by Bob Biderman
It was Beatrice’s relationship with the Stephen family that Maggie wanted to exploit. What she was able to find out was that James Fitzjames Stephen, the Lipski trial judge, had gone off to Devon right after the case to stay with a man named Froude, the noted historian and student of the tendentious Scotsman, Thomas Carlyle, laterally known as the ‘Sage of Chelsea’.
There was another side to Stephen, Beatrice told her. He wasn’t a fool, nor was he a vacuous mandarin. He had a clever mind, she said, and he knew how to use it. What’s more, she said, the Stephen family – and here she was thinking of Leslie Stephen in particular – were part of what she saw as the progressive elite who, some day, would help to complete the great shift in cultural and moral values which had been initiated some decades before by those like Huxley, the charismatic apostles of the magnificent Darwin.
That was not the side of Fitzjames Stephen Maggie had seen at the Lipski trial (nor in the little summer house set back in Virginia’s garden). If anything, her image of the man was quite the reverse – a torpid, lethargic, moralistic bigot who, when putting on his grotesque black hat to announce that Lipski would hang, looked as untroubled as a boy who sets fire to the tail of a mongrel cur because he likes the smell of burning whiskers.
Perhaps he was tired, Beatrice explained. She knew for a fact that his wife had been worried about him. He worked so hard, she had told her. And his enormous case load was becoming a burdensome strain. There were times he would have chucked it all in to do what he wished – namely to write like his friend Froude, perhaps a history of British law – something that would firmly establish his reputation as a juror of substance.
And did they have a close relation, he and his wife? Maggie wanted to know. Beatrice told her that it was, as far as she could tell, as close as you could get without merging into one. And, curiously, when she said that, somewhere in Beatrice’s mind a little memory of the future was triggered whereupon she saw an image of herself with a man, not particularly handsome (he had feet like a duck), but as brilliant as she, who would merge himself into her life both physically and intellectually – something which would empower her to become half of a Dynamic Duo that was famously adored and internationally feted.
Maggie, as we know, had already merged herself with a man, but hers was more controllable since his corporal body didn’t actually exist and thus he wasn’t the sort she had to clean up after. The idea of merging oneself with a real man intrigued as well as horrified her. However, if it were true that Stephen and his wife were close as all that – perhaps she could find out what she needed from the womanly half and not bother with the gruesome chore of searching up the far less fragrant other.
Mary Cunningham was her name before that day in 1855 when she and her husband, James Fitzjames were legally united. It was, according to her spouse, a marriage truly made in heaven. And even three decades on he could still say, without a modicum of facetiousness, ‘We have lived in a state of such uninterrupted and continually increasing happiness as I should hardly have believed could exist in this world had I not myself felt it.’
For Fitzjames (or Fitzy as he was known to his friends) was nothing if not a romantic. He loved his children and he loved his wife. He loved the Queen. And, most of all, he loved England. And when he said, ‘Adherence to rules of conduct founded on the principle of promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the best pocket definition of justice yet propounded,’ he probably meant it. And, yes, he was rather proud that his country, his great nation, could have abolished slavery even though it came at the enormous price of twenty million pounds sterling in lost revenue (not including all the vanished earnings from cheap sugar production in the West Indies).
But could one really quantify a moral debt like a transaction being analysed by a cost accountant? Fitzy could, because, in the end, the obligation of civilization was to manage, and any manager knows full well that without a proper cost accounting anarchy is just around the bend. Which is why he could write so scathingly about the spectre of European social upheaval and his feelings of ‘fierce, unqualified hatred for the revolution and revolutionists.’ For whatever their various defects or harshness, he felt it his duty to support all established institutions and, when they were attacked, to summon up the feelings of a scandalised policeman towards a mob. So it is also understandable that he could have written about the workers’ rising across the Channel a generation before, ‘I should have liked first to fire grapeshot down every street in Paris, till the place ran with blood, and next to try Louis Philippe and those who advised him not to fight by court martial, and to have hanged them all as traitors and cowards.’
Yet life for him was good and often serene – especially those glorious months of delightful tranquillity he spent each summer in Ireland at his eighty acre estate in County Louth, not far from Drogheda, the site of Cromwell’s most infamous massacre. He loved Ireland and his friendly Irish neighbours, but the idea of Home Rule filled him with a deep, abiding horror. For it was his nightmare that a reign of terror would thereby be launched that would make the French Revolution look like a winsome fairy tale. This vision of the future he saw through a demonic lens filling his head with dreadful images and sounds of hyena laughs and witch’s cackles as a tidal wave of blood swept malignantly into India and the rest of the Empire unleashing the devilish banshees of chaos which would finally sink their poisonous claws into the nation he so loved, ripping it apart forever.
It was, he believed, only the firm hand of British Law and Order that would stop this nightmare from occurring. Power, therefore, must always be kept in control of the wise and responsible. Democracy for working men or agricultural labourers, in contrast, he said, was ‘the last and worst creation of the devil.’ Though, he added, as a quiet aside, ‘if you went into public life you had to pretend to love it.’
Fitzy wasn’t alone in believing there was a fear that stalked the land and that fear was of The Rising. Where it would occur or when it would happen was debatable. But you only had to open your ears, you had only to look around to see that evil was encroaching – day by day, hour by hour. In Ireland, India and England itself, it was coming closer and closer. Wasn’t it Hobbs who said it? And he most definitely agreed: it was only the constant fear of punishment that made men just. Terror was the Great Defender.
‘We have gone too far in laying aside the punishment of death and it ought to be inflicted in many cases not at present Capital,’ he had said in 1883 when asked to address the Parliamentary committee discussing possible restrictions of the Last and Final Judgement. But wasn’t that a bit harsh, some on the committee had asked? ‘If society could make up its mind to the destruction of really bad offenders, they might, in a very few years be made as rare as wolves,’ he replied, as one might have done when addressing children who failed to comprehend a straightforward lesson in ethics.
The fools! Couldn’t they see that the real danger England faced came from the uneducated masses? Without a firm and guiding hand, anarchy, blood and tears could only follow. And a thousand years of civilisation would collapse. It was so blindingly obvious!
But, as Beatrice had said, that was only part of the man. Like all brilliant jurists, he was complex. And did Maggie know that just two years before he had suffered a stroke? It was disabling and severe and questions had been raised whether he would ever work again. Yet there he was, two short years later, sitting once more on the bench, presiding over complicated trials. One certainly had to admire the man’s commitment and endurance. Wasn’t that something to respect?
Maggie, though, was thinking of the former Mary Cunningham and the curious link Beatrice had so casually dropped as a defining feature that had no further consequence. Mary Cunningham Stephen, she said, was the daughter of a clergyman. Just like Maggie, herself.
CHAPTER 28
Z LEFT THE Café Royal feeling that Stead would carry on a strong campaign to keep the Lipski case open
and before the fickle eye of the public while investigations proceeded, helping to build pressure to force an appeal. He also felt that Stead’s hidden agenda, his desire to use this story to weaken the government and to redress personal grievances – getting back at those arrogant functionaries who had injured him – could be counterproductive. But there were always hidden agendas, weren’t there? Perhaps he even had one himself. Besides, the support of Stead and his newspaper was bound to make the case into a cause célèbre in certain quarters where people had the time, wealth and the untrammelled idealism necessary to celebrate causes (or anything else).
He strolled through Soho, making his way south, toward the Strand and then eastward toward Aldgate, that cruel entry point to another world, dividing east and west as starkly as a sentry post within a granite wall, partitioning the glitter of affluence from the decay of deprivation.
Those who passed through that portal could not but be impressed by the symbolic nature of the open abattoir, separated from the pedestrian by just a flimsy fence so they could hardly ignore the pitiful screams of the animals being butchered just a few feet away nor fail to take note of the blood which seeped under the rotting wooden slats they were forced to walk upon.
Once through that fiendish gate all was transformed. Z could have easily been in another country and perhaps he was. The dress, the smells, the language, the looks, the quality of sounds, the air, the feel, the mood, the tastes – everything was different. Everything. And Z? He was transfigured, too, once he passed through that sphinxian entrance.
Was it the musical rhythms of the speech or the way people moved – their gesticulations, their physical presence, their need to feel, to touch, to hold, to fondle? Was it that? Or was it the faces, the multitude of expressions, the coarser hair, the higher cheekbones, the darker complexions? There was something comfortable, something comforting, being around these people, he felt. Even though, if truth be told, they sometimes embarrassed him by their gawkiness, their crudeness, their inelegance, their superstitious minds, their humble prayers, their demeaning stance, their ridiculous determination to be who they were in spite of not being where they had been any longer.
Sometimes after being in the ghetto for a while, he felt the need to make a mad dash to the other side of Aldgate simply to breathe again. Sometimes it worked the other way around. Where was home? Where did he feel he belonged? Here or there? If he had believed in God, he would have prayed. And sometimes he prayed even though he didn’t believe anyone was there to hear his hapless lamentations. He prayed for his people and he prayed for himself. Would it do any good? Only God knew. And if there was no God? Then it didn’t matter, did it?
And yet there was another side to all of this. There was always another side. Like a hardened piece of dung that turns out to be a diamond in the rough with infinite potential facets, there was always the obverse view making a mockery of all preconceived notions. For he knew within the harshest deserts were springs of life that nourished the barren earth to bloom so amazing things would grow there. And he also knew these special oases could only be seen by those who believed and that others would dismiss them with insults, calling them mirages.
He was headed for the office of the Record to see Mordecai and to explain why his article had been delayed – an article Mordecai both wanted and feared and so, having mixed feelings, would probably just as well accept a delay since neither option (to publish or not to publish) would bring anything but misery for him as his dependence on Jewish merchants for his meagre advertising revenue balanced against a readership anxious for stories about this most gruesome case which had finally put them on the London map, meant he would have to tread a political tightrope no matter what was said on the Lipski subject.
But Z had already left the Record, in his head if not in deed. He had remained there simply to keep his hand limber and his words in print while he put his ideas into form. For Z was coming within the height of his powers; it was that wonderful time of life when nothing was beyond him. He had energy, talent and that great passion of youth which allows one to soar into the eternal blue without considering the consequence of flying too close to the blazing sun.
Even though he was headed for the Record, it was not where his feet were taking him. He realised this only after he had made a certain turn off Commercial Road which brought him to a small impoverished thoroughfare named Berner Street that seemed to lead into an abyss called nowhere. But it wasn’t nowhere he was headed, but, rather, somewhere. And that particular somewhere turned out to be an old two storey wooden building on that dark and dingy road which radiated a curious light, setting it apart from the other hovels that surrounded it.
The building had a sign identifying it as the International Workingmen’s Educational Association. He had been here before – several times, actually. Only last month he had come to hear the great William Morris and watch the mesmerised crowd of Poles, Russians, French, Germans, Italians, Greeks and native born English as they clung, like one of the artist’s intricately crafted patterns, on the façade of his poetry which punctuated the otherwise torpid ghetto air with the passion, hope and genuine belief of a better day to come if only the labouring classes would unite – even though few of them could understand most of his finely sculpted idiom.
This remarkable place was a superb example of the triumph of content over form, Z had thought. On the outside it was just another shabby house. On the inside it was much the same – bare, worm-wooded and austere. But the fires emblazoned here on most nights, overcoming the chill and the damp, the hunger and depression, with the heat exploding from the cauldron of passionate ideas, made it inconsequential that the place reeked of dry-rot, the walls were cracked and the paint was peeling from stem to stern. For in the heart of the ghetto not only were frocks for the wealthy being stitched in a multitude of sweatshops but words and ideas were being fabricated in the blistering coals of the melting-pot which would someday revolutionise the world and de-frock those who blindly ignored the brutal lives the frock makers endured. At least that is what those who came to this seemingly innocuous house on that non-descript street in one of the poorest ghettos of the European world truly felt. And that passion and heart-felt belief penetrated into the very cracks of the peeling walls, infusing them with the energy and powerful vibrations which Z felt envelop him as he made his way to the door of that electrically charged building, resonating with the cries of those who would have done with the gross indignities of human servitude and break the chains of endless toil.
Z had come there to see Krantz, the editor of the Yiddish weekly, Arbeter Fraint, whom he had met briefly at the defence committee meeting. Before he had left Hayward’s office, Krantz had taken him aside, suggesting that they should meet privately and talk – indicating by the way he phrased his words and the expression on his face that there were certain things he would like to have said but Hayward’s office wasn’t the place to have said them.
That evening – the evening Z arrived – there had been a performance of a new play by the Russian émigré, Nikolai Vasilyevich Chaykovsky, a passionate utopian socialist who had left St. Petersburg to set out on a curious journey that would lead him to the American state of Kansas (at the very time Frank Lyman Baum, the little newsman from Chittenango, New York, was dreaming up his Wizard of Oz fantasy which he would locate in the same wind-swept grasslands where Chaykovsky had set up his anarchist commune) and, eventually (though even a fantasist like Baum could never have dreamt it) back to revolutionary Russia where he would end up leading the anti-Bolshevik government at Archangel under the auspices of the Allied expeditionary forces.
Of course no one in the audience that night of two hundred socialist revolutionaries who had come to applaud their hero’s work could have known that Chaykovsky, the one who touched their spirit and their soul, would end up on the side of those he railed out against. But strange things happen in the course of life if one lives long enough and Krantz, as
well, when he looked back to 1887 from the distance of a hazy mountain top would hardly recognise himself. Nor would Z. Nor would anyone. For who we were and who we are is nothing if not relative to the particular star we are being observed from. As the world revolved around Chaykovsky, so too Chaykovsky revolved around the world. And if there were infinite worlds for Chaykovsky to revolve around, then there were infinite Chaykovskys, as well. (Which is only to say that the Chaykovsky applauded by the revolutionary socialists at the International Workers’ Educational Club that evening in 1887 was not the same Chaykovsky who joined the expeditionary forces at Archangel – even though he inhabited what was left of the body of the man who stood on stage that night and gratefully accepted the plaudits of those he would come to despise.)
Krantz appeared as a different man here in these surroundings. The other day at Hayward’s office, he had seemed, if not quiet, somewhat restrained – reluctant to snap at De Souza’s crude bait (offered up, Z suspected, more to humiliate than to threaten) and launch into a stormy altercation that would have proved nothing except to show he could fight back. It made him seem, perhaps, fainthearted but that would have been a misconception of the man who had travelled in many worlds and knew when the time was right to listen and when the time was right to roar.
But here in the International Workingmen’s Club – here he was in his domain. Here his body was lithe and his eyes were nimble. Here people respected and admired him as their collective voice, empowering him to articulate those deeply held passions and desires they found such difficulty in expressing. For it was only in the Yiddish press that they could truly speak, debate and argue on a level footing. It was their language; it was their tongue. It gave them the tool they needed to verbalise, to put flesh on their raw grievances, their fears, their desires and make them tangible and real – something they could never do in English, a language that would always be their master’s whip to bind them to the hierarchy of Empire at the very lowest rung. In Yiddish they were free; in English they were bound in servitude.