The Children's Book

assassinate the French president, Carnot, only last year. The article had implied that Stepniak was the killer. His English friends were deeply moved by his writings on the torture, imprisonment, and execution of Russian nihilists and objectors. But they were troubled to imagine the laughing man they took tea with waiting on the pavement, with the knife and the newspaper. They had become increasingly nervous about random acts of violence. Last year, an unknown man had mysteriously blown himself to bits outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. The grown- ups remembered the spate of attacks ten years ago—on government offices, The Times newspaper, underground stations, railway stations, Scotland Yard, Nelson’s Column, London Bridge, the House of Commons, the Tower itself. They understood that suffering caused rebellion. They tried to understand covert, isolated attacks on ordinary people. They tried to inhabit the minds of bombers. It was hard.

“Tell me, Mr. Tartarinov,” said Etta Skinner, who was a Quaker and a pacifist, “would you resort to blowing things—and people—up, to help your cause? You yourself, would you do such a thing?”

“We have to be prepared. There is certainly nothing we will not blow up, if it stands in our way. We must look steadily to the end and choose the appropriate means. Without flinching.”

Etta pulled her shawl tight around her shoulders.

“And you yourself? Could you kill someone in cold blood?”

“I do not know. I have never been faced with the necessity. None of us know of what we may be capable, when we are called.”

The group was joined by August Steyning, who wanted to introduce Anselm Stern, who brought greetings from socialists in Germany, several of whom were, as German socialists often were, given the Kaiser’s loathing of them, in prison for lese-majeste.

The boys asked themselves, naturally, if they could kill someone. Geraint had been brought up on tales of knights-at-arms and Icelandic warriors, but he did not imagine blood. Charles had disappointed his father by taking no pleasure in foxhunting or shooting. He rather thought he could not. Philip was not really listening to the conversation. He was looking at the juxtaposition of textures in the grass, the flowers, and the silks, and the very rapid colour changes that were taking place as the sky darkened. Browning and vanishing of red, efflorescence and deepening of blues. Tom imagined the thud and suck of a bomb, the flying stone and mortar, and could not quite imagine the crushing or burning of flesh. He thought of his own skull and his own ribs. Bone under skin and tendons. No one was safe.

Basil and Humphry Wellwood had begun to argue about Bimetallism and the Gold Standard. They came across the grass, breathing wrath and rhetoric, pointing decisive fingers into the evening air. Basil was a member of the Gold Standard Defence Association. Humphry supported the Bimetallic League.

That summer of 1895 was the height of the Kaffir Circus boom. Shares in real and fictive seams of gold were feverishly traded. Basil dined with the Randlords and had made a fortune, in gold and in paper. Humphry publicly used the jibe that a mine was a hole in the ground owned by a liar. He also said in public that the financial press took underhand douceurs to promote or condemn prospectuses. Basil suspected Humphry of being responsible for pseudonymous articles in satirical journals, mocking Croesus, Midas and the Golden Calf.

He also suspected him of using confidential knowledge from his employment in the Bank of England to attack that institution. In 1893 it was rumoured that the Chief Cashier, Frank May, had made huge, unauthorised advances to his son, a speculative broker. Worse, he had made advances to himself. Through 1893 and 1894 rumours seethed and bubbled. May had made advances to the City Editor of The Times. The Bank’s governors were genteel amateurs, could not produce a balance-sheet, had no independent auditors. Basil thought he detected Humphry’s style in some of the attacks. He was himself not happy with the state of affairs. But he believed the Old Lady should put her affairs privately in order. What Humphry was doing, if he was doing it, was treachery to the Bank, and treachery to Basil, who had put him there. Moreover the writings endangered Basil’s own dealings, and even his reputation.

They joined the group in time to hear Tartarinov’s remarks about blowing up obstacles. Basil muttered to his brother that he kept odd company for a man in a responsible position. Humphry said with even-toned bad temper that his beliefs were his own business.

“Not if they include condoning explosions and skulduggery. Where your activities are not ludicrous, they are murderous.”

“And gold-grubbing and wage-slavery are not murderous? Do you know how goldminers live? Or the poor creatures who stitched your fine shirt, and bled onto it?”

“You will not better their condition by parading along the Strand in your frock-coat and silk hat, selling pamphlets.”

Humphry began to speak the speech he made at meetings. He described the three million people swarming in the fetid wilderness beyond the Bank, without food or clothes to keep them in health, or beds to sleep in. The Social Democrats had claimed, in their despised pamphlets, that 25 per cent of workers earned too little to subsist without hunger and sickness. Mr. Charles Booth had challenged this figure and done his own meticulous survey of the poor. And he had revised the figure— upwards, Basil, upwards. Not 25 per cent but 30 per cent of working families tried to survive on less than ?12 os od per month. Think, said Humphry provocatively, tilting his champagne glass at his brother, how much of what you regard as personal necessities can be purchased for ?12 os od.

Basil did not feel able to mention the considerable moneys he disbursed to charities.

Humphry went on. He described the furious decline of the state of an injured worker—a man with a crushed hand or foot, or an eye blinded by splinters. In no time at all he had no house, no food, his children starved, their clothes were pawned, they slept in the workhouse or in the streets, his wife had to sell herself for bread. Mr. Booth and Mr. Rowntree had looked into schooling. At times of no special distress, they found, there were 55,000 children in London schools alone who were too weak from hunger to be expected to learn anything. “Fifty-five thousand is a large number. Now, imagine them one by one, child by child…”

Basil said that he was not a meeting, to be worked up. He would like to find practical solutions to the problem of poverty. He did not think it would be solved by fomenting revolution, or blowing up public buildings and injuring innocent bystanders.

Humphry said, as he had said before in meetings,

“I once walked through Poplar behind two ragged men. They bent continuously to the pavement, picking up orange peel and apple cores, grape stems and crumbs. They cracked the pits of plums between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked single undigested oats out of horse dung. Can you imagine?”

Florence Cain, who was lifting a shrimp patty to her lips, dropped it on the grass.