A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young
pencils?’ And in the same breath she writes, ‘And yet Gordon Craig appreciates my art as no one else has ever appreciated it…’ No doubt he did, in some way. And Isadora was herself perfectly capable of being dismissive of the work of others. Kathleen had fallen ill (three days of high fever due to overstrain, said the doctor) during a visit to Isadora at the Hague in November 1905, and Isadora had no respect for her anxiety about ‘some statue whose clay will crack if she doesn’t get back’.
So in the summer of 1906 Kathleen found her friend at Noordwijk, in a white house with a white shell garden among the sand dunes. Isadora told Kathleen that she was all alone, that she hadn’t told even her family of her situation; but Isadora was not above a little emotional blackmail. Her family did know, and her mother thought she should be married. ‘But she had been married, had found it impossible, and had divorced her husband. Why should she want me to enter the trap where she had been cruelly bitten?’ Isadora wondered. She turned instead to Kathleen, the ‘nice quiet English girl’, as Isadora described her to Craig, ‘very sweet and gentle’.
‘Kathleen was a magnetic person, filled with life and health and courage,’ Isadora wrote later, but those qualities were not to the fore when Isadora’s story first came out. Kathleen, initially, was shocked.
I was torn and shattered. All my inborn prudery, strengthened by the convent upbringing, was terribly affronted. The sad queer happenings in the Balkans served not at all to soften this present experience. The girls of my nightmare winter there were of a so completely different civilisation that they had seemed like lovely wild animals. But here was the dancer, my friend, with an education limited indeed, it is true, but speaking my language, sharing my acquaintances, with recognizable ambitions and ideals. It was a shattering blow to me, who found exultation in audacious defiance of convention coupled with an assured control. So loudly and arrogantly had I proclaimed that complete independence for a lass was fraught with no dangers whatever, given there was character and intelligence to back it. I was very young. Daughters were still living with their mothers in dutiful subjection. Well, here then was a situation to be grappled with. My pseudo maternal heart hit my head a sharp blow. ‘Get on with the job.’
‘Daughters were still living with their mothers,’ she wrote, to define the nature of propriety. She of course was not living with her mother, and never had. She was undoubtedly aware that to be as independent-minded as she was was quite unusual, but it is not clear that she yet associated her independence with her orphaned state. She was certain that there were no dangers for her; she was interested not so much in the nature of female independence as its fruits. And to find Isadora bearing such fruit as this was quite extraordinary to her. Sexual freedom, as an option, seems hardly to have crossed her mind before. Now that it did, ‘character and intelligence’ precluded it for her, and at the same time required her to ‘get on with the job’ for her foolish, as she saw it, friend. Perhaps she felt that Isadora had in some way let down the ideal of female independence by ending up in ‘the worst possible plight’.
Vicariously I figured myself the mother of Isadora’s son. It never occurred to me that the expected baby could be other than a son. For the health of this future son, the mother must be cheered and cared for. I would not let Isadora see that I was shocked, yes, quite simply and honestly shocked. Never did I let her suspect my rather mean fear lest any of my common-place standard-moraled relations should hear of my aiding and abetting, with sympathy and capacity, the arrival of an illegitimate child of a dancer. In my head I could hear the scorn with which those last words would be bandied from naval mouth to military, from military to clerical, from clerical to old maids’. ‘It is easy,’ I thought, ‘to have the courage of one’s convictions, but these are not my convictions. Well, I must have courage all the same.’
The life they led at Villa Maria was ‘queer and anxious’. The wind blew all the time, gently or in such storms that the house, in Isadora’s words, ‘was rocked and buffeted all night like a ship at sea’. Isadora sewed baby clothes and wrote cheerful letters to Craig, who had gone to London to visit his other pregnant mistress, Elena Meo. In one letter Isadora all but invites him to bring Elena with him to Villa Maria: ‘If there is anyone you care for very much who feels unhappy and wants to come with you she can have half my little house with all my heart. It will give me joy—and Love is enough for all.’ Sometimes Isadora was peaceful, but at others ‘a fierce cloud of doubt, fear and loneliness would descend upon her… and she would cry for death and plan her suicide.’ Kathleen would cheer Isadora with tales of future triumphs, and herself with the thought that people who talk of suicide are not usually the ones who go through with it.
Adding to the strangeness of the situation was the attention of the press— Kathleen’s first experience of it, though later she would come to know it well. The story of Isadora’s pregnancy had got out, along with rumours that she and Craig were married. (Craig quoted, rather aptly, of the press: ‘One said he was married, and the other he said nay, he’s just a blooming lunatic that wants his blooming way.’) A reporter had tracked Isadora down, and though he was refused an interview he remained hanging around the house. This added to Isadora’s misery, and to get rid of him and scotch the rumours she asked Kathleen to dress up in Isadoraesque drapery and run and dance on the beach in a very unpregnant fashion. Kathleen did it, to her ‘uncomfortable shame’. Later that night, in the small hours, Isadora walked out to sea. Kathleen woke with the sense that all was not well, and followed the trail from Isadora’s empty bed to the open front door to the lonely beach. The sea was calm, and there was the dancer standing in the water, with a gentle, dazed look, a faint childish smile, saying, ‘The tide was so low, I couldn’t do it, and I’m so cold.’ Kathleen led the fully-dressed Isadora out of the water and back to the house where she warmed her and rubbed her and fed her hot drinks and put her to bed.
That night was the low point. Soon afterwards Craig made his appearance, and everything changed. ‘Isadora’s lover arrived without heralding, to stay we knew not for how long. Isadora was radiant and masterful. He was to be treated as a Messiah, everything was to fall before his slightest wish. Our simple fare must be supplemented, wine must replace the customary milk, everything must be turned to festival.’
Kathleen’s first instinct was to fly. She says that the reason she did not was because of loyalty to the unborn child, her vicarious son, but she would have been rare indeed if she had had no curiosity about Craig, and had felt nothing at all of his notoriously attractive energy and intelligence. Almost certainly she was a little jealous. Whatever the reasons, ‘I felt I must submit to the presence of this thoroughly inappropriate father. Physically, I was bound to own, he was not altogether inappropriate. He was tall and well-built, with a mass of long, thick, golden hair, just beginning to turn grey. He had good features, high cheekbones, and a healthy colour. Only the hands with the low bitten nails betrayed the brute in him.’ Isadora mentioned the nails too; when ‘poor Craig was restless, unhappy, [he] bit his nails to the quick exclaiming often “My work. My work. My work.”’
He was gay, amusing, argumentative [continued Kathleen]. Only once or twice did wild outbursts of uncontrolled temper pass with a wave of terror through the little villa. And I, ever mindful of the little life, wondered whether it were taking any harm from these distressing scenes. Isadora herself remained externally beautiful and serene. Endowed always with an abundance of generosity to those about her, she seemed now ready to forgive, to condone, to accept, and to give herself up to ministering to this unbridled child of mature age.
There was one moment, at least, when Kathleen liked Craig. Live lobsters had been sent for, ‘to feed the rare brute well’, and put in a pail overnight. In the middle of the night Kathleen was woken by hair-raising noises, and rushed downstairs fearing suicide, murder or worse. The whole household had been raised, and they peered nervously round the pantry door to find that the lobsters, having upturned their pail, were amusing themselves by shattering all the crockery that shared their shelf. In the hysterical merriment, born of relief, which followed, they were all for a moment united.
Craig left, and Isadora’s time came. A telegram was sent to Craig in Rotterdam and he returned. Kathleen’s diary gives the bare and brutal bones.
22 Sept 1906: (Sat) 1. woke me at 5. Dilation pains begun. Got into bed with her and lay there till 8. Got her