A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott

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Monaco

10 October 1893

Hello Prechie

Here I blooming well are—beastly drunk and dead broke—so [sic] my pal. We’ve been here four days. We came with a thousand and forty pounds between us. He brought £1025 and I £15. I won £55 the first night lost £80 the second and now am dead drunk [crossed out] broak. So’s my pal. Don’t tell your brothers where I am my people don’t know. I’ve not paid a bloody sou for my hotel bill. It’s come to 30 frcs a day. Writing to a pal to send me thirty, Don’t suppose he’ll. Applying for a situation as a waiter at the hotel here. Lovely women here Russian princesses by the score. One very smart one to whom I was sufficiently attentive when I first came down lent me forty Louis—plunged on rouge and lost then she wanted to save me hotel expenses by—well you know—sort of marrying me but I heard she was already married and well it wasn’t my fault and I was drunk at the time the wine’s so beastly cheap and good here and we get it for nothing as we don’t paid. Like a sweet Prechie write me a long cheering wholesome letter to do me good and I promise not to be drunk when I write again … ever … Willie.

Willie was always a reprobate, and Kathleen was not so sporting about that as Presh, who wrote back to Willie sending him five pound notes she could ill afford and, on one occasion, repeating a ‘pretty thick’ story about ‘Oscar’ and ‘the pit’. ‘Where did you get hold of it?’ wrote Willie. ‘Your character’s done for.’ Later he told her of ‘a rumour about in Scotland that Oscar Wilde has been released and all the Highlanders have fled to the hills. I wonder why.’ Oscar Wilde fascinated them all—they couldn’t work out what he’d done. Kathleen assumed he’d had an illegitimate child. Willie probably knew what it was—he was doing it himself not so many years later. For the time being, though, he satisfied himself with girls, and reported it to Presh: ‘I disgrace myself at dances,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes successfully’; and ‘She kissed me as the French kiss, and must face the consequences.’

Such a reprobate was a shock to Kathleen, accustomed as she was to their childish naughtiness and Great-Uncle William’s proper household. She remembers life there with less jollity than Podge: ‘Here the blinds were kept down of a Sunday until dinnertime,’ she wrote in 1932 of Inverleith Row. ‘Here no book save the bible night be read on the holy day. Here at meals no child might speak till she had finished her meat course. Here surface order and decorum were of the strictest.’ Podge did recall that although Kathleen was pretty ‘for some years it was obliterated by a perpetual frown’. (Irene referred to her as ‘an ugly little maid’.) ‘I think you can’t have been at all well,’ Podge surmised:

From this age onwards you had no one to mother you or shew you any affection of any kind and more and more you shut yourself up and became reserved and chary of shewing any feeling whatsoever, partly due to our somewhat Spartan bringing up but more I think from fear of being laughed at. Once however you began to cry and nothing and nobody could stop you, you sobbed and sobbed, no one knew why and no one could console you, you lay on the bed inconsolable. At last Elma came in and Hilda told her. I shall never forget seeing the determination in her quick walk as she went to your room and came down like a thunderbolt. ‘Get up AT ONCE , wash your face and stop this minute.’ Implicit obedience and not another sound!

As a young child Kathleen was bereft, seeking affection and attention, and getting not much. If anyone complained of a headache, Kathleen would have one too. Mother figures came and went; the continuous one, Elma, was clearly unsatisfactory. Men were frightening. As she grew older, she learnt her worth and her independence. The imagination, which Podge once called ‘ridiculous’, became a source of fine games for both of them. She had an outwardly rebellious period, when she would go off to the sea without permission (and in the middle of the night, if she could); but she soon learnt the subtle art of doing exactly what you want without anyone noticing. She quietly avoided being confirmed for some years—she did the preparatory lessons, but avoided the ceremony. Her form mistress at St George’s School in Edinburgh reported her as having original ideas, but tending to keep them to herself. A contemporary, a Miss Baily, remembered her as: ‘a sturdy, indomitable little figure … bright blue eyes, a mane of thick brown hair and a clear cut classical profile and … a certain attractive exuberance of temperament. Sharing a desk with her in the Upper IIIrd Remove of 1891–2 was anything but dull. Merriment reigned in her neighbourhood.’ At some point when she was quite young, Kathleen decided to be happy, no matter what.

In 1892 Great-Uncle William died. The house in Edinburgh was sold and the proceeds divided among his fifty-four nephews and nieces. Each of the Bruce children got an allowance: Kathleen’s was £72 per annum, to pay for everything: education, clothes et al. Douglas, now twenty-five, took over as nominal head of the family, and Kathleen went to live with Elma and her husband Canon Keating (who wore pincenez). Cousin Willie described their household after a visit in 1892:

Found them pretty gloomy … the gas was not turned on at the main so they borrowed a lamp from the Theological Hall, but like the Biblical virgins’ it hadn’t got no oil so ‘they sat in solemn silence in a dull dark etc.’, cussing inwardly at each other. It was too dark for either of them to reach the poker otherwise there might have been ‘another ’orrible murder’. They’re a rum couple …

After a year of this Kathleen went to boarding school. It is hard not to surmise that she was ‘packed off’. Podge had already been (in her own words) ‘sent away’. Kathleen’s first boarding school was ‘a cheap convent’, as she called it, where she had to bathe in a chemise; ‘I was carefully initiated into the tricky art of changing from a wet chemise into a dry nightgown without one dangerous moment of seeing my own person.’ There was chapel three times a day and five times on Sunday, and the girls were given to having visions due to religious over-excitement. A popular one was for Christ the man to come down from the cross; for Kathleen, Christ the baby clambered from his mother’s arms and lay in hers. She loved it, and was late for dinner. She and Podge had had baby friends in the Botans and at Pettycar, where they went on holiday. ‘Babies were our chief amusement and interest,’ wrote Podge, who went on to be one of the first Norland Nannies, and to run a children’s home. There was Mary Ann Frew, for example, aged eight months, who they shared between them in hourly shifts, and a two-year-old named Arthur to whom Kathleen had given a toy horse. He had a very grand nanny, and the next day the horse was sent back because Arthur was not allowed to accept presents from people his mother did not know. Religion was important to the Bruces—three of the four brothers took the cloth (Wilfrid alone didn’t, he became a sailor); two of the sisters married churchmen and one, Gwennie, lived her whole life with her twin brother Lloyd as his housekeeper—but for Kathleen the miracle was not so much God as babies.

Though Douglas was now her guardian Kathleen had, in effect, no one to look after her. She was reunited with Podge at a second boarding school, St Michael’s, at Bognor, when Podge was called to look at her little sister’s vests. There were nine, and they were all in rags. ‘Absolute rags,’ wrote Podge, ‘in fact no underclothes fit to be seen, and Mrs. Sparks had spread them all on the bed for inspection.’ This doesn’t seem to have made Kathleen sorry for herself—no one to look after her also meant no one to tell her what to do. Podge wrote to Presh about ‘naughty little Kathleen’. She was ‘always in hot water’ at school, so Podge said, but she knew (because she’d been told, after Smith’s Classical Dictionary and a book on Christian Science were found under her mattress) that she wouldn’t be expelled, because she was an orphan. Her siblings were largely grown-up, and she was beginning to think that so was she. Douglas would send her patronizing letters about how he had arranged for an aunt to be so good as to take her for the holidays—this was how she saw it, at least. At sixteen she wrote back saying, in effect, no thank you, I shall go and stay with my friends, who want me. One such was Milly, who had been on holiday to Italy, where a musician had kissed her. She wasn’t certain that she might not be going to have a baby; Kathleen rather hoped she would, but thought it unlikely.

But perhaps Kathleen had once again misjudged her relatives. One, a vicar’s wife from Buxted in Surrey, wrote rather sweetly to Presh in March 1895: ‘I hear from Kathleen this morning that prearrangements will prevent her coming to us for her Easter holidays. When she could not come at Christmas we looked upon it as a pleasure postponed … so perhaps she may be able to come to us for a bit in the summer.’ But Kathleen had more exciting invitations than a vicar’s wife in Sussex. She was going to London to stay with wicked Cousin Willie.

She’d been to London before, in passing; she and Podge had had to cross it on their own on their way to Bognor. Podge had cried out, ‘We shall never get across London alone!’; to which Kathleen had replied, ‘Shan’t you? I shall.’ Unlike their Skene ancestors, most of the Bruces did not care for travelling. Podge thought Kathleen tremendously brave and cavalier in her attitude to the metropolis, and this view was confirmed throughout their lives.

It was arranged that she should stay a night or two with Willie’s ‘ramshackle, happy-go-lucky family’ at their house in Addison Gardens, Kensington.

and that we should dine together in a restaurant, and that he should take me to a play. Seventeen, but a pantomime was all I had ever seen, and never at all in all my life had I ever had a meal in a restaurant, not even at a station. First problem—what should I wear? Next—would I know how to behave as though it were not the first time? There were the agonies of cutting down the neck of my prettiest day blouse; and agonies again, lest it be too low. And the dark serge skirt, how clumsy it looked! Well, I must tie a ribbon in my jolly hair and hope no one would look below my nice clean face. Oh, heavens, one must wear a cloak! What could I do? Lucky if the odd two pounds were left over for clothes. A cloak, an evening cloak? Quick, quick! I had an idea. One yard of a coarse, unbleached stuff called workhouse sheeting, costing a few pennies a yard, a square of blue dye, and bottle of gold ink. Secretly I went about the business, dyed the stuff, put it in a cunning circle, and then made a bold, mad design in gold over it. The result would doubtless not be durable, but it looked not unlike a Fortuny cloak, and it would serve.

The evening was a success—Kathleen got the hors d’oeuvres all wrong but it didn’t matter; Willie had chosen the play because ‘the heroine is just like you, and it will do you good to know what you are like.’ Kathleen didn’t think she was like her at all, but rather hoped she was. Back at Addison Gardens there was an exotic brother, Hener, playing the piano ‘with great vigour and grandeur’. He was younger, wilder, stranger and more beautiful than Willie, and Kathleen was delighted with him and his thick black hair and wild gypsy-black eyes (Willie’s hair was red). She asked him to play Bach, the only composer she had ever heard of, but he played Liszt which she found quite delirious and intoxicating. (Their Great-Aunt Carrie had been taught to play the piano by Liszt in Paris: ‘a wild looking long-haired excitable man,’ Great-Aunt Fifi had called him. He liked giving girls one or two lessons so they could say they had been taught by him.)

The next morning Kathleen saw Hener out of the window, swinging a live cat by the tail, hitting its head against the wall, and was less delighted. She poured the water from her jug over him and threw up in her basin. Felix Skene did try to discipline his wayward sons. ‘I have had the hell of a row with my guvnor,’ Willie wrote to Presh. ‘He told me to leave the bally hovel and I said I wouldn’t and threatened to get him expelled from the Athenaeum.’ Willie was always short of money to lose on the horses: at one point he considered blackmailing Aunt Zoe, the Archbishop’s wife, by betrothing himself to a chorus girl.

It was Willie who sowed the seed of art as a living in Kathleen’s brain. She wanted to make up to him for being so taken with his brother when after all it had been Willie who had taken her out, so the next day, after the cat incident, she showed him some ‘very feeble but pretty’ watercolours that she had done, as a gesture of friendliness. At this stage she was meant to be going to be a teacher, like Irene and Presh—it was respectable, and would keep her out of trouble. ‘Why on earth go in for teaching?’ said Willie. ‘Why not go in for art?’ He probably forgot all about the suggestion. In 1900, after his wicked life had resulted in him ‘absquatulating’ to Bombay (where he worked for a bank, lived with an Indian boy in a tent, shot vultures, shocked the memsahibs and wrote scandalous letters to Presh asking her to send him ‘naughty French papers’), he wondered whether ‘pretty little Kathleen’ had become a duchess yet. But in 1895 he told his seventeen-year-old cousin to hell with mathematics and Latin, she was lovely and should have a lovely life. Nonsense, she replied, but she didn’t think it was nonsense at all.

TWO The Road to Hell (#ulink_c3adf6d3-899c-52ef-9308-e705b08df489)

1898–1901

‘IN THE FIRST YEARS of the twentieth century to say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens, had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to Hell.’ Kathleen didn’t write these words until thirty years later, but she knew at the time that they were true. To say this had no effect on her would be inaccurate; to say it discouraged her would be more so. Despite having every respect for education, and very much regretting that women could not take university degrees—she asked Rosslyn, when he had been to Oxford, to ‘pass on anything that he had picked up there’—Kathleen did not want to teach. Though it was not apparent to everyone, she was going to be an artist.

Kathleen left school at eighteen, and the world was quite clearly, to her eyes, her oyster. To the relatives, it was more the case that something had to be done with her. One option was that she go and stay in Ulster with another old uncle, Sir Hervey Bruce. His father, Tory true-blue and Ulster Orange member for Coleraine for many years, used to stand up on his seat in the House of Commons and crow like a bantam cock whenever a Liberal or Irish member got up to speak. The son, Kathleen’s uncle, was noted for contributing to the collection plate in church in inverse proportion to the length of the sermon—a sovereign for ten minutes, half a sovereign for twenty, and so on. Like Rosslyn, he had the Bruce weakness for animals: he once offered to peel a peach for a dinner guest, saying it was ‘too ripe for the monkey’. Kathleen stayed with Sir Hervey for Christmas 1899 at Downhill, his house in Ulster.

Downhill was huge. Sir Hervey’s son Henry, known as Benjie, who was brought up there, described it as ‘a fantastic place … a flawless gem … a great granite bathing box… a sombre grey granite mass, perched on an Atlantic cliff with nothing but the distant Scotch Isle of Jura between it and the North Pole. On the bleak down on which it stood no tree, shrub or flower could survive. For flowers we had seagulls, assembled in hundreds on the grass and all facing the wind.’ Often it was too windy to leave the house; Benjie’s diary records an occasion when ‘some of the servants went out but couldn’t get back except on their hands and knees. Seagulls tearing past the windows.’

Kathleen liked all that, and the sea and the lake and the wild country, but she didn’t much like her uncle.

He seemed to me an incredibly coarse and vulgar old man, and in my innocence I did not think baronets should be so. But we must remember that I was brought up in a convent, and he at Eton some sixty years before, where shirts were probably not the necessary outfit for a weekly bath, and chastity and propriety were less rigid. My puritanical rearing made me cringe with shame at his playful taunts. Nearly I loathed him, until one fine afternoon he took me across to the church yard, and showed me his wife’s grave, a wife who had died some thirty years before. ‘I miss her, my dear,’ he said, and I was ashamed that I could not express the spontaneity of sympathy that I would have expressed to a young male creature.

That evening after tea he said to me, ‘Look here, my dear, would you like to live here? You would pour out the tea and mend the china and things, and there’s no one here for you to get into mischief with. Think it over. You wouldn’t be in my way.’

She thought it over. She tossed and turned in her four-poster bed, and she concluded: ‘But I want to get into mischief!’

Kathleen declined Uncle Hervey’s offer, and went instead to London. She joined the Slade art school—not yet Paris, but in the right direction. She did stay with relatives, but she fantasized constantly about flats in Chelsea that she might take, either with another girl or—if only—on her own. But twenty-year-old daughters of the clergy did not live alone in Chelsea in 1900.

She managed to have an extremely jolly life all the same. It was made up largely of work, social fun and extra curricular self-improvement. Work was the Slade. She studied under Henry Tonks, whose face, she said, was ‘full of grey old miseries’. He was by all accounts a strict but rewarding teacher. His great respect was for draughtsmanship, and as a former medic he had considerable knowledge of anatomy. Another of his early pupils was Augustus John, whose work Kathleen greatly admired. She studied drawing, painting, criticism, and on 14 November 1901 her diary notes ‘modelling—first clay from life’. She was good at it. ‘Tremendous praise, I wonder why, I can’t really be doing it well I should think,’ she wrote. And ‘Went to modelling. Same as ever, “Very good indeed”, “excellent”, “you’ll make something of this” and so on.’

She loved her studies. ‘Oct 9: Oh how excellently do I want to go back to the Slade,’ she wrote, before term began again, and ‘Monday 14: First day of Slade very pleasant.’ But they were not enough for her. On a visit to the Royal Academy she had come across a quotation from Walt Whitman under a painting: ‘It is not enough to have this globe or a certain time. I will have thousands of globes and all time.’ On the strength of that she invested in a copy of Leaves of Grass, and, she said, ‘life began’.

The immediate globes she went for were art, music, theatre, philosophy, and people, but that was not all. Her diary records her eclectic interests: Wagner’s reaction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony (he fell into a fever and took to wearing silk and satin to compose); the fact that codfish lay two million spawn for two to come to maturity; Nietzsche; Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics; developing photos; Baudelaire; Swinburne ‘till satiated’; Goethe; Hegel; Hedda Gabler (with Max Behrens—‘Immense’); the British Museum; metaphysics; Egyptology; Rossini. In the late summer of 1901 she was visiting Edinburgh, and she went to the Glasgow Exhibition, which included Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. She thought it ‘marvellous’; and also admired an Adam and Eve by Frank Taubman; and the work of ‘Chas Ricketts and C. H. Shannon’, ‘one of which is a beautiful young man. Must be Ricketts—ask Albert. It’s Shannon.’ In 1901 she was a craning, admiring student, but within five years she was friends with three of these four: Rodin, Shannon and Ricketts. Rossini she never met (though Benjie Bruce met Puccini, who played him parts of Madame Butterfly on the piano, explaining it as he went. ‘Ca, c’est japonais; ca c’est moi,’ he said: That is Japanese, that is me.)

Interspersed with the self-improvement were the people: fellow art students, Rosslyn’s theatrical friends (he was now curate of St Ann’s, Soho, and knew all sorts of people who were generally held to be rather too interesting company for a clergyman), dashing young things about town. Again, Kathleen’s diary speaks: Ernest Thesiger came up; Aveling walked her home; more hysterics from Dolly; awful letter from Evelyn; Stella has dyed her hair; Rothenstein gave her Sappho; gruesome fog; Rover had a stroke; dined with Skenes; long talk with Victor Reynolds about mortality, Aubrey Beardsley, etc; ‘Drank champagne and were amusing’ before seeing Millicent off to Capri; kept meeting Aveling, ‘felt rather a cad about that’.

She became friends with Mabel Beardsley, sister of the late Aubrey. Mabel and Aubrey had been the subject of scandalous rumours of incest, and Mabel had an illegitimate child who some said was his. Kathleen ‘played’ with Mabel after they met in adjoining boxes at Two Little Vagabonds, and later they helped to organize a masked ball, which was a great success although Max Beerbohm didn’t turn up. They forgave him, and went to the private view of an exhibition of his caricatures. She took Rosslyn to ‘pinafore parties’ in studios, where the guests stayed till 5 a.m., and the day before Queen Victoria died in January 1901 Rosslyn took Kathleen to a play at the Garrick, and to a party given by the actress Madge Titheradge.

There were admirers, and admirees. In November 1901 she went to a play of Sherlock Holmes. She noted that the lead, William Gillette, was forty-five, and ‘oh so gorgeous, could love him heaps and heaps’. On December 5 she ‘met the Russian Goldarbeiter in a bus. Clever of him to contrive to make such a meeting romantic.’ One Watts had no such trouble at the Slade ball that Christmas: they danced many times and he proposed to her ‘with great élan’. ‘Percy’ merited only the comment ‘well I wonder’. Cousin Hener the pianist was reduced to ‘oh the silly ass of a child’.

Someone by the name of Wilfred, however, caused her slightly more grief.

Oct 3: Hideous jealousy. She’s not as fair I know, nor is her intellect to be compared. Had I modelled the statuette I would not have been so far inferior. It’s not severe enough to be unrequited love and thus an experience, simply irritating. Still it has the virtue of being the only thing so far that has occurred, and it has occurred in most lives that have been lived, and tis best to know and feel—it’s really only a pity that it isn’t more.

She was too proud, and too strict with herself, to allow much in the way of girlish moonings. Besides, as Herbert Spencer said and Kathleen copied down in her notebook: ‘Every pleasure increases vitality, every pain decreases vitality.’ Suffering was never her idea of a good time, and this is the only expression of jealousy of another female in all her diaries.

In August 1901 she went to Germany with her sister Presh. ‘Every prospect pleases, only man is vile,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Here alas there are women too, they are worse.’ Not Presh, of course. Kathleen was very fond of Presh. This is typical of her ‘dislike of women’ throughout her life: she would claim to dislike all women heartily, and yet there always seemed to be a couple present whom she liked very well.

For Christmas that year she went to the Hervey Bruces at their English pile, Clifton, near Nottingham. Sir Hervey’s late wife had been Marianne Clifton, whose family had lived there since Domesday, and the house included a renaissance ‘pages’ hall’, redecorated with Dutch painted panels in honour of a visit by Charles I; an octagonal Georgian hall; a Chinese drawing room; a scaled-down copy of the Crystal Palace as conservatory; two dozen bedrooms and no bathrooms, peacocks, bestatued balustrades and seven terraces. ‘Uneventful, physically and mentally,’ Kathleen wrote, which was about as damning as it could be. The only high spot was on 28 December when someone was overheard to say: ‘Heavens, child, be careful not to marry a Bruce, they are dreadful people with scarcely a redeeming virtue.’ Kathleen rather agreed. It was time to get away from all these Bruces.

‘I wish it were correct to live all alone,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It’s far the best form of existence.’ It was the sort of thing that you could do in … oh, Paris, say.