Then the fairy spread her wings and flew off. People came from far and wide to hear the tale of their adventures, and when it was told, they grew up loving and loved, with the fairies for their friends and protectors, ever ready to help them if they were in trouble; in time they were married and lived happily together – that is the end of the story.
(H.H.H. Nine Little Fairy Stories: A&C Black, London 1923)
London April 1919
Mr Mancini, the stout and mutton-chopped proprietor of the private hotel, had made an exception and allowed Henry Herbert possession of a front-door key, a privilege that was extended to no other of his residents. The outside doors of the slightly dingy establishment, with their stained glass panels and flanked by cream-painted Etruscan columns, were locked at 11pm every night and after that hour it was only Henry Herbert who was permitted the luxury of drawing up in a hansom and letting himself in, or, having walked home carefully in opera cloak and top hat and maybe a little woozy from the champagne consumed in the Crush Bar, of fumbling just a little with the key as he effected his independent entrance.
Somewhat willowy and slim of waist, with daintily barbered moustache (although he may have been getting a little thin on the top), Henry Herbert was a dapper fellow and while he might not have inspired an overriding impression of manliness, most onlookers found it gratifying to observe this tall gentleman with his neat cravat and swinging his cane as he bravely and confidently occupied the London pavements on his determined way to wherever he was heading.
Henry Herbert occupied the first-floor front, the finest rooms of the narrow five-storey building, overlooking the communal gardens with their protecting iron railings, their locked iron gates and their sooty plane trees. But this was in truth not to claim much, for the Frazer Private Hotel was, at best, a modest establishment in an unfashionable area and had few pretensions beyond its respectability and convenience. However, for Mr Mancini, Henry Herbert, with his fabled money and supposed connections was indeed a catch and an embellishment to the house, somewhat belied by his private ways and apparently modest way of life.
For Henry Herbert it was a two-way transaction. True, money was no object to him, but in exchange for what must at best be considered a somewhat frowsty dwelling he was given freedom from what could be called the attentions of the greater world and the demands of society as well as the quiet and peace he needed to finish his collection of Nine Little Fairy Tales and get them ready for publication. Although South Kensington was near to everything that the great world revered, and not half a mile from his place of birth and his childhood residence, it was, in 1919, a place in free fall from its glory days, the great houses being broken up into flats and rooming-houses, and its great cream stucco façades looking increasingly tired and begrimed as leases expired, families fled and ownership splintered.
On this day, in April 1919, at half past seven in the evening, Henry Herbert walked back to the Frazer Hotel after not having attended a concert of Mendelssohn and Schubert at the Aeolian Hall. The reason for his non-attendance was that the concert had been cancelled because of the “influenza epidemic” and, as he walked back to Queen’s Gate, past the groups of delivery boys waiting with their bicycles, the cabbies at the rank, the loiterers around the Gentlemen’s subterranean convenience and those few intent upon some business, he was for the first time hit with the realization that although the terrible war was over, something equally terrifying had taken its place, something that was evident in the subtly changed activity and atmosphere of the London streets. He had also taken note of a story that had been buried in the middle pages of most newspapers and variously reported as “General Dyer defends the Empire as illegal meeting broken up at Amritsar” to “Two hundred natives killed in the Punjab.”
Henry Herbert knew he was different from other men but after over 40 years of life still hadn’t quite worked out what it was that made him a constant outsider. Although he maintained decorous relations he was certainly at odds with his commercially-minded family to whom turning a decent profit took precedence over matters of the heart or art. As the only son of seven children, the preponderance of females put a terrible weight of expectation upon Henry Herbert’s narrow shoulders, far, far greater than the modest expectations placed upon his six sisters – that they should marry, and marry well enough not to bring disgrace upon the family. Four of them had accomplished what had been asked of them, not spectacularly but respectably, two were unmarried and certain to remain so, a disappointment to their parents but a minor one compared to Henry Herbert’s earth-shattering failure to do even the most miniscule part of what was expected of him, the only boy.
He loved his nephews and nieces, he adored his mother, he doted on his sisters, especially the unmarried youngest, Olive. He liked music and books, he loved pictures, he wrote fairy tales, he did illustrations, he collected engravings, he disliked sport, he was uninterested in politics, he was largely indifferent to the business that kept the great Empire turning. And now, for the first time, as he made his way through the streets of Kensington back to the Frazer Private Hotel on this day in April 1919, he had a flash of consciousness that not only had a major change come upon the world, wrought first by the terrible war that had just ended and now being consolidated with the palpable but hushed-up horrors of the influenza epidemic, but also that he himself, Henry Herbert, embodied this change in two ways. First in an awareness of how singular he was and the infinite vistas that opened because of this and how unlikely it was that the new world would be able to accommodate him, and second, that at the same time he was a part of this mass of human beings he encountered every day. This filled him with equal measures of fear and hope, putting him into a kind of stasis, and for a moment he was almost unable to breathe.
He stopped for a few moments by the church on the corner of Queen’s Gate to catch his breath and regain his equilibrium.
Having to some extent recovered, despite having soiled his lavender gloves on the sooty railing, he continued on the last stretch back to the Frazer Hotel.
This crisis of the imagination was to be replicated by real events a few moments later. Hardly had he put his key in the door than it was opened from within by Mr. Mancini. Behind the bewhiskered and sweating landlord centre-stage was a supporting chorus of residents and servants in what seemed like a tableau of outrage.
So what was this all about? After a lot of fevered explanation on the part of Mr. Mancini, it turned out that Miss Stratford-Tuke, the horsy girl from an impoverished county family who occupied the fourth floor back, had put in a complaint about a supposed visitor of Henry Herbert’s who had been encountered the previous day in the exceptionally dingy and dreary drawing room on the ground floor. This dark-skinned and hirsute young man, having been taken for a servant by Miss Stratford-Tuke and challenged for lolling in the chintz-covered armchair in front of the sulky heatless fire whilst perusing a year-old Illustrated London News provided by the establishment, had apparently proceeded to “insult” her.
After many fevered accusations from the angry chorus. Henry Herbert got to the bottom of it. The visitor was a acquaintance of his, a certain Tommy Stephanides, a young cockney Greek whom he had met amongst the etched glass and chandeliers of the Salisbury Tavern on St. Martins Lane. Tommy had been sitting at a nearby table with a glass of beer and a small volume of poetry which Henry Herbert eventually recognized as identical to his own copy of Towards Democracy, a revolutionary collection in the style of Whitman by Edward Carpenter. The sight of this familiar green book had the unusual impetus of emboldening Henry Herbert to initiate a hesitant conversation with the young man sitting at the next table.
From this interchange he learned to his amazement that the fellow had actually visited Edward Carpenter’s Uranian commune at Millthorpe in Yorkshire and the flyleaf had been signed by the man himself.
Tommy Stephanides with his crisp black hair and sharply defined moustache had something of the extremist about him, uncompromising and fundamentalist almost, no apparent softness and yet, somehow, the softest, most revolutionary person Henry Herbert had ever met. Clever and sketchily-educated though he was, Tommy negotiated the world in a way that Henry Herbert could only dream of. He lived with his mother in a tiny flat near the market in Spitalfields and he worked as a typesetter at a nearby press that turned out pamphlets and manifestos for revolutionary causes. He had been born in London along with the 20th century. He’d always felt constrained by his circumstances and had always felt that there must be something better for him and his mother. He had a Portuguese pal who had gone out to British East Africa and had made a better life for himself. But he lived his life as it was with a certainty and a commitment that seemed to spring from some source unavailable to Henry Herbert. He had a hunger for art and music and was doing his best to educate himself by attending evening classes at the Worker’s Educational Association, but his enormous energy still allowed him to find time to be outside the factory gates with pamphlets at least three evenings a week. It was, in fact, Tommy’s very certainties that made him able to be so soft. His negotiation with the world around him was without nuance, an absolute rejection of the rules by which the world was governed. This gave him an incredible freedom, including the freedom to be soft.
Henry Herbert found Tommy physically alluring and was also cautiously attracted by his brave radicalism and his uncompromising vision.
As the explanations unfolded against the background of anaglypta wallpaper, oleographs of Osborne House and gas mantles in the dreary vestibule of the Frazer Hotel, it soon became clear that the ‘insult’ to Miss Stratford-Tuke was entirely in the young lady’s mind and that while Tommy may indeed not have behaved like a gentleman, his comportment had been largely reactive, a modest response to the pent-up fury in the young lady when she perceived that her accusations were empty.
Henry Herbert had indeed invited Tommy to call on him at the Frazer Private Hotel. He loved the boy with the love of a true innocent. It was significant that it was Edward Carpenter that had brought them together. He knew well that he himself was not made for family life, the pursuit of money or the service of Empire but had never seen himself as any kind of revolutionary, while recognizing and accepting the fact that he was different. Picking up boys from the rich and hazardous street-life of post-war London, however tempting, was not Henry Herbert’s way. The terrible lessons of Oscar Wilde just over twenty years earlier had made him cautious. He sublimated his libido into his collecting, his daily routines and his fairy stories.
* * *
Glasgow docks, Berth 5, April 1923
Olympia Stephanides in her widow’s black waited at the foot of the gangway of the RMS Doric bound for Mombasa with her case and bundle while her son negotiated with a couple of officials. A motor taxi drew up and a dapper figure in a dark overcoat and with a cane emerged. The taxi-driver extracted a suitcase from the back. The man tipped the cabbie and took charge of the suitcase. He looked around and, fixing his eyes on Mrs. Stephanides approached her, took her hand briefly and inclined his head to hers. Tommy finished his dealing with the officials and joined his mother and the gentleman.
The ship’s horn sounded three times and suddenly the somewhat static scene of the wharf burst into frenetic life. The visually monochrome but socially divided crowd fast sorted itself into separate queues for the two gangways. To the observer it became evident that one was for steerage passengers, the other for first and second class. The man with the cane was seen to have a moment of hesitation, but after a brief consultation with Tommy, he joined the mother and son on the steerage gangway.
The rain which had been threatening to fall started as the ship’s horn sounded again. The comings and goings ceased, the crowds on the wharf dispersed and the Doric drew away from the wharf and heaved slowly off into the grey Clyde and the world beyond.
Whether the dapper gentleman had left the ship before it sailed or whether he had remained on board was not observed.
Feature Image: John Atkinson Grimshaw, Glasgow Docks 1881.