The Children's Book

31

The events, so far, had been initiated by Humphry’s lapse, and controlled by Dorothy’s will. To her surprise—and in some ways, to her relief—Anselm Stern now took over the control of the story, which he began almost to direct as though it had been the structure of a play. He arranged meetings, of different kinds, in different places. He took his new daughter for walks in the Englische Garten, with Griselda walking like a shadow a few paces behind. He wore a swinging coat with wide skirts, and a wide-brimmed hat. In his pockets, it turned out, puppets were tucked, with strings and bars. A wistful female child, a wolfman with a snarling smile and a fur coat, a strange mooncalf, luminous green with huge eyes. He held them out and they tripped along beside him. Passers-by waved to them. Anselm said to Dorothy

“I do not know whether I believe they have souls, or temporary souls, or intermittent souls.” He looked searchingly at Griselda. “Du kannst übersetzen? I think I believe that we are all fragments of one great soul—that the earth is one living thing, and the clay and the wood and the catgut these are made of are forms of life, as is the movement I lend them.”

Dorothy nodded seriously, pink. She had a pretty straw hat with a midnight-blue ribbon.

“I have embarrassed you,” he said. “No.”

“Oh yes. I knew I would. But I always walk here, with these creatures—these manikins—and I wish my daughter to know me as I am.”

The little figures danced on the path, and stopped, and looked up at Dorothy.

“Take one,” said Anselm Stern. “Move him.”

Dorothy pulled back. Griselda held out her fingers and was given the mooncalf. Dorothy then took the wolfman. They sagged. Griselda twitched and adjusted and the mooncalf began a drunken dance. Anselm Stern put his hand over Dorothy’s.

“Do not be afraid. Let him walk.”

The strings were, after all, alive. Horribly alive. Once, with Tom at the brook, she had tried dowsing with a hazel fork, just for the fun of it, and had been terrified when the dead wood lurched at her fingertips, and pulled. She had dropped the thing and refused to have more to do with it. These strings pulled the same way. She let her fingertips listen, and the wolfman began to stride, and bow. He raised his paw. He threw back his head, to howl, or to laugh. Her fingers tingled.

“You said,” said Anselm Stern, “you wanted to know who I am. I am a man who makes dancing dolls.” Griselda was tangled and did not translate, but Dorothy understood.

“I see,” she said, and halted the wolfman and handed him back.

Griselda would have expected the old, resolutely rational Dorothy to be worried, possibly even repelled, by the strangenesses and formalities. The garden walk was followed by an exploration of the cavern behind the stage, an introduction to all the hanging family, a disquisition on the character of every severed head, an exploration of the boxes in which they lay, decently, head to tail, all except Death, who lay back in his single casket until Anselm Stern raised him to bow deeply to Dorothy, to stretch out his arms to her, fold them, and lie back again. He talked only intermittently and Griselda could not translate all of it. The creatures had a purer, more essential existence than emotional beings. Griselda, the imaginative one, found it was she who was being half-sceptical. Dorothy wandered on in a listening dream.

It was not only serious metaphysics of marionettes. It was cream cakes and coffee in Café Félicité, with Anselm and daughter leaning on their elbows and staring into each other’s eyes, and a long interrogation.

“Your favourite colour, Fräulein Dorothy?”

“Green. And yours?”

“Green, naturally. Your favourite smell?”

“Bread baking. And yours?”

“Oh, bread baking, there is none better.”

He gave her little gifts. Things he had carved. An owl. A walnut. A hedgehog. She frowned over the hedgehog. It reminded her of Olive’s Dorothy-tale, about Peggy and Mistress Higgle, the shape-changer, and in a way that appeared truly uncanny Dorothy received, on the day he gave it to her, a fat envelope from home, containing another instalment, a placatory peace-offering from the storyteller in Todefright, who did not know what Dorothy knew, who was afraid of what she was finding out, and could think of nothing better to do than to send a segment of fairytale. Dorothy meant not to read it. But did. Mistress Higgle’s hedgehog-mantle—and with it her magic—had been stolen, Dorothy read. It had been folded away, in its secret drawer, and Mistress Higgle had come home to find the window open, and the spiny jacket nowhere. All the dependent furry creatures in the house—the mouse-people, the frog-people, the little vixen—had lost the power to change shape, because the thorny integument had vanished. Who was responsible? The story stopped there. Olive’s accompanying letter was somewhat plaintive.

I’m not sure, my darling, whether you still want the stories—maybe you are a grown-up lady now, and past childish things—but I thought about you a lot, and since writing stories is what I do, I wrote the one I still think of as yours. You don’t write to tell me how you are. We all miss you dreadfully. There is no one like you for good sense and understanding and getting things done. We are all a bit feckless and down in the dumps without you. And Tom is positively dirty with nights out in the woods. Please write, my darling. You don’t have to read the silly story if you don’t want to.

Your bewildered and loving mother.

There were now things Dorothy wanted to say to Anselm Stern without saying them to Griselda. She was picking up basic German but she could not speak it well enough to explain Mistress Higgle, or to ask him questions about her mother. She felt, in odd moments of solitude—like this one, sitting with the English schoolroom paper with writings on it about English furry creatures that were also human—that Anselm Stern had her under a spell. She was not happy now except when she was with him, or on her way to meet him, and yet she also felt fear, fear of a trap, fear of something unseen.

She handed him—they were sitting in his workroom—the sheaf of papers from Olive. She said, expressionless, in German

“Ein Brief von meiner Mutter. Ein Märchen. Ich habe meiner Mutter nichts von Ihnen—von Dir—gesagt.”

He gave her a long, sombre look, and picked up the papers. Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can’t understand, can and can’t accept. Griselda sat pale and vanishing. Anselm turned over the pages, with their little drawings of hedgehogs and frogs and underground kitchens with rows of pannikins. He said to Griselda

“What is this?”

“Tell him—” said Dorothy. “She writes a story for each of us. This is mine. It is a whimsical story about magic hedgehogs.”

“I can’t translate whimsical.” She looked at Dorothy. “Dorothy, don’t cry. Why did you bring it?”

“She’s in this story too. I brought it to bring it together. Don’t translate that.”

But he nodded, as though he had understood. “Higgle,” he said. “Mis-tress Hig-gle. What is Mistress Higgle?” “Eine kleine Frau die ist auch ein Igel,” said Griselda. “Ein Igel,” said Anselm Stern. “An eagle?” asked Dorothy.

“No, no. Igel is the German word for a hedgehog.”

“‘Hans mein Igel.’ That’s a story from the Grimms. He says he played it for her.” She turned to Anselm.

“Für die Mutter?”

“Genau.”

“So. Mrs. Higgle is Hans mein Igel. I have not played it for many years. The Hedgehog-human puppet is one of my finest, I think. We will find him out, and tomorrow I shall perform the story. I think she must have named you Mistress Higgle for Hans mein Igel. The story is strange. It is the tale of a woman who so desired a child that she said she would give birth to anything, even a hedgehog. And in tales, you get what you ask for. Her child was a hedgehog above, and a pretty boy below, and he revolted her.”

Griselda had trouble with “revolted.”

“So he slept in straw by the stove, and rode out into the woods on a fine cockerel, playing the—I can’t translate Dudelsack.” Anselm Stern mimed.

“Ah, bagpipes. He sat in a tree, and played the bagpipes and looked after herds of swine, and prospered. By and by he came to the attention of a king lost and bewildered, to whom he showed the way, and the king promised him whatever first met him on his way, which was of course, as it always must be, his daughter. And the daughter must marry the half-hedgehog swineherd, for promises in tales must be kept. And she was greatly afraid of his spines, and did not respond to bagpipe music. So we move to the bridal chamber and there in secret the hedgehog takes off his hedgehog-skin, and servants of the king rush in and burn it in a fire. This is a fine scene for puppets to play. And then he is wholly human, but black as coal. So they wash him, and dress him as a prince, and the princess runs into his arms and loves him—very much—mightily—and all is well. I think, Dorothy, your mother was thinking of the half-alien child, and the hedgehog—who is a trickster, a clever Hans, a German character—when she named your Mistress Higgle. You are the much-desired child who is half from somewhere else, a different child.

“In this story she sent, someone has stolen the hedgehog-skin. In this story, she needs it, it is magic, it makes her smaller, or invisible.”

Anselm Stern found out the old puppets from “Hans mein Igel,” the spiny-coated changeling, the prancing red cockerel with his golden comb, the mother with her face that perpetually wept, two painted tears on her wooden cheek—first, because she had no child, and then, because her child was uncanny. A few days later he put on the old play, with Wolfgang as his assistant. This play was not silent—the two men spoke all the parts, and Wolfgang played a tripping tune on a primitive bagpipe. They all came—Joachim and Karl, Toby and Griselda, Leon and Dorothy. Dorothy had noticed that the artist was quietly disappointed if she was not at every performance in the Spiegelgarten. Light glistened on the half-hedgehog’s lively spines. She thought, I shall never pass my matriculation, if I spend all my time in here, watching dolls dance. And yet, as the hedgehog came blackly out of the thorns, like a butterfly out of a chrysalis, and was washed white so he could bed his princess, she was moved to tears, she felt liquid inside, she was pulled about like tides by the moon. She had not bargained for all this.

Wolfgang, a few days later, caught at Griselda’s sleeve as she was leaving the lunch table in the Pension Susskind.

“A word with you—” he said, in English. “Some quiet place,” he said.

Griselda felt his fingers electric. She had been aware that he watched her—her skin was warmer in his searching stare. He was both a mocking and a serious young man. He made wry jokes about Bavarians and beer, about the Kaiser and his wardrobes full of uniforms, about King Edward in England, his harem of ladies, and the Boers suffering stolidly in South Africa. He was at home in this strange new world of satire, skits, innuendo and sudden plangent sentiment. He watched her, Griselda. When he saw she saw him watching, he curled his wide mouth in a deprecatory grin, and looked away.

She followed him out into the garden, and they sat at a table, under a vine sprawling over an arbour.

“I want you to see this,” he said.

He handed her a large sketch-book. It was filled with drawings of female heads, very occasionally with bodies attached to them, seen from every angle, with every possible expression. They were done in charcoal, in pencil, in chalk, in ink.

They were herself and Dorothy. They studied their bones, their hair, their attitudes, their habits of mind.

For a moment, Griselda thought Wolfgang had done them. Then he said

“What have you done to my father? He is verzaubert—bewitched. Is he in love with you? People have been speaking—to me and my mother. He has never been like this, never. Have you made him mad?”

Griselda stared at him in horror.

“It isn’t that, at all. Not at all.” She thought furiously. “I think you must ask him.”

“How can I? He is my father. He has always been—rather serious, a little distant. How can I ask him if he is in love with one or two English girls? People have said—spiteful—things to my mother.”

He looked gloomily at the table.

“We want you to let him go,” he said, slowly.

“I only translate—”

“So it is the other, the Dorothy—”

Furies flapped in Griselda’s head. The secret was not hers. She said “There is a secret. It is not mine to tell you.”

“What have you done?”

“Listen,” said Griselda. “It is their secret. If I tell you, it will only be so as to stop you—thinking wrong things. It is a secret.”

“So?”

“She is his daughter. She came to tell him she had found that out. He—he believes her, you can see. They—they are—you see how they are. I only translate,” she was compelled to add, though she was covertly studying the repeated recording of her thin and pale beauty in the sketch-book. She said

“And you are her brother. Half-brother.”

Wolfgang put his head to one side and considered Griselda. She said “I think you should tell him you know. I think—” I think it is all too intense, she wanted to say, and could not. Wolfgang said

“I am glad you are not my sister.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Griselda flushed and looked away.

“Will you come with me, to him—?” said Wolfgang.

Anselm Stern, confronted by his son, his sketch-book and a deprecatory Griselda, was briefly taken aback. He had been controlling a story, and one of the actors had taken the strings into his own hands. Wolfgang asked, politely and implacably, whether what Griselda said was true. Then he said that his father must speak to his mother, because people had been saying unkind things. He had always intended to speak to her, Anselm said. He had wanted—time to himself, time to think how best to go on, what to say to his sons. He smiled ruefully at Wolfgang.

“Now you know, there is no further reason to hesitate.”

“I’m sorry,” said Griselda.

“Why?”

“It wasn’t my secret.” A child both spoiled, indulged and neglected, she had never before for so long been simply ancillary to someone else’s drama.

“No, it is good,” said Anselm Stern. “Now I reflect, I must thank you.”

Angela Stern sent hand-decorated cards—with wickedly grinning cherubs—to the Pension Susskind to invite everyone—Joachim, Toby, Karl, Griselda and Dorothy—to supper in the Spiegelgarten. Dorothy looked at the cherubs and said that Frau Stern had a sense of humour. She put her hair up, carefully, for the occasion.

Frau Stern received them standing by the fountain. She was larger than her husband, in every direction, and seemed a little older, solid-featured, with a crown of greying fair hair. She wore a lace-trimmed blouse and a full grey skirt, nothing fancy. She shook everyone’s hand, Dorothy’s no longer than any other. She had one of those faces that in repose looks heavy, but can be transformed by a smile, or an eager sense of interest. When she smiled, she resembled Wolfgang, the same wide grin, the same concentrated glee. She served salmon and cucumber, sour cream and potato salad, accompanied by a choice of beer or Riesling. She said that the carvings on the fountain and the mirrors were her own work. Griselda watched her watching Dorothy, when Dorothy was not looking. Dorothy was sitting next to Leon, who said composedly that he had been talking to his brother and was happy to have his news.

When they had finished eating, Angela Stern invited Dorothy to come into the house and look at her work. Everyone—even, by now, the tutors—understood the importance of this. Anselm Stern brought the figure of a black cat out of his pocket and began to dance it on his knee.

“I shall show you my atelier,” said Angela Stern, who spoke English, in her own way. They climbed steep stairs and went into a large, largely empty room, with an easel set up, and two tables of modelled clay heads, some in progress, some finished.

“These are my sons,” said Angela Stern, pointing to three heads of very newborn babies. “Here Wolfgang, here Leon, here Eckhardt, who did not live. I love my sons, and I love my work, and I’m happy to see you in my house, Fräulein Wellwood.”

“Dorothy?”

“Dorothy.”

“It is kind of you to invite me.”

“I do believe that we should all be free to love when—where—we must—that we should not be constrained. What we believe and what we feel, you will understand, are not always the same. I—I did not know you—you—existed. I met your mother when she was here. She is a beautiful woman, full of life. She was very unhappy, in that time. We tried to comfort her.

“I believe I ought to be happy to see you—Fräulein—Dorothy—and now that I do see you, I believe I shall be happy. Come to see us, often. I shall show you my work. This is the room where I am myself. I should like you to know me—me also. I think I need say no more.”

“You are incredibly kind.”

“If there is any fault, it is not yours. These are my sons, as cherubs, and here, beginning to be young men. This is Anselm. I could not model him without a model in his hand. I have never got his look to my own satisfaction. I also do caricatures, and there I do better, I can make a simplified—how do you say—edge—outline of his look—”

Thinking about this conversation, later, Dorothy thought that the older woman was determined both to behave well, and not to be left out. Later still, she came to see that there were many ways in which Angela Stern resembled Olive Wellwood. “This is the room where I am myself.” Dorothy was at an age where she was still amazed to be able to describe to herself the movements of the minds and feelings of others. If you knew how somebody’s mind worked, did it mean you liked them? She was not a person of fierce affections or spontaneous emotions. All this bubbling up of excitement and delight and fear over her found father perturbed her. Angela Stern’s lovingly modelled heads of her boys were like Olive’s family tales—a form of love, a form of separateness.

Good sense is both a curse and a blessing. Dorothy sat in Munich, and thought everything out. If she was to be a doctor, she must return to Todefright and matriculate. She thought briefly about trying to stay in southern Germany and become a doctor there, but German women had more restricted options for study than the British, at that time. And she realised she had no idea what her new-found family would say if she asked to be taken in. And then she realised that she did not want to stay, not yet, not really. She was homesick even if she was happy. She missed both the Tree House and the convenience of Queen’s College, Harley Street and the lectures in Gower Street. There was also the problem of the tutors. Griselda and Karl knew what was going on and had accepted Wolfgang and Leon as proxy cousins. She made a plan. She asked Griselda to tell Toby Youlgreave, in very strict confidence, what had happened. And she asked Karl to tell Joachim Susskind, in even stricter confidence, the same story. They would be part of a circle who knew the truth about Anselm Stern and Dorothy Wellwood, and they would preserve the convention that Dorothy was indeed Dorothy Wellwood, and thus she could go home. She wondered what Toby would think, who had loved her mother so long—she was trying to rethink, revisit, what she surmised of the relations of those two. She rejected the idea that he might always have known that Dorothy was not Humphry’s child. She would have noticed, if he had looked knowing in any way. He did not. He looked baffled.

And how should she prepare her return—to a certain extent, a climb-down—to Todefright? She wrote a letter to her mother. It took her a long time to write.

Dearest Mother Goose,

I was so pleased to have your letter and hear that all is well at home. I miss the children, and Tom, and the countryside, even though it is both beautiful and exciting in the city. I am learning a lot. Germans are very different from us, and you come to understand yourself better by seeing people who are different.

I don’t know why you thought I might not want the fairytale. I always love to see it, and know what happens next. I showed it to Herr Anselm Stern whose theatre we have been visiting. He said Mistress Higgle might be related to Hans mein Igel (originally by the Grimms) and put on his own puppet play about Hans the Igel for all of us to see. We have become great friends with Herr Stern and all his family. Frau Stern is an artist. I don’t know if you have met her. She is a very kind and welcoming woman and invites all of us—including the Tutes—to supper. Herr Stern’s sons, Wolfgang and Leon, are very good friends of all of us, now. They talk to Griselda in German, and take Charles to cabaret theatres and cafés! I know you are sad we shall not be in Todefright for the Midsummer Party, but the Sterns have invited us to celebrate it—it is called the Johannisnacht Fest—here, with them, and we will think of you all. Everyone in Munich—that is, in artistic circles in Schwabing—dresses up in fancy dress on every conceivable occasion, so we shall have to think what to go as. Herr Stern has promised to do a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream with marionettes for the occasion. Everyone here loves to go out and see the Bauerntanz—the people dancing in the streets. Herr Stern says he can make the rustics in the Dream be like the German Bauern. I am learning German but very slowly. Griselda speaks it like a swan swimming in a river. But she too will be happy to come home. We all send love, to you, and to Father, and to everyone in Todefright.

Dorothy.

Dorothy thought this letter was both a masterpiece of the disingenuous, and a very useful lifeline, cast to Olive, if Olive wanted to grasp it. She then sat down to think about her own fury at Olive, her wish to close her out and punish her. What exactly was she punishing her for? For a moment of passion (she supposed it was a moment of passion) with the mysterious and intriguing Anselm? For her own birth? She was glad she had been born, she was contented enough with who she was, even if that person turned out to have a different origin from what she had always supposed. For bringing her up in ignorance, as a Wellwood? What else could a woman in that situation have done? She had not lied to Humphry—possibly could not. They had both loved Dorothy, that she had to admit. What angered her was the lie. Those who are lied to feel diminished, set aside, misused. So Dorothy felt. But she was also discovering that knowing about lies that have been told is a form of power. She had power over both Humphry and Olive, because they had lied to her, and she knew. And they did not know how much she knew, and they were fearful. The letter she had written would make them more fearful, more anxious. They deserved that. But the letter also, in its naïveté and neutrality, left the door open for everyone to pretend that nothing had happened at all—for them all to know they were pretending, and tell a story together. She pressed the envelope shut, licked the stamp, and carried it to the post.

Charles/Karl was also preoccupied with his double identity. He saw more both of the politically agitated and of the raffish and satirical sides of life in Schwabing than the young ladies did. He sat in the Café Stefa-nie, in the thick smoke and the singing, and listened to psychoanalysts and anarchists preaching ferment. He listened to slogans. “Unity is princely violence, is tyrannical rule. Discord is popular violence, is freedom” (Panizza). Intense analogies were drawn between hidden destructive parts of the soul, and the excitement of peasants and workers in mobs. It was dangerous to deny such impulses—violence, conspiracy, revolution, murder became necessary and desirable as the tyrannical state was opposed and overcome. It was a long way from the polite lucubrations of the Fabians, and even further from the horse-racing, shooting-party circles of the new King, at the edge of which Charles’s father moved—thanks to his German mother’s fortune. Charles was quite intelligent enough to see that he was able to be an anarchist because he was rich. The Munich café thinkers were aesthetically excited by peasant manifestations of energy—the charivari, the Bauerntanz, the Karneval. Karneval and misrule went together, and were glorious. Joachim Susskind mostly listened. Wolfgang said little, though, like his father, he sketched incessantly, beards wagging in passionate dissertation, women’s legs visible under their skirts as they leaned back, applauding. Leon joined in. He discussed the necessity of assassination, almost primly. Karl said he did not see that it was necessary—such detached Acts as there had been—anarchists had killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress Elizabeth and the King of Italy—had only led to more repression. There speaks an Englishman, said Leon, not unfriendly. You don’t recognise oppression as we do. You cannot be put in prison for Unzüchtigkeit—“obscenity” Joachim translated—or for lèse-majesté as our artists regularly are. We are driven to put on our serious plays in private clubs and cabarets. And then, the police come in, and the artists are imprisoned, or banished. Oskar Panizza is in Switzerland and cannot return.

“We shall take you to the new artists’ cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter. Eleven executioners,” said Joachim. “It’s better in German—the sharp edge of the axe is the bite of the wit.”

Karl was already amazed by the satirical poison and violence of the periodicals, Jugend, Simplicissimus, with their drawings at once elegant, wicked, obscene and lively. Black dancing demons. Bulldogs. Women like bats and vampires with black mouths. Leon invited him—as an English anarchist—to admire Simpl’s cartoons on English matters. Leon explained to Charles/Karl that artists in Schwabing felt great sympathy for the oppressed Boers in South Africa. The cartoons preached “Shoot the English in the mouth, where they are most dangerous.” There was a graphic and horrible image of King Edward and a colonial officer stamping on Boers in a concentration camp. “The blood from these devils is befouling my crown,” said the King. “Strong, is it not?” said Leon. “English tourists have tried to get it suppressed. It mocks the Kaiser also. His endless uniforms. His journey to the Holy Land.”

Karl was surprised—somewhat surprised—by his reaction to these images. He felt pure, chauvinistic English resentment and hurt, which he concealed from the Germans as he had concealed his anarchism from his family. Like Dorothy, he had moments of homesickness for a life more slow-paced, less intense, more ruminative. More polite. The English could not take such pleasure in giving offence. The cartoon would be funnier, less—less unpleasant.

• • •

They took him to see the Elf Scharfrichter perform. They took him on a night when the puppets were playing, because Wolfgang had helped in the construction of the cast, and was involved in the performance itself.

The Scharfrichter were eleven artists—including the playwright, Frank Wedekind—who paraded in blood-red robes and hangmen’s masks, carrying executioners’ heavy swords, and performed plays, songs, puppet and shadow plays, using popular forms—which were referred to as Tingeltangel—and comparing themselves to the workers in applied arts—they meant, they said, to make songs to be sung as craftsmen made chairs to fit people’s bottoms. Angewandte Lyrik was what it was about. They had a private stage in a tavern which held eighty people, at nightclub tables. It was, when Karl went with Joachim and Wolfgang, crammed full of spectators. The black walls were decorated with lurid and elegant posters from Simplicissimus, and with pornographic Japanese woodcuts, which startled Karl, though he tried to retain a studied English calm. There was a programme, on the cover of which a gleefully naked woman was tossing out her long, blood-red gloves. Inside the entrance was a totem: a solemn head of a bewigged person, from the Age of Reason, embedded in which was an executioner’s axe.

The executioners marched in, singing the song they always sang, aimed at the Catholic hierarchy.

Ein Schattentanz, ein Puppenspott!

Ihr Glücklichen und Glatten

Die Puppen und die Schatten.

Er lenkt zu Leid, er lenkt zu Glück,

Hoch dampfen die Gebete,

Doch just im schönsten Augenblick

Zerschneiden wir die Drähte.

A shadow-dance, a puppet’s joke!

You happy, polished people—

In heav’n on high the same old bloke

Guides puppets from his steeple.

For good or ill he guides their moves,

Each doll an anthem sings,

But then, just when it least behoves

We cut the puppets’ strings.

On this evening the executioners performed this song with gusto, and were followed on stage by Marya Delvard, a skeletally thin woman with a mane of flaming hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and a white skin, who sang, twisted in a long black gown, about sex and passion, suicide and murder, in a kind of low moan. She was lit by violet light. She had a vampire’s mouth. After her came the puppet play Die Feine Familie. There was a pit between the audience and the stage, which housed both musicians and puppeteers. It depicted the crowned heads of Europe as a gang of squabbling children, quarrelling over toys—the Empire in South Africa, the palace in Peking. There were the uncle and the cousins, Edward, the Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nikolas, roaring with rage like toddlers, conspiring with each other against each other. Karl sat very still and tried to follow the rapid patter. He did not approve of kings and royal persons. But, again, he became surreptitiously English. These strangers should not so easily mock England’s green and pleasant land, even in the person of a fat, amorous, red-faced, droning person in ermine and a silly crown. He had a moment of wondering what the world would be like to live in, when the desired burst of violent outrage finally happened. He had a moment of wondering whether it would really be better to be ruled by the whims of masked executioners and raucous seductresses. He applauded the end of the play, and Wolfgang winked at him.

“You have this kind of work in London?”

“We have music hall. It isn’t like this. It’s—sillier, and—and more sentimental.”

“We have sentimental things, too, in abundance. Schwabing has invented a word for them, a word I like. Kitsch.”

“Kitsch,” said Charles/Karl.

Another new theatre, Richard Riemerschmid’s Schauspielhaus, had also opened that spring. They went there all together—the tutors, the Sterns, Karl, Griselda and Dorothy—to see Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. The theatre was Jugendstil, and delicately, exquisitely beautiful. The auditorium was a hot red cavern or womb which was also an elven wood. Fine golden tendrils and stems spilled and clambered and tumbled everywhere, irregular, linking balconies to stage, framing the actors. Wilde was dead, now. He had died shortly after Karl and Joachim had seen him in Rodin’s atelier in the Grande Exposition. Karl did not enjoy Salomé, with its rhythmic moaning and sick sensuality. He had got rather attached to the new word “kitsch.” He ventured to say to Joachim that he thought this might be kitsch, and Joachim was shocked, and said no, it was Modern Art, it was freedom of expression. Dorothy stopped looking after a time, and started to try to remember the bones of the body and their names. The actress playing Salomé seemed supple and boneless, like a snake-charmer and a snake, simultaneously. Wolfgang said to Griselda that he believed the play had never been put on in Wilde’s own country, in his own language. Toby Youlgreave, on the other side of Griselda, said it had been written in French and translated into English, but the Lord Chamberlain had stopped the performance. Ah, said Wolfgang. You too have a Lex Heinze. Toby said he thought the reason given was blasphemy, acting biblical characters, not obscenity. The text had been published with illustrations by Beardsley. Naughty illustrations. But clever. Wolfgang said he thought he had seen them, in the tone of one who has in fact no real memory of doing so. He then said Beardsley draws sex, but always coldly. Unlike our artists. The English are cold, they say. He looked quickly at Griselda, and away. Griselda looked at the rich red curtain, closed for the interval. A very faint flush rose in her white cheeks.

Finally, it was the Solstice again, it was Midsummer. In England, Olive presided as usual over a depleted gathering on the lawn. It was a grey day. The fairy queen wore a velvet opera cloak over her floating robes. The absent Youlgreave was replaced, as Bottom, by Herbert Methley, who had finished his novel and resumed his social and amorous dealings. Florian was Cobweb instead of Dorothy. Tom was still Puck. Humphry was still handsome, but there was grey at his temple.

In Munich it was altogether wilder. The artists and Bohemians of Schwabing dressed up whenever they could, celebrated all feasts with gusto, danced in the streets and in courtyards and gardens. Anselm Stern put on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for marionettes. The puppets, human and stumbling, and the fair folk with trailing wings, rushed through a painted wood, whilst flutes and bagpipes squealed eerily. The Mechanicals were dressed as Bavarian workmen, and danced peasant dances. Oberon had Anselm Stern’s own thin face, Dorothy saw, and one of his characteristic looks of intent, almost dangerous, thought-fulness. Puck looked like Wolfgang, with horns pushing through the unruly hair. Hermia and Helena were Dorothy and Griselda, expressions set in wide-eyed surprise.

After the show they roamed the streets. Midsummer in the south of Germany was warm, was leafy, was inviting. They crossed other groups, and stopped in taverns and cafés to take a beer, or a glass of Riesling. At one point Dorothy, who was dressed as a silver moth, and Griselda, who was dressed as an eighteenth-century lady, bumped into a Valkyrie, with breastplate and horned helmet, who turned out to be English. Her name, she said, was Marie Stopes. She was studying at the University. Dorothy was interested. She said she hadn’t known women were admitted. They aren’t, said Marie Stopes. In my department I am the only woman. I am a palaeobotanist. I study the sex of fossil cycads. It is very interesting. If one, then more, Dorothy thought. At this point Joachim Susskind joined them and recognised Miss Stopes, who had taken an unprecedented first-class Honours degree in Botany—in one year, moreover—at University College. Dorothy suddenly felt silly in grey silk and velvet. She should be in a classroom. But then, here was the successful Miss Stopes, dressed as an ungainly Valkyrie, and slightly drunk.

Anselm Stern and his family had built a balefire in their courtyard—a cheerful, flickering construction, not mountainous, not a furnace. They all danced round it, and, as it subsided, jumped over the ashes. Anselm had given them all blue flowers, Rittersporn, larkspurs, to throw into the embers—“And all your cares and troubles with them,” he said.

Dorothy had two memories from that day which never left her. The first was of dancing with her new father, with Anselm Stern, a kind of fast whirling polka, round the Spiegelgarten. She caught sight of herself in a mirror—her hair had come loose—she looked wild—and she suddenly remembered waltzing in South Kensington with her other father, her new dress, his hand on her waist, and everything that had come from it. Because of that dance, this dance. She missed a step, and Anselm supported her. He looked down at her worried face, and, for the first time, carefully kissed her on the brow.

Dorothy’s second memory was of going indoors to find a lavatory, and having found one to be occupied, searching for another. And she came upon two people, standing closely together. They were Wolfgang and Griselda. Dorothy saw that both of them had closed their eyes. They had not seen her. She went back round the corner she had just turned. She said nothing to Griselda, and Griselda said nothing to her.