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.
Ein Schattentanz, ein Puppenspott!
Ihr Glucklichen und Glatten
Die Puppen und die Schatten.
Er lenkt zu Leid, er lenkt zu Gluck,
Hoch dampfen die Gebete,
Doch just im schonsten Augenblick
Zerschneiden wir die Drahte.
A shadow-dance, a puppet’s joke!
You happy, polished people—
In heav’n on high the same old bloke
Guides puppets from his steeple.
For good or ill he guides their moves,
Each doll an anthem sings,
But then, just when it least behoves
We cut the puppets’ strings.
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 Salome. 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 Salome, 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 Salome 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 cafes 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.
