subordination, and that she would rebel. In 1903 Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughters founded the WSPU, the suffragettes. Olive, like other successful women of her generation, had not involved herself in agitating for the Vote, although she accepted unreflectively that it was a “good thing,” better to have a Vote than not. Florence Cain attended meetings of the NUWSS and heard Millicent Garrett Fawcett speak. It was Hedda who, between 1903 and 1907, became more and more obsessed with suffrage, with opposition, with action, with revolt. She followed, eagerly, the campaign of the militants, as they broke glass and set bombs, were imprisoned, and later took to hunger-striking and suffered forcible feeding (1909). She occasionally hectored her mother and sisters. The rest of the time she brooded darkly. She would Act. In the beginning was the Act.
The person whose timetable, during the early years, was directed towards matchmaking was Griselda. She had promised her mother that in exchange for her time with Dorothy in Munich she would take part in the London Season of dances and house parties. Dutifully, she did. For her, 1902 was measured out in dressmakers’ and hairdressers’ appointments, balls and dances, country-house parties, tea-parties, lists of dancing-partners in tiny books with pretty covers hanging on gold and silver threads. She received two or three proposals of marriage—her pale and elegant good looks excited admiration—and protested calmly that she “did not know” these young men, that she could not imagine spending the rest of her life with them. There were many other young men who sensed a remoteness, a wilderness of ice, inside her, danced with her because she danced well, and proposed to other, funnier, warmer girls. Griselda invited Dorothy, with gentle desperation, to come to dances with her as she had gone to Munich, and Dorothy, grimly facing the reality of the timetable she had imposed on herself, said she could not. She could afford neither time nor money. She loved Griselda as much as ever, but she had a
Julian Cain was at King’s College, Cambridge, where he discussed both the Higher and the Lower Sodomy with Gerald and others. In 1901 he had been an Apostolic “embryo,” invited to breakfasts and dinners, investigated to see if he had interesting or amusing ideas. In 1902 he went through the birthing ceremony on the famous hearthrug, received the essential anchovy toast, and became a full member of the secret Conversazione Society, or the Apostles. He gave a witty talk on the manifold uses made of museums by human beings, from cognoscenti and artists to tradesmen, policemen and naughty children, which was well received. The Apostles gently mocked German philosophy by referring to themselves as The World of Reality—everything else in the universe was only Appearance, and persons who were not chosen Apostles were dismissed as phenomena. Something similar was going on, but with more bombast and more edge, in Bohemian Schwabing where the anarchist Erich Muhsam claimed that Schwabing had no boundaries because nothing in it was normal, there was no norm, measurement was not possible. The members of the Schwabing exclusive society, the Kosmische Rundschau, referred to themselves as
Julian talked easily to Brooke and to Bloomsbury but he did not belong. He was cynical about their high- mindedness, and more cynical about their cynicism. He wanted to want something, and did not know what it would be, or if he would find it. He knew it was not Gerald, though he loved him. He thought to himself that a love-affair, once begun, always envisaged its end. Time did not stand still. If Gerald could have loved Florence, as Arthur Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson’s beloved friend in the days when they were young, and Apostolic, had apparently come to love Tennyson’s sister Emily, there might have been a future, with the children Tennyson had imagined dandling on an avuncular knee. Sometimes, Julian thought, he would not much mind if he were told he was to die tomorrow. It wouldn’t matter. When he felt like that he walked into the Fitzwilliam Museum and asked to look at Samuel Palmer’s water-colours. They shone from an unearthly, too earthy, earth.
Charles/Karl decided for study, rather than immediate anarchy, and also went to Cambridge, a year later than Julian, and also to King’s. He was neither observed nor selected by the Apostles, and did not know of their existence. He took part in the luncheons and talks the serious undergraduates of those days arranged for workingmen, and found himself tongue-tied and at a loss. He went, in the summer vacation, on a walking holiday with Joachim that happened to wander past the new clinic on the Monte Verita, and the encampment of the holy, the mad, the aesthetic, the criminal and the lecherous that lay around it. He danced amiably in circles, hand-in-hand with
Geraint Fludd was in love, and making money. He was in love with Florence Cain, who smiled enigmatically and sadly when he told her so, and behaved as if he had said nothing. He found he needed urgently to know about sex and visited those who sold it. He coupled with street women, thinking of Florence, told himself he would not do that again, and did it again. Basil Wellwood, from time to time, found himself treating “Gerry” as the son he would have wished to have, interested in money, that most abstract of subjects, and in the ships and caravanserais and descending pitc-ages and slow barges that took things, all sorts of things, coconuts, carpets, sugar cane, glass beads, ingots, wheels with spokes, light bulbs, oranges, apples, wine and honey and converted them into change and exchange, shares and hunting and fishing and house parties and golf.
Basil asked Gerry what he “would do” theoretically, in certain situations—the issue of Consols, the run on Kaffirs—and lent him small sums of money, like the landlord in the parable of the Talents—five guineas, say, which Gerry made into another five guineas. At the end of May, in 1902, it was clear that the war in South Africa was coming to an end. There was expectancy in the Kaffir market. Gerry made a quick profit on some shares in a project called “Geduld Deep” which was simply a hole in the ground unrelated to the respectable Geduld Proprietary Mines. He bought, and sold, before the bubble burst and the story was over. The
Time moved as differently for the generation of the fathers, mothers and aunts. Humphry Wellwood welcomed the end of the war—it had been uncomfortable, even if gallant, being a pro-Boer. He wrote articles about mining scandals, including Geduld Deep, mocking the confidence men and the gullible alike. He became slowly obsessed by the way in which Alfred Dreyfus must have experienced Time, since time was the most terrible aspect of the long-drawn-out, cruel and confusing injustice done to him. He had been arrested and condemned, for a crime he did not commit, in 1894. His sword had been broken in front of him, and for five years he had been a convict, in appalling conditions, on Devil’s Island. The real traitor—acquitted in 1898—had killed himself, and in 1899 Dreyfus’s case had been reopened. His conviction was quashed by the Court of Cassation—he was still marched into court between guards, a convict—and then he was reconvicted, and sentenced to spend ten years in prison. Humphry had stood with the crowds and had seen him, a sickly, upright, grey husk of a man, with lightless eyes. (In 1906 he would be exonerated, and recalled to active duty.) He twined round Humphry’s imagination. All those stolen years, all that time of meaningless horror in that place—how did it pass, what was in his mind? Was it sluggish, or a false eternity, or did it burn with the pain of injustice and solitude? Humphry wrote about it. He wrote an article in which he said it was everyone’s duty to imagine, every day, that
