And what of Teddy?
Teddy was standing in a circle in a nearby field, kindly provided by Lady Daunt at the Hall. The members of the circle, mainly children, were moving clockwise, performing a peculiar caper based on Mrs. Shawcross’s fancy of what a Saxon dance might have seemed like. (“Did Saxons dance?” Pamela asked. “You never think of them dancing.”) They held wooden staffs—branches they had foraged from the wood—and every so often stopped and thumped the ground with these sticks. Teddy was dressed in the “uniform”—a jerkin, shorts and hood—so that he looked like a cross between an elf and one of Robin Hood’s (not very) Merry Men. The hood was a misshapen thing because he had been forced to sew it himself. Handicrafts were one of the things Kibbo Kift was keen on. Mrs. Shawcross, Nancy’s mother, was forever getting them to embroider badges and armbands and banners. It was humiliating. “Sailors sew,” Pamela said, in an effort to encourage him. “And fishermen knit,” Ursula added. “Thanks,” he said grimly.
Mrs. Shawcross was in the middle of the circle, leading her little dancers. (“Now hop on your left foot and give a little bow to the person on your right.”) It had been Mrs. Shawcross’s idea for him to join Kibbo Kift. At the very moment when he had started looking forward to graduating from Cubs to Scouts proper, she had seduced him away with the lure of Nancy. (“Boys and girls together?” a suspicious Sylvie said.)
Mrs. Shawcross was a great enthusiast for the Kinship. Kibbo Kift, Mrs. Shawcross explained, was an egalitarian, pacifist alternative to the militaristic Scouts from which its leader had broken away. (“Renegades?” Sylvie said.) Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, one of Mrs. Shawcross’s heroines, was a member. Mrs. Shawcross had been a suffragette. (“Very brave,” Major Shawcross said fondly.) One still learned woodcraft, Mrs. Shawcross explained, went camping and hiking and so on, but it was underpinned by an emphasis on “the spiritual regeneration of England’s youth.” This appealed to Sylvie, if not to Teddy. Although she was generally hostile to any idea that had Mrs. Shawcross as its origin, Sylvie nonetheless decided it would be “a good thing” for Teddy. “Anything that doesn’t encourage war,” she said. Teddy hardly thought that the Scouts encouraged war but his protests were in vain.
It was not just the sewing Mrs. Shawcross had failed to mention, there was also the dancing, the folk singing, the prancing around in the woods and the endless talking. They were in clans and tribes and lodges, for there were a good deal of (supposed) Red Indian customs mixed up with the (supposed) Saxon ritual, making an unlikely hotchpotch. “Perhaps Mrs. Shawcross has found one of the lost tribes of Israel,” Pamela laughed.
They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox (“Naturally,” Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf (“Honiahaka” in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle (“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Sylvie said, “talk about hubris”).
There were some good things—being with Nancy, for one. And they learned archery with real bows and arrows, not things that they had to make themselves from branches or such like. Teddy liked archery, which he thought might come in useful one day—if he became an outlaw, for example. Would he have the heart to shoot a deer? Rabbits, badgers, foxes, even squirrels occupied a tender place in that heart. He supposed if it were a matter of survival, if starvation were the only option. He would draw the line somewhere though. Dogs, larks.
“It all sounds rather pagan,” Hugh said doubtfully to Mrs. Shawcross. (“Roberta, please.”) This was in an earlier conversation, before their “incident” in the conservatory, before he had thought of her as a woman.
“Well, ‘utopian’ might be a better description,” she said.
“Ah, Utopia,” Hugh said wearily. “What an unhelpful idea that is.”
“Isn’t it Wilde,” Mrs. Shawcross said, “who writes that ‘progress is the realization of Utopias’?”
“I would hardly look to that man for my moral creed,” Hugh said, rather disappointed in Mrs. Shawcross—a deterrent he would remind himself of later when his thoughts returned to the scent of geraniums and the lack of corsetry.