The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [289]
She learned to speak at meetings. She went to a meeting in Sutton where someone emptied a sack of live rats into an audience. Things were thrown, foul things, rotten eggs, cayenne pepper, blown towards the speakers from bellows. The opposition was implacable, ingenious and stronger than most women. It was adept at knocking the chair from under the speakers. Men at meetings clutched respectable women by the breasts, or pushed beer-breathing mouths into their faces, pretending the women had invited it.
Hedda was afraid. She was partly excited by being afraid. It made her sure she was alive, and that life had a meaning, which she had always been uncertain about. But the fear was very real, and grew more intense as she came to understand, and to see, just how real the dangers were, of being badly hurt, or worse. She stitched up her own torn dresses: she did not want Violet asking too many questions. She did not tell her family where she went. They thought she was sticking stamps, and collecting subscriptions.
Talk boiled, and intermittent marches and other actions surged into being around the condition of women, and the condition of the Poor. In Cambridge in 1907, an idealist Trinity undergraduate, Ben Keeling, resuscitated the Cambridge Young Fabians. This was remarkable for being the first university society to admit both men and women as members. Keeling was a socialist and invited Keir Hardie, trade unionist and feminist, to speak. He diverted a howling mob of rugger-playing university thugs by deploying two counterfeit Hardies, in fat beards and red ties. He had a poster in his room with the workers of the world advancing with clenched fists. Its title was “Forward the Day Is Breaking.” A Newnham woman, Ka Cox, was treasurer, and the Newnham contingent not only came to listen, but spoke fluently. Amber Reeves, daughter of William Pember Reeves, soon to be Director of the LSE, made a formidable speech proclaiming the relativity of morals, and sympathy with the Russian bomb-throwers and bank-robbers. She was self-assured and beautiful and very clever.
Graham Wallas, one of the Fabian Old Guard, who had resigned because of a difference of opinion on Free Trade, and had—with some reservations—supported H. G. Wells’s attempts to shake up and reform the Fabian Society, came to speak. He was teaching Charles/Karl at the LSE and Charles/Karl came with him. Wallas spoke on the irrational aspects of human nature in politics—the herd instinct, the bubbling up of the subconscious in crowds and groups. That explorer of the unconscious depths, Sigmund Freud, was hardly known in Cambridge. The Interpretation of Dreams, with its claims that male infants desired to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, although it had appeared in German in 1900, had not yet sold out its print-run of 600 copies. Charles/ Karl knew of its existence, because he had met the wild and anarchic psychiatrist, Otto Gross, preaching Pan and Eros, amongst the bacchantes from Munich in the Mountain of Truth in Ascona. The Society for Psychical Research, home to serious psychologists and needy spiritualists, had also noted the Traumdeutung, believing Freud’s dreamwork to be a new way of exploring the Soul, and maybe the Common Soul to which all humans should have access. The irrational bubbled up, and met the rational, which fastened on it with glee, apprehension and, in Cambridge, wit.
In the summer term the Cambridge Young Fabians decided to invite Herbert Methley to speak to them. They wanted him to talk about the relations between the sexes. Wells was trying to recover respectability, after A Modern Utopia and In the Days of the Comet, denying that he had ever advocated “something nasty called free love … a sort of utopia of salacious freedoms