Autobiography Page 14
There was a memorial service for Kitchener in the great Cathedral. Kneeling beside me, Letty whispered “To think we might be at Ego’s requiem.” And all the while Ego was dead. He had been killed in a flash near the Sinai desert.
Patrick, evacuated from Gallipoli, had joined the French in Salonica. He had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and wrote happily enough from all theatres of war. But the fatal tug to join his last few friends in France soon dragged him back to the Naval Brigade, now commanded by Arthur Asquith (the Prime Minister’s son) in France. Patrick had been “a calm thought” to me, but his last leave was weighted with the dread of war and blackened by the deaths of his dearest friends.
Edward had recovered enough alas! to be sent to Egypt and from there back to his regiment, only to die in France in 1917. I was to see him but once again. I felt my spirit too low to recover. Only a few months before we had had to bear the worst of all our losses. Raymond himself was killed. By his death everything changed, except the war that ground its blind murderous treadmill round and round without retreat or advance, with no sign of the beginning of the end. The letters say repeatedly: “Write and tell me what hope you hear of the war ending.”
I wrote to Patrick in 1917:
Driving home from the ball with Duff, feeling a tragic jester, I gave way to a flood of tears such as I have never had without acute cause. I have so often promised myself that I have no illusions so that there could be no sad disillusions. Now I am broken to find youth failing me. The young today are far, far from our young ones—blameless from Eton predestined to an accepted routine. No Oxford, no soul-racking career-decisions to light and colour them. They have not the seriousness we carried before the war, nor the conscious hilarious desperation the war developed in us at the beginning when we never let the candles expire. They have only their pathos, and some veterans of twenty-one their maimed limbs to qualify them.
It’s half mood I suppose and half my surrender of Duff who left the F.O. today. I must stop writing, my tears are incontinent. Be careful and lucky, darling Patrick. I feel a straw will finish my back now—let alone a fair pillar of my house breaking on it.
Duff had become the most precious treasure in my keeping. The day when he would march away was bound to come, and bound to destine him to death. We had been spending every moment snatched from my hospital and his Foreign Office work with each other and for each other. To be together being all-important, it is surprising that we did not think or talk about marriage. It must have been instinctive or superstitious or a sensible resolve to give it no consideration till the war’s end.
My poor mother, saddened as she was by the death of Harry Cust and no doubt distressed by my unhappiness and secrecy, stayed much at Belvoir. We had no longer a sitting-room in London. Our relationship was almost at its worst. But I must quickly say (because I cannot bear it to be thought otherwise for a page’s minute) that these jarrings were never more than a temporary eclipsing of my great love for her. I was impossible. My nerve had gone. Dread had taken possession. I kept her more than ever in the dark. My lies bandaged her eyes. At least I thought they did, so how could I expect her to understand? She perhaps knew and felt and guessed a lot—knew perhaps of the drinking, and the Moore orgies, and the nights wound up at the Cavendish Hotel, with Mrs Lewis leading her Comus crew around and around and into a room where a man was dying (not in extremis) “to take his mind off,” or to fetch from the cellar Lord Somebody’s champagne, and to stay making fools of ourselves, dodging the police who were sleuthing for lawbreakers, till morning light—a dangerous, dissipated, desperate life for her daughter to be shaken into. She had been deeply sympathetic about Raymond’s death and the others too, for their mothers’ sake more than for mine, but her three worst fears for my future were constantly preoccupying her—Edward, Patrick and Duff—and the worst of these was Duff. I suppose she really thought only the highest was good enough.
So to Patrick I wrote:
The Duke of Connaught said the other day in the strictest confidence (so respect it) that I was the only possible wife that could keep the Prince of Wales his throne! I’m getting every day and night more fit for the Palace—soberer, staider, less yearning for orgy.
When I think of the 1915 debauchery I smile. One used to wake in the morning with only the longing to be (till death-released) an anchorite, to feed on fresh bread, hear babbling streams and contemplate flowers. So was one’s soul pure in a piebald temple. But now that I am purged with carbolic and have been given a lot of heavy and awkward crosses to drag with me to the feast, the temple’s tenant craves for riot and artificial paradises.
Duff and I would go on Sunday picnics to what woods there were near London. I remember once on a day of days preparing all morning a meal to be worthy of the lake and pines near Cobham. There were eggs in jelly and chickens’ breasts, rationed butter, fresh bread, strawberries and cream from Belvoir and a big bottle of hock cup to be cooled in the lake-water. With this treasure in a cardboard box, I came tripping down St James’s Street, over-excited, when the bottom of the box fell out and on the callous pavement lay all the broken meats, unpickupable! I ran to 88 and arrived in a flood of tears. But Duff could comfort me—it was one of his qualities. When the same swords stabbed us, I would run to his arms thinking, I remember well, “Who will comfort me when Duff is killed? Who will comfort me for his loss? Who will keep me sane?” This fear was ever with me.
In the spring his release from the Foreign Office was probable—almost certain—and one warm night in a Sussex garden, within the house the guardians of my sentiments Viola and Alan Parsons, he told me he was liberated and had joined the Grenadiers. A subaltern in the Guards had then as short an expectation of life as a fighter pilot was to have in the Battle of Britain. I knew that for a little time he would be sent to a cadets’ training college. I would see him less and less, until he went to France. Then, with fair luck, once or twice on leave, then never, never, never …
We all dread seeing him in the King’s uniform. He shares the horror but thinks he’ll only look supremely ridiculous in his hat.
He had a very big head.
At Chelsea Barracks there was more leisure than at the Foreign Office. Our Matron was glad to be putty in my hands. The summer was a generous one. With the help of protective friends and houses and the peace of 88, where we rested and read aloud and felt safe, we saw each other daily. We had long had the habit of lunching at a rather dreary little restaurant in Jermyn Street called Bellomo’s at 12.45. “C’è amici?” I would ask. And Duff, after careful scrutiny, would answer: “Nessuno.” No one I knew had ever heard of Bellomo’s. It served us well, and after a happy meal I would dash back to Arlington Street for a second lunch at 1.45.
The beautiful days were overshadowed by coming events. In July he left me for the Cadet School at Bushey, which was to be four months’ hard. His first letter was a cry of pain:
I have been here for three hours, but I will not tell you about it for fear of making you cry. One is not allowed to go to London except with special leave, which I’m told is hard to get. I shall not see you for a long time…. My uniform is as shameful as a convict’s. I sleep in a room with seven others—no sheets. All this however I mind not at all compared with separation from you. Just when I am bearing up and facing the discomfort, the thought returns that three summer months with you are being lost.
I shall try hard to get to Eton on Saturday. The cricket match is just the sort of excuse these mugs prefer. By the way, you mustn’t say you are going to Eaton when you mean Eton. People will think you don’t know the difference between strawberry leaves and strawberry messes…. I shall really have to abandon vanity—I consider it the supreme and final sacrifice to Armageddon—and meet you in my convict’s garb.
But in the next letter he had got to London, dined at his club with an imperial pint of champagne and Alice Through the Looking-Glass to read, and his “untroubled mind” had come back:
bringing courage, joy
and hope so that I was happier than I have been since I left you. I’m ashamed of my former misery. It was because everything was so different from what I expected. Now I shall enjoy it.
Bushey
I like you for not avoiding the theme of death, and I think to talk of it is a form of insurance. I am not frightened of it, you know, just as I wasn’t frightened of coming here. I’m too curious and too avid of novelty to fear the unknown.
Things improved. We were enterprising and contrived meetings imaginatively. There was a Golf Club in the Bushey grounds and, any night I could get away, Venetia and other friends would take me there. Duff was always the spoilt darling. There were country houses within the ten-mile radius where we could meet for thirty-six hours, and there was one long week-end spent with the Horners at Mells. Edward was home on leave. It was to be his last real one, shooting in the September sun with Duff, Michael Herbert, Tommy Bouch and Katharine Asquith. Her heart was broken and mine desperately ill with love’s fear.
Duff wrote that his return to Bushey was shattering, and I could not help him as I was pledged to go with my parents to Ireland, where my sister Marjorie and her husband were on some mission. “Now at my lowest ebb at dawn departing I think of you,” I wired, and I wrote:
Dublin
A wearier journey I never remember taking, perhaps a little modified in horror by my lovely new clothes and an oily sea, but interminable and the prospect of arrival offering no relief. And yet once there, a line of Wicklow mountains, a charred house out of which some rebels had been burnt, rows and squares of gentlemen’s houses of the best epoch, and a slap-up bouquet from the Viceroy [Ivor Wimborne] encouraged me a lot. I went straight up to dinner at the Viceregal Lodge in grandest tenue and alone. Perfect, I thought—don’t believe a word said against it. Forty to dinner—Convention men, Labour ones and Peers—red ties, diamond studs and stars. The Laverys, McEvoy, Léonie Leslie, “A. E.”—in fact a court as we would choose one. Her Excellency clotted and weighed down with jewels. Ivor flashy, but very graceful—flashy from being unlike the King, but not unlike a King. The table and its pleasures a treat—all gold and wine and choicest fruit. One Conventioner said he had never tasted a peach before (I didn’t believe him). The footmen too, such beauties, battling with their silver cords, blinded by powder.
“Gentlemen, the King” was good. The curtsey in the widevistaed door a positive danger, as the lady-in-waiting had warned us before that Her Excellency favoured the Spanish curtsey, and very beautiful it was as she did it, with the stamp of her heels and flourish of her fan. The rest of us made bobs. After dinner, talking to the Conventioners, some of them a bit unintelligible, and smoking gift cigars. One said of Lord Oranmore, who looks as prosperous as he is: “Sure he’s as stout as the Lamb of God.” Tomorrow a dash to see the Augustus John picture of Iris [Tree] so as not to feel too removed from the Coterie….
P.S. I have just heard that Basil Blackwood is dead. It came through to his mother from the Crown Princess of Sweden. You will have seen too that Uncle Bobby is killed. The long habit of death disinclines us to any demonstration.
And later:
I am going to the Viceregal for my last three days. The life there amuses me. You get your orders—the rest is free. I take a jaunting-car from the town to Phoenix Park—to shock I’m afraid—also because it’s great fun. I went over to a place called Powerscourt. I was much impressed by the beauty. An ancestor who discovered Italy with the rest of them in the eighteenth century stocked his garden with great marble Nikes and fauns and tender Ganymedes and Tritons blowing fountains a hundred feet high against the higher mountains. I was struck too by the pathos of Lady Powerscourt, a frail pale woman who lives in strictest poverty in the gaunt house stark alone. About thirty-five, an enthusiast of life as I might be, she is facing with only faint misgivings this coming impossible winter with two servants and no petrol. I know I shall think of her just as I get into my stride one happy fire-warmed evening, perhaps with you at 88—damn.
London
3 October 1917
Thank God to be back even in these discordant nights. I dined with Ivor last night in the cellar of Wimborne House, after an hour in the Arlington Street basement, with some of the wounded, and screaming kitchenmaids—most trying. Later at Wimborne House arrived Jenny [Lady Randolph] Churchill and Maud Cunard, both a little tipsy, dancing and talking wildly. They had been walking and had got scared and had stopped for a drink. Maud had a set purpose to get to the opera, because it being raid-night the public required example. She really, I expect, wanted to die with Thomas Beecham if Covent Garden was to be hit. So we let her out at ten. I hope she was all right. The streets are opaque black with only the dear brave mauvais sujets about, thieving and vicing, and now this morning I have spent an hour and a half in the Reville & Rossiter dug-out, so maybe it’s an ill wind which might blow me good when I claim that Bushey is a safer dining place than London.
I’ve ordered myself chemises embroidered in hand-grenades and a nightgown with fauns.
My brother John had married Kathleen, the youngest and most beautiful of the Tennant sisters. She was pure and lovely as an anemone, and we gathered her to our house with delight and good reason. John was to survive the war and live happily with his bride for many years. That summer she was living with her baby at the old Rowsley house, which I revisited.
The Woodhouse, Rowsley
It was here that I have seen twelve hot summers fade into cold winters—here been injected almost to suicide with Marjorie’s melancholy. Here was born and here died that regrettable friendship with R. One would think with such records the place would hold no ghost of sentiment, and yet the forty days of heat and bathing and Grenfells and Ego and Edward, Bunt and Patrick blot out all the horrors. The place is crowded with objects of my own that I loved before I became anti-possessive, and though I have no great desire to retrieve them it enrages me to see them put to mean uses. I had a low dark room which I equipped through the years with necromancer’s and alchemist’s properties—curious bottles coloured and crusted with iridescent sediments from elixiral experiments, that now are scoured and used for tooth-water. Delicate gold scales, hung for allegory over my mirror, now have to determine whether fish weigh more or less than a mean lb. A painted ivory ship is only produced should the baby whine. George Meredith’s palsied head becomes a nursery picture. It made me sad. I am thankful you were never here to make it more poignant. At dinner I gave them a slight description of your Bushey day (faintly blushing) and Mother said “Do him a lot of good to rough it a bit,” upon which John and Uncle Charlie flew at her—no need for me to utter. Blessed be their hearts that wish you well.
Arlington Street
9 October 1917
This is bad news—it is muttered that you stand a chance of “not passing” and in consequence remaining more months at Bushey. It hurt me terribly when it came to my ears. I love your record to be brilliant…. I shall find complete consolation, if you do fail, in remembering that the further from London the further from the war … but it has worried me terribly all day. I told my fool informer that I had just heard from somebody in authority to the exact opposite. It was the same story with Edward’s course at Cambridge. God! can I never put down my whitewashing implements for a minute? I had to walk from Marble Arch home in absolutely flooding rain at seven tonight, thinking how terrible everything was, and that really if I fell down I would not get up again.
Bushey
12 October 1917
How silly you are to believe that I could fail. Be assured that such rumours are due to the nicety with which I calculate the very minimum of trouble one need take in order to achieve some tiresome business. I think the grenades on your chemises the most romantic thing in my life and they strike a note of poetry and high chivalry worthy of the sixteenth or perhaps the fourteenth century.
Arlington Street
18 October 1917
Jack Pixley has been killed. It upsets me a lot. My endurance is w
eakening. Osbert told me as he often does—a great ill-omened bird—in the middle of the opera, and I have come home and cried and been beastly to Mother on the subject of my lovers, which O shame! comforted me. I must try and be better. At what? … Your future is always with me, a jagged companion. I may no longer draw a cheque—so not a rag to put on or any luxuries…. Don’t fuss about passing.
Arlington Street
20 October 1917
I am so sad about poor “Lucky Pixley” and for the first time in my life a little remorseful that I wasn’t nicer and didn’t come up from Chirk two days earlier though he begged me to. If only one happened to know Death’s plans.
I couldn’t write yesterday as it was “Our Day.” I worked hard and scraped £700 together. The lottery was drawn by the uninterested hand of F. E. Smith and was won, I regret to say, by Teddie Gerard.* Last night just as I was starting for Edwin and Alan’s farewell (they leave tomorrow for India) and Maud Cunard was in the hall to fetch me, the raid warning was given. Till 9.30 I argued with Her Grace. I had no case save that the guns had not begun—a poor one for they didn’t begin even when Piccadilly Circus was demolished and a knot of the proletariat killed, not even when the élite, represented by General Lowther, had his hat blown off. I got away in the end and found myself between Alan and Edwin, the latter divine, in the mood of the doomed, speaking bravely enough of his thankfulness for two Heaven-given years with his wife, of his reliance on me to look after her widowhood, and of several significant omens that signalled his approaching death. His fear has been quelled by complete resignation. Alan was little better—ashy-white with an unshakeable belief that he would be left to die at Aden…. After dinner I talked to Winston a great deal about you.