But Kenneth had escaped entanglement before. It seems likely that he had repulsed Annie Grahame; firmly he held at bay the ‘Bandersnatch’, Evelyn Sharp. In Kensington Crescent, Tom Greg’s salt-glazed stoneware and grès de Flandres tankards had been replaced by Kenneth’s growing collection of children’s toys, among them mechanical figures like a cardboard-limbed model acrobat called Leotard, ‘who lived in a glass-fronted box… iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, unceasingly novel in his invention of new unguessable attitudes’, and a drawer full of dolls.20 As always, Kenneth looked backwards as well as forwards. Fear as much as curiosity coloured his contemplation of marriage. As he wrote in a poem called ‘Love’s Reveille’, about fear of romantic commitment, ‘the troops of Eros waver,/ See the ranks begin to shake!/… the little cowards break’.21
In the period preceding his wedding to Elspeth Thomson on 22 July 1899, he misunderstood the force of her determination; too late, he recognized that the feelings he had encouraged in her could not be ignored. She clung to her attachment to him. Her pursuit was single-minded and unwavering, by turns assertive and submissive, pathetic, frustrated, loving. For a while, physically attracted to her, drawn by her whimsy and flattered by her admiration, Kenneth succumbed. And then he fell ill, and the game became one-sided, and Elspeth scented victory.
• 9 •
‘I hardly feel I tread the earth I only know that thou art mine’
APPROPRIATELY, IT WAS a courtship of words. By letter Elspeth requested that Kenneth ‘save thy heart for me’.1 In his letters Kenneth offered her the devotion and physical ardour that gripped him intermittently. He committed himself by letter, too.
And what letters they were. Early on, Elspeth affected rusticity – ‘Zur, Plaze to vorgive that I make so bold as to write-ee’ – like a milkmaid or serving wench in a sentimental comedy; then her side of the correspondence disappears.2 Kenneth wrote to her in a mixture of music-hall Cockney and baby talk: his letters are studded with childish mispronunciations, contrived spelling mistakes and elongated Cockney vowels, all conveyed phonetically. In this mawkish Darby and Joan play-acting, Kenneth was ‘Dino’, Elspeth ‘Minkie’, the grounds for these aliases now lost. It was not always a smoothly loving exchange: Kenneth’s letters betray exasperation as well as fondness. If Elspeth had slackened her chase and Kenneth been less kind and decent, he would certainly have slipped away.
He was promoted early in 1898 from acting secretary of the Bank of England to secretary. It was an administrative and executive role, concerned not with devising policy but overseeing its implementation and, bar the dilatoriness of his approach, ideally suited to Kenneth’s good-natured tact, his common sense and the respect his lack of partisan politicking had already won for him. Laconically Kenneth described his role as ‘writ[ing] letters… for one’s daily bread’.3 At the end of the year, to a second chorus of praise, John Lane issued Dream Days. The book consolidated Kenneth’s literary renown. His finances were comfortable, his position in the City assured.
Against this backdrop of professional and literary success, Grahame was enduring rapidly escalating ill health and feelings bordering on panic. 1899 proved crunch time. No record survives of Kenneth and Elspeth’s meetings over the previous year and a half: that there had been communication, contact, advances offered and accepted is clear from Elspeth’s behaviour subsequently and Kenneth’s letters. Elspeth’s single remaining letter contains a steely warning: ‘Now ’ee don’t think o’ me, do ’ee? Happen he forgets the garden and all that stood in’t… But he spook kine [kind], and the trees heard ee, and I remember.’ [my italics]4 In February, Kenneth experienced a recurrence of the old familiar bronchial problems in the form of a severe cold. Elspeth fell ill at the same time. From his bed, he wrote her his first Dino/Minkie letter. He thanked her for a copy of Moby-Dick, admitted that he felt ‘orfle slack still but am wearin down the cold grajjly’, that he was lonely and low in spirits; he called her ‘darlin’, described himself as ‘your own luvin Dino’.5 Pet names and loving expressions indicate the distance travelled since that first accidental meeting in Onslow Square.
Kenneth complained at the prospect of returning to the bank. ‘Don’t like goin ter work tmorrer one bit. It dus seem a shame wen I can do nuffin so well & other people aint no good at it torl.’6 Take away the Cockney baby talk and it is the rhetoric of his ‘Stevensonettes’ about laziness: ‘Loafing’ and ‘Of Smoking’. He gave in at the beginning of April. He put in a long day, culminating in a formal dinner. It would be his last day at work for five months. His cold was not beaten; pneumonia set in; he was suffering from empyema: pockets of pus in the lungs caused by bacterial infection. An operation was necessary, followed by convalescence at home in the care of his sister Helen. In the background, Sarah Bath hovered attentively. Kenneth’s condition was serious, even life-threatening. For weeks Dino wrote no more to his Minkie. But Elspeth was every bit as attentive as Sarah Bath. To Kensington Crescent she brought carnations and grapes; the following month, with Kenneth no longer in danger, she suggested her stepfather send him port to build up his strength. Helen concealed her visits from Kenneth.
Helen’s attitude was more than that of a nurse shielding her patient from disturbance. From the first, her antipathy to Elspeth was pronounced, and remained so. In an understatement, Kenneth described her as ‘irresponsive’ on the subject of his relationship: she disliked Elspeth on sight as a threat to Kenneth’s independence and the family status quo. Helen is unlikely to have minced her words. She forbade Kenneth to write letters, Elspeth her target. At the end of May, Kenneth did so in secret: ‘a smuggled line – for I’m not supposed to sit up writing letters yet’, he explained.7 Less covertly, he thanked John Fletcher Moulton for the port. Neither Elspeth’s request to Moulton, nor Kenneth’s letter of thanks, prepared the older man for revelation later of the exact nature of the relationship between his stepdaughter and the banker-writer. When it happened his reaction was much like Helen’s. In the meantime he offered Kenneth the use of his carriage for restorative drives.
Kenneth invited Elspeth to spend the afternoon with him at home on 26 May 1899. He was under no obligation to do so and the invitation can only have been prompted by a desire to see her. It was an incendiary request, even more so as Kenneth arranged it secretly, when Helen would be out of the house finalizing plans for the trip brother and sister were about to make to the West Country to complete his recovery. Of course Elspeth accepted the invitation. In doing so, she accepted what, in 1899, amounted to a statement of intent on Kenneth’s part, as he himself must have known. The invitation was a request that Elspeth jeopardize her reputation for him: on no other terms could unmarried young men and women spend time together alone, unchaperoned. Kenneth’s invitation was tantamount to a proposal. Elspeth Thomson had hooked her fish.
Landing her catch would prove a different matter.
*
Kenneth’s journey with Helen reminded both of their earlier convalescent holiday on the Lizard. For ten days they stopped in Torquay, ‘rarver shut in and I wants the open sea and the roll o’ the billers’, in the first of the daily letters Kenneth wrote in pencil to Elspeth. His bedroom had a balcony, shaded by an awning; it overlooked the harbour, ‘so I sees the botes’.8 Even in such pretty surrounds a claustrophobic drama was beginning to unfold: Helen delighted at the distance between Kenneth and Elspeth, Elspeth concerned at loss of influence, Kenneth beholden to neither, unpredictable, elusive. Elspeth wrote bossy, possessive letters. Kenneth replied with childish prickliness – ‘I eets wot I chooses and wot I dont want I dont and I dont care a damn what they does in Berlin thank gord I’m British’ – or else a determination, at odds with his usual kindness, to make her jealous, the uncharacteristic impulse in itself a sign of his muddled feelings.9 ‘I don’t want to be muvvered just now. If I do theres a chambermade wot’ll take it on… Don’t care much bout the otel… [We] shall move on nex week unless sumfin ideal in chambermades turns up.’10 His grouchiness subside
d in the absence of hectoring. He commended one of Elspeth’s letters for its lack of ‘preechin’.11 And once, encouragingly, he involved her in a typical escape fantasy: ‘I wish you were here we wood go crors the bay in the little steem ferry bote & not cum back – there is poppies t’other side.’12
From a distance, Elspeth was struggling. If the clandestine meeting at Kensington Crescent had felt conclusive, subsequent missives were anything but. She despatched presents to Devon, including hampers of food and a parasol that Kenneth called ‘the tussore-silk umbrella’. She did her best to whet his appetite sexually, too, conjuring pictures of lovers in country lanes, arms encircling waists. His replies were confusing (probably because he was confused himself). He responded to one letter, in which she imagined them spending the night together, with details of the chambermaid’s pink-and-white spotted dress. If Elspeth were with him now, he told her, he could ‘play’ at throwing her over the cliff, and she could play ‘at bandonin me artlessly for nuther’.13 An exasperated, uncertain Elspeth overlooked possibly murderous tendencies and accused him of taking no interest in her physically.
Kenneth’s replies were inconsistent. First he pushed Elspeth away, then he reined her back in again. It might have resembled clumsy coquetry, but the letters lack convincing playfulness. Even his chosen patois of infantile Cockneyisms feels more like a form of concealment – a screen to hide behind – than a shared joke. Kindness balanced discouragement and disparagement often enough to avoid an out-and-out break. From Teignmouth he wrote a genuinely tender letter, assuring Elspeth that ‘very soon we shall actually be tryin to be good to each uvver sted o writin it, which is sumfin to fink bout, and I’m sure I fink bout it orlwis my deer’.14 Lamenting his broken sleep patterns, he added, ‘then I fink of you – ony dreemings better as then I’m in reel Poppyland were wonderful things do appin!’15 Whether Kenneth meant that his dreams were full of Elspeth and that she was with him in ‘Poppyland’, or that dreams of Poppyland – another escape fantasy – were better than thoughts of Elspeth is not clear.
In the face of all this to-ing and fro-ing, Elspeth clung doggedly to the inevitability of his capitulation. There is no reason to doubt her love for Kenneth. Nor had he provided categorical grounds for her to conclude that he did not reciprocate her feelings in some measure, even if he appeared incapable of straight talking or the flowery protestations of devotion that she really craved. After arriving in the Cornish fishing town of Fowey, he took to addressing Elspeth by the name of whatever boat in the harbour had most recently caught his eye: an ambiguous tribute. He also teased her that he was pleased to be sleeping in a single bed again, ‘a nice narrer sorft one insted of a broard ard one that leadeth to destruckshin’.16 To complete this picture of sexlessness, he inquired ‘oos lookin arter my drorful o dolls at ome & givin em seed & water & grounsle?’, his manner that of an exacting child.17 Against this he told her that one of her letters had ‘fired my ot young blood’.18
And then, wonderfully for Elspeth, something in him apparently changed. ‘I play at your bein ere, oneymoonin, and corl it our “poppy-moon” cos it’s a dreemmoon,’ he wrote to her, ‘and I only ope the reel will be in so nice a place.’19 Days later he signed off a letter ‘wif orl the love that’s goin bout ere, from your most luvin Dino’.20 He joked about Helen, her lack of humour, her unrelenting vigilance – a symbolic shift in his loyalty. He sent Elspeth a Battersea enamel box painted with a loving motto: ‘the senkyment [sentiment] and spellin is irreproachable’, he reassured her.21 Happiness moved Elspeth to verse: ‘Now of light there is no dearth/ Oh radiant warmth, and bliss divine/ I hardly feel I tread the earth/ I only know that thou art mine.’22 Meanwhile Kenneth braced himself to confront Moulton. Even though he continued to refer to Elspeth in boating terms, his letters must have pleased her: ‘I’m ritin to your farver today cos I think it wos time you was “brort to your bearins”.’23 There remained gaps in their knowledge of one another, Kenneth even unaware of her Christian name. He called Elspeth ‘Elsie’: ‘So glad you’re called “Elspeth”,’ he wrote, ‘cos I didn’t no it and I like it so much. Shant call you nuffin else.’24
To Kenneth’s letter, a furious John Fletcher Moulton made no response at all. For the moment, Elspeth’s assertive younger brother Courtauld was equally unforthcoming. Grudgingly, after an interval of silence in which Kenneth suggested elopement, Moulton relented. Kenneth waited until Helen had gone to visit friends to announce their engagement in the Morning Post. It was the first Helen knew of it and her reaction, on her return to Fowey, mirrored Moulton’s. She repacked her suitcase for London. But the deed was done. After weeks of prevarication, Kenneth had resolved the impasse by the only means available to him, given that secret afternoon in London and his essential fair-mindedness. His regret was swift. In response to Helen’s question as to whether he really meant to marry Elspeth, his only answer was ‘I suppose so; I suppose so.’25
Briefly in his letters to Elspeth, he hid behind talk of wedding presents. ‘My bruvver ses ees got us that rare article – a reely decent biskit-box, moddled on a old Georgian caskit so praps we shant arter swop orf that un’; he noted that, from her own friends and family, Elspeth was ‘cumulatin a large orde of bullion’.26 Then two weeks before the date set for the wedding, he panicked. ‘Darlin, ow’d you like ter go on livin at Ons: Sq: & cum away wif me fer week-ends?… It wood be so nice & immoral.’27 But Elspeth had no intention of becoming Kenneth’s wife part-time or, worse, his mistress.
*
Kenneth’s letters to the woman who was now officially his fiancée were, if anything, more exasperating than those that preceded them. Airily, he instructed Elspeth to take charge of wedding plans and ‘arrange wot is best for bofe of us’. Then he filled his days with messing about in boats on the Fowey River, or, with an idea of smoking as a means of reinflating his recovering lung, ‘smokin and drinkin o gin and ginger beer’ in a Fowey pub called the King of Prussia.28
He described Fowey in The Wind in the Willows, ‘a little grey sea town… that clings along one steep side of the harbour’, with white-painted houses along the harbour side and green seas lashing the headland. It is the last stopping point of the seafaring rat in ‘Wayfarers All’. The rapture of the rat’s description is Kenneth’s own, his impressions of sunshiny high summer in the weeks before his wedding. ‘Through dark doorways you look down flights of stone steps, overhung by great pink tufts of valerian and ending in a patch of sparkling blue water. The little boats that lie tethered to the rings and stanchions of the old sea-wall are gaily painted… the salmon leap on the flood tide, schools of mackerel flash and play… and by the windows the great vessels glide, night and day, up to their moorings or forth to the open sea.’29 Kenneth attributed the decision to marry in Cornwall to Elspeth.30 Undoubtedly it suited his own inclinations and convenience better.
He had made new friends during the protracted convalescent period in which, from a distance, he tugged and jangled Elspeth’s feelings. ‘Q’ was a journalist and novelist, Arthur Quiller-Couch, exiled from London for reasons of his health, four years younger than Kenneth, a dandy and a passionate sailor, the son of an amateur folklorist. A trio of Cornish novels predated his arrival in the small town, including Troy Town, in which Troy is Fowey. He was married – Kenneth called his wife Louisa, whom he disliked, ‘Mrs Q’ or ‘Qette’; they had a son and daughter, Bevil and Foy. Among his boats was a skiff, the Richard and Emily, which he loaned to Kenneth for sculling. Q organized sailing expeditions and picnics; he invited Helen Grahame, too. Paddling the Richard and Emily up and down creeks – slowly, mindful ‘that I woon’t stroke in a eight’ [sic] – Kenneth amassed material that, a decade later, contributed to the composite river portrait at the heart of The Wind in the Willows.31
Through Q, Kenneth met Edward Atkinson, called ‘Atky’, commodore of the Fowey Yacht Club. He described their shared tastes as ‘boats, Bohemianism, Burgundy, tramps, travel, books and pictures’; he might have added bachelordo
m.32 Quiet himself, Kenneth relished Atky’s talkativeness: ‘ee flow on like summer brook,’ he told Elspeth.33 In Atky’s house were a collection of forty-five telescopes, an ‘enormous stock of clocks, barometers and binoculars’ and ‘a drore full of toys wot wound up’, like Kenneth’s drawer of dolls in London; lunch consisted of ‘fancy hors d’oeuvres and every sort of sausage’.34 House and owner attracted Kenneth like magnets. ‘I get my boat at Whitehouse Steps and scull up the river past the grey old sea wall, under the screaming gulls, past the tall Russian and Norwegian ships at their moorings, and so into Mixtow Pill, and ship my oars at the little stone pier, and find Atky waiting on the steps, thin, in blue serge… and stroll up the pathway… to the little house above it, and be talking all the time and always some fresh whimsicality.’35 Together Kenneth, Q and Atky staged a race of the wind-up toys in Atky’s drawer: ‘a fish, a snaik, a beetle wot flapped is wings, & a rabbit’.36 Elspeth’s response to such questionable larks does not survive. Her irritation that, their engagement formalized, Kenneth had retreated further into a Boy’s Own world of sailing, loafing and penny toys was well founded. She did not suspect her indebtedness to Q, whom she correctly identified as a rival and resented on principle even before her arrival in Fowey on 21 July, the eve of her wedding. But it was Q who had pressed Kenneth to the sticking point, insisting that he owed Elspeth redress, and shown him by example the happy, fulfilling, boyish side of marriage.
Eternal Boy Page 10
