The Children's Book (74 page)

“I didn’t mean—”

“Did you not? It has made me see what I myself feel. For my own part, I can think of no greater happiness than making you my wife. And giving me the
right
to look after you. I am much older than you are. I know that. So do you. But in some timeless place, I do believe, we see each other as equals, face to face. I don’t want to let you go. Perhaps I should, but I cannot. And will not.”

He looked at her, almost angrily.

She looked at him. Her large eyes were steady. She said “I love you. I do love you. Perhaps that is all that need matter?” He thought of cross Florence, and raging Benedict Fludd, and knew it was not. He was a strategist, he would devise a strategy. He said “Come here—”

She stood up and came. He took her in his arms and kissed her brow, and her neck, and then, gently, her lips, and then, less gently, her whole mouth, and he knew that she did indeed love him.

He said “We won’t tell Florence, until we have thought things out, further. Or Julian, of course. I do not think that will be easy, but I think it may be managed. What I shall do, as soon as possible, with your permission, is drive over to Purchase House—no, my love, you will
not
come with me—and ask your father, very formally, for your hand in marriage. Everything else, we will plan calmly, and carefully. Do you feel able to go to the metalwork school in the camp? I could drive you there, on my way.”

Elsie let him into Purchase House. She pointed across the yard, to the studio in the dairy. She opened her mouth to impart some information or other, and closed it again.

“He’s in there. I saw him go in,” she volunteered.

“Thank you,” said Cain, and marched across the yard. Fludd was standing at a high table, modelling one of his facing-both-ways jugs. He was incising more sullen lines into the sullen side. The other was a blank oval.

“Who is it?”

“Me, old friend.”

“Ah, you.” Fludd turned round, at bay. Cain did a mental calculation about their respective ages. Fludd must be less than ten years older than himself. He was not yet fifty and Fludd was not, he thought, sixty, though he looked older, grizzled and heavy.

“I have come to ask you something.”

“You have done enough harm.”

“I don’t think it’s harm. It is—I agree—unexpected how it has turned out. I have come to ask you for your daughter. Who has agreed to become my wife.”

“Wife—”

“I am older than she is, but she is happy to set it aside. She says I may ask you for your goodwill.”

“I don’t give it.”

“Wait. Think. She does love me. I do love her, Benedict. I think in an odd way we have a chance of happiness. We are at ease with each other. I can make her comfortable, and encourage the talent she has inherited from you—”

“What have you done to her?”

“Nothing. She has been like my daughter, together with my daughter. And very recently things have changed—developed, one might say—”

“Stop making reasonable noises, for Christ’s sake. You can’t do this. That’s final.”

“She is of age, and I don’t need your consent. But I do beg you to think for a moment of her—this
is
a chance of happiness for her—I have assured myself that—”

“She was happy here.”

“I think not, Benedict. I do think not. But this is a new beginning.”

“Howl,” said Benedict unexpectedly. “Howl, howl, howl.”

After a moment Prosper realised that this impossible person was quoting King Lear, as he came on stage bearing his dead daughter in his arms.

The important lectures were at the weekends, so that audiences might come in from outside, or even travel down from London. On the first weekend, in the late afternoon, on the Saturday, Humphry Wellwood spoke on Human Beings and Statistics: Changing the Condition of the Poor. On the Sunday, Herbert Methley spoke. His subject was Leaving the Garden: the Shamefulness of Shame. Miss Dace had asked him if he was quite sure about this title, and he had answered, flatly, “Yes.”

Prosper Cain and Imogen Fludd were in a state of exultant tension. They smiled too much, and Florence watched them, and they watched Florence watching them. They touched hands, secretly, in doorways, and when they were sure they were quite alone, Imogen ran into his arms. He had not expected his intense, quasi-fatherly affection and concern to become blind physical passion, but that had happened and he felt reinvigorated and renewed. As for Imogen, the slight stoop she had had, the deferent low voice, the slow movements that resembled her mother’s had turned to eagerness and quickness. Prosper knew he should tell Florence, and found himself taking intense pleasure in secrecy.

Things were complicated by the arrival of Julian and Gerald, who were on a walking holiday and had decided to walk to Lydd and hear Humphry’s lecture. Gerald was trying to decide between becoming a moral philosopher and going into politics, if he could find a party that met his exacting standards. Julian had an idea for a thesis on English pastoral poetry and painting. He wanted to write about the bright, transparent visions of Samuel Palmer and the woodcuts of Calvert. Gerald was writing about Love and Friendship and the Good, when he was not talking late, or swimming in the Cam, or bicycling across the marshes, or climbing in the Alps. He thought Humphrey’s Fabian socialist views on human nature were interesting. The young men arrived at the Mermaid in time for lunch, and were shown up to the family sitting-room, where they found Florence, writing.

“You could have
said
you were coming,” she greeted them, taking in Gerald’s beauty under his floppy linen hat.

“We didn’t know. Then we saw a poster for this lecture, so we thought we’d call on you for lunch, and go to hear it. Where’s Papa?”

“Silversmithing.”

“Is he coming here for lunch?”

“He didn’t say.”

Julian looked at Florence, who was looking at Gerald. He said “Well, we can lunch with you, and cheer you up, can’t we?” He saw that she needed cheering up. He said

“Are you not helping with the silversmithing?”

“I have no skill. And I don’t want to.”

Gerald had walked across to the window, and was staring out. Julian said “What’s up?”

“You’ll soon see,” said Florence, darkly.

At the lecture, they found themselves in a row of old friends. Julian was on the end, and Florence was next to him, and Gerald was on the other side of her. Beyond Gerald was Geraint, and next to him the young woman from Purchase House, Elsie Warren, decorously dressed and looking severe. Next to Elsie was Charles/Karl Wellwood, who was thinking what to do at the end of his Cambridge studies, whether to go to the London School of Economics or to Germany, to be an anarchist or a socialist or some kind of worker. Dorothy and Griselda were not there. They had gone into the hay barn where the marionettes and life-size puppets were being constructed. Griselda wanted to speak German. Dorothy was watching Anselm Stern stitch a tiny costume on to a slender silken trunk. Wolfgang and Tom had made a lolling platoon of death-still scarecrow men and women, decked with hay and flowers, stretching out rigid arms of coat-hangers and hoes.

Humphry more or less bounded onto the stage, his red hair and beard darkly glowing. His wife was in the front row, looking queenly, and Marian Oakeshott was towards the back, looking thoughtful.

Humphry talked about the paradox of statistical surveys and individual human fates. The Christian religion, he said, which had formed our thought, insisted that each human soul was unique and valuable in the sight of God. Jesus Christ had advised the rich man to sell all he had, and give to the poor. He had also said that the poor were always with us. He had said that where every prisoner and sick man and pauper was, there He was also among them. He had urged charity on his followers.

Much had been done, much that was valuable, by those who had
gone out amongst the starving and the derelict and had reported on crowded rooms in unsanitary buildings, dead and dying crowded together, the sickness of sweat-shop and lucifer workers. He read out a description of the appalling, rapid descent into penury and death of a good worker who injured his back.

He said that compared to individual witness and individual feelings, the compiling of statistics might seem dry. But those stirred not only the imagination but the reason, and the will to act. Statistics was a human science. It had begun, he rather thought, with Durkheim, noticing that the number of suicides in Paris did not vary from year to year. All of them different human creatures, all of them grim decisions taken that life was no longer bearable. The causes might be poverty, lost love, failure at business, humiliation or sickness. But the figure was the same.

In the case of poverty the compilation of figures touched the imagination in a way individual cases could not. The hero of this study was Charles Booth who had interviewed everybody—registrars, school attendance officers, School Board visitors, census-takers—and had produced, beginning in 1892, seventeen volumes of reports on the nature and extent of poverty in London. He had mapped it street by street, colouring the streets according to the data, and had come to the conclusion that a million people, over 30 per cent of the population of London, had not the wherewithal to subsist or continue living. This figure revealed an unjust society as individual descriptions alone could not. It was a prerequisite for putting forward constitutional and legal changes—the introduction of a pension for the aged in place of the foul and degrading Workhouse, the suggestion of minimum legal wages, and maximum hours of work, of help for the unemployed that was rationally administered and not a function of charitable impulses amongst the better-off.

Charles/Karl listened dubiously. He had been moving amongst those who believed that only a revolution of the underdogs would bring about any change in the gruesome system. Everyone bothered about the poor. His parents’ friends truly held the belief that the undeserving poor should be sequestered in concentration camps and reformed, reconstructed or even—in the case of imbeciles and madmen—charitably put to death. In his college in Cambridge lunches were given for working-men, some of whom were crusty, some of whom were boys with sidelong
glances under long lashes, some of whom were auto-didacts, socialists, or would-be poets. He did not feel he had got to know any of these selected and collected examples. He did not know what to say to them. He did not speak their language though he could communicate with intense small groups of German anarchists. He thought he might discuss the LSE with Humphry. The glamour of statistics had touched him.

Gerald kept making remarks to Julian over the top of Florence’s hat, as though she was not there. He said once, with a sardonic smile,

“He who would do good must do it in minute particulars.”

Julian drawled back “Not clear, my dear chap. Are you referring to particular people, or minute particular
figures?”

Florence said “William Blake was mad, you know,” but neither of them appeared to have heard her, and perhaps it was not a clever remark.

They gathered after the lecture, the three Kingsmen easy in each other’s company, analysing good points, dismissing bad ones. Personal relationships, said Gerald, were the root of every virtue, couldn’t be done without, a man could not spend his life on reducing other men to figures without damage. Florence said we are not all monads, and nobody answered. Charles/Karl said society did exist, it was not only a mass of individuals. Classes existed. And male and female said Florence, crossly. Indeed, said Julian politely. Geraint, who had joined them, said that new women’s groups for agitating were very interesting. Gerald took the conversation back to human friendship.

He was embarrassing Julian, not because he was insulting Julian’s sister, but because Julian no longer loved him, and was not ready to admit that, precisely because of the intensity of the Apostolic faith in friendship as a supreme value. Julian no longer wanted to kiss, or indeed even to touch, Gerald, who had—as often happens—become much more eager to touch, to hold, to grasp Julian as Julian withdrew. Julian had begun to think Gerald was clever and silly, and did not want to know he thought that, it was inconvenient, their group was so comfortable, their walks so companionable, Cambridge and the English countryside so lovely.

Geraint moved round the group to Florence’s side. He said “I wish you had been able to persuade Imogen to go back home for a few days.” So did she, said Florence, repressively.

Geraint said she was looking beautiful. She broke off her intent frown to smile weakly at him, which encouraged him. He did not feel at home with the theoretical Kingsmen. Also he half-despised them for their lack of acquaintance with “real life” which he thought he knew better. He asked Florence her opinion of Humphry’s talk and she said it did seem to suggest things that could really be done, and that it was absurd for the middle classes to live in fear, as they did, of the dirty and desperate armies in the sinks of their towns.

At this point, inopportunely, Elsie Warren approached them. She nodded to Florence, and asked Geraint, without urgency, if he had seen his father. Geraint had not.

“He’s not at home. At least I think not. He’s not at meals. Mind you, he often isn’t.”

“Probably recovering from his lecture,” said Geraint. “A very small quantity of society makes him a recluse for days.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Elsie. “Your mother isn’t bothered.”

“We shall need him at the end of the camp—for the firing.”

“I think he’ll come. He’ll want to oversee it.”

Geraint turned away from her rather abruptly, and asked Florence if he could walk her back to Rye. He expected her to say no, but she said yes. This was partly to claim independence from Julian and Gerald, and partly because she thought Geraint might have something to say about Imogen. But it was partly also that his feelings for her—his steadfastness and patience—were comforting. He was as much out of a men’s world as the Cambridge men, but in his men’s world, men liked women, women interested them.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Something is going on, that’s
odd.”