Fatal Glamour (31 page)

No sooner had Rupert gone off to Rye with James than he again started to play the ardent and repentant lover:

There are two newly-married couples. The husbands have both retired, just now (9.0). How it brings the old days back, eh.

Have they got Irrigators? Are they using Oatine? The dears! . . . I feel mentally better for being beastly to you. I'm loving you extraordinarily . . . Oh my God, I
want
you so tonight. Your nakedness and beauty – your mouth and breasts and cunt. – Shall I turn in a frenzy and rape James in the night? I'd burn you like a fire if I could get hold of you.
¹⁹

Next day came more of the same, coupled with the demand that “You'd better marry me before we leave England.” But Ka was asked to reply
“chez Noel” at Limpsfield. “I'd like to get rid of that woman,” Rupert told her, “before I came into you. I'll crawl in for comfort – the old game! I'm sick about Noel. I, even I, find my theories true – she gets hold of one – oh, I know what I'm doing, it's all right!”
²⁰

Caught in his eternal balancing act, Rupert decided to see Ka in London on Monday afternoon before taking the train to Limpsfield that night. In the meantime, however, she had been exposed to the full blast of Gwen's and Jacques's disapproval. Seeing Rupert again was more than she could face. She begged off the rendezvous, saying she was too tired, and would stay at her sister's rather than go down to her cottage in Woking. On the train that was taking him to see Noel and Bryn, Rupert erupted again:

Are you wanting to make me wild before I see Noel, lest should be too nice to her? or do you want to get rid of me by killing me – can't you do it quicker easier ways?

I'm going to do the hardest and one of the worst things ever done tomorrow. A thing you hardly understand. And all the time I, the filthied blasphemous I, will be agonizing about you.

Wire that all's right, that you're in Woking.

Gwen Jacques and a thousand more yourself me decency love honour good fineness cleanness truth – : you'd sacrifice them on your lust – and such lust – I'm frantic. I shall see you thank God or I'll kill myself – on Wednesday.
²¹

Rupert was speaking in code because he could not bear to speak directly. When he forbade Ka to tire herself, what he meant was that she must stay away from London, and particularly from those parts of it where she might encounter Henry. His own “blasphemy” lay in renouncing the chaste Noel for the fallen Ka. At Limpsfield he was struck by how supportive and calm Noel was, given his unexplained neglect of her over the past several months. Having stayed an extra day at Limpsfield, Rupert turned up at Woking on Thursday, 4 April for a much less happy meeting. The passionate scenes he had imagined at Rye fizzled out as soon as they were face to face. “I'm going to leave Ka alone,” Rupert reported to Jacques, “till she's rested and ready for Germany. I found her (I came yesterday) pretty bad. To rest, as far as she will, is the best thing for her: (and for me). She sees – anyhow – what other people
think.”
²²
What other people thought, evidently, was that Ka and Rupert should marry; and Rupert told Jacques that he had set himself a deadline to do just that by 10 May, the day before Dudley Ward and Annemarie von der Planitz were due to wed.

In the week after he left Bilton Road at the end of March Rupert saw all of his closest friends, decided that he and Ka should get married, and hinted in almost every letter he wrote that he planned to kill himself – and perhaps others. That would mean a Mayerling scenario, where in 1889 Grand Duke Rudolf of Austria had killed his mistress, Marie Vet-sera, and then himself. Behind these wild words was a new crisis: Rupert was afraid that Ka was pregnant. When James gave him directions for contraception the previous April, in Munich, he had told him (wrongly, of course) that the safest time for intercourse was halfway between periods. Rupert's consummation with Ka was probably delayed accordingly, until 17 February 1912, when they had been in Munich for two weeks. Her period was due at the end of the month, and by the middle of March Rupert was trying to reassure her: “Do I see you've been fretting over the non appearance of your month,
allerschuhteruste?
I suppose it was my fault, upsetting your damn inside. But I sort of think you've been half-fearing we'd mismanaged the machine, and that your well-known fecundity had been set off.” From Rye, on 30 March, Rupert noted that she must be “at, or nearly at” her period – presumably the second one due after they had gone to bed.
²³
Then, the letters say nothing more. But there is no reason to doubt Cathleen Nesbitt's report: that Ka had a “still-born” child, and Rupert felt very guilty about it.
²⁴
She might have got pregnant when she was with Rupert near Berlin at the end of May but February seems more consistent with the surviving evidence. After Ka went to stay with Virginia Stephen at the end of April, Virginia wrote to her: “I've heard about every household between this and Newhaven now, and I regret to say that the proportion of illegitimate children is quite amazing . . . So you see, gossip is not confined to the Ap . . . les [Apostles] and their satellites.”
²⁵
This might suggest that Ka had confided in Virginia about her pregnancy.

If he had the threat of becoming a father hanging over him, one can understand better why Rupert's actions, in his remaining two weeks in
England, were so frantic. He could not go back to Ka, and would not go back to his mother. Luckily, the faithful James stepped in once again. After the weekend at Rye (where they rang Henry James's doorbell, without reply), James took him back to Mrs Primmer's at Bank. She was “the best cook in England,” Rupert said, which would help his “stuffing” cure. But his main reason for going must have been to revive memories of his secret rendezvous with Noel and Margery, three years before. That was Easter 1909; now he had come back to spend Easter in the forest again. The contrast between past and present, however, made him flatly suicidal. “It is thought by those who know me best (viz, myself),” he wrote, “that I shall die. Nor do I greatly want to live.”
²⁶

Two months later, Rupert told James that he had decided “on April xth” to buy a revolver, but had found that in England it was not easy to get one. Under the Pistols Act of 1903, to purchase a handgun a licence was required, but they could be provided at a Post Office. It was an offence to sell a handgun to someone of “unsound mind,” and perhaps Rupert gave that impression.
²⁷
He might have made his vain search in Brockenhurst, after putting James on the London train on Tuesday the 9th. He was all alone, and had no idea of where he might go next. He had asked Bryn to come and look after him, but she was off climbing in Wales with the Hubbacks and Hugh Popham. What better way to die, after all, than to shoot himself in some glade where he had walked on a spring morning with Noel, in the days of his innocence three years before?

Lacking the necessary weapon, however, he had to go on living for a while. The next morning, a letter came from Bryn and he went off to Brockenhurst again, waiting several hours for her train. On arrival, she found that Rupert had made no explanation to Mrs Primmer about a single young lady coming to join him. But no objections were made, so they had four days in the forest together. On the rebound from killing himself – on the rebound from everything that had happened in the past year – Rupert now fell in love with Bryn. “For three whole months,” he told her later, “I'd been infinitely wretched and ill, wretcheder than I'd thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped completely away, and – oh! how lovely Bank was! – I suppose I should
never
be able to make you see what beauty is to me, – physical beauty – , just even the
seeing
it, in spite of all the hungers that come.”
²⁸
Bryn threw Rupert into a rapture by showing up in the nick of time, and by giving him kindly affection. It is unlikely that this included anything more than a sisterly kiss
or a few melting looks. Rupert wanted to make love to
her
, certainly, but he was too shy to make his feelings or desires clear, and Bryn surely would not have yielded to them anyway. She cared for Rupert, and felt responsible for him when she was with him. But she was thinking more and more about marriage, and Rupert was obviously too shattered to make a proper husband for anyone.

Why had they never made a couple in better days? More glamorous than Ka, more accessible than Noel, Bryn would seem to be a perfect match for Rupert. At the beginning, they were perhaps too alike to make a pair: too sought-after for their looks, too backward in finding their own path in life. And Bryn had no academic pretensions, so that Rupert compulsively sneered, behind her back, at her lack of brains. When he fell in love with Noel, Bryn may have been mildly jealous; but she and Noel were basically a close and loyal pair, and Bryn never wanted to cut her sisters out. Rupert, however, saw Bryn as a last-minute saviour from his troubles, and he was clearly not restrained by the consideration that his honour was already engaged – and over-engaged – to Ka and Noel.

Rupert and Bryn left the forest together on Sunday the 14th for London, where they had tea with Virginia Stephen at Brunswick Square. She reported to Ka that Rupert was “slightly Byronic” (deadly modifier!) and that Bryn “has a glass eye – one can imagine her wiping it bright in the morning with a duster.”
²⁹
The eye was not literally glass, of course, but the image catches Bryn's shiny facade. After tea, Rupert and Bryn went down to Limpsfield to spend a few more days together. Since Noel was there too, his penchant for playing a double game around the dinner table must have been satisfied to the full.

On Thursday, his last day at Limpsfield, Rupert got a letter from Ka saying that she no longer wanted to go to Germany with him. His letters had become fewer and more distant, he was spending all his time with the Oliviers, and there was no indication that his moods had settled down. Unfortunately, Ka's refusal made them all the worse:

I wonder why you want me to kill you now rather than later.

Isn't it rather insolent of you, when I've rather resolutely gone away to get well
for
Germany, to make the beginnings of my success an excuse for trying to shirk Germany? . . .

“Not the right and only thing” “not absolutely free” . . . “it
may bring the most awful misery” are your funny little reservations and irrelevancies . . .

My dear, you don't seem to recognise where we are. I suppose it's because you have had no pain worth calling pain. You twixt sentimentality and weakness –
I
don't know – played with mud. It raised a storm, that – you were startled – in the end tossed
you
a bit. At that you shrink in “quietness” and “peace,” hastily, and demand a four month's respite. Things may have blown over by then. Oh Child, it won't do. You
must
realise that we're
en route
. You can't back out because you're tired or a little bruised.
³⁰

The most Rupert would concede was that they might have a week or two of celibacy when they first met in Berlin. Before they could thrash it out, a Hardyesque chain of errors intervened: one of Rupert's letters arrived at Woking after Ka had left for London, another was confiscated by her sister Hester. When Rupert came to London on Thursday evening, ready to confront her, he found no message at his club, while Ka thought he was cutting her because of her misgivings about Germany. On Friday she spotted him on a passing bus and they met later in Trafalgar Square, where Ka “collapsed and had to lean behind a lion, against Lord Nelson's pediment, till the crying was over. I think she thought I'd suddenly decided not to bother about her at all: and it brought her round with a jerk.”
³¹
She had been bullied, against her better judgment, into going on a trip that she feared would end disastrously for her – which it did.

While Rupert was pressing Ka to go to Germany, the Oliviers and James were pressing him to stay at home. Ignorant of the real reason, they could not understand why he was setting off for an indefinite stay in the Prussian capital. Noel told James that she and her sisters felt a racial distrust of Germany. They feared to meet a fat and loud-voiced Rupert when he came back. They got him to miss his train on Friday and go to Harry Lauder instead. Bryn, who had left the party, weighed in with a “lovely hurried note in pencil, saying I must stop in England, on principle, because it was my Duty as an English Poet.” After such an appeal, what could Rupert do but propose to her?

I, at 1.30 in the morning, and very drunk, wrote a
very
long letter, which said “My dearest, your letter would – if aught could – have saved me from making a hole in the water.
Not
, heart,
because of the
general
grounds for living you advance, but (ah God), because your lips (I'm trembling) are like a rosebud, and they curve distractingly. I love you so . . .”

Oh, I was young and mad.
³²

This was how Rupert described the letter to James, but the letter he wrote was nothing like a proposal. “Your letter was incredibly nice to get,” he actually replied to Bryn. “If anything could have turned me North instead of South East, it would. But I'm going. It's the will of God.” He was drunk enough to get the bearings of Limpsfield and Berlin reversed, and to end with endearments – though not so fulsome as the ones he invented for James:

Your letter (by the way, you
must
not address me as “R.”: it's disgusting) was full of Brynnisms – I suppose you wouldn't notice it. I wept over it a little, quietly, in one of these black, shiny armchairs, this afternoon. I kiss you for it.