“I’d like to look at the puppets. Shall we?”
“I’m sure he’d be pleased if you did. I don’t really want to.”
Griselda hesitated.
“Go on,” said Dorothy. “He’ll be pleased.”
Griselda went and stood beside Anselm Stern, who was sorting and winding the wires, and putting the little figures, now inanimate, into their boxes or beds. They stared out of their pale faces with black intense eyes, in no particular direction. Griselda said
The puppetmaster looked up and smiled.
He stood up, and rather formally offered her his hand. Then he took a small notebook and a pencil from his pocket, and asked her to write her name and address in it. Griselda was elated, both because she had had a real conversation in German, and because she was to receive a book of fairytales.
Arthur Dobbin was thinking about Philip. He wanted to suggest to someone that Philip should go back with the Fludds and himself to Purchase House. Benedict Fludd was in need of an assistant. Dobbin had hoped to be that assistant, and had failed. The clay squirmed to shapelessness under his fingers. His kilns aborted. Fludd had told him, when he left for Todefright, not to bother to come back. He wanted to go back. Fludd had genius, and Dobbin wanted to be near it. He wanted to take Philip as a peace-offering. He considered asking Seraphita Fludd, but she was not in the habit of making decisions; she endured, stately and smiling. Her daughters appeared to be like her. Geraint might listen, but Dobbin sensed that Geraint did not like him. And Geraint was afraid of his father’s moods, like everyone else. There was also Prosper Cain, who came to Purchase House for advice on ceramics, since Fludd would not go to him. Dobbin found decision-making hard. He watched Philip watch the puppets, intent and thoughtful. Dobbin wanted to be part of a wider group, a fellowship. He looked at Philip with a preliminary love. Lydd in the Romney Marshes was a perfect place for a community, even if Fludd was a difficult figurehead. Dobbin could smooth things. He thought that might be his vocation.
He had come to Lydd by accident. Like many of his kind he had changed his life as a result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe. Carpenter, with his working-class friend George Merrill, lived a life of studied simplicity, cultivating the earth, wearing homespun and homemade sandals, sunbathing and windbathing naked to the elements. Dobbin had heard Carpenter lecture, in Sheffield, on the evils of civilisation, and the way to cure them. Dobbin had responded violently to the anarchist saint’s reasonable charisma.
He was the plump son of a doctor’s widow. He was dutifully studying medicine, as his father would have wished, and continually failed the medical exams. He imagined, timidly, passionate friendships with fellow students, but was almost pathologically dumb with embarrassment. When he heard Carpenter, he knew that the only answers were a complete change of life, or self-slaughter. He thought he was not imaginative. He had no idea where to look for a new life.
Some of this he managed to mutter to Carpenter, over the convivial beer and smoke after the lecture. Carpenter recognised him for what he was, and invited him to visit Milthorpe.
There he enjoyed George Merrill’s salmon pie, and watched the two men quietly knitting. The house was occupied by a shifting population of seekers, idealists and the lost. There were Cambridge men and farmworkers, emancipated women and unsatisfied clerics. Dobbin gave up medicine and got a job in a pharmacy. At Milthorpe one summer he bathed naked in the stream with a gipsyish wanderer called Martin Calvert. Calvert had trained for the priesthood and given it up. He had been a lay member of a religious community in Glamorgan. He had learned to weave at a Crafts community in Norfolk. When Dobbin met him, he had decided to be a potter. To work with the stuff of the earth itself, he said. Dobbin was immediately taken with this idea of an art of the earth. They noticed, blushing and laughing as they bathed, that their members were erect and swaying in the water—“like charmed snakes” Martin laughed, and Dobbin was charmed.
They went on a walking tour, in search of a master of ceramics. They went to the South Kensington Museum and saw vessels made by Benedict Fludd. Martin Calvert said that this man was a master, and they might try to find him. Dobbin saw the perfection of the pots, through Martin’s eyes, as Martin described them, the proportions, the subtle glaze, the authority.
They walked south, in search of Fludd. They found him in Purchase House, a partly derelict Elizabethan manor, hidden in woodland in the flat marshy plain beyond Lydd. Martin spoke for both of them, with engaging enthusiasm. Fludd was in an expansive mood, and accepted their offer of help with a firing. The firing was a disaster. Fludd’s mood darkened. He cursed them. Dobbin was almost sure that he uttered a formal curse, out of a commination service. The next morning, Martin was not there. He had taken his pack, crept out before dawn and disappeared.
Dobbin stayed where he was, and waited for a message, which did not come. He avoided Benedict Fludd who was now in semi-retreat—and tried to be helpful to Seraphita and her family. He couldn’t make pots, but he could cook. He cooked fresh fish, and vegetable pasties, and custard tarts. The Fludd women could not cook, and they were at the time too poor to employ a cook. They accepted him. His heart was broken, but he was too genuinely humble to make much of it.
This continued for six months or so. Fludd mostly pretended not to see Dobbin, and Seraphita gave him small sums of money to do shopping and repairs. One day, he went into the village church. The marshes are spread with imposing churches, built for rich farmers and seafarers before the sea receded and the waterways silted up. This church was dedicated to St. Edburga. To Dobbin’s surprise it had a small Burne-Jones window, showing the saint in a graceful white gown, barefoot amongst flowery meadows. Dobbin knelt down under her grass-and-golden light, put his head in his hands, and found himself weeping, with tears spouting between his fingers.
Someone came up behind him, touched him gently, and offered help.
That was how Arthur Dobbin met Frank Mallett, the curate at St. Edburga’s. He was thin, blond and skinny, with a pretty little moustache, and a Shakespearean pointed beard. He was a bachelor and lived in a cottage in the village of Puxty. He was not Martin, and not Edward Carpenter. In some ways—shyness, lack of self-respect—he resembled Dobbin, so that he easily abandoned the roles of counsellor or rescuer, and became a friend. They talked of the dream of a community or fellowship, of the new life that could start in the draggled barns and outhouses of Purchase House to the benefit of everyone.
Dobbin decided that the only thing to do was to ask Geraint. Geraint was talking to Julian and Florence Cain
