Fatal Glamour (39 page)

Rupert sailed from Liverpool on the
RMS
Cedric
on 22 May 1913. She was a relatively slow ship, taking nine days to get to New York. There were more than two thousand emigrants below in steerage but Rupert, in first class, had nothing to say about them. His main concern, as the ship plowed on at sixteen knots, was to make firm his relationship with Cathleen.
¹
That forced him to say more about what had happened with Ka a year earlier, and about his resolution to make a clean break with her:

It's bitter destroying and breaking things two have built together – intimacies and trusts and friendliness. It's like cutting something out of oneself . . .

Child, beyond a certain point men and women shouldn't go, unless they marry. Not if they're people of human feelings. Or they pay overmuch in irretrievable ways . . .

I cling more and more to the peace and comfort, I find more and more in loving you and being with you . . . I pray you love good and keep away from the evil things of the world, for my sake and for your sake and for both our sakes.
²

It was good that Rupert laid some of his cards on the table, and explained what he had learned from his misfortunes with Ka. But he was also holding back his ace. Cathleen might well assume that they would
get married when he returned, but Rupert's letters said everything
except
that. And when would he return? He had told Eddie that he would probably be back by January 1914, but that was not a promise. Cathleen thought he was going because of Ka, not realising that it was mainly because of Phyllis Gardner and her mother that he needed to get out of town. Once he was in America he could not be pressured by Cathleen to take any decisive action about their future. Cathleen herself seems to have accepted Rupert's strategy of delay. She could have demanded a commitment from Rupert, as Phyllis had, and seen what the outcome might be. Instead, she kept playing out more line, all the way to Tahiti. When Rupert returned a year later he would still be unwilling to decide, until the war ended all decisions.

Meanwhile, his immediate task was to come to terms with America. Henry James would note that Rupert's dispatches to the
Westminster Gazette
became “steadily more vivid and delightful as he continues his travels from New York.”
³
James complained that Rupert's idea of New York focused on the pervasiveness of advertising, and especially of giant neon signs: “we feel him not a little lost and lonely and stranded in the New York pandemonium – obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering fury of imaged advertisement for want of some more interesting view of character and manners.”
⁴
James regretted Rupert's limited human contact with New Yorkers, apart from the usual clichés about Americans being boastful and simple-minded. But he was right about Rupert being “lost and lonely.” He had managed to leave his letters of introduction behind, and was stuck in the gloomy Broadway Central Hotel.
⁵
Although he managed to knock out his three articles on the visit, he was indeed homesick and suffering from culture shock. “I'm crying,” he wrote Cathleen, “I want you. I don't want to be alone.” The next day he was ashamed, but sent the letter anyway: “After all I wrote it – one of the ‘I's. And you'd better see them all.” Even the sturdier “I” of the day after was convinced that “this is
not
a land for a civilized man.”
⁶
Rupert went up to Boston to see the Harvard Commencement, and enjoyed the welcoming style of the undergraduates. When he returned to New York he was no longer feeling so much at a loss. Part of his trouble was that he had come for a negative reason, to put an ocean between himself and Ka, Phyllis, and Noel. The
Gazette
assignment had got him out of England, but hadn't given him any pleasure in being in the United States.

Rupert spent only the month of June in New York and Boston, followed by two and a half months in Canada.
⁷
He was not exactly an imperialist, but it was important to him that North America still had a country ruled by the king and looking in many things to the motherland. He did not much like Canada or Canadians, in the eastern part at least. But he grasped that it was a country oriented to the future, and dominated by a vast and unpeopled natural world. About that future, his record as a prophet was mixed. In Montreal, he encountered the primary difference between Canada and the United States: the “French fact,” and the “complete separateness of the two races.” “Inter-marriage is very rare. They do not meet socially; only on business, and that not often. In the same city these two communities dwell side by side, with different traditions, different languages, different ideals, without sympathy or comprehension.”
⁸
“Racial difficulties are the most enduring of all,” Rupert concluded. He had a letter of introduction to the former prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, but predicted confidently that no francophone would ever be prime minister again. He was wrong about that, but right about the persistence of “two solitudes” a hundred years later.

Rupert went on to Ottawa, which he liked better than Montreal, and where he formed his only real friendship with a Canadian. Duncan Campbell Scott was a poet who celebrated his young nation in verse, complete with stereotyped Indians and Québécois peasants. Twenty-five years older than Rupert, he was deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs. Today, he is condemned for his aggressive policies of cultural assimilation. Scott took a schizoid view of the Aboriginal question, not unusual for his time. He took regular canoe trips into the wilderness and romanticised the Native heritage, but his assimilation policy was carried out with singular ruthlessness. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” he wrote, “I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are unable to stand alone . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department.”
⁹

Since the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century, Europeans had tried to Christianise Native Americans. Canada's assimilation policy went further. Its main – and most notorious – instrument was the residential school, which Indian children were persuaded or forced to attend. The schools were run by either Protestant or Catholic clergy. In addition to
religious instruction, the children were separated from their traditional culture, made to wear European clothes, and punished for speaking any language except English. No doubt Scott praised the policy to Rupert; so far as we can tell, he accepted the need for assimilation, while also taking a romantic view of Indians he happened to meet on his travels. But that would not be until he had travelled further west.

Noel wrote to Rupert in June, after their awkward dinner just before he left England. She admitted that she had little idea of how she wanted to live, or should live. But she knew where Rupert was likely to go: “You, an English gentleman, having become le grand indifferent, will have the success of the man who pockets his heart and can devote his energies to prattle and flash. Then . . . you will drop all that and very determinedly set up a family in England; bully them rather, and write pamphlets; and all the old friends will say you found your level and visit you from time to time.” In reply, Rupert spent most of July writing a letter in installments. He vowed that he no longer loved Noel, and was going to marry and have children very soon: “I've tried loving a woman who doesn't love me, you; and I've tried loving a woman who isn't clean, Ka; and it doesn't pay. I'm going to find some woman who is clean, and loves me.”
¹⁰

Rupert's formula might even have worked, if the third woman was Cathleen. But things in that quarter were not straightforward, starting with the problem that if a woman went to bed with Rupert, she would stop being clean. Nor, he admitted, was it easy to be truthful about his plans: “It's so very hard, trying to write humanly. All these damned affectations get in the light – they leap from the end of the pen.”
¹¹
The affectations were camouflage for the submerged conflict between them: that Noel had held on implacably to her virginity, while Rupert found this both necessary and intolerable. The open conflict was about Lytton Strachey. Noel found him “a good-natured, slightly dotty buffoon; and in so far as the ridiculous makes the world brighter – an excellent fellow.” To which Rupert countered: “I know he is Judas Iscariot. So let it rest.”
¹²
Noel did not let it rest, though: she went on peppering her letters with cheery mentions of her Bloomsbury chums. This was a way of annoying Rupert but also a point of principle. Unlike Rupert, she did not believe in living her life in compartments, each walled off from the other.

Rupert continued his journey westwards, finding little to spark his imagination in Toronto, but something hugely impressive in Niagara
Falls. It caused “great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires [to] drift through the mind . . . the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a community . . . In such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood.”
¹³
In July 1913, such thoughts were dangerous.

In Winnipeg, Rupert found an Old Rugbeian, who took him to the wilderness east of the city. On the way they encountered a motley crowd of immigrants, whom Rupert saw with a jaundiced eye: “The problem of immigration here reveals that purposelessness that exists in the affairs of Canada even more than those of other nations. The multitude from South or East Europe flocks in . . . The most remain, often in inassimilable lumps. There is every sign that these lumps may poison the health of Canada as dangerously as they have that of the United States.”
¹⁴
Despite his chauvinism, Rupert perceived what would, in the long run, make Canada one of the most successful multicultural countries. “Purposelessness” is another name for the lack of a rigid national identity, to which newcomers are required to conform. From his nativist perspective, Rupert saw only “the peril of too large an element of foreign blood and traditions in a small nation already little more than half composed of British blood and descent.” That perspective remains a force today – more in Britain than in Canada, surely – but Rupert did not see Canada's potential for hybrid vigour. Holding on to his racial categories, he equated immigration with mongrelisation: “Canadians regard this influx [of immigrants] with that queer fatalism which men adopt under plutocracy.”
¹⁵
Early Fabians like Rupert often supported eugenics, which meant hostility to immigration and ethnic intermarriage.

When he got to Calgary, Rupert could take into account the only people in Canada who were not immigrants. His chapter on “The Indians” recognises the partial success of the government policy of assimilation. “Not the best Indians these, say lovers of the race. I have met them, as clerks or stenographers, only distinguishable from their neighbours by a darker skin and a sweeter voice and manner . . . So we finish with kindness what our fathers began with war.” Rupert visited the Stoney Indian Reserve, outside of Calgary, and felt sentimental about their attempt to keep living in a traditional way, “more in touch with permanent things than the America that has succeeded them.”
¹⁶
The further away from
cities they were, the better their chances of sustaining a nomadic life of hunting and trapping. But Rupert foresaw the problems ahead for either choice: assimilation, or life on a reservation.

Rupert did not find it easy to produce his travel pieces to order, and this showed in the result. Noel Olivier pointed out the limitations of going rapidly from town to town. “And in the people you meet,” she noted, “it is only the superficial, queer and obvious things you look for; and if you find them to be what you like to think is typical of the country, you are satisfied and leave them.”
¹⁷
A fair criticism, except that Rupert did not put everyone he met into the
Westminster Gazette
. On 19 August he left Calgary for Lake Louise, in the Rockies, where he would “rest awhile and try to write.”
¹⁸
Well, not exactly.

Back in New York, Rupert had reminded Eddie of his offer to introduce him to “a rich widow in Canada.” This was the Marchesa Mannucci Capponi, whose husband had recently died. He came from a storied Tuscan family, established in the Villa Capponi at Barberino Val d'Elsa. The marchesa was an American, née Agnes Smith, daughter of a Midwestern physician. She had taken a degree in English as a mature student at Stanford in 1898, then married a German and gone to live in Berlin. In 1906 they had a son who died two days after he was born. Agnes was a widow when she married Mannucci Capponi, and now was a widow again, living in Minneapolis. She became acquainted with Eddie Marsh around 1911–12, thanks to whom she and Rupert could meet at the Chateau Lake Louise hotel.
¹⁹
The many letters he wrote to her over the next year make it almost certain that they became lovers over the fortnight that they were together at the lake.
²⁰

Rupert wrote to Agnes affectionately and at length. He found her an oasis of sophistication in the Canadian wilderness, but it is hard to get a sense of what she was like, or how deeply he cared for her. When she came back to the United States on the
ss
Celtic
in 1912 she took eight years off her age on the ship's register.
²¹
Did Rupert realise that she was forty-one, not thirty-three? In any case, she was clearly older than he was, whereas all his previous lovers or half-lovers were younger. We can only assume that she knew what she wanted, sexually, and that Rupert was happy to give it to her. Even allowing for the expurgation of his letters, there is no hint of the usual hysteria and ambivalence in his love affairs. His previous relationships had been plagued by various kinds of uneasiness around virginity, pre-marital sex, contraception, and secrecy.
Up in the mountains, where no one knew him, with an experienced and eager partner, Rupert could turn the page on the past.