apparently endless, unreal reality of subjugation. Humphry wrote better as he got older.
He had hoped that his inconvenient need for new women would slacken with his muscles. Women his age were no longer desirable, why should he be? And yet, he was. He kept testing it—women lecturers at summer schools, youngish ladies in bookshops, Fabians, socialists, he excited them, and through them, himself. He visited Marian Oakeshott from time to time, and played with her Robin and young Ann, before catching her round the waist and complimenting her on her fine figure and lively intelligence. Her Robin was the spitting image of his other Robin, at Todefright. He felt everyone must notice this, but no one said anything. Marian did not love him, now, he knew. But he sometimes persuaded her into bed, because she had a need, which tormented her, for certain things he had taught her. “I hate you,” she would say, clutching him, and he would murmur cheerfully, as he pumped, “Better hatred than indifference. At least we are alive.” And she would laugh drily.
He had frightened himself by clutching at Dorothy. He did love Dorothy. He had always loved Dorothy, always knowing she was not his. And it was not that he loved, in her, the same things he loved in Olive for she was not darkly passionate but stubbornly practical, somehow wise in her independence. He was tortured by the rift he had caused. (He relieved the torture by seducing a female student from the LSE after a meeting on women’s rights.) He watched her behaviour, when she came home. She spoke to him in public, drily, practically, much as she always had. He wondered whether she would ever allow him to speak to her in private again. Then, one day, she came to him, in his study—it was the summer of 1902, and she had sat some of her exams for matriculation, and was preparing others for the end of the year. The tutors were organising a reading party in a cottage in the New Forest, a romantic cottage, in a clearing in the trees, with a river running past. Dorothy said she was going, with Tom and Griselda and Charles, to read there—and Julian and Florence would come, and Geraint and maybe the Fludd girls. She said
“And my father is coming to stay with August Steyning, and his sons are coming with him, and I think it would be fun to invite them to the camp. Wolfgang and Leon, that is.”
Humphry dared not ask any questions. He murmured, awkwardly, “That’s good, that’s good.” Then, lightly, “What do they know?”
“As much as they need to know. We don’t really talk about it. But I like them. Very much. And they like me.”
“Well, that’s good. No harm done?”
Dorothy hesitated. Both of them remembered the urgently fumbling hands, the blood. Humphry wanted to say, please don’t set one mad moment against a lifetime—well, your lifetime—of love. He stared at the floor. Dorothy said, judiciously,
“Not no harm, no. But it is all right. You are my father, that’s a fact.”
It was a warning, as well as a concession.
“I do love you,” said Humphry, entering the forbidden ground. And Dorothy was able to say, lightly, practically, apparently easily, “I love you too. Always did.”
Humphry put his arms briefly round her, and kissed the top of her head, as he had done when she was a little girl. And she kissed the side of his beard, lightly, lightly, as she had done as a little girl.
During these years Prosper Cain was preoccupied with the slowly rising, dangerous, dust-clouded new building, draped in a network of scaffolding, muffled, and mysterious. Under the scaffolding domes, pinnacles and a central crowned tower came into being. Inside the building there was dissension between those concerned primarily with the beauty of the objects to be displayed, and those concerned with their utility as teaching aids for craftsmen. There was a movement on the Continent to construct or reconstruct rooms and settings—panelled, or with stone pillars and lancet windows, in which beds, tables, chairs, carpets and ceramics could be seen as the museum designers imagined their makers might have seen them. In Munich the Bavarian National Museum was newly built to show—on its facade—every period and style of architecture—and inside rooms with ceilings, floors and pillars expressly designed to show off a collection of church furnishings, or a lady’s boudoir. Photographs of these splendours were published in 1901, and the Emperor of Prussia expressed approval and delight.
Prosper Cain had failed to save the strange and lovely furniture, bought by one of the jurors at the Paris Exhibition and donated to the Museum. It had been banished to Bethnal Green, and South Kensington had been sneered at as a “pathological museum for design disease” by those favouring order and logic. In 1904 Major Cain travelled with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs and saw that the display mixed “order and connection to facilitate study” with “sufficient variety to give the feeling of life: thus a piece of tapestry is seen, as it should be, over a bed, a chest or a seat, not placed in a line between an earlier and a later specimen.” This was what Prosper Cain would have wished to achieve. But it was not to be. The Museum’s fate was to be decided by a civil servant from the Board of Education, Robert Morant, who had tutored the royal family in Siam, and taught the poor in Toynbee Hall, before setting South Kensington in order. He believed that it was the duty of the curators to make an educational order—spoon after spoon, banister next to banister, dishes in rows and carpets side by side. He simply demoted Skinner—who died fifteen months later, in 1911 at the age of fifty, of a broken heart. Prosper Cain had admired Skinner and had shared his views. He kept his own post but felt detached from the new order. All this was still to come. Major Cain plotted and planned and projected in the first seven years of the new century. It ate up his life, but he took pleasure in it.
His children delighted and worried him. Julian seemed to have settled for the life of a scholar, for want of an urgent vocation. Florence, who had been so forthright and practical as a girl, became, he said to himself, “moony” as she grew into womanhood. He was distressed by her ability to cling on to a hopeless—indeed, he considered it an unreal—passion for a man who was not what she thought he was. He thought he should perhaps speak to her, but was profoundly shy, when it came to speaking of the heart. She would not listen to him if he
He had his worries about her, also. In 1902 she was twenty-three and becoming an accomplished silversmith. He liked to watch her work.
The new Professor of Design, W. R. Lethaby, and Henry Wilson, the expert in silverwork and jewellery, newly arrived from the Art-workers Guild, had introduced new ways of working. The artists sat at French jewellers’ benches, which were made of beech and had semicircular holes cut, like a flower, under which hung leather sheepskins to catch every shred and filing of precious metals as they fell. Each worker had his or her own blow- pipe, and tall Imogen sat there patiently, her hair coiled behind her head, tending the sharp blue flame, making long silver wires for filigree work, beating silver plates finer and finer. She worked in soft stones—turquoise, opals. She used a delicate bow, an ash rod strung with iron wire, to slice opals, which had to be done very very slowly and precisely. Prosper Cain liked to look at her calm face as she concentrated. She wore an indigo-blue overall, full length, and tucked her long legs under the sheepskin. At first he had thought her inexpressive and slow, but he thought now that she was a masked woman, that underneath was another kind of creature, fierce, precise,
