But meanwhile I had come into the picture and, little as any of us suspected it at the time, I had come to stay.
And here I am going to meet with a difficulty because, up to this period of John's life, I have been dealing exclusively with matters concerning her and other people, and of which she or others have told me. But as from August 1st, 1915, the story becomes also my own story, and it will be less easy to be completely objective. Moreover, since from the day of our meeting we were at first much together, and soon afterwards scarcely ever apart, it becomes difficult, or I am afraid it may be far from easy, to continue making this as I wish it to be, the story of Radclyffe Hall and not of Una Troubridge....
To some extent I must inevitably enter in and I shall in any case try to be as critical of myself as I am of other people, but I shall also try to omit, so far as possible, my personal concerns and history.
However, it seems inevitable that I should describe our first meeting, or what was in point of fact our second meeting but the first time that we realized one another's exisence I had once before met her, with Ladye, several years earlier at an afternoon reception in one of the old houses in Cheyne Walk. Of that meeting small details remain in my mind to this day. The three of us sat and talked in the garden. Ladye, of course, I had always known and she introduced her friend. Of John I remember nothing at all. Of Ladye a rather adhesive tailor-made suit of the prevailing cut, made of a grey material with a white stripe that dazzled and made one blink, and what we should now consider an overwhelming hat. They drove me home to St. George's Square, where I was then living, but the meeting had no sequel; nothing warned us of what the future held in store.
In 1915 I was living in a tiny house in Bryanston Street; for very good reasons I was deeply depressed and intensely lonely. But for these facts I might not have accepted an invitation from my cousin Lady Clarendon to have tea with her in Cambridge Square on August 1st... she added that 'Mabel' would also be coming. I did not like Lady Clarendon. She was an ex-beauty, always jealous of her more attractive sister and, having married Lord Clarendon as her second husband, she had become, as Violet, Duchess of Rutland, expressed it to Ladye, 'very Countessy'. But I had always liked Ladye and admired her, and, as I have said, I was lonely and so I accepted....
Of Ladye on that second occasion I have no recollection, but I can still see John as I saw her on that day, as clearly as if she stood before me now. She was then thirty-four years of age and very good indeed to look upon. At that time, short hair in a woman was almost unknown and she had not yet cut hers. Ladye would have been horrified at the mere suggestion! It was silver-blonde, and she ruthlessly disposed of its great length and abundance (it reached nearly to her knees and its growth defied frequent pruning) by wearing it in tight plaits closely twisted round her small and admirably shaped head. Her complexion was clear and pale, her eyebrows and very long lashes nearly as golden as her hair and her eyes a clear grey blue, beautifully set and with a curiously fierce, noble expression that reminded me of certain caged eagles at the Zoological Gardens! Her mouth was sensitive and not small. It could look very determined; indeed in those days it sometimes looked hard, but was liable to break into the most infectious, engaging and rather raffish smile that would spread to her eyes and banish the caged eagle. Her face and the line of her jaw were an unusually pure oval. From great-grandfather John Hall she had inherited an aquiline nose with delicate, tempered wings to the nostrils. From the mythical American-Indian, unusually high cheekbones. In any case it was not the countenance of a young woman but of a very handsome young man. Like her father she was only of medium height but so well-proportioned that she looked taller than she was and the very simple tailor-made clothes which she wore, even in those days, fostered the illusion. Her hands, and here again, they were not feminine hands, were quite beautiful and so were her feet. Altogether her appearance was calculated to arouse interest. It immediately aroused mine and for reasons much less obvious that interest was returned. Our friendship, which was to last through life and after it, dated from that meeting.
But there seemed to be many factors against it at the time. Kindly as she was towards me, Ladye most certainly felt no overwhelming desire for my incorporation in their daily life and John, I know, honestly believed that her feeling for me was just such another sudden fancy as she had experienced before. She was nothing if she was not honest and I remember her saying to me: 'How do I know if I shall care for you in six months time?...' As for me, I thought little and felt a great deal. I was swept along on a spate of feeling, of learning the endless aspects of this strange personality, and all I knew or cared about was that I could not, once having come to know her, imagine life without her. I had, at twenty-eight, as much consideration for Ladye or for anyone else as a child of six.
Being now nearly sixty, most of my vision works backwards and I can visualize what seemed at the time a mere vortex of impulses and coincidence and tragedy as a pattern that in retrospect seems to have had its definite purposes. But when the three of us were beset by conflicting emotions and loyalties we could not know that Ladye's death was imminent. We could not know that John was shortly to be left alone, and that the fact that her death brought John not only intense sorrow but also a measure of remorse (for, though her devotion to Ladye had never wavered, she blamed herself bitterly afterwards for having harboured another affection) would lead to her taking up an investigation that involved endless labour, patience and precision and developed in her that industry and perseverance in which she had always been so conspicuously lacking. We could not know that in that investigation I was to make the more important moves, was to work with her as her lieutenant in closest co-operation and was, for my part, to develop the qualities that would enable me to give her the service she would require when she settled down to her real purpose in life.
In 1915, all this was hidden in the impenetrable future. Ladye was merely not in robust health; her heart was supposed to need care and John was vigilant in sparing her any exertion....
Of the doctors who had attended her, not one had suggested that dieting might be advisable for a blood pressure of well over 200 and of this potential peril we were blissfully unaware. She felt fairly well, and led her normal life with John, a life of which, during that summer, autumn and the succeeding months, I also became a part. I had my own flat and they were living at first in Cadogan Square and later, having sold the White Cottage and disposed of their flat, in a suite of rooms at the Vernon Court Hotel in Buckingham Palace Road, debating where they should pitch their tent. During the summer they came down to visit me in Brighton where I had taken my child and her nurse, and later we all went together to Watergate Bay in Cornwall. There my intimacy with John developed in the course of long walks and talks and drives in the local jingles. There I saw her for the first time in rough country clothes; heavy short-skirted tweeds unusual in those days, collars and ties and, I remember, a queer little green Heath hat with a pot-shaped crown. I also heard Ladye lament her complete absence of vanity and her indifference to the unbecoming effects of wind and rain ... and day by day I fell more completely under the spell of her enthralling personality. She was so intensely alive, she could be so kind and so tender, and she was also so wilful, so humorous and, in those days, so intolerant! Her temper was so violent, so quickly spent, and her penitence, if she thought she had given pain, so extreme.... She was so intuitive, so intelligent and yet so naive and simple. She was still a mass of sharp corners, prejudices and preconceptions that she was sure nothing was ever going to modify! She was at that time not only devout but, to my mind, bigoted in the extreme, and young as I was, and also devout, I rebelled at her militant theories. I remember saying to her: 'I believe you would be prepared to torture heretics ... in another age you would have been a Torquemada...' and to this extent I was right: I had met for the first time in iny life a born fanatic. Not, however, as I then suggested, one who would persecute others, but one who, if the need arose, would go to the pillory or the stake for her convictions, one who would go through fire and water, would never accept defeat and would fight the good fight through mental and physical suffering until, when the tormented body failed, the spirit blazed forth, brave, patient, and unafraid, and she rendered up her splendid soul to God.
But in the days of Watergate Bay if battle and martyrdom and many aspects of her complex nature lay hidden in the future, there were many characteristics that were obvious and that she had shown since childhood and one of these was her passionate devotion to animals, her indignant championship of them in suffering or neglect. This was a fundamental instinct that was later to appear in almost everything she wrote. Horses, as I have said, she loved and understood, though she had not then, as she did later, learned to love also the fox. Dogs large and small (she had no patience at all with the professed dog-lover who made size a qualification) she was never without. When I met her at Lady Clarendon's she was accompanied by a toy foxterrier named Jill, a recent acquisition - an uninteresting and generally unsatisfactory little beast which, to my relief, was soon planted in a good home. But others remained and were frequently reinforced. There was Rufus, ageing at that time but deeply loved, and deeply mourned when he died. He was a big sable Welsh collie rescued from the Battersea Dogs' Home. She would say in later years that she sometimes heard him breathing at night in her bedroom and as she lay in bed a few days before she died she said to me quietly: 'Rufus is standing beside me with his head on my arm.' Fortune, a French bull bitch, was acquired soon after we met, the first in my time of an endless series, ranging from a Great Dane weighing some five stone to a Yorkshire terrier who turned the scales at one pound and three quarters and who taxed even my neat fingers by the necessity for collecting his head furnishings daily into five tiny plaits tied with silk.
Not all these were personal companions; we bred dogs later and for a time sold them, but all got a full measure of tender care and consideration and the breeding was soon given up as we found we could not bear to sell our produce and see diem go off to an unknown future. Those who wished to buy from us thought us cranks and having agreed to part with their money were bored or resentful at receiving endless instructions and having to undergo an apparently endless catechism as to the home and care they were prepared to offer.
In the world of dog shows too, though we had many good friends and incidentally were very successful, there were also some who thought us cranks. They resented our championship of the exhibits as sentient creatures and our unrestrained denunciation of certain inhuman practices and of those exhibitors who, provided a dog could win for them, thought it quite permissible to leave the shivering beast deserted and lying on a bed of scanty straw through the long winter nights of a 'three day' Crufts or Kennel Club show. I say 'we' said and did these things, for all our canine activities (and by that time all our other interests and pursuits) were shared, but I want to make it clear that in this, as in so much else, she was the initiator, the leader and, however little she realized it, the teacher. Since childhood I had loved animals, had revelled in the scanty opportunities afforded to a London child of country and farm life and had imposed my love of dogs, especially, upon my rather reluctant family. Since my marriage I had owned a number of dogs and they tad always been cherished and well-cared for. Moreover I had inherited or acquired from my father a horror of killing and of all blood-sports. But it was John, and John alone who, without any conscious intention, taught me to appreciate the rights of animals and conferred on me the painful privilege of the 'seeing eye', until in the end I also could not fail to remark the underfed or overloaded horse or ass, the chained or neglected dog, the untamed bird in the dirty, cruelly tiny cage. But before my eyes were cleansed, I remember once to my shame saying angrily: 'You spoil everything! We can never go anywhere that you don't see some animal that makes you unhappy....' And it is to the credit of her influence alone that I became in time as earnest as she was in the cause of the weaker brethren, willingly toiled half across Europe burdened with cages of rescued victims and on one occasion walked around Lisieux like a caricature of a Greuze maiden, clasping to my breast a dove that she had spotted on the fourth floor of a slum house. Having extracted it from a cage resembling a rat-trap, we were hunting the town for an ironmonger who could supply more suitable accommodation.
All the same, I am glad to say that even our humanitarianism had its light moments and I remember an occasion when we arrived at some seaside hotel for a holiday accompanied by two dachshunds and a canary. By the time John had surveyed our bedroom and had decided upon a site where the canary would be safe from cats and on positions where the dogs could sleep immune from draughts, I was reduced to remarking: 'After all, darling, do remember that they did bring us....'
To jump a long way backwards, I think Ladye occasionally felt something similar, for although she loved the dogs and willingly travelled with a tame Alexandrine parakeet called Lorim, there were two goldfish that were the bane of her existence. Not only did John insist upon their also travelling everywhere in a specially constructed zinc case, but she felt strongly that they must have unlimited exercise and insisted on their taking it in the bath, where Ladye complained of subsequently finding ants' eggs and less pleasant reminders of their activities.
I shall say more, later, of the animals she owned and loved; they were so much a part of her life, up to the very end, that they cannot be passed over briefly - but this particular digression seems to have carried me an unduly long way from Watergate Bay in 1915.
We all spent the following winter in London, and in common with other Londoners we gaped at the Zeppelins and later at the aeroplanes that passed over our heads. John was by then anxious to undertake some active war-work, but she was quite seriously ill for a time and when she recovered it was to nurse me through pneumonic tonsilitis and to realize that Ladye (was she perhaps subconsciously aware of the impending separation?) was surprisingly insistent that she would not be left alone. In view of the lingering aftermath of her accident John would not insist and she confined her war activities to visiting the wounded in St. Thomas' Hospital and serving in a canteen. Neither of them, as it happened, had any close friend or relation involved in the struggle, and they had therefore no deep personal anxiety.
On three occasions, during that winter and in early spring, John and I went out of London together for a few days. In late November she took me down to Malvern and I saw the White Cottage for the first time. Soon afterwards we spent some days together at the Wellington Hotel in Tunbridge Wells and in early spring, Ladye not feeling up to the effort, I went alone with John to Malvem again, where we stayed at the Hornyold Arms and superintended the handing over of the White Cottage to its new owners. Both John and Ladye were grieved at its sale, as they had been so happy there, had made the garden together and the whole place had many associations, but retrenchment had become imperative and it had to go. It was an unpretentious but very attractive little house of uncertain age, long and low and built upon the side of a hill so that the first floor as seen from the front became the garden level at the back. It had a verandah running the whole length of the back elevation and a series of photographs exist of Ladye and John, sitting and standing on this verandah, accompanied by Rufus, the collie, Claude, a large old-fashioned Yorkshire terrier, and Lorim, the Alexandrine parakeet.
But any regrets regarding the cottage were soon swept from our minds for in May 1916, with terrible suddenness, came tragedy and the blow that was again to alter the course of John's life. On May l0th John and I had arranged to spend the day at Maidenhead, bent on the inspection of a French bulldog puppy which, if it proved suitable, she was proposing to give me. The weather was lovely and so was Maidenhead, and, having left Ladye busy and contented preparing to sing that day at an afternoon party, we debated remaining for the night at Skindles and returning to London in the morning. I have always thanked God that we decided against it, for when I reached my London flat before dinner but rather later than we had intended, I heard Ladye's voice for the last time on this earth. Having returned from the party she rang me up to ask whether John was on her way home and I, having told her that this was the case, we laughed together when I also told her that, so far from having bought me a puppy, John had invested in a gangling untrained specimen for herself... Ladye's rueful comment being 'Not another dog!'
About an hour later the telephone rang again. This time it was John asking for my doctor's name and address as their own was not available. She seemed worried but quite collected and told me very briefly that Ladye, having dined normally and drunk a glass of red wine, had suddenly felt very unwell and was complaining of pins and needles all down one side. Of what this symptom portended John was as ignorant as I was myself. I gave the required address and as a matter of course hurried off to their hotel. By the time I got there, Ladye was unconscious. The cerebral haemorrhage was a gradual one, but it affected the speech centres from the first and though she lingered on until May 25th, showed that she recognized John and on one occasion managed to raise her hand to her lips and kiss it, she was never able to speak again.
John's grief was overwhelming and was intensified by remorse. She blamed herself bitterly and uncompromisingly that she had allowed her affection for me to trespass upon her exclusive devotion to Ladye, that she had brought me so closely into their home life, thereby as she thought, marring the happiness of Ladye's last months on earth... she saw no excuse for herself in the fact, fully realized by Ladye, of the twenty-four years' difference in their ages and her comparative youth. She even reproached herself for that last day at Maidenhead. She turned to me instinctively in her despair, as she was always, thank God, to turn to me in all trouble throughout her life, and yet, paradoxically, her desire for expiation was such that I think there was a time when, had she only considered herself, she would have put me out of her life and offered me up as a sacrifice to loyalty. But even in the depths she was incapable at all times of considering herself alone, and there is proof of that in an incident during Ladye's last illness. Day and night John had sat beside her, awaiting what she knew to be the inevitable end but clinging to the hope that before it came - there might be a momentary return to full consciousness that would allow her to speak of her deathless devotion and to receive absolution for any real or imagined shortcomings. But when, before the end, the doctor told her that consciousness could be induced by an injection, if it was for any reason desirable, she utterly refused to accept consolation for herself at the risk of rousing Ladye to possible pain ... and she let her go in silence.
With the same generosity, she would not even scourge herself at my expense, since she realized that she had become the be-all and end-all of my life ... and as often happens, her unselfishness had its reward. A friendship and companionship which at that time she continued chiefly for rny sake, too numb with grief to feel any personal reaction, grew steadily and ripened between us until it became as precious, fulfilling and essential to her as ever it could be to me ... until neither of us could have claimed to care more than the other or could have conceived that even death could divide us.
For a short time after Ladye's death, though we spent some hours together almost every day, we did not, at first, share a home. I had taken a furnished house, since demolished, in Royal Hospital Road (it was ancient, most attractive and quite abominably haunted) and John, for the time being, became a paying guest in her cousin Dorothy Clarke's house, No. I Swan Walk, a few yards away. It was a terribly unhappy time for us both and there seemed no light ahead. John was submerged by an all-pervading sorrow. I was torn by sympathy and by anxiety on her behalf and also desperately miserable at what looked like an almost total shipwreck of our happy relationship. When we met there were hours of mutual sympathy and understanding, but quite as many hours, at first, when we frayed each other's nerves.
I was not well; an old heart affection had recurred under the stress of anxiety and, partly with the idea that a change might do me good but partly in the hope that it might help us to a release of tension, John took me to an hotel at Llanberis in Wales. I remember that Rufus the Collie went with us. It was lonely and beautiful and we went to the top of Snowdon and trailed round Carnarvon Castle, with John nobly trying to be cheerful for my sake ... but it was not a success.
She was seeing a good deal at the time of Ladye's only daughter, anxious in this respect to carry out what she knew to have been Ladye's wish, but it is seldom that such wishes bear posthumous fruit and this case proved no exception to the rule. She even took Lady Clarendon as her guest to St. Leonards but as the jealousy complex survived even death and John told me on her return that she had been freely entertained with thinly-veiled animadversions upon Ladye's mental and physical characteristics, that experiment was not repeated.
We gradually spent more and more time together, the fact being that not only was a fundamentally deep affection asserting its sway, but that also, in spite of all the elements that seemed to oppose it, I was the person who most completely understood her bereavement and to whom she could most easily talk of all that she had lost, of all that tormented her. Before very long another factor arose to cement our union. She developed measles and her cousin, who feared infection for her baby, practically turned her out at an hour's notice. There was a bed and an eager welcome waiting for her in my house and she remained there until she was able to move into a flat of her own at Cadogan Court, Draycott Avenue. She had signed the lease before Ladye's death and she kept it on till the end of the war, though latterly it was let furnished. While she lived there I would sleep there as often as not. Before long the air-raids became so serious that I gave up the London house and moved my child and her nurse to 'Grimston', a little furnished villa at Datchet, and John and I made common cause at Cadogan Court, frequently visiting the child at 'Grimston' and later at 'Swanmead', another furnished house in Datchet.
From that time onwards we shared a home, or rather a succession of homes, and were never apart for more than a few days (and that only, I think, four times) in the twenty-seven years that remained to her of earthly life. We had also by that time begun to share a common interest and a very laborious investigation. We were already launched upon the intensive study of psychical phenomena, at which we worked systematically for a number of years, as is testified by various publications in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
At the time of Ladye's death, war and consequent bereavements had aroused an unprecedented interest in the possibility of communication with the deceased and it was inevitable that someone should propose to John that a visit to a medium might result in consolation. Neither she, Ladye nor myself had ever taken the slightest interest in such matters and moreover we all belonged to a church that holds very strong views upon the inadvisability of such practices. In any case, what was proposed to us in the first instance was sheer, uncritical, credulous spiritualism. However, desperate cases grasp at desperate remedies, a medium recommended by a friend was visited, with disconcerting and, since the medium in question was mentally unstable, most unpleasant results. Neither of us was sufficiently unbalanced or uncritical to accept such phenomena as genuine, but by that time John had read quite a lot on the subject and she was still anxious to pursue her investigations in some more reliable manner.
Since her temperament was such that her demand for unequivocal proof kept pace with her desire for conviction, it was essential that our new start should be made under reliable guidance. And it was at that juncture that Sir Oliver Lodge published his book Raymond and renewed a statement which he had already made some years earlier to the effect that he was convinced of personal survival of bodily death and of the possibility of communication between the dead and the living.
This is the story of Radclyffe Hall and not a treatise on psychical or psychological controversy, and I am not proposing to discuss Sir Oliver's beliefs, but whatever may or may not have been their justification, at that time he certainly represented the highest scientific aspect of the subject and I decided, on John's behalf, to write to him for advice as to our next venture.
A most courteous reply led to us visiting the medium Mrs. Osborne Leonard, and to our undertaking investigation of her phenomena in the careful and critical manner recommended by Sir Oliver.
The measure of conviction we obtained is not a matter I propose to discuss just now. What was in any case of immense importance to John, in her desperate unhappiness, that before very long her intelligent and cautious reports and comments had so impressed Sir Oliver that he asked for more and proceeded to train us relentlessly in the way we should go.
Very soon we were sitting regularly and frequently with Mrs. Leonard, were also testing other mediums, were employing a full-time secretary to type notes and reports, and John, with myself as collaborator and second in command, was launched upon an existence of regular and painstaking industry such as she had never before even dreamed of The idle apprentice was metamorphosed by sorrow into someone who would work from morning to night and from night till morning, or travel half across England and back again to verify the most trifling detail.
Nor were our labours confined to our own investigations. Having, at Sir Oliver's suggestion, joined the Society for Psychical Research and thereby made the acquaintance of the scholars who had for so long directed its activities: Lord (then Sir Gerald) Balfour, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. J. G. Piddington and others, we found ourselves preparing a paper which John read at a meeting of the Society, undertaking various subsidiary tasks, and concurrently to all this we undertook on Sir Oliver's behalf a special form of 'war work'. We dealt with a large proportion of the people who, being bereaved, wrote to him for information and assistance, we examined their circumstances and credentials and when we thought it advisable escorted them to sittings and acted as note-takers for them, reporting the results to Sir Oliver.
Looking back upon the uncertain and meagre personal harvest that we eventually reaped from all this arduous labour, I can only feel that, for us, it served its chief purpose in training John in that infinite capacity for taking pains that she had so signally lacked, that became so salient a characteristic of her methods in later life and brought her natural genius to complete fruition.
Of course, as Catholics, we were faced very early in our venture with the Church's veto upon all spiritualistic practices, but fortunately for us, just at that time, a very eminent scholar-priest published his opinion that those who were genuinely investigating these alleged phenomena with an open mind undertook a good and not an evil work. We approached him and having satisfied him that our minds were indeed open we continued our activities with his knowledge and approval, frequently discussing with him debatable and interesting phenomena ... his also was essentially the open mind.
And, as a matter of fact, twenty-seven years of experience and study in these matters left us both, John and myself, still with...the open mind. We discussed the question shortly before her death and when we both knew that bodily separation was imminent and she asked me whether, when the time came, I should attempt to establish communication through a medium, I replied that I did not for a moment think so. I disliked the processes associated with such alleged communication through a third person and felt that my faith would be strong enough to sustain me until I could join her. I added, however, that most things were possible and that I might conceivably find myself so desperately unhappy that I would attempt even that expedient Her reply was that, should I ever do so and should it prove possible, she from her side would, of course, do her utmost to respond. I then asked her: 'If it were the other way round and I were going and leaving you behind, what would you do? Would you go to Mrs. ...?' (And I mentioned a celebrated medium of acknowledged integrity.) Her answer was emphatic: 'No; never.... The Communion of Saints would be enough for me.'
It has also been and will be enough for me during our temporary separation, and I have thought it worth while to set down here what were our measured conclusions on the question when we ourselves became most deeply involved. Peace was declared and it found us established in our first unfurnished home: the first also of a series of homes of which the freehold or a very long lease was bought under the impression that we should remain in them for the rest of our lives. In this respect we both suffered from incurable optimism, and in any case we got an immense amount of fun out of our various ventures and the fun would not have been nearly so fulfilling if we had not at each fresh beginning been completely convinced that here at last we had discovered the perfect home for all the years to come and for our old age.
Our homes! Houses, flats, large and small, in town and country, in England and in Italy ... each in its turn seemed ideal and in none of them did we remain longer than four years. Time and again we immersed ourselves gravely in preliminary discussions that heralded the next move. Gravely we agreed that we were only suited to a country life and dog breeding. With equal gravity, after a couple of years of rustication we concluded that what we wanted was a house very accessible to London and its activities. After a period of suburban experiment we (or shall we say John in this instance, but always with my loyal assent) rebelled at the constant journeys to and fro and decided that only urban life provided the necessary stimulus for her work. One home proved too big, another was definitely much too small and when circumstances at length took us to Florence, which we both loved dearly, we left our first flat after a year of gasping in pitiless Italian sunshine only to discover that the agreeably cool one that succeeded it had also definite disadvantages.
The coming of the Second World War found us discussing the conflicting attractions of the flat we had left in Florence and a villa we happened to have seen at Fiesole, and 1942 saw John hankering for an ancient dilapidated little house with its feet in the cold sea at Lynmouth. She liked the idea that at high tide and in stormy weather the waves beat against its walls! Truly it seems fortunate that in the country where I am going to meet her again we have been told that there are many mansions!
But to return to our first real home. It was a modern, pretentious and very ugly house at Hadley Wood, Middlesex, twelve miles from London, with the absurd name of 'Chip Chase' and a facade that included a turret with roughcast battlements. We were quite aware that it suggested the forts that used to appear at Hamley's toyshop in the Christmas season. But we were also aware that, as a consequence of the war, it was almost impossible to make repairs or alterations and that our mock castle, which belonged to a rich industrial magnate, contained, for a comparatively reasonable price, every comfort and convenience that our hearts could desire. That price also included carpets, curtains and fixtures, the selection of which the owner, wisely mistrusting his own taste, had entrusted to Burnetts of Covent Garden. The house, moreover, was a stone's throw from the beautiful Hadley Woods.
And so John and I thumbed our noses at jeers and she bought a ninety-nine years' lease of Chip Chase and we enjoyed our first orgy of selecting and discarding the furniture she already possessed and of hunting for and buying the early oak which she had always loved and which she taught me to love and to understand. We had a glorious time, the first of many, and a great deal of the furniture I now possess evokes those wonderful thrills that perennially accompanied the discovery of something really beautiful and unquestionably genuine. Presently we moved in, with a personal maid, four house servants, a gardener and a gardener's boy and were we comfortable and were our supercilious friends only too willing to visit us and enjoy that comfort! There was a glass-tiled, marble-flagged bathroom with a glass-enclosed bath and masses of chromium-plated intestines that in itself was a special exhibit.... And, joking apart, the rooms as seen from the inside were beautifully proportioned and, with our furniture, very attractive.
There was a pleasant little office where the psychical work was done and where the secretary had her habitat, and a big study for John opening on to the garden. But the drawingroom seemed at first superfluous. It soon proved to have its uses all the same, for we laid linoleum, fitted it with wooden partitions and commissioned it as a home for our growing kennel of griffons.
It was an interesting and pleasant life. Plenty of work needing close application; reports that must be so adequate and so accurate that they did not return to us from Sir Oliver or from the trinity of scholars at Fisher's Hill with slightly satirical notes and queries. Regular sittings with Mrs. Osborne Leonard and with any other medium who aroused the interest of the Society for Psychical Research. Visits to and from members of that Society and particularly from members of its Council (it was during our time at Chip Chase that John was co-opted to that Council). And on one occasion a visit from a young woman whose interest for the Society lay in the fact that she was liable without warning to become one of two other personalities! This she proceeded to do at Chip Chase at frequent intervals.
Then there were, of course, the dogs; John had given me a red dachshund bitch of matchless beauty: Champion Brandesburton Caprice, the holder of seven challenge certificates, re-christened by us Thora the Fairest of Women. She was as hysterical as she was devoted. Later, she crept into The Forge under the name of 'Sieglinde', though some of that lady's adventures were imaginary.
The first griffin was mine: Fitz-John Minnehaha (we had by then invested in a Kennel Club prefix), alias Tinkie, a Brabançonne weighing three-and-a-quarter pounds, a wonderful specimen but ineligible for show, having been born a 'war-baby'. Her charms were such, however, that she ushered in the Kennel ... we took to breeding and showing griffons rough and smooth and got a lot of pleasure out of it, though the difficulties were such and the casualties so frequent that like many other people in that breed we gave it up and subsequently only entertained griffons as pets.
John's personal dogs at Chip Chase were Olaf, a blue Dane, huge and docile and devoted, who went into a series of epileptic fits at twelve months old and had to be shot by the vet in the garden... I can suddenly remember John's face as we sat waiting for the sound of that shot... She also had a tiny Blenheim spaniel, Prudence. Prudence remained alive but as she grew up proved to lack discrimination in her affections, or rather to prefer any lap to any individual. She was transferred to a lady who was ready to ofier a perpetual lap.
But the end of Chip Chase came after about two years. Not only were we bored by the much-advertised 'twelve miles to the Marble Arch' that were to have been such a trifle, but which were a dreary penance of tramlines and traffic, not only was the neighbourhood suburban in the extreme, but the size of the house and the number of the servants were devouring income which we felt could be spent to better advantage.
Like Hilary and Susan Brent in The Forge, between one day and another we decided that what we wanted was a small house in London accessible to our friends, to theatres, and dog shows, and so economical in upkeep that we could afford to leave it if and when we wished to travel. And so, after an interim period of hotels, of Italy and of furnished houses, John bought No, 9 Sterling Street in Knightsbridge, just off Montpelier Square. Our staff was reduced to three and no gardeners, we stored such furniture as absolutely refused to be pulled, pushed or poured into our new abode (it was a freehold this time), and tried desperately to believe that we were comfortable. We were already becoming adept at counting our domiciliary blessings and also, if I may be forgiven a mixed metaphor, at ignoring rocks ahead.
It must be emphasized that our illusion in this case was favoured by the fact that although a great deal of work was in progress it was not then creative work. It had never occurred to either of us that a time was coming for John, when quietness and seclusion would be essential to inspiration and when a sudden interruption might frustrate the output of many hours. The psychical records were only a matter of application and of careful accuracy, guests could be denied the door when we were dictating notes to the typist in the back part of our sitting-dining room, and the typist herself could be banished to a bedroom for copying and correcting her work.
So we started the era of Sterling Street confidently, even if it was rather difficult to move about, if doors had had to be rehung to admit out-size furniture (old oak tends to be large) and if we had to eat our meals and entertain our friends sitting along one side of a refectory table, facing the wall. In spite of being unduly crowded, it was attractive. We had the communicating bedrooms that were dear to our conviviality and a delightful small gothic table and settle at the foot of my bed where we could, and did, have breakfast together. It was well-heated and got such sunshine as England provided and was near Harrods' stores for us and the park for the dogs. Thora was dead but we had Thorgils of Tredholt, another red dashshund bought by John at a Brighton dog show. He became a big winner and was presently joined by Wotan who as Champion Fitz-John Wotan helped to make dashshund history. He was a liver-and-tan, seen from the car by John in a side street in Shepherds Bush and bought for me from an old woman who had bred him. We got him registered without pedigree at the Kennel Club. He swept the benches and beat every dog he met but one (and in that case the judge was so openly doubtful that the rival was never allowed to risk a reversal of judgment). He sired seventy-three puppies during his first year at stud and gave me a passionate and exacting adoration that made my life a burden! I do not think I ever possessed so devoted or so selfish a dog! Fortunately town life disagreed with him and eventually he had to be pensioned off in the country. To this day I meet his unmistakable descendants in all kinds of unexpected places.
But before we settled into Sterling Street there was one great experience. We went to Florence together for the first time. We had both of us visited it and loved it in the past, but that was a very different thing from discovering all its joys and beauties in the company we both liked better than any in the world: that of each other. We spent an autumn, winter and early spring at the Hotel Albion on the Lung'Arno Acciaiuoli, looking across at the lovely houses of the Borgo San Jacopo reflected in the waters of the Arno. We watched them at sunrise, at noon and in the evening and when their windows glowed softly golden in a misty green twilight... and I have just learned that the Germans destroyed them before they left the city.
It was in 1921 that we were there, when Communism was rampant, atheistic slogans chalked up on every wall and the early Fascists, already too strong for total suppression, had been forbidden to carry arms. We would see bands of them swinging along the streets, many of them boys of fifteen and sixteen, wearing the black fez with its pendant tassel and its death's head device and 'armed' only with a cutting whip fastened by a thong to their wrists: the manganello.
But despite prohibitions they bore other arms at night We would be woken by the sound of reports across the river in the San Frediano Communist quarter followed by the insistent ringing of a small bell. Questioning of the chambermaid in the morning would elicit that the reports were colpi di rivoltdla, and on being asked about the bell she answered simply: 'Misericordia, signore....'
The movement at that time was still chiefly associated with Gabriele d'Annunzio, who was actually its founder. Medals were sold on the Ponte Vecchio bearing his head and on the reverse the Fascist war cry: È, é, é, ííá. But another name was already becoming familiar; another star was rising.
One day as we leaned out of the window of our room at the hotel we saw crowds hurrying by and coming also from other directions towards the junction of the Ponte alla Santa Trinita and the Via Tornabuoni. I called down to someone below to ask the reason for the commotion and was told: 'It is Benito Mussolini who has arrived at Santa Maria Novella and is coming to the bridge to speak to the people'. I was desperately anxious to sally forth to see and to listen, but John was adamant: I was to stay indoors. It was my Irish blood yearning for a free fight. I should get injured and embarrass my Italian friends by becoming an International Incident... To this day I wish that I had been more insistent or that she had yielded.
But there were more peaceable distractions available in Florence. We were neither of us constitutional sightseers and went to see only such pictures and sculptures as we already knew and loved, but we got to know the real Florence very thoroughly; the Florence that is so beautiful that Or San Michele, the Mercato Nuovo and the Porcellino, the Loggia dei Lanzi and the Palazzo Vecchio are mere everyday incidents. We also got to know its shops and its food, but of the latter only one memory is very clear. Peasant-baked bread in the shape of a small wreath, which we bought straight from the oven in a cellar near the Ponte Vecchio; cool-tasting unsalted bread which we devoured in our bedroom with plenty of sweet fresh butter bearing the stamp of the Florentine Lily.
Four things remain to recall that happy time. The Fascist medal of d'Annunzio, jewelled cuftlinks which I bought for John at Settepassi on the Ponte Vecchio. A big sapphire ring which she gave me and which I always wear and a treasure which I discovered by chance in a shabby little shop in the Via della Vigna Nuova. A tre-cento reproduction in miniature of the Volto Santo of Lucca cast in bronze with enamelled eyes. Its beauty was apparent to the most casual glance and we bought it for an absurdly small sum. It was only later when I cleaned it that I discovered that its shoes were silver and its crown and adornments of pure, yellow gold.
But Sterling Street, which we left so soon and so gladly (it was really a most uncomfortable little house and we never regretted it), had one claim to fame, for it was while we were living there - though actually while we were on holiday at Lynton in North Devon - that John made the most important decision of her life. We were staying, as on former occasions, at the Lynton Cottage Hotel and one evening, while we were at dinner, sitting at the end of the long room, we watched a couple of fellow guests making their way to their table: a small, wizened old lady and an elderly woman who was quite obviously her maiden daughter. The latter was carrying a shawl and a footwarmer and clutched a bottle of medicine. She fussed for several minutes round the old lady, putting the footwarmer under her feet, the shawl round her shoulders and inquiring if she felt warm enough and not too warm before she herself attempted to sit down. And John said to me in an undertone: 'Isn't it ghastly to see these unmarried daughters who are just unpaid servants and the old people sucking the very life out of them like octopi!' And then as suddenly 'I shall write it, I shall write Heinemann's book for him and I shall call it Octopi'.
And so she began her first novel: it was only on the eve of publication that, at my suggestion, the tide became The Unlit Lamp.
It took her two years to write it, for from the very beginning she was not a regular worker. Never for her the steady output, at fixed hours, of so many words a day. It is true that she did not at first work at night; her bad habits grew with the years. But from the beginning she had hours and days of urgent, fertile inspiration, alternating with days and hours of blank, arid inability to string two words together. From the first her work was of the kind that comes only as it listeth, a fact that she was not always prepared to accept I have seen her almost unaffected by incredibly long spells of continuous writing and I have also seen her grey with exhaustion when, determined to dispose of some situation, to complete some section or chapter, she has wrestled vainly, hour after hour, against an inspirational blackout.
Knowing the devastating effects on her health and nerves of such fruitless battling I have many times implored her to desist, to wait until the spirit really moved her, and occasionally I would prevail, but much more often I would be told I was a fool for my pains... though later, when mournfully but firmly destroying the results of her persistence she would generously admit that I had been right!
Whether she felt inspired or not, her method of work never varied. She never herself used a typewriter, in fact she never learned to type and the mere thought of dictating her inspiration to a typist filled her with horror. She always said that the written word was to her an essential preliminary and she wrote her work with pen or pencil, very illegibly, generally mis-spelt and often without punctuation. Sometimes she wrote in manuscript books but, especially in later years, often on loose sheets of sermon, paper or indeed on paper of any kind, and to this day I will find scraps covered with sentences and sometimes discover 'try outs' on a bit of blotting paper or an old cardboard box. Occasionally she would have a spasm of determination to produce a sightly and presentable manuscript and a laborious effort would be made; spelling was to her always an insoluble mystery, and she was ludicrously distressed by this deficiency (which, incidentally, is by no means infrequent among talented people). She was quite seriously ashamed of it and would constantly ask me to inspect letters she had written and insist on re-writing them if I reluctantly pointed out mistakes. It was quite incurable; however often she would ask for the spelling of a particular word she would always revert to her (doubly) original versions. These sometimes varied but on the whole were fairly consistent and became very familiar to me with the passing years. She got some consolation from the discovery that she shared this affliction with Stephen Vincent Benet, who told her that he had refused a very large sum from a public museum for the manuscript of John Brown's Body, as he would not allow his fantastic spelling to humiliate him posthumously in the eyes of posterity.
The first draft accomplished, the next step would be to ask me to read her what she had written. Luckily I had so long been familiar with her writing that the wildest scrawl presented little difficulty to me. In fact, I sometimes deciphered hieroglyphics that defeated the ingenuity of their author.... I would read and read again as often as she desired and as I read she would dictate alterations and corrections and these I would put down and incorporate in the next reading. (This explains the fact that my handwriting appears on some of her manuscripts.)
If she was satisfied with what she had done, the next stage would be dictation to a typist who was trained to her particular method of dictation. This involved never 'tapping' while she spoke or while she was reflecting. For as she dictated she continued to polish and the typist had always to be prepared to 'X' out at demand any word or sentence and continue her script with the substituted amendment.
That script was again read aloud by me, but generally after further correction by John, and so the stages would move on to re-typing, to further readings and further correction until the result satisfied her and reached the goal of the 'publisher's copy', which she insisted should be spotless and practically without corrections.
I have known a chapter worked on for weeks on end. I have often read one aloud a score of times and I learned to read so closely to punctuation that she knew by my timing whether she had put down a semi-colon or a comma. Never can any writer have taken more patient pains than did this erstwhile idle apprentice.
There was immense interest for me in my share of her labours, as I would find myself always the first to read and to hail the beautiful prose which was later to delight so many; to follow the intricate weaving of those large tapestries upon which she preferred to work.
There was also need for the exercise of tact and for the not infrequent acting of a drama which was essential to her processes. After a day or night spent like Jacob, wrestling with the angel of her own uninspired obstinacy, she would hand me the resulting manuscript with an excellent simulation of self-confidence and command me to read it aloud. This I would solemnly proceed to do with the best imitation I could produce of approval and appreciation. But in spite of my efforts there would be a growing flatness in my voice that infuriatingly confirmed her own infallible judgment; and having been asked whether I was tired and told that I was reading abominably and sometimes informed that my ineptitude was ruining the beauty of what I read, the manuscript would be snatched from my hands and torn to shreds or thrown into the fire. Physically and mentally exhausted, black depression would overwhelm hen She had seen the last of her inspiration, she would never write again.... What she had written was as dead as Queen Anne, it would shame a child of seven... why had she ever imagined she could write? Nothing like this had ever happened to her before... and so on and so on until, in spite of chronic insomnia, sleep would come, and days perhaps of stagnation and recuperation. Days also when she would give way to my persuasion, and, chiefly for my sake, would agree to a 'first night', to a meal at a restaurant, to seeing some of our friends (and would incidentally thoroughly enjoy these distractions herself); when the dogs would move into the foreground and their grooming and exercising would be taken over from the maid; when she would indulge in housework and in strenuous polishing of our collection of old oak (at this period of our peregrinations there was no scope for the gardening which she always loved), and then, as suddenly as it had left her, one day inspiration would blaze out once more.
There was another recurrent aspect of her literary labours: the books that she herself well knew would never see publication; that were without salient merits and served merely as trolleys to carry her from a fallow period to one of renewed production.
There were several of these, but one in particular was rewritten at least three times, an apparent waste of energy extending each time to some twenty-five thousand words. But it acted as the baptist to what she herself (and I also) always considered her best book: The Master of the House, and also to The Sixth Beatitude.
In the case of the 'trolley' books the drama was the same as in that of her briefer bouts of spiritual dryness, but it was prolonged and much more elaborate. After she had finished a book and corrected the proofs there would be a time of happy, contented indolence; of quiet consciousness of work well done, of holidays in the country, at the seaside or abroad (we hardly ever stayed in other people's houses, much preferring our own independence). For her an orgy of being read aloud to by me. This reading aloud was in any case a constant feature of all times, one of our chief pleasures and her chief relaxation. But when she was engaged upon her own work she barred the reading of good English novels, lest they might affect her own style, and our programme was restricted to biographies, history and memoirs, French books of any description and detective fiction, in which she frankly revelled. I would read to her endlessly and many times I thanked God that my voice had once been trained and never seemed to fail me. I would read by day and often by night in an effort to exorcize her constitutional sleeplessness. When we went away together to an hotel the first things to be unpacked were at least a dozen books of every description. I would have borrowed or bought them on various recommendations and have glanced through them provisionally or have read them myself.
My star-turn was when we lay on twin beds at the Osborne Hotel in Paris while I read her for eight hours on end Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's Body. On that occasion even my voice went on strike!
But these periods of enjoyment had their inevitable sequel. One day she would awake with a faint feeling of anxiety and presently that anxiety would find expression in an apparently casual remark to the effect that it was now some time since she had finished her last book. Even while I made an equally casual reply, reminding her of how desperately hard she had worked and of the exhaustion from which she had afterwards suffered, I knew that the halcyon days were over and that the curtain had rung up for the usual performance.
That faint anxiety of hers would grow like Jack's beanstalk until it overshadowed every other consideration. Why was she still without an idea in her head? Was she never going to be able to write another book? She was getting no younger and her output might be over ... she had not begun to write till maturity. Never had she known so prolonged a period of stagnation! Was I sure that the last book had been really first-class! After all, there had been some adverse reviews. Come to think of it, she couldn't remember many good ones! Did I remember such and such a criticism? Was it really worth while her writing at all? And yet again and again and again: why was she without the ghost of an inspiration? Head by head I would tackle this Hydra; infinitely pitiful of what she endured but perfectly confident of the ultimate issue, and almost invariably her misery would seek relief in the gestation or resurrection of a trolley book and the curtain rise upon the second act.
It would all be undertaken with the utmost gravity and the Lord knows she suffered enough in the process! Silence and concentration and all the customary routine would ensue. Long hours of grinding out chapter after chapter of well-constructed prose lacking the breath of life. Long hours of listening to my reading of the same, perpetual assurances (for her own reassurance) that what she was writing surpassed all that had preceded it. My assent demanded and duly supplied while neither of us was ever deceived for a moment. Writing, reading, dictating, correcting, typing and retyping, and I would wonder wearily how long it must continue. Fury at times at my alleged lack of appreciation, but a half-hearted fury aimed chiefly at herself. One by one the chapters would be completed; the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh....
Then one day a morning of feverish concentration as I sat patiently beside her in careful silence waiting to put up a creditable reading of chapter twelve. A few sheets handed to me without any comment:
'In a quiet curve of the coast of Provence, in a stretch of that coast which before the war was seldom if ever visited by strangers, lies the small sea-port town of Saint-Loup-sur-Mer, cleansed by strong winds and purified by sun-shine.'
There was no more need of reassurance on either side, the drama was over and the Holy Spirit had descended, and I read her the first chapter of The Master of the House.
It was five years later that that scene was repeated exactly. It was the day on which we moved from a flat in St. Martin's Lane which we had joyfully furnished a couple of years earlier. The trolley book had on this occasion progressed even further; it had, if I remember rightly, been entirely re-written and its name for us both was deathly weariness.
John was sitting at her immense desk surrounded by chaos. That desk and our chairs were the only remaining furniture in a flat that was actually in the process of 'removal'. Through sheer cussedness, as it seemed, she had elected to choose that morning for work, and to add yet more weariness to that moribund book. But I was well-trained and I certainly knew better than to protest, especially as on this occasion she very soon desisted. Moreover she was amiable and definitely apologetic:
'I know I'm the limit; I don't know how you endure me! But will you read me this and tell me what you think of it'. Only one sheet this time and the removal could proceed:
'Hannah Bullen stood staring seaward. Romney Marsh stretched out between her and the sea, more than two miles of greyish-green marsh with cattle upon it, sheep and strong steers - for a long time ago the sea had left Rother'.
And no more was heard of that unhappy trolley book. Packed away among the manuscripts of the books that are so familiar is the definitive typescript of that perennial hobby-horse - it will never be published and I suppose I should destroy it. Actually it contained one fragment of inspiration which did see publication as a short story: Fräulein Schwartz. It did also embody an excellent theme, but it was not destined to join the works of Radclyffe Hall. Yet somehow I feel a reluctance to burn it; it has already borne the heat of the day.
But, talking of destruction, there was one respect in which I trained John and repeatedly read the riot act until she ceased to transgress. In the early days of her writing, when dissatisfied with a piece of work after a first trial reading, she would sit down to re-model it nearer to her heart's desire. And sometimes she would be perfectly right and the second version would surpass the first. But it occasionally happened that her dissatisfaction was unjustified; was born perhaps of a mood induced by exhaustion and overwork, and that when I came to read and she to hear her revised version, our eyes would meet and she would say ... 'I know what you're thinking. The first one was better. ...' and I would reply: 'Of course it was. Let me read it to you again: where is it?' Guiltily she would look at me and confess that she had destroyed it. If it had been torn up it meant only patient reconstruction of the fragments in the waste-paper basket, but sometimes the flames had already had their way.
There came a day when after such a disaster I exacted a solemn promise that never, never again would she destroy anything until we had finally examined it together and she had confirmed her verdict of destruction, and I am able to record that she kept that promise.
I have related how she at last decided to write 'Heinemann's book', and the fact that it took her two years to write it. None of her books was to have a peaceful career and The Unlit Lamp was no exception. She met and conquered all the difficulties of her inexperience, sustained by the memory of a great publisher's praise. And before the book was half completed came the news of Mr. Heinemann's unexpected death; she had waited too long to fulfil his prophecy.
His firm had the first offer of the book and declined to publish it, as did nine other well-known publishers. They were unanimous in declaring that it was a work of merit, but too long and too depressing to find a public, especially as the book of an unknown novelist. I.A.R. Wylie and J.D. Beresford, who had agreed to read it, were not encouraging, but from somewhere or someone there came a suggestion that if John could write a much shorter, light novel and could get it accepted, it might facilitate the publication of The Unlit Lamp.
Depressed and discouraged, she yet held to her conviction that The Unlit Lamp was worthy of success. If it needed a herald, then it should have it and she wrote The Forge in less than five months. It was published by Arrowsmith in 1924 and was very well received; they were eager for more, but they had firmly classified her as a humorous writer and had no use at all for The Unlit Lamp.
If I went into all her publishing vicissitudes I might become libellous as well as boring. It suffices to say that The Unlit Lamp was published by Cassell in 1924 and established her reputation and that after she had put paid to Arrowsmith with A Saturday Life, she was able in 1926 to give Newman Flower Adam's Breed.
Adams Breed. The first I heard of it was at the Pall Mall restaurant, which was at that time rather a favourite haunt of ours. In the middle of a pleasant tête-â-tête luncheon John became abstracted and inattentive. Her eye was following our obsequious waiter and presently she said to me with quiet decision, 'I am going to write the life of a waiter who becomes so utterly sick of handling food that he practically lets himself die of starvation.'
Newman Flower wrote of Adams Breed that it was the finest book that had been submitted to him in twenty years, that he was proud to publish it but did not expect it to sell. It won John the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and the American Eichelberger gold medal. It sold twenty-seven thousand copies in the first three weeks and is still selling steadily after nineteen years. It is one of the books that has come to stay. It was translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian and I cannot remember what other languages. Though it criticized the Italians they loved it dearly and accepted the criticism as just.
It was in Adams Breed, when it was published, in 1927, that a dedication first made its appearance that was subsequently repeated in every book that she wrote. That dedication: 'To Our Three Selves', that has aroused so much curiosity among her readers. Many were the letters that reached her from all parts of the world, asking for the identity of the Three Persons alluded to, but during her lifetime John smiled and kept her own counsel in the matter; she vouchsafed no explanation, and, at her wish, I also held my peace.
However, since her death it has come to my knowledge that the dedication has continued to stimulate curiosity and that speculation has in some cases led to erroneous conclusions, and I think the time has come to reveal the very simple solution of the mystery:
The Three Selves referred to in the dedication were Ladye, who had encouraged her first efforts in prose and of whose continued interest she was firmly convinced; myself, whose glad and humble service to her talent she chose thus to acknowledge and honour and ... Radclyffe Hall, since, generous as she was in her tribute to Ladye's influence and to my service, she could not deny that the books were her own creation.
I could write an entire book about John collecting copy, for whenever and wherever she sought it, I went with her. Sometimes it was I who enabled her to collect it. I it was who discovered the macaroni factory in Old Compton Street and introduced her as an eccentric signorina who wwished to inspect it. Soho, of course, she knew in her bones, and The Doric was born after an exhaustive tour of the underground regions of the Berkeley.
We followed Gian Luca step by step to the New Forest and I am not likely to forget our hunt for that charcoal burner; we trudged and waded in abominable weather and found him at last; almost, it seemed, by chance, and she listened for hours while he expounded his lore.
I remember that I beguiled a part of the time by extracting a sheep-tick from his kitten's ear!
Her final exploit in regard to Adam's Breed she performed without me under the escort of Dr. Brontë, the pathologist. He took her to visit a public mortuary so that she could verify details of procedure and it was not until at least three weeks had elapsed that she revealed to me that its only occupant had been a baby recently dead of diphtheria!...
Adam's Breed was another case of an altered title and here again Lynton comes into the picture. We were once more staying at the Cottage Hotel when Newman Flower put through a trunk call; he had been considering the original title: Food, and had made up his mind that he could not digest it. John was too agitated to grasp what he said, but I hung on until I heard him protesting that with such a title the book would be still-born....
'It's bound to be mistaken for a cookery book', he wailed. Time was short and a title had to be found, and once more I displayed my solitary talent. Firmly rejecting John's frenzied suggestions, I ransacked the local Smith's for sources of inspiration and ended by finding what we required in Kipling's Tomlinson: 'I'm all 'oer-sib to Adam's Breed that I should mock your pain.' And what is more I still think it a most excellent title!
And since I am busy just here blowing my own trumpet, let me add that I also christened... The Well of Loneliness, The Master of the House, and The Sixth Beatitude.
It was after the success of Adam's Breed that John came to me one day with unusual gravity and asked for my decision in a serious matter: she had long wanted to write a book on sexual inversion, a novel that would be accessible to the general public who did not have access to technical treatises. At one time she had thought of making it a 'period' book, built round an actual personality of the early nineteenth century. But her instinct had told her that in any case she must postpone such a book until her name was made; until her unusual theme would get a hearing as being the work of an established writer.
It was her absolute conviction that such a book could only be written by a sexual invert, who alone could be qualified by personal knowledge and experience to speak on behalf of a misunderstood and misjudged minority.
It was with this conviction that she came to me, telling me that in her view the time was ripe, and that although the publication of such a book might mean the shipwreck of her whole career, she was fully prepared to make any sacrifice except - the sacrifice of my peace of mind.
She pointed out that in view of our union and of all the years that we had shared a home, what affected her must also affect me and that I would be included in any condemnation. Therefore she placed the decision in my hands and would write or refrain as I should decide.
I am glad to remember that my reply was made without so much as an instant's hesitation: I told her to write what was in her heart, that so far as any effect upon myself was concerned, I was sick to death of ambiguities, and only wished to be known for what I was and to dwell with her in the palace of truth.
Then and there she set to work on The Well of Loneliness. But long before this Sterling Street was forgotten. After Italy came a period spent in furnished houses. There was one in Trevor Square, Knightsbridge, where we endured that curiously unendurable phenomenon that occasionally comes to England, a heat wave. Another in North Terrace, South Kensington, where sewer rats the size of rabbits proved to be sharing our tenancy. I remember that the house agent questioned our veracity and that when one of the intruders obligingly died in the kitchen I arranged him neatly in a shoe-box and posted him to the gentleman in question. There was a melancholy furnished flat in Kensington Palace Mansions and then another freehold; no, it was a lease that would outlast everybody, at 37 Holland Street, near the Carmelites in Church Street, Kensington.
And of course there was always at intervals 'dear abroad'. After the first journey to Italy we often crossed that abominable Channel which John rather enjoyed and which I braved because of what lay beyond it. She was invariably merciful in this respect and always saw that I was segregated in a private cabin in which, fortified by a dry martini cocktail (and by a second in mid-channel if the weather proved capricious), I would await in panic the seasickness that never materialized. While she humoured my phobia she would often point out that I would arrive at Calais unscathed and with a healthy colour on days when she had wrestled with impending disaster. But as a matter of fact she was an excellent sailor. She had occasional yearnings for a long sea voyage and sometimes distressed me by pointing out that my inability to share this yearning had erased that pleasure from her scheme of existence. I always replied that I would follow her anywhere, but I could not contemplate seafaring with pleasure.
But the Channel horrors at any rate were quickly over and then we could both settle down to their reward. Luncheon on the Paris train, and such a luncheon as it was in those days, ending up with the invariable tower of bombe glacée and with the coffee splashed into the thick pale-blue cups; and Paris itself, which we 'discovered' together. She already knew it but had never lived there and since it had for her no special associations we built up those associations together and came to know it well and to love it dearly. We also built up a circle of friends who always welcomed our arrival warmly and eagerly added to the pleasure of our visits: first and foremost Romaine Brooks, the painter of memorable canvases, and Natalie Barney (who lives in The Well of Loneliness as Valerie Seymour), The Duchesse de Clermont Tonnerre, Adrien Mirtil (who also figured in it, slightly idealized, as the gentle and learned Jew) and the ever enchanting Colette, whose genius we revered while we revelled in her rare personality. Most of our visits to Paris were punctuated by the gift of another of her books. I have them all with those witty dedications for which she seemed never to lack inspiration.... Yes; Paris was always beloved and always new, always a signal for carefree enjoyment. It became peculiarly 'ours' and until the summer of 1926, when she was actually beginning to write the book, nobody was less aware than John that she was absorbing copy for The Well of Loneliness.
We had in the early days and after some uncomfortable experiments our own hotels, the little Osborne in the rue St. Roch, and later the Pont Royal in the rue du Bac, and we discovered and patronized the Vert Galant, that little riverside restaurant near the Palais de Justice where one ate and drank most admirably, upstairs or downstairs, and could entertain one's friends, as we very often did, in delightful little rooms with lunette windows looking out on to the Seine.
We went to many churches; to St. Etienne du Mont where Ste. Geneviève lies in her golden shrine and those exquisite twisted stairways lead one closer to heaven; to the Sacré Coeur, of course, which, like Stephen Gordon, we both loved but which was, it must be admitted, difficult of access, and more and more often to the unaesthetic Madeleine to which we were both drawn by the always beautiful music. In any case John had a passion for the Madeleine which had nothing to do with artistic appreciaion. She would sometimes murmur to me during Mass: 'You do love it, don't you?' and closing my eyes to shut out the sculptural atrocities of the high altar I would murmur back quite truthfully that I did. Sometimes we descended to that shabby little chamber of horrors in the crypt where the authorities have bestowed such cheap or damaged statues of the saints as are not considered worthy of a place above. We would buy votive candles from the practical-minded attendant, especially for St. Expedit, who, we had been told, was able to ensure us a calm Channel crossing. Observing the destination of our candles the attendant once remarked: 'Ses clients sont d'habitude trés satisfaits'.
Bagnoles de 1'Orne saw us at irregular intervals, for John the humanitarian was reaping the harvest sown by John the sportsman. A vein injured long ago in hunting began to cause anxiety and we went to Bagnoles so that she could take the baths. We became very fond of the dull little burg where the baths (which I also took) were pleasant enough and the unconquerable sleepiness that followed them delightful. Books we took with us, of course, as usual, and enticed the wild birds to join us in our bedroom. The chaffinches would bring their babies to see us and would feed them from the crop as we lay and watched them.
There was an unsuccessful visit to Monte Carlo, undertaken by John partly as an 'aftercure' and partly because I had never seen the Riviera. We went there 'hors saison' and were very unhappy. It was before the evolution of a summer season and we found a desert of dusty streets and shuttered shops. Although years had elapsed since Ladye's death and John had thought herself able to face the past, the wound of her bereavement seemed to open afresh and no effort could dispel her abysmal depression. We had made up our minds to beat a retreat when one night she suddenly became violently ill. Whether it was food poisoning or a virulent chill, the results were such that I was panic-striken. The hotel people were as unsympathetic as only the French can be at their worst and offered no assistance in getting a doctor. Moreover I was well aware that the sanitation was fantastic. The lavatory ventilated into the bedroom and necessary repairs had not been forthcoming, and I was therefore doubly uneasy as to the possible origins of the illness.
The English doctor whom I finally located immediately plugged in morphia to stop the sickness and as soon as she was relatively able to travel we risked a return to Paris and civilization.
On arrival in Paris we were met by another manifestation of French character. If Monte Carlo was empty, Paris was full, attending the Salon de 1'Automobile, and when we arrived at the Osborne Hotel, to which I had telephoned from Monte Carlo, the proprietor informed us calmly that he had no vacant rooms. He did not deny the fact of promised reservations but remarked that these had been 'settlement par téléphone'....
I remember trailing round Paris in a taxi, with John exhausted and barely convalescent, clutching as usual the inevitable dog (a griffon bitch not destined to survive quarantine), while eight hotels in succession refused us hospitality. At the Continental the porter went so far as to run out to our taxi, before it had pulled up, to inform us that they were full and already had a waiting list.... There are times when the most confirmed British globe-trotters would give the earth to be back in England!
But eventually we had luck at the Hotel Pont Royal, quiet and pleasant in the rue du Bac, and there in a bedroom converted into a study, John wrote much of The Well of Loneliness. It was one of three communicating rooms and we were happy enough there for several months. True, we shared a chronic dislike of hotel food, but luckily we also shared, a passion for 'café complets' and I should not like to say how many thousand of these we consumed in the course of our peregrinations. We always stipulated when arranging 'terms' to be allowed a caf$#233; complet in the place of a meal....
We have sat together before countless trays, in England and in every part of Europe we have visited, and among the details that live in my memory is the shape and flavour of an endless succession of rolls, good, bad and indifferent, that we have broken together in various countries: the bread of the communion of perfect companionship.
It was in Paris that we bought the unforgettable Raton. She was a 'petite Brabançonne' just imported from Brussels and I bought her for John in the rue de Ponthieu. She was eight months old and weighed exactly one kilo; her ears were cropped, her head was the size and colour of a tangerine and she was one of the best griffons I have ever beheld. She opened the ball at luncheon by biting John; from her lap she had tried to get into her plate. Very soon afterwards she became my property. John said she was too small to carry and that she never knew whether she was carrying her or not. She fought every step of her education and I thought she would never consent to go on a lead. I worked like a slave to rear and train her and we nursed her and brought her through virulent distemper, with Cheron, that great Paris vet, in attendance. As soon as she realized she was seriously ill she accepted all treatments with self-possessed philosophy and I never knew a dog with such a determination to live. She was as clever as sin and as stubborn as hell. She loved no one but herself and she loved herself consumedly. When she was convalescent I would carry her about the room with only her shrewish little black face emerging from the blanket. She quite obviously shared our triumph when she was pronounced out of danger and I feel sure she was confident that she would have her own way for the rest of a long life.
Very soon after her recovery she died in ten minutes of quite another ailment ... we could have better spared a better dog....
During our earlier visits we actually did some conventional sight-seeing in Paris: Versailles and the Trianon, the Malmaison, the Cointiergerie, Fontainebleau and, only once I think, we went to the Louvre. But that, I remember, was in mid-winter and the French had decided not to heat it, so we came away quickly and only lingered near the exit where they were selling small bronzes cast direct from the Egyptian originals. John gave me one of a limited edition of the little head of Akhnaton's daughter. She is very lovely on her base of Siena marble. I bought for John an exquisite Egyptian cat, elegant and sinister in the extreme. So sinister indeed that we decided he was unlucky to us and handed him on to someone less superstitious.
Once on our way back from Bagnoles de 1'Orne, we visited Lisieux. It was before the building of the new Basilica and the tinted and clothed marble effigy of Thérèse still lay in the chapel of the Carmel with the Holy Father's Golden Rose in her hand. But already it was one of the greatest pilgrimages in France, masses were said daily at a dozen altars, from five in the morning until noon or later, and pilgrims came from all over the world to pay homage to the Alençon jeweller's daughter who had been so certain of the road to heaven. Blatant vulgarity was already enthroned and at High Mass when the bell rang for the Elevation, electric lights surrounding the tinted marble altaipiece spelt out: 'Je femai tomber une pluie de roses'. French bourgeois taste was rampant and blatant, but as Henri Ghéon has since pointed out it is well to remember that Thérèse Martin, before she was a saint, was herself a French bourgeoise and that many of her 'clients' are of her own country and station. She is not reserved for the faithful of impeccable taste, as is testified by the curtains that flank or used to flank her shrine, entirely composed of ribbons of the Croix de Guerre, left there as tribute by soldiers who believed that they owed their lives to her protection.
And once more the café complet appears on the scene. We stayed at the rather primitive but nice little Hotel du Nord and were woken betimes by the Angelus bells. Returning to the hotel after early mass we found breakfast awaiting us in a ground-floor coffee-room. Butter and sugar were on the tables but one took one's choice from a mountain of fresh croissants piled in a corner and the cups were filled from two gigantic urns with taps that spouted forth boiling milk and coffee.... No wonder that one always goes back to France and forgives her deeply ingrained inhospitality.
Beauvais we visited on another occasion and Chartres, but personally I preferred Beavais. And there we loved best not the cathedral but the church of St. Eustache (or is it Etienne), that has the lovely and unforgettable windows. We stood entranced before the Tree of Jesse with its human flowers against a sapphire sky and the Lily of Salvation above them all. Later a scholarly French priest pointed out to us the deliberate vandalism that had wrecked the lower lights in the Revolution. There is another fine window in which St. Eustache kneels before a white stag with Christ between its antlers, so I expect the church is dedicated to St. Eustache and that St. Etienne is a slip of my memory. No café complet emerges from Beauvais but an excellent luncheon at a very good hotel, washed down by a memorable Mersault Charmes.
I do not think that either of us was exceptionally greedy, but it is surprising when one comes to the evoking of past happiness how often it is associated with memories of food and drink. One could never forget the flowers in Florence, the glory of them heaped round the Porcellino, but neither do I forget the mascherpone eaten with lashings of peach jam, nor the great blue-green Tuscan asparagus. And in memories of Fontainebleau the Chateau must always go hand in hand with its delectable namesake the featherweight cream cheese... while as for wines... they are memory incarnate... Coup de Mistral and the Câte des Maures... Vin Santo and Castel Toblino... Maddalena and Bolzano, Gewürz Traminer and Riquewihr, Castel Rametz and Merano.... I feel I could go on listing them indefinitely, but one of the more recent memories is among the most pleasant. A fiasco of golden sunshine bought in the station at Orvieto together with two ignoble little cardboard cups. We sat in the train face to face, John and I, with that flask between us on the little table. It was the last time we were ever to see Rome together and when we got there the flask was empty.... I shall not drink again of that fruit of the vine until I drink it with her... where she now awaits me....