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By Root 2260 0

politician, bloodily cut down before his own altar. Another proud and wilful politician, Joseph Chamberlain, was Colonial Secretary in the new Conservative Government. He secretly encouraged Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa, to send his friend, Dr. Starr Jameson, with 500 men to invade the Boer republic of the Transvaal. President Kruger, of the Transvaal, was resolutely refusing voting rights to the inflooding speculators and miners, the uitlander in search of Kaffir gold. Humphry, on his way back to Todefright, heard the rumours that were coming in by telegraph, and would dearly have liked to stay in London, to follow events, and to write something wry and witty about the jingoistic mood, so different from the international grief for Stepniak, that was overtaking much of English public life. The Fabians were divided about questions of empire—some, including socialists like Ramsay MacDonald, hated the whole idea. Some believed in planning for the greater good of the many, which included the farflung inhabitants of the colonies. Beatrice Webb, one of the moving spirits of Fabian socialism, had been in love with Joseph Chamberlain as a young woman, and wrote in her diary at the beginning of 1896 that the whole mind of the country was absorbed in foreign politics, that the occasion had found the man, and Joe Chamberlain was today the National Hero. “In these troubled times, with every nation secretly disliking us,” she wrote, “it is a comfortable thought that we have a government of strong resolute men, not given to either bluster or vacillation, but prompt in taking every measure to keep us out of a war and to make us successful should we be forced into it.” Little England, Great Empire. In 1896 Humphry Wellwood was interested in the relations of armies and gold mines, diamond merchants and Stock Exchange dealers. The dead Nihilist jostled the piratical Starr Jameson in his busy mind. But Olive had made him promise to go home, immediately, so he went.

When he opened his front door he was greeted by a full-throated howl of pain, followed by wild sobbing, from upstairs. It had begun. Violet appeared on the stairs, took his coat, patted his shoulder, said “She’s having a hard time. The child is fast in the passage, and cannot come out. And they are both weak, I think.”

“Shall I go to her?” Humphry asked. Olive liked to be left alone at these times. Violet kissed him and said she would tell her he was back, that would settle her a little. She would talk to the midwife, and then she would make Humphry a cup of tea, or a bowl of broth, after his journey. All the little children had been taken to the Tartarinovs’ by Nurse. She was looking after the Tartarinov children too, as the couple were away at the funeral.

Violet went back to her sister’s bedside, and returned to say that Olive could perhaps see Humphry later, the doctor and the midwife were busy. Another scream echoed across the landing: Humphry and Violet crept downstairs. There was frantic, agitated moaning, and smooth hushings and calming noises from the attendant medical people.

Olive thought she had forgotten what pain could be. She was a railway tunnel in which a battering train had come to a fiery halt. She was a burrow in which a creature had wedged itself and could go neither forwards nor back. She was arch after arch of electric pain and the imagination of geometry could not create an issue—the immovable object and the irresistible force were one thing, and could neither advance nor retreat, so that bursting seemed the only way out, like the eruption of a volcano. Something would drown in there, something would be engulfed by flame. The doctor begged her not to fling her head from side to side, not to waste her breath on shrieking and wailing, but to make an effort, for the sake of the child who could not come out, and expel it.

She arched herself, howled and bore down.

Red and angry, black-lipped and uttering a desperate whimper, the child shot into the world. He was a boy. They cleaned his face, and cut his cord, and he wailed