The Children's Book

“This is no time when I am sending my soldiers to battle against the yellow beasts to try to make money out of so serious a situation.”

The Chinese, despite murder, rebellion and war, had nevertheless constructed an elegant and expensive pavilion in the shining Parisian microcosm. It was carved in dark red wood, with jade-green tiles and pagoda roofs, and an elegant tea-room. It stood in the exotic section, side by side with a Japanese pagoda and an Indonesian theatre.

Art Nouveau, the New Art, was paradoxically backward-looking, flirting with the Ancient of Days, the Sphinx, the Chimera, Venus under the Tannenberg, Persian peacocks, melusines and Rhine maidens, along with hairy-legged Pan and draped and dangerous oriental priestesses. Some of its newness derived from the deep dream of the lost past which informed both Burne-Jones’s palely loitering knights and porcelain-fine maidens, and Morris’s sense of saga-scenes and bright embroidered hangings. But it was radically new also, in its use of spinning, coiling, insinuating lines derived from natural forms, its rendering in new metal of tree-shapes newly observed, its abandonment of the solid worth of gold and diamonds for the aesthetic delights of nonprecious metals and semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl, grained wood, amethyst, coral, moonstone. It was an art at once of frozen stillness, and images of rapid movement. It was an art of shadows and glitter that understood the new force that transfigured both the exhibition and the century to come. Electricity.

The American Henry Adams visited and revisited the Exposition whilst it was open, driven by a precise and ferocious combination of scientific and religious curiosity. He wrote a riddling chapter of The Education of Henry Adams and called it “The Virgin and the Dynamo.” He saw where the centre was, in the gallery of machines, in the dynamos. He began, he wrote, “to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.” The dynamo was “but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere that heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight.” But he found himself comparing it as a force-field to the presence of the Virgin, the Goddess, in the great mediaeval cathedrals of France. “Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”

The dynamo that drove the exhibition was on the ground floor of the Palace of Electricity. At first it failed to work. In front of it was a Chateau d’Eau, designed to be brilliantly lit by a rainbow of light. There were tiers of fountains, like the fountains at Versailles, and the palace was covered with stained glass and transparent ceramics, surmounted by a statue of the Spirit of Electricity, driving a chariot drawn by hippogryphs. When all this failed to come to life, there was an uneasy black cavern, a gaping hole, at night. But workmen attended to it, oiled it, polished it, stroked it, like a beast being urged out of inertia. Adams was right: a bunch of fresh flowers was placed on the back of the cylinder as an offering. Its pulse was felt as it shuddered into life. And when it worked, it transformed the facades of buildings into rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, and the dark cloth of the night into a tapestry of shimmering threads. The Water Tower ran liquid diamonds, shot with changing opal and garnet and chrysoprase. The Seine itself became a heaving, dancing ribbon of coloured lava, where variegated threads intertwined, sank, and rose again, changed and relumed.

Wonderful illuminated portals, curving like the vegetation of an artificial paradise, led down to the flashing electric serpent of the new Metro. The whole exhibition was encircled by a moving pavement where citizens could travel at three different speeds, squealing with amazement, clutching each other as they moved from strip to strip. There was incandescent writing in magazines about the “fairy electricity.”

The Palace of Electricity was set about with warnings. Grand Danger de Mort. It was a death without tooth, claw or crushing. An invisible death, part of an invisible animating force, the new thing in the new century.

22

Prosper Cain’s party had rooms in a hotel called Albert, in Montmartre. Cain had work to do—he visited the Bing Pavilion to study the delights of Art Nouveau, and the Petit Palais to look at the rich collection of historic art. He went repeatedly to the German decorative section, where the new elegance of Munich was displayed in rooms decorated by von Stuck and Riemerschmid, in their new young style, the Jugendstil. He went to the Austrian and Hungarian rooms, audaciously swirling with linear curves, round simple but luxurious furniture, with a lurking wickedness and suggestiveness.

When the young men went out in the morning, ready to get into the omnibus, covered with a striped awning and drawn by four horses, a figure appeared out of a side-alley and raised his hat to them. It was Joachim Susskind, who said he was surprised and delighted to see them there. He himself was attending a congress, but had already visited a great deal—by no means all, that would take months—of the Exposition. He was afraid they would find the German pavilion ostentatious. But there were things from his native Munich of which he was proud.

Julian thought immediately that Susskind was not there by chance. He was there by arrangement with Charles. Julian’s imaginings were sexual, not political. He considered Susskind’s hay-coloured moustache and did not think it would be pleasant to be kissed by him. He considered Charles’s sharp blond slimness, and decided that Susskind was probably in love with Charles, as teachers tended to be in love with self-assured, eager boys. His smile of greeting had been both self-effacing and hungry, Julian thought, pleased with his own perceptiveness. Because he had been watching Susskind he had not been able to notice whether Charles appeared to be abashed, or confused, or gleeful. When he did look at him, he saw he was blushing, with what was certainly the self-consciousness of having engaged in a subterfuge—but what else was there? Julian was intrigued. But he was more interested in the possibilities this opened for himself.

Julian asked casually, when they reached the exhibition space, what everyone wanted to see. Tom said he should like to go on the travelling pavement, and ride on the Great Wheel. Charles looked at Susskind and said he would like to see the Hall of Dynamos and the motor cars. Julian said he himself wanted to see the Bing Pavilion, with the decoration which his father had said he must not miss. They agreed to meet later in the day in the Viennese tea-shop and eat cakes.

When Charles and Joachim Susskind were out of earshot of Julian and Tom, Susskind said, with some excitement, that there was a young woman he wanted Charles to meet. She was lecturing on anarchy and the sex question. She was here, in Paris, as he was, to attend the Second International Anti-Parliamentary Congress. She was also a delegate to a secret gathering of Malthusians, who wished to discuss birth control, which was outlawed in France. Her name was Emma Goldman. She had come from America, where she was a great Anarchist leader, and she was earning her keep, by showing American tourists round the Exposition. “She will certainly know what we should most like to see and learn about,” said Susskind. “But you must be very discreet, and not repeat what I have told you. I said we would meet her outside the Palace of Woman.”

Julian was planning a campaign to come close to Tom, without being at all sure what he wanted, finally, to achieve. He was himself very strung up, his nerves full of electricity, a state he intensely enjoyed. He had looked at himself in the hotel bedroom mirror, before they set out, trying to see his body through Tom’s unimaginable eyes. He was slim, and looked agreeably wiry inside his cord jacket and egg-blue shirt. On the other hand he was—small, short—there was no good word for it. He had his Italian ancestors’ olive skin, and dark line of moustache. His eyes were deep-set. His hair was slick, that was how it liked to be. How did he look to Tom, who was red-gold and casual, and sculpted where Julian was drawn with pen and ink?

Julian was good at being in love. He had needed to know about sex. He had needed, precisely, to know what an emission felt like in contact with another body, as opposed to his own hand and sheet. But he was clever enough to know that what he really liked about being “in love” was the state of unconsummated tension. Public school made one a connoisseur of beautiful boys, boys in surplices with angel-faces, always deliciously veiled in sweat as they toiled after a football or swung a bat, boys anxiously kneeling at the toe of one’s boot, polishing a shoe. The beauty