The Children's Book (42 page)

Cain went to Purchase House and tempted Fludd with the sight of some of his “Paradise” ware, intricately covered with birds, beasts, fruit,
angels, and naked humans, which he hadn’t seen for twenty years since they had been bought by a Belgian collector. He said Fludd would like to see Gallé’s work, and inspect the Art Nouveau. Fludd glared and grumbled, and said he hadn’t been to Paris for twenty years. It was a pother of a city which would be worse with the stinking crowds of garlic-eaters there would be. But a glint of interest appeared in his eye as he contemplated these horrors, and he agreed to come.

Prosper decided he would also take his son, as he hoped he might follow him into his profession. He told Julian to bring a friend, and Julian said he should like to take Tom, if Tom would come, which he imagined he would not. Charles Wellwood, it turned out, was intending to go. Julian asked Charles if he would ask Tom.

Charles walked over to Todefright to ask Tom in person. The Todefright Wellwoods were sitting in the garden, taking tea in the midsummer sun. Charles said Prosper Cain was getting up a party to go to the Great Exhibition, and Julian would like Tom to come. Tom opened his mouth to say without thinking that he’d rather not.

Phyllis said “He won’t come. He never goes anywhere anymore.”

Hedda said “Tom’s a recluse. Tom is growing odd, you know, Charles. I wish you’d asked me.”

Tom closed his mouth, and his eyes. Then he opened them again, and said he would be delighted to go.

He was becoming odd. He did not want to be odd. He wanted to be invisible.

Charles said that Prosper Cain had persuaded Benedict Fludd to come with them. Tom said he supposed Philip Warren would be coming too—Philip needed to see all the new art.

It turned out that nobody had thought of taking Philip. When they considered the idea, they saw it was good. Philip was exactly the person who would be inspired by the new world of arts, crafts, and social hope embodied in the Exhibition. So Fludd told Philip he was going to Paris, and Cain bought him a new suit to go in.

On the deck of the packet-boat, midway across the Channel, Philip realised, with sudden shock, that he had no idea what France, or Paris, or Europe was. He had seen the French shoreline, on clear days, white cliffs with a difference, or vague solids melting into mist, which fascinated him. He was always fascinated by transparent films and substances
that half concealed, and half revealed, other, different objects. He saw the French coastline as an analogy of glazes. He had been out on the Channel waters, fishing for mackerel—mackerel skin, like mackerel skies, was another endlessly fascinating structure. He tried to calm himself, when he realised he needed calming, by looking at the transient, repeated blades and arrows in the water ploughed back by the prow. Bottle-greens, greens chock-full of silver air, what cream and white, what a darkness under. Fludd was standing next to him, his arms on the rail, staring equally intently into the water. Philip knew they were seeing the same thing. Behind them, the three young men chatted and laughed. Julian was telling a story which entailed mimicry of a Frenchman. Charles was laughing. Prosper Cain was reading what appeared to be a catalogue. Philip realised he was both excited and afraid. Another country, other people, other habits, strange food. He was the only member of the party who had never travelled.

Julian had been to Paris several times before. He knew the museums and galleries: he had been in cafés, and ridden in a rowboat on the Seine. Charles had stayed in the best hotels, and ridden in the Bois de Boulogne. Tom had been on a family holiday, some time ago with Violet in charge, and had a vague recollection of Notre-Dame and aching feet. Fludd had spent time in attic lodgings in his misspent youth, drinking, smoking and exploring women.

Only Prosper Cain was at all prepared for the effect of the Grande Exposition Universelle.

The Exhibition could be seen as a series of paradoxes. It was gigantic and exorbitant, covering 1,500 acres and costing 120 million francs. It attracted 48 million paying visitors, took over four years to build, and included the elegant new Alexander III Bridge, arching over the Seine, the glass-roofed Grand Palais, and the pretty pink Petit Palais. But it had the idiosyncratic metaphysical charm of all meticulous human reconstructions of reality, a charm we associate with the miniature, toy theatres, puppet booths, doll’s houses, oilskin battlefields with miniature lead armies deployed around inch-high forests and hillocks. It had the recessive pleasing infinity of the biscuit tin painted on the biscuit tin. It was forward-looking, containing new machines and weapons, and
images of craftsmen, clearly enjoying their work. It contained a reconstruction of mediaeval Paris, with troubadours and taverns, picturesque beggars, and ladies in bumrolls. There were new facilities—plentifully scattered different public conveniences, from the basic to the luxurious with running water and towels, telephone kiosks, moving staircases and a moving pavement, travelling at three different speeds. There was a palace of mirrors, and a complete fake Swiss village, complete with waterfall, peasants, mountains and cows. Along the left bank of the Seine were the palaces of the nations, some with mediaeval towers, some baroque or rococo. The USA provided telegrams, iced water and Stock Exchange prices for businessmen away from home. The Kaiser himself had supervised the napery, glassware, silver and china in the restaurant of the German pavilion. He had also sent a collection of the complete range of Prussian military uniforms. The Italians had reconstructed St. Mark’s Cathedral. The British had commissioned Edwin Lutyens to make a perfect replica of a Jacobean country house, which they then filled with paintings by Burne-Jones and Watts, and furniture and hangings by Morris & Co.

There was a Palace of Electricity, with a Tower of Water in front of it, a hall of dynamos and a hall containing hundreds of new automobiles, in every shape and size. The Tyrolean Castle was juxtaposed with the Pavilion of Russian Alcohol, the Palace of Optics and the Palace of Woman, next to the pretty sugar comfit-box Palace of Ecuador, which was to serve later as a municipal library in Guayaquil. In the Place de la Concorde, where you bought your tickets, stood the astounding and unloved Porte Binet—a monumental gateway, like something out of
The Arabian Nights
, decorated with polychrome plaster and mosaic, studded all over with crystal cabochons. It was flamboyantly artificial but was based on living forms in nature, the vertebra of a dinosaur, the cell-structure of beehives, the opercules of madrepores. On top of it stood a monstrous effigy of a woman—La Parisienne, huge-bosomed and fifteen feet tall, modelled on Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a negligee or a dressing-gown designed by Paquin himself. On her head she wore the crest of their City of Paris, a prow, like a peaked tiara. She was generally disliked and jeered at.

The two largest exhibits in the whole Exposition were Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers-Maxim’s collection of rapid-fire machine guns. The Kaiser had not been invited to his, or any other, sumptuous displays. His advisers and the French hosts were both afraid
that he would say something disconcerting or incendiary. If British troops were killing Boers, the Germans were engaged in combat, in the outside world, with the Chinese. The Kaiser had reprimanded Krupp for equipping Chinese forts with cannon that fired on German gunboats. “This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”

The Chinese, despite murder, rebellion and war, had nevertheless constructed an elegant and expensive pavilion in the shining Parisian microcosm. It was carved in dark red wood, with jade-green tiles and pagoda roofs, and an elegant tea-room. It stood in the exotic section, side by side with a Japanese pagoda and an Indonesian theatre.

Art Nouveau, the New Art, was paradoxically backward-looking, flirting with the Ancient of Days, the Sphinx, the Chimera, Venus under the Tannenberg, Persian peacocks, melusines and Rhine maidens, along with hairy-legged Pan and draped and dangerous oriental priestesses. Some of its newness derived from the deep dream of the lost past which informed both Burne-Jones’s palely loitering knights and porcelain-fine maidens, and Morris’s sense of saga-scenes and bright embroidered hangings. But it was radically new also, in its use of spinning, coiling, insinuating lines derived from natural forms, its rendering in new metal of tree-shapes newly observed, its abandonment of the solid worth of gold and diamonds for the aesthetic delights of nonprecious metals and semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl, grained wood, amethyst, coral, moonstone. It was an art at once of frozen stillness, and images of rapid movement. It was an art of shadows and glitter that understood the new force that transfigured both the exhibition and the century to come. Electricity.

The American Henry Adams visited and revisited the Exposition whilst it was open, driven by a precise and ferocious combination of scientific and religious curiosity. He wrote a riddling chapter of
The Education of Henry Adams
and called it “The Virgin and the Dynamo.” He saw where the centre was, in the gallery of machines, in the dynamos. He began, he wrote, “to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The dynamo was “but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere that heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight.” But he found himself comparing it as a force-field to the presence
of the Virgin, the Goddess, in the great mediaeval cathedrals of France. “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”

The dynamo that drove the exhibition was on the ground floor of the Palace of Electricity. At first it failed to work. In front of it was a Château d’Eau, designed to be brilliantly lit by a rainbow of light. There were tiers of fountains, like the fountains at Versailles, and the palace was covered with stained glass and transparent ceramics, surmounted by a statue of the Spirit of Electricity, driving a chariot drawn by hippogryphs. When all this failed to come to life, there was an uneasy black cavern, a gaping hole, at night. But workmen attended to it, oiled it, polished it, stroked it, like a beast being urged out of inertia. Adams was right: a bunch of fresh flowers was placed on the back of the cylinder as an offering. Its pulse was felt as it shuddered into life. And when it worked, it transformed the façades of buildings into rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, and the dark cloth of the night into a tapestry of shimmering threads. The Water Tower ran liquid diamonds, shot with changing opal and garnet and chrysoprase. The Seine itself became a heaving, dancing ribbon of coloured lava, where variegated threads intertwined, sank, and rose again, changed and relumed.

Wonderful illuminated portals, curving like the vegetation of an artificial paradise, led down to the flashing electric serpent of the new Métro. The whole exhibition was encircled by a moving pavement where citizens could travel at three different speeds, squealing with amazement, clutching each other as they moved from strip to strip. There was incandescent writing in magazines about the “fairy electricity.”

The Palace of Electricity was set about with warnings.
Grand Danger de Mort
. It was a death without tooth, claw or crushing. An invisible death, part of an invisible animating force, the new thing in the new century.

Prosper Cain’s party had rooms in a hotel called Albert, in Montmartre. Cain had work to do—he visited the Bing Pavilion to study the delights of Art Nouveau, and the Petit Palais to look at the rich collection of historic art. He went repeatedly to the German decorative section, where the new elegance of Munich was displayed in rooms decorated by von Stuck and Riemerschmid, in their new young style, the
Jugendstil
. He went to the Austrian and Hungarian rooms, audaciously swirling with linear curves, round simple but luxurious furniture, with a lurking wickedness and suggestiveness.

When the young men went out in the morning, ready to get into the omnibus, covered with a striped awning and drawn by four horses, a figure appeared out of a side-alley and raised his hat to them. It was Joachim Susskind, who said he was surprised and delighted to see them there. He himself was attending a congress, but had already visited a great deal—by no means all, that would take months—of the Exposition. He was afraid they would find the German pavilion ostentatious. But there were things from his native Munich of which he was proud.

Julian thought immediately that Susskind was not there by chance. He was there by arrangement with Charles. Julian’s imaginings were sexual, not political. He considered Susskind’s hay-coloured moustache and did not think it would be pleasant to be kissed by him. He considered Charles’s sharp blond slimness, and decided that Susskind was probably in love with Charles, as teachers tended to be in love with self-assured, eager boys. His smile of greeting had been both self-effacing and hungry, Julian thought, pleased with his own perceptiveness. Because he had been watching Susskind he had not been able to notice whether Charles appeared to be abashed, or confused, or gleeful. When he did look at him, he saw he was blushing, with what was certainly the self-consciousness of having engaged in a subterfuge—but what else was there? Julian was intrigued. But he was more interested in the possibilities this opened for himself.

Julian asked casually, when they reached the exhibition space, what everyone wanted to see. Tom said he should like to go on the travelling
pavement, and ride on the Great Wheel. Charles looked at Susskind and said he would like to see the Hall of Dynamos and the motor cars. Julian said he himself wanted to see the Bing Pavilion, with the decoration which his father had said he must not miss. They agreed to meet later in the day in the Viennese tea-shop and eat cakes.

When Charles and Joachim Susskind were out of earshot of Julian and Tom, Susskind said, with some excitement, that there was a young woman he wanted Charles to meet. She was lecturing on anarchy and the sex question. She was here, in Paris, as he was, to attend the Second International Anti-Parliamentary Congress. She was also a delegate to a secret gathering of Malthusians, who wished to discuss birth control, which was outlawed in France. Her name was Emma Goldman. She had come from America, where she was a great Anarchist leader, and she was earning her keep, by showing American tourists round the Exposition. “She will certainly know what we should most like to see and learn about,” said Susskind. “But you must be very discreet, and not repeat what I have told you. I said we would meet her outside the Palace of Woman.”