You are the wild bird – fly away – as Gus says our life does not suit you. He will follow, never fear. There was never a poet could stay at home. Do not think myself to be pitied either. I shudder when I think of those times, simply because it was pain… It has robbed me of the tenderness I felt for you – but you can do without that – and I would do anything for you if you would ever ask me to – you still seem to belong to us. I.’15
What Ida overlooked was that, during the first few months of 1905, Augustus had grown rather less attentive towards Dorelia, as if the wild bird being caged was no longer capable of extraordinary flight. It was true that he could not find freedom, or poetry, or love in domesticity. Not for long. Love was like fire to Augustus. Confined within the grate of marriage, it smouldered drearily, collapsing into ashes. Its smoke choked him and its dying coals were cheerless. He wanted to spread it around, let it take light where it would, to make a splendid conflagration – rather than sit fixed by its embers. And now Dorelia, whom he had once likened to a flame, was sinking into this domestic apathy. His poems dried up, his gaze fell vacant. What he needed from Dorelia, and also from Ida, was positively less of them. He needed distance and elusiveness to get his romantic view in focus. He was not really a demonstrative man and became impatient over homely displays of affection. Confused by this sudden heating and cooling of emotion, Dorelia grew defensive. Ida had hardened towards her; Augustus, at moments, appeared indifferent; neither of them mentioned her unborn baby, and, from Augustus, this hurt her. She confessed as much to Ida who, contradicting her avowed loss of tenderness, wrote back to reassure her:
‘My dear, men always seem indifferent about babies – that is, men of our sort. You must not think Gus is more so over yours than he was over mine. He never said anything about David except ‘don’t spill it’. They take us and leave us you know – it is nature. I thought he was rather solicitous about yours considering. Don’t you believe he came over to Belgium because he was sorry for you. He is a mean skunk to let you imagine such a thing. If ever a man was in love, he was – and is now, only of course it’s sunk down to the bottom again – a man doesn’t keep stirred up for long – and because we can’t see it we’re afraid it’s not there – but never you fear.’16
This consolation, which was also needed by Ida herself, was to flower after the birth of Dorelia’s baby, leading to a special affection between the two women. But, for the time being, it was another confusing factor. Like a lake, swollen by the rivers of their mixed feelings, their bewilderment rose. At times, it was the only thing the three of them shared. Augustus’s pronouncements certainly sounded unmixed, but then they were so quick, and so quickly succeeded by other pronouncements equally strong and utterly different. Ida, for all her disenchantment, still harboured a deep affection for him – ‘he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is’ – as Dorelia was to do. Admiration and anger, jealousy and tenderness for Dorelia spun within her. Amid all this eddying of emotion, it was up to Dorelia to steer a firm course. But for her pregnancy, it seems likely that she would have slipped away without a word. Words were not her métier – words, explanations, all this indulgence, were not in her line. She was, so she always insisted, ‘a very ordinary person’, blessed with an extraordinary vicarious gift. She had little talent for making independent decisions: she excelled at making the best of other people’s, and when, as now, no one made any decisions, she drifted without a compass. Hoping that Ida might decide for her – for the two of them had never been so intimate as by post – she wrote expressing her confusion. But when Ida replied, she saw her confusion faithfully reflected:
‘About your going or not you must decide – I should not have suggested it, but I believe you’d be happier to go… Yes, to stay together seems impossible, only we know it isn’t – I don’t know what to say. Only I feel so sure you’d be happier away… I know I should be jolly glad now if we all lived apart – or anyway if I did with the children. Don’t you think we might as well? – if it can be arranged.
I don’t feel the same confidence in Gus I did, nor in myself.
Yes I know I always asked you to stay on, but still I don’t see why you should have – you knew it was pride made me ask you, and because I wouldn’t be instrumental in your going, having invited you – also because I didn’t see how I could live with Gus alone again. All, all selfish reasons.
…I have often felt a pig not to talk to you more about the*2 baby, but I couldn’t manage it. Also I always feel you are not like ordinary people and don’t care for the things other people do. Gus says what I think of you is vulgar and insensible – I don’t know – I know I’m always fighting for you to people outside, but probably what I tell them is quite untrue – and vulgar. I know I admire you immensely as I do a great river or a sunny day – or anything else great and natural and inevitable. But perhaps this is not you. I don’t feel friendly or tender to you because you seem aloof and like some calm independent animal – you don’t seem to need anything from me, or from any woman – and it seems unnatural and a condescension for you to do things for me. Added to all this is my jealousy. This is a true statement of why I am like I am to you...
As to Gus he’s a poet, and knows no more about actual life than a poet does. This is sometimes everything, when he’s struck a spark to illumine the darkness, and sometimes nothing when he’s looking at the moon. As to me, we all know I’m nothing but a rubbish heap with a few buried treasures which will all be tarnished by the time they come to light.
This mistake I make is considering Gus as a man instead of an artist-creature. I am so sorry for you, poor little thing, bottling yourself up about the baby. Shall we laugh at all this when we’re 50? Maybe – but at 50 the passions are burnt low. It makes no difference to now does it?… I do want to be there for your baby. I do want to be good, but I know I shant manage it.’17
But so much of Ida’s analysis, it seemed to Dorelia, made ‘no difference to now’. Dorelia needed to simplify things in order to act, not to investigate them more minutely. So far as action was concerned, there was only one new simplifying factor in Ida’s letter: she was no longer asking Dorelia to stay. Dorelia wrote back briefly and cryptically, stating that she would ‘treat it as an everyday occurrence’ and, she implied, wander off. But Ida, fearing that Dorelia would vanish before she got back, answered urgently:
‘Do not go until we all go, it would be so horrid… I want to go out from Matching Green all together and part at a cross roads – don’t you go before I get back unless you want to… We shall have dinner all together – no slipping away. My admiration of you does not prevent my hating you as one woman hates another. Gus doesn’t seem able to understand this – & it is so simple.’
As an inducement for Dorelia to remain until she arrived back, Ida promised ‘a bottle of olives… 2 natural coloured ostrich feathers and some lace!’18
So Dorelia was persuaded to wait. Augustus had by this time gone up to yet another new studio*3 in London, and the two women joined him there in the last week of March. This was to be the crossroads, the parting of the ways. He did not know that they had been corresponding, and seems to have believed that the crisis of Dorelia’s departure had passed: after all, no one had said anything. What then happened surprised everyone. ‘We had a terrific flare up,’ Ida afterwards (27 March 1905) told Alice Rothenstein.
‘…and the ménage was on the point of being broken up, as D[orelia] said she would not come back, because the only sane and sensible thing for us to do was to live apart. But I persuaded her to, for many reasons – and we settled solemnly to keep up the game till summer. Lord, it was a murky time – most sulphurous – it gave me a queer sort of impersonal enjoyment. After it we all three dined in a restaurant (which is now a rare joy) and drank wine, and then rode miles on the top of a bus, very gay and light hearted. Gus has been a sweet mild creature since.’
The ‘many reasons’ for Ida’s change of attitude are nowhere specif
ied. Certainly this change puzzled Dorelia and also, it appears, was not really understood by Ida herself. The ‘queer sort of impersonal enjoyment’ she felt may have been the exercise of power. Where Ida led, Gus and Dorelia followed, and the knowledge of this may have given her satisfaction.
But one of the ‘many reasons’ was Ida’s dread of living alone with Augustus. If she remained with him, as she might have to do, then he would take other mistresses, and none of them was likely to match Dorelia. It had been Ida’s love for Gus that had drawn all three of them under the same roof; but it was her feeling for Dorelia that now held them together.
Augustus saw things somewhat differently. This last year, he reflected, they had been living rather too conventionally. ‘I get to think of London as Hell sometimes,’19 he told Michel Salaman. Matching Green was better, but even there they were confined with ten perpetually growling cats, squeaking canaries, games of cricket and flocks of chickens outside, tadpoles within, and of course the children like acrobats forever falling into the coal scuttle. Perhaps it was the parrot that he had taught to swear in Romany that gave him the solution. ‘I want to buy a van or two next year… I expect I’ll take my family somewhere, Dorelia included,’20 he had written to Sampson at the end of 1904. It would be just the thing for serious gypsy spotting, for hunting up bits and pieces of their vocabulary.
It was his old Slade friend Michel Salaman who came to the rescue. He had started out on his honeymoon in a smart new caravan, but for some reason decided a few miles into his marriage to sell it. Augustus bought it in the spring of 1905 for the handsome sum of thirty pounds, paid scrupulously over the next thirty years. But what was a caravan without a horse? Here too Salaman was able to help. ‘I might well use your horse,’ Augustus conceded. ‘…Before I take possession of it please give me some notion of his tastes & habits – I should not like to upset him by wrong treatment, and I know nothing of horses’ ways.’21
By April all stood ready and the future shone bright. ‘I look forward to being out with a van or two,’ he wrote to Salaman, ‘our… multitude of boys are an amusing lot.’ The horse and van had halted near the centre of Dartmoor, a fine challenging place, if they could find it. ‘Probably I shall have a Gipsy to help in these matters,’ Augustus had speculated.
But for the time being horse and van were to have a more discreet role as Dorelia’s shelter for the birth of her first child. Ida, who had gone to stay with the Dowdalls in Liverpool, wrote to ask whether Dorelia ‘would like me to help you over the baby’s birth or if you’d rather I kept out of the way’, adding: ‘I’d like to and I’d hate to. I would rather come, probably only because I don’t like to be away from things.’
In the event Ida was not with Dorelia when the baby was born, and nor was anyone else. ‘I was surprised to hear you had your baby so soon,’ Gwen wrote from Paris. ‘I’m so glad everything has gone well, & it is such a charming one, it seems to be a real gipsy. I should like to come over, but I don’t suppose I shall… Goodbye & love to you.’22
It was a boy, born in circumstances deliberately made obscure so as to conceal his illegitimacy. For the occasion Dorelia assumed the name of ‘Mrs Archibald McNeill’, wife of a naval officer long at sea, while Augustus on his arrival posed as her solicitous brother. Later on their identities changed. ‘I’m quite certain there is no penalty attached to having a bastard in the family,’ Augustus reassured her from a Liverpool pub called The Duke. ‘So better register him as my son – provided of course it isn’t published next morning in the Daily Mail or Express – as your family and my father no doubt take in one of those journals and such advertisement would be very disturbing. Have you stuck to that list of names? A sensation takes possession of me that Pyramus may be omitted or Alastir… The parish of Lydford wasn’t it?’23
Pyramus was born at Postbridge on Dartmoor in late April or early May. Though Dorelia was alone (except for a large herd of cows), she was not far from an inn owned by a friendly landlord and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hext, who saw to it that a doctor and nurse visited her. Both Augustus and Ida had planned to be there, but Augustus ‘wearing my new suit so of course I cannot think very composedly’ was fastened in Liverpool where Charles Reilly ‘keeps at me about his scheme of a school of 10 picked pupils and walls and ceilings to decorate – and £500 a year’. Ida, meanwhile, was held at Matching Green in polite talk with her mother, who had determined to stay with her over Whitsun. In their absence Augustus and Ida both sent money, advice on diet (‘don’t live on potatoes’), and plenty of unanswered inquiries.
As soon as the telegram – in almost impenetrable Romany – arrived at Elm House saying Dorelia’s baby was born, Ida abandoned her mother and with mixed feelings churning within her hurried down, travelling through the night by train and arriving by eleven next morning. She found Dorelia lying along the caravan shelf which served for a bed, with her infant – ‘a boy of course’ – beside her. Augustus, ‘suave and innocent as ever’, turned up the following day ‘to kiss the little woman who is giving up much for love of him’, Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘The babe is fine, a tawny colour – very contented on the whole – we have to use a breast pump thing as her nipples are flat on the breast.’
A few days later the other children flocked down, shepherded by Maggie who had returned for the emergency, and they all settled down to graze upon the moor for two months, Augustus coming and going at intervals. ‘It is adorable and terrible here,’ Ida wrote. ‘We work and work from 6 or 7 till 9 and then are so tired we cannot keep awake – at least I can’t. Dorelia is more lively – owing perhaps to an empty belly.’ All day they were out of doors, wearing the same clothes, going about barefoot, growing wonderfully sunburnt – ‘at least the women and children are – the Solitary Stag does not show it much’ – and eating double quantities of everything.
Ida seemed transformed in this new climate. They were in a wide valley, with dramatic distant hills and never-ending skies. It was not simply the open-air life that transformed her, but a change in Augustus’s attitude in the open air. ‘Gus is a horrid beast,’ she eulogized in another letter to the Rani, ‘and a lazy wretch and a sky blue angel and an eagle of the ranges. He is (or acts) in love with me for a change, it is so delightful – only he is lazy seemingly, and when not painting lies reading or playing with a toy boat. Then I think well how could he paint if he has to be on duty in between – duty is so wearing and tearing and wasting and consuming – only somehow it seems to build something up as well which is so clever.’ Ida hardly knew how to interpret this change. At the very moment one might have expected him to give his fullest attention to Dorelia, he had turned to Ida herself. She had lost confidence in herself to such an extent that she could not believe he loved her. But then what was Gus’s love? What was anyone’s love? ‘We had one flare up – nearly 2,’ she confided to the Rani,
‘…owing to Gus’s strange lack of susceptibility – or possibly by some human working, his being too susceptible. It is a difficult position for him. He is so afraid of making me jealous I believe – and he was not wildly in love with her – nor with me, only quite mildly. With the result that he appeared indifferent to her, while really feeling quite nice and tender, had I not been there. But Lord – it is impossible but interesting and truth-excavating.’
Despite the difficulties, and odd flare-ups, this was a marvellous summer for Ida. She adored living in the van. All their worries seemed to lose themselves among the rocks and heather of this open country, to float away with the procession of clouds across the great sky. Yet Ida knew they would have to work out something more permanent than this.
For Augustus too it was a happy summer. He was free to work, and work went well. ‘I have made a step forwards but what infinite worlds before me!’24 he had written to Sampson. And to Michel Salaman also he wrote that summer: ‘I know now infallibly what is good painting, good imagination & good art.’25 He was doing many etchings – romantic pieces entitled ‘Out on the Moor’ and ‘Pyramu
s and Thisbe’ and a good study of Dartmoor ponies. Close by their camp was a spring for washing and drinking, which the women and children used; while in the evenings Augustus would stride off out of sight to the Hexts, sit in their plain flagged kitchen and warm himself before the peat fire. Back at the camp he erected a tent of poles and blankets after the gypsy fashion and, like the Hexts, lit peat fires – but they were ‘usually all smoke’. At night they would retreat into the tent to sleep ‘and you can hear the stream always and always’.
The rest of this summer Ida and Dorelia passed together at Matching Green, while Augustus roamed the country between his school in London and his prospective school in Liverpool. In his absence the two women grew extraordinarily close. The whole basis of their friendship was shifting. They managed the house, looked after the children, made each other clothes and in the evening played long games of chess which Ida always won – ‘except once’, Dorelia remembered. Towards Augustus, it appeared, they now occupied very similar positions. ‘A woman is either a wife or a mistress,’ Ida had written to Dorelia.
Augustus John Page 29
