The Children's Book

“I do not know whether I believe they have souls, or temporary souls, or intermittent souls.” He looked searchingly at Griselda. “Du kannst ubersetzen? I think I believe that we are all fragments of one great soul—that the earth is one living thing, and the clay and the wood and the catgut these are made of are forms of life, as is the movement I lend them.”

Dorothy nodded seriously, pink. She had a pretty straw hat with a midnight-blue ribbon.

“I have embarrassed you,” he said. “No.”

“Oh yes. I knew I would. But I always walk here, with these creatures—these manikins—and I wish my daughter to know me as I am.”

The little figures danced on the path, and stopped, and looked up at Dorothy.

“Take one,” said Anselm Stern. “Move him.”

Dorothy pulled back. Griselda held out her fingers and was given the mooncalf. Dorothy then took the wolfman. They sagged. Griselda twitched and adjusted and the mooncalf began a drunken dance. Anselm Stern put his hand over Dorothy’s.

“Do not be afraid. Let him walk.”

The strings were, after all, alive. Horribly alive. Once, with Tom at the brook, she had tried dowsing with a hazel fork, just for the fun of it, and had been terrified when the dead wood lurched at her fingertips, and pulled. She had dropped the thing and refused to have more to do with it. These strings pulled the same way. She let her fingertips listen, and the wolfman began to stride, and bow. He raised his paw. He threw back his head, to howl, or to laugh. Her fingers tingled.

“You said,” said Anselm Stern, “you wanted to know who I am. I am a man who makes dancing dolls.” Griselda was tangled and did not translate, but Dorothy understood.

“I see,” she said, and halted the wolfman and handed him back.

Griselda would have expected the old, resolutely rational Dorothy to be worried, possibly even repelled, by the strangenesses and formalities. The garden walk was followed by an exploration of the cavern behind the stage, an introduction to all the hanging family, a disquisition on the character of every severed head, an exploration of the boxes in which they lay, decently, head to tail, all except Death, who lay back in his single casket until Anselm Stern raised him to bow deeply to Dorothy, to stretch out his arms to her, fold them, and lie back again. He talked only intermittently and Griselda could not translate all of it. The creatures had a purer, more essential existence than emotional beings. Griselda, the imaginative one, found it was she who was being half-sceptical. Dorothy wandered on in a listening dream.

It was not only serious metaphysics of marionettes. It was cream cakes and coffee in Cafe Felicite, with Anselm and daughter leaning on their elbows and staring into each other’s eyes, and a long interrogation.

“Your favourite colour, Fraulein Dorothy?”

“Green. And yours?”

“Green, naturally. Your favourite smell?”

“Bread baking. And yours?”

“Oh, bread baking, there is none better.”

He gave her little gifts. Things he had carved. An owl. A walnut. A hedgehog. She frowned over the hedgehog. It reminded her of Olive’s Dorothy-tale, about Peggy and Mistress Higgle, the shape-changer, and in a way that appeared truly uncanny Dorothy received, on the day he gave it to her, a fat envelope from home, containing another instalment, a placatory peace-offering from the storyteller in Todefright, who did not know what Dorothy knew, who was afraid of what she was finding out, and could think of nothing better to do than to send a segment of fairytale. Dorothy meant not to read it. But did. Mistress Higgle’s hedgehog-mantle—and with it her magic—had been stolen, Dorothy read. It had been folded away, in its secret drawer, and Mistress Higgle had come home to find the window open, and the spiny jacket nowhere. All the dependent furry creatures in the house—the mouse-people, the frog-people, the little vixen—had lost the power to change shape, because the thorny integument had vanished. Who was responsible? The story stopped there. Olive’s accompanying letter was somewhat plaintive.

I’m not sure, my darling, whether you still want the stories—maybe you are a grown-up lady now, and past childish things—but I thought about you a lot, and since writing stories is what I do, I wrote the one I still think of as yours. You don’t write to tell me how you are. We all miss you dreadfully. There is no one like you for good sense and understanding and getting things done. We are all a bit feckless and down in the dumps without you. And Tom is positively dirty with nights out in the woods. Please write, my darling. You don’t have to read the silly story if you don’t want to.

Your bewildered and loving mother.

There were now things Dorothy wanted to say to Anselm Stern without saying them to Griselda. She was picking up basic German but she could not speak it well enough to explain Mistress Higgle, or to ask him questions about her mother. She felt, in odd moments of solitude—like this one, sitting with the English schoolroom paper with writings on it about English furry creatures that were also human—that Anselm Stern had her under a spell. She was not happy now except when she was with him, or on her way to meet him, and yet she also felt fear, fear of a trap, fear of something unseen.

She handed him—they were sitting in his workroom— the sheaf of papers from Olive. She said, expressionless, in German

“Ein Brief von meiner Mutter. Ein Marchen. Ich habe meiner Mutter nichts von Ihnen—von Dir— gesagt.”

He gave her a long, sombre look, and picked up the papers. Dorothy was in that state human beings passed through at the beginning of a love affair, in which they desire to say anything and everything to the beloved, to the alter ego, before they have learned what the real Other can and can’t understand, can and can’t accept. Griselda sat pale and vanishing. Anselm turned over the pages, with their little drawings of hedgehogs and frogs and underground kitchens with rows of pannikins. He said to Griselda

“What is this?”

“Tell him—” said Dorothy. “She writes a story for each of us. This is mine. It is a whimsical story about magic hedgehogs.”

“I can’t translate whimsical.” She looked at Dorothy. “Dorothy, don’t cry. Why did you bring it?”

“She’s in this story too. I brought it to bring it together. Don’t translate that.”

But he nodded, as though he had understood. “Higgle,” he said. “Mis-tress Hig-gle. What is Mistress Higgle?”