Over the next year Everett saw a lot of Augustus. ‘All the things Orpen had told me about John were true,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘His character had completely changed. It was not the John I’d known in the early days at the Slade.’ He was getting commissions for portraits and drawings and the quality of his work had never been higher. He seemed, however, quite irresponsible. In some ways he was like the sailors Everett rubbed shoulders with during his voyages. He would make an appointment with some sitter for the following morning, go off drinking half the night with his friends, then wake up grumpily next afternoon. Yet he was not really a heavy drinker. Very little alcohol got the better of him and he could quickly become morose; unlike Conder, who drank far more, remained cheerful, but had a tendency to see yellow-striped cats. Sometimes Augustus stayed out all night, and more than once he was arrested by the police and not released with a caution until the next day. Despite his broken appointments, he was making a reasonable income, though often obliged to borrow from his friends. Money had only one significance for him: it meant freedom of action. To his friends he was open-handed, and when in funds it was generally he who, at restaurants, demanded the bill, or was left with it. Other bills, such as the rent, he sometimes omitted to pay. ‘Gus says you need never pay Mrs Everett!’ Orpen assured Michel Salaman. Some landladies were more exigent. ‘I want to talk to you about this studio [76 Charlotte Street],’ Orpen wrote in another letter to Salaman on his return from Vattetot. ‘There is great trouble going on about Gus. I’m afraid he will not get back here.’ Mrs Laurence, who kept the house, had grown alarmed by what she called ‘Mr John’s saturnalias’. One night, simply it appears in order to terrify her, he had danced on the roof of the Church of St John the Evangelist next door. Other times he was apparently more conscientious, working late into the night with a nude model over his composition of ‘Adam and Eve’, and, in the heat of inspiration, stripping off his own clothes. Woken from her sleep by sounds of revelry from this Garden of Eden, Mrs Laurence, chaperoned by her friend old Mrs Young, went to investigate and, without benefit of art training, was shocked by what she found. When Augustus had left suddenly for France with the Carfax money in his pocket, he had paid her nothing; and so, when he returned in October, she refused him entry. He retreated, therefore, to old territory: 21 Fitzroy Street – ‘comfortless quarters’, as Will Rothenstein described them, but economical.
Here was Will Rothenstein’s cue once more to hurry to the rescue by generously offering his own house, No. 1 Pembroke Cottages, off Edwardes Square in Kensington, to Gus and Gwen. Augustus used the house only spasmodically, preferring to sleep in Orpen’s Fitzroy Street cellar rather than trudge back to Kensington late at night. The springs of this bed had collapsed at the centre, so only the artist who reached it first and sank into the precipitous valley of the mattress was comfortable. Neither liked early nights, but Orpen was eventually driven by lack of sleep to extra-ordinary ingenuities, falling into bed in the afternoon twilight, bolting doors, undressing in the dark, anything at all, to win a restful night. Augustus would then mount the stairs to John Everett’s room, drink rum in front of his fire till past midnight, and suddenly jump up exclaiming: ‘My God! I’ve missed the last train!’ For weeks on end he slept on two of Everett’s armchairs.
When Will Rothenstein returned to London, ‘I found the house empty and no fire burning. In front of a cold grate choked with cinders lay a collection of muddy boots… late in the evening John appeared, having climbed through a window; he rarely, he explained, remembered to take the house-key with him.’90 This was a sincere test of Rothenstein’s hero-worship. ‘There were none I loved more than Augustus and Gwen John,’ he admitted, ‘but they could scarcely be called “comfortable” friends.’91 As for his wife Alice, she insisted that the walls must be whitewashed and the floors scrubbed before their little home would again be habitable.
Will Rothenstein had recently finished, for the New English Art Club, a portrait of Augustus92 that won the difficult approbation of Tonks and, more difficult still, avoided the disapprobation of Augustus himself. It shows a soft and dreamy young man whose efforts to roughen and toughen himself are visibly unconvincing. Yet the life he was now leading was certainly rough. After a last effort to recapture 76 Charlotte Street – from which he was repelled ‘with a charming County Court summons beautifully printed’93 – he took up fresh quarters at 61 Albany Street, by the side of Regent’s Park. ‘I’ve abandoned my kopje in Charlotte Street,’ he told Will Rothenstein in the new Boer War language, ‘trekked and laagered up at the above, strongly fortified but scantily supplied. Generals Laurence and Young hover at my rear… the garrison [is] in excellent spirits.’
He had briefly taken up with a Miss Simpson who, dismissing him as hopelessly impoverished, decided to marry a bank clerk – and invited Augustus to her wedding. Except for his pale-blue corduroys he had nothing to wear. What happened was described by Orpen in a letter to John Everett:
‘I met John last night – he had been to Miss Simpson’s wedding, drunk as a lord. Dressed out in Conder’s clothes, check waistcoat, high collar, tail coat, striped trousers. He seemed to say he was playing a much more important part than the bridegroom at the wedding and spoke with commiseration at the thought of how bored they must be getting at each other’s society… He almost wept over this, gave long lectures on moral living, and left us.’
Augustus’s theories of ‘moral living’ had strained his relationship with Ida almost to breaking point. He was painting a portrait of her which ‘has clothed itself in scarlet’, she told Michel Salaman (1 February 1900), adding: ‘Gwen John has gone back to 122 Gower Street.94 John sleeps, apparently, anywhere.’
The break between them came after an eventful trip Augustus took with Conder that spring to Mrs Everett’s boarding house at Swanage. His hair was now cut short, his beard trimmed and he went everywhere in part of Conder’s wedding equipment – tail coat, high collar and cap. After the dissipations of London, both painters tried hard to discipline themselves. ‘I am quite well now and had almost a providential attack of measles which left me for some days to do my work,’ Conder wrote from Swanage to Will Rothenstein. Not since his early days had he worked so consistently out of doors, painting at least nine views of Swanage.95 He seemed to have found a technique for combining life and work. He would sit painting at the very centre of a rowdy group of friends. ‘There would be a whole lot of us smoking, talking, telling good stories,’ Everett optimistically recorded. ‘Conder would join in the conversation, talk the whole time, yet his hand would go on doing the fan. At times it really seemed as if somebody else was doing the watercolour.’
‘We drink milk and soda and tea in large quantities,’ Augustus solemnly confided to Orpen. ‘I must confess to a pint of beer occasionally on going into the town.’ As at Vattetot, both painters worked hard. Conder reported that Augustus was painting ‘a decoration 8 ft by 6… with a score of figures half life size’. Though this was ‘no easy matter’, he nevertheless appeared to ‘work away with great ease’ and, Conder concluded, large composition ‘seems to be his forte’.
Augustus too was impressed by Conder’s painting ‘which becomes everyday more beautiful’, he told Will Rothenstein. ‘The country here is lovely beyond words. Corfe Castle and the neighbourhood would make you mad with painter’s cupidity!… I have started a colossal canvas whereon I depict Dr Faust on the Brocken. I sweat at it from morn till eve.’ Not even an attack of German measles could interrupt such work. ‘Conder had them some weeks ago,’ he reported to Will Rothenstein.
‘I had quite forgotten about it when I woke up one morning horrified to find myself struck of a murrain – I have been kept in ever since, shut off from the world. In the daylight it isn’t so bad, but I dread the night season which means little sleep and tragic horrors of dreams at that. I mean in the day I work desperately hard at my colossal task. I can say at any rate Faust has benefited by my malady. In fact it is getting near the finish. Th
ere are about 17 figures in it not to speak of a carrion-laden gibbet.’96
Illness benefited their painting, but the renewal of good health, seasoned by the salt air, brought its problems. Mrs Everett, protected from a knowledge of their world by her harmonium, had invited down two fine-looking Slade girls, Elie Monsell and Daisy Legge, to keep them all company. John Everett, who visited Pevril Tower during weekends, watched the danger approaching gloomily. It seemed inevitable that some romantic entanglements would develop, and before long Conder, to his dismay, found himself engaged to the Irish art student Elie Monsell. Hauled up to London for a difficult interview with the girl’s mother (who seems to have been younger than himself), he shortly afterwards fled across the Channel to join Orpen in France. The engagement appeared to lapse, and the following year Conder found himself married to Stella Bedford.
Augustus was also experiencing what he called ‘the compulsion of sea-air’97 directed towards ‘a superb woman of Vienna’,98 Maria Katerina, an aristocrat employed by Mrs Everett in the guise of parlourmaid. ‘A beautiful Viennese lady here has had the misfortune to wrench away a considerable portion of my already much mutilated heart,’ was how he broke the news to Orpen. ‘Misfortune because such things cannot be brooked too complacently… Conder is engaged on an even more beautiful fête galante.’
In a letter written nearly twenty years later (2 February 1918) to his friend Alick Schepeler, Augustus was to make a unique admission. ‘The sort of paranoia or mental hail storm from which I suffer continually’, he told her, ‘…means that each impression I receive is immediately obliterated by the next girl’s, irrespective of its importance. Other people have remarked upon my consistent omission to keep appointments but only to you have I ever confessed the real and dreadful reason.’
This new mental hailstorm temporarily obliterated his feelings for Ida. It was as if he had never met her, as if he had been blinded and could no longer see her. Possibly his confinement with measles – ‘German measles please!’ he reminded Will Rothenstein, ‘I did not catch them in Vienna’ – had helped to bring about the dreadful impatience of his emotions; and this impatience was exacerbated by the girl’s elusiveness. The letters he wrote to his friends reverberate with the echoes of this passion. ‘It was without surprise I learnt she was descended from the old nobility of Austria. Her uncle, the familiar of Goethe, was Count von Astz,’ he admitted to Michel Salaman. ‘This damnably aristocratic pedigree, you will understand, only goes to make her more fatally attractive to my perverse self… She wears patent leather shoes with open work stockings and –’
On Conder’s advice, he bought a ring and presented it to her one dark night at the top of a drainpipe that led to her bedroom window. This gesture had a telling effect upon Maria Katerina’s defences, which ‘proved in the end to be not insurmountable’.99 She ‘has sucked the soul out of my lips’, Augustus boasted to Will Rothenstein. ‘I polish up my German lore. I spend spare moments trying to recall phrases from Ollendorf and am so grateful for your lines of Schiller which are all that remain to me of the Lied von der Glocke.’ But with the very instant of success, perhaps even fractionally preceding it, came the first encroachment of boredom.
‘Sometimes when I surprise myself not quite happy tho’ alone I begin to fear I have lost that crown of youth, the art of loving fanatically. I begin to suspect I have passed the virtues of juvenescence and that its follies are all that remain to me. Write to me dear Will and tell me… those little intimacies which are the salt of friendship and the pepper of love.’
On his last night in Swanage, Augustus and Maria met secretly on the cliffs. She was wearing her ring and promised to meet him in France where he was shortly to go with Michel Salaman. Back in London he felt desolate, and more than usually unself-sufficient. On 18 May, Mafeking Night, he strolled down to Trafalgar Square to see the fun, as people celebrated the lifting of the seven-month siege of Mafeking by the Boers. London had gone mad with excitement. Bells rang, guns were being fired, streamers waving; people danced in groups, clapping, shouting, kissing. The streets filled with omnibuses, people of all sorts, policemen without helmets. As if by magic, whistles appeared in everyone’s mouths, Union Jacks in their hands, and in the tumult of tears and laughter and singing complete strangers threw their arms about one another’s necks; it was, as Winston Churchill said, a most ‘unseemly’ spectacle. Some were shocked by such a ‘frantic and hysterical outburst of patriotic enthusiasm’, as Arnold Bennett called it. ‘[Trafalgar] Square, the Strand and all the adjacent avenues were packed with a seething mass of patriots celebrating the great day in a style that would have made a “savage” blush,’ Augustus wrote.
‘Mad with drink and tribal hysteria, the citizens formed themselves into solid phalanxes, and plunging at random this way and that, swept all before them. The women, foremost in this mêlée, danced like Maenads, their shrill cat-calls swelling the general din. Feeling out of place and rather scared, I extricated myself from this pandemonium with some difficulty, and crept home in a state of dejection.’100
*
‘You have evidently forgotten my address,’ Augustus remarked with surprise to Michel Salaman. This was not difficult. By June 1900, shortly before he was due to join Salaman in France, he had reached the same point of crisis at Albany Street as had been achieved the previous year in Charlotte Street, and by much the same methods. ‘We all went back to John’s place in Albany Street,’ John Everett wrote in his journal. ‘On the way they picked up an old whore, made some hot whisky. The result was John fell on the floor paralytic, the old whore on top of him in the same condition… Orpen and [Sidney] Starr tried to pull the old whore’s drawers off, but she was too heavy to move.’
‘I cannot come just yet,’ Augustus wrote to Michel Salaman in France, ‘ – I have some old commissions to finish amongst other deterrents to immediate migration. Yet in a little while I have hopes of being able to join you. I have had notice to quit this place. I think I will take a room somewhere in Soho if I can find one – a real “mansarde” I hope – I want to hide myself away for some time… I shall have to see my Pa before I would come as it is now a long while since I have seen him… it would be nice if Gwen could come too and good for her too me thinks.’ Salaman had taken rooms at a house called Cité Titand in Le Puy-en-Velay, a medieval village in the Auvergne built about a central rock and dominated by a colossal Virgin in cast iron with doors opening into her body. Augustus arrived early in August. ‘It is a wonderful country I assure you – unimaginably wonderful!’ he wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 19 September 1900.
‘…There are most exquisite hills, little and big, Rembrandtesque, Titianesque, Giorgionesque, Turneresque, growing out from volcanic rocks, dominating the fat valleys watered by pleasant streams, tilled by robust peasants bowed by labour and age or upright with the pride of youth and carrying things on their heads. I have bathed in the waters of the Borne and have felt quite Hellenic! At first the country gave me indigestion; used to plainer fare it proved too rich, too high for my northern stomach; now I begin to recover and will find a lifetime too short to assimilate its menu of many courses...’101
To the golden-haired Alice Rothenstein, who had recommended Le Puy, he wrote with equal enthusiasm. ‘Really, you have troubled my peace with your golden hills and fat valleys of Burgundy!...
‘I work indoors mostly now. I am painting Michel’s portrait. I hope to make a success of it. If when finished it will be as good as it is now I may count on that. I am also painting Polignac castle which ought to make a fine picture...102
The very excellent military band plays in the park certain nights, and we have enjoyed sitting listening to it. It is very beautiful to watch the people under the trees. At intervals the attention of the populace is diverted from following the vigorous explanatory movements of the conductor by an appeal to patriotism, effected by illuminating the flag by Bengal lights at the window of the museum! It is dazzling and undeniable! The band plays very well. Rend
ered clairvoyant by the music one feels very intimate with humanity, only Michel’s voice when he breaks in with a laborious attempt at describing how beautifully the band played 3 years ago at the Queen’s Hall that time he took Edna Waugh – is rather disturbing – or is it that I am becoming ill-tempered?’
Where Augustus went, could Will be far behind? He turned up with Alice early in September and stayed two weeks at the Grand Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. ‘Every day we met at lunch in a vast kitchen, full of great copper vessels, a true rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,’ Will Rothenstein remembered, ‘presided over by a hostess who might have been mother to Pantagruel himself, so heroic in size she was, and of so genial and warm a nature.’103
On their bicycles, the four of them pedalled as far south as Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, where Stevenson had once stayed on his travels with a donkey. Augustus on wheels was a fabulous sight, and Will noticed that the girls minding their cattle in the fields crossed themselves as he whizzed past, and that the men in horror would exclaim: ‘Quel type de rapin!’ At Arlempdes, a village of such devilish repute it went unmarked on any map, they were entertained by the curé, who commented ecstatically upon Augustus’s fitness for the principal role in their Passion play. ‘Who does he remind you of?’ he asked his sister. ‘Notre Seigneur, le bon Dieu,’ she answered without hesitation. ‘I take it as a compliment,’ Augustus remarked, but refused the part – understandably, since the previous year, in the heat of the occasion, Christ had been stabbed in the side. On reaching Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, Alice took sanctuary at an inn while the three men spent the night in a Trappist monastery where Will believed he might see Huysmans. Though rising early, he saw no one. Augustus lay abed in his cell where he was served by the silent monks with a breakfast of wine and cheese.
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