truly like to guide them round the circles of a hotter place. Have you seen Rodin’s
She talked away about sex, with wit, indignation and a kind of social fervour that was new to Karl. She had argued with Kropotkin about it, she said, as they rode the travelator, and had been forced to tell him he underestimated it because he was no longer young. He had the grace to laugh and to concede the point, she said. She told Joachim in an undertone that the Malthusian society was meeting in secrecy—she would tell him where and when if he was interested, but the police were snooping, and she had no wish, at present, to be imprisoned in the cause of birth control, because that was only one part of the larger mission, the whole vision.
They came to the hotel on the Boul’ Mich’ and ate Russian beet soup, and a beef hotpot, with boiled potatoes, concocted on the burner. The room was full of smoke from Russian cigarettes and French Gauloises—everyone’s outline was blurred in Charles’s eyes, and the gathering spoke many languages, apparently at random, French, Russian, Italian, German, American, Dutch. Joachim in this company looked smiling and wild, his hair ruffled, his shirt-neck open. He sounded meek and thoughtful in English. In German he sounded excitable and harsh. They were talking about someone called Panizza, who had been imprisoned in Munich for blasphemy and was now released and in Paris. Emma Goldman said that Panizza had called on her—she had been moved and excited—and had invited her to dine with Oscar Wilde. “Dear Hippolyte,” she said, turning to her lover, had recalled her to ethics—it was the night of the comrades’ session—but she would so very much have liked to meet Wilde.
Karl looked curiously at Hippolyte, who was small, agitated, elegantly dressed and had bandaged hands. He was a penniless Czech, who had ruined his skin cleaning boots for a living. As an example of “free love,” he was uninspiring. He fussed. He said something in either Russian or Czech about Wilde, in which the tone was disparaging. Someone else, a grey-haired Dr. somebody, said he was surprised at Emma Goldman, a good woman, defending a man like Wilde, a pervert, and a perverter.
This led to an animated discussion of the right attitude to inversion, perversion and “sex variation.” Most of it was in German. Karl had learned German, as his German mother wished. He thought Susskind knew that he knew German, but for some reason, he had kept quiet about it. He found he had an instinct to be secretive. He took pleasure in having a secret life, and within his secret life, he took pleasure in keeping secrets. He listened to the fierce discussion of Panizza’s ideas about masturbation, rape and perversion with the blank face old Etonians knew how to put on, courteously imperceptive. He was both excited and alarmed by the world he had entered. If you were a German freethinker, you could be imprisoned for blasphemy, like Panizza, or for
The conversation had moved to Emma Goldman’s forthcoming lecture on Trafficking in Women. This discussion was in English. What other ways of earning their bread did most women have, other than selling their bodies, Goldman asked. How could you blame a woman who was a servant kept to herself in a cellar, or a labourer at a factory bench, for wanting human warmth and better nourishment, yes, and pretty clothes. Wages were so low that married women sold themselves too. With their husband’s connivance, often enough. The men who used these women went home and infected their wives—whom they had also bought—with syphilis. It was not the men who were punished by the state and its police and doctors, of course, oh no. It was the women. Women must take control of their lives and their bodies.
A thin woman in a grey dress, with a regular little cough, asked whether the supplies of rubber had arrived. Was it true that the Americans meant to demonstrate these things at the congress?
Goldman said she hoped so.
Charles felt himself vaguely excited. Not in quite the right way. Later, as he walked back to the hotel, he looked intently at all the women they passed, the little groups of smiling and beckoning girls in pretty skirts and prominent corsages, the elegantly strolling
He dined with the Cains, Tom, Fludd and Philip. Everyone talked of what they had seen at the fair. Charles did not mention Emma Goldman, and did not discuss streetwalkers. Cain said he supposed it was encouraging that people at war with each other—the Germans and the Chinese, for instance—could coexist in this imaginary city. Benedict Fludd, who seemed alternately excitable and grumpy, said perhaps Cain had not seen the papers? An anarchist had stepped out of a crowd with a revolver and shot point-blank at the King of Italy. They missed him three years ago with a knife, said Fludd. This time they got him. He’s dead. What do they hope to achieve?
“Chaos,” said Prosper Cain. “They are mad.” Karl kept his polite public-school face at this moment also. He was in a moral knot that he was beginning to recognise. Belonging to something, believing in an idea, meant perhaps conceding assent to things that were, outside the belief, ludicrous or horrid. He had tried being Christian, and had tried to force himself to believe in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. He found the anarchists compelling and arousing. But he could not—he could not—accept that a symbolic killing of this or that muddle-headed or insulated old monarch would really advance freedom or justice. And then he tried to see it from the anarchists’ point of view. He formulated an idea: they are more sane, and madder, than other people. They have a better idea of human nature, which is perhaps only an idea. But they are serious and real, and this hotel is not, and this souffle is all airy nothing, and the women in evening gowns at the next table are bought and sold.
It was, however, a delicious souffle, elegantly put together with Seville orange and Grand Marnier. It lingered on the tongue like a blessing.
Philip had spent much of his time alone. Fludd would refuse to get out of bed, or would sit in the hotel gloomily drinking coffee and cognac. He told Philip to get out and educate himself. Philip walked for miles, looking at the lights, translating things seen into ideas for pots, failing miserably. It was all too much for him. His own art seemed small and provincial and far away, and he felt he was a lout and an ignoramus.
He found the ceramics stands on the Esplanade des Invalides. He was attracted to the special exhibition of the Gien Faiencerie by its principal exhibit, an awesome ceramic clock, towering more than three metres, and standing on a carved pedestal. He thought it was a silly shape, and was in awe of the extraordinary technical skill that must have gone into its construction. It was shaped like a very tall vase, decorated with gold underglaze he had never seen before, and sprouting, at its shoulders so to speak, spirals and pendants of green and turquoise blue foliage, out of which, like strange fruit, peeped and poked a bunch of spherical electric lights. Above this, three naked cupids knelt sportively, and supported a clock in the form of a pale blue celestial globe, studded with stars, and telling the time with a mechanism contained in its depth, showing the process of the hours in an opening in the equator. Another Cupid, with little wings, squatted on top of the globe and clasped a torch, which also contained a powerful electric light.
