The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [261]
Things were complicated by the arrival of Julian and Gerald, who were on a walking holiday and had decided to walk to Lydd and hear Humphry’s lecture. Gerald was trying to decide between becoming a moral philosopher and going into politics, if he could find a party that met his exacting standards. Julian had an idea for a thesis on English pastoral poetry and painting. He wanted to write about the bright, transparent visions of Samuel Palmer and the woodcuts of Calvert. Gerald was writing about Love and Friendship and the Good, when he was not talking late, or swimming in the Cam, or bicycling across the marshes, or climbing in the Alps. He thought Humphrey’s Fabian socialist views on human nature were interesting. The young men arrived at the Mermaid in time for lunch, and were shown up to the family sitting-room, where they found Florence, writing.
“You could have said you were coming,” she greeted them, taking in Gerald’s beauty under his floppy linen hat.
“We didn’t know. Then we saw a poster for this lecture, so we thought we’d call on you for lunch, and go to hear it. Where’s Papa?”
“Silversmithing.”
“Is he coming here for lunch?”
“He didn’t say.”
Julian looked at Florence, who was looking at Gerald. He said “Well, we can lunch with you, and cheer you up, can’t we?” He saw that she needed cheering up. He said
“Are you not helping with the silversmithing?”
“I have no skill. And I don’t want to.”
Gerald had walked across to the window, and was staring out. Julian said “What’s up?”
“You’ll soon see,” said Florence, darkly.
At the lecture, they found themselves in a row of old friends. Julian was on the end, and Florence was next to him, and Gerald was on the other side of her. Beyond Gerald was Geraint, and next to him the young woman from Purchase House, Elsie Warren, decorously dressed and looking severe. Next to Elsie was Charles/Karl Wellwood, who was thinking what to do at the end of his Cambridge studies, whether to go to the London School of Economics or to Germany, to be an anarchist or a socialist or some kind of worker. Dorothy and Griselda were not there. They had gone into the hay barn where the marionettes and life-size puppets were being constructed. Griselda wanted to speak German. Dorothy was watching Anselm Stern stitch a tiny costume on to a slender silken trunk. Wolfgang and Tom had made a lolling platoon of death-still scarecrow men and women, decked with hay and flowers, stretching out rigid arms of coat-hangers and hoes.
Humphry more or less bounded onto the stage, his red hair and beard darkly glowing. His wife was in the front row, looking queenly, and Marian Oakeshott was towards the back, looking thoughtful.
Humphry talked about the paradox of statistical surveys and individual human fates. The Christian religion, he said, which had formed our thought, insisted that each human soul was unique and valuable in the sight of God. Jesus Christ had advised the rich man to sell all he had, and give to the poor. He had also said that the poor were always with us. He had said that where every prisoner and sick man and pauper was, there He was also among them. He had urged charity on his followers.
Much had been done, much that was valuable, by those who had gone out amongst the starving and the derelict and had reported on crowded rooms in unsanitary buildings, dead and dying crowded together, the sickness of sweat-shop and lucifer workers. He read out a description of the appalling, rapid descent into penury and death of a good worker who injured his back.
He said that compared to individual witness and individual feelings, the compiling of statistics might seem dry. But those stirred not only the imagination but the reason, and the will to act. Statistics was a human science. It had begun, he rather thought, with Durkheim, noticing that the number of suicides in Paris did not vary from year to year. All of them different human creatures, all of them grim decisions taken that life was no longer bearable. The causes might be poverty, lost love, failure at business, humiliation or sickness.