It was a sickness of living from which she suffered – quite different from the suicidal troughs of Matching Green. Then there had been rising waves of jealousy; now, though she often dreamed of Augustus and Alick Schepeler, they were absurd dreams, never tortured. ‘Last night you were teaching her [Alick] french in the little dining-room here while I kept passing through to David who had toothache and putting stuff on his tooth.’ It was as if she was too tired to feel anything more. On hearing that Augustus was coming over at Christmas, she had remarked to the Rani: ‘Funny – I haven’t been alone with him for 2½ years – wonder what it will be like – boring probably.’ Yet she had not been bored at all. She had been happy.
In Ida’s letters, especially to the Rani, there is a fatalistic flirting with death: ‘Oh Rani – Are you in a state when the future seems hopeless? I suppose things are never hopeless really are they? There is always death isn’t there?’ Except for death, there seemed no new thing under the sun. She lived in a pale stupor. ‘The only way to be happy is to be ignorant and lie under the trees in the evening,’ she had told the Rani. But she could not regain such green ignorance.
She had not counted on Augustus. Now that he had finished his portrait of Alick, now that Dorelia had inexplicably melted away, he suddenly proposed returning to live with Ida. Why not? They had come through so much. What else was there for them? Ida was dismayed. She hardly knew what to answer. Even if he was temporarily feeling dissatisfied with the present arrangement, surely he would not regret it later on. Had he considered the implications of living with her? What about the children – ‘Can you really want to see them again?’ she asked. ‘You know they worry you to death.’ But Augustus had no home. He could find nowhere to live in London, and he could not work. Was his request really so unsatisfactory? After all, they still loved each other in their fashion; why should they not settle down in London and be happy? Besides, he had given her scheme a long trial. What he said, and the troubled way he said it, did not sound unreasonable. She told him he would be happier alone, but some men were helpless when left to themselves. ‘It may be I should come back to London,’ Ida reluctantly agreed. ‘You must tell me. I will come – only we get on so much better apart. But I understand you need a home. Dis moi et j’y cours. As to the love old chap we all have our hearts full of love for someone at sometime or other and if it isn’t this one it’s the other one over there.’
Her real feeling at the prospect of returning comes out in a letter she sent the Rani: ‘Gus seems to hanker after a home in London, and I feel duties beating little hammers about me, and probably shall find myself padding about London in another ½ year – Damn it all.’
One factor that tied her to Augustus, as she had explained at Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes, was financial dependence. Throughout the autumn and winter she had saved exorbitantly. To Augustus she represented such thrift as an art, parodying his own: ‘Am still trying to take care of the pence with great pleasure in the feeling of beauty it gives – like simplifying an already beautiful, but careless and clumsy, work of art.’ The impetus behind this economic activity was her desire to build some independence in the future. But the little hammers of duty were destroying this last dream. She had complained in the past of her own selfishness, but she was not selfish enough.
In a letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida wrote: ‘It chills my marrow to think of living back in England.’ The Rothensteins were growing increasingly worried about her life with and without Augustus, and wrote to inquire, complain, praise and comfort her.
‘My only treasure is myself,’ she insisted to Will, ‘and that I give you, as I give it to all men who need it… as to Gussie, he is our great child artist: let him snap his jaws. What does he matter? It is you who matters, and you dare not be frightened except at your own self. I am glad to have your letter: it is such a comfort to hear a voice. Life is a bit solemn and silent in the forest where I live, and the world outside a bit grotesque and difficult. Certainly there are always the gay ribbons you talk of but they are only sewn on and are there to break the intolerable monotony, for which purpose, darling Will, they are quite inadequate...’
Such gloomy letters worried the Rothensteins, who blamed Augustus. But this was too simple, and Ida would not allow it. Gus never treated women as if they were children or inferior to men. He treated them as adults, fully capable of looking after themselves in a difficult world. Nor did he lie to them or seriously mislead them. He was transparent. The advantages and disadvantages he offered were immediately obvious. ‘I must write to say it is not so,’ she firmly answered Will. The devil, she explained, was in herself – ‘and as soon as you wound it, it heals up and you have to keep on always trying to find its heart.’ This devil had so many names: it was jealousy (which had driven Dorelia away); a vanity which masqueraded as duty; finally sloth. Would she ever kill it? ‘When one fights a devil does one not fight it for the whole world? It is the most enchanting creature, it is everywhere. God, it seems to spread itself out every minute. Sometimes I do find its miserable fat heart and I give it a good stab. But it is chained to me. I cannot run away.’
*
All of them were in Paris during February: Augustus moving into his new studio, and Gwen in hers; Dorelia in her logement; Ida still at the rue Dareau. ‘Let’s go up the Volga in the sun,’ Augustus entreated Alick. But it was no more than a gesture: he could not run away now from Ida. At moments he might have liked to. Paris that winter seemed crowded with the bourgeoisie, and he blamed them for his ill thoughts. ‘I am much depressed to-day by the aspect of civilization – never was human society so foully ugly, so abysmally ignoble – and I have also had a cold which doesn’t improve matters.’ He revisited all the places which had so delighted him less than a year ago – the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Panthéon (‘to encourage myself with a view of Puvis’s decorations’) – but everywhere seethed with masses of people which ‘brought my nausea to a climax’. The whole French nation oppressed him. ‘I went into the morgue and saw 4 dead men,’ he told Alick; ‘they looked awfully well really – the only thing impressive I found today… These four unknown dead men, all different, seemed enlarged by death to monumental size, and lacking life seemed divested only of its trivialities.’
To be reborn was what he longed for – not through death, but in the birth of Ida’s fifth child. ‘Oh for a girl!’ she had written to him, yet he knew that ‘I always have boys’. She referred to the unborn baby as Susannah, but noticed that she was ‘pushing about in a fearfully strong masculine way’. The contemplation of another boy, which still had the power to excite Augustus, only caused her heartache. ‘In 3 weeks – si on peut juger – a new face will be amongst us – a new pilgrim. God help it,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘What right have we, knowing the difficulties of the way, to start any other along it? The baby seems so strong and large I am dreading its birth. How pleasant it seems that it would be to die.’
Wyndham Lewis – whom Augustus was now accusing of ‘the worst taste’, but whom Ida still liked – had spent much of his time recently at the rue Dareau. ‘Mrs John and the bonne [Clara] will have their babies about the same time I expect,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘ – I suppose beneath John’s roof is the highest average of procreation in France.’
As it turned out neither of these babies – nor yet a third one that Wyndham Lewis had so far failed to spot – were born under Augustus’s many roofs. After some hesitation Ida decided to have her child in hospital. ‘It is much simpler and I don’t pay anything,’ she explained to her mother. ‘I just go when it comes on without anything but what I’m wearing!’
Clara and Félice had by now both left,80 and Ida engaged a new nanny called Delphine for the children. ‘Gawd knows if she’s the right sort,’ she reported to Augustus, ‘ – one can but try. She’s fairly handsome 22 years old.’ Under these circumstances Ida was obliged to send word to Dorelia asking whether she would return to the rue Dareau while she was in hospital; and Dorelia, in a
greeing, walked back into the web.
‘Augustus is well in his studio now and a beauty it is – and he has plenty of models just at present… Dorelia – and all the kids – to say nothing of me in spreading poses,’ Ida wrote to the Rani late that February. Although the writing of letters made her feel ‘pale green’, she continued her correspondence right up to the time of her confinement. To lighten the black humour of some of these letters, she had told the Rothensteins: ‘we shall come up again next spring you know’. After which, she promised, all their worries ‘would melt away like the mist when the sun comes out’. But to the Rani, with whom she felt less need to dissemble, she confessed that it was not to the spring she was looking forward, but ‘to the winter for some inexplicable reason’. She was suffering from an ‘egg-shape[d] pessimism’ and ‘I am dreadfully off babies just now… in a fortnight or so the silent weight I now carry will be yelling its head off out in the cold.’
There was one further item of recurring news in the new year that seemed to promise, for all their heroic efforts over the last months, an indefinite spinning out of the complex network of their lives. Dorelia was again pregnant.
*
In the first week of March 1907, Ida walked round to the room she had engaged at the Hôpital de la Maternité, ten minutes away in the boulevard du Port-Royal. Nothing, as she had predicted, could have been simpler. The baby was born in the early morning of 9 March: it was a boy.
The complications began immediately afterwards. Mrs Nettleship, who had gone over to Paris partly for business and partly to see Ida, bringing with her on Ida’s instructions parcels of magnesia and dill water, special soaps and strong building bricks (‘by strong I mean unbreakable’), explained to her daughters Ethel and Ursula what was happening:
‘My dears, Ida is to have a slight operation. It is serious but not very dangerous. In 48 hrs she will be quite out of danger. It will be to-night – I can’t come home for a few days… They think a little abscess has formed somewhere and causes the pain and the fever. She has to go to a Maison de Santé [private nursing home] and one of the best men in Paris will do it. I am glad I was here as I could help… I have been running about all day after doctors and people.’81
Augustus seemed paralysed by these events. The waiting, the suspense, above all the stupefying sense of powerlessness unmanned him. It was a nightmare, and he like someone half-asleep within its circumference. ‘Apart from my natural anxieties,’ he wrote, ‘I was oppressed by the futility of my visits, by my impotence, and insignificance.’82 Every decision was taken by Mrs Nettleship from her headquarters at the Hôtel Regina. It was she who chose a specialist and arranged to pay him sixty pounds – ‘I would have paid him £6oo if he had asked it’; it was she who organized Ida’s move to the new hospital and paid sixteen shillings a day for her room there (each sum scrupulously noted); it was she who wrote each day to family and friends keeping them informed of developments. She was particularly reassured that the specialist, besides being the best in Paris, was well connected (his wife was a niece, she ascertained, of a baronet) and had attended several diplomats at the British Embassy. When not busy at the hospital she would inspect the children at the rue Dareau, interview Delphine and even Dorelia, replant the entire garden there filling up the children’s mud-holes, and conduct David to his new school. ‘He talks about “the boys in my school” just like an Eton boy might,’ she noted with approval. Between times she managed to keep her business affairs going, sending off satisfactory messages to various titled clients. Her energy was prodigious, and in complete contrast to Augustus’s stupor. ‘Gus looks quite done up,’ she confided to Ursula. ‘He has the grippe and he is terribly upset about Ida. He does everything I suggest about Doctors and things, but has not much initiative – he has no experience.’
The maison de santé to which Ida had been removed was a light spacious building in the boulevard Arago. Somehow the atmosphere here engendered optimism. ‘The place is the very best in Paris,’ Mrs Nettleship reported. ‘…The nuns who nurse her are the most experienced and so quiet and pleasant. If it is possible for her to recover she will do it here.’
The crisis, which so galvanized Mrs Nettleship and demoralized Augustus, was seen by them at each stage differently. Where she is hopeful, he is pessimistic. ‘Ida has got over her operation better than we expected,’ she writes to her daughters, while Augustus the same day tells John Sampson that Ida ‘is most seriously ill after an operation’. While Mrs Nettleship busied herself with complicated plans for Ida’s recovery, Augustus would scribble out wan messages to the Rani: ‘She is a little worse to-day’
But on one subject they were agreed: the baby. Augustus indeed was the more enthusiastic: ‘The new baby is most flourishing so far. I really admire him,’ he told Margaret Sampson. ‘…He has a distinct profile. We called him Henry as it was the wish of Mother Nettleship to memorialize thus her great friendship with [Sir Henry] Irving.’ But on Dorelia and on Mrs Nettleship Henry imposed an additional strain. ‘He sleeps all day and cries all night,’ Mrs Nettleship wrote to Ursula. ‘Someone has to be awake with him every night.’ He was, she added, ‘a great beauty’; but ‘I hope he will turn out worth all this trouble and anxiety.’ This pious hope was to echo, like a curse, down his life.
Ida was suffering not from ‘a little abscess’ but puerperal fever and peritonitis. ‘It all depends on her not giving way,’ Mrs Nettleship explained. ‘She is no worse to-night than she was this morning and every hour counts to the good – but she might suddenly get worse any minute.’ The main hope of her pulling through lay with what Mrs Nettleship called her ‘natural vitality’, but this had been worn away through the years to a degree that her mother did not know, and it was Augustus who saw what was happening more clearly. To Mrs Nettleship her daughter’s recovery was, once the doctors had done their best, a matter of simple determination. It did not occur to her that Ida might not want to live, that she could consent to die.
She was in pain and fever much of the time. Except while under the anaesthetic, she did not sleep night or day following Henry’s birth. Mrs Nettleship maintained a whirl of cheerfulness revolving round her bedside, almost a party, so that Ida should not realize the gravity of her illness. But Augustus had little heart for this charade. ‘I do everything that is possible,’ Mrs Nettleship assured Ursula. ‘She is very unreasonable as usual and wants all sorts of things that are not good for her. I have to keep away a good deal as she always begs me to give her something she must not have and I can’t be always refusing.’ Augustus could refuse her nothing. She made him ransack Paris for a particular beef lozenge; she demanded violets; asked for a bottle of peppermint, a flask of eau de mélisse: he got them all. She seemed to understand that any definite activity came as a relief to him, and when she could invent nothing else for him to be doing she made him go and have a bath. To Mrs Nettleship it sometimes appeared as if he were acting quite irresponsibly, but she made no move to stop him. Perhaps Ida sensed some friction between them. ‘Either you’re all mad or I am,’ she told them.
But on the morning of 13 March she demanded something that even Augustus could not do for her. Sitting up in bed, she declared her determination to leave the hospital and go to Dorelia in the rue du Château. There she would cure herself, she said, ‘with a bottle of tonic wine, Condy’s, and an enema’. Augustus, in a panic, ‘got the doctor up in his motor car’ and at last he managed to dissuade her. But this was a bad day for Ida, and having relinquished the hope of joining Dorelia, her spirit seemed to give up the struggle.
‘I adore stormy weather,’ she had once written to the Rani. On the night of 13 March there was a violent storm, with thunder and lightning, lasting into the early morning. Lying in her hospital bed, Ida longed to be in the middle of it, somehow imagining that she was. ‘She wanted to be a bit of the wind,’ Augustus wrote to the Rani. ‘She saw a star out of the window, and she said “advertissement of humility”. As I seemed puzzled she said after a bit “Jok
e”.’
The hospital staff tried to remove him, but Augustus stayed with her that night. Sometimes she was highly feverish, ‘her spirit making preparatory flights into delectable regions’,83 but there were periods of contact between them. He rubbed her neck with Elliman’s Embrocation and, when she asked him, tickled her feet. She pulled his beard about. To the sisters she remarked: ‘C’est drôle, mais je vais perdre mon sommeil encore une nuit, voyez-vous.’ In a delirium she spoke of a land of miraculous caves, then, with some impatience, demanded that Augustus hand over his new suit to Henry Lamb, who had recently turned up in Paris. Despite the fever, the pain had vanished and she felt euphoric. ‘How can I speak of her glittering smiles and moving hands?’ Augustus afterwards told the Rani. And to Margaret Sampson he wrote of that night: ‘Ida felt lovely – she was so gay and spiritual. She had such charming visions and made such amazing jokes.’
In the morning, after the storm was over, she roused herself and gave Augustus a toast: ‘Here’s to Love!’ And they both drank to it in Vichy water. It was a fitting salute to a life that had steered such a brave course between irony and romance. Mrs Nettleship came in shortly afterwards with Ethel her daughter, who had arrived from England. ‘We are just waiting for the end,’ Ethel wrote to her sister Ursula. ‘Ida is not really conscious, but she talks in snatches – quite disconnected sentences. Mother just sits by her side and sometimes holds her hand – she has some violets on her bed. I am just going to take the children for a walk – they are not going to see her as they would not understand, and she cannot recognize them.’
Augustus John Page 36
