The Children's Book

The weather was foul. Heavy rain poured and swirled in a slapping, chill wind. The skirts of the women, rich and poor, were soaked and draggled. Their cheeks and noses burned as the cold sleet bit. Mud in the parks, mud in the gutters, mud liquefying the dung in the roads, sucked at them. They went on, in their thousands. Mounted police were used against them. They rode down the women on the footpaths, jostled them and shoved them under the hooves and wheels. The women went on.

Hedda felt as she felt, walking in the countryside, when the weather turned wild. First, you put your head down, and try to protect the dry places inside your damp garments. Then, as damp becomes drenched, and fingers and toes cool and numb, you put your head up, open your mouth, and eat the weather, tasting the sting of the air and the water. This was the Mud March. Hedda was young and strong and striding. A policeman shoved her. She kicked at him with a sharp boot. He skidded in the mud. She was blooded.

She learned to speak at meetings. She went to a meeting in Sutton where someone emptied a sack of live rats into an audience. Things were thrown, foul things, rotten eggs, cayenne pepper, blown towards the speakers from bellows. The opposition was implacable, ingenious and stronger than most women. It was adept at knocking the chair from under the speakers. Men at meetings clutched respectable women by the breasts, or pushed beer-breathing mouths into their faces, pretending the women had invited it.

Hedda was afraid. She was partly excited by being afraid. It made her sure she was alive, and that life had a meaning, which she had always been uncertain about. But the fear was very real, and grew more intense as she came to understand, and to see, just how real the dangers were, of being badly hurt, or worse. She stitched up her own torn dresses: she did not want Violet asking too many questions. She did not tell her family where she went. They thought she was sticking stamps, and collecting subscriptions.

Talk boiled, and intermittent marches and other actions surged into being around the condition of women, and the condition of the Poor. In Cambridge in 1907, an idealist Trinity undergraduate, Ben Keeling, resuscitated the Cambridge Young Fabians. This was remarkable for being the first university society to admit both men and women as members. Keeling was a socialist and invited Keir Hardie, trade unionist and feminist, to speak. He diverted a howling mob of rugger-playing university thugs by deploying two counterfeit Hardies, in fat beards and red ties. He had a poster in his room with the workers of the world advancing with clenched fists. Its title was “Forward the Day Is Breaking.” A Newnham woman, Ka Cox, was treasurer, and the Newnham contingent not only came to listen, but spoke fluently. Amber Reeves, daughter of William Pember Reeves, soon to be Director of the LSE, made a formidable speech proclaiming the relativity of morals, and sympathy with the Russian bomb-throwers and bank- robbers. She was self-assured and beautiful and very clever.

Graham Wallas, one of the Fabian Old Guard, who had resigned because of a difference of opinion on Free Trade, and had—with some reservations—supported H. G. Wells’s attempts to shake up and reform the Fabian Society, came to speak. He was teaching Charles/Karl at the LSE and Charles/Karl came with him. Wallas spoke on the irrational aspects of human nature in politics—the herd instinct, the bubbling up of the subconscious in crowds and groups. That explorer of the unconscious depths, Sigmund Freud, was hardly known in Cambridge. The Interpretation of Dreams, with its claims that male infants desired to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, although it had appeared in German in 1900, had not yet sold out its print-run of 600 copies. Charles/ Karl knew of its existence, because he had met the wild and anarchic psychiatrist, Otto Gross, preaching Pan and Eros, amongst the bacchantes from Munich in the Mountain of Truth in Ascona. The Society for Psychical Research, home to serious psychologists and needy spiritualists, had also noted the Traumdeutung, believing Freud’s dreamwork to be a new way of exploring the Soul, and maybe the Common Soul to which all humans should have access. The irrational bubbled up, and met the rational, which fastened on it with glee, apprehension and, in Cambridge, wit.

In the summer term the Cambridge Young Fabians decided to invite Herbert Methley to speak to them. They wanted him to talk about the relations between the sexes. Wells was trying to recover respectability, after A Modern Utopia and In the Days of the Comet, denying that he had ever advocated “something nasty called free love … a sort of utopia of salacious freedoms … the absolute antithesis of that regulated parentage at which socialists aim.” Methley was writing columns in magazines over the pseudonym “Wodwose,” about the need for a new Paganism, for “natural” behaviour, for “spontaneity” and “a proper attention to the Life Force.” He wrote short stories about women who were the priestesses of Gaia, who understood the ancient goddess, Chthon. (He corresponded with Jane Harrison about this.)

He spoke at the Cambridge Young Fabians on the subject of “The Conventions of the Novel.” This looked innocent enough as a title to pass the critical gaze of censors and critics. He spoke in a Literary Lecture Room in Trinity Street. Julian Cain went along to hear him, with some other Apostles, including the beautiful Rupert Brooke from King’s, who was an enthusiastic Fabian. There he found his sister, Florence, in a smart blue dress, and Griselda Wellwood in silver-grey, as well as the other Newnham regulars. Charles/Karl was also there, having come to visit, and chaperone, Griselda, which he could do, as an elder brother who had graduated. They were all invited to dinner in Brooke’s rooms, afterwards, where a more informal discussion was to take place. Methley’s books had been censored: he needed to be circumspect in public.

He spoke very cleverly about how the conventions of the novel mirrored the conventional attitudes of society. Everything in a novel must end with a marriage—this was still so, although great novelists had already revealed that life, and love, particularly love, continued after marriage and were not confined by it. He said that intelligent young people who read novels came to see—as they lived their lives—that the world did not quite correspond to the world described either by novels, or by conventional social beliefs. On the one hand, the young ladies present surely did not really believe that their very existence and presence would be an intolerable provocation to the young gentlemen present, unless they were accompanied by chaperones? On the other hand, the young gentleman were not all ready to turn the young ladies into idols, or goddesses, or visions of perfection? They had come to talk to them as was right and proper. They were grown-up people, in charge of their lives.

And then, subtly and disconcertingly, he changed tack. As they grew older, he said—“I have the advantage over you of some years of experience and observation, no other”—they must realise that they knew, and felt, and observed, all sorts of things—nuances of delicate feeling, strange little social observations, seeds of attitudes, and problems—which did not appear in novels. He must mention the sexual feelings, because not to do so would be dishonest. The character in a novel must put into a reverential, chaste kiss feelings that surged up from underground and—in a novel, perhaps in life—had to be repressed. You came, as a reader, to recognise coded descriptions—taking off a glove, let alone a stocking, conveyed so much more than those simple acts. He was always surprised at the description of scholarly, or intelligent, ladies, as bluestockings. For the word—in itself a lovely, mysterious word—caused people to think of precisely what they were being defied to think of—the human body, in all its energy and beauty.

He had said he must mention the sexual feelings. But to give the impression that they were the only, or most powerful, feelings would also be wrong. Women in novels were saints, sinners, wives, mothers. Sometimes they were actresses. They were not politicians, financial managers, doctors or lawyers, though they might be artists of what George Eliot called “the hand-screen sort.” And yet modern women felt inside them the struggling towards the light of the repressed doctors and lawyers, bankers and professors, politicians and philosophers. There was more subterranean life, nearer the surface, feeling its way blindly through veins and tunnels, like roots, which move like animals. And if these energies broke the surface, or the skin, there were dowagers like the Duchess and the Red Queen, waiting to hammer them down with mallets and bind them with iron hoops, as Blake said or, to change the metaphor, to reply, as the Fool did to King Lear, who cried “O me! my heart, my rising heart! but, down!”

Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ’em i’ the paste alive; she knapped ’em o’ the