The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [136]
The Silf neither staggered with helpless age, nor lay like a ripe woman in the boy’s arms. It danced about like a marsh light, celebrating its freedom, and warned the Company of unexpected dangers lurking in the next passages. It said that if it were Tom, it would go back whilst it could, and thought he could subsist perfectly happily without his shadow, in a perpetual noonday. It said “Maybe your Shadow won’t want to come up to the air. Maybe it will want to stay with the gnomes and salamanders.” Tom said “My shadow is mine.”
“Maybe it no longer thinks so,” the Silf said, and Olive wondered wildly what were the implications of that remark, which she had inserted on an impulse from nowhere.
20
At the turn of the century, the young were about to be adults, or some of them were, and the elders looked at the young, with their fresh skins and new graces and awkwardnesses with a mixture of tenderness, fear and desire. The young desired to be free of the adults, and at the same time were prepared to resent any hint that the adults might desire to be free of them.
Prosper Cain’s family appeared to be unproblematic, indeed hopeful. Julian went to Cambridge in December 1899 and took the entrance exam for King’s College, where he was awarded a scholarship. He would start in the autumn of 1900. Florence was studying for Cambridge higher certificates in several subjects, and was talking of studying languages at Newnham College. The newly named Victoria and Albert Museum was in a turmoil of building and a turmoil of reorganisation; arguments raged between those who saw the museum as a “collection of curios,” and those who saw its primary task as the academic education of craftsmen and teachers. The Royal College of Art, which had replaced the National Training School, of which Walter Crane had been Principal in 1898–9, was now ruled by a Council of Art, four experts from the Art Workers Guild, full of Arts and Crafts idealism. W. R. Lethaby became the first Professor of Design at the college, and the course was energetically rearranged for “Art Teachers of both sexes,” “designers,” and “Art Workmen.” There was a Matron for Women Students since there was no woman teacher, and a large body of young ladies.
Prosper Cain had been watching Imogen Fludd. He could not, he told himself, stand the sight of her mooning around Purchase House looking something between a draggled goosegirl and an incarcerated princess. By 1900 she was twenty-one, or thereabouts, and had neither husband, nor profession, nor sensible life at home. But she did, he thought, have a delicate but real artistic talent. He was sure she should get out of Benedict Fludd’s aura, and the miasma of Seraphita’s inactivity, and learn to do something. He spoke to Walter Crane, who admired Benedict Fludd’s pots, and was well aware of the vagaries of his temperament. Prospective students had to take a rigorous series of exams in architecture (twelve hours for a drawing of a small architectural object); a six-hour modelling exam of—say—in charcoal the mouth of Michelangelo’s David; drawing (a life drawing of the head, hand and foot); ornament and design—a drawing from memory of a piece of foliage, such as oak, ash or lime; and lettering by hand of a given sentence. Prosper Cain did not know whether Imogen had skills enough—or courage enough—to enter these public competitions. He persuaded Crane to allow her to attend the college classes as an amateur observer. They would see how she developed. There could be a polite fiction that she was “visiting” the Keeper of Precious Metals.
Cain went down to Lydd in the late autumn of 1899 and put this idea to Imogen, whom he took for a walk along the beach, having rather firmly and rudely rejected Seraphita’s hints that Pomona would like to come too. This gave him a ridiculous feeling that he was behaving like a suitor, when in fact his feelings