The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [340]
Once, which was the worst thing, she started thinking of the little jar of beef jelly as though it had the authority of the act she had performed. She must have the beef jelly. She must not. She must. She walked. To and fro, and then stopped and took up the spoon.
The taste was intense, through her furred tongue. She gulped down the whole jar, spoon after spoon. A woman came in and said—with what Hedda felt was contempt—“That will set you up a bit, that’s the first sensible thing I’ve seen you do.”
Hedda wept, retched and vomited, and was slapped. She knew now that she had disgraced herself and could not break her fast. She walked, the foul stuff was poured into her, she vomited, she walked. If you hold the funnel too high or too low the food is suffocatingly painful as it finds its way to places where it is not meant to go.
They let her out, in July, under the Cat and Mouse Act, to make herself well enough to be reimprisoned without danger of death.
There was a group of women, waiting for her. A group of suffragists who knew all about cleaning, and resting, and slowly feeding the recuperating martyrs. And her sister Dr. Dorothy Wellwood, who tried not to show her shock at Hedda’s cracking lips, blood-suffused eyes, sharp bones almost breaking the skin.
“You nearly killed yourself,” said Dorothy. “We must get you well.”
Hedda was muttering about beef jelly. Would she like some, said Dorothy. Hedda wept. She said Dorothy didn’t understand. “I messed it up.”
“Only if you die. And I’ll see you don’t.”
IV
THE AGE OF LEAD
50
In May 1914 Diaghilev brought the Russian Ballet with music by Richard Strauss for a triumphant season in Drury Lane. They played Ivan the Terrible and Strauss’s Joseph. Rupert Brooke went to see them; Bloomsbury was there; Anselm Stern and his sons went with August Steyning. On July 25th the last performance staged both Joseph and Petrouchka, ending with the pathetic death of the living puppet. That evening the Austrian Ambassador rejected the Serbian reply to his ultimatum, and left for home. The Sterns also went home. It was prudent, Anselm said. There was conflict in the air.
On July 31st Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia, and declared Kriegsgefahr, danger of war, and began to mobilise its men. The socialist world rallied round Jean Jaurès, who was still hoping for a general rising of workingmen against war. That evening, as he dined in the Café Croissant in Montmartre, he was shot with a pistol, by a young man who had been following him for a day. He died in five minutes. On August 1st, as his death was reported, the French army mobilised.
The City of London, troubled by dangers to the gold market, sent a deputation to Lloyd George, to say that “the financial and trading interests in the City of London” were “wholly opposed to intervening in the War.” Nobody expected war. Nobody was prepared for it. The financiers had believed that they lived in a world of financial and economic forces, so constructed that political forces were subjugated to the economic structures of prosperity and growth. Lloyd George remarked that “Financiers in a fright do not make a heroic picture. One must make allowances, however, for men who were millionaires with an assured credit which seemed as firm as the globe it girdled, and who suddenly found their futures scattered by a bomb hurled at random from a reckless hand.” The Economist advocated strict neutrality. The quarrel on the continent “was no more our concern than would be a quarrel between Argentina and Brazil or between China and Japan.”
Saki, who had written so many stories of feral and irresponsible children mocking the respectable in English gardens, woods, and pigsties, had published When William Came—a grimly satirical tale of English society adapting very well to Hohenzollern rule. The story culminated with a planned ceremonial march of Boy Scouts past the German