The Children's Book

kissed them all, and said to her sister, lightly, “Where’s Tom?”

“He went out to get some air, he said.”

“It is very hot,” said Olive. “I hope he enjoyed the play.”

“Everybody did,” said Violet. “And so they should.”

Olive was given a large bouquet of red roses, lilies and stephanotis, in a silver holder, the size you have to cradle in your arms, which made the control of her hair even harder. She was wearing a black stiff silk skirt, embroidered with gold flowers, and a silver shirt, with a ruffled neck. Humphry had given her a double row of amber beads. It was a present for the First Night. There were insects trapped in some of the beads: one was a lace-winged fly, millions of years old, which had left traces, in the hard translucent bead, of its struggle to escape the oozing sap. Humphry had said “I thought it was appropriate. I couldn’t give you a coal-ball.” Olive kissed him. “I love you, Humph,” she said. “We have come a long way from the Dream in Hackney.” “A long way and no way,” said Humphry, and kissed her again.

People came to praise. James Barrie, saying he was moved, and Bernard Shaw, saying she had managed to please the multitude with intelligence, which was hard to do, and H. G. Wells, who called the play an allegory, which caused Olive to frown. Fabians came, and the Portman Square Wellwoods, though Griselda and Julian Cain were not there, were coming with a party from Cambridge the following weekend. Prosper Cain was absent: his wife was near her time, and unwell, they were told.

Olive said “Where’s Tom?”

“He kept dozing off,” said Hedda, remorseless.

“Not really dozing,” said Phyllis. “More resting his head.”

“Where is he?”

“You know he doesn’t like crowds,” said Violet. “He’ll turn up.”

There was a party. There was champagne, and high excited laughter. People asked the Germans how they did it and were told it was an old German art made new. People embraced the Germans and embraced Olive, again and again. Her beads were tangled in her flowers, and her hair came right down, and Humphry said she was the White Queen, removed the flowers, and found a theatrical make-up person to put up the hair again, with a red rose knitted into it. Steyning was criticising the timing of some of the lighting. Olive said

“Has anyone seen Tom?”

No one had. Violet repeated that he didn’t like crowds, and would turn up.

Tom put on his overcoat and slipped out of the theatre, where the enthusiastic audience was spilling out into the lighted Strand. He began to walk. He walked along the Strand and down Whitehall, and came to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. He walked on to the bridge, and stopped for a moment, leaning his head on his elbows, and squinted down at the river, which was high and on the turn, black, glinting, moving fast. He remembered Hedda, in the theatre, saying one was always tempted to throw oneself over, or outwards. He looked at the black surface—he didn’t know how long. Then he moved on, over the bridge, and turned south. He walked along well-lit streets, and shady ones. Now and then an electric tram passed him, making a groaning sound and full of yellow light, but he did not think of boarding one. It did not matter where he went. All that mattered was to move, to be on the move, to use his body and not his mind. He wove erratically across the south of London. He found himself crossing the flat expanse of Clapham Common, with its ponds sullen in the meagre light, and its trees black. You knew you were out of London when the bark of the elm trees ceased to be thick with soot. London was a creature that grew busily and decayed busily: terraces and houses went up and came down. Cranes stood skeletal against the glow of the streetlights; there were huts in the road for the diggers of drains and of channels for cables. The air was nasty in his lungs. He went on, and came to Dulwich Village, which was pretty, though encroached upon by the tentacles of the city. He headed for Penge, avoiding Croy-don. He did not have a plan. He meant to get out of the dirt, and the noise, and the dense population, and head for the North Downs where he knew where he was. At this point, he thought he was heading for Todefright, and home. Where else should he go? He went fast, in a long, loping, even stride. I am, he thought to himself, an expert in not thinking.

•  •  •

Olive and Humphry read the reviews over breakfast in London. They were ecstatic. The Times pointed out that like Peter Pan, Tom Underground had used old theatrical forms—the pantomime, the ballet—in new ways. Peter Pan was a children’s play with hidden depths revealing hidden truths about childhood and motherhood. Tom Underground was for grown-ups, although its form was that of old fairytales, the places “Under the Hill,” combined with images taken from Wagner’s black dwarves and from contemporary coal-mining. This play had the magic of Peter Pan combined with something dark and Germanic, the bright black intentness and craziness of the world of the puppet and the marionette. The reviewer even quoted Kleist’s essay on the superiority of the marionette and its pure gestures. Something of that had been experienced that evening by a bewitched audience.

“You are a heroine,” said Humphry, and kissed her.

“I wonder what happened to Tom.”

“He’s always going off on his own. He doesn’t like crowds. He’ll surface.”

“I think so, yes.”

They went back to Todefright, by train.

Tom had reached the edge of the city, at dawn. He saw the stars, as he saw the edge of the London pall of smoke, and passed beyond it, and saw the sun come up, over the North Downs, as he began to climb. He knew the drovers’ paths, and the wooded abandoned roads of the Downs and the Weald. He stopped beside a horse trough, and filled his hands, and drank. The water was very cold: it was early in the year, but there was no frost, and the ground was dry, not clagged with mud. He was on the road home. It would take him a day or so to come there. He bought a lump of bread in a shop near Badgers Mount.

A woman journalist had come from The Lady to interview Olive. She wrote about Todefright in the winter sunshine.

She lives in the perfect house for a writer at once so enchanting and so down to earth. I suggested to her that there was something witchy about the name Todefright and she immediately put me right. Todefright comes from the amphibian and an old Kentish word for “meadow.” No death or spectres! And it is such a mellow pleasant house, with bright, unusual pots and plates, with hand-crafted modern wooden furniture that looks centuries old. There is a pleasant lawn for children to play on, which borders a satisfactorily mysterious wood. Mrs. Wellwood has seven children, ranging from young men and women to schoolboys, all of whom have been the privileged first listeners and readers for Mrs. Wellwood’s spellbinding tales! The house is full of their presence—bats and balls, models and exercise books, no question of these children being banished to a nursery, seen and not heard.

We discussed her wonderful inventions, the Silf and the Gathorn, and the splendid acting of Miss Brettle and Master Thornton in those parts. Had she enjoyed the challenge of working with nonhuman actors, with life-size figures and tiny marionettes? She spoke enthusiastically of Mr. Steyning’s innovative lighting, and the skills of the Stern family from Munich.