The Children's Book

“Miss Warren,” said Charles/Karl, “I wish you would not talk as though you were a group, or a class, or a committee. I should like to be talking to you as a person.”

“Can you?”

“Why should I not?”

“For every reason. I am both working-class and not respectable. I am a Fallen Woman. I have a daughter. You don’t want to be talking to me as if I were a person, Mr. Wellwood.”

This information, far from shocking him, excited him. In Munich the goddess, Fanny zu Reventlow, was the mother of a lovely child with no known father. Desire should be free, they said in Schwabing, and Charles/Karl listened, and desired in the abstract, and agreed in principle. He could not—not now—discuss Fanny zu Reventlow with this pugnacious person with a narrow waist, in a red belt.

“Do you talk to everyone like this, Miss Warren?”

“No. I don’t. Only to well-meaning persons like you.”

“I should like—” said Charles/Karl. He would like, he realised, to undo the belt, and several of the buttons, and slap her and kiss her. He was astounded. He was also gratified to find such a spontaneous reaction in himself.

“What would you like?” asked Elsie, in a way that almost persuaded him she had read his secret mind.

“I should like to get to know you. I should like you to stop treating me as a representative of a class, and allow me to talk to you. I should like to be permitted to walk you home, if you are going home.”

“I am. You can come, if you want. I really should be looking for Mr. Fludd, but if he don’t want to be found, he won’t be. He is a secret man.”

They set off together. Motion made them easy with each other. He said “Do you think a man and a woman can be good friends, Miss Warren?”

“Elsie, why don’t you. I suppose you call Philip, Philip.”

“Karl.”

“I thought it was Charles. Karl for Karl Marx?”

“You know a great deal.”

“I have friends—women friends—who are teaching me. I hope to become a teacher myself. I do not fancy cleaning and carting for ever. And, in answer to your question, I think yes, a man and a woman can be good friends. But it isn’t easy for them, being as no one else will suppose that that is what they are. And then, there’s the problem of men and women being different sexes. You are not to laugh. It is a problem.”

“I know that. What I do think—”

“What do you think?”

“I think if they are good friends—then whatever else they are—or are not—is better.”

They went on walking. He said

“You will only laugh if I say you can be just as trapped in a house in Portman Square, and a public school and a university, as in the kitchen.”

“Yes, I will. I will laugh heartily. I will listen, Karl, and I will laugh and laugh.”

“I never talk to anyone as you talk to me.”

“I shall teach you, Mr. Deprived-Rich-Man. I may even introduce you to my very little, very clever daughter.”

She looked into his face to see if she had gone too far, had lost him.

“I should like that,” said Charles/Karl.

Herbert Methley leaned confidentially out over the lectern. He told his audience that he was a workingman. He worked hard as a gardener on a smallholding in this county, the Garden of England, and he worked also at his desk, describing life in that Garden. But the fruits of his labours had been taken from him by the police in their boots and helmets, and had been cast into a fiery furnace, and consumed. He had been told that what he had written was shameful. But it was the men in gowns and helmets who had real cause to be ashamed.

He was a stringy sunburned man, with a crimson silk neckerchief round his prominent Adam’s apple. He had that habit good lecturers have of letting his eye rove over the audience, looking for listening faces, or expressions of boredom. He saw Griselda and Dorothy with Tom and the two Germans, near the front. At the back, at the side, Julian and Gerald sat together. Florence was not with them. She was with Geraint, towards the front, in the centre. There was a row of older, judiciously composed women, Marian, Phoebe, Patty Dace, towards the back. Also near the back was Elsie Warren. Charles/Karl had seen that the seat next to her was empty, and had sat in it. She was sitting very upright, with her arms folded round her chest. Phyllis came in late, and sat down just behind Leon. Frank Mallett and Arthur Dobbin were there. Methley acknowledged them with a nod, before embarking on his attack on the clergy.

Where did the concept of shame come from? he asked. Our fellow creatures in the garden of earth do not know shame, though we persuade ourselves sometimes to feel it for them, to our shame. Shame began, we are told, in the Original Garden, when the innocent man and woman saw that they were naked, and were ashamed. What caused this? The wily serpent caused it, by making them eat the forbidden fruit, which he told them was the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, said Herbert Methley, insinuating that good and evil originated in those parts of the body that the shamed human beings now felt they must cover. Yet why should this be so? Are good and evil not much more— infinitely more—to be found in cruelty, in humiliation of others, in selfishness, in abuse of power, in theft—I could go on in this way, said Herbert Methley—for the rest of this little talk. Good and evil do not reside in human flesh, in which we should rejoice, about which we should not—neither men nor women—feel shame. Every day in this camp the young folk come out and perform graceful, and strenuous, and delightful bodily movements. He smiled, imagining them.

Gerald whispered to Julian, with the grave naughtiness of the Apostles, “I think he emits some kind of musk.