The Children's Book (29 page)

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

In the New Year of 1896, Humphry went to Portman Square to take home his two eldest children. Phyllis, Hedda, Florian and Robin had been taken by Cathy the maid to visit her family on a farm near Rottingdean. Phyllis had looked plaintive, and sulked a little. She preferred being the youngest of the big children to being the eldest of the small children. Violet tried to suggest that the Basil Wellwoods might find room for her, it would do her good to be more independent, but nothing came of that. Dorothy was grim and tense during these discussions. She wanted to be with Griselda, and having Phyllis around was quite exactly
not
being with Griselda. Tom would rather have stayed at home; he did not have interests in common with Charles, who was a year older than him, but they did not quarrel, either.

It was decided that Humphry should approach his friend Leslie Skinner, who worked with Karl Pearson in the Department of Applied Mathematics at UCL, to find a good tutor to take both Charles and Tom, and coach them for the entrance exams of Eton and Marlowe. Toby Youlgreave had agreed to help them with history and literature. Tartarinov was doing well with Tom’s Latin, and Humphry was happy to suggest that he reciprocate his brother’s hospitality by offering space to Charles in which he could come and polish his classics. Basil and Katharina felt that what young women needed was accomplishments—music, manners, painting and drawing. They offered to invite Dorothy to share Griselda’s art lessons. Griselda had been reading
The Mill on the Floss
and had persuaded Dorothy to read it too. They sat in Griselda’s bedroom, indignant Maggie Tullivers, for whom maths and Latin and literature were not considered.

They all went to tea with Leslie and Etta Skinner, in their narrow parlour in Tavistock Square, to meet the maths tutor Leslie Skinner thought might do the job. They all went, because Humphry combined the tea with a visit to the British Museum, and he enjoyed Dorothy’s company on such outings. He took them to see Viking gold and the Elgin Marbles, and made them all shudder in front of the Egyptian coffins with dead men and women bandaged inside them.

The parlour had dark green Morris & Co. wallpaper, spangled with scarlet berries, and a Morris set of spindly Sussex settle and chairs, with
rush seats. There were woven rugs on a dark floor, and high shelves of orderly books. The possible tutor was already present, a young German, from Munich, Dr. Joachim Susskind, in a threadbare suit, and wearing a red tie. Dr. Susskind had flowing, hay-coloured, dry hair, and a fine, waving moustache to go with it. His eyes were blue and mournful, not clear, glassy sky-blue like Dr. Skinner’s but a clouded, faded blue, the diluted blue of an almost-white Small Blue butterfly, Tom thought. He looked mild and harmless. Leslie Skinner presented him by saying that he was not only a first-class mathematician, but also a first-class teacher, which many mathematicians were not. Dr. Susskind smiled mildly. He said he should like to know whether Tom and Charles
enjoyed
mathematics? Yes, said Tom. No, said Charles. Dr. Susskind asked both of them, why? Tom said it wasn’t arithmetic he liked, he often got that wrong, it was the way things fitted together in geometry, the sense of finding it out. Charles said he didn’t like feeling a fool, which was the effect maths had on him. Leslie Skinner asked which subjects Charles
did
like, and Charles said, none, really, they didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.

“And what do you want to know?” asked Skinner, Socratic.

“Things about life. Why are the poor poor? What is wrong with us?”

Humphry laughed, and said he was afraid Charles would not get much information about poverty at Eton. Charles said he didn’t want to go there, but nobody cared what he thought. Skinner said it was always useful to be taught
how
to think, and Dr. Susskind said, almost inaudibly, looking at no one, that that was a good question to ask, a good question.

The two girls sat side by side, one dark, one pale gold, their long hair brushed out over their shoulders. Etta Skinner turned to them briskly and asked in a principled and slightly combative tone where
they
were to get their education. Leslie Skinner turned his blue look on Dorothy and gave her his complete attention.

“You are the young lady who is to be a doctor.”

Dorothy said she was.

“Then it is high time you were seriously studying science.”

“I know,” said Dorothy, incurring a sharp look of reproach from her father.

“Well, I do know,” she said, answering the look. It turned out that Etta had an answer to propose. She herself did some teaching at Queen’s College, in Harley Street, which gave classes
to females of any age over twelve years, either to prepare them for a teaching career, or to improve their skills and knowledge if they were already teaching. Dorothy and Griselda might attend—part-time even—together. Griselda said she would go to science classes with Dorothy if Dorothy would go with her to classes in German and French. And Latin, said Leslie. They would need Latin if they were to think of university, as he hoped they would. UCL made provision for women to study science. Skinner told Humphry that a good Fabian should consider his daughters’ education as seriously as his sons’. Humphry said that Dorothy—and Griselda—were still only little girls. Hardly, said Skinner, smiling at the two serious young faces. Hardly. They would be young women any moment, he could see. His look made Dorothy feel unexpectedly heated, on her skin, and also inside her. She wriggled a little and sat straighter. Griselda said she didn’t think her parents saw any need for her to be educated. Skinner said, it should be enough that she
wanted
to be educated. Etta took Humphry’s arm, and said surely he could explain to his family how much it might mean, how much it should be a right… Griselda said Dorothy could stay with her, and they could go to the lessons together, if only the families agreed. Humphry said he would miss his girl, and Dorothy said he might not notice, he was so much away, now, himself.

Tom and Charles began immediately to go to University College to do maths with Dr. Susskind, who shared a poky little office in a mews behind the main building, with another statistician, who was collecting data on human heights, weights and ages. They went on Monday and Tuesday afternoons, and were given work to take home. They were measured themselves, as a statistic. Then, some weekends, they travelled to Todefright to work with Vasily Tartarinov, and to read with Toby Youlgreave in his cottage.

Tom liked the maths well enough, and tried not to think of the consequences of getting the Marlowe scholarship. He felt unreal in London, as though his flesh and blood were in abeyance, as though he was a simulacrum of a boy, floating along Gower Street with its prim houses, dodging cabs in Torrington Street. The maths, especially the geometry, intensified his sense of abstraction. He waited to be back in Todefright. He thought continuously of the woods and the Tree House. He read
William Morris’s new book,
The Well at the World’s End
, and also
The Wood Beyond the World
, and
News from Nowhere
. Charles read these books, too, but they did not discuss them much, except to make a joke, when their homework was hard, of the fact that William Morris appeared to believe that boys could educate themselves as and when they chose, with no more chalky effort than they had put into learning language as babies. Joachim Susskind delighted in teaching Tom, for he was indeed quick, and instinctive, and did not need lengthy explanations.

Charles was slower and less apt. He was given extra lessons, in Dr. Susskind’s lodgings in a house just behind the Women’s Hospital, between Euston and St. Pancras. It was true that Susskind was a good enough teacher to see not only
what
Charles didn’t understand, but how and why he didn’t understand it. He explained, in his soft German voice, just what was blocking enlightenment. At first he didn’t talk to Charles about anything other than maths. Then, one day, he said

“You asked, why are the poor poor. I was struck by that.”

“What I can’t see—what I really can’t see—is why
everyone
doesn’t ask themselves that,
all the time
. How can these people bear to go to church and then go about in the streets and see what is there for
everyone
to see—and get told what the Bible says about the poor—and go on riding in carriages, and choosing neckties and hats—and eating huge beefsteaks—I can’t see it.”

“I have brought a book for you to read. I think probably you should not let it be seen in your home. But I think it will speak to you.”

So Charles Wellwood read Prince Kropotkin’s
Appeal to the Young
, which called on young doctors, lawyers, artists, to consider how they would live and work in the light of the horrors of starvation, disease, and desperation in the world of the poor. Its prescriptions for the good life were vaguer than its fierce calling-up of the bad. It called on the young to organise, to struggle, to write and publish about oppression, to be socialists. It did not say how the desired revolution could be brought about. Charles went back to Dr. Susskind and asked if he had more such books. The two looked at each other, the German gentle and quietly excited, the English boy tense with abstract need, his face white, erupting on brow and cheeks, his eyes hungry.

He asked Susskind if he was a socialist. Susskind replied that he was
an Anarchist. He believed the world would be better if all authority, all hierarchy, all institutions were abolished. There would come a revolution. After that, harmony, all giving to all and accommodating all.

Something in Charles was wary of the prophetic enthusiasm of this. If goodness were really easy and natural, how had authority ever come about? He had read
News from Nowhere
with a certain scepticism. He was not sure it was possible to return to mediaeval pastoral and abolish the machine. He was coming to believe that the Todefright Wellwoods were not
real
socialists, were not confronting the problem head-on. For one thing, their house was full of things made in small quantities by poor men for rich ones. He had heard his own father sneer at Morris & Co. for selling vastly expensive fabrics and tapestries with golden age and paradisal foliage on them. Somehow they slid away from the horrors they should be confronting.

He said as much, as best he could, to Susskind, who said how wise he was, that Mr. Morris himself had called himself a dreamer of dreams, born out of his due time. Peter Kropotkin believed in the printing-press. Maybe Charles would not believe this, but not far from where they were was just such a press, producing a monthly revolutionary paper called
The Torch of Anarchy
. It might interest Charles to know that the paper had been founded by three young people—still children really—from a famous poetic family, by Olive, Arthur and Helen Rossetti, when they were younger than Charles was now. The press had recently moved to a stable loft in Ossulston Street—but had produced powerful revolutionary literature from a room in the basement of Mr. William Rossetti’s house—a basement in which
everything
was painted blood-red, said Joachim Susskind, smiling over the absolute enthusiasm of the young Rossettis. He said, timidly, that he could give Charles some copies of this pamphlet, and even take him to see the press at work, if he felt he could go there. He himself helped out when he could. He loved mathematics as much as revolution, so he could not give up his college work. Statisticians and mathematicians would be welcome in the new order. Professor Pearson was not unsympathetic, though he inclined more to Karl Marx’s socialism than to Kropotkin’s anarchism. Indeed he had changed his name from Charles to Karl, to show his respect for the thinker.

Charles wanted to see the press. He wanted to see work being done, to change things. No one thought to question him at home, if he said he
was going to visit Dr. Susskind. And so, one afternoon, the two of them set off for Ossulston Street.

Ossulston Street stank. The gutter ran with yellow horse-piss, and the road was almost solid with caked dung. Charles walked gingerly, trying to keep his shoes clean, and wondering whether clean shoes should be of any concern. The offices of
The Torch of Anarchy
were in a loft above a stable, behind the “jugs and bottles” door of a dingy public house, The Bay Tree. Joachim Susskind and Charles had to negotiate a kind of midden to get to the wooden stairs that led to the loft. As he went up, Charles suddenly remembered Humphry’s midsummer speech about the poor man who picked and ate undigested oats from stuff like this. This was what he
ought to know about
. He followed his tutor through a ramshackle door into a long wooden shedlike room, full of dust, floating in the air, thick on the heaps of literature and pamphlets which covered almost all the floor. There were strong smells in this dusty air—tobacco smoke and tobacco juice, human odours of thick sweat and excrement, a pervasive smell of sour milk, and another of rancid fat. And the smell of dog, though he could see no dog. There was also a smell of sour beer. A man in a greasy jacket was scoffing fried bread and bacon scraps from a newspaper on what appeared to be the plate of the printing press, at one end of the room. There were two or three little groups of people, none of whom appeared likely to be the young Rossettis. One group was talking fast and intently in Italian. One consisted of three people on a bench, against which leaned a hard placard. “The Day of the Beast Is Upon Us.” At one end of the room was a mattress, where someone—or more than one person—was snoring thickly under a heap of tattered cloth and a bundle of flags. Susskind said to the eating man that he had understood that Comrade Bartlett would be printing. He had brought his promised article on the German anti-socialist laws. He had brought a young man who was interested in anarchist ideas. Comrade Bartlett said his hand was too black with ink to shake the new Comrade by the hand, and asked his name. Charles said his name was Karl. He said he would like to help. Comrade Bartlett swept his meal off the press and began to ink it. Charles/Karl found himself worrying intensely about his clothes, at which the inhabitants of the loft appeared to be staring. His shirt was clean and starched, his jacket was pressed and expensive. He looked
wrong
and moreover he was going to get dirty, and be in trouble at home. He was saved by Joachim Susskind, who produced a workman’s
apron from his bookbag and gave it to Charles, with a smile of complicit understanding.