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By Root 1943 0

cast to Olive, if Olive wanted to grasp it. She then sat down to think about her own fury at Olive, her wish to close her out and punish her. What exactly was she punishing her for? For a moment of passion (she supposed it was a moment of passion) with the mysterious and intriguing Anselm? For her own birth? She was glad she had been born, she was contented enough with who she was, even if that person turned out to have a different origin from what she had always supposed. For bringing her up in ignorance, as a Wellwood? What else could a woman in that situation have done? She had not lied to Humphry—possibly could not. They had both loved Dorothy, that she had to admit. What angered her was the lie. Those who are lied to feel diminished, set aside, misused. So Dorothy felt. But she was also discovering that knowing about lies that have been told is a form of power. She had power over both Humphry and Olive, because they had lied to her, and she knew. And they did not know how much she knew, and they were fearful. The letter she had written would make them more fearful, more anxious. They deserved that. But the letter also, in its naïveté and neutrality, left the door open for everyone to pretend that nothing had happened at all—for them all to know they were pretending, and tell a story together. She pressed the envelope shut, licked the stamp, and carried it to the post.

Charles/Karl was also preoccupied with his double identity. He saw more both of the politically agitated and of the raffish and satirical sides of life in Schwabing than the young ladies did. He sat in the Café Stefa-nie, in the thick smoke and the singing, and listened to psychoanalysts and anarchists preaching ferment. He listened to slogans. “Unity is princely violence, is tyrannical rule. Discord is popular violence, is freedom” (Panizza). Intense analogies were drawn between hidden destructive parts of the soul, and the excitement of peasants and workers in mobs. It was dangerous to deny such impulses—violence, conspiracy, revolution, murder became necessary and desirable as the tyrannical state was opposed and overcome. It was a long way from the polite lucubrations of the Fabians, and even further from the horse-racing, shooting-party circles of the new King, at the edge of which Charles’s father moved—thanks to his German mother’s fortune. Charles was quite intelligent enough to see that he was able to be an anarchist because he was rich. The Munich café thinkers were aesthetically excited by peasant manifestations of energy—the charivari, the Bauerntanz, the Karneval. Karneval and misrule went together, and were glorious. Joachim Susskind mostly listened. Wolfgang said little, though, like his father, he sketched incessantly, beards wagging in passionate dissertation, women’s legs visible under their skirts as they leaned back, applauding. Leon joined in. He discussed the necessity of assassination, almost primly. Karl said he did not see that it was necessary—such detached Acts as there had been—anarchists had killed the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress Elizabeth and the King of Italy—had only led to more repression. There speaks an Englishman, said Leon, not unfriendly. You don’t recognise oppression as we do. You cannot be put in prison for Unzüchtigkeit—“obscenity” Joachim translated—or for lèse-majesté as our artists regularly are. We are driven to put on our serious plays in private clubs and cabarets. And then, the police come in, and the artists are imprisoned, or banished. Oskar Panizza is in Switzerland and cannot return.

“We shall take you to the new artists’ cabaret, the Elf Scharfrichter. Eleven executioners,” said Joachim. “It’s better in German—the sharp edge of the axe is the bite of the wit.”

Karl was already amazed by the satirical poison and violence of the periodicals, Jugend, Simplicissimus, with their drawings at once elegant, wicked, obscene and lively. Black dancing demons. Bulldogs. Women like bats and vampires with black mouths. Leon invited him—as an English anarchist—to admire Simpl’s