Fatal Glamour (18 page)

I felt the time had come to find a grave:

I knew it in my heart my days were done.

I took my staff in hand; I took the road,

And wandered out to seek my last abode.

Hearts of gold and hearts of lead

Sing it yet in sun and rain,

‘Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,

Round the world and home again.'

What if Davidson had only faked suicide? they wondered. Perhaps he was now enjoying a secret life, after casting off all his responsibilities: “The idea, the splendour of this escape back into youth, fascinated us.
We imagined a number of young people, splendidly young together, vowing to
live
such an idea, parting to do their ‘work in the world' for a time and then, twenty years later, meeting on some windy road, one prearranged spring morning, reborn to find and make a new world together, vanishing from the knowledge of men and things they knew before, resurgent in sun and rain.”
³⁸
The walkers made a solemn pact to meet for breakfast at Basel station on 1 May 1933. Turning their backs on England, they would start a new life, “fishing for tunnies off Sicily or exploring Constantinople or roaring with laughter in some Spanish inn.” Jacques was invited in November; Godwin Baynes, Ka, and a few others would also get the call. “The great essential thing is the Organised Chance of Living Again,” Rupert told Jacques, instead of becoming “a greying literary hack, mumbling along in some London suburb, middle aged, tied with more and more ties, busier and busier, fussier and fussier . . . the world will fade to us, fade, grow tasteless, habitual, dull.”
³⁹
It is unclear why 1 May 1933 was the target date, except that by then they would all be twice their present age, and Mayday was a festival of springtime and youth. They could hardly have foreseen that by the appointed day Rupert and Jacques would be dead, Margery insane, the others tied to duties that would make the gathering unthinkable. What really mattered, anyway, was the vision as it first came to them, for Rupert's long letter of invitation to Jacques is the closest thing to a “Neo-pagan manifesto.”

Their great aim was to throw off the natural accumulations of age: houses, jobs, spouses, children. One was not made old just by living long but by accepting a place in society without protest. To avoid being like your parents, you had only to get rid of everything your parents had got. “We'll be children seventy-years, instead of seven,” Rupert vowed in conclusion. “We'll
live
Romance, not
talk
of it. We'll show the grey unbelieving age, we'll teach the whole damn World, that there's a better Heaven than the pale serene Anglican windless harmonium-buzzing Eternity of the Christians, a Heaven in Time, now and for ever, ending for each, staying for all, a Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind, in the only place we know or care for,
ON EARTH
.”
⁴⁰

But instead of “living romance,” Rupert meekly went home to Rugby after Clevedon. For three weeks his mother subjected him to “nightly
anti-Olivier lectures” (which meant attacks on Bryn, whom the Ranee wrongly suspected of being Rupert's favourite Olivier). Meanwhile, Margery Olivier attacked him from the other side. Rupert had evaded Margery's vigilance by turning up unannounced at Bank and for the Penshurst camp. But Margery made sure that Noel did not come to Clevedon, and made it clear to Rupert that his attentions to her were not welcome. After he went home, Margery followed up with a long letter that kept him up all night with anxiety. Rupert would only do harm to himself and Noel, Margery argued, if he declared his love outright and tried to draw her sister into a premature commitment:

Love, for a woman, she said, destroyed everything else. It filled her whole life, stopped her developing, absorbed her. “You'll see what I mean if you look at women who married young,” she grimly adds. “No woman should marry before 26 or 27” (why
then?
if it kills them). And later “if you bring this great, terrible, all absorbing thing into Noel's life now it will stop her intellectual development,” etc. It's a bloody thing, isn't it? The Logical outcome is that one must only marry the quite poor, unimportant, people, who don't matter being spoilt. The dream of any combined and increased splendour of the splendid you, or the splendid I with the splendid X
–
that's gone. We can't marry X. At the best we can, if we try to marry X, marry her corpse.
⁴¹

Despite Rupert's fulminations, he was probably being given good advice – even if it was tinged with Margery's self-interest. Of the four sisters she was the most committed to intellectual and political causes; she was also the only one without a train of lovesick men. She was trying to be a New Woman and she wanted the same for Noel, a free space in which to work out her destiny. But it was naive to speak of Noel's or Bryn's destiny without accepting that their beauty was inevitably part of it. Nor did Margery admit how much she wanted to keep Rupert away from Noel in order to have more of him for herself.

In laying claim to Noel, Rupert also had his own inner divisions to contend with. One side of him longed for marriage, to move from fitful immaturity to love and sexual fulfilment. But the other side loved Noel precisely because he imagined her as a nymph who would vanish into a
thicket if pursued. This Rupert, in his poems, harped on the physical and mental unsavouriness of old age. “Menelaus and Helen,” for example, fills in what Homer left untold:

He does not tell you how white Helen bears

Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold,

Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold

Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys

'Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice

Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.

Often he wonders why on earth he went

Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came.

Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent;

Her dry shanks twitch at Paris' mumbled name.

So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried;

And Paris slept on by Scamander side.

The poem reveals Rupert's fear of actually sharing a life with any of the young women he might love. By the time he sailed to the modern wars of Troy at Gallipoli he was consciously acting the poem out, preferring a warrior's early death to the long anticlimax – as he feared it – of married life.

To back up her views, Margery simply left Noel immured at Bedales, refusing to bring her out for any occasion where she might meet Rupert. He was unable to see her at all for five months after Penshurst. As autumn closed in at Grantchester, he began to suffer from fits of loneliness and depression. He had barely scraped through his exams, he was cut off from the girl he loved, he had struck so many attitudes that he no longer knew who he really was, and he was mired in sexual frustration that seemed likely to drag on indefinitely. All of this contributed to his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith in October, as a compensation for his failure with Noel.

“The Charm” shows how Noel fed Rupert's imagination but not his need for everyday love or companionship:

In darkness the loud sea makes moan;

And earth is shaken, and all evils creep

About her ways.

Oh now to know you sleep!

Out of the whirling blinding moil, alone,

Out of the slow grim fight,

One thought to wing – to you, asleep,

In some cool room that's open to the night,

Lying half-forward, breathing quietly,

One white hand on the white

Unrumpled sheet, and the ever-moving hair

Quiet and still at length!

Rupert wrote this within a month of his adventure with Russell-Smith, which should perhaps be included among the evils that creep around the world at night. Certainly the “unrumpled sheet” on which the beloved lies contrasts with the “dreadful mess” on the bed of lust. Rupert's sexual initiation, instead of giving him a more realistic vision of Noel, led him to make her even more of a wax figure, unconscious of desire.

The Clevedon vision of escaping over the hills was a reaction to the opposite kind of shift that the Neo-pagans now had to make, from student life to a serious vocation. Rupert could live poetically at Grantchester, but most of them would have to make their way in London, and their outings would now be holidays from the work that held them in the capital. From 1909, London began to replace Cambridge as a centre for their shared lives. Even Rupert needed a pied-à-terre there, so he joined his father's National Liberal Club. As clubs went, it was cheap and politically progressive. At one visit or another, he must have bumped into a fellow contributor to the
Westminster Gazette
called Raymond Chandler, a year younger than himself. They both wanted to be poets, but Chandler soon gave it up. His success, unlike Rupert's, would come late, and be achieved by cynicism rather than sentiment.

Gwen Darwin had been chafing at home for years. She did not have enough to do, her health was uncertain, and she felt smothered by an extended family that was almost an institution in Cambridge. She wished she had been born a man so that she could follow her interests without
interference. In the autumn of 1908 her parents finally let her study art at the Slade School in Chelsea. She would live with her uncle William, but to be an apprentice artist in the anonymity of London was to her a liberation and a joy. Justin had come at the same time, to be articled to a firm of solicitors as preparation for joining his father's company.
⁴²

Jacques Raverat came to London in November, renting rooms in Chelsea. He was taken on as an apprentice at the Ashendene Press, where his project was to typeset Blake's
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. In the afternoons he studied drawing at the Central School of Art; after Christmas he transferred to the Slade, which brought him into daily contact with Gwen.

Ka had decided to spend a fourth year at Newnham, but her social work projects often brought her to London, and the flat in Westminster that she shared with Hester became a centre for her Neo-pagan friends. Gwen Darwin, having escaped from her own dominating family, was especially charmed by Ka's way of life – a home without parents:

Ka's flat was a pleasant place. It seemed to belong to her alone, for Hester was always out at some gaiety or other. There we lolled in chairs, and sat and lay on the floor, and smoked and talked; talked easily, openly, intimately, while Ka treated us all like children, with indulgent affection.

There was always tea for us, or coffee in the evening, and we used to put the light out and sit with the fire light flickering on the walls and casting odd shadows on the ceiling . . . I used to lie on the sofa, while Justin perched like a bird on the end; Ka sat with her white hands on her lap, and Margaret would be on the floor by the hearth, leaning her tired head against the chimney. And sometimes Brynhild would drift in like a gentle fragrance; or Noel with her bag of books, to tease Justin until they came to blows in childish horseplay. And Geoffrey would talk big and tell wild stories, to be laughed at after he had gone; and James would come in out of the rain like a distressed cat, to look at Rupert with adoring eyes. And then rather early, Margaret would say she must go or Aunt Emily would be frightened; and one by one we would drift off to affairs of our own, until only one or two of us were left alone with Ka, talking, talking till late at night.

And – I don't know what the others felt – but to my mind, always hidden among the shadows behind our backs, was Death – Death waiting to catch us who were so young and full of hope; Death, ready to snap us up before our work was done – Death, barely hidden, waiting to destroy all our youth and beauty and grace.
⁴³

After a frenetic social round in London – including an appearance at the Slade Arts Ball in a recycled version of his
Comus
costume – Rupert left for his third Christmas in Switzerland, this time at Lenzerheide. Margery Olivier organised the party; she included Daphne but not Noel or Bryn. Ka and Justin begged off also, though Jacques came, to make up for his awkward exit at Andermatt. Rupert blamed Noel for failing to appear. He was in rather a surly mood for the holiday and, as it turned out, there would be no more Christmases in Switzerland for the Neo-pagans. Four months after the plan for their reunion at Basel, here they were in Switzerland and already far from unanimous in spirit or commitment. The forces that would eventually drive them apart were starting to work, for those who had eyes to see them.

On the way back from Lenzerheide, Rupert fell ill with inflammation of his mouth and throat. He blamed it on some bad honey he had eaten in Basel. Soon after he had to deal with something more serious – the collapse of Parker Brooke's health. “He has been unable to see more than men as trees walking,” Rupert told Dudley Ward. “He's a very pessimistic man, given to brooding, and without much inside to fall back on – in the way of thought. It has been bad to see him tottering about the House, or sitting thinking and brooding over the future for hour on hour, never speaking, and always in pain.”
¹
Parker Brooke had been in decline since his son Richard's death three years before, but now he had suffered a stroke. Two weeks later a second stroke carried him off, at fifty-nine. After his early brilliance at school and university, he had slowly dwindled into hen-pecked mediocrity. His career helped to create Rupert's almost pathological fear of age.

After the funeral, Rugby agreed that Rupert should come from Grantchester to run School Field until April. This continued his father's salary and profits, and gave his mother time to find a new home. The Fabian Society, of which Rupert was now president, was entrusted to Hugh Dalton and a rising young student politician, Clifford Allen.
²
Rupert had fifty-three boys to look after (though not to teach) for two months. It was the only time in his life that he held down a regular job, apart from his seven months in the Royal Naval Division at the end of his life. He rated himself “an efficient schoolmaster, tired and high-voiced and snappish” – and not afraid of discipline. Giving a flogging was an
“extraordinary sensation,” he told James Strachey. The boy he flogged “had broken his furniture to small pieces with a coal-hammer. But I had no consciously sexual emotions. I cried a little after he had gone.”
³