At night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth I sought him and I found him not
Once we shared a pillow and he said Stella my star my breath is yours and yours is mine now it is fifteen steps from my door to his so he’s safe from the contagion that’s in me
Ah but he has a better helpmeet! Let him kiss her with the kisses of his mouth for his love is better than wine and she has the stomach for it!
I understand there’s a kind of blue paint they call ultramarine, because the stones they grind to make it are borne to us over the sea
2
A woman walked onstage alone at the Mile End Assembly Hall. Slight, dark-browed, darkly dressed, she surveyed her scant audience good-humouredly. Perhaps a hundred men and women waited whispering under the white vault: here then was Eleanor Marx Aveling, and more than her father’s daughter.
Among them – breathless from his walk – sat Edward Burton, feeling dwindled down to nothing inside his winter coat. Martha fidgeted beside him: ‘I met her once, you know,’ she said, glinting. ‘She said to call her Tussy, like her friends.’
Left to his own devices Burton may not have chosen to attend a public meeting of the Socialist League, but Martha had been impossible to resist. ‘No sense just listening to me,’ she’d said, pouring tea from the cooling pot. ‘No sense taking things secondhand. I’ll go with you – we’ll walk together – you can’t be forever cooped up in here with your plans.’
In the weeks of his convalescence the earth had leaned a little further from the sun; the air now was bright, gleaming, as though he viewed the world through a polished pane of glass. It had struck him lately that if his body these days was weary his mind – at last! – was not: Samuel Hall had roused him from a long slumber. It seemed impossible that there’d been years when he’d taken his allotted place without complaint, fitting neatly into the whole great grinding enterprise of London. What he saw about him now was a sick body convulsing as it shook off its fever – disease coursing in the arteries of its roads and canals, poison silting in the chambers of its halls and factories. He was awake – painfully, restlessly so: he ate his bread wondering what long hours the dying men worked in the flour-mills; he watched his mother stitching scraps and knew her worth to be less than that of the bricks in the street. The landlord raised their rent, and he saw it not as an act of personal greed, simply another symptom of the sickness. He thought of Samuel Hall’s cracked skull and his own guilt was overlaid with pity: Hall had been degraded by enslavement, as they all were.
This new fervour was indistinguishable from what he felt for Martha, and he made no attempt to set one aside from the other. He’d never been much in the company of women: they’d been prized objects to be bickered over, and rarely more than that. Now he sought no other company but hers, and could scarcely name the boys and men who’d once clustered round his Holborn desk. She seemed to him neither man nor woman, but some other sex entirely. How she stood in the window with a hand pressed to the scooped hollow of her back, how once between her shoulder-blades he’d seen sweat blot her dress: these gave him a thirst he was afraid he could never drink deep enough to sate. But she was also brisk, combative, indifferent to praise – would not give ground, moved him to laughter, never tried to please, played no tricks. Edward knew himself outwitted and outgunned. That she spoke so often of Cora Seaborne in a manner by turns fond and furious seemed wholly in keeping. She was a being like none he’d ever known and he accepted her completely. His mother was wary. ‘I’ve never known it!’ she’d said (put out that Martha always left their rooms a fraction neater than she found them). ‘A woman needs her own home and a man in it. A waste, I call it – and should she be here on her own?’
No theatrics from the stage in the Assembly Hall, still less the ardour of a Bible Rally preacher: the speaker’s tone was matter-of-fact, perhaps a little wearied. She has suffered, thought Burton, certain of it. ‘It’s a sad and hideous story,’ said Eleanor Marx, and it seemed to those watching that she grew in stature as she spoke, her masses of hair unwinding. ‘This unholy alliance of masters, lawyers and magistrates against the wage-slaves …’ Beside him Martha nodded once – twice – made marks in her notebook; in the front row a woman holding a sleeping infant sat quite still but weeping. Now and then a dissenting voice broke through and was silenced by a look: the stage seemed thronged with girls broken by machinery and boys flayed by the blast-furnace, while standing by, stout men fondled their watch-chains and watched their capital accumulate. ‘These are hard times – and even harder times will come until this bad order is replaced. This is not the end of our struggle – it is the beginning!’ There were cheers, and a hat thrown onstage – no bow, but a raised hand, which was a gesture both of farewell and encouragement. Yes, thought Edward Burton, standing, putting a hand to his aching breast. Yes, I see: but how?
On a bench in a small square park he ate chips with vinegar. Children dressed in party clothes stood waiting on the kerb, and behind them, Standard sellers bawled the evening news. ‘But how?’ he said. ‘It makes me stupid sometimes – all I read and hear. I have anger in me and I don’t know what to do with it.’
‘It is how they’d have us,’ said Martha. ‘It’s not the function of the wage-slave to think. The girls at Bryant and May, the boys down in the quarries: d’you think they’ve time to think, to plot, to revolutionise? That’s the great crime: that no-one need be put in chains when their own minds are shackles enough. Once I thought we were no better than horses tied to the plough, but it’s so much worse – we’re only moving parts in their machinery – just the bolts on the wheel, the axle turning round and round!’
‘What then? I must work. I cannot escape the machine.’
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Not yet: but change is slow. Even the world turns by inches.’
Weary Edward leaned against the bench. Croesus touched the chestnut trees, the oaks and London limes; his friend was by his side. ‘Martha,’ he said: just that, and it was enough for now.
‘You’re pale,’ she said. ‘Ned. Let me take you home.’ She kissed him, and on her mouth there was a grain of salt.
Edward Burton
4 Templar Street
Martha – won’t you marry me? Don’t we do all right together, you and I?
EDWARD
By hand
Dear Ned –
I cannot marry you – I cannot marry at all.
I cannot promise to love, honour and obey. I obey only as my reason commands me to obey – I honour only those whose actions demand that I must honour them!
And I cannot love you as a wife’s obliged to love a husband. I see the day coming when Cora Seaborne’s done with me but I can never be done with her.
What now – do you think politics stops at the doorstep? Do you think it only a matter of soapboxes and picket lines, and not also a matter of our private lives?
Don’t ask me to enter an institution that puts me in bonds and leaves you free. There are other ways to live – there are bonds beside those sanctioned by the state! Let’s live as we think – freely and unafraid – let’s be bound by nothing but affection and by holding our purpose in common.
If you cannot have a wife, will you take a companion – will you have a comrade?
Your friend –
MARTHA
Edward Burton
4 Templar Street
Dear Martha –
I will.
EDWARD
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