The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [287]
Julian Cain was also doing postgraduate work, trying to define a subject for a thesis on English Pastoral, in literature and art. He too went along to the Fabians, with younger men like Rupert Brooke and James Strachey.
The fiery Wells published a strange fiction, In the Days of the Comet, in which, in some immediate future to come, the magnetic field of a passing comet completely changed the sexual nature of the human race, which became simultaneously promiscuous without guilt, rational and ready to bring up children at the expense of the state in communal nurseries. The books that were loved, however, were still written for children. E. Nesbit published The Railway Children, in which the children’s father was imprisoned, wrongly, and had connections with the Russian liberals. She published, also, The Story of the Amulet, the first book in which children were able—after finding an amulet in an odds and ends shop—to visit the remote past. The remote past, and the English earth, came hauntingly and solidly to life in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, set in Sussex, full of fairytales and magic from under the hill.
Humphry was sadly amused and pleased by the final rehabilitation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who, looking pale, transparent and somehow mechanical, was given back his command in the French army.
Olive was writing. She was writing the play, in collaboration with August Steyning. They had tried this plot, and that, Elves and changelings, Grimm and Lady Wilde. And one day, Olive had raided the cupboard, and carried the books containing the endless Underground tale over to Nutcracker Cottage. She said, hesitantly, that of course it was long, far too long, but it contained things … Steyning would see …
He was alight with excitement. Here was what they needed. Mines, shadows, a journey, supernatural beings, a good Queen and a bad Queen, a travelling crew of magical creatures, the Gathorn … She had written it as though she had had his own staging skills—his use of lighting—in mind. And Anselm Stern and Wolfgang would be integral to the special effects, the making of the world. They wrote, and talked, and rewrote, all through 1906.
At the end of that year Tom went to the woods, and found that a gamekeeper had chopped down the Tree House. They were public woods, and he had thought the man was his friend. But there was the Tree House, hacked into a heap of logs and spars—even including those branches of the tree which had supported and concealed it. The contents—the little stove, his writings, such as they were, Dorothy’s outgrown collection of rabbit bones and bird bones and dried skins—all this had been taken. As had his blanket-bag, his mug, his knives. His wooden stool was chopped into chunks alongside the log pile.
Tom had a few very simple beliefs, one of which was that we should not be attached to things. Other creatures were not. He had taken to wearing the same clothes until they wore out—though Violet grabbed them, washed them, and returned them, at intervals. He saw that these chopped things were not possessions, they were—or had been—parts of himself.
He had no one to tell. He thought of going to London, to tell Dorothy, and then thought, how would that help? He didn’t know whether she had come to the Tree House since he told her about the vixen, which he had regretted, as though he had betrayed either the vixen or himself.
He stood very still, for a long time, like a man at a graveside, looking from pale plank to brown bracken to moss on the branches.
A shadow went over the sun, and