The Children's Book

6

Nutcracker Cottage, like many English things, appeared at first sight to be an instance of pure whimsy, but was in fact more complicated. It was a restored labourer’s cottage, with new thatch, and small recessed windows in thick white walls. The front garden had long beds along a flagged path, thick with flowers—hollyhocks, delphiniums, foxgloves and pinks, sweet williams and bachelors’ buttons, with a haze of self-sown forget-me-nots. The front door opened directly into the parlour, with walls covered by what William Morris had called “honest whitewash, on which sun and shadow play so pleasantly.” The parlour had been made by knocking two rooms into one. At one end was an alcove-study papered with Morris’s pink and gold honeysuckle, and containing a plain table. There was little furniture—a heavy dining-table, some heavy, mediaeval-looking chairs, a modern box piano. The plainness was contradicted, to an extent, by a scattering of incongruous pots, on the mantelshelf, in the hearth, on the windowsill. There were lunatic mugs with smiling faces, a piece of fine Italian gold and indigo majolica, decorated with arabesques and maenads, an imposing piece of Sèvres-style Minton, in that violent dark sugar-pink, with Pierrot and Columbine on an oval plaque amongst roses and clematis. Standing in a corner, four feet high, was an object that amazed Philip and was immediately identified by Prosper Cain as a version of the Prometheus Vase shown by Minton at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Prometheus in fleshy earthenware sprawled on the gleaming turquoise dome of the lid. A green-gold eagle perched on his thigh and belly, and tore at his crimson liver. The tall handles were blond-bearded chained Titans in mail shirts. The body of the vase was painted with fury, a whirling scene of mounted, turbaned oriental hunters and hounds, spearing a hippopotamus at bay, its painted mouth wide open, displaying tusks, molars, and a coral tongue and throat. At the foot of the vase snakes were coiled and intertwined with acanthus leaves. Philip stared. He could not begin to comprehend the glazes, let alone the subject-matter.

The puppet theatre was already set up on the dining-table, which had been displaced to make room for the audience. It was a large, black lacquered box, veiled by black velvet curtains, with imitation onyx pillars and a gilded architrave. The table itself was covered by a velvet pall, underneath which the puppet caskets were stacked.

August Steyning offered everyone tea in the garden. His housekeeper, Mrs. Betts, was arranging sandwiches and an urn on the round stone table on the lawn. The garden was surrounded by trees—a walnut, an ash, hawthorns, sloes—and fenced, with a wicket-gate that led to the wild, a little wood on a rising hillside, in which, Steyning said, he had hidden surprises for children bored by adult talk.

Anselm Stern was wearing a soot-coloured, not-entirely-British Norfolk jacket over his dark drainpipe trousers. He stood with his teacup (Minton, Dresden shape, painted with pansies) and spoke in German to Vasily Tartarinov. He was hesitant in English, but became rapid and passionate in German. Tartarinov, much taller, wearing his working smock, bent over him, speaking softly and insistently. The English formed an impression of conspiratorial secrets, partly because the only words they understood were the names of the recently assassinated French President, Carnot, and the guillotined anarchist, Vaillant, who had thrown a nail-bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Yet a few moments later, Tartarinov joined authoritatively in a discussion about royal treasuries between Olive Wellwood and Prosper Cain with some knowledgeable observations about the gold and silver objects in the possession of the Tsar. Etta Skinner, wearing a shapeless flowing apple-green tent, took her teacup gingerly and stared critically at the sandwich plate, which had the Three Graces dancing on a floral meadow, surrounded by sugar-pink. August Steyning smiled at her. He said she probably thought he should have earthenware plates, bearing the marks of the fingers that made them, was that not William Morris’s diktat? Etta said that was indeed her preference, but everyone had a right to his own taste. August said he liked things absurd and fragile, and that the skill of the painter and gilder was as much skill as that of the moulder. Philip stood, looking sullen, taking in the argument, thinking of his mother. Prosper Cain said he had a weakness for Minton who had designed some bold pieces—including the ceramic pillars—for the museum. Olive Wellwood described how, as a small child, she had made up stories about people on teacups.

“We had some precious ones that only came out on Sunday, and feast days, with girls in pink floating petticoats clinging to craggy ledges with bushes with roots in the air. I gave them all names, and worked out how they got stranded on those stony places, and how they were rescued by eagles, just as the North Wind set about to blow them over…”

When Olive spoke, she made an electric silence around her. She was looking lovely, in a tea-gown of cream Liberty lawn, covered with field flowers, cornflowers, poppies and marguerites. She had a straw hat with a scarlet ribbon. When she saw they were all listening, she laughed, and said

“I still do that. People on plates, sipping from glasses they will never empty, plucking roses they never put in their hair. I imagine them escaping, out of their flat circle. I had an idea about two-dimensional beings trying to locate themselves in a three-dimensional world. And then the three-dimensional beings would enter another dimension in just the same way. Catch glimpses, of other life-forms—”

Anselm Stern said something to Tartarinov about Porzellan-sozialismus.

“Ah, yes, m-m-m,” said Tartarinov. “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s definition of utopian socialism, m-m-m, the pleasant and frangible vista on a teacup. Porcelain socialism.”

“Maybe that is all we are,” said Humphry, ruefully. “Porcelain socialists, or in the case of Etta, earthenware socialists. When the just society comes, we will have quite other ideas of beauty. I agree with Morris, Sèvres is an abomination. I am shocked at you, August.”

“To be frivolous is to be human,” said August. “To be pointlessly skilful is to be human, as far as I can see. I hope you would not consider legislating to prevent me from having a Sèvres vessel.”

Humphry frowned. “We must hope to make a society where nobody wants anything so absurd.”

Etta nodded vehemently. Leslie Skinner said that a new society must produce new patterns, as yet not thought of. Made by craftsmen, not by wage-slaves. Humphry looked round for Philip, but he had sidled away to go back and look at the Prometheus Vase.

The children, most of them, had wandered, as instructed, into the wood. In it they found creatures squatting in hollows, perching on roots, warty toads, scaly lizards, an owl with matted clay feathers and amber glass eyes, a pair of malevolent crows. Tied to their necks and claws were shiny scarlet boxes of sugar flowers, and burnt toffees. They wandered, nibbling, along a rapid little stream, over a wooden bridge. Hedda had brought the shoeful of manikins, from which she would not be separated.

Philip stayed behind. He wanted to stay inside and study the vase, but came out to be given tea and cake, and found something just as interesting. This was a fountain, which was, like the two-faced jars and mugs indoors, and the grotesque creatures in the wood, the work of the Martin Brothers, which appealed to August Steyning’s theatrical imagination. It was shaped in a series of thick dishes, glazed in muddy greens and browns and occasionally vivid ceramic emerald slime. The stem of it was intertwined roots, serpents, worms and creeping ivies. The dishes were inhabited and clung to by toads and newts and fish with legs.

Behind the column, blending into it, was a figure of Pan, knob-horned, bearded, squinting and grinning, with water pouring down his smooth torso and into the shaggy hide of his haunches and over his cleft hooves. He brandished his pipes, through which water and green vegetable threads dripped, slowly.

Philip pretended to be absorbed in it, and then was.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder.

“I am told you are an expert on pots.”

It was Arthur Dobbin, who had accompanied the Fludd ladies. Philip shrugged and shook his head. He muttered that he come from Five Towns, that was all.

“And what do you make of this monstrous creation?”

Philip said it was clever. It was interesting. It was difficult, he should think. Dobbin gave him a little lecture on the Martin Brothers and their strange craft. He said he had been told Philip wanted to make pots. Was this right? Was this why the fountain intrigued him?

Philip said guardedly that yes, he did want to make pots.

“Not like this, exactly. This is—alive and very clever—but I want—I want—”

He remembered that Dobbin was associated with the aqueous pot at Todefright.

“I work with a potter,” Dobbin informed him. “I work with Benedict Fludd, the husband of that lady. I try to help, but he finds me inept. I believe in hand-crafts, but my talent isn’t—isn’t for working with clay. Mr. Fludd is not a patient man. I do believe he is a genius. I should like to encourage a community of artists—that is my dearest ambition—it would be easier if I were more skilful with my hands.”

His tone was a strange mixture of cheerful enthusiasm and stolid gloom. He squeezed Philip’s shoulder. Philip said

“I should like to see Mr. Fludd’s work. I saw the pot—back at the house—I saw it—I’ve never seen anything better—”

Dobbin squeezed again, and relaxed.

“Where do you go from here?”

“I dunno. They seem to be thinking about it.”

“I might be able to help.”

August Steyning came out of his house with a large drum, and beat a tattoo, proclaiming in his high, clear voice, that the show was about to begin.

When they were all indoors, and seated, he stood before the curtained box, and spoke to them.

They were about to see the Sternbild Marionettes, from Munich, perform E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann. August wanted to offer a word or two about marionettes. Many of those present would know Punch and Judy. He himself had his own Punch and Judy. They, and their German cousin, Kasperl, were honest artists, with ancient traditions. They were glove puppets, and glove puppets were of the earth, earthy. They spring up from below, like underground beings, gnomes or dwarves, they belabour each other with cudgels and go back into the depths, of their booths, of our human consciousness. Marionettes, by contrast, are creatures of the upper air, like elves, like sylphs, who barely touch the ground. They dance in geometric perfection in a world more intense, less hobbledehoy, than our own. Heinrich von Kleist, in a suggestive and mysterious essay, claims daringly that these figures perform more perfectly than human actors. They exhibit the laws of movement; their limbs rise and fall in perfect arcs, according to the laws of physics. They have—unlike human actors—no need to charm, or to exact sympathy. Kleist goes so far as to say that the puppet and God are two points on a circle. The earliest shadow puppets were in fact gods, the presences of gods. “I found in Amsterdam some exemplars of the oriental shadow-figures, the Wayang Golek, whose movements were made by trained priests. Herr Stern and I have studied these marvellous beings, and introduced some refinements into his German figures.”

He bowed. His pale hair flipped over his face. He stepped behind the box.

• • •

An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made of silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own laws of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight. August’s flute was heard, and some were ready to listen and some were not. The curtains opened on a child’s bedroom. He sat against his pillows. His nurse, in comfortable grey, bustled about him, and her shadow loomed over him on the white wall.

She told the small Nathanael about the Sandman. “He steals the eyes of naughty little children,” she said, comfortably, “and feeds them to his own children, who live in a nest on the moon, and open their beaks like owlets.”

There was a heavy tap-tap of slow feet ascending the stairs. The backcloth showed the shadow of the turning of the banister, and the rising head and shoulders of the shadow of the old man, hook-nosed, hump-backed, claw-handed, stump, stump, his coat-skirts swinging.

The puppet-child pulled the blankets over his head, and the stage darkened.

In the next scene Nathanael’s father, the alchemist, and his horrible visitor, Dr. Copelius, bent over their secret work in a cauldron. The stage was full of shimmering firelight. Nathanael hid, and was discovered. Copelius waved his ebony stick. The father fell dead and crumpled into the flames. Smoke rose.

Happier scenes followed. The grown Nathanael, his friend Lothar, and Lothar’s sister Clara, met and embraced in a garden. Clara had spun-gold hair and a blue silk dress. The garden was full of roses and lilies and blue light. They danced to flute music.

Then Nathanael was in his study in Rome, surrounded by tiny books, a globe, an astrolabe, the articulated skeletons of tiny creatures which danced furiously together when the room was empty of humans. Snakes, rats, lizards, cats. They gave the pleasure that the miniature gives, the tiny perfect replica of something that arouses an inexplicable delight in the onlooker. Nathanael in this pleasant place was visited by the Copelius-puppet in disguise, wearing a cloak, a brimmed hat and an eye-shade, carrying a pedlar’s tray of glinting glass eyes and tiny tubes which were spyglasses. Nathanael bought a spyglass. When he looked into it, holding it to his eye in his white china fist, a circle of rosy light appeared, moving as he moved his head.

And then, on one side of the stage, there was a female figure in a window, in a rosy halo, and Nathanael at the opposite side, staring through his glass. She wore a plain white silky dress, which the light filled with pink flares and sanguine folds. She moved very little—she raised her little hand to her calm round mouth, to cover a yawn, she turned her head modestly down.

The ball scene, which followed, was a triumph. A musical box played, invisible. Couples whirled across the stage, gliding smoothly in a waltz, capering extravagantly in polka and hornpipe, curtseying and bowing. Nathanael danced with Olimpia. The puppetmaster, with extraordinary skill, created simultaneously the agitated movements of his hero, and the mechanical glide of his beloved. The male puppet rushed busily around the female, ushering, supporting, interrogating, bowing over her hand, trembling with emotion. She repeated her series of restricted gestures, the graceful inclination of the head, the raising of the elegant hand to the pink, round mouth.

The curtains closed, and reopened. Nathanael burst into the room where Olimpia’s princely father was quarrelling with Dr. Copelius. They menaced each other with ebony canes. Copelius leaped into the air like a furious frog. They laid hands on Olimpia, who lay still, draped over a satin chair. They grasped her, one by the neck, one by the feet. They tugged. Olimpia trembled, but did not struggle; the representation of her minimal movement was very fine. Suddenly and terribly she came apart in their hands, exploding all over the stage, her head flying upwards with floating hair, her trunk flying sideways, extruding a coil of metal wires. The prince and the doctor menaced each other with an arm and a leg. Hedda clapped her hands, and an infant anarchist began to cry and had to be comforted. Nathanael collapsed in despair.

Lothar and Clara reappeared, lifted him, restored him to life. They went walking on a church tower, against battlements. Nathanael had his arm around Clara’s blue waist. And then Nathanael’s shadow rose huge in the limelight as the blue sky darkened and began to menace him, independent of him, larger than life. He turned to face it, and began a gyratory, jerky dance of shadow-boxing, like a hanged man on the end of his strings. Lothar took hold of Clara and led her away from the maddened whirl. Nathanael’s movements became wilder, jerkier, less and less human, and his shadow clawed at him out of the backcloth. He leaped up, cycling his legs in emptiness, for a moment in flight and weightless, and then plunged over the parapet to his doom.

Everyone applauded. Tom felt winded, as though he had been in a fight, and lost. He looked furtively at Julian, Charles and Geraint, to see how they had responded to the play, and saw that they were all smiling and clapping enthusiastically, so he too clapped. Philip clapped. He had been interested above all by the china faces of the characters. How did you decide, when a character went through so much, and could have only one expression, what that expression should be? He could see how Dr. Copelius could do well with a mouth that both smiled and sneered, but Nathanael was exactly right, serious and not strong, delicately thin and not quite smiling. His mad dance at the end had showed more of the shadow than the solid face. That was clever. And the difference between the “real” puppet and Olimpia the puppet-automaton was wonderfully done. To glide with a caricature of the gliding all puppets did—that was something. He clapped.

Dorothy hadn’t liked Cinderella, and didn’t like this. Her head was full of the idea of spiders, and strings, and stings. She thought of the clever fingers controlling the story and its characters, and she thought, only half-consciously, of all such control as dangerous and to-be-resisted. She enjoyed the disintegration of Olimpia. She told herself she couldn’t see the point, but she could, and didn’t like it.

Griselda did like it. She felt a freedom in the otherworld inside the box, where things were livelier, more beautiful and more terrible than the mundane. Clara’s blue silk robe was magical in its tiny pleats where her own Miss Muffet dress was a monstrosity. Olimpia was an excellent parody of, and commentary on, the world of calling-cards and teacups. There were better things in the world than she was being offered. The puppetmaster knew that.

He came out, Anselm Stern, with August Steyning, from behind the velvet box that now concealed his creatures, and bowed to his audience, shyly, without meeting their eyes. Mrs. Betts brought more refreshments. Anselm Stern disappeared again. Griselda looked at Dorothy, who looked cross.

“I’d like to look at the puppets. Shall we?”

“I’m sure he’d be pleased if you did. I don’t really want to.”

Griselda hesitated.

“Go on,” said Dorothy. “He’ll be pleased.”

Griselda went and stood beside Anselm Stern, who was sorting and winding the wires, and putting the little figures, now inanimate, into their boxes or beds. They stared out of their pale faces with black intense eyes, in no particular direction. Griselda said

“Ich danke Ihnen, Herr Stern, ich danke Ihnen für eine grosse Freude. Das war ausgezeichnet.”

The puppetmaster looked up and smiled.

“Du sprichst Deutsch?”

“Meine Mutter ist aus Deutschland. Ich lerne nur, ich kann nicht gut sprechen. Aber die Sprache gefällt mir. Und die Märchen. Ist es möglich, Der Sandmann zu lesen?”

“Natürlich. Es ist ein Meisterwerk von E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ich schicke dir das Buch, sobald ich nach Hause komme. Deutsch mit Hoffmann zu lernen, das ist etwas.”

He stood up, and rather formally offered her his hand. Then he took a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket, and asked her to write her name and address in it. Griselda was elated, both because she had had a real conversation in German, and because she was to receive a book of fairytales.

Arthur Dobbin was thinking about Philip. He wanted to suggest to someone that Philip should go back with the Fludds and himself to Purchase House. Benedict Fludd was in need of an assistant. Dobbin had hoped to be that assistant, and had failed. The clay squirmed to shapelessness under his fingers. His kilns aborted. Fludd had told him, when he left for Todefright, not to bother to come back. He wanted to go back. Fludd had genius, and Dobbin wanted to be near it. He wanted to take Philip as a peace-offering. He considered asking Seraphita Fludd, but she was not in the habit of making decisions; she endured, stately and smiling. Her daughters appeared to be like her. Geraint might listen, but Dobbin sensed that Geraint did not like him. And Geraint was afraid of his father’s moods, like everyone else. There was also Prosper Cain, who came to Purchase House for advice on ceramics, since Fludd would not go to him. Dobbin found decision-making hard. He watched Philip watch the puppets, intent and thoughtful. Dobbin wanted to be part of a wider group, a fellowship. He looked at Philip with a preliminary love. Lydd in the Romney Marshes was a perfect place for a community, even if Fludd was a difficult figurehead. Dobbin could smooth things. He thought that might be his vocation.

He had come to Lydd by accident. Like many of his kind he had changed his life as a result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe. Carpenter, with his working-class friend George Merrill, lived a life of studied simplicity, cultivating the earth, wearing homespun and homemade sandals, sunbathing and windbathing naked to the elements. Dobbin had heard Carpenter lecture, in Sheffield, on the evils of civilisation, and the way to cure them. Dobbin had responded violently to the anarchist saint’s reasonable charisma.

He was the plump son of a doctor’s widow. He was dutifully studying medicine, as his father would have wished, and continually failed the medical exams. He imagined, timidly, passionate friendships with fellow students, but was almost pathologically dumb with embarrassment. When he heard Carpenter, he knew that the only answers were a complete change of life, or self-slaughter. He thought he was not imaginative. He had no idea where to look for a new life.

Some of this he managed to mutter to Carpenter, over the convivial beer and smoke after the lecture. Carpenter recognised him for what he was, and invited him to visit Milthorpe.

There he enjoyed George Merrill’s salmon pie, and watched the two men quietly knitting. The house was occupied by a shifting population of seekers, idealists and the lost. There were Cambridge men and farmworkers, emancipated women and unsatisfied clerics. Dobbin gave up medicine and got a job in a pharmacy. At Milthorpe one summer he bathed naked in the stream with a gipsyish wanderer called Martin Calvert. Calvert had trained for the priesthood and given it up. He had been a lay member of a religious community in Glamorgan. He had learned to weave at a Crafts community in Norfolk. When Dobbin met him, he had decided to be a potter. To work with the stuff of the earth itself, he said. Dobbin was immediately taken with this idea of an art of the earth. They noticed, blushing and laughing as they bathed, that their members were erect and swaying in the water—“like charmed snakes” Martin laughed, and Dobbin was charmed.

They went on a walking tour, in search of a master of ceramics. They went to the South Kensington Museum and saw vessels made by Benedict Fludd. Martin Calvert said that this man was a master, and they might try to find him. Dobbin saw the perfection of the pots, through Martin’s eyes, as Martin described them, the proportions, the subtle glaze, the authority.

They walked south, in search of Fludd. They found him in Purchase House, a partly derelict Elizabethan manor, hidden in woodland in the flat marshy plain beyond Lydd. Martin spoke for both of them, with engaging enthusiasm. Fludd was in an expansive mood, and accepted their offer of help with a firing. The firing was a disaster. Fludd’s mood darkened. He cursed them. Dobbin was almost sure that he uttered a formal curse, out of a commination service. The next morning, Martin was not there. He had taken his pack, crept out before dawn and disappeared.

Dobbin stayed where he was, and waited for a message, which did not come. He avoided Benedict Fludd who was now in semi-retreat—and tried to be helpful to Seraphita and her family. He couldn’t make pots, but he could cook. He cooked fresh fish, and vegetable pasties, and custard tarts. The Fludd women could not cook, and they were at the time too poor to employ a cook. They accepted him. His heart was broken, but he was too genuinely humble to make much of it.

This continued for six months or so. Fludd mostly pretended not to see Dobbin, and Seraphita gave him small sums of money to do shopping and repairs. One day, he went into the village church. The marshes are spread with imposing churches, built for rich farmers and seafarers before the sea receded and the waterways silted up. This church was dedicated to St. Edburga. To Dobbin’s surprise it had a small Burne-Jones window, showing the saint in a graceful white gown, barefoot amongst flowery meadows. Dobbin knelt down under her grass-and-golden light, put his head in his hands, and found himself weeping, with tears spouting between his fingers.

Someone came up behind him, touched him gently, and offered help.

That was how Arthur Dobbin met Frank Mallett, the curate at St. Edburga’s. He was thin, blond and skinny, with a pretty little moustache, and a Shakespearean pointed beard. He was a bachelor and lived in a cottage in the village of Puxty. He was not Martin, and not Edward Carpenter. In some ways—shyness, lack of self-respect—he resembled Dobbin, so that he easily abandoned the roles of counsellor or rescuer, and became a friend. They talked of the dream of a community or fellowship, of the new life that could start in the draggled barns and outhouses of Purchase House to the benefit of everyone.

Dobbin decided that the only thing to do was to ask Geraint. Geraint was talking to Julian and Florence Cain about boarding school and lessons at home. Geraint would have liked to be at Eton or Marlowe, he thought, but was coached in Latin and History by Frank Mallett, and shared a maths tutor with the sons of the local squire. He was not pleased to be interrupted by Dobbin, earnestly asking about Philip.

“Go and ask Mama,” he said.

Dobbin looked depressed. Both of them knew she would give no answer. Florence said she had seen Philip’s drawings, which were amazingly good. Geraint said if he was that good, they were not doing him a kindness to bury him in the marshes with no one to talk to. Florence said he had been sleeping in a tomb in the basement. Florence’s interest roused Geraint. He said that he thought his father might be pleased to think about Philip if Florence’s father were to recommend him—send a letter or something. So Prosper Cain was consulted, and he spoke to Seraphita, who smiled pacifically and said she was sure it would all turn out well.