The Children's Book

23

Tom sat in the sombre library of the British Pavilion, in the late afternoon, when it was closed to the public. Guests of the Special Keeper of Precious Metals at the Victoria and Albert Museum were allowed in. Tom could imagine himself in the seventeenth century, surrounded by leather books and glowing tapestries of the Quest of the Grail. In front of him was Burne-Jones’s painting of Lancelot’s dream at the Grail chapel. The clearing in the forest was desolate and moonlit. The light was pale moony-gold, shining on the rump of the tethered horse, and the faces of the sleeping knight and watching angel. The knight was half-recumbent, his elegant mailed feet crossed like an effigy, his young, fine face expressing not rest, but absolute exhaustion. His shield was propped in a twisted, leafless bush: the moon glinted on his long sword and the helmet on the ground by his feet. The expression on the angel’s concerned little white face was almost one of terror or horror. Thorns grew round the foot of the chapel wall. Tom was deeply moved by all this. He wanted to go home. He took the latest instalment of Underground out of his bookbag, and wrote a letter.

My dearest Mother,

Thank you for sending the unwrapping of the Silf. It is one of the best things you have done, I think, very exciting and disturbing. I hope we shall see a lot more of the Silf—is it a “she” or an “it”—you seem undecided. I think you are quite right about the spelling. Silf is much more mysterious than sylph, and gets rid of all sorts of airy-fairy associations.

I am having a very good time here, seeing lots and lots of amazing things, some entertaining, some instructive, some beautiful too. I have been up the Eiffel Tower and on the Great Wheel and have ventured into the new Underground Railway, the Métro, which has gates like the gates of fairyland. Everything is driven by electricity—it all hums and buzzes—and there are forests of lights twinkling and glittering everywhere. I don’t know if it is more like Vanity Fair or Camelot or even at times Pandemonium. I am not very good at living in all this noise, I really am not, I think often of a quiet walk on the Downs in the early morning, with the dew on the turf and the sun rising. I really do wish you were here. You would make more of all this enchantment and artifice than I can. It is like that story you wrote of the palace inside the palace inside the palace. You could make stories out of almost everything.

Julian is very good to me, and I hope we are really friends. But he is so sophisticated and so—I can’t find a word—sardonic? Not quite—you will know what I mean—that I’m never quite at ease with him, and daren’t say what I feel, in case he thinks it’s silly. Major Cain has been wonderfully kind, and explains the art objects to us. You would love to see the jewellery. Mr. Fludd is a bit mysterious—he seems to stay in bed a lot—Philip looks after him, I suppose. We hope to see someone called Loïe Fuller dance. I think there is all sorts of food for your imagination here. As for me, sometimes I really enjoy things like moving pavements, and sherbet in little glasses, and the Russian diorama. But sometimes—mostly I think—I do want to be at home and sit in the garden with lemonade, and read about the Silf.

Your loving son

Tom.

Prosper Cain came to the modest hotel where Benedict Fludd and Philip were staying. He found Philip, who said that Benedict Fludd was still in bed and had said he was not to be disturbed. Cain said he was to be disturbed, and immediately. He was to visit the Lalique stand, and he was to lunch with Siegfried Bing in the Pavillon Bleu, as he knew very well. Philip said drily that he did not think he dared disturb Fludd.

“I dare,” said Major Cain. He considered Philip. “How are you finding the Exposition?”

Philip detailed his visits to the ceramics exhibitions, and pulled out his sketch-book to show Major Cain the monstrous clock.

“Have you seen anything except the pots, Philip?”

“I’m finding my way around them, sir. I made a French friend at the Gien place. He doesn’t speak English. He’s a decorator.”

“You should be having fun and broadening your mind. Have you seen the jewellery? Have you seen the Bing Pavilion?”

“No.”

“Benedict should be showing you things. I wanted to show some of the dealers here some of your work. You could come and draw for them. I might need you, if Fludd’s out of form.”

• • •

Benedict Fludd was under a wine-stained sheet, with his head entangled in a serpentine French bolster. “Get out,” he said to Cain.

“I won’t. You are lunching with Bing, as you very well know. Get up. You owe it to Philip Warren, to show these folk his work, as well as to yourself. Bing is interested in your pond bowl. Very interested. Get up. In the army we had very nasty ways of making people get up. Get up and get washed. Horrible man.”

Everyone, therefore, gathered at the Lalique stand. It was yet another imaginary dwelling, with pleated gauze hangings. Shining white moiré bats swooped in a highly arched window, and there was a screen, sinister, delicate, lovely, made of five naked bronze women, with huge, skeletal wings like the bronze veins of moths, hanging below and beside them. The most prominent exhibit was a large ornament, in the form of a turquoise woman’s bust rising out of the mouth of a long, long dragonfly, its narrowing gold body studded with shimmering blue and green jewels at regular intervals, diminishing to a tiny sharp gilt fork at the base. The woman’s head was crowned with an ornament which was a helm, or a split scarab, or the insect eyes of the metamorphosing being. From her shoulders hung what were at once stiff, spreading sleeves, and the realistic wings of the dragonfly, made in the new, transparent, unbacked enamel, veined in gold, studded with roundels of turquoise and crystals. The beast had huge dragonlike claws, stretching either side of the womanhead, on gold muscular arms. Round this piece were lesser jewels in the shapes of insects and flowers. Philip asked Fludd if he knew how the transparent enamel was done. He said to him “Look” at a brooch made of two completely realistic stag-beetles, their heads locked, the pitted horny roughness of their wing-cases perfectly reproduced.

“Hmn,” said Fludd. “Another French wizard who moulds from life, I imagine. Like Palissy.”

Fludd was coming to life. He took out an eye-glass and peered at the tiny tourmaline eggs which crusted the rumps of the insects, at the blood-red stone they clutched between them.

Julian pointed out to Tom that the heart-shaped form of another jewel with two dragonflies conjoined was in fact an exact reproduction of copulation. So it was, said Tom, with a naturalist’s interest.

“I meant to surprise you,” said Olive Wellwood, floating up to them under a creamy hat clustered with butterflies and silken bees. “Now be surprised, my darling. I couldn’t resist, after your lovely letter—”

She was accompanied by Humphry, looking casually elegant, and August Steyning, wearing moth-grey and a peacock-blue cravat.

There were exclamations and kisses. Olive was lovely and excitable, with a hectic flush on her face. She was carrying a rose-coloured silk parasol, which, out of doors, made her shadowed face dark rose in pale rose. Tom had a feeling he immediately remembered, though he had never learned to expect it. Olive in the flesh, Olive perfumed with attar of roses, was not the secret sharer of the otherworld, to whom he wrote letters. That was a kind of second self, who wrote him and inhabited his dreams. This was a lively, sociable woman in creamy broderie anglaise, over whose fingers Prosper Cain was gallantly bowing his head.

“How pleasant to see you, dear Mrs. Wellwood. Just the right setting, among the peacocks and damselflies. I did not know you intended to visit the Exposition.”

“I did not know myself. It was an impromptu decision, prompted by a letter from Tom—now I am speaking nonsense, impromptu can’t be prompted—a letter describing all the enticements and enchantments so that I was irresistibly drawn to them. And we discovered that August Steyning had already planned a visit, so we attached ourselves to him. You must tell us everything, you must show us all the beautiful things …”

She is overdoing it, thought Tom. What he could not know was that Olive’s coming was the effect of a move by Herbert Methley, who had insistently and even fiercely tried to coerce her into performing a sexual thing she found disgusting. She had blushed like fire. Tears had started from her eyes. She had no idea whether Methley was a monstrous pervert, or whether she herself was—as he accused her of being—naïve and cold, not to understand, not to respond. She suddenly couldn’t stand the smell of him, struggled out of his arms, and out of the hired bed, and thought blindly “I have got to get away.” She was so pleased to see Prosper Cain, whose admiration for her was old-fashioned and gallant.

And Tom, of course, she was pleased to see Tom, Tom loved her more than anyone did.

Prosper Cain was buying jewellery. He liked buying small pieces, and was looking for the perfect gift to take home for Florence. He had bought her one of Lalique’s horn combs, with carved sycamore seeds, and was hesitating over an unusual anemone brooch, in which the lovely flower was denuded of all its petals but one, made of pink enamel, set amongst twining ivory roots, through which strange faces peered. But perhaps you didn’t give an image of fall and decay, however beautiful, to a young girl? He found a pliqué-à-jour enamelled poppy—“like a thin, clear bubble of blood” as Browning said of the wild tulips—and bought it to pin on his daughter’s dark hair. He then examined another, paler piece, which combined transparent enamelled honesty seed-cases with a sumptuous thistle, made of enamelled silver and frosted glass. Olive, who was touching the jewels with a gloved fingertip, holding a snake-bracelet against her wrist to admire it, suddenly wondered if the second piece might be an offering designed for herself. It had a soft, fairytale gleam. Cain watched its wrapping, and put it, with the poppy, in his pocket. He thought he might give it to Imogen Fludd, if that would not embarrass her. She had become interested in jewellery design—the small scale, the precise craft, the rigour and delicacy of it suited her temperament. But London was full of ladies doing bits of enamelwork and stringing beads. If jewellery was to be her means of independence she must do it well, very well.

It was a mistake to try to visit the Grand Palais in a large group. There were thousands of paintings in the Décennale, which showed work from the last ten years of the century, from all the exhibiting countries. August Steyning said in a forthright way that they should all proceed at their own pace and follow their own interests until it was time for lunch, when they should forgather—“for a reason”—in front of Jean Weber’s painting Les Fantoches. They strolled in ones and twos—Steyning, Cain and Olive, Tom and Julian, Charles and Joachim Susskind, Fludd and Philip. Philip was oppressed by the size and weight and insistent dark meaning ofmuch ofthe work. He was appalled by vast paintings of clumped dead and dying naked humans, strewn with snakes and surveyed by tiny winged angels. In one painting, entitled Towards the Abyss, a woman in modern dress, with huge batwings and a windblown bonnet, strode forward against the wind, followed by a crawling crowd of nudes, geriatric and bearded, female and glaring, all in extremis, some already expiring. Philip timidly asked Fludd what it meant.

“Dunno,” said Fludd. “She might be Woman, but she is not very taking, looks like a mad governess. She might be Capitalism but she looks like a miserable vampire. Or the Church, she might be. Or syphilis. Very French, she is. I prefer pots. They don’t have to be weighed down with meaning. They are what they are, earth and chemistry.”

Julian, by now an eager student of Art Nouveau and the artists of the Secession, hurried Tom away to look at Klimt, whose delicious Lady in Pink shone palely out, and whose ambitious allegory of Philosophy glittered with elegance. Joachim Susskind and Charles were arrested by Rochegrosse’s The Race for Happiness, a mad conical heap of humans in frock-coats, evening gowns and workmen’s striped jumpers, who climbed up and over each other, so that a bunch of desperate arms, black-sleeved, or silk-gloved, protruded like stakes into the sky, against a background of chimneys. Susskind said it was impressive as an image of capitalism. He thought for some time, and then said that maybe a very expensive painting that must have taken years of work wasn’t the best instrument to bring about a just society.

There was more naked female flesh in Les Fantoches where they met. It showed what looked like an artist’s garret with a long couch in the mansard corner. The light from the six glass squares of the window illuminated the naked body of a woman who lay diagonally across most of the canvas. Her head lay at an awkward angle. Her arms were open, and bent, with pathetically clenched fists. Her hair was dark, her eyes were closed, her expression might have been a pout or a scowl. Her legs were splayed, her tiny slit visible, though there was no pubic hair. One foot rested awkwardly on an embroidered cushion on the floor, one was equally awkwardly clinging to the embroidered cover of the couch. She looked both very uncomfortable and completely inert, her flesh like putty. Behind her sat a bearded, handsome man, his face intent on a delicate doll, or puppet, whose waist was circled by his two hands—the two seemed to be conversing. The rest of the painting was peopled with dolls, or puppets, shining out of the gloom—a Javanese figure, a Byzantine queen, erect and tiny and full of presence, a floating Rapunzel in the foreground, all long hair and huge wistful eyes. A jointed doll with no sex lay face down at an angle to the naked woman’s knees. A kind of Punchinello was draped over the man’s knee. The Punchinello had the peculiar lifelessness of unanimated cloth, which is different from inert female flesh.

When August Steyning arrived, they saw why he had picked this painting. He was accompanied by the puppetmaster from Munich, who had performed at the Midsummer party. Anselm Stern was soberly dressed in a black frock-coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. With him, thin and wiry, wearing a beret and a pale blue cravat, was a young man who was obviously his son, and was introduced as Wolfgang. They were neither of them tall: both had large dark eyes and sharp noses and mouths. Humphry asked Steyning and Stern to explain the painting, please.

“We can’t agree on anything. Is she alive, is she dead? Is he ignoring the flesh for art and if so is he culpable or to be admired? Could he animate the dead woman if he gave her the attention he’s giving the pretty doll? She looks damnably uncomfortable, as though she’ll skid off that couch any minute.”

Steyning laughed.

“It’s about the borders between the real and the imagined. And the imagined has more life than the real—much more—but it is the artist who gives the figures life.”

Olive said it was a pity more women didn’t paint allegories about the imagination. This woman was like clay in a stocking.

Everyone looked at Anselm Stern.

“What one gives to one’s art,” he said, in slightly uncertain English, “is taken away out of the life, this is so. One gives the energy to the figures. It is one’s own energy, but also kinetic. Who is more real to me, the figures in the box in my head or the figures on the streets?”

“You could see this artist as a vampire,” said Steyning provocatively. “He has sucked the life out of that poor girl and is giving it to wooden limbs and painted faces.”

“He has a good face,” said Stern, smiling slightly.

Philip pulled at Fludd’s sleeve and pointed out in a whisper that the draped Punchinello was the reverse image of the draped human woman.

“The message is,” said Stern, “that art is more lifely than life but not always the artist pays.”

• • •

It was not clear for some time whether Wolfgang Stern spoke English. Joachim whispered to Charles that Anselm Stern was an important figure in Munich’s artistic life—and a sympathiser with the anarchists and the idealists. “He is not your English Punch-and-Judy—he dines with von Stuck and Lehnbach—his work is discussed in Jugend and Simplicissimus. This I know. I do not know his son.”

Philip was the odd man out amongst the young men. He found himself frequently alone. Wolfgang Stern found him sitting on a bench, drawing, and sat down beside him.

“I may?” he asked. Philip nodded. Wolfgang said “May I see? I speak only little English, I read better.”

“I had a long talk in pictures with a Frenchman,” said Philip, flicking the pages back to his dialogue with Philippe; drawings, the Gien faïence, and the little grotesque figures of the majolica urns and dishes.

“You are artist?”

Philip made his signature gesture of hands inside clay cylinder rotating. Wolfgang laughed. Philip said “And you?”

“I hope to be theatre artiste. Cabaret, new plays, also Puppen as my father. Munich is good for artists, also dangerous.”

“Dangerous.”

“We have bad—bad—laws. People are in prison. You may not say what you think. May I see your work?”

Philip was trying to work out a new all-over pattern of latticed and entwined bodies, part-human, part-beast, part-dragon or ghost. He was making impossible combinations of the Gloucester Candlestick’s warriors and apes, the majolica satyrs and mermen, Lalique’s insect-women, and, more remotely, the naked women who sprawled and smiled and died on all the huge symbolist paintings. The drawing he was working on combined the limp puppet with the limp woman from Les Fantoches; he was paying too much attention to the female breasts, and the proportions were ugly. Wolfgang laughed, and touched a breast with a finger. Philip laughed too. He said

“I saw your father’s puppets in England. Cinderella. And one about an automatic woman. Sandman, or something. They come to life—and don’t come to life. Uncanny.”

“Un-canny?”

“Like ghosts, or spirits, or gnomes. More alive than us, in some ways.”

Wolfgang smiled. He said again “I may?”

and took Philip’s pencil, and began to draw his own trellis of forms—little grinning black imps, and bat-winged females. “Simplicissimus,” he said, which Philip failed to understand.

They went to the Rodin Pavilion in the Place de l’Alma. Here were gathered most of Rodin’s works in bronze, marble and plaster; the walls were hung with large numbers of his drawings. Vast forms of sculpted flesh and muscle loomed. Delicate frozen female faces emerged from rough stone, or retreated into it. Everywhere was appalling energy—writhing, striving, pursuing, fleeing, clasping, howling, staring. Philip’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was too much. It was so strong that it would destroy him—how could he make little trellis-men and modest jars, in the face of this skilled whirlwind of making? And yet the contrary impulse was there, too. This was so good, the only response to it was to want to make something. He thought with his fingers and his eyes together. He needed desperately to run his hands over haunches and lips, toes and strands of carved hair, so as to feel out how they had been done. He edged away from the Wellwoods and the Cains. He needed to be alone with this. Benedict Fludd too had edged away. Philip followed him. Fludd was considering The Crouching Woman, who squatted, clutching an ankle and a breast, her female opening displayed and lovingly sculpted. He spoke to Philip’s thought. “Shouts out to be touched,” said Fludd, and touched her, running his finger in her slit, cupping her breast in his hand. Philip did not follow his example, and looked around apprehensively for guards, or angry artist.

The artist was in fact in the pavilion, which he treated as though it was a studio. He was talking to two men, one of them tall and very shabby, with greasy long locks, muffled in an overcoat despite the warm weather. The other too was shabby and had wild jerky movements. They were standing in front of the ghostly white plaster cast of The Gates of Hell, and Rodin, red beard jutting, blue eyes glittering, was explaining it to them, showing them the grand design with sweeping and stabbing gestures.

“By God,” said Steyning, “that is Wilde. I’ve heard he sits in the cafés here and takes tea from Algerian boys. He hasn’t got any money, and people cut him in the street. He hides behind a newspaper so as not to embarrass his old acquaintances.”

“We should say good morning to him,” said Humphry. “He has paid a terrible price, and it is paid.”

Anselm Stern said that the other man was Oskar Panizza—“our own notorious writer of—obscene plays and satires—in banishment here in Paris. He is an alienist, a madman who studies the mad.”

“An anarchist,” said Joachim Susskind, “who believes all is permitted. We should say good morning to him also.”

Olive felt warm with admiration for Humphry as he strode forward, with August Steyning, to greet the great sinner. He was magnanimous. She loved him when he took risks. But she did not go with him.

The overpowering sensuality of the work had had its effect on Olive, too. She had managed to crunch, or tuck, her bodily memory of Methley’s unpleasantness into a kind of compressed roundel of brownish flesh, which could be avoided when it rose to consciousness—ah, that again, look the other way—but things like The Crouching Woman reanimated it, like a frozen snake warmed. The Danaïde was lovely. She was white and gleaming, her back arched in despair, her face against the rock, and her marble hair flowing down over her head in frozen white waves. She was a denizen of the underworld, damned with her fifty sisters for stabbing her husband, damned to attempt for ever to carry water in a leaking sieve, the image of eternal futility. But she was breath-takingly lovely. Olive touched her ear timidly with a gloved finger. Tom concentrated on her beauty. He wanted nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

Julian would have liked to meet Wilde, though he did not like the idea of Wilde. He stood a few steps behind Steyning and Humphry Wellwood, as they shook the wanderer’s hand. They also shook Rodin’s hand, which he would have liked to do. Wilde looked appalling. His skin was covered with angry red blotches, which he had unsuccessfully tried to cover with some sort of powder or cream, or both. When he opened his fleshy mouth, he displayed a black space where his front teeth were gone, and had not been replaced by a plate. He said he was touched to be recognised by Steyning—“you have still great things to do on the stage, whereas I am rattling like dead leaves in the wind.” He introduced Panizza—“a fellow poète maudit, who is surprised by no human habit, and has studied them all—” When Rodin and Panizza turned away Wilde came close to Humphry and breathed in his ear that he would be infinitely obliged by a temporary loan—his funds were much diminished and not reaching him. “He smelled horrible,” Humphry later told Olive. “I gave him what was in my pocket, because he smelled so bad that I felt guilty of his stink. There he stood, foul, in front of the Gates of Hell. He shuffled off—receiving embarrassed him horribly—muttering about sipping mint tea. His mouth itself is a Gate of Hell.”

They looked at The Gates of Hell. None of them saw the same thing as the others. The Gates were a ghost of what they would become. Many of the great forms of the beautiful and the damned were not yet fixed to the two white slabs, which had an almost abstract look, with mysterious swirls and rough spirals of plaster. But the rising columns of the frame and the receding space of the tympanum were full of swarming human forms attached to each other in all sorts of predatory, desiring and revolting ways. Julian knew Dante, whom he read in honour of his lost mother. He looked for the Circles of Hell which were not there, and got lost in the turmoil that was. Tom was puzzled that there were so many dead babies in Hell. Olive was grimly appalled by the figure of an old woman—a very old woman—rising or falling along the left pillar, with every detail of her fallen flesh remorselessly and lovingly recorded—flat, flaccid breasts, withered thighs, hanging bag of a belly. A dead child trampled her head, another pressed its face into her stomach. Olive stood there, in her pale pink dress, and her hat with roses, and gripped the pommel of her pretty blush-pink parasol. She felt anger with the sculptor for having observed the descent of flesh with such indifferent glee, neither love nor hate, she thought, but a pleasure in mastery, of every kind. And so she felt mastered, but stood there, pink and charming. She, like Charles/Karl, had observed the midinettes and the street-women, and had said to herself with Northern realism, there but for the grace of God, and her own lucky face and figure, and Humphry’s magnanimity and eccentricity, went she. She caught the sculptor looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Undressing her? What did he see, this man who could model gauche passion, and shame and shamelessness and voracity in women? She turned her face modestly down in the shade of her hat-brim, swung her bottom under her skirt, and moved off to talk to Prosper Cain.

Philip could not bear the Gates. They were more unbearable than The Crouching Woman, because they, like what filled his mind, were a pattern of interlinked human figures. He could not discern or analyse the pattern, though its presence was overpowering and annihilated him. He wanted to tear up his sketch-book, but instead he doggedly got it out, and began to draw the one rhythm he was sure he could see, a dance of repeating rounds in the tympanum, breasts and buttocks, cheeks and curls, intermingling with grinning death’s-heads and grotesques. He thinks with his fingers, close-up, Philip knew. And one form gives him the idea for another, even before he is finished with the first. Is he ever at a loss for a form? I think not, I think he fears he will never get it out and down.

Drawing calmed him. He squatted on the edge of a plinth and devised a notation to get it down quickly. They would probably drag him off to eat French food, and he would not have seen.

A shadow fell across the paper. He looked up. Rodin was looking down at him, peering at the drawing. Philip grasped his sketch-book to his chest.

“Je peux? Ne vous inquiétez-pas, c’est bon,” said the sculptor. Philip’s face was red and damp. Benedict Fludd came to join them. Rodin turned the paper. “Ah bon, c’est intéressant. Un potier comme Palissy.” Philip understood “Palissy.” He looked up at Fludd, and then automatically held out his hands to the sculptor, and made the airy shape of clay on the wheel with his fingers. Fludd laughed a deep laugh, made the same gesture, and said “Benedict Fludd, potier, élève de Palissy, épouvanté par Auguste Rodin. Anglais. Philip Warren, mon apprenti. Qui travaille bien, comme vous voyez, je pense.”

Rodin said he knew Fludd’s work. He tapped the Gien-majolica-candlestick men with his clay-ingrained finger, and said they were interesting. Wait, he said, and opened a cupboard, and brought out a large celadon-coloured greenish jar, with a twisting female figure incised in the glaze. These, he said, he made himself at the Sèvres porcelain works.

“There is much to learn, in all forms of the clay,” he said. And to Fludd, “I know your work. You are a master.” Fludd ran his fingertips over the porcelain as he had run them over The Crouching Woman. He was in a good mood, alert and benign.

Out on the moving pavement, he began to look at the women, and comment to Philip in an undertone on their shapes and attitudes. He asked Philip if he was enjoying himself—and do look at that lovely sulky little visage, the one with the shiny little hat—are you widening your knowledge of the world, would you say?

“It is all a bit much. Too much too good too new, all at once.”

“And too stimulating, I suppose, with all this flesh sailing past on the fast strip?”

“Sailing or standing,” said Philip with a sigh, “too much.”

“I think I should do my duty and see to your education,” said Fludd. “I’ll take you out tonight. Just you and me.”

Benedict Fludd—that is to say, Prosper Cain on his behalf—had sold a very large midnight-blue bowl with a miasma of pale gold dragons to Siegfried, sometimes Samuel, Bing. He had French money in his pocket. He led Philip through streets alternately dark and flaring with lamplight, alternately silent and shrill with voices, to a narrow street of tall houses, where needle-strips of brightness showed on the upper floors at the edges of shutters. Fludd knocked imperiously at one of these, and the door was opened, after a time, by a trim servant in a dark dress. Fludd said, in French, that Madame Maréchale was expecting him. He said that Philip was his apprentice, a word that had only recently crept into their relationship, which Philip recognised in French.

They climbed a narrow, carpeted staircase, and were ushered into a room with many tiny bright lights under etched glass shades, wine-red, strawberry-pink, topaz. It was inhabited by women, in various states of dress and undress. Some had elaborately knotted hair, and some wore it loose, like young girls. They wore ambiguous gowns, somewhere between morning gowns and dressing-gowns, open to display the swing of their breasts and sometimes more. There was a confusion of smells—orris root, which Philip had never met and found sickly, attar of roses, wine, cigarette smoke and an undertone of human bodily odours. He made out faces through drifts of smoke, faces weary, faces laughing, faces middle-aged and faces very young. The fully and fashionably dressed lady of the house hurried forwards to welcome Benedict Fludd. Champagne was brought, and Philip, now sitting gingerly on a sofa facing a watchful row of ladies, had his first taste of it. It steadied him. He was excited and afraid. More champagne was brought. He was studied and discussed in incomprehensible French. Benedict Fludd sat in an armchair decorated with cabbage roses, with a young woman on his knee, a girl with her hair down, meekly dressed in white cotton, barefoot, and, Philip could see, wearing nothing under the cotton. The ladies who were assessing him were older and more assertive. They smiled, professionally, but amiably enough. “Take your pick, Philip,” said Benedict Fludd. “They can teach you a thing or two. They are good girls. I know them well.”

Philip did not think he could know them very well, since he spent his life stamping around the Marshes or tending the furnace. He was suddenly homesick for the Romney emptiness, and the marsh grass. He had had too much of too many bodies, all these last days, and he did not know if he was overexcited or surfeited. He remembered The Crouching Woman, and primitive desire stirred in him. He drank more champagne and looked at the women. One had a bony face not unlike Rodin’s squatting figure, and a big, sharp mouth. She was wearing a crêpe de Chine dressing-gown, with the kind of silvery crinkle over Japanesey flowers that reminded him of the clever crackle-glaze on the Gien pottery which he admired but did not like. He did not know how you went about “picking” a lady, so he asked her, in English, what her name was. Rose, she said, my name is Rose.

She took him upstairs, to a little room with an ample bed, a huge mirror and more shaded lights. He was curious, and afraid. He knew about the danger of disease. He might be killing himself. It was odd that he felt compelled to go on—Fludd expected it, his manhood was in question, there were things he needed to know. She took off his clothes, and sat beside him on the bed, exhaling tobacco. The skin of her face was quite thickly painted, and did not breathe. She looked kind, he thought. She began to teach him the parts of the body, in her language, pouring him more champagne, dabbing his fingers and chin and eyes with it, naming them in French, and licking away the champagne. Chest, navel, cock and balls. His body answered her touch. His fingers, with which he thought, set about her body, feeling the difference between flesh and clay, the weight of a breast, the warmth and damp of her, underneath. Briefly he remembered cold naked Pomona, pushing under his blanket in Purchase House. Cold and white like marble, like The Danaïde. Rose had clever, coercive fingers, with which she too thought. Philip, who was growing up fast in every sense, thought that the naming of parts must be a routine she went through with all foreigners, and then thought he didn’t care, it was all perfectly sensible and efficient. Rose was generous to him. He got overexcited and came quickly, and she then revived him and showed him subtler ways of pleasure, slower rhythms, until at last he was thinking with that part of him, as happened occasionally when he was pleasuring himself. He thought Rodin must think a lot in this way. He had an obscure vision of a church window, on the Marsh, showing the Fall of Man, the woman handing the man the round apple from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the fork-tongued snake staring with satisfaction. It had never made any sense to him, and he didn’t believe a word of it, but suddenly as he pushed into the compliant Rose, clutching her breast, he saw it in his body, the round apple, the tough sinuous snake, the knowledge of nakedness and good and evil.

“Bon?” said Rose, with professional concern.

“Bon,” said Philip, drowsily, feeling the damp of sex like the slip on the clay.

August Steyning invited everyone to see Loïe Fuller perform in her own theatre; they went back to England the next day, so the dance was the finale of their visit. Loïe Fuller’s image was pervasive in the Exposition—her whirling figure crowned the Palais de la Danse, and stood above the entrance to her own theatre, with her floating veils solidified into plaster. Bronze figurines and statues of her were on sale there and elsewhere. Philip said to Fludd that there must be better ways of making images of floating cloth than these solid blobs which reminded him of melting butter. The theatre itself was low and white, and its front wall, modelled to resemble a skirt or shawl with a frilled hem, resembled, Philip also thought, an iced cake before it was trimmed. There was a low portal, like the entrance to a grotto or cavern. Inside were huge butterflies and flowers and a grille of Lalique’s bronze butterfly-women. “That is the way to do it,” said Fludd to Philip. “With veining and empty space.” Lalique had designed the electric light fittings also, in gilt bronze. Laughing imps were cupped round the mysterious face of an enchantress, above whose head the electric bulbs were suspended in delicate, snowdrop-shaped flowers on fine stems.

Fuller’s dances depended on two things—furling, unfurling, billowing lengths of cloth, and electric lighting, in magic lanterns covered by different coloured gelatines. Her body was half-glimpsed through coils transparent, translucent, opaque. She deployed her veiling with the aid of supporting batons. They saw “The Flight of the Butterflies,” and “Radium,” an iridescent shimmering confection dedicated to Pierre and Marie Curie. They saw, finally, the Fire Dance, in which the dancer was lit from below, through a lantern using an intense scarlet light. The moving silks became a stream of volcanic magma, they became the rising flames of a burning pyre, they became the oven of a holocaust. “The Ride of the Valkyries” sang out, and the woman gyrated in a cocoon of fire—like red clay, like white marble luridly lit, smiling in the conflagration, stepping through the fires of hell-mouth incandescent and unconsumed. They were all entranced. Julian wondered if it was vulgar, and then got lost in the silk fringes. Tom was happy with that happiness that comes from being shut in the unreal box of the theatre. Olive was reminded of the uncanny feeling she had had as Hermione, wound in marble folds of grave-cloth or wedding dress. She remembered the flowing marble hair of Rodin’s Danaïde, and felt that everything was of a piece, that the dancer, and the carved woman, and the glassy lit surface of the river outside with its threaded slivers of emerald, opal, amethyst, peridot, hissing and crackling with electricity, electricity, a river of life, a river of death, were all one. It made her want to write, as things delightful and things threatening, both, made her want to write.

When they were safely back in Todefright, Humphry sat down to write an article on Exhibitions and the Arts of War and Peace.

Olive wrote a tale in which, at night, the silky ladies and resplendent peacocks, the manikins and marble men and maidens, the puppets and the glimmering butterflies and dragonflies and fishes in the tapestries, came to life and held their own market of magical goods in the shadowy spaces and the sumptuous uninhabited chambers of the Bing Pavilion.