Читать книгу A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott - Louisa Young - Страница 10

1902–1905

‘AS AN ARTIST I thought of the dancer as a resplendent deity,’ Kathleen wrote, ‘as a human being I thought of her as a disgracefully naughty child. As an artist I exulted in her; as a tiresome child I could not abandon her.’ In 1902 Isadora was twenty-four, and well on her way to becoming ‘a household name in St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Copenhagen, and Stockholm’, as Martin Shaw described her a couple of years later. She hadn’t yet had a duel fought over whether her free, unfettered modern form of dancing was better than the classical ballet, but she soon would have.

The friendship between Isadora and Kathleen was based on idealism, but though their ideals of independence, love, joy and art were similar, they had very different ways of manifesting them. In the beginning this did not matter. They both believed that inherited money limited a child’s freedom; that marriage limited a woman’s freedom; that adventure was the root of true wealth; that art and babies were the greatest achievements. Neither could understand why, in Isadora’s words, ‘if one wanted to do a thing, one should not do it’. In the end their different ways of treating these ideals drew them apart. Kathleen grew up; Isadora didn’t.

Even those who wanted to dislike Isadora’s dancing found it difficult. Some, because she had bare legs and loose tunics, wanted it to be lewd, and came away having to admit that these bare legs were the most innocent. Kathleen’s brother Rosslyn was very impressed by the fact that she ‘could dance in her petticoat without it seeming improper’. Some, because she was American, wanted it to be naive and pretentious, and came away admitting that it might be genius. Kathleen had no such problems. She wanted it to be art, and it was art, and for love of the dance she loved the dancer, and travelled with her across Europe. Hers was one hand held out from which Kathleen did not turn away.

‘Come with me to Brussels,’ said she, and I went. ‘Come with me to the Hague.’ At each place and many more she gave her grand performance. The greatest conductors led the finest orchestras for her; the houses were crowded out. At Liège one night the audience stood up in their seats and waved their hats and roared. I sat quietly on my seat, disposing of my preposterous tears, before going round to see that my dancer had her fruit and milk, and a shawl over her whilst she cooled off, before facing the wild enthusiasts who surged around the stage door and yelled their delight.

We got up early, ran in the park that was near, and did a few gymnastics. Whatever happened later, and terrible things did happen, at that epoch the dancer was a healthy, simple-living, hard-working artist, neither beautiful nor intelligent apart from her one great gift for expression. She was open handed, sweet tempered, pliable, and easy going. ‘Oh, what’s the difference?’ she would say if I, who hated to see her put upon, wanted to stand out against over charges etc. ‘What’s the difference?’

Kathleen mothered her, and she needed it. At that stage Isadora was more or less keeping her family (mother and three siblings—her father had not been in evidence for years) financially; later she would keep her lover and her dancing school too, all on the money made from performing. She had a wild, romantic imagination and a saleable talent, but she was not practical. When the ‘terrible things’ started to happen, it was to Kathleen that Isadora turned.

Though she loved travelling about with her friend, Kathleen did not wish to become ‘vicariously engulfed in dancing’. Back in Paris she worked hard at her own talent, but Isadora’s life touched upon hers in more ways than one. Among Isadora’s disciples was a pair of German Jewish brothers with whom Kathleen was rather impressed, as they seemed very literary. The younger, aged about twenty-eight, ‘hung himself round with mysteries’ and wanted to involve her in a ‘grand scheme he had’ for shipping revolvers to Russia hidden behind false bottoms in petrol cans. Writing in 1932, married to a cabinet minister (her second husband, Edward Hilton Young, later Lord Kennet), Kathleen claimed ignorance:

I thought this great fun and most exciting. I had no notion of the purpose of the firearms, nor why they should be sent thus. One day when the young man came round to my studio with a couple of suitcases full of I knew not what, saying that the police were going to search his rooms, I very gaily said, ‘Rather, leave them here. Stuff them out of sight somewhere.’ Later these young men introduced me to a middle-aged Englishman who, they told me, shared my enthusiasm for the Greek dramatists and philosophers. He was a prim little man, always neatly and conventionally dressed, but he seemed even poorer than me and I therefore took to making an evening meal at home and letting him share it, in return for which hospitality he would read the Greeks aloud to me. I knew little, indeed nothing, about him, so I was not in the least ruffled to hear that a bomb had been thrown at the King of Spain in a Paris street and that the Englishman had been arrested as the maker of this murderous bomb. All my standards of right and wrong had suffered such an upheaval since I left England that this seemed no queerer than many other things. Perhaps this sort of thing was quite usual, like having lots of mistresses and yet being quite nice. Perhaps it was only a matter of getting used to it. Still it was rather a ruffling affair to get a letter from the courts of justice to ask me to appear at the trial, as I was understood to be one of the accused’s few friends in Paris. The trial lasted several days. I crept off each morning, returning in the evening. I dared tell no one what I was up to. I was terrified that my name would get into an English paper, and I imagined aunts and uncles toying with the word anarchist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the word meant. But it made me feel uncomfortable.

This sounds to modern ears almost unbearably naive, but Kathleen was not political, not a newspaper reader. Her world was apart from such things, and she was dangerously cavalier about it all. ‘I was young enough not to have discerned the difference between knowledge and wisdom,’ she admitted later, ‘and nearly got myself into very hot water.’ As it was, all she had to do was stand up in court and say yes, she knew the accused, that he visited her studio and read Sophocles. Laughter in court. Did he ever talk about the King of England? Oh dear no. What did he talk about? Socrates. More laughter in court, and it was all over.

Her other adventure with the mysterious German Jew was a trip to the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died. Kathleen had read some Wilde, and found it ‘very amusing’. She still didn’t know what it was that he had done. Rosslyn had known Wilde’s lover Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, at Oxford (he had once appeared on the football pitch wearing a wreath of flowers and patent leather shoes) and had met Oscar Wilde, but he had not enlightened his little sister. Nigel Playfair told a story of how in 1894, when Kathleen had been visiting Rosslyn at Oxford, a clergyman had been hideously embarrassed when she, aged sixteen, had asked whom Holman Hunt had married. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the clergyman later, out of her earshot, ‘I could hardly tell a young lady that Holman Hunt had married his deceased wife’s sister!’ ‘Deceased wife’s sister’ became a joke term among them for something unmentionable. Times had changed and she was in very different company, but homosexuality still dared not speak its name.

The German talked about Wilde with awed voice as about a prophet or a martyr. I, amiable and acquiescent, said I would love to come down with him to the little place, where he was acquainted with the hotelkeeper. After a few preliminary civilities we were shown a rough wooden box full of books with a coat and waistcoat on the top of it. These were Oscar Wilde’s. In the coat pocket was a hypodermic syringe and a used handkerchief. Underneath were several signed photographs, and about fifty books, many of them signed by their authors. The hotelkeeper said, if the English lady would like the contents of the box she was welcome. I hesitated, and then went through it and took a selection of half a dozen of the most interesting. Would I not like the syringe? No thank you! It would be better to throw that away.

This adventure I innocently recounted to Hofbauer, who, to my amazement, detonated in violent rage. What right had the damned German Jew even to speak of Wilde to me, and to let me rummage about with his disgusting possessions, that, it seemed, was too much. Sales gens! (Disgusting man!)

Not unreasonably, Kathleen thought that her Rabelaisian painter, with all his mistresses, might be the person to clear up the mystery. ‘Oh, ne demandes pas ça h un français’ (Oh, don’t ask that of a Frenchman), he replied, with a ‘furious gesture’, and she was none the wiser.

Kathleen was to spend the rest of her time in Paris in the studio with the roof and the mackintosh, but that is not to say that she was always there. She had already acquired a taste for ‘vagabonding’: putting some hard-boiled eggs in a bag and going off for a long walk—preferably one lasting several weeks. Given the choice between sleeping indoors or out she would take out any time, and travel and adventure were next only to sculpting as her pleasures.

Late in 1903 a new adventure, a major one, opened to her. Noel Buxton, a young and fervent English politician (later a Labour MP and Lord Noel-Buxton), a friend of Rosslyn, visited her in Paris and made her feel that her existence there was something of a waste of time. He talked to her of the troubles in Macedonia.

In the first years of the twentieth century Macedonia was under Turkish rule, and armed bands known as Komitadjis had been supporting Bulgarian nationalist priests and teachers in Slav Macedonia. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, formed in 1896 for all Macedonians ‘regardless of sex, nationality or personal beliefs’ was loosely pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turkish. On the night of 2 August 1903, 750 of these rebels took over the small town of Krusevo, fighting under the skull and crossbones, the symbol of the uprising. When the Turkish garrison fled, the red flag was raised instead and Krusevo, population 15,000, was declared a socialist republic, the first in the Balkans. The republic lasted nine days: on 11 August 15,000 Turkish soldiers, plus the Bashi Bazouks (irregulars), moved in to put a stop to it. Despite deeds of heroism, the red flag gave way to the white.

The whole uprising was suppressed within three months, and a bitter vengeance taken: according to conservative Bulgarian figures, 9,830 houses in Macedonia were burned down and 60,953 people were left homeless. Whatever the true complexity of the political situation, to the West Turkey had put itself deeply in the wrong and the Bulgarians were innocent victims. And winter was drawing in.

Buxton told Kathleen of disease and starvation, torture and cold. He told ‘how the Turks were massacring the Bulgarians, how direly they were in need of help, how good was the organization in London to collect necessities for them but how there was nobody on the spot to see to the distribution of food, money and clothes.’ He told her that ‘the plight of the people there is unspeakable. Babies are being born, quite untended, that nobody wants, and quite unprovided for; terrible cases …’

Well, to Kathleen that was it. Babies, untended, unprovided for, unwanted? She would tend and provide for them. She wanted them. ‘My heart beating loudly against my chest, I said, “Couldn’t I go?” And so it came about that the very next day my work was again discarded, the key turned in the studio door, and off I went to England to see the austere lady who was looking for an assistant to undertake on-the-spot relief.’

Lady Thompson was ‘more than twice my age, and very sad’—her husband had dropped dead a year before. She engaged Kathleen ‘as if she were engaging a kitchen maid’, and on 4 December they were on their way to Salonica, Kathleen teaching herself Turkish and writing to Rosslyn: ‘Lady Thompson is fagged out… but I could face a massacring Turk with a cheerful rebuff.’

Dec 12: Set off about daybreak with Mr. Hazkell, the American missionary, to Monastir. All the way from Uskub the line was guarded by poor miserable-looking soldiers in tents surrounded by mud and water, they had been there some eight or nine months. Trains are not to run at night, as frequent attempts are made to blow them up. The day before we crossed the frontier 2 Servians (sic) being searched in the customs were found to be stuffed with dynamite. There is much smallpox in various districts. Dined excellently in a corner of the bar room at the Hotel Constantinople, where quantities of Turks were smoking, playing billiards and backgammon, and drinking. A Mussulman, mark you, may not drink wine, but he may drink spirits, for that was not mentioned in the letter of the law, not then being known. Much nonsense is talked of the dirt of these places. The cabinet is truly not pleasant but in no way worse than the Paris studio ones, and the rooms are perfectly clean and fresh. Doubtless my opinion might undergo a change in the warmer weather.

One of their first duties on reaching Monastir was to call on Hussein Hilmi Pasha, the Inspector General: ‘He was supposed to be omnipotent in Macedonia, and he fondly believed the supposition,’ wrote Henry Nevinson, a journalist who had also been inspired by Noel Buxton. Nevinson rather fell for Hilmi Pasha.

His dark blue uniform was drawn tightly around his tall and graceful figure, his fez thrown rather back from his pale and weary face, relieved so effectively against the carpet of deep purples and crimsons that further darkened the wall behind. It is the face of a tired but unflinching eagle, worn with toil. On each side of the delicate eagle nose, the deep brown eyes looked into yours with a mournful but steady sincerity that would carry conviction of truth into the wildest tale of Arabian Nights. A grave charm hangs over his face, sometimes broken by a shadowy smile…

Kathleen was less impressed. They had been advised to call on Hilmi in the evening, it being Ramadan.

he would have broken his fast and regained his good humour. Therefore at 10pm we drove to his dwelling and were ushered along passages by countless flunkeys. The great man was sitting at his writing table … for a long and weary time we discussed trivialities in French. I thought we should never arrive at the point of our visit; the heat of the room was excessive [‘a genial warmth’, Nevinson called it] and tho’ he plied us with lemonade and tea I was scarcely able to control my impatience. Numerous servants were rung for, for various causes, each retiring backwards, never turning his back upon the Pasha.

When it came to talking business Hilmi told them that three or four thousand hamlets had already been rebuilt. He gave them permission to travel in a particularly dangerous district; he would organize a guard for them, with a French-speaking officer; he would send word ahead that they were coming and arrange for the hospitality of the local bey. ‘His affability and foresight were amazing, but in spite of it all I was in no way attracted to him. I in no way distrust his intelligence, but he inspires me with no confidence and very little interest,’ Kathleen wrote in her diary. Her reaction proved right. Hilmi was not ‘capable, just, and inspired with a benevolent zeal for reform’ as Nevinson had hoped. He was a bureaucrat, master of the gap between an order given and an order carried out. His specialty, as all the Macedonian relief workers were to find out, was allowing everybody everything they wanted—in theory. Nevinson, on further experience of him, reported how he would smile and say, ‘But all must be well, I gave the order!’ ‘Of all the incarnations of State that I have ever known in any land he was perhaps the most complete,’ Nevinson concluded.

Kathleen had not even started work yet, and she was riddled with impatience. In Monastir ‘The depot house is stocked with blankets, which makes me even more anxious to get to work, they seem to be wasting their warmth.’ As the winter set in women with hungry babies and men with gangrenous wounds were coming down from the mountains to which they had fled during the fighting. Their need was great, and so was the desire of the relief workers to get on with it.

Then arrived Henry Brailsford, agent of the Macedonia Relief Fund, and his wife Jane, a very fine couple by all accounts: ‘extraordinary mental energy … accurate mind … unfailing memory … sensitive and sympathetic temperament … unflagging industry,’ said Nevinson of Henry, and of Jane ‘… much the same qualities, beautified by the further touch of feminine delicacy and imagination; beautified also by Celtic blue-grey eyes, dark hair and a smile to soften the heart of any infidel.’ Kathleen too found Brailsford to have ‘enormous personal charm’, even though he changed plans at the last minute, and she thought Jane Brailsford extremely pretty. With the Brailsfords, Lady Thompson, a guard of Turkish cavalry and an officer (ostensibly to guide and protect them, but actually to report on them and hinder them if need be—Brailsford called them ‘spies in uniform’), in a party of twenty, Kathleen set off for Klissoura.

‘We set out … in a ramshackle carriage with three horses. Wonderful wild desert scenery, and a slight rather pleasant rain. After a long distance we began to rise and rise, and finally our horses could no more…’ For a while they walked, following a lamp as darkness overtook them. The cavalry, with whom they had left the carriage, could not follow. Brailsford went back to find them, taking the lamp. It was at least three miles to the village, and there were brigands in the neighbourhood, they all knew. Ankle deep in mud on a narrow, precipitous road, they lit cigarettes to frighten the wolves away. When the cavalry finally caught up, Kathleen was more than happy to ride: ‘astride a Turkish soldier’s saddle is quite a comfortable thing,’ she noted, despite ‘perilous precipices and streams, lit merely by a lantern, climbing over slippery rocks and boulders …’ She was even happier to arrive at the house of ‘a rich Wallachian’ (she doesn’t seem to have mentioned to him her descent from his former Grand Postleniks) where their boots were removed and their hands washed for them, and they were provided with a ‘wonderful completely Turkish room—half the floor covered with mattresses… we reclined by a roaring wood fire’.

At dusk they had passed a burnt out village; the next morning they went to the monastery to which its refugees had fled. Some of the thirty-three families had returned to the village to try to rebuild it, but the Bashi Bazouks had swept down in the night and stolen the wood they had prepared for building. Kathleen admired their babies, ‘all swaddled, they felt like brown paper parcels when one took them’, and arranged for wool to be provided so that the women could knit socks and jerseys, which the relief workers would then buy and distribute.

At Klissoura refugees were living two or three families to a room: ‘some were in excellent spirits, others wept and mourned, all were overjoyed to see us.’ They had thin mattresses, a blanket, a little maize or corn. Nothing else. Kathleen was much outraged at ‘a rascally doctor, a perfect brute who cheated hideously in distributing flour.’ Visiting villages, burnt-out or full of Komitadji, resulted in ‘considerable unpleasantness’ with their officer when Brailsford spoke to men who had been beaten to give up their arms. ‘I fear it may have sown an annoying seed, which may bear unpleasant fruits.’

Thence to Kastoria, where two nuns from Salonica had set up a ‘primitive but good’ hospital. The English ladies’ accommodation was a thousand times better than Kathleen had expected, with a view over the beautiful lake, and their work began in earnest.

Dec 21st: Today I saw an old woman with a very dreadful bleeding cancer on her left breast, but the majority are merely cases of starvation … One woman had died, another being in the worst plight [pregnant and unmarried—Kathleen always used this phrase] had gone mad with shame, and the doctor was undecided whether to kill the embryo with drugs or not. If the child is allowed to be born, the people will not allow it to live. The case is difficult but in this country his action would not be criminal. Another case was a little girl of ten, and many more, more or less horrible. Her grandmother locked one girl in a cellar to hide her from the soldiers, and there she went mad. Another was brought to the hospital, but sat looking out the window, crying. She wanted to go to her Turk.

Rape and seduction by soldiers were rife, and as well the Turks levied a tax on Christian marriages; if the tax was not paid, droit de seigneur was claimed. Kathleen had not been old enough to hear the tales her mother was bred on in Athens of the basic evil of the Turk, but Rosslyn, now working in England to raise money for Macedonia, may well have remembered and passed some on. He certainly remembered their mother’s visit to her brother George in a field hospital at Scutari after the Crimean War, the horrors she saw there, and the letter she wrote to her grandfather, who had sent it to The Times. Its publication had helped to stir up public feeling just before Florence Nightingale started to put together her troupe of nurses (three of whom were trained by Fifi Skene).

It was to Rosslyn that Kathleen wrote. Later he published her letters, along with his own from his trip to Macedonia in 1905.

Today there are 30 patients, mostly starvation [she wrote]. Last night the wife of a village priest was brought in; her eyes were fixed and staring. Her husband and his brothers had been missing for a long while, and they thought them imprisoned in Kastoria, but lately their bodies were found in the mountains, cut in pieces, and she is going mad. She wouldn’t stay, and went off this morning.

Kathleen did the accounts, listed requirements, distributed blankets, applied hot cups to congested chests, and held the hands of the dying. ‘Here I learnt a calmness and a lack of dread of death,’ she wrote later.

In very few cases was the fearful death rattle I had read of. Almost always death came merely as a cessation, as a clock runs down. Only once did I falter. The dying patient was a boy of about 14, with large brown eyes like a raccoon and tousled black hair. He clung to my hand with a strength that made me hope that they were wrong in abandoning him, and that he might not be dying, at any rate not tonight. And he would open his eyes and say things to me, and I could not understand a word. And then, very suddenly, with his eyes still open, he stopped breathing. My religion, which had been waning and waning, went out with a spirt.

At times she got depressed. ‘A miserable day. Not the weather, but uselessness, that horrid curse.’ She visited a hospital with six patients, men, women and children, one with smallpox, all in together on mattresses a metre long and having had no food or doctor for three days. Two days before Christmas they were told their hospital was to be shut down, and their doctor was not to visit the villages. A woman with pleurisy was sent away after travelling an hour and a half to get to the hospital.

25th: Cheerful sort of Christmas, eh? Never mind. I had a letter, a great event. Gave out blankets, and went a tramp round the town, but feel very useless and stupid. On the hill to the back there are some fifteen corpses still lying, all horrid and dried, unburied.

30th: Wednesday: Rode to Vernik. Hideous roads. Very poor and miserable. Even the children’s faces seem wrinkled with a chronic shiver. Women tell one their horrible tales, but one has heard them before. Little boys look starved, but one knows they are starved. Old old priests tell how they have been beaten, but others have been beaten. Our whole being is pity.

Her worries she kept to her diary on the whole; but in one letter to Rosslyn she said how lonely it was to have no one to call her anything but ‘Miss Bruce’. Kathleen liked and respected Lady Thompson, and worried that she was miserable or sick, but as Brailsford wrote years later: ‘Lady Thompson was a stiff and conventional person, and she and Kathleen were temperamentally poles apart.’ One rare sunny morning Kathleen was brushing Lady Thompson’s long hair, and singing a comic song: ‘I cannot understand,’ said the austere lady, ‘how you can sing with so much sadness all around you.’

Propriety was another problem. On one occasion Lady Thompson took Kathleen aside, when she had touched their Major’s knee after a long hard journey, saying, ‘Why, you’re absolutely drenched.’ ‘You are very young, my dear,’ said Lady Thompson, and explained that it was really a little indecent to touch a man’s knee. Later, when Kathleen had taken off her soaking hat during a rainy ride, that same man rode up beside her

and with many apologies begged me to be so very kind as to forgive him but he had something very delicate to implore me (Oh dear oh dear, my austere lady must have been right; what is coming?). He hated being obliged to ask me, but would I mind, could I please, put on my hat. It appeared that I might ride astride, ride without a skirt, do almost anything, but to have the head uncovered was terribly shocking. With deepest and most serious apology I put on my soaking cap, and never again offended. Then I turned over in my mind the prejudices of the middle aged lady and the Turkish soldiers, and thought I had my work cut out for me: perhaps somehow, somewhere, there would come a time when it would be right to be simple, direct and innocent. But that time never came.

Her escape was to go out riding on the tough little Turkish horses, one of which she bought for £7. She became quite used to riding astride, and rather preferred it. Henry Brailsford remembered her as ‘a very spirited and attractive young woman. I doubt if she had ever been on horseback before. That was like her. Nothing daunted her.’ But even riding was generally accompanied by the spies in uniform: ‘We are never allowed outside this little town without 12 or 15 Turkish Cavalry, an officer and several policemen. Even in the town we have always to have an armed escort, and a policeman is stationed in our passage… Yesterday we had to pass through a favourite brigand pass—we were forty-two, all armed! … A real-live gorgeous staff major never leaves us,’ she reported in a letter, being cheerful. When she did escape alone, she found dismembered limbs out on the mountainside, arranged like the limbs of a starfish.

No relief was found either with the wives of the local notabilities with whom they stayed when doing the rounds of the villages.

En route we stopped for half an hour chez un Bey and were forced to go to his Harem. The women there were the worst things made in creation, hair dyed scarlet, teeth absolutely black, and fat, ma chère! fat to such a degree that one became physically unwell in seeing them—barefooted, and hideously indecent in word and gesture. It was indeed a relief to go back to the rough cavalry after that den of harpies.

On New Year’s Day 1904 they mounted their horses and rode to Smrds. ‘Don’t comment that there are no vowels in their words: there is no water in their houses, no streets in their towns and no justice in their land.’ Smrds had been one of the wildest and fiercest of the rebel towns. Small boys refused to study in school; a five year old explained that studying wouldn’t help them to shoot Turks. The ambition of the people there was to survive through winter so that in the spring they could fight the Turks again, and no doubt get killed that way. ‘It seems a false economy,’ Kathleen wrote to Rosslyn. ‘Once begun however one must go on, so heaps and heaps more money must be sent.’ It was getting very cold: Kathleen wore five layers of wool, and slept in a sleeping bag, two blankets, a fur coat, two golf capes and a fur cloak, with hot water bottles, and still froze. And it was damp. And ‘Mud, mud, mud, oh dearie man,’ she wrote, ‘do you know you have never seen mud never in all your life.’ She kept warm on the affection and gratitude of the people she helped, and longed to bring the babies home with her, but made do with supplying bundles of cloth for their mothers to dress them in.

Her other pleasure was the landscape. ‘This is the most detestable country I ever knew… nothing attractive in all the land except the views which are exquisite.’ She marvelled at the ice: ‘perilous and wonderful, but beautiful white mountains stood against a deep clear blue sky, too impressive for fairyland, but too brilliant to be true. Ice, snow, eagles, vultures, the sound of the bells of trains of mules in the valley below, the soldiers singing their weird songs, a good smell of horses—enfin, every sense gratified.’ When Rosslyn went to Macedonia he taught his infidel escorts to sing hymns—they particularly liked ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.

On 17 January Kathleen heard that her brother Wilfrid was ill. On the 18th she cut out 19 shirts, 12 pairs of knickers and 16 babies’ outfits, and noticed that she was covered with an extraordinary rash. ‘I don’t want to die out here. I can’t die without seeing Wilfrid. I say “die” because I could not be ill out here and not die, of that I am convinced.’

20th: Set out at 7.30. No sooner had we started than a terrible storm of wind and rain came on. Snow! It was rather great slabs of frozen horror that hit you in the face, and cut. It blinded and choked me and made me so numbed I was incapable of resisting the infuriated gallop of my little animal, who sought to extricate himself from the horror that surrounded him. This lasted for miles, over horrid ridges, streams, boulders, everything ...

The next day ‘I was a little ill, but would not be so.’ That night she ran a fever of 105°; then followed delirium, haemorrhage, coughing up blood, and a temperature of 107°.

She was nursed at first by a Greek carpenter, Nico, who spoke no English and only a little French. He did his best for her, but only once did she rave in French, and all that he could make out was that she wanted him to bring her old white pony to her. The room was at the top of a steep, narrow staircase, and realizing that he really could not satisfy the only wish he had been able to understand, he wept. Rats ran around her bed at night, but they gave her comfort because they reminded her of Rosslyn’s rats from her childhood.

The disease was ‘a malignant type of influenza with symptoms like typhoid’ as Brailsford described it; it was epidemic and many died of it. Kathleen was not one of them, largely because of the reappearance of Jane Brailsford, who ‘descended as if from heaven, and the will to live was supported by the dear devotion of this young Englishwoman’, as Kathleen wrote years later. At the time she wrote in her diary, ‘It is splendid to have someone. She is most good and thoughtful.’ Mrs. Brailsford acquired clean sheets for her, and slept in her room throughout the delirious nights.

By 30 January Kathleen was writing to Rosslyn: ‘Sorry I couldn’t write the last week or two, I was too busy striving with death. But I won! So here goes. The Turks still put every kind of difficulty in the way of every step one takes. You think of some nice little scheme to help some people with something, and down come the authorities and put a stop to it, stating no possible excuse or reason …’ Though her tone is jolly, the litany of misery continues: a child with a face ‘which was already like that of a corpse, quite without colour or any look of intelligence’; the ‘hideous, most malicious’ influenza epidemic, walls falling down and burying people. She wonders rather pathetically if perhaps Rosslyn and Nigel might ‘come and fetch me and we [might] go home by Athens a little.’

On 2 February she is in bed, but cheerful: ‘There is a funny little Turkish girl of about fifteen sticking her nose into my letter in terrified wonder that I can write. Now she has discovered Lady Thompson’s stays (for all the world walks in and out of our bedroom—our officer, the post and all). She is holding them up and shrieking for joy.’ Later in the same post she reports having heard from Brailsford that soldiers were beating up ‘our ill people on their way to our hospital. Can you imagine anything so horrible?’ Stuck in bed, she felt useless and miserable, ashamed of not having finished her work even though all the relief workers were being warned that they would soon have to pack up and leave, as the spring approached and the Komitadji started action again. The expectation of renewed fighting was universal.

By 6 February she had had three more fevers, but by the 12th she was well enough to travel to Klissoura by ‘antediluvian cacique’ and ‘ramshackle open carriage’. The most upsetting thing about the journey was the moans and groans and ‘Mon Seigneur, c’est pour vous que je souffre’ (Oh Lord, it is for you that I suffer) of the French nun with whom she was travelling, as they passed through a snowstorm. At Klissoura she reported ‘the drollest of adventures, which may not even be written in a private female notebook. But ah! I shall nevertheless not forget’, which was very annoying of her.

In Salonica she stayed a week with the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul: ‘nice, good souls, absolutely without self-control, the most arrant chatterboxes I ever knew. I haven’t had a word of religion spoken to me, and that’s just as well or I should be obliged to go away. One can’t help mocking a little sometimes at the things which are attributed to the almighty, and the absolute lack of logic in their exclamations. But here is a subject on which I could mock for pages … à quoi bon?’ (To what good?)

To get away from too much Christianity she went to a mosque:

I had taken the precaution to put myself on excellent terms with the two men who guard the mosque, having spent half an hour sitting in their garden and picking their flowers … Outside there is a fountain at which each man washes his feet, his arms to the elbow, his face and behind his ears. Then he enters barefoot, carrying however his shoes. From within are called prayers and instructions, amongst which is a supplication that the powers of the world may never agree. They stand, kneel, prostrate themselves in turn, and sometimes they place their thumbs behind their ears; finally they turn their heads slowly to one side and then the other, and then get up and go away. All move as one man, very much superior to their military drill. I am told it is an exceptional favour to be allowed to be present on such an occasion.

She was still ‘preposterously weak, and I get hot and cold all about nothing. But I can walk now, thank god!’ At the end of February she left by sea, heading for Marseilles, looking forward to home. She felt as if she’d been away six months, but in fact it was not quite three.

Kathleen boarded her steamer for France in high spirits. But the boat was small, the sea was rough, and she was the only woman passenger. Though her health had returned ‘in waves of well being’, her seasickness was so terrible that by Naples she could bear it no longer and jumped ship. She had little money, no Italian, and no acquaintance in Naples, so she fled for peace and quiet to Capri. ‘There I engaged a tiny room at the top of a small hotel, and stayed until the earth grew steady again under my feet.’

When it did she realised that she was ‘magically and unaccountably’ in Italy, and decided to go to Florence to see the art. She knew students there who lived on next to nothing. After the long terrible winter in Macedonia, spring in Florence was a joy, as her autobiography tells.

At all times convalescence is a sort of delirium, tasting life again and tasting it abundantly. A slight guilty feeling that my studio lay empty, my work undone, my painter Hofbauer, Hener and Isadora, who all rather looked to me to stir them, all neglected; and neglected the Macedonian Committee, which should have been reported to personally. All these guiltinesses perhaps enhanced the glory of the weeks that followed. I found a little art school. I found too a band of light-hearted English students, some of whom I had known in London. I found Charles Loeser, a great connoisseur of things Florentine, eager to show me, to teach me, to explain to me carefully the distinguishing features of trecento and quattrocento mouldings, to make me look beyond the Donatellos and the Michelangelos, which might otherwise have satisfied me. I found a grand young singer, Von Warlich, who would walk home along the Lung’Arno with me at night, singing so gloriously that even the crotchetiest old maid, woken in her pensione, could surely not complain. I found an entrancing dwelling on the Via dei Bardi. It consisted of one room on the fifth floor up an old solid stone stairway, one room and a terrace. The terrace hung out over the Arno with the Ponte Vecchio on the left and straight opposite a high tower, which belonged to my middle-aged friend the connoisseur. When, as often happened, we had dined together in his lovely house or in some underground cellar restaurant, there was always a solemn ritual. We would wave our candle to each other across the river before turning in. I found bathing parties, dances, revels and copious sunshine. Health came back by leaps and bounds. There were queer and ugly things in Paris. There were ugly and terrifying things in Macedonia. Here, to me at any rate, all seemed as spontaneous as a Botticelli picture.

Another friend she found was Herbert Alexander, a sun-browned, bleached-haired English painter, with whom she danced by moonlight. He told her of his explorer brother who had been ‘destroyed by natives, probably cannibals’, and invited her to watch the sunrise from Fiesole, on the hill above Florence.

It was misty, almost foggy. Not a sign of Florence was to be seen, just an ocean of clouds, gold, blue and white, with the sun shining down on it from the east. We stood shyly, transfigured with the rare, the unusual beauty. Florence was lying hidden, ‘a bosomer of clouds’. Just as that thought ran through my mind, the clouds settled a little, and the great dome of the cathedral shone out firm and clear, as though the lovely Firenze had turned in her sleep, thrown aside her white linen and bared one shining breast. The lad and I held our breath with joy and wonder.

She slept, as ever, on the terrace. Across two rooftops on the right lived Herbert and another young painter. ‘One night about two o’clock, under a low crescent moon, I woke from sleep feeling something near me. I lay absolutely still; keeping my eyelids all but closed I saw kneeling by my bed, with hands together like a medieval saint, the quiet figure of Herbert. His hair as well as his clothes looked white under the moon, and his face very still and radiant. My heart knocked, thumped, roared in my ear, but I lay deathly still, scarce breathing. So we stayed. At last, very very stilly, with an athletic movement, he slipped back on to his bare heels, and raised himself to his feet and tiptoed to the buttress of my terrace, swung himself lightly on to it, and climbed with sure-footed agility over the roofs, his lithe figure showing up now and again against the sky.’ She never told him that she had been awake.

A few days later she and Herbert set off with knapsacks and bathing costumes to vagabond in the countryside. Initially she tried to disguise herself as a boy—her hair was still short after the illness—but no matter what she put on ‘I would look like nothing but a fat German boy of about sixteen, a risible figure’, so she borrowed peasant clothes from a lace maker who lived in her building. For three weeks they wandered, walking twenty miles a day, sleeping in haylofts and caves and riverbeds, bathing in lakes, hanging their clothes to dry on bushes.

‘Getting meals in these mountain villages was always in the nature of an adventure. I knew no Italian and Herbert next to none.’ Local people fed them, and assumed that they would want meat.

When they found that bread and cheese and eggs sufficed they became, with scarcely an exception, animated and delighted to bring out their best. Almost always they refused payment at first, and often at last too. Sometimes, if there was a beautiful daughter, or an attractive child, or a characterful old man, they took pay for food in the form of a watercolour sketch. This in some places was tremendously popular. Quantities of lovely creatures presented themselves as possible models offering food and shelter in exchange.

My heaven was so many sided! Never before had I seen fireflies. In some places the woods in the early night were bright with them. They would even settle for a moment on my arm. One such lovely night we made our camp in a small wood. I spread my mackintosh sheet, wrapt my blanket over me, and turned the spare half of my mackintosh sheet over me to keep off the dew. Suddenly I felt something moving under my pillow.

It was a mole, wriggling about underground, and Herbert had to come from his bivouac, a gentlemanly distance away, to help her find what it was that could be felt but not seen. By the time they had tracked it down and laughed about it they had attracted the attention of two country carabinieri who were patrolling the road.

We simple innocents were tracked down by these vigilant sleuths, themselves even more simple and innocent than their victims. Followed a conversation that nobody understood. Finally we arranged to explain that though we couldn’t explain ourselves in Italian, we could in French. ‘Ah, Enrico,’ said one policeman to his mate, ‘you’ve always said you could speak French, now’s your chance. Ask them what they’re doing here.’ A considerable pause, while everybody turned hopefully to Enrico. Finally, very slowly and deliberately, Enrico addressed me. ‘Quel est le prix du beurre à Paris?’ With elaborate composure I replied that butter, when I left Paris, cost two francs a kilo. Enrico turned triumphantly to his colleague. ‘It’s clear we must take them to the police station.’

Our detention was abbreviated by Herbert’s suggestion of a bottle of Chianti in the adjoining café before it was too late. This idea seemed easy to grasp and was fallen in with. A good deal of laughter ensued, and we wayfarers were allowed to disperse, with the injunction that we must never sleep out again. To this injunction we complied for about half an hour.’

‘It’ll be a bore not being able to tell people our lovely adventures,’ she said to Herbert.

‘Won’t we be able to? Why not?’ he replied.

‘Because we mustn’t tell anybody. Well, you could perhaps, because you could pretend you were with another boy, but I wouldn’t pretend I’d been with another girl—too dull.’

‘I shan’t pretend. I shan’t need to tell anyone. I’ll just put it by and hoard it,’ said Herbert very gently and slowly.

And so she returned to Paris, ‘looking more like a sun-gilded Amazon than a typhoid convalescent’.