A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
later.
In very few cases was the fearful death rattle I had read of. Almost always death came merely as a cessation, as a clock runs down. Only once did I falter. The dying patient was a boy of about 14, with large brown eyes like a raccoon and tousled black hair. He clung to my hand with a strength that made me hope that they were wrong in abandoning him, and that he might not be dying, at any rate not tonight. And he would open his eyes and say things to me, and I could not understand a word. And then, very suddenly, with his eyes still open, he stopped breathing. My religion, which had been waning and waning, went out with a spirt.
At times she got depressed. ‘A miserable day. Not the weather, but uselessness, that horrid curse.’ She visited a hospital with six patients, men, women and children, one with smallpox, all in together on mattresses a metre long and having had no food or doctor for three days. Two days before Christmas they were told their hospital was to be shut down, and their doctor was not to visit the villages. A woman with pleurisy was sent away after travelling an hour and a half to get to the hospital.
25th: Cheerful sort of Christmas, eh? Never mind. I had a letter, a great event. Gave out blankets, and went a tramp round the town, but feel very useless and stupid. On the hill to the back there are some fifteen corpses still lying, all horrid and dried, unburied.
30th: Wednesday: Rode to Vernik. Hideous roads. Very poor and miserable. Even the children’s faces seem wrinkled with a chronic shiver. Women tell one their horrible tales, but one has heard them before. Little boys look starved, but one knows they are starved. Old old priests tell how they have been beaten, but others have been beaten. Our whole being is pity.
Her worries she kept to her diary on the whole; but in one letter to Rosslyn she said how lonely it was to have no one to call her anything but ‘Miss Bruce’. Kathleen liked and respected Lady Thompson, and worried that she was miserable or sick, but as Brailsford wrote years later: ‘Lady Thompson was a stiff and conventional person, and she and Kathleen were temperamentally poles apart.’ One rare sunny morning Kathleen was brushing Lady Thompson’s long hair, and singing a comic song: ‘I cannot understand,’ said the austere lady, ‘how you can sing with so much sadness all around you.’
Propriety was another problem. On one occasion Lady Thompson took Kathleen aside, when she had touched their Major’s knee after a long hard journey, saying, ‘Why, you’re absolutely drenched.’ ‘You are very young, my dear,’ said Lady Thompson, and explained that it was really a little indecent to touch a man’s knee. Later, when Kathleen had taken off her soaking hat during a rainy ride, that same man rode up beside her
and with many apologies begged me to be so very kind as to forgive him but he had something very delicate to implore me (Oh dear oh dear, my austere lady must have been right; what is coming?). He hated being obliged to ask me, but would I mind, could I please, put on my hat. It appeared that I might ride astride, ride without a skirt, do almost anything, but to have the head uncovered was terribly shocking. With deepest and most serious apology I put on my soaking cap, and never again offended. Then I turned over in my mind the prejudices of the middle aged lady and the Turkish soldiers, and thought I had my work cut out for me: perhaps somehow, somewhere, there would come a time when it would be right to be simple, direct and innocent. But that time never came.
Her escape was to go out riding on the tough little Turkish horses, one of which she bought for £7. She became quite used to riding astride, and rather preferred it. Henry Brailsford remembered her as ‘a very spirited and attractive young woman. I doubt if she had ever been on horseback before. That was like her. Nothing daunted her.’ But even riding was generally accompanied by the spies in uniform: ‘We are never allowed outside this little town without 12 or 15 Turkish Cavalry, an officer and several policemen. Even in the town we have always to have an armed escort, and a policeman is stationed in our passage… Yesterday we had to pass through a favourite brigand pass—we were forty-two, all armed! … A real-live gorgeous staff major never leaves us,’ she reported in a letter, being cheerful. When she did escape alone, she found dismembered limbs out on the mountainside, arranged like the limbs of a starfish.
No relief was found either with the wives of the local notabilities with whom they stayed when doing the rounds of the villages.
En route we stopped for half an hour chez un Bey and were forced to go to his Harem. The women there were the worst things made in creation, hair dyed scarlet, teeth absolutely black, and fat, ma chère! fat to such a degree that one became physically unwell in seeing them—barefooted, and hideously indecent in word and gesture. It was indeed a relief to go back to the rough cavalry after that den of harpies.
On New Year’s Day 1904 they mounted their horses and rode to Smrds. ‘Don’t comment that there are no vowels in their words: there is no water in their houses, no streets in their towns and no justice in their land.’ Smrds had been one of the wildest and fiercest of the rebel towns. Small boys refused to study in school; a five year old explained that studying wouldn’t help them to shoot Turks. The ambition of the people there was to survive through winter so that in the spring they could fight the Turks again, and no doubt get killed that way. ‘It seems a false economy,’ Kathleen wrote to Rosslyn. ‘Once begun however one must go on, so heaps and heaps more money must be sent.’ It was getting very cold: Kathleen wore five layers of wool, and slept in a sleeping bag, two blankets, a fur coat, two golf capes and a fur cloak, with hot water bottles, and still froze. And it was damp. And ‘Mud, mud, mud, oh dearie man,’ she wrote, ‘do you know you have never seen mud never in all your life.’ She kept warm on the affection and gratitude of the people she helped, and longed to bring the babies home with her, but made do with supplying bundles of cloth for their mothers to dress them in.
Her other pleasure was the landscape. ‘This is the most detestable country I ever knew… nothing attractive in all the land except the views which are exquisite.’ She marvelled at the ice: ‘perilous and wonderful, but beautiful white mountains stood against a deep clear blue sky, too impressive for fairyland, but too brilliant to be true. Ice, snow, eagles, vultures, the sound of the bells of trains of mules in the valley below, the soldiers singing their weird songs, a good smell of horses—enfin, every sense gratified.’ When Rosslyn went to Macedonia he taught his infidel escorts to sing hymns—they particularly liked ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
On 17 January Kathleen heard that her brother Wilfrid was ill. On the 18th she cut out 19 shirts, 12 pairs of knickers and 16 babies’ outfits, and noticed that she was covered with an extraordinary rash. ‘I don’t want to die out here. I can’t die without seeing Wilfrid. I say “die” because I could not be ill out here and not die, of that I am convinced.’
20th: Set out at 7.30. No sooner had we started than a terrible storm of wind and rain came on. Snow! It was rather great slabs of frozen horror that hit you in the face, and cut. It blinded and choked me and made me so numbed I was incapable of resisting the infuriated gallop of my little animal, who sought to extricate himself from the horror that surrounded him. This lasted for miles, over horrid ridges, streams, boulders, everything ...
The next day ‘I was a little ill, but would not be so.’ That night she ran a fever of 105°; then followed delirium, haemorrhage, coughing up blood, and a temperature of 107°.
She was nursed at first by a Greek carpenter, Nico, who spoke no English and only a little French. He did his best for her, but only once did she rave in French, and all that he could make out was that she wanted him to bring her old white pony to her. The room was at the top of a steep, narrow staircase, and realizing that he really could not satisfy the only wish he had been able to understand, he wept. Rats ran around her bed at night, but they gave her comfort because they reminded her of Rosslyn’s rats from her childhood.
The disease was ‘a malignant type of influenza with symptoms like typhoid’ as Brailsford described it; it was epidemic and many died of it. Kathleen was not one of them, largely because of the reappearance of Jane Brailsford, who ‘descended as if from heaven, and the will to live was supported by the dear devotion of this young Englishwoman’, as Kathleen wrote years later. At the time she wrote in her diary, ‘It is splendid to have someone. She is most good and thoughtful.’ Mrs. Brailsford acquired clean sheets