The Children's Book (94 page)

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:

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.

Lloyd George replied with steel irony

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 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