Children of No Man's Land

by G. B. Stern

Deb had lied. It was not “The Tale of Two Cities,” but an account of the Dreyfus case.

This first war Christmas of nineteen-fourteen, the Marcuses moved out of their house in Lansdowne Terrace. The Stock Exchange was one of the definite places where a man of German extraction could be made to feel uncomfortable; very uncomfortable. Ferdinand Marcus did not complain of the cold-shouldering he received. “It’s natural, Stella; every time I open my mouth they are bound to be reminded.” But then some arbitrary stockbroker accused him publicly of being a spy and a traitor ... and Marcus quickly resigned his partnership in the firm of Nash, Rothenburg and Marcus; and withdrew to live as best he might on his income. The little man was hurt and sorrowful; he loved England passionately—he had renounced Germany and chosen England from motives of pure love. Not all the sons of Germany are as violently attached to the Fatherland as the Fatherland would like to make out. Some among them have resented the prison-wall system, the prevalent aggressive despotism that crushes out their human ways and wishes. So they had come to England, and had found a difference, and had stayed.... “Especially we Jews find the difference,” Ferdinand explained to his sister, when he told her what had occurred on the Exchange. “They don’t realize, over here, how the Jews are still treated in Germany. And so they won’t believe that our loyalty to a country adopted is not hypocrisy, and that we can be truly glad if England wins the war. Stella, I wish they would believe it; I wish they would.” His lips trembled with the pathos of a child who has received an unmerited snubbing. “What ho! who cares?” he cried jerkily. Ferdie took pride in his collection of English slang; a pride which dated back to his enforced return to Germany, thirty-two years ago, with a few typical samples of the period. Stella remembered how he had kept up his forlorn spirits by use of such defiant oddments as “By Jingo,” “Here we are again,” “It’s all my eye and Betty Martin,”—“What’s that?” thundered his father, overhearing. Ferdie, blushing crimson, tried to explain that Betty Martin was the name of a lady—and—and the rest was idiom. “You will hold your mouth,” came the irritable edict....

Now—“What ho! who cares?” But he was miserable at the necessity for leaving his home. He was at that ripe pippin stage of the late forties when comfort, sentiment, and beaming good-humour make a happy blend of man. His voice had loudened to a hearty geniality. When he sat in a chair, he expanded and filled it out. On the anniversaries of Dorothea’s death and of their wedding-day, he did not go to business, but put white flowers under her portrait, and sobbed tenderly and unashamedly over the memories aroused. He liked standing with his carving-knife at the head of his own table, with a well-roasted joint in front of him. He liked Christmas carols, and happy faces, and giving presents to his family, and surprises, and Deb’s arms round his neck while she pleaded for some special treat; and songs with a bloom of mellow sadness over them; and a tame landscape with a sort of chubby frolic to it—cottage-children or lambs in the sunshine; and well-worn slippers, and moonlight. If he had continued to live in South Germany, he would no doubt have liked Schumann and beer, and the Lorelei and charcoal-burners and Grimms’ Fairy-tales. Perhaps these tastes still lingered on, unsuspected, in his system, subservient to a solemn love for the river Thames; he had given his heart to the Thames while he was still a stripling, and no Rhine-memories could alter the preference. Richard certainly should go to Oxford; Ferdie looked forward to visiting him there; to some mysterious festivity entitled Commem.

Above all, perhaps, he loved the sight of lovers. Lovers such as he and Dorothea had been: compounded of joy without ecstasy; sadness without anguish; youthful, blushing lovers who held hands, and could be teased and blessed.... And later—“the bride was given away by her father.”... And later still: “—of a girl” ... who would soon learn to blow on his watch and crow when it flew open.

For of course he was thinking of Deb.

No parental coercion in her case; no prudent selection by her elders. To that he was pledged; had not he and Dorothea planned that Deb should seek out her own true mate in her own good time, and bring him home?

And bring him home.... But home was “Daisybanks,” Lansdowne Terrace. Ferdie’s pleasures were not of the scattered order, but had associated themselves very closely with just that click to the gate, announcing his home-coming every evening; just that virginia creeper, matting one side of the house in red; and just that half-acre of garden at the back, where the sweet-william and the canterbury bells repaid so gratefully his careful watering every summer evening, though the hose still leaked at that one faulty portion of rubber tubing.

“We shall have to tell them about that leak, Stella,” was all he found courage to say, when his sister informed him that she had already found a tenant to take over their expiring lease, and to buy the furniture.

Stella was the practical person of the family. Stella had beautiful white teeth, and a shrill excitable voice. Because she rattled on incessantly, she was regarded by her contemporaries as a wit; and her popular entrance into a room was usually hailed uproariously, as though the assembled company had been awaiting its jester. Her secret horror was to be regarded as the traditional narrow-minded and intolerant old maid; and to avert this she harped facetiously on the topic. She owned a unique collection of the sort of cayenne “good tale” which can always be relied upon to raise at least one blush and one protest; and so by repartee and impromptu, she managed to achieve an enfant terrible reputation, of which she was as vain as younger girls of their conquests. Men called her “a sport,” and would often drop into a chair by her side, with the latest chuckle from Town Topics or the Pink ’Un—“Nothing shocks Stella Marcus, you know!” ... and certainly, as far as anything verbal was concerned, Stella fancied herself well in the van of the New Movement. But she did not realize that lip-service was no longer vassal to emancipation; and that: “Do shocking things, not say them all day long,” was the up-to-date rendering of Kingsley’s advice; did not realize, in fact, that for all her breathless determination, she was not quite able to catch up with Deb’s generation.

Deb! ... of necessity she could not stand for a cipher in Stella’s emotions; was bound to arouse love or hatred ... perhaps the conflict was not yet finally decided. For Deb was not only the daughter she might have borne—if Hermann Marcus had not interposed his bulky will between Stella and Stella’s destiny, but also the girl she might have been—again if Hermann had taken the same views of fatherhood as Ferdie. Out of the non-fulfilment of Stella’s existence had arisen Deb’s present Paradise of liberty; Stella herself perceived that: herself the ashes and Deb the gaily-plumaged phœnix. Ferdie, as a father, needed the tragic example afforded him by his elder sister unmarried—for marriage, when it is obviously a vocation squandered, is as true tragedy as the squandering of some great gift. Stella by nature had been just such a girl as Deb was now.... And she did not hate Deb, nor use her authority to baulk the girl where herself had been baulked. To her credit, she took instead a fierce, yet half-amused pride in flaunting Deb’s emancipation from control, before the grimly disapproving glare of Deb’s grandfather; it was revenge by proxy.... “You prevented me from acting thus—and thus—and thus—You have no power here. Look—and look again: this is what I should have been, this is what I should have done. But all the spilt joy has been gathered into another cup—and yours are no more the fingers at the handle!”... So Stella’s long-shaped greenish eyes danced their wordless triumph at her father; while Deb, innocent of interplay, was frankly and chummily telling Ferdie about some successful impertinence of girlhood.