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By Root 2126 0

Appearance, and persons who were not chosen Apostles were dismissed as phenomena. Something similar was going on, but with more bombast and more edge, in Bohemian Schwabing where the anarchist Erich Mühsam claimed that Schwabing had no boundaries because nothing in it was normal, there was no norm, measurement was not possible. The members of the Schwabing exclusive society, the Kosmische Rundschau, referred to themselves as Enorme, or Giants, or outside the normal—and those who were not Enorme were Belanglosen, unattached, meaningless. The Kosmiker inclined towards nature mysticism, and racial mysticism, and were given to dressing-up as ancient Greeks and Romans, with vine leaves in their hair. They put on plays and pageants, as did that beloved Apostle, Rupert Brooke, who enacted the Herald in Aeschylus’ Eumenides in 1906, lovely in boots, greaves, helmet and a military tunic and skirt so short that he was unable decently to sit down at the postperformance party in the Darwin house in Silver Street.

Julian talked easily to Brooke and to Bloomsbury but he did not belong. He was cynical about their high-mindedness, and more cynical about their cynicism. He wanted to want something, and did not know what it would be, or if he would find it. He knew it was not Gerald, though he loved him. He thought to himself that a love-affair, once begun, always envisaged its end. Time did not stand still. If Gerald could have loved Florence, as Arthur Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson’s beloved friend in the days when they were young, and Apostolic, had apparently come to love Tennyson’s sister Emily, there might have been a future, with the children Tennyson had imagined dandling on an avuncular knee. Sometimes, Julian thought, he would not much mind if he were told he was to die tomorrow. It wouldn’t matter. When he felt like that he walked into the Fitzwilliam Museum and asked to look at Samuel Palmer’s water-colours. They shone from an unearthly, too earthy, earth.

Charles/Karl decided for study, rather than immediate anarchy, and also went to Cambridge, a year later than Julian, and also to King’s. He was neither observed nor selected by the Apostles, and did not know of their existence. He took part in the luncheons and talks the serious undergraduates of those days arranged for workingmen, and found himself tongue-tied and at a loss. He went, in the summer vacation, on a walking holiday with Joachim that happened to wander past the new clinic on the Monte Verità, and the encampment of the holy, the mad, the aesthetic, the criminal and the lecherous that lay around it. He danced amiably in circles, hand-in-hand with Mädchens and maenads, greeted the Sun, discussed the coming of a future state of total freedom, and went back to Cambridge. He discovered he was good at economics. He graduated in 1905 and went to Germany to visit old friends. The British Government appointed a Royal Commission to study the Poor (and appointed Beatrice Webb as a member). Karl decided he could help the poor better by studying them than by getting to know them, and enrolled as a postgraduate at the London School of Economics.

Geraint Fludd was in love, and making money. He was in love with Florence Cain, who smiled enigmatically and sadly when he told her so, and behaved as if he had said nothing. He found he needed urgently to know about sex and visited those who sold it. He coupled with street women, thinking of Florence, told himself he would not do that again, and did it again. Basil Wellwood, from time to time, found himself treating “Gerry” as the son he would have wished to have, interested in money, that most abstract of subjects, and in the ships and caravanserais and descending pitc-ages and slow barges that took things, all sorts of things, coconuts, carpets, sugar cane, glass beads, ingots, wheels with spokes, light bulbs, oranges, apples, wine and honey and converted them into change and exchange, shares and hunting and fishing and house parties and golf.

Basil asked Gerry what he “would do” theoretically, in certain situations—the issue of