Bloomsbury's Outsider (3 page)

A regular visitor to The Cearne, John Galsworthy always remained calm in the face of a crisis, and there seemed often to be a crisis when he visited. On one occasion he captured a savage cat which had torn Bunny's brow, and on another he remained calmly detached when the dog, Puppsie, brought a stinking maggot-ridden rat indoors. Galsworthy removed the offending
object, which he buried, afterwards washing his hands and then dusting his knees with an
Eau de Cologne
scented handkerchief. Bunny rewarded Galsworthy's unfailing kindness with the honorary title ‘Running Elk'.

Although Bunny's schooling remained limited he nevertheless acquired considerable learning, but his knowledge was idiosyncratic, based upon the accidents of influence rather than benefiting from any formal curriculum. He had a precocious knowledge of Russian literature, an unusually deep understanding of natural history, a taste for English and French literature, but otherwise great gaps in his education. At the age of seven he either read, or more likely had read to him, Constance's translation of Turgenev's
A Desperate Character
, which, Edward informed Conrad, prompted Bunny to exclaim: ‘ “I love him. I ENVY him”, and on the maternal warning that a D[esperate] C[haracter] came to a bad end he remarked scornfully “Yes, at the end, we all come to a bad end!” '
⁹

Bunny loved to be taken to London, which for him consisted of ‘hansom cabs and the galleries of the British Museum'.
¹⁰
Here, under his grandfather's supervision, he pored over illustrated books in the King's Library and was let loose in the galleries. His grandparents lived in a house within the museum which opened directly into the Manuscript Department and Bunny considered it a great privilege to have such immediate access from the domestic to the public sphere. On being taken to the forecourt of the museum by his grandfather, Bunny was
thrilled by the saluting porter in his gold-laced top-hat. He felt a particular
frisson
when his Grandpapa led him into the Reading Room, for he knew it was forbidden to anyone under the age of twenty-one. ‘I kept close to him, and we passed the policeman, but he made no move to stop me.'
¹¹

From the outset of the Boer War in October 1899, Constance and Edward were pro-Boer, as was J.A. Hobson, Harold's father. The two boys shared their parents' sympathies in this respect, and in consequence were stoned by village boys on Limpsfield Common, where they were pursued by angry cries of ‘Krujer!' Bunny noted ruefully: ‘Having to run the gauntlet to get to Carl Heath who lived unfortunately only a ‘stone's throw' from Limpsfield elementary school.'
¹²
A year later, walking through the woods, Connie invented a game in which she and Bunny were a Boer mother and son, escaping a farm burned, under the ‘Scorched Earth' policy, by General Roberts. Bunny was being educated to think independently, an education he might not have received at school.

With Edward's encouragement, Bunny undertook his first paid work aged eleven, drawing a map of the ‘NEW SEA and the BEVIS COUNTRY', to illustrate Richard Jefferies'
Bevis
. The map was labelled with the legend ‘D.G. FECIT', and the publisher George Duckworth paid Bunny five shillings for his labours. If this made him feel grown-up, he was brought sharply down to earth when Constance sent him to Westerham Prep School, some five miles from The Cearne, the fees paid by Edward's father. Bunny travelled to school by archaic means even for those times, riding high upon a Bantam, a diminutive
version of a Penny-farthing, which had been ridden by his uncle Arthur Garnett as a boy. ‘It was typical of my family,' Bunny later commented: ‘Mounted on this museum specimen and wearing a French beret over my untidy mop of hair, I presented myself to the critical inspection of the other little boys and was at once christened “Onions”.'
¹³

It was not, however, the boys who bullied Bunny, but a master, Mr Hunt. When Bunny employed the words
sarcasm
and
irony
in an English essay, Hunt sneeringly suggested to the class that Bunny did not know what he was writing about. Too clever by half, Bunny replied that ‘sarcasm was making fun of people, as he was making fun of me, but that irony was when the truth was funny, because it was quite different from what people pretended'. Hunt caned Bunny, who, furious at this affront, ‘begged so hard' that Constance and Edward agreed not to send him back to school.

Freedom from the constraints of the academic year made possible other educational adventures. In May 1904 Constance promised her father-in-law: ‘I will be careful that not a word of criticism shall be heard from David or me that could wound the most sensitively patriotic and orthodox ears in Russia.'
¹⁴
The promise was occasioned by Constance's decision to visit Russia, this time with twelve-year-old Bunny. She felt the need to reassure Dr Garnett and Edward, who were concerned that she had chosen to go at a politically sensitive time, after the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war and when typhoid was endemic. They would stay in St Petersburg then spend a few days in Moscow, before setting out for Yablonka, in Tula Province, south of
Moscow, to stay with Constance's old friend Sasha Shteven with whom she had travelled in Russia on her first visit. Sasha (Baroness Aleksandra Alekseeva Shteven) had since married a landowner called Yershov, of whom Constance knew little. Finally, she and Bunny were to stay in Tambov Province further away to the south-east, with the family of Aleksandr Ivanovich Ertel, an estate manager whom they had not previously met.

On 11 May they sailed from Hull in a Finnish boat, Bunny carrying a treasured pocket compass and magnifying glass, which Conrad had given him. For the first twenty-four hours, both Connie and Bunny were seasick, too ill to undress at bedtime. Reaching calmer waters, Bunny spent his time on deck with his telescope and admired the sailors' Finnish knives. At Copenhagen where they remained on board while the ship took in cargo, Bunny was enthralled by the cranes and mechanics of cargo-loading, although once again afloat and sea-sick, he declared he would ‘give all to possess the sight of a beech-leaf!'
¹⁵
They reached Helsingfors on 16 May, where they waited twelve hours to find a train to St Petersburg with sleeping accommodation. This afforded Bunny the opportunity to buy a little Finnish knife, and to practice his Russian by purchasing fruit from a Finn who spoke less Russian than he did. On the train, the lack of ventilation made Bunny so faint that Constance stood him at an open door at the end of a carriage. They arrived at St Petersburg the next day, relieved to find Constance's friend Madame Lavrov waiting on the platform.

In St Petersburg they stayed with Madame Lavrov's daughter, Madame Sliepstov, in a fine flat with huge rooms overlooking the Neva. Unfortunately Constance was instantly plunged into
confusion and uncertainty: she found a letter from Sasha waiting, informing her that Sasha's daughter had typhoid. Constance was torn by her desire to see her friend and her need to protect Bunny. She wrote to Edward asking him to ascertain whether it was possible to protect against typhoid by drinking only boiled water and by avoiding butter, milk and raw vegetables. ‘It will be a cruel disappointment', she added, ‘to have come to Russia & not to be able to see Sasha!' ‘Don't be anxious', she reassured him, ‘If you knew how I feel the responsibility here every moment of the boy, you would not be afraid of my doing anything silly.'
¹⁶
Constance was reassured when a physician explained that typhoid was not infectious but contracted by drinking polluted water and that all would be well if their water was thoroughly boiled.

Bunny wrote to Edward, telling him, excitedly, that he had seen some Cossacks and had crossed the Neva in a river steamer and was soon to go to the Hermitage. Later he recalled that: ‘Of the many things which impressed me, the most exciting was seeing a fashionable lady driving down the Nevsky Prospekt, in an open troika with an enormous bearded coachman on the box, while beside her on the seat of the carriage was a large bear cub, about half-grown.'
¹⁷

Bunny kept hugging himself with delight, exclaiming “How I love it! It's like a dream!” Constance found him an ideal travelling companion, ‘always catching every impression & sensation & eager & interested in every detail'.
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But Bunny could not fail to
notice signs of disorder and military bustle everywhere. In St Petersburg his chief impression was of soldiers and uniforms: ‘The streets were thick with officers in white blouses, peaked caps and epaulettes, high boots of Russian leather, jingling spurs, sabres worn in the Russian manner, back to front, and rolled grey overcoats worn slung round the body like bandoliers. There were Cossacks, Circassians, Generals of enormous size, military of all arms and all ranks, and the saluting was incessant.'
¹⁹
He was too young and impressionable to understand the implications of the military presence which had been called in to control escalating civil unrest in the face of rising prices, poor working conditions and the Tsarist government. Watching a review of cavalry before the Winter Palace, Bunny longed to handle the sabres and revolvers, but knew better than to confess this to his mother.

In St Petersburg, according to Constance, Bunny ‘had fallen in love with more than one new friend'.
²⁰
He was so enamoured of a bearskin in Madame Lavrov's apartment that he wielded his handy Finnish knife to secretly lop off its smallest claw as a souvenir. After St Petersburg they stayed a few days in Moscow before leaving not as planned to visit Sasha, but to take the longer journey by rail to Morshansk in Tambov Province, to meet the unknown Ertels.

The journey was tedious. Owing to the war, ‘the lines were crowded with trains of wagons filled with men and horses and hay – trains which bumped along at ten miles an hour interminably while we waited for an hour in one siding, and an hour in another, watching them go past'.
²¹
At Morshansk Constance and Bunny
were met by the Ertels' carriage, which conveyed them the half-day drive to the estate where Ertel lived with Marya Vasilievna (his wife in all but name), and their teenage daughters Natalie (Natasha) and Elena (Lolya), an adopted daughter Elena Grigorievna Goncharova (Lenochka), Miss Haslam the English governess, and Kirik Levin, a young man whom they had found as a baby, lying in the road. The Ertels lived in a large, white, brick and wood house, with a green-painted roof. Bunny and Constance immediately felt at home, comfortable in the company of a family with whom they formed an instant, affectionate, rapport.

Bunny enjoyed the extended-family intimacy the Ertels afforded, and he introduced a particularly British pastime to his new friends, one which rather perplexed them: a paper chase. As he later commented, ‘The Russians were a good deal astonished at people running on a hot summer's day of their own free will and without an object'. A few days later the Ertels were paid an unexpected visit by the District Commissioner, who had received reports that they had been scattering revolutionary leaflets all over the countryside.

Ertel gave Bunny a pony, Moochen, which he quickly learnt to ride. He wrote to Edward:

I am having a very jolly time riding every day on a pony called Moohen I am going to have a knout [whip] which is a lovely thing […]. All the stable-boys are so nice that one wants to hug them […]. It looks like a picture in the Boys Own paper sometimes when I ride up to one man and 5 other men gallop up & all the horses rub noses. It is worth seeing them crack their knouts, they ride as they were centaurs.
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Bunny soon befriended the stable-hands and the ten or so boys, aged between eight and fifteen, who herded the horses. He spent his afternoons with them, noting that the boys were utterly responsible, all the while watching for any straying beast. On one occasion some horses escaped, resulting in an unforgettable corral in which Bunny took part:

My pony was for a time completely out of my control, and horses were on all sides of me, their manes tossing, their eyes rolling in mischief, the earth trembling under us, Kolya, ahead of me, cutting out and heading off a chestnut two-year-old, and Vanya, who was only about ten and riding bareback with rope reins on his old bridle, passing me on the right, going like the wind and performing prodigies with the twelve-foot lash of his stock-whip.
²³

Bunny and Constance moved from the main house to a wooden summer-house in the garden, comprising a spacious room opening onto a verandah on which was a solid table where Constance worked. Their day began with breakfast at the main house after which they returned to the hut, where Bunny spent the morning working on a Russian exercise or translating Tolstoy. It was an idyllic time, but the war encroached. Two weeks after their arrival, mobilisation was proclaimed – many of the village men were called up. Constance described the impact on the village: ‘The proclamation arrived at 3 o'clock in the night on Sunday & on Wednesday morning early 40 men from the village & 6 from the estate were marched off followed by the whole village, weeping & mourning as though at a funeral.' She told
Edward that Bunny ‘was much upset & had a good cry the previous evening over the sadness of all his friends, usually so smiling & cheerful'.
²⁴
Bunny was further upset when his beloved Moochen was commandeered and taken to Morshansk with many other local horses. Fortunately it had a wall-eye, was found wanting, and returned.

On 24 June Constance sent Edward a postcard, proclaiming: ‘I am in danger of getting too fat & David of getting spoiled!'
²⁵
They were fed very well, not least at the numerous dinner parties given by the Ertels, which Bunny remembered typically consisted of:

soup accompanied by little pies, always filled with delicious and unexpected delicacies – minced cockscombs, sweetbreads, mushrooms and sour cream. Then there was caviare in large dishes and hot toast; a couple of roast sucking pigs, stuffed with buckwheat kasha, which drank up the fat; new peas, thin pancakes with sharp cranberry sauce and thick layers of sour cream, and lastly a vast ice pudding, stuffed with grated pistachio nuts and fragments of candied peel and angelica.
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