The Children's Book

14

The winter that followed St. Martin’s Summer was sodden and severe. The end of golden 1895 was struck with gloom. On Monday December 23rd the whole Tartarinov family rushed uphill to Todefright, brandishing a telegram. The Wellwoods gathered in their hall already decorated for Christmas with green boughs, holly and mistletoe. Stepniak was dead, said Vasily Tartarinov. Humphry had visions of bombs, or furtive stabbing. Tartarinov was in tears. Stepniak had indeed died violently, possibly accidentally, possibly not. He had walked onto a railway line, near his home in Bedford Park, and had been cut down by a train, and killed, more or less instantly. It was a local train, on a single track. The driver had whistled and braked, whistled and braked, in vain. It was hard to understand, said Tartarinov, waving expressive hands, mopping his face, how Stepniak could have failed to get out of the way. Maybe his foot was caught. Maybe he had been overwhelmed by personal sorrows and the sorrows of the world, and had decided to end his life. We shall not see his like again, said Vasily Tartarinov, whilst the Wellwood family ordered tea to be brewed, and tried to help him compose himself. No, we shall not see his like again, Humphry agreed, wishing the Tartarinov children would stop howling, and Mrs. Tartarinov would cease to look as though she might choke with emotion.

Olive held on to the back of a chair—it seemed rude to sit down, but her muscles ached all over. She kneaded her distended flanks, surreptitiously, with her fingers. Tartarinov’s vivid imaginings of Stepniak’s torn body reminded her that soon, soon she would herself face pain, and possible death, of one, or two people.

Tom had been about to walk down to the Tartarinovs’, to read Virgil with Vasily. He was clutching his Aeneid, and his exercise book. He tried to take his mind away from Stepniak’s fate before he had really imagined it, and failed. He saw the shining rail, stretching before and after, and the black, thundering weight, in its shroud of steam, bearing down, a final dark rushing. It would have been quick, it must have been quick. A moving wall of black, a solid tunnel opening. Facilis descensus Averno.

• • •

Stepniak’s funeral was on the 28th. Christmas came between, and the Wellwoods put up a tree, hung with baubles, bright with candles, and sang together, “The First Nowell,” “Silent Night.” They carved two geese and ate Christmas pudding, spherical in eerily flaming blue sheets, like a captive will o’ the wisp, Olive thought, inventing a story about a flame-imp set to work in a suburban kitchen, causing chaos. After Christmas, before the imminent birth, the larger children were sent to spend New Year with the Basil Wellwoods, in Portman Square. Humphry took them to London, delivered them, and went on to join Stepniak’s funeral cortège, which processed slowly from Bedford Park to Waterloo Station, from where the coffin would travel by train to the crematorium at Woking.

It was a day of steady, smutty London drizzle. The coffin was covered with a blanket of brilliant flowers, tied with red ribbons. Radicals and revolutionaries from all Europe marched behind it. Hundreds of people gathered at Waterloo. Speeches were made in German, Italian, Yiddish, French and Polish. The crowd stood for over an hour and listened to the socialist and anarchist leaders, Keir Hardie, Eduard Bernstein, Malatesta, Prince Kropotkin, and John Burns, the workingman, unionist, Fabian and Radical MP for Battersea, who had organised the proceedings. Eleanor Marx spoke as she always did, passionately, lucidly; she said Stepniak had loved women, and women would grieve for him. William Morris, hugely fat and breathing badly, spoke for English socialists and condemned Russian oppression. This was Morris’s last speech at an open-air gathering. Humphry Wellwood went by train to Woking Crematorium with the mourners, sitting discreetly at the back, watching with almost technical curiosity as the coffin passed through folding doors into the flames. Later he wrote a moving description of the event for a magazine, describing international grief and solidarity, confusion and a baffled sense of loss in the soaked, patient crowds on the railway platform, and the heartstruck weeping mourners before the furnace.

The next day, December 29th, was the Feast of St. Thomas à Becket, the turbulent priest and wilful politician, bloodily cut down before his own altar. Another proud and wilful politician, Joseph Chamberlain, was Colonial Secretary in the new Conservative Government. He secretly encouraged Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa, to send his friend, Dr. Starr Jameson, with 500 men to invade the Boer republic of the Transvaal. President Kruger, of the Transvaal, was resolutely refusing voting rights to the inflooding speculators and miners, the uitlander in search of Kaffir gold. Humphry, on his way back to Todefright, heard the rumours that were coming in by telegraph, and would dearly have liked to stay in London, to follow events, and to write something wry and witty about the jingoistic mood, so different from the international grief for Stepniak, that was overtaking much of English public life. The Fabians were divided about questions of empire—some, including socialists like Ramsay MacDonald, hated the whole idea. Some believed in planning for the greater good of the many, which included the farflung inhabitants of the colonies. Beatrice Webb, one of the moving spirits of Fabian socialism, had been in love with Joseph Chamberlain as a young woman, and wrote in her diary at the beginning of 1896 that the whole mind of the country was absorbed in foreign politics, that the occasion had found the man, and Joe Chamberlain was today the National Hero. “In these troubled times, with every nation secretly disliking us,” she wrote, “it is a comfortable thought that we have a government of strong resolute men, not given to either bluster or vacillation, but prompt in taking every measure to keep us out of a war and to make us successful should we be forced into it.” Little England, Great Empire. In 1896 Humphry Wellwood was interested in the relations of armies and gold mines, diamond merchants and Stock Exchange dealers. The dead Nihilist jostled the piratical Starr Jameson in his busy mind. But Olive had made him promise to go home, immediately, so he went.

When he opened his front door he was greeted by a full-throated howl of pain, followed by wild sobbing, from upstairs. It had begun. Violet appeared on the stairs, took his coat, patted his shoulder, said “She’s having a hard time. The child is fast in the passage, and cannot come out. And they are both weak, I think.”

“Shall I go to her?” Humphry asked. Olive liked to be left alone at these times. Violet kissed him and said she would tell her he was back, that would settle her a little. She would talk to the midwife, and then she would make Humphry a cup of tea, or a bowl of broth, after his journey. All the little children had been taken to the Tartarinovs’ by Nurse. She was looking after the Tartarinov children too, as the couple were away at the funeral.

Violet went back to her sister’s bedside, and returned to say that Olive could perhaps see Humphry later, the doctor and the midwife were busy. Another scream echoed across the landing: Humphry and Violet crept downstairs. There was frantic, agitated moaning, and smooth hushings and calming noises from the attendant medical people.

Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back. She was arch after arch of electric pain and the imagination of geometry could not create an issue—the immovable object and the irresistible force were one thing, and could neither advance nor retreat, so that bursting seemed the only way out, like the eruption of a volcano. Something would drown in there, something would be engulfed by flame. The doctor begged her not to fling her head from side to side, not to waste her breath on shrieking and wailing, but to make an effort, for the sake of the child who could not come out, and expel it.

She arched herself, howled and bore down.

Red and angry, black-lipped and uttering a desperate whimper, the child shot into the world. He was a boy. They cleaned his face, and cut his cord, and he wailed again, and again—“He has a good voice,” said the doctor. “And strong limbs,” said the midwife, circling a puny thigh with one hand, wiping the crimson male organ. Blood and water were everywhere. Olive felt it well out. And the afterbirth, so all was well. The midwife bundled up the bloody sheets, and mopped the floor, and washed the mother, and arranged her under a pretty counterpane, tugging a comb through her sweat-tangled hair. She tickled the swathed child under his chin. “Now we’ll fetch Daddy, now you’re fit to see.” She put him in the cot—not new, but prettily decorated with starched sheets and ribbons. She went to look for Humphry who was consuming his bowl of broth, watched intently by Violet, to whom he was describing the funeral, the weather, the music, the flowers.

Humphry tiptoed into the bedroom, in the traditional manner. Olive looked at him from far away, her hands inert on the counterpane. The midwife showed him the boy, who had reddish hair, not very much, and strong features, a brow, a big mouth. What shall we call him, Humphry asked Olive. She shifted the bleeding sack of her body. You choose, she said. Humphry was thinking of Shakespeare, for the article he would write about the Transvaal. He was thinking about England. He hesitated between Harry and George. “Cry God for Harry, England and St. George.” Harry was more dashing. Harry was a good no-nonsense English name. “Harry,” he said, and Olive smiled, and said Harry was a good choice, she too had been considering Harry. Harry Basil, she suggested, thinking of Basil’s forthcoming generosity with Tom’s school fees.