The Children's Book

home-owners. Last year the Liberal Government had abolished the property qualification for Poor Law boards and had made it possible for married women to stand for election. Miss Dace had rejoiced. She had stood for election herself, and had been defeated by a married woman, Mrs. Phoebe Methley, the wife of a writer, Herbert Methley, who had bought a smallholding near East Guldeford. Miss Dace had had a good Christian upbringing. She tried to feel neither disappointment nor resentment, and turned her attention to the cultural life of the community. She was the custodian of the Fabian book-boxes, which were despatched from London full of challenging and improving reading. She arranged lectures, both for the Fabians and for the Theosophists, and for combined groups of both. Until recently, she had also, through something called the Christo-theosophical Society, tried to arrange discussions of esoteric spiritual life, and especially the female aspect of Christian spirituality. Patty Dace wanted more life and thought it might reside in Theosophy. She had been put out to read, in the pages of Lucifer, a passionate denunciation of Christianity’s attitude to women, written by Blavatsky herself, studded with quotations from the Bible and the Church Fathers about woman as the organ of the devil, the hissing of the serpent, the most dangerous of wild beasts, a scorpion, an asp, a dragon, a daughter of falsehood, a sentinel of hell, the enemy of peace. Mme Blavatsky noted that in the New Testament “The words sister, mother, daughter and wife are only names for degradation and dishonour.”

Patty Dace the feminist, Theosophist and socialist sat down and argued with Patty Dace the vestigial Christian, condemned her nostalgia for the Church, and renounced it. This had led to a certain amount of embarrassment over what she felt to be duplicity in her dealings with Frank Mallett, with whom it was such a pleasure to collaborate in choosing lecturers and publicising lectures. She would, oddly, not have been comforted to know that Frank himself often felt that his faith was erected on shifting and slipping sands. She liked the Church to be there, like the overlarge, ancient solid mediaeval buildings in the marshes, a reality, even if she had to relinquish her connection to it.

She welcomed the young men, and gave them cups of tea, and homemade shortbread biscuits after their ride. They had, as a committee, secured a series of Thursday evenings in a community hall in Lydd, where audiences of local writers and teachers and shopkeepers were augmented by officers and men from the military camp near the town. She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill at ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again—Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

Miss Dace said she was interested more in change. She wanted lectures on new things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The Theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris’s socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter’s ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and the anti- vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese sang de boeuf. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women’s work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. The committee considered what it would like to hear, and how the contributions should be balanced. Dobbin proposed that August Steyning be asked to expound his ideas about the new theatre, which would go beyond realism into the ancient skills of marionettes and puppets. It was agreed that Toby Youlgreave should be asked to speak on the relations between modern folklore and the ancient fairy faiths of our ancestors. They decided to invite Edward Carpenter to speak on his hopes for men, women, and his “in-between sex,” newly described. Names were brought up: Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas, Beatrice Webb. Annie Besant, who had spoken persuasively, intensely and successively for secularism, birth control and Fabian socialism, had taken on the disputed leadership of the Theosophists since Madame Blavatsky had, in 1891, “abandoned a physical instrument that could no longer be used,” the “worn-out garment that she had worn for one incarnation.” For two or three visionary moments the three made models of what Mrs. Besant might have to say. But Patty Dace said, reluctantly, that she felt that Mrs. Besant would be too implicated in the current problems of the society to want to come and talk in Romney Marsh.

Miss Dace proposed a lecture on prostitution and the injustice in the differing ways in which women and men were treated. It was not, on reflection, a good idea to give such a lecture to an audience including so many military men. Maybe Mrs. Wellwood could talk about modern children, and modern children’s literature; that was safer. It was agreed, rapidly, that Mr. Fludd was not temperamentally suited to lecturing. Maybe someone from the South Kensington Museum could speak about crafts and their future.

All of them knew, even Dobbin, that no lecture series conforms to its ideal elegance and depth, as first mooted. Lecturers refuse, lecturers fail. The same people, who can be relied on, turn up, and say the same things. There would have to be a lecture on vegetable-growing, and Mrs. Wolsey would have to give it. Bernard Shaw would be replaced by some thin and nervous student, who would have no idea how to speak to soldiers. They went on to the second stage of planning, which is the secondary list of reliable performers.

Patty Dace said she thought they should ask Herbert Methley. He had decided opinions and was an inspirational speaker. She had heard him, once, in Rye, which was an indication that he might be willing. She could not remember exactly what he had said, but she remembered it as being mesmeric. It had been to do with freeing the instinctual self, something like that. Everybody present had been stimulated and excited.

Frank said that he had never met Mr. Methley but he had been very impressed—very impressed indeed—by the copy of Marsh Lights which Miss Dace had kindly given him. He had gone on to read The Giant on the Hill, and Bel and the Dragon, which he had also admired. He would be delighted both to meet Mr. Methley, and to hear him speak.

Patty Dace looked searchingly at him. He smiled mildly back. He was unaware that the gift of the novel had been a test of his faith on her part. It had tested his faith. But he felt obliged not to reveal to Miss Dace how much it had done so. In fact, he thought about it, quite hard, every day. It had given him solid images of his doubt.

It was a novel about someone in his own position, the solitary priest in a made-up Marsh church, with a dwindling congregation. The priest in the book, who was called Gabriel Medcalf, had been bewitched by, or had fallen in love with, or had deceived and disappointed, a woman called Bertha, whom he met mostly when he was walking along the brook in the countryside. There was a kind of greenness about this character, which was rather cunningly done by flickering references to the lights in her pale hair, or her eyes, or the shadows on her fine skin. Frank was not very responsive to female charm, and Bertha corresponded to no fantasy of