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By Root 2183 0

mistletoe. Stepniak was dead, said Vasily Tartarinov. Humphry had visions of bombs, or furtive stabbing. Tartarinov was in tears. Stepniak had indeed died violently, possibly accidentally, possibly not. He had walked onto a railway line, near his home in Bedford Park, and had been cut down by a train, and killed, more or less instantly. It was a local train, on a single track. The driver had whistled and braked, whistled and braked, in vain. It was hard to understand, said Tartarinov, waving expressive hands, mopping his face, how Stepniak could have failed to get out of the way. Maybe his foot was caught. Maybe he had been overwhelmed by personal sorrows and the sorrows of the world, and had decided to end his life. We shall not see his like again, said Vasily Tartarinov, whilst the Wellwood family ordered tea to be brewed, and tried to help him compose himself. No, we shall not see his like again, Humphry agreed, wishing the Tartarinov children would stop howling, and Mrs. Tartarinov would cease to look as though she might choke with emotion.

Olive held on to the back of a chair—it seemed rude to sit down, but her muscles ached all over. She kneaded her distended flanks, surreptitiously, with her fingers. Tartarinov’s vivid imaginings of Stepniak’s torn body reminded her that soon, soon she would herself face pain, and possible death, of one, or two people.

Tom had been about to walk down to the Tartarinovs’, to read Virgil with Vasily. He was clutching his Aeneid, and his exercise book. He tried to take his mind away from Stepniak’s fate before he had really imagined it, and failed. He saw the shining rail, stretching before and after, and the black, thundering weight, in its shroud of steam, bearing down, a final dark rushing. It would have been quick, it must have been quick. A moving wall of black, a solid tunnel opening. Facilis descensus Averno.

• • •

Stepniak’s funeral was on the 28th. Christmas came between, and the Wellwoods put up a tree, hung with baubles, bright with candles, and sang together, “The First Nowell,” “Silent Night.” They carved two geese and ate Christmas pudding, spherical in eerily flaming blue sheets, like a captive will o’ the wisp, Olive thought, inventing a story about a flame-imp set to work in a suburban kitchen, causing chaos. After Christmas, before the imminent birth, the larger children were sent to spend New Year with the Basil Wellwoods, in Portman Square. Humphry took them to London, delivered them, and went on to join Stepniak’s funeral cortège, which processed slowly from Bedford Park to Waterloo Station, from where the coffin would travel by train to the crematorium at Woking.

It was a day of steady, smutty London drizzle. The coffin was covered with a blanket of brilliant flowers, tied with red ribbons. Radicals and revolutionaries from all Europe marched behind it. Hundreds of people gathered at Waterloo. Speeches were made in German, Italian, Yiddish, French and Polish. The crowd stood for over an hour and listened to the socialist and anarchist leaders, Keir Hardie, Eduard Bernstein, Malatesta, Prince Kropotkin, and John Burns, the workingman, unionist, Fabian and Radical MP for Battersea, who had organised the proceedings. Eleanor Marx spoke as she always did, passionately, lucidly; she said Stepniak had loved women, and women would grieve for him. William Morris, hugely fat and breathing badly, spoke for English socialists and condemned Russian oppression. This was Morris’s last speech at an open-air gathering. Humphry Wellwood went by train to Woking Crematorium with the mourners, sitting discreetly at the back, watching with almost technical curiosity as the coffin passed through folding doors into the flames. Later he wrote a moving description of the event for a magazine, describing international grief and solidarity, confusion and a baffled sense of loss in the soaked, patient crowds on the railway platform, and the heartstruck weeping mourners before the furnace.

The next day, December 29th, was the Feast of St. Thomas à Becket, the turbulent priest and wilful