The Children's Book Read online

  The English socialists were embarrassed to ask certain questions. Three years ago an anonymous article in the New Review had described the cold-blooded killing of a certain General Mesentsev. He had been stabbed with a blade, a kitchen knife wrapped in a newspaper, exactly the method subsequently used to assassinate the French president, Carnot, only last year. The article had implied that Stepniak was the killer. His English friends were deeply moved by his writings on the torture, imprisonment, and execution of Russian nihilists and objectors. But they were troubled to imagine the laughing man they took tea with waiting on the pavement, with the knife and the newspaper. They had become increasingly nervous about random acts of violence. Last year, an unknown man had mysteriously blown himself to bits outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The grown-ups remembered the spate of attacks ten years ago—on government offices, The Times newspaper, underground stations, railway stations, Scotland Yard, Nelson’s Column, London Bridge, the House of Commons, the Tower itself. They understood that suffering caused rebellion. They tried to understand covert, isolated attacks on ordinary people. They tried to inhabit the minds of bombers. It was hard.

  “Tell me, Mr. Tartarinov,” said Etta Skinner, who was a Quaker and a pacifist, “would you resort to blowing things—and people—up, to help your cause? You yourself, would you do such a thing?”

  “We have to be prepared. There is certainly nothing we will not blow up, if it stands in our way. We must look steadily to the end and choose the appropriate means. Without flinching.”

  Etta pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders.

  “And you yourself? Could you kill someone in cold blood?”

  “I do not know. I have never been faced with the necessity. None of us know of what we may be capable, when we are called.”

  The group was joined by August Steyning, who wanted to introduce Anselm Stern, who brought greetings from socialists in Germany, several of whom were, as German socialists often were, given the Kaiser’s loathing of them, in prison for lèse-majesté.

  The boys asked themselves, naturally, if they could kill someone. Geraint had been brought up on tales of knights-at-arms and Icelandic warriors, but he did not imagine blood. Charles had disappointed his father by taking no pleasure in foxhunting or shooting. He rather thought he could not. Philip was not really listening to the conversation. He was looking at the juxtaposition of textures in the grass, the flowers, and the silks, and the very rapid colour changes that were taking place as the sky darkened. Browning and vanishing of red, efflorescence and deepening of blues. Tom imagined the thud and suck of a bomb, the flying stone and mortar, and could not quite imagine the crushing or burning of flesh. He thought of his own skull and his own ribs. Bone under skin and tendons. No one was safe.

  Basil and Humphry Wellwood had begun to argue about Bimetallism and the Gold Standard. They came across the grass, breathing wrath and rhetoric, pointing decisive fingers into the evening air. Basil was a member of the Gold Standard Defence Association. Humphry supported the Bimetallic League.

  That summer of 1895 was the height of the Kaffir Circus boom. Shares in real and fictive seams of gold were feverishly traded. Basil dined with the Randlords and had made a fortune, in gold and in paper. Humphry publicly used the jibe that a mine was a hole in the ground owned by a liar. He also said in public that the financial press took underhand douceurs to promote or condemn prospectuses. Basil suspected Humphry of being responsible for pseudonymous articles in satirical journals, mocking Croesus, Midas and the Golden Calf.

  He also suspected him of using confidential knowledge from his employment in the Bank of England to attack that institution. In 1893 it was rumoured that the Chief Cashier, Frank May, had made huge, unauthorised advances to his son, a speculative broker. Worse, he had made advances to himself. Through 1893 and 1894 rumours seethed and bubbled. May had made advances to the City Editor of The Times. The Bank’s governors were genteel amateurs, could not produce a balance-sheet, had no independent auditors. Basil thought he detected Humphry’s style in some of the attacks. He was himself not happy with the state of affairs. But he believed the Old Lady should put her affairs privately in order. What Humphry was doing, if he was doing it, was treachery to the Bank, and treachery to Basil, who had put him there. Moreover the writings endangered Basil’s own dealings, and even his reputation.

  They joined the group in time to hear Tartarinov’s remarks about blowing up obstacles. Basil muttered to his brother that he kept odd company for a man in a responsible position. Humphry said with even-toned bad temper that his beliefs were his own business.

  “Not if they include condoning explosions and skulduggery. Where your activities are not ludicrous, they are murderous.”

  “And gold-grubbing and wage-slavery are not murderous? Do you know how goldminers live? Or the poor creatures who stitched your fine shirt, and bled onto it?”

  “You will not better their condition by parading along the Strand in your frock-coat and silk hat, selling pamphlets.”

  Humphry began to speak the speech he made at meetings. He described the three million people swarming in the fetid wilderness beyond the Bank, without food or clothes to keep them in health, or beds to sleep in. The Social Democrats had claimed, in their despised pamphlets, that 25 per cent of workers earned too little to subsist without hunger and sickness. Mr. Charles Booth had challenged this figure and done his own meticulous survey of the poor. And he had revised the figure—upwards, Basil, upwards. Not 25 per cent but 30 per cent of working families tried to survive on less than £12 os od per month. Think, said Humphry provocatively, tilting his champagne glass at his brother, how much of what you regard as personal necessities can be purchased for £12 os od.

  Basil did not feel able to mention the considerable moneys he disbursed to charities.

  Humphry went on. He described the furious decline of the state of an injured worker—a man with a crushed hand or foot, or an eye blinded by splinters. In no time at all he had no house, no food, his children starved, their clothes were pawned, they slept in the workhouse or in the streets, his wife had to sell herself for bread. Mr. Booth and Mr. Rowntree had looked into schooling. At times of no special distress, they found, there were 55,000 children in London schools alone who were too weak from hunger to be expected to learn anything. “Fifty-five thousand is a large number. Now, imagine them one by one, child by child…”

  Basil said that he was not a meeting, to be worked up. He would like to find practical solutions to the problem of poverty. He did not think it would be solved by fomenting revolution, or blowing up public buildings and injuring innocent bystanders.

  Humphry said, as he had said before in meetings,

  “I once walked through Poplar behind two ragged men. They bent continuously to the pavement, picking up orange peel and apple cores, grape stems and crumbs. They cracked the pits of plums between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked single undigested oats out of horse dung. Can you imagine?”

  Florence Cain, who was lifting a shrimp patty to her lips, dropped it on the grass.

  Violet said “Really, Humphry, I see no need to disgust and upset the children.”

  “Don’t you?” said Humphry. “I hope they will remember, and remember again when they are choosing how to live.”

  The boys and girls listened. Tom tasted the plum kernels and oats in his dry mouth. He knew he would sleep badly. Philip wrinkled his brow and backed away. Those lives held up to horrify were his life. He was one of the many who were poor. And he had left his poor mother, and made his sisters poorer. He felt dully angry—not with Basil, the rich man, but with Humphry, who had made him into an object, had appropriated his hunger.

  Charles Wellwood was truly affected. He had a logical mind and a Christian upbringing. In school chapels and Sunday services, chaplains and parsons in speckless surplices repeated Christ’s injunction. “Sell all thou hast and give to the poor.” Charles thought this was quite clear, and his mentor
s and family were either foolish or sinful not to understand. The Christian message was levelling and anarchic. Nobody appeared to hear it. Except possibly his uncle Humphry, who was possibly also writhing with discomfort about the creature comforts that lay about him. He thought he might ask Humphry, one of these days, what was to be done. Out of earshot of his parents. His mother was a good and fearful Lutheran, who gave away both time and money, visiting hospitals for the poor, organising bazaars and clothing collections. But she ate from Meissen porcelain with silver spoons. There were hideous inconsistencies.

  Dorothy said to Griselda “Let’s go away and look at the lanterns in the orchard. You’ll have to mind your nice shoes.”

  “Silly shoes,” said Griselda, following her cousin.

  Geraint automatically sympathised with anyone who was not shouting. He admired Basil’s self-restraint. He loved the sheen on his waistcoat and the sparkle of his studs. There was a mystery in correct dress. There was a mystery in money. He was sick of homespun and home-made. He had secreted a glass of champagne behind the black lacquer puppet-boxes, and thought it was delicious and complex, cold bubbles bursting on his tongue, the mist on the glass, the transparent gold liquid. Some people had this every day. Some people did not sleep under a leaky roof in an old mansion with a cold wind blowing through it, for the sake of mounds of clay and visions of glazed vessels. Money was freedom. Money was aesthetic. Money was Arab stallions, not rough cobs. Money was not being shouted at. (Even though Humphry was shouting at Basil.) Money was freedom. Money was life. Something like that, Geraint thought. The brothers had always stepped back from the brink of a real rift. They sparred, and grumbled, and spoke of something else. No one supposed, when Humphry provocatively mentioned Barney Barnato, that this time would be different.

  Barnato was a genial, smooth-talking East Ender, who had made a fortune in the diamond fields of Kimberley. He was a founding member of a club in Angel Court, off Throgmorton Street, which was jokingly known as the Thieves’ Kitchen. Barnato had moved from diamonds to gold mines, and was in the process of founding his own bank. He generated a fever of greed and excitement and risk. Basil had invested in his enterprises, and was uneasy about it. An article had appeared in a satirical paper, the Domino, over the pseudonym, The March Hare. It represented the Thieves Kitchen as a gambling Hell in which a recognisable Barnato appeared as a demon croupier, raking the stakes into a fiery pit. It compared him also to Bunyan’s “Demas (gentleman-like)” who “stood a little off the road against a little hill called Lucre, and called to the pilgrims Ho! turn aside hither, and I will show you a thing. Here is a silver mine and some digging in it for treasure; if you will come, with a little pains you may richly provide for yourself. Christian asked Demas Is not the place dangerous? Hath it not hindered many in their pilgrimage? Demas said Not very dangerous, except to those that are careless. But withal he blushed as he spake.”

  The March Hare had played elegantly with that giveaway blush. Humphry made the mistake of quoting Bunyan in the argument with Basil. This reminded both of them of The March Hare’s accusations. But Humphry quoted further into Pilgrim’s Progress, passages not in the Domino attack. Barnato led people into rashness and loss, said Humphry. “Whether they fell into the pit by looking over the brink thereof, or whether they went down to dig, or whether they were smothered in the bottom by the damps that commonly arrive, of these things I am not certain …” People perish like Mr. By-Ends, said Humphry.

  Basil said “You know your text very well.”

  “We all know the Pilgrim’s Progress, from childhood. And you must know it is apt.”

  “We do not all have it at our fingertips, to quote in libellous articles, to which we dare not put our name.”

  The accusation had been made. Humphry could neither bluster, nor deny.

  “You cannot deny the argument has weight? That the warnings in it need to be heard?”

  “A man should not do one kind of work by day, and stir up mud by night, to stick on his colleagues. And to harm his family,” Basil added.

  Humphry sneered. He did not feel like sneering—he felt he was himself on the brink of a pit. But the form of the quarrel required him to sneer.

  “You cannot have been so foolish as to implicate yourself—or your family—in any of Barnato’s gambles?”

  “You do not know what you are talking about. You purvey malicious chatter which can do real harm—”

  “I do what my conscience leads me to do.”

  “Your conscience is a will o’ the wisp, leading into a bog,” said Basil, rather cleverly, twisting the metaphor his way.

  Violet said “Let us talk about something else. Let us make peace.”

  Basil said “I think I cannot stay in this gathering any longer. Come, Katharina. It is time to leave.”

  Katharina said “Very well.” She was conscious that it was hard to sweep out when your spare clothes were in your host’s bedroom. She said to Charles

  “Fetch Griselda.”

  “She’ll not be happy,” said Charles, sotto voce.

  Dorothy and Griselda were fetched back from the orchard. Katharina told Griselda they were going home. “Why?”

  “Never mind. We are going home. Put on your cloak, please.”

  Griselda stood in her party dress, white, like a pillar of salt. She had not a defiant nature. But she had not a compliant nature, either. Tears brimmed in her eyes. She swayed. Dorothy said

  “We have been looking forward to midsummer for ever. We have not had the fire, or the music, or the dancing. How can we have them without Griselda and Charles? How can we have the music without Charles? Their beds are made up…”

  Basil said to his wife “I really cannot stay.”

  “Perhaps we might leave the children with their cousins. It is a time that they have been looking forward…”

  “As you wish. I simply do not want to stay.”

  “Then we will go,” said Katharina, signalling to her maid, putting out her hands to Olive, who had come to see what was happening. She did not feel she could apologise for Basil, indeed, she felt he was justified, but she had no wish to ruin the party. Violet appeared at her side, murmuring sensible things about the later return of the children. The carriage came and was loaded. No one went to wave goodbye. Humphry went and refilled his glass, drained it, and refilled it again. He was full of an electric sense that everything was at risk. For the moment, there was the party. He called for music.

  Dorothy said to Griselda

  “The first thing is to find you a dressing-up dress, like ours.”

  Griselda was still white and stricken. Violet took her hand to lead her into the nursery. Violet instructed Philip and Phyllis to light the lanterns.

  Griselda stood in the nursery and undid the buttons on the pink dress. She stepped out of it, and it subsided, Miss Muffet reduced to a tuffet. She ought to put it on a hanger. She left it where it lay.

  Violet said that the Rhine-maiden dress was the thing. It would look pretty on Griselda.

  This was an old evening dress of Olive’s, cut down by Violet, and securely stitched into a girl-sized fancy dress. It was sea-green pleated silk over a grass-green underskirt, with a gilded girdle. Violet adjusted it. Griselda put up her hands and undid the tight coils of her hair. Violet brushed it out over her shoulders. Griselda had eyes which would normally be called grey, or hazel, which became, when she was dressed in green, suddenly emerald. Dorothy said “You look lovely.” Griselda wriggled. “I can move, at least.”

  When she rejoined the party, everyone clapped. Humphry took another glass of champagne and proposed a toast to Greensleeves. Violet said it was the Rhine-maiden dress, and Anselm Stern began suddenly to sing a version of the opening music of Rheingold, bowing over Griselda’s hand. He had a clear, high voice.

  They danced. The music was a trio: Charles on the fiddle, Geraint on the flute, Tom on a mixture of a small drum and a penny whistle. They played “Greensleeves” for Griselda, and “O
du lieber Augustin” for August Steyning and Anselm Stern. It was a developing tradition that the old danced with the young. Humphry whirled Dorothy, her small squarish feet racing to keep time, whilst Prosper Cain revolved calmly with Florence. Olive danced with Julian, who was neat and graceful. August Steyning led out Imogen Fludd, and then danced with her stately mother. Humphry released Dorothy, who was breathless, at the request of Leslie Skinner, who handled her as though she was breakable and hopped over tufts in an odd way. Anselm Stern danced with Griselda, humming to himself, capering like his own puppet prince. The Tartarinovs danced together, moving like one whirligig. Anselm Stern bowed to Dorothy, who backed away, and said she did not want to dance any more.

  Violet Grimwith insisted that Philip dance with her. He flushed crimson in the lantern light, and shambled to and fro, staring at his feet, until she released him, and took her turn with Humphry. He backed away into the shrubbery, where he found Dorothy, sitting on a bench in the near-darkness, in a kind of nook in the hedge. Both of them were in search of solitude and felt constrained to be polite. Dorothy said, with Fabian truthfulness, that you could have too much dancing. Philip agreed, with a kind of snort.

  They sat in silence. Dorothy said

  “No one asked you what you wanted to be.”

  “Just as well, probably.”

  “I said I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know I did, until I said it, that was what was odd. Because I do.”

  Dorothy believed that if you told someone something truthfully, and honestly, you were giving them something, a kind of respect. Philip said