THE LIFE
AND DEATH
OF
RADCLYFFE HALL

by
Una, Lady Troubridge

Foreword

A number of people have asked me to write all that I know of John, of her life both before and since I shared it. They have warned me that if I die leaving it unwritten many things that her readers will want to know, will have the right to know, about a writer of her talent, will be buried with me.

I have hesitated: an expurgated biography is of no value to anyone, an idealized biography would be an insult to her honesty and sincerity, but a perfectly truthful biography must of necessity involve others and include indiscretions of which she, with her high code of honour, might disapprove. But after all, she herself always dwelt of choice in the palace of truth, where I dwelt with her, and I have decided, so far as in me lies, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As I am no scribe, except that I am much addicted to letter-writing, I have decided to write all I know of John in the form of a long letter addressed to those who will read it. Here then is 'The Life and Death of Radclyffe Hall'....

I will be full, oh, full of praise
For each and every nation.
I'll bless the Lord and all His ways,
And magnify Him all my days
As part of His Creation.
I'll have a band, a mighty band,
And no more idle strumming
When I go out to Jericho,
Across the plains to Jericho,
In the good time that's coming!

I will be bold and unafraid
And great with high endeavour;
And all the trumpets men have made,
And all the drums that men have played,
They shall be mine for ever.
There'll be a noise, a mighty noise
Of bugling and drumming
When I go out to Jericho,
Across the plains to Jericho,
In the good time that's coming!

So I'll be silent for a while,
And keep my soul from doubting.
There shall not be so long a mile
But I will foot it with a smile,
For some day I'll be shouting.
There'll be a shout, a mighty shout
To set the planets humming
When I go into Jericho,
Between the gates of Jericho,
In the good time that's coming!

I Suppose I ought to begin this narrative with some account of John's origins and forebears, but I have no intention, for the present at any rate, of delving among records and pedigrees. For the purpose of these memories it seems to me sufficient to give a general idea of the very mixed strains that went to her making and to mention those few ancestors who are of general interest, even such as are only collaterally involved.

Her family crest, the Talbot's head, makes its first appearance, so far as I know, in the churchyard of Stratford-on-Avon, on the tomb of Dr. John Hall, who lived at the beautiful half-timbered house, 'Hall's Croft', in that town and married Susanna, daughter of William Shakespeare. They had, however, no male issue, and the descent is not in the direct line. Of the Halls, the earliest portrait known to me is that of the Reverend Samuel Hall who was, I believe, rather a remarkable man and was tutor to De Quincey of Opium Eater Fame. I possess also a portrait of his son, John Hall, a fair gentleman with handsome, clear-cut features and a fierce expression whose resemblance to his great-grand-daughter in a bad temper is quite remarkable! He was the father of Dr. Charles Radclyffe-Hall, whose portrait is also in my possession.

John Hall's mother was Sarah Radclyffe and, for reasons unknown to me but probably connected with some inheritance, he assumed her surname in addition to his own. Her portrait (family tradition called it a Lely which, though a very fine picture, it certainly is not. In my opinion it is suggestive of Allan Ramsay) is of interest, apart from its artistic merit, as it was she who brought into John's bloodstream that of the Earls of Derwentwater, of the two Radclyffes who were beheaded for their support of James and of Charles Edward Stuart, and who in their turn were descended from Charles II, through the actress Moll Davis. One of these Earls of Derwentwater was not only a Jacobite patriot, but a poet and mystic. He was an ardent Catholic; miracles were said to have occurred at his tomb. There was even talk of a process for canonization and, more popularly, his name became associated with a natural phenomenon occurring over Derwentwater and known as the 'Derwentwater lights'. This, I think, exhausts practically all that I know ofjohn's paternal descent until we come to her grandfather. I possess other pictures and some miniatures and silhouettes: portraits of John Hall's wife and sister-in-law, a rather fine painting of an elderly, jollylookiiig divine in bands and a wig like Dr. Johnson's, known to John only as 'Uncle Shrigley', but he must have been at least a three times 'great' uncle. In any case I know of nothing connected with these people that throws any light upon the character and career of their last descendant; peace be to their ashes....

On her mother's side she was American, her mother being Mary Jane Diehl of Philadelphia. Of her forebears I know very little beyond the fact that they hailed partly from Dutch emigrant stock (hence the name Diehl), were connected with Livingstones, of Scottish origin (but this I vaguely fancy was only by recent marriage) and, a detail "wheich John always related with jeering laughter, were among the legion that claimed to have in their veins the blood of Pocahontas!

In this last connexion, however, there is something not uninteresting to be said. In spite of her blue eyes and fair colouring, there was about the construction of John's face and features something distinctly reminiscent of the North American Indian, and on one occasion when I persuaded her to colour her skin and go to a fancy-dress party in the costume of a brave, wearing the war bonnet, the effect was very surprising. After a good deal of protest she consented to being photographed in the costume and the photograph furnishes, I think, strong evidence in favour of my statement. Since her death, seeing for the first time photographs of the North American half-breed, Grey Owl, it struck me at once that he might have easily passed as herbrother! In any case, whether she had a distant Indian strain or not, there was plenty of Celtic blood in her maternal ancestry to account for her creative imagination. There was even some Welsh blood, she told me, though I don't know how or where that came in. And so she was a compound of many races: North Country English, American, Scottish, Dutch, Welsh and, if we admit of legend and delve into history, American Indian via Pocahontas and French and Italian via Charles II!

John's own father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, was the only son of Dr. Charles Radclyffe-Hall, himself a son of the fiercelooking John Hall and an eminent physician who specialized in tuberculosis and (as we would now think, most unwisely) popularized Torquay as a resort for consumption. Beyond the fact that Dr. Radclyffe-Hall was an intimate friend of Bulwer Lytton, I know very little about him except that he lost, soon after his marriage, a beautiful step-daughter whom he had loved so devotedly that he mourned her for the rest of his life. He seems to have compelled his household to share this mourning, and to have banished from his home all normal frivolities; he certainly would appear, like his granddaughter, to have had deep affections.

Of her father, John knew a little by hearsay and even less by personal memory, her mother having divorced him when she, John, was only three years old. She has told me that in her opinion the enforced gloom of his home and undue severity on the part of his father must have contributed to his early-developed insubordination and subsequent dissipation. His ex-tutor, by name Begley, was John's chief informant regarding her father when she grew to maturity and I think the picture was further filled in by her mother's implacable and indelible animosity.

John learned and told me that her father's childhood and adolescence were punctuated by scenes and disagreement with his father. Mr. Begley, however, had loved him dearly, and a personality by no means unlovable emerges from his narrative.

Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall (as I know by photographs which show a very strong resemblance to his daughter) was extremely handsome. Blue-eyed, fair, not tall but wellbuilt, with beautiful hands and feet. He adored animals, was a fine horseman and was always surrounded by dogs, especially poodles, which he is said to have trained to an almost incredible degree of understanding and behaviour. He claimed that one of his poodles, in an emergency, could and did make use of a chamber pot! - and there is a suggestion here that he had a sense of humour. He also loved the sea and in later life lived much aboard a small yacht. He had some talent for both music and painting, but seems to have lacked industry or perseverance in any direction. Such of his paintings as I have seen were definitely poor in quality, and, at any rate after his father's death, he was a rich man and earning was no inducement to industry. So far as John knew he never showed any talent for writing, either in prose or verse, and there is no evidence of such talent having existed in any of her forebears.

He seems to have scrambled through Eton and Oxford. I think he was at St. John's - and there is a record of his reading for the Bar - he told Begley that the 'dinners' gave him indigestion. He finally broke with his father and left Torquay in circumstances connected with a scandalous liaison with a fisherman's daughter. John knew her name and told it to me, but I have forgotten it, which is perhaps just as well! He certainly visited Torquay on at least one subsequent occasion. Having joined a theatrical touring company he arranged to make his appearance in his natal city as Charles Surface in 'The School for Scandal', an exploit, according to Begley, devised with the deliberate intention of enraging his father and creating a scandal in Torquay for that eminently conventional and respectable specialist. I possess a very attractive cabinet photograph of Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall in this role.

John gathered, also from Begley, that he was of a markedly moody nature, subject to extreme variations of high spirits and depression, and that when he became a victim of melancholy he would either go off to his yacht and the sea that he loved, or even more often set out alone on a riding tour, with no definite goal, putting himself and his horse up at any country inn where accommodation was available, when rest became imperative for man and beast, and disappearing until such time as his mood passed and he chose to be heard of again.

His temper is said to have been quite uncontrollably violent (a temper inherited by his daughter who, however, learned to control it), and one of Begley's anecdotes related to his throwing a table-knife at a young woman who was temporarily under his 'protection' and who had disagreed with him in the course of a meal. The knife, fortunately, only pinned a fold of her dress to her chair.

And there the curtain - so far as my memory serves - comes down on the anecdotes related by Begley concerning his friend and pupil, 'Rat'. No; there is one more glimpse: a leg of mutton that, being either under- or over-cooked, failed to give satisfaction and was thrown down the kitchen stairs at the cook's head...

As for John's personal memories of this author of her being, they are fragmentary and one of them at least is not, I think, to his credit as the father of an only and very delicate child. She remembers him, when she was very small, coming on horseback to see her at the house where she lived with her mother and her maternal grandmother, and his horse being held outside the door. Very clearly, being even at that age passionately interested in horses, she remembers the promise of a cream-coloured pony for which she waited and waited and waited, and which never materialized.

Subsequent meetings (her grandmother would periodically take her to see him) seem to have left little or no impression until the last time she saw him, when she was eighteen years of age, on the eve of his departure for Cannes where he fell ill and was brought back to England in a dying condition. She told me that when she saw him he was emaciated and looked terribly ill and that she remarked on this and upon his shattering cough. He replied that it was only his asthma and that it would improve when he got to the Riviera. He also remarked that he had not realized that he had such a good-looking daughter, seemed moved to a measure of interest and affection and told her he intended making a new will in which he would bequeath to her that part of his estate that was not already entailed upon her. He inquired about her studies and her aims in life and urged her to stick to one thing and not to be 'a Jack-o£-all-trades as I have been' ...

She felt affectionate and tearful, and was worried about his obvious depression and ill health. She never saw him again.

On the arrival of his yacht at Cannes, accompanied by his valet and his 'innamorata' of the moment, he was taken ashore desperately ill and the doctor when summoned informed these rather inadequate attendants that if they wished him to die in his own country no time must be lost. He was still alive when he reached England but died at the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover almost immediately after his arrival...John said, of tuberculosis, but there is no evidence of the fact so far as I know and it may have been pneumonia as something was said of a bitterly cold wind at Cannes ... on the other hand, many years later, John's Italian doctors, investigating the original cause of the acute pulmonary tuberculosis from which she had suffered in adolescence, advanced the hypothesis that she might have taken the infection during that final visit to her father.

The new will had not been made, but the old one revealed a bequest for the benefit of a natural child, the daughter of a woman in humble circumstances: this child received an adequate income which one feels represented some sense of responsibility.

Her mother... Here the narrative could be lengthy, the data are only too abundant but they are not pleasant writing or reading. She had been married before, in America, and John's father was her second husband. I have always felt that the dissipated, irresponsible and neglectful 'Rat' was one hundred per cent the better parent.

At the age of three John was handed over unconditionally (with a very large annual allowance for maintenance and education) to a technically blameless mother who had not wanted a child (especially by a man whom she, after a brief infatuation, had grown to detest), and who had vainly tried every expedient to defeat gestation. John was her second child; an earlier baby, a girl named Florence, had died in infancy. From the hour of birth she disliked her second daughter, and later would frequently remark distastefully to the girl herself upon her resemblances to her father: 'Your hands are just like Radclyffe's'; 'You're the image of your father'... In the mother there was a violence of temper equal to that of the father, but unaccompanied by intellect or talent of any description. A brainless, vain, selfish woman, possessed of an unlimited obstinacy and of a certain shrewdness in compassing her aims. It is not pleasant to think of her as the guardian of an ailing and intensely sensitive child, whose only protection was an ageing grandmother who loved her but was too weak and too much intimidated by bullying and by actual violence, to protect her. An early champion, her nurse, known and beloved as 'M'Nana' was very soon dealt with by Mrs. Radclyffe-Hall. This nurse, finding on the child's body the marks of cruel beatings, protested that it was one thing to punish a child but a scandal to reduce it to such a condition... and was summarily dismissed. This story rests, I imagine, partly upon the child's own memory of beatings administered in accesses of fury and partly upon what John learned kter from her grandmother to whom she afforded a refuge when she herself, on coming of age, left her mother's house.

Other memories: a governess known as 'Nottie' who seems to have been quite kind. A pug, her first dog, called Joey, whom she loved and plagued and who loved her but never hesitated to bite her when annoyed. A poodle called Adolfe who was run over. An Airedale, Yoi, who seems to have survived quite a long time and who was terribly seasick on a steamer trip from Ilfracombe to Lynton ... always animals, always beloved, and in that connection another miserable little incident.

The child, about eleven years old, travelling now with Nottie, with her mother and with her mother's singingmaster and third husband, Alberto Visetti, and taking with them the child's adored canary, Pippin, cherished and finger-tame. At some hotel in Belgium, Signor Visetti suddenly decided that the canary and its cage were an encumbrance and decreed that the bird must be given to one of the waiters in the hotel... It would seem that neither mother, grandmother nor governess had the imagination or the pluck to oppose this decree, and so the party moved on, minus the canary. The child, suffering by that time from asthma that kept her sitting up awake night after night, and precluded by day from all playing or exercise, had plenty of time in which to meditate upon the possible vicissitudes of her beloved canary in unknown hands.... To the end of her days she never forgot the misery of leaving the canary unprotected among strangers. Even at that early age, such an incident struck at one of her most deeply-rooted instincts: that of protection towards anything weak or helpless... it grew to be in her case an all-pervading passion. And in this conjunction comes a memory connected with her grandmother from whom she herself learned of it. That as a very little girl indeed when crossing London streets she would put.her hand on the elderly lady's arm and say: 'Hold on to me, granny, and I'll take you across. Don't be afraid...'

John was in her thirties when I got to know her first, and I in my twenties, sufficiently callous easily to lose patience and to say to her on one occasion: 'The trouble with you is that you'e got protection mania...' It was a mania that grew with the years, thank God, and flowered in every book she wrote and in her every thought and act to man and beast.

There is a pathetic photograph of her which I have often examined in the past. A faded shiny carte-de-visite obviously taken to exploit the 'paternal' affection of Alberto Visetti. John, a very thin, bony little girl of about ten, very unbecomingly dressed and with all the appearance of an unloved child, standing awkwardly beside the seated Visetti, already getting rather portly, the epitome of smug self-satisfaction and conceit.

His marriage to her mother, even apart from such incidents as I have already mentioned, was a disastrous affair for John... indeed the disadvantages latent in her mother's acquaintance with him began before their marriage took place. Presumably because in those days her family were not likely to view the courtship of her singing master with a favourable eye, Mrs. Radclyffe-Hall decided that it should be conducted abroad. I believe there was also some question of bringing a hesitating suitor to the point by an apparent flight. In any case, she decided to move to Belgium and she settled in Bruges, with a child who had already had double pneumonia once and who proceeded to have it again, besides being a martyr to bronchial asthma. I think there is little doubt that this enforced residence in the Low Countries was a factor in the development of the lung trouble which attacked her later, was never properly diagnosed or treated and which left her lungs in so ravaged a condition. Children and young people are marvellously uncomplaining. They accept philosophically such treatment as is meted out to them. But many years afterwards, when an X-ray of the lungs revealed the damage, and close questioning elicited memories of the asthma, of very exhausting coughing, or periods of general illness, of pneumonia, pleurisy and so forth, I remember Professor Lapiccirella of Florence saying to me: 'It is a mystery that she ever recovered and lived. By all ordinary reckoning she should have died. She must very often have felt terribly ill!'

  

The story of her mother's married life with Visetti is a trivial and a rather sordid one. After the marriage they settled down with Mrs. Visetti's mother in a large house in Earl's Court where Visetti pursued - very successfully - his profession as a singing-teacher; actually as professor of singing attached to the Royal College of Music, and he and his wife proceeded to spend on their own social aspirations and amenities the greater part of the income received from the Radclyfie-Hall trust for the maintenance and education of the child who was sole heir to the estate. 'Nottie', an amiable but I suspect very inexpensive governess, was succeeded by day schools in the neighbourhood, the best of which seems to have been one kept by a Miss Coles, which had numbered among its earlier pupils Edy Craig and the Vanbrugh sisters, Violet and Irene. A short period of attending King's College was followed by a year in Dresden at a pension where the girls were allowed one bath a week ... that completed John's 'education'....

Her home life was passed among the incessant and violent quarrelling of her mother and stepfather and her companions were his pupils who in some cases boarded in the house. Very early in life she herself showed remarkable musical capacity and a genuine talent for improvisation and composition, but entirely without the necessary elements of industry and perseverance. At some stage of her adolescence, Nikisch, the great German conductor, was her stepfather's guest and listened to her performance on the piano. He was genuinely impressed by the originality of her talent and asked her to put everything else aside, come to Germany and study composition as his pupil. He also elicited that she could not read a note of music and did not know in what key she was playing... she utterly refused to contemplate a life of hard work and application and that was that...

She had composed verses ever since her earliest childhood, and quite soon had begun to do so (as she invariably did in her maturer years) at the piano, fitting them to her own settings so that words and music came to birth simultaneously. The words were written down and many of them were subsequently published. The settings remained only in her memory, she being incapable of transcribing them, and were usually forgotten. I would sometimes get really angry with her when I found that some original and delightful little tune that had greatly pleased me had casually wandered out of her mind to the land of lost music.

Once I got hold of a young musician, an Indian, and got him to listen to her playing and to transcribe the settings chord by chord. One of them, 'The Last Cuckoo', was published by Chappel and Company, and sung by a number of well-known singers ... but all this was of course merely the versatility that had been her father's undoing and against which he had warned her. Throughout her adolescence and her maturity until the age of thirty-four, she was idle, bone idle, spending her days, as soon as she became mistress of her own time, in pleasure; in hunting, travelling, writing an occasional poem, in entertaining and feeing entertained. And periodically, from the age of seventeen and onwards, falling in and out of love.

She was exceedingly handsome, had plenty of charm, plenty of intelligence, plenty of money, no education to speak of and was out exclusively to enjoy herself and to give others a good time. She systematically over-smoked, anything and everything, including green cigars. Drank freely on occasion but only in congenial company and never in her life felt the shadow of a craving for liquor (nicotine was her craving and in those days to crave was to have...) and drove her cousin Jane Randolph (later Caruth) all over the States in a primitive car with one spark-plug at the back and a revolver handy for obstreperous negroes. There was also an aggressive bull-terrier, Charlie, as auxiliary protection.

I have in my possession a little leather-bound album with leaves of different colours: in it are written down, by her mother or grandmother, her earliest attempts at verse, beginning when she was three years old. So far as she or I could see when we examined them they show no talent or promise of any kind, no imagination or sense of rhythm: they are about flowers and 'birdies' and redolent of the atmosphere diffused by the simple old American dame, her grandmother, and by her entirely brainless mother. There is, however, one prophetic touch: one of the earliest is a love song, composed, I think, at the age of five. There are only four lines, of which the last is: 'No wonder the birdies love you, dear!'...

Of her earliest days, beyond the ill-treatment she suffered, I know very little. She hated dolls, loved drums and noisy toys, but such tastes are common to many girl children and might seem to have had little if any significance had the future not confirmed the fact of her sexual inversion. That her passionate temper was early developed is evidenced by her own memory of lying flat on her face in a new white plush coat in Kensington Gardens as a protest against being put back into her pram or mailcart when she desired to walk.

She was a beautiful child to look at. There is a life-size painting of her at five years old which her grandmother commissioned from Mrs. Katinka Amyat, the leading child portraitist of her day. It hung on the line at the Royal Academy and is the acme of photographic convention. A blue-eyed, golden haired little girl in a muslin frock and white socks sitting on a flowery bank, holding a bunch of oxeye daisies. But the child has beautiful features and looks out at you with brave honest eyes and an enchanting, jovial half-smile....

There is a much earlier portrait. A photograph done in infancy of a sturdy-looking baby with silky fair down on its well-shaped head, propped upon a fur rug. Its fists are clenched and its expression fierce; there is a quite definite resemblance to the Radclyfie Hall of later years when she had made up her mind about anything and meant to see it through.... No one would doubt for a moment that this was a male child, and indeed, as I write this, a memory crops up that she was told at one time that throughout her infancy strangers always mistook her for a boy. She was still very young when she shed the baptismal name of Margaerite, selected by her mother, and became known to her friends as Peter... a name that later was replaced so universally by John that for years many people knew her by no other. It was on the tide page of her first published novel that John Radclyffe-Hall became: 'Radclyffe Hall'.

Later photographs show her, as I said before, shy and uahappy-looking at about eleven years of age standing beside her stepfather; in her very early teens as a beautiful child with the melancholy eyes of her maturity, with a straight fringe and with unusually long and luxuriant fair hair. Later still comes a series, taken by society photographers during her adolescence, when her mother, refusing to be baffled by the aquiline nose and a severity of contour more suited to a youth than to a debutante, evolved the fiction that she resembled Gainsborough's female portraits and proceeded to impose her illusion by means of many ruffles, soft draperies and plumed hats. It was a period filled for John with embarrassment and helpless resentment, but it had to be endured until her twenty-first birthday brought her freedom ... and the information that her mother, despite the sketchy education she had received, had managed to overspend the 'maintenance' allowance to the tune of £12,000. She told me that when she showed surprise and enquired how such a considerable debt had been incurred her mother flew into a violent rage and expressed deep endignation that a daughter should dare to question her parent's expenditure. But by that time the relations between them had long since been strained to breaking point; the situation being intensified by the mother's suspicions that her daughter was not what she considered 'normal'. This was, of course, only a suspicion, as she had absolutely no evidence to go on, but even the suspicion further inflamed her initial dislike and John told me of an occasion when her mother, in a blind fury, flew at her and tore her hat (and some of her hair with it) from her head. One of Visetti's most eminent pupils, who lived in the house as a member of the household, told me later that John's life at that time was sheer misery and that she had seen her mother 'go for her' and belabour her with her fists!

It was at this time also that John was called upon to protect her grandmother, when the old lady came to her in tears, having been struck by her daughter.

It is hardly surprising that as soon as she was free to do so and had control of her income, John left such a 'home' and took a house with her grandmother where the two of them could live in peace. That house was the corner one at the junction of Church Street, Kensington, and Campden House Terrace... I do not know how long they lived there but have an idea that although John, as time passed, travelled a lot and spent long periods in America, she returned to Campden House Terrace at intervals and that it remained her grandmother's home until her death. I know that at one time, after spending over a year in America touring the country, but living chiefly in Washington with her mother's relations, she became homesick (as she always did when she was long absent from England) and returned to London and to her grandmother bringing with her her widowed cousin, Jane Randolph, and the latter's three children, two boys and a girl. The children became exceedingly fond of John and the eldest boy, Decan (his brother did not survive childhood), came to visit us when we were together at Cadogan Court during the First World War.

Jane Randolph (by that time not only re-married to Harry Caruth, but widowed a second time) also visited us during the war when we had settled into our frst unfurnished home, 'Chip Chase', Hadley Wood.

I think she was as great a surprise, and one might almost say as great a shock, to John as she was to me. John had described a plain young woman with projecting teeth but with a perfect figure, lovely hands and feet and masses of long and beautiful auburn hair. A woman always exquisitely dressed and of such charm that John, in her first youth, was the successful one of many adorers who flocked around her and strove for her favour. She and Jane had shared all kinds of youthful escapades in addition to their wanderings in the antediluvian car. There was the occasion when they left a Christmas feast of terrapin soup and champagne in such a condition that Jane greeted the frosty night with the remark: 'I want to schlide...', did so with catastrophic results and was helped home and upstairs past the bedroom door of a prim mother by John, who had only survived owing to a head of iron.... There was another story, very different, of her insisting upon accompanying John into hospital for the removal of an impacted wisdom tooth and occupying an emergency cot in her room with a devotion undeterred by the acute sickness that was always John's reaction to anaesthetics.

Anyway, the picture in my mind had been that of a hardgoing, reckless and somewhat fickle but loyal-hearted seductress, who had managed to capture John's, at that time, rather volatile fancy and to hold it through various vicissitudes for several years. I awaited her arrival with a friendly interest and some curiosity. So, I am quite sure, did John, who was in any case determined to offer every hospitality that wartime conditions (it was in 1918) would allow. We found ourselves entertaining a stout, ageing American dame. (John had forgotten the detail that her attractive cousin had been many years her senior: when one is in one's twenties an additional ten or fifteen years only enhance attraction.) Our guest had heavy jowls and an elaborately piled coiffure of hair that was still abundant but had assumed that unpleasant brindle of auburn and grey that is almost mauve. She was smartly and tightly upholstered in expensive clothes and seemed very prosperous, but her expression reflected the discontent of her mind. Her conversation was a tissue of cranky, prim and hypercritical strictures upon the behaviour of her children, the upbringing of her grandchildren and life in general... but only one sentence remained permanently in John's memory and mine. Offering her a cup of tea on her arrival at our war-rationed abode, John enquired: 'Do you have milk in your tea now, Jane?' and Jane replied firmly: 'Cream, please...' As neither of us had seen cream for four years the request made an indelible impression.

The visit, despite all our efforts, was not a success. She no longer really liked John, who was quite unable to like her, and she definitely disliked me and, incredible as it seemed after so many years, resented my existence.... When she left us she returned to America and we never saw her again, though her daughter came over and did visit us with a nebulous husband and a thoroughly tiresome little girl named Jane after her grandmother, by whom, I believe, she was afterwards adopted. Sometimes in later years we used to smile, John and I, over the 'cream, please' incident and other details that I have now forgotten.

Occasionally letters came from Decan and from the daughter, Winefred (full of complaints, hers were, of her mother's attempted interferences and difficult ways), but somehow I don't think John ever really linked up the unpleasing guest of 1918 with the boon companion of her salad days or even with the cousin who had lived with her and her grandmother for a time at Campden House Terrace and who was the mother of two unruly boys and a girl.

It never seems to have struck John that she took over a heavy burden in assuming complete financial responsibility for an impecunious young widow and three children and carting them over from the States; a responsibility that only ended at Jane's re-marriage, again to a Southerner, but this time to a very rich man. In all the years I lived with her I never knew John to be turned from any purpose by difficulties or deterred by potential responsibility, and I think the story of her friendship with Jane Randolph-Caruth shows that this was an early and fundamental characteristic. I may add that, responsibility once assumed, it was never in any circumstances repudiated; I am convinced that there does not live, and never has lived, anyone who can truthfully say that Radclyffe Hall failed them, or ever let them down.

Of course there are many dropped stitches in the fabric of my knowledge of her early life: so many things she had forgotten herself or did not think worth telling. So many things, alas, that she did tell me and that I have forgotten.

Her first serious falling in love, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, was, she always told me, with a voice... The lovely pure soprano voice of her stepfather's pupil, Agnes Nicols... For several years she worshipped and served and followed that voice to and fro on the initial stages of a big career. Wherever engagements in opera, concert or oratorio took the young singer, there also went John, listening, encouraging, sympathizing and adoring. Holding cloaks, mufflers, bouquets, gargles and inhalers; in hotels, lodgings, trains and dressing-rooms, her existence entirely regulated by the imperious demands of that wonderful voice.... I can remember it myself, as I first heard it, at Covent Garden, after looking superciliously at the then almost unknown English name on the programme. It was unique, and once heard quite unforgettable: a strange blend of woman, choirboy and angel, and, in justice to Alberto Visetti it must be admitted, most beautifully produced.... I cannot wonder that John, adolescent, intensely musical and emotional, listening day by day in her own home to the gradual evolution of this exquisite thing, fell deeply in love both with the voice and the singer. Agnes Nichols was seven years her senior, an earnest student and steadily determined to succeed. Love, if it came, must be harnessed to that ambition, which, as we now know, was to be fully realized, she passed on her triumphant way none the less surely because John, whom the Lord had not designed to be a satellite, grew weary after a time of dressing rooms and theatrical paraphernalia and glamour; of the despair that attended a trifling hoarseness, of all life subordinated to that supertyrant, a singer's voice, and at some unspecified date departed to firesh woods and pastures new on a visit to her mother's relations in America....

I know that Agnes Nichols has always remembered John with affection, is a great admirer of her work, and, but for the fact that she was ill at the time, would have sung the solo at her Requiem Mass.

There was another American cousin of whom she became fond, or who at any rate attracted her for a time and in John's case, though she was by no means always emotionally attracted to those of whom she became fond, she inevitably developed a measure of affection for and a protective sense towards those with whom she fell in love.... The latter impulse might spring up in her instantaneously and fully armed, irrespective of the merits of its object, but invariably that other side of her curiously complex make-up: that generous, highly spiritual element that in the end burnt up any lesser thing and pervaded and possessed her entirely, would hasten to discover and, failing that, to manufacture in the object of her attraction qualities that justified afiection or admitted of sheltering care....

Such a process, I think, must have taken place long before I knew her, in the circumstances of her connection with the young cousin Dorothy Diehl (the only daughter of her mother's brother) whom she met for the first time in America and who returned with her to England and afterwards travelled with her for a time in Europe.

She seems to have made a habit of bringing home American cousins! In this case, Dorothy Diehl was younger than herself, which facilitated the protective attitude. She was plump and very pretty in a blue-eyed, golden-haired, pink and white style suggestive of the Dutch maiden of the musical comedies of our youth. She certainly had a charming mouth with deeply indented upturned corners and an infectious smile, and when I met her long afterwards I thought her very amusing; but her wit had a cutting edge to it and her nature a crudity that was revealed in the coarsest hands I ever remember seeing on any woman. At the time I came to know her she had an immensely fat baby and had been married for a number of years to the composer Robert Coningsby Clarke. She had fallen violently in love with him while still making her home with John and as they were both young and he relatively impecunious (his subsequently successful career as a ballad writer not having yet materialized), John had helped the course of what she was assured was true love to run more smoothly by supplying an allowance which was continued for many years.... It lasted longer, I think, than the true love, but was finally discontinued when Dorothy Clarke, despite repeated warnings from John, persisted in making mischief between her and an old friend.

Dorothy Clarke is dead now, and you might well say, 'de mortuis' but this record is to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and the truth in this case is that in an affair that was doubtless lighty undertaken on both sides John ended by giving a good deal, both morally and financially, and received in return not even elementary gratitude or loyalty.

And, you may begin to ask, where in all this do we find any traces of Radclyffe Hall, the future writer?

All through the years whose vicissitudes I have tried to indicate she was, as I said before, resolutely and remorselessly idle and bent exclusively on making of life a pleasant pastime.

Such energy as she possessed (and in spite of a far from robust constitution, her nervous system was as young and as reckless as she was herself. It supplied all the necessary fuel and she was often very energetic indeed), was devoted to love-making, to hunting (sometimes five days a week), to riding and mastering unmanageable horses; to rushing about by car, boat or train (at that time the air was not available!) to any new place that took her fancy; to all and anything but mental effort, which was represented in her programme by occasional verses that arose spontaneously and unsought into her consciousness, were written down and received, it must be admitted, even in those days a measure of careful polishing and revision.

They were published, those verses, and, to give the first date I have mentioned (and I mention it for a very good reason to which I shall return later), before 1908 three volumes of those verses had appeared and had met with considerable success. The first volume was produced by John and Edward Bumpus, the publication being paid for by her proud grandmother! The subsequent volumes were published by Chapman and Hall. I have pored over them many times, and so has their author, and neither of us was able to find anything worthy of survival in the first two volumes; in fact long before her death she made a determined effort to destroy any existing copies of the volumes in question, hoping to consign them to total oblivion. (One of the results of her efforts has been that collectors of her work are ready nowadays to pay quite a high price for either of those despised offspring of her idle youth!) Nevertheless, at the time of publication, these lyrics met with a very good reception indeed and were very favourably criticized by the Athenaeum and other serious journals.... John never got over her astonishment at the fact: she was thoroughly ashamed of her Juvenilia. But the verses, and the volumes that followed them (one of them with an appreciation by Robert Cunninghame Graham) also met with another kind of success. Perhaps partly because, as I said earlier, they had usually been written at the piano, they were eagerly seized upon by a number of well-known song writers of the time and many of them were set to music by Liza Lehmann, Coleridge Taylor, Teresa Del Riego, Easthope Martin, Mrs. George Batten and others and were sung at the ballad concerts that were the predecessors of the B.B.C. and by all those enthusiastic amateurs who performed in the home! Most of these songs are seldom heard nowadays, but one has survived one war and is working its way steadily through another: Robert Coningsby Clarke's setting of her lyric 'The Blind Ploughman' (a poor and over-theatrical setting in my opinion) ... the plain words of a puritan peasant set to an emotional organ obligato. But Dame Clara Butt, Chaliapin, Powell Edwards, Paul Robeson, and, much later, Rossi-Lemeni, to mention only five singers, have used that song as a powerful appeal for those who had lost their sight in war, and not long ago I turned on my radio and suddenly heard the strains of 'The Blind Ploughman'.

Too much dwelling, you may say, upon a few volumes of inferior verse; but the fact is that much of the verse in her third, fourth and fifth volumes was far from inferior and the quality of such lyrics as 'The Blind Ploughman' was the first serious indication of things to come.

John's deliberate mental indolence, her absorption in sport, her restlessness, her carefree, careless youth were to meet their Waterloo at Homburg, where she went for some frivolous purpose in 1907 and there met my cousin Mabel Veronica Batten, Mrs. George Batten, who was to alter her entire outlook on life and the whole course of her existence.

When John, at the age of twenty-seven, first saw her and fell head and heart and soul in love with her, 'Ladye', as she was called by all her intimate friends, was still, at fifty, a very lovely woman. She was no longer physically, perhaps, what she had been when Baron de Meyer took the photograph of her that has so often been reproduced, but she had always been infinitely more attractive than her more classically 'beautiful' sister (Mrs. Eddie Bourke, afterwards Lady Clarendon) and she kept the charm of her perfectly set eyes, chiselled and slightly tiptilted nose and of one of the loveliest mouths I ever saw, until her death eight years later. If she was no longer slim, she was no more than graciously ample and she had great dignity and length of line. She had that characteristically Irish colouring of a pale complexion, dark blue eyes and dark hair and not only her beautifully produced singing voice, but also her speaking voice, were quite enchanting. All of this John saw and heard and loved, but she very soon realized that Ladye was not merely a lovely woman; she was also exceedingly intelligent, cultured in the extreme and a personality in every sense of the word. She accepted homage as a matter of course; she had always received it. She reciprocated affection in full measure but she had no intention of sharing her life to any extent with what she regarded as a half-educated young cub who ignored all the important aspects of a civilized existence and preferred hunting to literature, music or the arts.... She herself was acknowledged in London as a patroness of music; she was one of those who sponsored the young Mischa Elman and the newly arrived Percy Grainger. Her own voice was a mezzo-soprano, not powerful, but it was most perfectly trained and she, Mme. Felix Zemon and Mrs. Henschel were the leading 'amateur' lieder singers of their day. She always accompanied herself and was a composer of some talent. She spoke French quite as well as her own language, and had some knowledge of Italian. She read voraciously everything that seemed to her worth while in the first two languages.... She was, as a matter of fact, physically indolent, but she very soon met John's adoring gaze with the brisk remark that people who had loved and been loved by her had always done something, been someone or in any case had used their brains.

And so, in her immense desire to make herself worthy of someone she loved, John's real education began. And not very long after she first met Ladye, John had a very severe accident which greatly facilitated these cultural aspirations. At that time, in addition to a flat in Tite Street, Chelsea, close to Ladye's house in Ralston Street, Tedworth Square, she had taken a lease of Highfield House, a large house in Malvern Wells in a situation that enabled her to hunt with three packs.

I never saw this house, but John told me it was modern, not particularly attractive, and that she took it because of its fine and spacious stables. She kept at least five horses at that time and their comfort was more important to her than her own. To the day of her death she hated to see a horse in a stall and I suspect an adequate supply of loose boxes to have been one of the factors in her taking Highfield.

Of the horses she owned, I do not know very much. But I know she took a great pride in the upkeep of her stables. There was a very handsome cob, Grey Dawn, which she sometimes brought to London and rode in the Row. There was a beloved and very wise hunter, Joseph, who was also sometimes brought to London. I have photographs of Joseph and I have his hooves, mounted by Rowland Ward, in my possession. On one occasion during a run, Joseph was terribly cut with barbed wire, but the valiant horse ignored the injury and went on and it was not until the end of the run that the condition of his knees was discovered. The vet's only prescription, after the distracted John had led him home step by step, yard by yard, was a bullet. But John loved him dearly and he loved her, affection prevailed and saved his life; he was put in slings and was so amenable to her ministrations that he recovered and lived until old age brought infirmity and, like Raftery in the Well of Loneliness, of whom he was to some extent the prototype, he was shot in her presence.

But not all her horses were like Joseph. There was also Xenophon - a magnificent jumper with such a temper that her grooms refused to ride him and friends prophesied that he would kill her, which in the upshot he very nearly succeeded in doing....

One day out hunting, an unmannerly amateur pounded them at a fence, Xenophon lost his temper in mid-air and came crashing down in the ditch, pitching his rider into it on her head while the interloper jumped over them both and missed her by inches. Farmers came to the rescue, Xenophon was none the worse and John, keen as mustard, decided that she was quite able to go on with the hunt which she proceeded to do, eventually riding ten miles home and only when she got there collapsing with severe concussion and a spinal injury.

She was very ill indeed; in fact at one time, as she used to relate with much amusement, an X-ray was taken of her neck and the doctor informed her it was suspected that she was a most interesting case in that she was alive and walkingp> about with a broken neck. I remember her telling me that the doctor was so excited that he inquired there and then whether, in the event of a second X-ray confirming these suspicions, she would be willing to attend at the hospitals as an exhibit! The second X-ray, however, to his unconcealed disappointment, proved that the neck was intact. But she was nonetheless suffering severely from shock and the aftermath of concussion, had much spinal pain and terrible headaches, I believe, and since she was an excellent sailor and, like her father, adored the sea, it was suggested that a sea voyage would accelerate recovery. As Ladye also adored the sea and was an even better sailor than John there was no reluctance in following the doctor's advice and before very long they had left England together, bound for the Canary Islands.

And here it may be noted that to all intents and purposes this incident marked the decline of John's sporting activities. She did not at once stop hunting, which in those days she dearly loved, she kept her horses and rode when in London, but nevertheless, the end of that phase was in sight. Hunting meant English country life throughout the winter months, she and Ladye had by then definitely made common cause, and while an English winter might be very agreeable to hearty folk who shot and hunted, Ladye had less than no use for England except during the summer and she was increasingly conscious of the charms of Morocco, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Alassio, Rome and even, when it came to that, of Monte Carlo!

She knew nothing of horses and was afraid of them. Her fear was not diminished by the fact that Xenophon, when she was introduced to him in his palatial loose box, scented her timidity and ran at her with his teeth bared!

As for riding herself, a habit was duly ordered and a quiet mount carefully prepared, but after one attempt John warmly agreed with her that horsemanship was not her bent. There was a story that she would tell against herself. When as a young woman she had been in India, her husband, who was secretary to the Viceroy, had decided to teach her to ride. Having very quickly realized that she had not been born with good hands, he had exclaimed: 'Feel his mouth, Mabel, you must feel his mouth' ... and she, leaning as far forward as she dared, had replied: 'I can't, George; I can't reach it!'

To all this must be added the very understandable fact that, after John's accident, Ladye was always nervous and uneasy when she was hunting and must have made her anxiety deliberately apparent. In any case, it was quite obvious that two completely divergent ways of life could not be combined and that Ladye's views would naturally prevail. It was also obvious that, particularly after their voyage to Orotava, in John herself brawn was giving way to brain and she was eager for more voyages and exploration of pastures new.

By the time I came to know her, in 1915, hunting was a distant memory and she had not been on a horse for several years. She never again hunted (by that time she had acquired a horror of killing) and she did not ride again until she and I went to Lynton together for brief holidays, during what was then known as the Great War, and spent most of our time astride a couple of local ponies.

However, in spite of the humanitarian scruples that now forbade hunting, or any blood sports, her eye would always kindle if she happened to meet hounds and she would say to me: 'Aren't I unregenerate! I'd love to follow; there's something in hunting that you never find in anything else...' She would talk of setting out in the early mornings through a countryside that was not yet awake, and then add hastily: 'Yes, but that was cubbing, the most brutal thing of all...' And even in her most unregenerate days, stag hunting had always aroused her horror and indignation.

And so, gradually and with the passing of hunting and of Joseph, Highfield went, the horses went, and life assumed the pattern that suited Ladye, and by that time suited John very well also.

Early in their friendship, George Batten, who was about twenty-five years older than his wife and had for years filled the functions of a devoted and indulgent father, slipped out of life, relieved to know that she would still have love and protection. He had grown very fond of Johnnie, as he called her, demanded her constant presence in his last illness and knew that he could trust her.

The house in Ralston Street was given up, as was the flat in Tite Street, and they took a flat at 59 Cadogan Square and bought the White Cottage, Malvern Wells. In those days John was a rich woman, Ladye was quite well provided for and money being plentiful these two homes could not only be easily maintained, but they could be easily left in reliable hands when their owners wished to go further afield. In some five or six years they wandered a good deal, To Morocco; a second time (1 think) to the Canary Islands. They spent one summer, and I believe also one winter, at Alassio where they took a furnished villa, and one winter and spring in Rome, where John acquired Roman fever and very nearly came to an abrupt end. The aftermath of the emanations from the then undrained Pontine Marshes never really died out of her system and would crop up at all sorts of unexpected moments. Rome they loved; not classical Rome, but the Rome of their faith, for Ladye had been a Catholic since early youth and John had been received into the Church not long after they became friends. In Rome, therefore, they attended many religious functions, under the guidance of Cardinal Gasquet, who also obtained for them a private audience with His Holiness Pius X. The saintly peasant-Pope abhorred ceremony and his humility deprecated homage. John has told me of how the Cardinal warned them to omit the customary three genuflexions and of how, when in her shyness and reverence she forgot and fell on to her knees, the Cardinal clutched her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her to her feet, hissing 'Get up! What did I tell you!'

In any case it was Ladye who was the success of that audience. Her Italian was quite tolerable, while John's had not yet come into existence. Ladye was self-possessed and said and did the right thing, putting the Pope (who was himself a desperately shy man) at his ease, while John hovered in the background tongue-tied. The result was that when the Cardinal presented two photographs for signature, Ladye's bore a lengthy inscription: 'Alia diletta figlia Veronica...' while John's received only an unadorned autograph, to which the kindly Cardinal, fearing that she might be disappointed, added the date and the fact that it had been signed at a private audience.... And now Pius X is long dead, and has already been beatified. Cardinal Gasquet and Mabel Veronica Batten have been followed by Radclyffe Hall... I wonder if they have all met and discussed that audience and laughed over the incident of the photographs?

But life was not only Rome and Papal audiences and religious ceremonies: there was also Monte Carlo and the tables, for though Ladye might be both pious and cultured she was no prig. In fact, inveterate gambler as John might easily have become, it was Ladye who at a certain time of year was wont to develop what John called the Riviera wheeze and the Monte Carlo cough, hinting at the desirability of avoiding the English winter and seeking refuge in a warmer climate. John used to say that it was surprising that wherever they planned to go for a holiday the route as worked out by Ladye invariably found its way through Monte Carlo.

But when they got there Ladye was very moderate in her playing. She liked to potter along in a quiet way, getting tremendous excitement out of small losses or gains. Not so John; when she played at all, she went the pace and went it hard, and on one occasion, fully recognizing her own inability to pull up, she marched in upon the bank manager at Monte Carlo, and, having cashed a cheque that would cover hotel expenses and the journey home, requested him to cancel the balance of her letter of credit.

I like to dwell upon those years. They were amongst the happiest of her life, for they were shared with a most delightful, sympathetic and versatile companion. I, who had known Ladye since my childhood and grew to know her very well before her death, can vouch for that. And if those years were apparently idle and pleasure-seeking, they nonetheless saw the gradual development of John's true personality. For whether they travelled or stayed in England, whether they rusticated at the White Cottage in Malvern Wells or led a social life in London: opera - theatres - concerts - receptions and the reciprocal entertaining in private houses and flats that had not yet been superseded by the restaurant and the night club, always they read and read and read, in English, in French, even occasionally, to judge by a few volumes in Ladye's library, in Italian. Ladye would read aloud to John, as I also did later through so many years, and books and their writers, music and its composers or exponents, the theatre, the Russian opera and ballet when they came, were all woven into the texture of their daily life which was lived to a great extent among people with exceptional brains, people who 'did things' and who counted for something in the world. Through those years John's devotion burned with a steady light and was returned; her fancy did stray once, it is true, but it was a trivial, passing lapse, broke no bones and left no aftermath. It is hardly worth recording, Ladye dismissed the incident with a tolerant smile, and no one but John, scourging herself for infidelity, gave it any great importance.

At intervals during those years, poems were written and more carefully polished and revised. Three volumes were published: Songs of Three Counties in 1907, I think, Poems of the Past and Present in 1910 or 1911, and in 1914, The Forgotten Island.

The contents are of unequal quality, but there is plenty of good verse in them and some that is eminently worthy of survival. She herself revised them not long ago, 'beheading' a number of the lyrics and setting the stamp of her more mature approval upon others.

But what is more important to my mind is that it was during those years when she was already over thirty, in the intervals of writing verse, that she began to try her hand at prose and wrote some half dozen short stories. I have got the manuscripts of all these early efforts, written and rewritten, scored out and corrected; they bear, in this respect, a great resemblance to those of later years. Whatever the intrinsic merit of the stories, one thing emerges clearly. The future talent was stirring in her, something was asking insistently to be born, something in her nature was not easily satisfied with what she produced and reluctantly, intermittently, inexpertly, she was awakening to self-criticism, she was beginning to try to work....

These tentative efforts at prose were undoubtedly met by Ladye with sympathy and encouragement; as evidence of the fact I could produce a number of exercise books in which (neither of them possessing or knowing how to use a typewriter, nor apparently thinking of employing a typist) she has laboriously made in her clearest handwriting a fair copy of the defaced and almost illegible manuscripts. Whether she would have liked the life that (proudly and joyfully!) was mine for so many years; a life of watching, serving and subordinating everything in existence to the requirements of an overwhelming literary inspiration and industry, guarding and sustaining a physique that was never equal to John's relentless perseverance or to the strain she compelled it to bear, is a question that Ladye was never asked to answer. But one thing is certain. She was delighted that John had a brain to use and that she should try to use it. She had sufficient taste and judgment to recognize talent, even in the egg, and having done so, she took steps that led, indirectly and long after her death, to the writing of The Unlit Lamp and of all its succcessors.

Being convinced that John's short stories showed signs of genuine talent she began to wish for their publication and the only means that occurred to her of forwarding this aim was to show them to a potential publisher. She therefore sent them, with an explanatory letter, to an acquaintance who was none other than William Heinemann, at that time at the height of his fame as the discoverer and publisher of unsuspected talent. This was, I think, in 1913.

The results exceeded everyone's most sanguine expectations. She very promptly received a letter from him informing her that the manuscripts she had sent him were of such a quality that he wished to meet the author, and he suggested that they should both lunch with him and talk things over. I wish I had that letter now. I am pretty sure that either Ladye or John must have treasured it, as they were both of them immensely impressed by the result of Ladye's venture. But it must at some time have been mislaid or destroyed. Or for that matter it may still be lurking among John's multitudinous papers; in any case I have never come across it.

The invitation, however, was accepted and the luncheon took place; an exceedingly proud and delighted Ladye escorting an exceedingly shy and embarrassed John, who, to her utter amazement, was informed by Mr. Heinemann that not only did her stories show signs of real talent but that one of them, in his opinion, was among the best short stories that had ever come his way. I am not sure that he did not say, in his genuine excitement at having, as he believed, discovered a fine writer, that it was the best short story ever submitted for his approval.

The story in question was The Career of Mark Anthony Brakes and it has never been published. Circumstances, as I shall explain, delayed its publication, and when, many years later, John might have included it in her first and only volume of short stories, she decided that whatever might be its merits of style and construction, what had, when she wrote it, been the originality of its theme: the sudden and disastrous breakdown of civilization and self-control in an educated negro under the stress of sexual emotion, had since then been treated and exhausted by other writers, both white and coloured, and that her story had definitely missed the boat.

To return to the fateful luncheon, however. Mr. Heinemann repeated and indeed elaborated his favourable criticism of the stories, and even John's natural shyness, melted by this meed of praise, gave way and she said bluntly and hopefully: 'Then you are going to publish my stories, Mr. Heinemann?' To which he replied trenchantly: 'I will certainly do nothing of the kind. I am not going to present you to the public as the writer of a few short stories, however good they may be, and what is more, I do not want you to offer them to any periodical. You will set to work at once and write me a novel, and when it is finished I will publish it...'

John was disappointed, disconcerted and moreover, as she told me more than once, positively appalled at the suggestion. She protested that she had not the faintest idea even of how to set about writing a novel, had never thought of undertaking a work of any length and felt quite certain that she would never be able to do it, would, as she put it, 'never stay the course'. 'Oh yes, you will', replied Mr. Heinemann. 'You don't know it yourself yet, but I know it. You can and you will and you will bring it to me.'

She never saw him again. She was not at that time ready to modify her entire way of life and make the sacrifice demanded by so great an effort and a programme of work on a large scale, nor, I think, did Ladye urge it. She herself had no real conception of the powers latent in her friend, no idea that any sacrifices of leisure and pleasure would bear fruit in the production of such literature as she would have been the first to appreciate. Their mode of life was, in every way, fulfilling to them both and it never occurred to them to alter it. Mr. Heinemaim's appreciation had been a pleasant incident and a gratification and it was disappointing that he had not been prepared to add a volume of short stories under a fine imprint to the five existing volumes of verse. But it certainly never entered either of their heads that his unerring perspicacity had again spotted a winner and that a distant future was to justify every word that he spoke.

Nor, looking back with the eye of one who knows the sequel, can I regret the fact that John was not, at that time, able to decipher the writing on the wall. True, she was by then a very different person from the embryonic youngster who had met Ladye at Homburg, Athletic diversions had receded into the background and she had to a great extent come into her destined inheritance of intellectual, artistic and religious understanding. But her experiences had been chiefly pleasurable and, while a reciprocated devotion to an eminently worthy object had done much to develop in her the latent unselfishness and tenderness that had hitherto lacked scope, she had, apart from the unhappiness of her childhood, and passing storms of emotional despair, never suffered deeply, as she was to do during the years that elapsed before she began to fulfil Mr. Heinemann's prophecy.

All the same, even if they were unproductive of intellectual fruit, I like to think of those years from 1907 until 1913... Except for one passing emotional storm to which I have already alluded, they were so happy; the happiest she had ever known, or was perhaps ever to know. An easy, congenial, interesting existence in perfect company, with her newly-awakened perceptions rising one by one into her consciousness and welcomed and fostered with sympathy and understanding.... No; injustice to myself, I will not, cannot, say that she was not to know an equal happiness later, and many times in our long pilgrimage together. Perhaps she was to rise to greater heights of true happiness such as are only reached by those who have plumbed the depths of sorrow and suffering. But all the same, there was an idyllic, peaceful happiness in those years that was all their own, and how glad I am to think that she had them.

I have said that circumstances as well as inclination interfered with her attempting to obey Mr. Heinemann's behest. She and Ladye might well cling closely to their pleasant mode of life; they were not to enjoy it much longer.

During the early summer of that same year as their car (a heavy limousine) was passing the crossroads at Burfbrd on the way to the White Cottage at Malvern Wells, it was literally charged from the near side by a small open car driven by a lady who met the emergency by mistaking the accelerator for the brake. The violence of the first impact was such that it flung the heavy car over against a stone wall which it demolished, while the aggressor proceeded to pound it repeatedly before her engine stalled. The big car ended up on its side, terribly shattered (the body-makers subsequently expressed surprise that anyone had come out of it alive), the maid who was sitting in front beside the chauffeur was injured, John was practically unhurt but Ladye lay unconscious in the bottom of the car with several broken ribs, an injury to a vertebra of her neck and bleeding from severe cuts on her head. The chauffeur, who had not been hurt, lost his head and wept hysterically, but fortunately there were people about who helped John to extricate Ladye and who carried her into a house near by. Her injuries were skilfully attended to and she had every possible care and treatment but it was many weeks before they were able to proceed on their journey to the White Cottage. She was an invalid for as many months; she never, I think, completely recovered, and moreover, when she died of a stroke less than two years later, the doctors were of opinion that she had suffered the first seizure at the timeof the accident.

They did not go abroad again but spent that summer and the next at the White Cottage, which they had bought together and which she dearly loved. They were there in August 1914 when the war came and they returned to London and that was almost the last that Ladye saw of the cottage. It had to be sold early in 1916 when prices were rising and incomes were diminishing and when it was also decided to move from Cadogan Square to a less expensive flat.