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for Konstantin Stanislavski. He had designed and directed a production of Dido and Aeneas that had almost single-handedly revived interest in the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell—which was where Mother had come in. The man wrapped his cloak more tightly around his frail and trembling body, trapping the stench of himself but allowing the fabric to send eddies and gusts from its folds. He was an artist’s artist and his black, bloodshot eyes were in no way diminished by the shadow of his great slouch hat. He was shivering in the wretched cold of the peninsula’ssummer, but all he could think to say to his young hero was that his dinner disagreed with him; he was digesting it poorly—belly inflated like a medicine ball and shooting fireworks at the back of his throat—and could not think straight. His breath was unbearably laden with garlic and deeper evidence of the indigestion, and Charles leaned away. That Sir Edwin could not think straight, and yet was up to admitting it, this was a confusing sign in his experience: too much steam building up in a kind of self-conscious engine already starting to shake and rattle its bolts. Sir Edwin claimed to be a futurist, but Charles was hard pressed to understand what such an identity entailed. More specifically, but even less clearly, he was a vorticist—that was to say, not Italian, but something “like a futurist” from “the vortex of London.” He preferred “found sound” to composed and performed music—but was an acknowledged influence of the Second Viennese School—and was very much in favor of the war: war was “the one great art,” and the only way civilization had to remove the more “festering and stinking of humankind’s many gangrenous limbs.”
    Charles and Sir Edwin watched the rehearsal, its director absent but lurking, disintegrate: acrobatic silliness, exaggerated, mask-like mimicry of primary emotional states in ridiculous contexts, and the kind of mincing mock-violence that had actors chasing each other around tables with very small steps, furiously waving their arms and puffing their cheeks out, not knowing what to do once, for instance, one character succeeded in getting his hands around the neck of another character, whom he ostensibly wished to throttle to death. The plumber’s sons broke off their swordplay, and Sir Edwin suggested to Charles that even the children found it all unbearably childish.
    â€œI would rather you tried, all of you, really tried to hurt each other. This waggling of fingers and chasing someone whom you clearly do not want to catch—it’s appalling! Don’t you think so, Charles? I mean, really. It’s insulting unless your audience are children eating birthday cake. You know how to use a sword.” It was true that he was able to fence dramatically well; and while fencers perforce show each other the slenderest profile, Charles oftenfound it possible to drop the point of his foil to the floor and advance, spine straight and shoulders square, one, two, even three long arrogant strides directly into his opponent’s range. “Go down there,” commanded Sir Edwin, “and shove it up someone’s arse, why don’t you.”
    â€œMy position, Sir Edwin, is that somersaults and comic faces are delightful.”
    â€œThey make me want to vomit.”
    â€œThe thought of attempting to wound someone—”
    â€œYes, but that’s just it! The thought of the attempt—precisely!”
    â€œâ€”to wound a brother or a sister is abominable, maestro.”
    â€œStop and think a moment while your fluttering little heart becomes a piece of pumping meat again.”
    â€œI find it directly opposed to the nature of the theatrical enterprise.”
    â€œThat is not only sentimental horseshit but the foundation of everything that is infantile in the arts.”
    â€œMaestro, this may in fact not be a heaven