The Children's Book

a place for another night, and she did say “I mustn’t stay away from Ann, Ann needs me.”

•  •  •

Walking across the gravel path to the cab, after paying the bill, he thought confusedly that he could now never marry, because he could not imagine wanting another woman. He had made decisions that had made… muddle … for everyone.

48

In 1911 King George V was crowned in Westminster Abbey on June 22nd in the middle of the longest hottest summer the country had known. The King took a measure of 98° Fahrenheit on his greenhouse thermometer. Neo- Pagans slid naked into cool pools in Grantchester, under hanging boughs, and hid giggling in the undergrowth, watching punts pass, full of tourists and dons. The royal yacht Hohenzollern carried the Kaiser and his family to the Coronation. Queen Mary wore a hat with cream roses and delicate feathers. In July the Kaiser sent the new German gunboat, Panther, to Agadir and was accused by the French and the English of interfering in French colonial affairs.

The Webbs, the driving force of the Fabian Society, had absented themselves from heat, gaiety and tension together, and had parted for Canada on a tour that was to take them a year. Work at the National Committee diminished in intensity. This was partly because the poor, the workers and their dependants, were stirring with discontent, dissatisfaction, determination and even rage, all over the country. There had been miners’ strikes and railwaymen’s strikes, strikes of woollen and worsted workers in Yorkshire and of cotton spinners in Lancashire, strikes by the Card and Blowing Room Operatives’ Association. In that hot summer there was a wave of action beginning with seamen’s and firemen’s strikes in Poole and Hull two days before the Coronation. Then the dock workers joined the seamen and firemen. Agreements were reached, threats of military action were made, new demands arose amongst the workers. In August, there was a strike of the Transport Workers, who were joined by the lightermen, the stevedores, the carters, the tugboatmen, the crane porters, the coal bunkerers and the sailing bargemen. The Port of London came to a stop. Vegetables rotted and butter went rancid in casks. Frozen meat from Argentina, New Zealand and the USA went foul, green and noisome as the refrigeration ships gave up work, powerless. Starvation threatened. At this point the women of Bermondsey, led by Mary Macarthur, suddenly left their work and ran into the streets, shouting and singing. It was spontaneous: they did not have one overwhelming grievance; they had discovered that their lives were intolerable and the world they lived in unacceptable and unjust.

Commentators saw this human ferment of wrath and energy as an expression of a natural force, like a fire, like a hurricane, or as Mr. Ramsay MacDonald put it mildly, like the stirrings of spring.

“The Labour world responded to the call to strike in the same eager, spontaneous way as nature responds to the call of springtime. One felt as though some magical allurement had seized upon the people.” A conservative writer, Fabian Ware, commenting on the new syndicalism in the union members and the socialists, a French import that implied the will to cause a revolution, said that this set of beliefs was “an assertion of instinct against reason.”

Ben Tillett, the workers’ indefatigable and charismatic leader, wrote

“Class war is the most brutal of wars and the most pitiless. Capitalism is capitalism as a tiger is a tiger and both are savage and pitiless towards the weak.”

Charles/Karl, reading William Trotter on the herd instinct in hu-mans, observed the marching, famished, furious men and their starving families with anxiety, and a feeling of human uselessness. Trotter was interested in groups, in “the aggressive gregariousness of the wolf and the dog, the protective gregariousness of the sheep and the ox, and differing from both these, we have the more complex social structures of the bee and the ant, which we may call socialised gregariousness.”

But Trotter believed, and Charles/Karl understood him, that human beings had constructed a social structure no longer directly subject to evolutionary pressures and checks. Man was a creature who made beliefs and myths about the world, and morals, and treated them as things, not as words and thoughts:

We see man today, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny, unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe towards his moral code, and a belief, no less firm, that his traditions, laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of reality. Living as he does in a world where outside his race no allowances are made for infirmity, and where figments, however beautiful, never become facts, it needs but little imagination to see how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures, ignominiously to be swept from her work-table to make way for another venture of her tireless curiosity and patience.

Charles/Karl was losing his belief in Beatrice Webb’s Individualist State. He found it perilously easy to hate the whole of his own class—his mind was full of visions of over-bred chows and borzois, Cochin fowl with useless feet and nattering voices. He saw the Coronation in Trot-terian terms as a confection of human-invented unrealities, a small man in a foolish hat, in a building made to house a non-existent human deity, surrounded by fawning creatures who could barely move in their dragging garments. To believe in the Empire as a truth was to join in the fiction of calling an evolutionary fact—tooth, claw, cringing and triumphalism—by a solemn and poetic name.

And in the East End the crowds marched like one creature, stirring its huge length out of the sloth, or subjection, or lack of knowledge of its own power, that had kept it down.

But there was no place there for him. He couldn’t dance, and he couldn’t march, or not with any sense of common purpose, and abolishing the Poor Law was not going to undo Trotter’s argument.

The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, went on August 17th to meet representatives of the railwaymen’s unions. He offered them a Royal Commission on their grievances. He spoke from the height of his position. The alternative to the long deliberations of a Royal Commission appeared to be the use of force against the workers. They went away, consulted, and came back. They refused, flatly, to accept the Commission or to return to work. Mr. Asquith was distinctly heard, as he walked out of the room, to say “Then your blood be upon your own head.” Winston Churchill despatched troops to stand by for trouble with the miners. Tension and boiling indignation persisted.

In the autumn of 1911 Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, in its entirety, was performed at Covent Garden. Bloomsbury had seats, and the Fabian Nursery had seats: Rupert Brooke and James Strachey and the lovely daughters of Sir Sidney Olivier juggled tickets and sat in rows together. The black elves tapped their hammers in violent rhythms in Nibelheim, one-eyed Wotan and Loge the trickster, the fire god, descended to the underworld and tricked its king out of his gold ring of power, and his helmet of invisibility. Fire rose and shimmered around Brunnhilde the Valkyrie sleeping on her rock, and Brynhild Olivier applauded. Wotan had mutilated the World Ash to make laws and treaties for his dispensation, which, all too human, slowly foundered in its own inanity and inadequate beliefs about good and evil. Human beings were either corrupt, or deluded, or victims, although the Rhine and the music—and indeed the flames of fire—rippled and sang.