A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
soon as that, is it?’ was the uninterested reply. My heart beat preposterously. ‘He can’t go back on Tuesday. It’s Sunday today.’ Would he lunch at the restaurant on Monday? I went early with my book, Le Temple Enseveli by Maeterlinck. No waiting, no!—hardly had I settled in the usual place and ordered my meagre meal than Steichen passed me and sat down at his usual table. He glanced up at me with his usual half-smile, neither less nor more. Was he really leaving for America the next day?
I ate my lunch slowly, wondering would he not perhaps at last speak to me? He made no sign, so I got up and quietly crept to the door. As I paused at the caisse for change he came up behind me, and said very quietly: ‘You know, Esmeralda, that I’m going home tomorrow?’
Esmeralda—why Esmeralda? I never knew.
‘I know,’ I said, without turning my head.
In the street I found his tall figure walking beside me in a silence through which I dared not even look up at him. At long last he touched my yellow covered book.
‘What are you reading, Esmeralda?’ I showed him. ‘Oh, Maeterlinck, he’s good, stick to him. Well, goodbye.’
And he turned abruptly and went back towards his studio. I tore across the road to my school without looking back. What had I said—nothing. What had I looked like?—half-witted probably. Oh dear, oh dear!—his voice was gentler than I expected, and he was going away tomorrow.
There was dinner! Would he come to dinner? Probably not, he would be packing, but I went early…
He did come to dinner, in his cloak and wide-brimmed black hat, and as he left he mentioned that he happened to have a picture he’d taken of Maeterlinck, and would she like it? He knew where she lived, he said, and he’d drop it round later.
Kathleen spent the evening tidying her room, doing her hair, straightening her books, changing her dress, looking at her watch, wondering if he were making fun of her, wondering why she always thought people were making fun of her, imagining reasons why he wouldn’t come. And he came, and said things like, ‘What will become of you, Esmeralda?’ and ‘Why didn’t I find you before, Esmeralda?’ and ‘You oughtn’t to be here by yourself, you’re not like the others.’ Then he kissed her on the doorstep.
No notion had he that this was the first event of my prudent little life. The clouds of convent faith had long been dispersing—all but gone by now. Nevertheless I flung myself on my knees by the friendly old box-mattress. Glory and gratitude must be expressed to something. ‘… In the heights and the depths be praise!’ The odd thing is that it was all I wanted. I was glad, exhilarated, with the knowledge that he was going away. I was drunk with the joy that this one hour had come as the climax of those five months of reticence, and that it was finished. For four stormy years I was faithful to that hour.
Steichen returned to New York in 1902, the same year that Aleister Crowley, the notorious decadent and practitioner of black arts, first met Kathleen, according to his Confessions. Crowley’s view of Kathleen is wildly different to her description of her first kiss:
She was strangely seductive. Her brilliant beauty and wholesome Highland flamboyance were complicated with a sinister perversity. She took delight in getting married men away from their wives, and the like. . . Love had no savour for her unless she was causing ruin or unhappiness to others. I was quite ignorant of her intentions when she asked me to sit for her, but once in her studio she lost no time, and ‘The Black Mass’, ‘The Adepts’ and ‘The Vampire’ describe with ruthless accuracy our relations. She initiated me into the torturing pleasure of algolagny on the spiritual plane. She showed me how to intensify passion by self-restraint … She made me wonder, in fact, if the secret of Puritanism was not to heighten the intensity of love by putting obstacles in its way.
Either immediately after her first kiss with Steichen she changed from a chaste though romantic ex-convent girl into a practised pricktease, ‘a devil gloating on the pain’, ‘playing the whore’ to ‘her troth-plight lover’, with the blood of her victims ‘glittering a diadem upon [her] dazzling brows’, as Crowley described her in his poems, or their world views were simply miles apart.
The only point, which coincides, is that of ‘reticence’ and ‘restraint’. Kathleen was puritanical, partly by upbringing but enough too by personal taste that, as she shed habits of her upbringing, the puritanism remained. In particular, she was sexually puritanical. The reasons for this are manifold. It was the habit of her class, her sex and her time. She was romantic, insecure and self-protective. The most individual reason was her intensely idealistic attitude towards motherhood. Her passion for babies in general had matured into a particular passion for a particular baby—her future son. This was very important to her. Her ultimate interest in men was to find the one, the fine, heroic one, who would father the fine, heroic son of her dreams. She might flirt, fall in love, and have long and intense platonic relationships with men. Certainly young men became very worked up about her, but that does not prove that she had or did not have any physical relationship with them. She might, after her loyalty to Steichen had run its course, have run her fingers through their hair and let them kiss her, but she did not sleep with them. She was a virgin when she married, and by her own account her love for her husband took off on to new planes when her son was born.
All this need not preclude an intense unfulfilled sexuality. It is hard to know what Crowley meant by ‘algolagny on the higher plane’, but presumably it refers to Von Schrenk-Notzing’s term for sexual masochism, algolagnia (from the Greek algos, pain, and lagnos, lust). His suggestion of marriage-breaking may be a misdated reference to a later development in her friendship with Steichen, when in the early 1920s his wife (Clara Smith, whom he married in America in 1903) pretended to attempt suicide, and his attentions to Kathleen were cited as one reason for it. ‘Our affair’, Crowley wrote, ‘was too much ginger for the hoi polloi,’ but it sounds rather more that she wouldn’t have him. Although she mentions a great many people in her diaries, Crowley does not appear until 1930, when someone tells her he has become very fat and she is not at all surprised.
At the end of 1902 Kathleen was back in London on a visit. On 12 December she went to the Slade arts ball with Rosslyn and their friend Nigel Playfair. He tells (in Hammersmith Hoy) how he arrived late at the party having been to review a play, and found that Kathleen had broken her leg.
We brought her back to Gray’s Inn, [where Playfair lived] and sent for a doctor who promptly decided that she must stay where she was for at least six weeks. Her brother, most Jesuitically I thought, decided that he could return to his own rooms in Soho Square, Mrs. Brooks my housekeeper, plus a leg in plaster of Paris, being ample chaperonage, and there we were, a fortnight before Christmas. [Another version says that Rosslyn came back and stayed too.]
My own family were to spend the holidays in Hampshire, but I thought that I must not neglect my guest and that I would give a dinner party in her honour, she being by then able to hobble. But though her brother and Mabel Beardsley were available, there was nobody else free, and you can’t have a real Dickensian Christmas banquet for four. So it occurred to me to advertise for guests! And this is how I did it, in the columns of the Morning Post, to secure a reasonable social atmosphere. ‘A brother and sister’ (note trifling hypocrisy, but Queen Victoria was only just dead) ‘living in rather pleasant rooms near the Temple invite any ladies and gentlemen who may be lonely to dine with them on Christmas Day. All ladies must prefer Lewis Carroll to Marie Corelli and the gentlemen must not wear made-up ties. Reply box xxx.’
It does not seem very daring today, but the sensation this advertisement caused was immediate and tremendous. I think it was the Daily Telegraph had a leader on the subject, and I don’t think any, unless it were The Times, refrained from comment. We had over four hundred replies, written with varying wit, and we chose eight or ten guests who promised to be the most amusing, writing (a heavy labour) polite regrets to the rest.
They were so busy they forgot to order any food, so at the last minute a local restaurant, Café Roche, was asked to send in the dinner, and although Rosslyn had been busy in church from 5.30 that morning Nigel found it ‘a most amusing evening … we played