The Children's Book

48

In 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 22nd in the middle of the longest hottest summer the country had known. The King took a measure of 98° Fahrenheit on his greenhouse thermometer. Neo-Pagans slid naked into cool pools in Grantchester, under hanging boughs, and hid giggling in the undergrowth, watching punts pass, full of tourists and dons. The royal yacht Hohenzollern carried the Kaiser and his family to the Coronation. Queen Mary wore a hat with cream roses and delicate feathers. In July the Kaiser sent the new German gunboat, Panther, to Agadir and was accused by the French and the English of interfering in French colonial affairs.

The Webbs, the driving force of the Fabian Society, had absented themselves from heat, gaiety and tension together, and had parted for Canada on a tour that was to take them a year. Work at the National Committee diminished in intensity. This was partly because the poor, the workers and their dependants, were stirring with discontent, dissatisfaction, determination and even rage, all over the country. There had been miners’ strikes and railwaymen’s strikes, strikes of woollen and worsted workers in Yorkshire and of cotton spinners in Lancashire, strikes by the Card and Blowing Room Operatives’ Association. In that hot summer there was a wave of action beginning with seamen’s and firemen’s strikes in Poole and Hull two days before the Coronation. Then the dock workers joined the seamen and firemen. Agreements were reached, threats of military action were made, new demands arose amongst the workers. In August, there was a strike of the Transport Workers, who were joined by the lightermen, the stevedores, the carters, the tugboatmen, the crane porters, the coal bunkerers and the sailing bargemen. The Port of London came to a stop. Vegetables rotted and butter went rancid in casks. Frozen meat from Argentina, New Zealand and the USA went foul, green and noisome as the refrigeration ships gave up work, powerless. Starvation threatened. At this point the women of Bermondsey, led by Mary Macarthur, suddenly left their work and ran into the streets, shouting and singing. It was spontaneous: they did not have one overwhelming grievance; they had discovered that their lives were intolerable and the world they lived in unacceptable and unjust.

Commentators saw this human ferment of wrath and energy as an expression of a natural force, like a fire, like a hurricane, or as Mr. Ramsay MacDonald put it mildly, like the stirrings of spring.

“The Labour world responded to the call to strike in the same eager, spontaneous way as nature responds to the call of springtime. One felt as though some magical allurement had seized upon the people.” A conservative writer, Fabian Ware, commenting on the new syndicalism in the union members and the socialists, a French import that implied the will to cause a revolution, said that this set of beliefs was “an assertion of instinct against reason.”

Ben Tillett, the workers’ indefatigable and charismatic leader, wrote

“Class war is the most brutal of wars and the most pitiless. Capitalism is capitalism as a tiger is a tiger and both are savage and pitiless towards the weak.”

Charles/Karl, reading William Trotter on the herd instinct in hu-mans, observed the marching, famished, furious men and their starving families with anxiety, and a feeling of human uselessness. Trotter was interested in groups, in “the aggressive gregariousness of the wolf and the dog, the protective gregariousness of the sheep and the ox, and differing from both these, we have the more complex social structures of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialised gregariousness.”

But Trotter believed, and Charles/Karl understood him, that human beings had constructed a social structure no longer directly subject to evolutionary pressures and checks. Man was a creature who made beliefs and myths about the world, and morals, and treated them as things, not as words and thoughts:

We see man today, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief, no less firm, that his traditions, laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments, however beautiful, never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures, ignominiously to be swept from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience.

Charles/Karl was losing his belief in Beatrice Webb’s Individualist State. He found it perilously easy to hate the whole of his own class—his mind was full of visions of over-bred chows and borzois, Cochin fowl with useless feet and nattering voices. He saw the Coronation in Trot-terian terms as a confection of human-invented unrealities, a small man in a foolish hat, in a building made to house a non-existent human deity, surrounded by fawning creatures who could barely move in their dragging garments. To believe in the Empire as a truth was to join in the fiction of calling an evolutionary fact—tooth, claw, cringing and triumphalism—by a solemn and poetic name.

And in the East End the crowds marched like one creature, stirring its huge length out of the sloth, or subjection, or lack of knowledge of its own power, that had kept it down.

But there was no place there for him. He couldn’t dance, and he couldn’t march, or not with any sense of common purpose, and abolishing the Poor Law was not going to undo Trotter’s argument.

The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, went on August 17th to meet representatives of the railwaymen’s unions. He offered them a Royal Commission on their grievances. He spoke from the height of his position. The alternative to the long deliberations of a Royal Commission appeared to be the use of force against the workers. They went away, consulted, and came back. They refused, flatly, to accept the Commission or to return to work. Mr. Asquith was distinctly heard, as he walked out of the room, to say “Then your blood be upon your own head.” Winston Churchill despatched troops to stand by for trouble with the miners. Tension and boiling indignation persisted.

In the autumn of 1911 Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, in its entirety, was performed at Covent Garden. Bloomsbury had seats, and the Fabian Nursery had seats: Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and the lovely daughters of Sir Sidney Olivier juggled tickets and sat in rows together. The black elves tapped their hammers in violent rhythms in Nibelheim, one-eyed Wotan and Loge the trickster, the fire god, descended to the underworld and tricked its king out of his gold ring of power, and his helmet of invisibility. Fire rose and shimmered around Brunnhilde the Valkyrie sleeping on her rock, and Brynhild Olivier applauded. Wotan had mutilated the World Ash to make laws and treaties for his dispensation, which, all too human, slowly foundered in its own inanity and inadequate beliefs about good and evil. Human beings were either corrupt, or deluded, or victims, although the Rhine and the music—and indeed the flames of fire—rippled and sang.

Griselda Wellwood went with Julian, Charles/Karl, Wolfgang and Florence. Griselda was interested in what she thought were Wagner’s own adaptations of the myths in the Edda and the Nibelungenlied. She told Julian that there was no source for the cutting-down of the World Ash to set fire to the World and Valhalla. It was Wagner’s own invention, his addition to the story. Julian said the singing made him feel impotent. Charles/Karl, still interested in groups and instinct, said an audience was a different animal from a man reading on his own. An audience—if the work was good—was a creature. Like a dragon, said Griselda. You can lull dragons with music. Julian said a dissatisfied audience was a creature too, its emotions were common, it worked itself up. Wolfgang said, be quiet, pay attention, the music begins again. And the dangerous sound hung in tantalising strands, and answered itself, and grew stronger, and wove itself together.

Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, wrote in her journal in 1906: “I have not one woman friend who knows or cares about politics—they love the personal aspect, the prestige, the Cabinet-making.” She had written: “Women are d—d stupid really, and only have instinct, which after all animals have. They have no size or reason—very little humour, hardly any sense of honour or truth, no sort or sense of proportion, merely blind powers of personal devotion and all the animal qualities of the more heroic sort.” She despised and feared the suffrage agitators, who spat at her at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet and in 1908 threw stones through her windows in Downing Street, making her fear for her infant son.

“I nearly vomited with terror that he should wake and scream. Why should my life be burdened by these worthless, vicious, cruel women? They say men would not be so seriously dealt with, what lies they tell! Men would be horsewhipped on every street corner.”

She had great faith in her own feminine authority and intuition. In late 1910 she made an appeal to Lloyd George during the election campaign. It was a silly letter, sublimely unaware of its own silliness.

I am sure you are as generous as you are impulsive. I am going to make a political appeal to you. I say political against personal for, if you do not respond to my appeal, I shall be very unhappy, but not affronted. Don’t when you speak on platforms arouse what is low and sordid and violent in your audience; it hurts those members of it that are fighting these elections with the noblest desire to see fair play; men animated by no desire to punch anyone’s head; men of disinterested emotion able to pity and heal their fellow men, whether it be a lord or a sweep. I expect the cool-blooded class hatred shown for some years in the corporate councils of the House of Lords has driven you into saying that lords are high like cheese etc. etc. etc.

If your speeches only hurt and alienated lords, it would not perhaps so much matter—but they hurt and offend not only the King and men of high estate, but quite poor men, Liberals of all sorts—they lose us votes …

Lloyd George replied with steel irony

… I have undertaken in spite of a racking cold to address a dozen meetings before the election is over. If you would only convey to the Whips your emphatic belief that my speeches are doing harm to the cause you will render the party a service and incidentally confer on me a great favour…

In November 1911 Lloyd George mischievously announced that he had torpedoed the Conciliation Bill, which would have given the Vote to a limited number of women. Instead there was to be a Bill on Manhood Suffrage Reform. The women, both the militant suffragettes and the calm and reasonable suffragists, were appalled.

In February Emmeline Pankhurst stated: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in politics.” Women had discomfited the daily life of the nation, as it had been, with increasing wit and venom. “Votes for Women” was burned into the greens of golf courses and written in scarlet greasepaint on the Prime Minister’s blotting pad. Respectable black-garbed ladies, under respectable black hats, produced from comfortable, large, respectable handbags claw hammers and large stones, and walked steadily down the great shopping streets of cities, rhythmically crashing down the plate-glass windows. Miss Christabel Pankhurst, in various disguises, pink straw hat, blue sunglasses, evaded the one hundred hunting detectives to the tune of the “d___d elusive Christabel.” She finally slid away to Paris, from

where she directed the increasingly extravagant acts of outrage, and took her small, pretty dog for walks in the Park. Her mother was, as she frequently was, suffering in prison.

In March Mr. Asquith, the silver-tongued, spoke in the House about the coal-miners’ strike which was paralysing the country. He appealed to the miners and to the members of Parliament. He broke down in tears.

In March, also, Margot Asquith decided to intervene secretly. She wrote to a labour leader who had been invited to luncheon, and proposed a secret meeting. It was a very feminine plea.

The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want?

I don’t, of course, mean for yourself, as I am certain you are as straight as I am, and disinterested. It would be on far higher grounds than this that I would ask it.

Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity?

Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bank books, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man?

I am a socialist, possibly not on the same lines as you… People who get what they want at the cost of huge suffering to others I would like to understand more perfectly.

Just now I suspend judgement, as I don’t really comprehend. I don’t care what creed a man holds, but the bed-rock of that creed should be Love, even of your enemies, which is a hard creed to put into practice.

Having suffered greatly yourself, I expect you don’t want anyone else to suffer, and this is what makes you a socialist. It is also my point of view, but I am only a woman. I don’t like to see my husband suffer in his longing to be fair, just and kind to both sides in this tragic quarrel.

The letter continues on the same note, which William Trotter would have been able to identify as a making of human moral structures into tangible Things, where they are not. She received no answer. The strikes went on.

So did the suffrage protests. Miss Emily Davison was arrested in Parliament Street holding a piece of linen, saturated with paraffin, burning brightly, which she was inserting into the pillar box of the Post Office. The Prime Minister and a gathering of friends and family, returning from a Scottish holiday, were jostled at Charing Cross by a crowd of shouting suffragettes. The party fought back: Violet Asquith “had the satisfaction of crunching the fingers of one of the hussies.” It was Violet, wielding a golf club, who had driven off a group of women attempting to strip the Prime Minister of his clothes at Lossiemouth Golf Course. Asquith wrote in a letter that he himself resembled St. Paul at Ephesus “fighting with beasts—Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras dire—as Milton says somewhere.”

In April, that year, the City was snared in the invisible strands of the wireless. There were posters everywhere announcing that the new, invincible wonder-ship, the Titanic, had struck an iceberg in mid-ocean. The ship sent radio messages to the land, which after a time became confused and fragmentary and then ceased. A rumour began that the passengers were saved and the ship being towed into Halifax. The City went to bed quite cheerful, and woke to disaster in the morning. Among the drowned was W. T. Stead, the crusading journalist, who had so long ago purchased a young girl for sex, and exposed a business of procuration and abuse.

The Webbs returned from their global journey and took in the changing world. The Committee for Reform of the Poor Law was wound up, and replaced by the New Fabian Research Bureau. The Society moved closer to the Independent Labour Party and campaigned for a national minimum wage. Ameliorating the condition of the poor was changing to a syndicalist ideal of revolt.

Individuals were in odd states of mind. Rupert Brooke had taken Ka Cox to Munich and ended his heterosexual virginity, which he was convinced was causing a nervous breakdown. They returned—Ka pregnant, nervously exhausted, Rupert on the edge of madness. Madness was cured by a drug to repress sexual desire and by a regime of immobility and “stuffing”—lamb cutlets, beef, bread, potatoes. Rupert wrote wild letters of anti-Semitic nausea to his friends, and told Virginia Woolf, also enduring a breakdown, also being “stuffed,” the tale of a Rugby choir where

Two fourteen-year-old choirboys arranged a plan during the Choral Service. At the end they skipped round and watched the children enter. They picked out the one whose looks pleased them best, a youth of ten. They waited in seclusion till the end of the Children’s Service. They pounced on their victim, as he came out, took him, each by a hand, and led him to the vestry. There while the Service for Men Only proceeded, they removed the lower parts of his clothing and buggered him, turn by turn. His protestations were drowned by the Organ pealing out whatever hymns are suitable to men only. Subsequently they let him go. He has been in bed ever since with a rupture. They were arrested and flung, presumably, into a Reformatory. He may live.

The tone of this is not quite the insouciant tone of the Bloomsbury/ Apostles school of buggery chatter. And it was written to a woman temporarily mad. To his neo-Pagan friends he was writing diatribes against Lytton Strachey’s filth and prurience, not unlike D. H. Lawrence’s horror of the same group as black beetles creeping out from under. Brooke knew, almost certainly, that it wasn’t funny. What did he think—who did he think—he and it was?

Margot Asquith was one of a social set called the Souls, who were clever with words and sporty with tennis and bicycles. Margot’s set liked to be daring and unusual, unconventional and “natural.” The children of the Souls, including Margot’s stepchildren, Raymond and Violet Asquith, formed what came to be known as the Corrupt Coterie. Raymond was the king of this group, who indulged in “chlorers” and opium, impiety and black humour. Lady Diana Manners said “Our pride was to be unafraid of words, unshocked by drink, and unashamed of decadence and gambling.” Diana was, Raymond Asquith said, “an orchid among cowslips, a black tulip in a garden of cucumbers, nightshade in a day nursery.” They parodied the charades and theatrical tableaux of their parent Souls (the nomenclature has an odd echo of the private grades of the Cambridge Apostles, or the Munich Cosmic Circle, with their embryos, godfathers and Angels, their Giants and Peripherals). They had a particular game called Breaking the News. It consisted of acting out as comedy the breaking of the news of a child’s death, to his mother.

In November 1912 the great “silver scandal” gripped the City and filled the newspapers. Messrs. Simon Montagu & Co. had been secretly purchasing silver for the Indian government as part of its currency reserve. There were accusations of corruption, and smears of anti-Semitism. John Maynard Keynes—who believed in the gradual elimination of the gold standard, and of a tangible currency reserve—published his book, Indian Currency and Finance, in June 1913. In November of that year there was a crisis. “The great silver speculation has failed and the Indian Specie Bank is bankrupt. What a tragedy!” wrote Sir Charles Addis, who was instrumental in forming a syndicate of bullion brokers who in December managed to avoid the disaster.

Geraint Fludd had become more and more involved in the currency and bullion work of Wildvogel & Quick. He bought Keynes’s book and read it carefully. Basil Wellwood invited the young man to dinner in Rules restaurant one evening and fed him on potted shrimps, venison, Stilton and syllabub, with a bottle of very good claret. It had never been clear to Basil exactly what had happened to Geraint’s “engagement” to Florence Cain, who was now Mrs. Goldwasser. He had noticed a difference in Geraint—a grimmer determination about his work, an unsmiling propriety. At the end of the dinner he said

“I wanted to tell you how much I admire the resolution with which you have worked over the past year or two. I think you have had setbacks to contend with, and have contended with them.”

Geraint said that that was so. He observed that if things could not be mended they should be set aside in the mind, but that that could be hard.

Basil said that he had come to feel that Geraint was in many ways another son to him. His own son made no pretence of being interested in the drama and life of the City. In that sense, Geraint was his spiritual heir—a spiritual heir of material things. He wanted to advance him as best he could, as fast as he could. He had been very impressed with his work on the Indian silver crisis. What would Geraint feel about being sent out there, next year, to take a good look at the Bank’s business in that country?

They raised their glasses. The room smelt of wine and bread and gravy, and the light was rich and dim. Geraint didn’t answer.

“I thought a change of scene …” said Basil. “A long voyage on an ocean liner. Full of hopeful beautiful women,” he added, daring.

Geraint read Kipling. He thought of the mystery of India, the jungle, the light, the colours, the creatures. The complexities of the silver dealings. The distance. He was, he saw, in need of distance. And his imagination touched on the beautiful young women sailing across dark starlit oceans in search of husbands. A journey like that made you free, made you a different man.

“I should like that, sir,” he said. “You have been very kind to me.”

Basil said “It was a fortunate day for me when you came into the Bank. You are too young to be fixed by one setback. You have all your life in front of you. The world in front of you.”

Geraint set his hurt against the pull of the oceans and the strange continent. He could feel his own energy stirring.

“I know,” he said. “You are right. Thank you.”