Fatal Glamour (37 page)

A month before, Rupert had told Jacques that he was reluctant to go back to Germany: “At present I feel more like going to bed or into an asylum for three months. I feel half mad, most of the time.”
³¹
With Phyllis, it was closer to being mad all the way. They swam at the pool, then went into the meadow on the other side:

He seized hold of me by the throat and pressed his thumbs on my Adam's apple, and laid me back on the grass, and said: – “Supposing I were to kill you?” And I smiled up at him and said: – “Supposing you did? Then I should be dead . . .”

He said: – “I want to see you,” and spread me out flat. And he looked at me, and felt me, and then said in an off-hand kind of way: – “You've rather a beautiful body.” And then quite suddenly he bent over and kissed me.

And then we got dressed.
³²

Rupert didn't really want to murder someone, but he wanted to feel what it was like to be a murderer. It was not just the trouble with Ka that sent him over the edge, though that was trouble enough. Bryn was lost to marriage with Hugh; Noel was still indispensable, and still impregnable. And as he was trying to seduce Phyllis at Grantchester, Rupert was finalising plans for a weekend away with Elisabeth van Rysselberghe. Some of this was just a frantic attempt to try every door, in the hope of finding one that wasn't locked. But if Rupert managed to get through a door, he was likely to become more frantic on the other side. The women he chose were all well-brought-up young ladies who cherished their virginity, and whose sentimental idealism left them ill-equipped to handle a flagrant neurotic like Rupert. They thought that sex should wait until marriage, or at least that it should come with the kind of love that would guarantee marriage soon after.

The trip with Elisabeth required careful planning, Rupert told her: “England's a queer place, and I mustn't be seen by my relations spending the weekend with a young woman . . . Dress Englishly . . . have you a ring that looks like a plain gold one? If it has a gold band you can wear that outside and the rest inside – turned round. It's only England!” To avoid another kind of mishap, he would send her a book on contraception.
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Elisabeth came up from Swanley on Friday afternoon, 1 November. Her instructions were to get a taxi at Victoria – telling the driver to go to Hampstead if anyone she knew was in earshot – and meet Rupert in the tea room at Waterloo. From there they would leave to spend the weekend in Devon.
³⁴
Everything went according to plan, except for the bodily joys that Rupert had been looking forward to so eagerly. As had happened with Ka at Neu Strelitz, the sex was incomplete and disappointing. Rupert was angry, or indifferent, or impotent, or simply beastly; he left Elisabeth broken-hearted, though still in love with him. Unhappily for her, it was precisely her love and desire for Rupert that stirred up his old resentments.

As usual, Rupert's instinctive response to difficulties with girls was to make himself unavailable. Once Elisabeth was back in Kent, he left for a month in Berlin, to stay with the Wards and finish his thesis. He told Hugh Dalton that he hadn't written a word, but spent his time making love – unsuccessfully – to female dancers.
³⁵
This would be either Annemarie Ward's sister Clotilde, or friends of hers. Another escape from the thesis was to meet T.E. Hulme at the station, on 22 November, and spend several days showing him around Berlin. Hulme had come because of a curious predicament, which he kept secret from Rupert and from everyone else. He had been the house guest of a wealthy Fabian called Wilson Carr and started an intrigue with his daughter Joan, who was a sixteen-year-old prefect at Roedean. Hulme was extremely keen on sex: not just doing it, but also talking or writing about it. He drew Joan into a correspondence where he taught her all the four-letter words, and the actions that went with them. Although he failed to actually seduce Joan, some of the correspondence fell into her father's hands. He had his solicitors send Hulme a stern warning about his “letter of an unspeakably disgusting character.” Hulme promised that he would go to Germany as soon as he finished a translation he was working on, and would have no further contact with Joan. This was not enough for Wilson Carr, who wrote to the master of St John's College, Cambridge, where Hulme had
just been re-admitted (he had been sent down in 1904 for riotous behaviour and immorality).
³⁶
That ended Hulme's second attempt to get a Cambridge degree. The price of his escape from prosecution was a promise to stay in Germany for at least a year. He actually stayed in Berlin for six months and returned to England in mid-May 1913, just before Rupert would leave for the United States.

Like Rupert, Hulme had a considerable stake in German culture (which did not affect his eagerness to fight as soon as the war began). Rupert described Hulme as “an amiable creature,” but they remained acquaintances rather than friends.
³⁷
For Hulme, Rupert was too much the despised “Romantic” type, both poetically and personally. Hulme's ideals of Classicism, Toryism, and “dry hardness” could not have been Rupert's cup of tea. His coarse ideas about relations with women would not have helped either. Still, it was a conversation in the street with Hulme that inspired one of Rupert's most powerful but least typical poems, “The Night Journey.”
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The blind purposefulness of a night train stands for a man's half-conscious encounter with his fate:

Sure as a flood, smooth as a vast wind blowing;

And, gathering power and godhead as he goes,

Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,

Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows.

Sweep into darkness, triumphing to his goal,

Out of the fire, out of the little room! . . .

–There is an end appointed, O my soul!

The deep fatalism of this vision may connect with Rupert's work on the tragedies of Webster and other Jacobean dramatists, which he discussed with Hulme. Beyond that, the weak foundations of his personal identity left him vulnerable to external powers – including, of course, those of August 1914.

Rupert did finish his thesis in Berlin, and came back to submit it at King's in mid-December. If he succeeded this time, he would have a respectable position in the world; that might soften his mother's anxiety about whether he could recover from his collapse at the beginning of the year. The immediate success of
Georgian Poetry
also boosted his morale. His reputation was growing, and the anthologies would bring a steady flow of cash to their
contributors. Still, Rupert felt the need for a radical break with everything he had been doing for the past two years. As soon as the Christmas holidays were over at Rugby he went off to spend ten days with the Cornfords in Cornwall, and take stock of his prospects for 1913.

Frances was a firm believer in resolution by separation and a complete change of environment. Rupert and Ka had become a toxic pair, and any contact between them could only increase their pain. While Rupert was with the Cornfords at the Lizard, Ka finally left for Berlin to stay with Dudley and Annemarie. She would go on to St Petersburg, and not return to England until the summer. Absence rarely did much to soothe Rupert's amorous turmoil, and he kept skirmishing with Noel by letter, worrying about her safety in a half-mad way: “I say, there's one thing . . . So many people get kidnapped nowadays: and you're always drifting about alone. Please, I'm perfectly serious – be careful . . . Don't ever, on any pretext, go off with people you don't know, however well authenticated, or get into cabs – it's impossible to be too careful. I demand this.”
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He was not giving up his obsessions with dangers to Ka and Noel, and he was building up new ones about pre-emptive strikes against people he disagreed with. His talk to the Society in October had been a scattered attack against people he considered evil. In February 1913, talking to The Heretics in Cambridge, he concentrated his fire on the feminists who were upsetting the natural order between men and women.
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There was little distinction between his intellectual opposition to feminism and his frustration with the two women he was trying to get into bed – Phyllis and Elisabeth. The only real cure for that trouble was to remove himself from temptation.

When Rupert came back to Eddie's from Cornwall he knew that he would be leaving for the United States some time before the year was out. He brought with him a poem, “The Funeral of Youth,” that was an epitaph for his days of innocence. His inspiration came from Hardy's “God's Funeral,” which had been published in the
Fortnightly Review
two years before. Both poems describe a line of symbolic mourners following a coffin; but Hardy's is a solemn meditation on the death of belief, Rupert's a cynical jest at his own expense. Everything that once gave him joy has gone: “
Laughter
 . . . 
Pride
 . . . 
Love
 . . . [and]
Contentment
, who had known
Youth
as a child / And never seen him since.”

There seemed to be little reason for discontent in the first two months of 1913.
Georgian Poetry
was flying off the shelves, and likely to have a
sequel.
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Eddie's social campaign on Rupert's behalf reached every corner of fashionable London. At the Russian Ballet's
Les Sylphides
, Rupert was introduced both to the late King Edward's Queen, Alexandra, and to his mistress, Mrs Keppel.
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Rupert had already met Hardy at Cambridge; now Eddie brought in A.E. Housman and Yeats, who came up with the delirious judgment that Rupert was “the handsomest man in England.”

Rubbing shoulders with literary giants was pleasing, even if Rupert was never going to be in their league. But the other fruits of Eddie's snobbery helped to widen the breach between Rupert and his earlier friends. The Apostles, Bloomsbury, even the Neo-pagans, still felt some loyalty to the Cambridge tradition of “plain living and high thinking.” They held themselves superior to the aristocratic and socialite circles to which Rupert was transferring his allegiance. His new fondness for queens and duchesses struck them as both a betrayal and a degeneration. His shift to aggressively conventional views on patriotism and personal relations confirmed their feeling that he was no longer “one of us” but “one of them.”

The only Neo-pagans that Rupert was now seeing regularly were Jacques and Gwen at Royston and Frances in Cambridge (where her husband was a fellow of Trinity). He felt safer with married people, if not safe about getting married himself. Rather, he was trying to get sex in a less official way, meeting regularly with both Phyllis and Elisabeth. When he was alone during the day at Eddie's, Phyllis was free to visit, hoping to pick up where they had left off in October: “We discovered that we wanted to see one another again with nothing on . . . we gently ran our hands over one another.”
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Neither of them, however, was ready to go further. Rupert's hesitation may have been connected to fallout from his weekend with Elisabeth. He wrote to her on Christmas Day from Rugby: “I did you wrong. I'm sorry. I was very tired those days; and you made me very angry . . . I am a beast.”
⁴⁴

By Christmas there was yet another turn of the wheel. Four days after his failed confrontation with Noel on 17 September, Rupert went to the first night of
The Winter's Tale
at the Savoy theatre. Harley Granville-Barker was the director and the matinée idol Harry Ainley played the jealous
king, Leontes. Cathleen Nesbitt, an unknown young actress from Ulster, had auditioned for a small part and then been given the lead when Granville-Barker became dissatisfied with his original Perdita. At twenty-three, Cathleen became a star overnight. She charmed audiences as the shepherdess who was really a king's daughter; and she charmed Rupert with her artless femininity. After his string of mishaps with the demi-virgins of 1912, infatuation with a real virgin was the obvious antidote.

Cathleen's virginity was already under siege when Rupert met her. Harry Ainley was only nine years older, but forceful enough to be credible playing her father. He set about wooing Cathleen and she fell in love with him, while drawing the line against actually going to bed. Before long she learned that her caution was well advised. Ainley had a mistress who was in a nursing home with a difficult pregnancy; he also had a wife, who showed up at Cathleen's dressing room and accused her of being pregnant with Ainley's child. By the time of this confrontation, Cathleen had moved on to her next part, as a parlourmaid made pregnant by her master's son.
⁴⁵
Life and art were getting confused.

Eddie Marsh was an avid theatregoer, with a wide acquaintance among actors. He invited Cathleen to dinner on 20 December so that Rupert could meet her. Cathleen accepted because she wanted to meet Gilbert Cannan, a young playwright and novelist who was currently in the limelight. He was married – to the former wife of J.M. Barrie – though he came alone to Eddie's. To stir the pot, Harry Ainley came too. Eddie enjoyed the company of glamorous or aristocratic women, but that was as far as it went. He once asked a friend, “Why is it harder to fall in love with women the more real they are?” He could fall in love with women in novels, or famous women of the past, “next with an actress in a part and hardest of all with actual women in real life.”
⁴⁶
Perhaps he felt that Cathleen was not real enough to threaten his closeness to Rupert.

Rupert and Cathleen did manage to fall in love, though on both sides it was largely a passion for appearances. He told her she was “incredibly, inordinately, devastatingly, immortally, calamitously, hearteningly, adorably beautiful.” But their admiration never brought them to sexual union, as Cathleen explained (and there is no reason to doubt her), “When we spent the night at a country inn we had separate rooms. He would come in and sit on the edge of my bed and talk almost until dawn,
but strange as it may seem to anyone of this generation, we never actually became lovers in the sense that he ‘seduced' me, as the contemporary phrase would have it. We both had very serious views on marriage and we both wanted to be very sure that we would have a good one.”
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