The Children's Book (66 page)

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.

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.

T
HE
S
ILVER
A
GE

Backwards and forwards, both. The Edwardians knew they came
after
something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed little mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust. The new King was an elderly womaniser, genial and unhealthy, interested in oiling the wheels of diplomacy with personal good sense, in racehorses, in the daily shooting of thousands upon thousands of bright birds and panting, scrambling, running things, in the woodlands and moors of Britain, in the forests and mountains of Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Russia. It was a new time, not a young time. Skittishly, it cast off the moral anguish and human responsibility of the Victorian sages Lytton Strachey was preparing to mock. The rich acquired motor cars and telephones, chauffeurs and switchboard operators. The poor were a menacing phantom, to be helped charitably, or exterminated expeditiously. The sun shone, the summers broiled and were brilliant. The land, in places, was running with honey, cream, fruit fools, beer, champagne.

They looked back. They stared and glared backwards, in an intense, sometimes purposeful nostalgia for an imagined Golden Age. There were many things they wanted to go back to, to retrieve, to reinhabit.

They wanted to go back to the earth, to the running rivers and full fields and cottage gardens and twining honeysuckle of Morris’s Nowhere. They wanted to live in cottages (real cottages, which meant old stone, mossy cottages) and grow their own fruit and vegetables, getting their own eggs and gooseberries. They wanted, like Edward Carpenter, to be self-sufficient on smallholdings, and also to be naked and dabble their toes in real mud, like him, having taken off real, handmade sandals, like him. They did love the earth. The chalk Downs and Romney Marsh are the ultimate heroes of
Puck of Pook’s Hill
, published in
1906, the year of the building of HMS
Dreadnought
. Ford Madox Ford, living on a smallholding in Winchelsea, wrote movingly about digging the bones of a buried Viking out of the cliff at Beachy Head. Ford’s bones in the cliff are like the human bones in Kipling’s chalk, or the bones turned up on the Downs by rabbits in Hudson’s
Shepherd’s Life
. They are a dream of humans as part of the natural cycle, as they no longer seem to be.

E. M. Forster grieved over the invasion of Abinger by machines and the violation of Chanctonbury Ring. Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloomsbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jefferies and later W. H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land—both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.