia.
Of course, Miss Lestrange was older than she was, and had had more time to collect young men to be in love with her.
Julia took the same sort of intense imaginative interest in the private lives of Marian and Gipsy as she did in the lighted windows of houses that she passed at night. There was nothing more thrilling, thought Julia, than gazing at lighted windows, especially when the curtains were drawn back and you could see into the room; see the angle of a table, perhaps, with people sitting at it. If you knew exactly what the house was like inside, and who the people were, the magic would have been gone. At night Julia could imagine anything about what went on in these strange hollow shells called houses that looked so solid by day; she could feel herself part of every drama played there.
The two work-girls, who sat and stitched in a little back room at the top of the narrow Georgian house of l’Etrangère, interested Julia, too, but not as much as Marian and Gipsy. She knew their sort before. There wasn’t so much to wonder about. They were nice girls enough. Milly Benson, the younger, was stupid except with her fingers, but she was a good worker; and the elder, Meggie Parsons, who had had much more experience, was fitter as well as work-girl. She was rather a grave and serious person whose talk was chiefly of her invalid mother. It seemed odd to Julia that anybody could be so interested in a mother.
The house had only three floors, and the middle one was taken up with the fitting-room in front, which was gaily furnished in modern style with a wide divan covered with cushions, and with odd painted cloth dolls sitting about on it. Behind it was the small room where Mrs. Santley, the hat expert, grey-haired and a veteran at her job, sat and worked.
Like Julia herself, Hilda Smythe, the show-girl, had to be all over the house at once. Hilda’s father was an auctioneer, and in the hierarchy of the shop world, being a show-girl, she ranked above Julia, but she was very friendly and pleasant. She was not a pretty girl, but she was very smart and had a beautiful figure, and red-gold hair that was bobbed like Julia’s own.
There had been a dreadful row at home when Julia first got back with her bobbed hair, but as a matter of fact it suited her very well. It made her look more than ever as though she came out of an Italian painting, with her long, full neck, her narrow grey-blue eyes. She still did not look pretty, but her moments of beauty were more frequent now that she wore this aspect of a gallant medieval youth. Even her father and mother, who at first said she looked a “sketch” and a “shoot,” noticed it, and her cousin Elsa, who came up to spend the day with Aunt Mildred from Dulwich, was frankly envious.
“Mother won’t let me bob my hair,” she complained. “She says it looks common, but I like it.”
Julia, gazing at the thin tight plaits without beauty of colour or texture that hung half-way down Elsa’s back, suppressed a smile. The Dulwich relations bored her very much. Almost every Sunday since she could remember, the Almonds had either gone to Dulwich to the house of Uncle George Beale, or Uncle George brought Aunt Mildred and Elsa to whatever house the Almonds were inhabiting at the moment. It was supposed because the girls were cousins they must be good friends, although Julia was six years the elder, and thoroughly bored with Elsa, who was a rather whining, spoilt child. Julia had quite offended Aunt Mildred by refusing to allow her to come and visit her at the shop and bring Elsa with her. Why, they might mistake her for a little matcher, thought Julia. The “matcher,” by name Flossie—no one ever knew her surname—was, as Miss Clarkson had predicted, quite a rough little thing, who was put upon by everyone, including the work-girls.
During her first weeks at l’Etrangère, Julia used to come home so tired that she could not even take Bobby for his walk, but used to fall into bed and eat the soup that her mother, with an insufferable air of “I told you so!” would bring to her. It wasn’t that the work was so hard; it wasn’t that there was so much to do; but that you never knew quite what it was.
Julia had to wait on everyone, and she ran up and down, up and down, the steep winding staircase a hundred times a day. Her first duty when she arrived at the shop was to dust all the furniture, for the charwoman’s notions of cleanliness were confined to the scrubbing-brush and pail. She tidied the stock, re-lined the chests of drawers with paper if they needed it, and worked at arranging the window under the directions of Gipsy. Then the real work of the day began; the running up and down stairs, answering the telephone, the waiting on everyone else, and general fetching and carrying.
Miss Smythe, good-natured and generous, paid her sixpence a week for doing her errands for her, and making her the endless cups of tea on which she and the work-room girls seemed to subsist. Nobody’s duties were very sharply defined in such a very individual business as l’Etrangère’s. Everyone did a little bit of everything. It often fell to Julia to rush out and do the matching, when little Flossie had brought back some particularly unsuitable patterns. As to fashion-drawing, Julia wondered why she had ever bothered to learn it. In fact, nothing she had ever known in her life seemed to be of any use to her now.
All the time she was watching and learnin
g. Quite soon she discovered never to say “costume,” but to talk about “a suit,” and not to say “the dressmaking,” but simply “dressmaking.” One didn’t even say “bathing costume,” no, not even “a fancy costume,” everything had to be “a suit” or “a get-up” or “a frock;” one never talked of “perfume,” but always of “scent.” She learned, too, that “Honourable” was a title never used. You might almost as well not have it, thought Julia, if the sight of it on an envelope was all you ever got out of it. This sort of knowledge Julia picked up with startling facility. Just as she had learned from Miss Tracey what were the things to admire in literature, and to be quieter in her manner than the people with whom her childhood had been spent, so now she learned all the little shibboleths which came so naturally to people like Marian Lestrange and Gipsy Danvers. How she admired them … their certainty about themselves … their calm conviction of being “all right.” For Julia, for all her swiftness of imitation, and the bold front she put on things, was always at the mercy of terrible moments of panic, when she felt common, awkward, and utterly frightened. Some weakness in Julia made her prefer to be with the work-room girls, or even with the matcher. To them she was a superior. She was an apprentice, and all her vitality, unafraid of criticism, would well up in her again like a clear spring. But that other thing in Julia that would not let her be; that thing which always made her reach out for the bright and shining bubble which was beauty, forced her to be as much as possible with Marian and Gipsy, watching them, imitating them, trying also to appear at her ease.
In sharp distinction from the “staff” were the customers, always spoken of by everyone in the shop as though they were hardly human beings, but rather a race apart, just as summer visitors are spoken of by the natives of a seaside village. Customers and summer visitors are needed for the money that they bring, but nobody really likes them.
The opinion in the shop was that customers were always wrong, and the opinion of the customers was that the shop was always wrong, and Julia could not help thinking that there was a great deal to be said for both sides.
She soon learned to classify customers. There were the great friends of Marian and Gipsy, and then the shop resounded to the cry of “darling.” Some of these friends paid, and paid at once; some paid after great pressure (when they invariably said they would never have expected such behaviour from dear Marian or dear Gipsy, as the case might be); some never paid at all, and when they had exhausted their credit, went elsewhere. Some customers were friends of friends. They generally began by saying, “Darling Pamela sent me. She told me you were so cheap, and I do hope you are, because I simply haven’t got a bean.” Nobody, as far as Julia made out, ever had a bean, and yet, as she put it to herself, they all knew quite well how many beans make five.
Then there were the customers who came in from the street—referred to in the shop as “Women off the street.” They came in because they had seen a hat or a frock that took their fancy. These inevitably began by saying: “Will you tell me how much that little hat, or that little frock, is?” as though by using the adjective they could subtly depreciate the hat or frock in question, and suggest that it ought not to cost very much. Very often the answer so staggered them that they drifted out into the street again. Sometimes they stopped and tried on everything in the shop—very occasionally, they bought.
The clothes really were good, and Gipsy really was capable, and so, in her curious, strange way, was Marian Lestrange, but they had a very different way with customers. Gipsy would jolly them along, cheer them up about their figures, and always agree with them. Marian frequently reduced them to tears, and Julia made the discovery that there are customers who like to be bullied and made to cry, even by their dressmaker. When Marian had been particularly brutal to some rather tiresome woman, Julia always expected never to see that particular customer again, but she invariably came back, and meekly accepted Marian’s orders as to what she should and should not wear.
It was a queer topsy-turvy world, that of l’Etrangère. A mixture of ruthlessness, unexpected kindliness, hard business and extraordinary amateurishness, and real friendliness. Many of Marian’s friends seemed to use the shop very much as a club, and some of them were amazingly good-natured to Julia herself. There was much careless generosity—for Marian would suddenly give a thing away to someone whom she knew was genuinely hard-up at under cost price, and there was also a bare-faced exploitation of the rich and disagreeable. And, welding the staff together, with the possible exception of Flossie, there was the feeling that they were all helping each other, all bearing with the customers; all breathing the same sigh of relief when the shop door was closed for the day and the tidying-up had been finished; all sharing in the depression when a large order went wrong, or some customer who had seemed particularly safe, failed to pay.
The same extremes obtained in the matter of food as in the matter of frocks and work. Sometimes Marian and Gipsy would be taken out to lunch by some friend, and come back announcing that they had eaten too much and would never do it again. Sometimes Flossie would be sent out for sandwiches to the nearest public-house, and everyone would nibble hastily while trying to rush an order through in time; and always there were the cups of tea—the endless cups of tea.
Julia had her seventeenth birthday after she had been a few weeks at the shop. It fell this year upon a Sunday, and Mr. Starling asked her to midday dinner, that is to say, that Mrs. Starling wrote a note and asked her, but it was a note obviously dictated by her husband and brought round by him when he knew Julia would be at home.
Julia enjoyed the birthday dinner. At the Starlings’ she was able to be a Miss Lestrange, confident and poised. It was obvious that she was admired and looked upon as one who would go far.
Dad and Mr. Starling talked stuff she would have thought dull a few months earlier. They talked about the Irish business, and what Carson was doing in Ulster. Julia had heard so many little bits of political gossip lightly tossed about in the shop that she now knew in a sketchy and superficial way what the men were talking about. Dad said for the thousandth time in his life that he was a Liberal and that the Irish ought to have Home Rule. Herbert Starling announced that he was a Conservative, and that the Irish ought to be kept in their place, or that anyway Ulster ought to be allowed to decide for itself, and that he liked to see a man that was a man and you couldn’t deny that Carson was a man, and a strong one. Julia described Marian’s angry parting with Billy Embury, and at once both men deferred to her. They evidently thought that anybody really in society like Miss Lestrange must be in the way of hearing things that never found their way into the newspapers. Herbert Starling was obviously pleased that the Honourable Marian Lestrange’s favourite tango partner should, like himself, be pro-Ulster. A breath, warm and scented, from the great wicked world, seemed to blow about the Starlings’ prosaic dining-table as Julia languidly imitated Marian’s disgust. Yes, the birthday dinner was a success, and Julia went back to work next day with something of its glow still about her.
One morning Mr. Almond tut-tutted over his morning paper more than usual. There had been an assassination somewhere—some foreign Archduke—Julia gathered.
“These Servians,” said Mr. Almond; “always making trouble. Dear me, I remember as though it was yesterday that awful business when they massacred Queen Draga and her husband, and now, here they are killing an Austrian Archduke. Really I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” However, he soon forgot the place with the strange name of Serajevo, in his worry over Ireland. Julia worried about neither, but she was very sorry when on reading the paper for herself she discovered that the victims of the assassination had been morganatically married. Ever since she had read a novel on the subject of morganatic marriages, Julia had thought such a union the most romantic thing imaginable. You were married all right, and so you were a good woman, and you were also married to a royalty, which was romantic, and yet you weren’t married, in a funny sort of fash
ion; and just that tiny little fact of not being married endowed the whole arrangement with glamour. It was a shame that such people should have been murdered.
Julia agreed with the “bit” that she read in the paper about it. … “The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and his charming consort has shocked all the world in general, and pained London in particular, for it was only last autumn that they came to England to see a typically English product—the Flower Show.” Thus was the arrogant, dead bully sanctified by the Press.
That was a fine July and Julia enjoyed it. She was feeling more at home now in her work. She had even been asked to prepare a water-colour drawing of a frock for a customer. Of course, the customer did not know that it was Julia who had done it, but the thing was a success, which was all that mattered, and Marian flung her a word of praise. Gipsy, more practical, gave her one of her own hats, one that she had only worn twice because it didn’t suit her. Julia’s mind leaped ahead to a future when she would have a little room of her own, and do many fashion drawings.
But that strange word, Serajevo, kept cropping up and up. More and more Julia caught little scraps of conversation now and then between one of the “Darlings,” as the girls used to nickname those customers who were Marian’s friends. One day the word “war” was dropped out casually, and startled Julia into an awareness of events.
“Do you think there’s going to be a war, darling?” asked one lovely lady, smoothing her hair in front of the mirror, preparatory to putting on her hat.
“Father seems to think so,” said Marian. “It’ll be an awful bore.”
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