were covered with blue-grey cloth embroidered with white silk roses. Julian thought he would have liked to see Tom in a silk dressing-gown, standing in that room—he imagined the gown in midnight-blue, he imagined it in dark pewter, he combined the two, whilst Tom strode around with genuine curiosity and repeated that it was a pity his mother could not see it. “It would give her so much for her work,” said Tom. He pushed his hands through his fair thatch, making temporary horn-stubs. They moved on into a bedroom, where a great bed was spread with an embroidered cover in every muted shade. Julian tried to imagine Tom spread naked on it, whilst Tom stood a little stiffly taking an interest in the bed-curtains. A large number of fashionable ladies and gentlemen came into the little room and exclaimed over the fittings, and made aloud several observations about inhabiting the bed. Tom said suddenly that he was tired, he felt oppressed, he should be glad if they could sit down.
They sat in an adjacent cafe, waiting for Prosper Cain. They ordered
“Doesn’t it seem odd that Herr Susskind turns up, just like that?”
“Does it? Everybody in the world seems to be here. I can’t get my breath for being crushed by people. I admit there are so many, the chances of meeting any particular one can’t be very high.”
“I think he fixed it with Charles. I think he knew we were there. Maybe he has a thing about Charles.”
“A thing?”
“Maybe he’s in love with Charles. He seemed excited.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of that. It’s odd, though. I bumped into them together, once, in Hyde Park. I was going through with Papa. They pretended not to see us, and we pretended not to see them. Papa said it was gentlemanly to look the other way. I didn’t quite know why, but I could see everyone was embarrassed.”
Julian said “Have you ever been in love? Really in love?” Tom looked down at the table. Julian immediately thought he had gone too far. Tom was in fact thinking that Julian was sophisticated, and would mock the true answer. Nevertheless, he said
“Only in the imagination.”
“A mysterious answer. What do you mean by that?”
Tom was dumb. Then he said “I don’t know why I said that.”
“Do you mean love in the imagination with real people you don’t love—in the flesh, so to speak? Or in the imagination with ideal people you don’t know at all?”
Tom looked up, and flushed. Julian was looking at him with a quizzical, but amiable grin.
“More the second. But they get mixed. You wonder what it would be like, you know—”
What Tom meant by “what it would be like,” was in fact a reference to knights and damsels riding together through forests, heading from the city into the vacant and the unknown. He had had a habit since childhood of inserting his imagination into Sir Gareth, in Tennyson’s “Gareth and Lynette,” who had been bidden by his mother to be an anonymous kitchen-knave in the ashes of King Arthur’s Hall, and who had ridden on his first quest with the scolding and jeering young woman, who said he smelled of the kitchen, like a foul agaric, but had slowly come to know how strong and gentle he was, who had been sorry, and watched over him like a mother in his sleep. He had no idea why he had picked on Gareth, and not the more complicated and passionate Lancelot.
Julian said
“I suppose we try it out in books, or on beautiful boys at school. Until we find something real—”
Tom flinched, and Julian remembered what he imagined had been done to Tom at Marlowe.
They sipped their
“When I think that thought,” said Tom, “I think of caves of ice, I don’t know why, with things frozen into weird shapes, and tunnels all bored into it—”
“They talk as though youth is carefree, and at the same time, ever so subtly, they try to mould you, into a gentleman, or an empire-builder, or whatever. I don’t want anything to do with the Empire. I don’t ever want to rule anyone, or order anyone to do anything.”
“What do you want?” It was Tom asking, now.
Julian said “After seeing all this—all this lovely stuff people have made—I think I do want what my father wants for me—which is very banal and unorthodox, to agree with one’s father, one ought to be in—manly rebellion. I wouldn’t mind being a collector, or a dealer, in beautiful things. And I want to love, of course, someone. To love and be loved.”
He looked straight at Tom, who had his chin in his hand and was staring, unfocused, at the beckoning ladies on the outside of the Bing Pavilion. Julian wondered if Tom was putting this distant innocence on. He thought not.
He said to himself that he had never met anyone so virginal.
Karl Wellwood was finding out about sex in a quite different way. Joachim had hurried him to the Palace of Woman, an elegant modern building, in whose entrance hall stood figures of women of achievement, with the Byzantine Empress Theodora side by side with Harriet Beecher Stowe. There they met the famous Cassandra, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who was just bidding goodbye to a group of earnest American tourists. She was a serious-looking woman, with cropped dark hair, deep-set eyes and a black bow at the neck of a striped shirt. She kissed Joachim Susskind, and shook Karl’s hand, saying that anyone trusted by Joachim was a friend of her own. They had heard her speak passionately against the South African War, earlier that year, in London, dealing wittily with hecklers, arguing lucidly. Her good sense and passion for justice and tolerance, like those of Peter Kropotkin, who spoke with her, were part of what excited Charles about anarchy, although, still the son of a successful businessman, he could not help feeling that these individualist idealists would save no one without better, and more, organisation.
They strode swiftly away to the boulevard Saint-Michel, where Susskind and Goldman were staying in the same hotel. Goldman told Charles she was earning her keep by being a cicerone at the Exposition and by cooking lunch on an alcohol burner for a group of friends in the hotel—“I am a good cook, you will see, I invite you to lunch, and you may pay what you can.” She was, she said, irritated to desperation by the prudery of the American schoolteachers, who were embarrassed by naked statues in the Louvre—“What, I ask myself, do they make of the women for sale on every pavement—but I dare not ask them, for I must smile and smile and earn my loaves and fishes. I would
