A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
leg was better Kathleen went to Spain with Hugo Law and his family. They were friends initially of Rosslyn—Hugo’s father, the Chancellor of Ireland, was a neighbour of the Bruces at Downhill. Kathleen thought Lota Law, Hugo’s wife, ‘the beautifulest woman of all’, and took to Hugo when he tried to teach her to drive. She had two pieces in the Salon in Paris and learnt that ‘the papers have given me some rather nice notices … what they really appreciate was done in three hours so I think I shall give up working very hard,’ as she wrote to Rosslyn. Despite a fever and her new resolution of laziness, she was busy on this holiday learning Greek and sculpting the friends who came to stay.
Back in Paris, the company Kathleen kept was pretty mixed. On the one hand were the British: Eileen and Jessie and cousin Hener Skene, who had arrived in Paris knowing no one but Kathleen, and who played the piano to her for hours on end. He soon entered into Paris life: he met Crowley, and introduced him to Isadora Duncan’s companion Mary Desti, who became Crowley’s lover and his ‘seeress’ under the name of Sister Virakam, and wrote a biography of Isadora. It was probably Kathleen who introduced Hener to Isadora (whom, as we shall see, she met through Rodin, and it could well have been Hener who introduced Kathleen to Crowley).
Hener had been in Vienna, ostensibly studying the piano with Leschetizky, though in fact he never met him. He had given away his lessons with the maestro to a German girl called Else: after three years she said, ‘You have compromised me,’ so he married her, shook hands at the church door and left her. ‘She was a better pianist than me,’ he said. (Willie Skene, who had by now ‘absquatulated to the colonies’, thought Hener’s marriage shocking, and that Hener should have been made to do more sport at school. ‘He would have learnt that… one can’t compete with anybody without training,’ he wrote pompously to Presh, which coming from him was a bit stiff.) Hener had discipline, though. On one occasion he locked himself into his room for a week with an enormous bunch of bananas, to prepare for a concert. He became Isadora’s pianist, playing with her all over Europe; Eileen and Jessie took him up too, but Kathleen could never forget the cat being bashed against the wall.
Other foreigners she knew at this time included Gertrude Stein, whom Rosslyn described as ‘a bookish American lady writer who talks and writes any way she likes, mixing her tenses and first and third persons at will’, and ‘her odd companion and sounding-board Alice B. Toklas’. Stein was rather taken with Kathleen: she described her (in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) as ‘a very beautiful very athletic English girl, a kind of Sculptress, [who] had at that time no money to speak of either but she used to bring a half portion of her dinner every evening for Penelope.’ (Penelope was Isadora Duncan’s sister-in-law, who was then both pregnant and impoverished.) Kathleen knew Picasso too, slightly; she introduced him to Rosslyn, who sold him a terrier.
On the other hand were the French. Her closest French companion was a successful painter seven years her senior, named Hofbauer. He was suffering slightly from resting on his laurels and spending more time on the town than in his studio. ‘He had dozens of mistresses’, but Kathleen confounded any improper intentions by agreeing to meet him only at six in the morning for her daily swim in the Seine, and calling him a coward when he didn’t turn up. She would meet him for breakfast, for a dawn stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens or on the roof of Nôtre Dame (when she could persuade the custodian to let her up) but she wouldn’t meet him indoors or in the evening. He was rather embarrassed by it. What would his friends think of ‘this subjugation to a badly dressed anglaise with virginal tastes’, as Kathleen described it? Luckily they would never see them together, because they were always still asleep at the times Kathleen and Hofbauer met. And if they did see the couple together at six in the morning, they would assume they had spent the night together. Kathleen didn’t like to think of that, but recognized that it was unavoidable.
Hofbauer became jealous of Hener (‘Ha ha! That was it! There was a cousin!’) and started following Kathleen about. Finally he lost his temper, and she explained her reasoning: ‘I wanted to learn French, I’ve done that. I wanted to get you to work in the morning, you’ve done that. And I wanted to get our friendship on to a proper sort of foundation. We’ve done that.’ Later on when his laziness was again being a problem she borrowed Hener’s idea and locked Hofbauer in his studio every day, bringing him food and not letting him out until the day’s work was done. The painting he produced under this discipline won the Prix du Salon.
Her other French friends were Monsieur and Madame P (though Madame was in fact South American), at whose house she met writers and poets, Henri de Regnier, Paul Adam and Anatole France. ‘It was quite useless really, for my French was so poor that I dared not utter a word of it, and their French was so flashingly fast that I scarcely followed a word.’ The Ps were ‘rare friends’, ‘young, rich’, with ‘charm and wit’, her ‘skylight to a different Paris’. Kathleen introduced Eileen to the Ps—she had still not realised that her nervousness with Eileen and sense of inferiority were actually an unacknowledged dislike, and tried to please her with introductions and attentions. ‘I was baffled about Jocelyn, and made repeated efforts to disperse that intimate, slightly scoffing regard with which she seemed to look with mockery into the deepest recesses of my heart, and find there nothing but the commonplace and the trivial.’
She did, however, realise that it was time to get a place on her own, but not before Eileen had played a trick on her of dressing up as a boy. She announced the arrival of a cousin; could Kathleen entertain him for the evening because she Eileen was otherwise engaged? Certainly Kathleen could. She was completely taken in by the slender youth in a baggy Norfolk jacket, and when Eileen made her true identity known Kathleen’s reaction was mixed. She laughed, she claimed to have thought it was fun, but she felt sick too. Her love of her own freedom was always slightly charged by her distaste for the way the people around her in that easy-going milieu used theirs.
The day after Eileen’s trick Hener gave Kathleen vicious Chinese burns, demanding to know what had been going on. Eileen had sworn Kathleen to secrecy, so she didn’t tell. Hener got his own back by telling Kathleen that there was a Swede about who wanted to kill her, who was at that moment asleep in a drunken stupor on Hener’s studio floor. Hener had discovered him lurking with a revolver, threatening to shoot Kathleen. ‘What have you been doing to Sternstrom?’ Hener demanded. ‘He said he loves you, and that he is a god, and that it’s not fitting that a god such as he should be slighted. Later he wept and said you were so lovely you had better be killed before you got less so.’ Kathleen was less upset about the revolver (she knew about that anyway, and only hadn’t told Hener because she thought it might give him ideas) than about the drunken stupor. She decided to bolt to Chartres, where at night she read in her room at the Chariot d’Or, and by day communed with the statues on the west face of the cathedral, loving the stained glass, far away from ‘violent cousins, jealous painters, sinister Jocelyns and murderous Swedes’. Cathedrals gave her great pleasure. Such religious beliefs as survived her childhood had been waning for some time, but cathedrals were something else. ‘Could worship anything of which Cologne was emblematic,’ she wrote after a visit in August 1901.
When she got back to Paris she moved house.
On her first night in her new room, a long narrow studio overlooking a courtyard with a pump, she observed her opposite neighbour across the yard. ‘He was a young bearded Frenchman, animated and rather good-looking, and despite the beard I thought he might be an amusing neighbour.’ He seemed to be giving a party; there were a lot of people, a lot of late-night toing and froing. In fact he was doing a moonlight flit. She was rather disappointed.
The next occupant of the opposite studio hanged himself: she saw his dark figure through the window, fixing something to the ceiling. The afternoon before he died she had had her first conversation with him, and she tormented herself with feelings of guilt. ‘He could have been planning these ultimate measures while I stood beside him unawares. How dreadful were these unawarenesses! It is impossible to take on the responsibility of intimacy with everyone who stretches out a hand… I found it difficult to believe that my sympathy had been so dormant. I was well, healthy and happy. How unspeakably grim.’ Quite soon she moved again.
Her new studio had a flat roof; she rigged up a mackintosh awning and slept out, rain or shine, pulling the mackintosh this way or that according