The Sweetest Dream Read Online Free PDF Page B

genial gentle family. Her
father was a diplomat, her mother a musician. In July 1914 came
visiting Philip Lennox, a promising Third Secretary from the
embassy in Berlin. That fourteen-year-old Julia should fall in love
with handsome Philip–he was twenty-five–was not surprising,
but he fell in love with her. She was pretty, tiny, with golden
ringlets, and wore frocks the romantic man told her were like
flowers. She had been brought up strictly, by governesses, English
and French, and to him it seemed that every gesture she made,
every smile, every turn of her head, was formal, prescribed, as if
she moved in a dance. Like all girls taught to be conscious of
their bodies, because of the frightful dangers of immodesty, her
eyes spoke for her, could strike to the heart with a glance, and
when she lowered delicate eyelids over blue invitations to love
he felt he was being rejected. He had sisters, whom he had seen
a few days ago in Sussex, jolly tomboys enjoying the exemplary
summer that has been celebrated in so many memoirs and novels.
A sister’s friend, Betty, had been teased because she came to supper
with solid brown arms where white scratches showed how she
had been playing in the hay with the dogs. His family had watched
him to see if he fancied this girl, who would make a suitable wife,
and he had been prepared to consider her. This little German miss
seemed to him as glamorous as a beauty glimpsed in a harem, all
promise and hidden bliss, and he fancied that if a sunbeam did
strike her she would melt like a snowflake. She gave him a red
rose from the garden, and he knew she was offering him her heart.
He declared his love in the moonlight, and next day spoke to her
father. Yes, he knew that fourteen was too young, but he was
asking for formal permission to propose when she was sixteen.
And so they parted, in 1914, while war was coming to a boil, but
like many liberal well-adjusted people it seemed to both the von
Arnes and the Lennoxes that it was ridiculous Germany and
England could go to war. When war was declared, Philip had left his
love in tears just two weeks before. In those days governments
seemed compelled to announce that wars must be over by
Christmas, and the lovers were sure they would see each other soon.
    Almost at once xenophobia was poisoning Julia’s love. Her
family did not mind her loving her Englishman–did not their
respective Emperors call themselves cousins?–but the neighbours
commented, and servants whispered and gossiped. During the
years of the war rumours followed Julia and her family too. Her
three brothers were fighting in the Trenches, her father was in
the War Office, and her mother did war work, but those few
days of fever in July 1914 marked them all for comment and
suspicion. Julia never lost her faith in her love and in Philip. He
was wounded, twice, and in devious ways she heard about it and
wept for him. It did not matter, cried Julia’s heart, how badly he
was wounded, she would love him for ever. He was demobbed
in 1919. She was waiting for him, knowing he was coming to
claim her, when into the room where five years before they had
flirted came a man she felt she ought to know. An empty sleeve
was pinned up on his chest, and his face was taut and lined. She
was now nearly twenty. He saw a tall young woman–she had
grown some inches–with fair hair piled on top of her head, held
with a big jet arrow, and wearing heavy black for two dead
brothers. A third brother, a boy–he was not yet twenty–had
been wounded and sat, still in his uniform, a stiff leg propped
before him on a stool. The two so recent enemies, stared at each
other. Then Philip, not smiling, went forward with an
outstretched hand. The youth made an involuntary movement of
turning away, with a grimace, but he recovered himself and
civilisation was reinstated as he smiled, and the two men shook hands.
This scene, which after all has repeated itself in various forms