Fatal Glamour (24 page)

Virginia saw the Neo-pagans as capable of a clean start, free from the Victorian gloom and debility that had shadowed the youth of herself and her friends. They also stood for a move from town to country. 1910 had been for Virginia a year of nervous breakdowns and long rest-cures away from London. She found these retreats so agreeable that she decided, at the end of the year, to rent a modest house at Firle, Sussex. “Another side of life reveals itself in the country,” she explained to Clive Bell, “which I can't help thinking of amazing interest. It is precisely as though one clapped on a solid half-globe to one's London life, and had hitherto always walked on a strip of pavement.”
⁷
Perhaps she could recapture some of the glory of her childhood summers in Cornwall, rudely interrupted when her mother died in 1895.

Such were the overtones of her plan to go on holiday to France with Ka, in April: “I mean to throw myself into youth, sunshine, nature, primitive art. Cakes with sugar on the top, love, lust, paganism, general bawdiness, for a fortnight at least; – and not write a line.” Behind the high spirits, we sense that Virginia found Ka very appealing physically. This is not to say that “general bawdiness” would mean a real affair with her. Virginia's passions – for Madge Vaughan and Violet Dickinson – had been unconsummated, girlish crushes. But she gave Ka a pet name, “Bruin,” that suggested the mixture of affection and sexual interest she felt for her.
⁸

The trip to France fell through when Virginia had to rush to Turkey to help her sister Vanessa, victim of a miscarriage in a remote village. But Virginia's plan was clearly to take up the Neo-pagans, and to sound them out. She expected to renew her acquaintance with Rupert when he returned from Munich. Meanwhile, she invited Jacques in March to stay at Firle for a weekend. They too became friends – though each found the other somewhat intimidating – and Jacques urged her to make the step from country house to living in a tent, at the Neo-pagan camp in August.

Looking back at this time, Virginia spoke of Jacques as an “adorable” young man. Bertrand Russell was less impressed:

I went to Grantchester . . . to tea with Jacques Raverat who is to marry Gwen Darwin. He has immense charm, but like all people who have superficial and obvious charm, I think he is weak and has no firm purpose. He is staying with Rupert Brooke whom I dislike. I find there Keynes and Miss Olivier (daughter of Jamaica Olivier) and Olwyn Ward, daughter of Prof. James Ward. Young people now-a-days are odd – Xtian names and great familiarity, rendered easy by a complete freedom from passion on the side of the men.
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Russell was in the throes of separating from his wife, Alys, in order to pursue his affair with Ottoline Morrell. Perhaps he was annoyed by the offhand way the male and female Neo-pagans treated each other, and he certainly loathed Rupert's breezy, schoolboy-hero manner. But Jacques's engagement had scarcely been settled so casually as Russell imagined. After staying with Virginia at Firle, Jacques had gone off for a walking tour in Cornwall with Dudley Ward, to make up his mind about his love triangle with Ka and Gwen. Virginia at this point knew only about his engagement to Gwen, which struck her as too self-consciously lusty. Jacques “is quite red, quite unshaven, hatless,” she told Clive, “with only one book – Rabelais; in two months, he says, . . . That I take to mean, bed with Gwen. It is portentous; I think the dots give the feeling rather well. How malicious we are about them! But I suppose they have their own brand of malice.” Soon afterwards, Ka took her out on the downs and confided the whole story. No doubt Virginia showed concern and sympathy, though to her sister she gave an acid survey of the future of
Neo-paganism: “cynically considering the infantile natures of all concerned, I predict nothing serious. Ka will marry a Brooke next year, I expect. J will always be a Volatile Frog. Gwen will bear children, and paint pictures; clearly though, J. and K. would be the proper match . . . I'm sure J. will always be susceptible; and as Gwen will grow stout, he will roam widely.”
¹⁰
By involving herself with the loves of Ka, Jacques, and Gwen, Virginia was serving two of her own interests. First, she loved intrigue for its own sake; then, she was trying out at second hand the possibilities of heterosexual love for herself. Until now, she had been interested mainly in her own sex, and her male friends had been largely gay. But she was nearly thirty, and becoming reconciled to the idea that the sensible thing for her to do was to marry. The Neo-pagans were to her an intriguing new society, in which young men and women mingled freely and tried out a series of sentimental attachments before settling down. She hoped to be both entertained and guided by observing them.

Rupert arrived back from Florence early in May. The immediate task he faced was to write his fellowship dissertation on John Webster and Elizabethan drama. He had less than eight months to do it, and this time he could not hope to get through by skimping and bluffing – as he had done too often before in his academic career. For the balance of the year, he had to stay in England and try to put work before pleasure.

At Grantchester, he began by moving house. The Stevensons, his landlords at the Orchard, had had enough of the free and easy ways of Rupert and his friends. Bare feet were apparently the last straw, and when Dudley Ward came to stay at the Orchard with two German girls, Rupert warned him that they would have to keep their boots on at all times.
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Fortunately, Mrs Neeve at the Old Vicarage next door was willing to give Rupert room and board, including the famous honey from her husband's bees. The house was a bit decrepit but had a pleasant garden, and was so close to the river that its sounds and smells filled the three rooms where Rupert lived. He described it to Elisabeth van Rysselberghe as one of the loveliest but also one of the unhealthiest houses one could imagine. It was infested with fleas and woodlice, against which Mrs Neeve waged ineffectual war with a yellow powder. Not surprisingly,
Rupert took to sleeping out on the lawn. The birds woke him up at 2:30 a.m.; he would curse them, and finally get back to sleep, and wake with his hair wet with dew.

Jacques and Gwen married in Cambridge on 7 June 1911. There was a dinner a week before at Gwen's house, where Rupert met Monsieur Raverat and renewed his acquaintance with Virginia. He was not having a happy return to Grantchester, after Jacques had asked him if he and Noel were in love. “I
think you
aren't,” he continued “and I
know she
isn't.” Rupert needed Noel to give Jacques the lie, but got this instead: “If Jacques had asked me that question I shouldn't have had the determination to answer anything but a frank ‘no!' because I dont believe we are . . . You seem to
want
us to be in love so much; why do you? I dont want to do what Jacques and Gwen do and I dont want their emotions, I know quite well what they are like, they destroy all one's judgement and turn one into an ape.”
¹²
That left Rupert feeling like a dog tied up outside the house. “I'd a bad touch,” he reported to Ka, “of that disease you too'll have known. The ignoblest jealousy mixed with loneliness to make me flog my pillow with an umbrella till I was exhausted, when I was shut into my lonely room to read myself to sleep, and they went roaming off to tell each other truths . . . But we might convalesce together.” He was not jealous of Jacques's possession of Gwen, since on the sexual plane she was never anything more to Rupert than “a square-headed woman who cuts wood.”
¹³
His jealousy was of the married state itself, mixed with fear of losing his closest male friend, and the first one to marry.

This fear turned out to be largely justified. Gwen and Jacques were married equally to each other and to art; from now on, friends would play a lesser role in their lives. Rupert, full of romantic idealism, did not think of marriage as a partnership based on a common interest. But Gwen had taken warning from the way her cousin Eily's artistic ambitions had been swallowed up by marriage: “You know all the artists in the world feel like that when they're married – except for J. and me. Particularly the women. For they are quite clean cut in 1/2. There never was anything in the world like us before – except Mr and Mrs Browning only for some reason my fiance does not like me to say this.” Before her engagement Gwen believed that she valued her work more than people, but with Jacques she discovered the power of her “dreadful feminine craving for someone to love and pity.”
¹⁴
The solution, once she was
married to him, was for both of them to submerge themselves in work and cut themselves off from the overcharged emotional atmosphere that Ka had created. It may seem unkind to note that Gwen suffered as the “Plain Jane” of the group and that she may have had a residue of hurt feelings over this status. Certainly she was frank enough about the jealousy and exclusiveness she felt towards Jacques, once she had won him.

Ka thus had no rival claims when Rupert, once installed at Grantchester, began sending her plaintive letters asking her to visit and hinting that he was falling in love with her. But she must have been uneasily aware that when he got back from Munich he was somehow too busy to join her in Yorkshire for a walking tour. Instead, he made the rounds of his friends and went down to Limpsfield when Bryn returned from Jamaica, with Sir Sydney, on 14 May. She had written to Rupert affectionately from the boat and mentioned that it was time she got married – a hint that deserved investigation, presumably. Having been shut out by Jacques and Gwen, Ka needed sympathy and trustworthiness from Rupert. What she got instead was an all-too-Apostolic frankness about his confused emotions. When Geoffrey Keynes asked for a portrait Duncan Grant had painted of her, Rupert lectured her on the Neo-pagan code: “Oh, come. The group of people we're part of may be awfully honest and genteel and chaste and self-controlled and nice – but at least we're far enough ahead for that. We don't copulate without marriage, but we
do
meet in cafes, talk on buses, go unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage. Can't we even have each other's pictures?” That seemed to draw the lines clearly enough; as did Rupert's vow that he wanted to be “
damned
intimate” with Ka. But she would have done well to heed the warning that went with it: “I'll try to cut off all the outside, and tell you truths. Have I ever seemed to you honest? That was when I got one layer away. There are nineteen to come – and when they're off what?”
¹⁵

Noel, meanwhile, was not being altogether firm in her position. Having told Rupert to accept that she didn't love him, she went to stay in Oxford with her parents and started reeling him back in: “I shall be dangerously affectionate at times; so please, if you come, be stern with me, because I should hate to find myself drifting into a relationship that I can not maintain with you; last summer was glorious at the time, and now I love it for that; but it was sometimes so dreadful . . . that I feel I shall never want to do quite the same again.” She signed the letter “Love from
Noel.” Rupert duly went up to Oxford, at the end of July, but nothing dangerous followed. He tried again a few days later: they were both going to the Neo-pagan camp in Devon later in August, and Rupert proposed that they meet secretly three days before and walk together cross country to the camp. Noel swatted him away: “That idea won't do; you must wait until I'm 21.”
¹⁶

Meanwhile Elisabeth van Rysselberghe had turned up in England in July, and she would be twenty-one in three months. Rupert arranged to meet her in the Italian Room at the National Gallery, and said he was glad to see her, but in fact he would be glad only if a spell of cohabitation could be arranged. He told Ka later that he felt a “horrible mixture of lust and dislike” for Elisabeth at this time.
¹⁷
She was staying, unhappily, with the family of a clergyman at Teddington. Rupert told her to go and engage rooms at a nearby town, after which he would join her; then he said he was tired and confused and didn't really know what he wanted. It was simple enough, in fact: he wanted to hide her from his other friends, to go away with her for a week of passion when he could find the time, and then be free to move on. Elisabeth loved him, but would not have him on those terms. They met occasionally and secretly until the autumn, when Elisabeth went back to Paris.

Rupert's best chance of getting a committed lover now lay with Ka. The idealistic side of his nature remained faithful to Noel, however awkward it might be actually to carry on any connection with her. From Ka he wanted sensuality, when he was feeling lustful, or somewhere to lay his head, when his strenuous and complex activities brought him to the point of nervous collapse. Since Ka was above all someone who needed to be needed, they were in a way well matched. But neither their friends, nor society at large, nor their own consciences, would allow them to be peaceably together on any such terms.

Still, forming a couple was very much on the program that summer. “I am thinking a good deal, at intervals, about marriage,” Virginia Stephen informed Vanessa in August.
¹⁸
Similar impulses were at work among some of the Bloomsbury men. The Society was at a low ebb in 1911, and its members inclined to seek new horizons. After James Strachey moved to London to work on the
Spectator
in 1909, only three of the younger Apostles were left at Cambridge: Rupert, H.T.J. Norton, and Gerald Shove. From Shove's election in January 1909 nearly two years passed without the election of a new member. There was an uneasy balance
between Fabians and Liberals, and between those who were gay and those who were not. Bill Hubback, Frankie Birrell, and others were looked over, but none aroused general enthusiasm. In November 1910 J.T. Sheppard, Rupert's former tutor at King's, pushed through the election of his “special friend” Cecil Taylor. It was a blatant case of sexual favouritism, like the election of Hobhouse five years before, and had no better result. Taylor's main claim to fame was the unfortunate one of having three balls. There was a tendency in the Society to jeer at him behind his back; he was nicknamed “the squitter-squatter,” and Rupert never took him seriously. It would be fifteen months before the next election.
¹⁹
Though Rupert still attended on Saturday nights and read several papers, the Society at this period claimed only a modest share of his interest and energy.