CHAPTER EIGHT

Being an Impression of Two Ladies of Genius

So far the feminine element has not obtruded greatly into these pages, not for lack of females, but for lack of distinguished ones. It is a matter of little significance to the reader that in May I met a charming girl called Jean, and in June lost my heart to a languorous beauty named Helen. But at about this time (the summer of 1920) I did meet and get to know two very remarkable women.

The first was Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She was staying at a house whither I journeyed in late July to escape the heat of a London summer. My first sight of her was as I emerged from the car; very dirty and dishevelled after a long journey, in which somebody had spilt a bottle of champagne all over my trousers. I entered the hall, and observed a strange, dark woman in orange looking at me, wondered who she was, wondered still more when she advanced and said in a deep booming voice:

‘Oh, young man. Run upstairs quickly before you go in to see them. The room is full of earls and cocktails.’

This remarkable announcement (which was true in so far as there was an earl somewhere in the distance, and the clinking of ice in glasses) was followed by a mutual introduction.

A fiery, billowing, passionate, discontented creature of genius--that is my impression of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She absolutely dominated the party during my whole visit. I fell passionately in love with her, with the shy, ridiculous love of twenty-one for--?

Try to see her as I see her now. The tall, cool dining-room, the Romney smiling from the wall, the long dining-table, and, near the end, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, hunched up, scowling, smoking a cigar, and as she puffed the smoke into the face of the lady opposite (whom she detested) telling the following story:

‘Do you know’ (oh! the mellow boom of that magical voice!) ‘the story of the old hen that was crossing the road and that was run over by a Rolls-Royce? There was a flutter of feathers, a shrill cackle and then--’ (turning to her neighbour) ‘what do you think the hen said as she died? _My God, what a rooster!_’

I don’t think anybody was ever quite so rude to people as Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She would stand in front of the glass, tugging fitfully at her dress, and then, with her head on one side, she would say, in dreamy but resounding tones:

‘Isn’t it awful? I try to look like a lady and all I look like is Miss --.’ The fact that Miss -- was standing just behind her, made no difference at all.

At this house there was a swimming bath--rather on the Roman model, with pillars of pale blue marble mosaic, and little nooks and corners where one could drink cocktails before summoning up the energy to dive in. It was a very hot summer and the bath was in great demand, especially after tennis. On one of these occasions we all assembled, in dressing-gowns of varying gorgeousness, and plunged into the water. Enter Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She herself was in a tea-gown, having no intention of bathing. Lying on a couch, she surveyed the splashing throng. Suddenly, as a pretty girl in a _décolletée_ bathing dress scrambled up on the diving board the great voice rang out:

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t appear like that before the man you loved!’

I don’t know what happened. I only know that the two never spoke to one another again.

And yet, when one got her by herself, she was the most fascinating of creatures. She was, at the time, moving into a little house near by, and whenever the opportunity occurred, we would go over to assist her in her task. It is probable that the ‘assistance’ considerably delayed her entry into possession, for though we had all of us very decided ideas upon house decoration, we had not the remotest idea of how to carry them out. I remember standing in a small and dishevelled room for nearly an hour, while we all argued exactly where a set of the works of Bernard Shaw (which the author had given her) should be placed. Finally, with a gesture that would have done credit to an empress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell swept the whole lot on to the floor, drew from her pocket the manuscript of a one-act melodrama by Clemence Dane, and tramped round the room reciting it, her golden voice echoing over the empty house. She must have quite demoralized the young man who was putting in a new bath, and she certainly created havoc among the various vases and oddments with which the floor was strewn.

After that, we decided that we would leave the house to itself for an hour or two, and go into the village to buy garden implements. I wish you could have seen Mrs. Patrick Campbell stalking into that provincial ironmonger’s shop. She stood in the entrance, drawing her furs around her, swept out her hand and pointed to some extraordinary instrument covered with knobs and spikes (probably designed for the uprooting of turnips).

‘What,’ she boomed, ‘is that?’

The man, like a startled rabbit, tried to give her some indication of its use.

‘Give it to me,’ she cried.

The next thing was a rake. She asked for a r-r-rake, rolling her r’s and her eyes as though she were asking for some esoteric poison. When she held the rake at arm’s length she reminded one irresistibly of a Britannia of the decadence. Choppers, trowels, insecticide, squirting things--enough to staff a place four times the size of her own--were all ordered and bundled into the car, so that when eventually we set out for home we must have looked like a party of _sans-culottes_ departing to arm their local legion.

The actual use of these instruments was never fully discovered. The rake was of course a simple matter, and was employed with great aplomb in removing the remaining gravel from the centre of the drive to the sides, where it served as a very effectual choker of the drains. The clippers also wrought confusion with the grass borders, and became caked with earth and grit. But the spiked thing remained a complete mystery.

I never understood how Mrs. Patrick Campbell wrote her autobiography. When I saw her it was apparently due at the publishers towards the end of the next month, although not a word of it had been written. She would suddenly get up in the middle of a conversation, and rush away to her room saying, ‘Now, I am going to write.’ But half an hour later she would invariably be back again, booming at us from the sofa.

This habit of leaving things to the last moment undoubtedly explains, to a large extent, the fact that her later career has not been marked with the same triumph as she enjoyed during her earlier years, in spite of the fact that she is still the superb genius, shining with a dark radiance that hardly any of her younger rivals possesses.

Does she allow that genius to run to waste? I wonder. She does not appear to have the capacity for taking pains. Philip Moeller, the author of _George Sand_, told me that she was anything but word-perfect in the title-rôle. ‘At the final dress rehearsal,’ he said, ‘she was sweeping about the stage with the text in her hand, reading it, word by word. She carried it off somehow, by gagging--magnificent gagging, if you like--but still, you can’t expect to play a part on those lines.’

A pity, a decided pity. For so fine and sensitive an artist must have suffered tortures when she first saw inferior artists taking her place. And when she had to appear at the music-halls it must have been like putting a queen in a pillory. I once heard a marvellous story of her in this connection.

It is alleged to have occurred at some London music-hall where--sadly to relate--she had to share the honours with some performing sea-lions. Think of it! Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had swept London off its feet in _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, having to appear in the unworthy company of beasts of that nature, which probably eat their young and sleep all the winter. These animals were apparently incapable of appreciating true art, for during the whole of her act (which preceded their own), they made the most appalling noises off stage, booming and bellowing for food. They were, of course, kept hungry in order that they might go through their tricks with proper alacrity.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell, according to the story, put up with the sea-lions for two performances, but after that, she had had enough. On the following evening she therefore paid an early visit to the theatre, a strange bundle under her arm. In this bundle was a packet of succulent fish with which she proceeded to feed the sea-lions one by one, addressing them, as she did so, in terms of great affection. After a couple of fish the bellowing ceased, and gave way to contented licking of lips....

Mrs. Patrick Campbell went through her act in a deathly silence that night. But when the sea-lions came on, the general impression of the audience was that it was a very poor show.

* * * * *

I cannot better introduce the other lady who at this time so impressed me than by quoting a very penetrating sentence that was written about one of her books by Mr. Middleton Murray. It referred to _Vera_ (by the authoress of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_), and he called it ‘A Wuthering Heights written by a Jane Austen.’

For Lady Russell--if one may be so unkind as to strip from her the mask of anonymity which she is always so careful to preserve--is just like that. It is as though she dwelt in an early Victorian drawing-room, listening to some passionate dialogue of life that was being carried on outside the window. The voices rise and fall, the rain splashes against the bright panes, the wind moans and whistles round the stoutly built walls. Then, there is a lull, and in the silence may be heard the scratching of her little quill pen, transcribing the violent things she has heard in a tiny, spidery handwriting, catching the thunder in a polished phrase. And when she has finished writing, there, on the paper, is a story as full of tension, fierce and frightening as any that dwells in the broken, passionate sentences of Emily Brontë.

When one meets her, inevitably she suggests Dresden China, with her tiny voice, tiny hands, tiny face, tiny manners. And then suddenly, with a shock, you realize that the Dresden China is hollow, and is filled with gunpowder. Not that Lady Russell will tell you. You simply sense it, and stand back a little, wondering.

After I had returned to London, I was trying to endure one of those dull Septembers which seem to concentrate in themselves all the heat and stuffiness of a summer that has outstayed its welcome, when somebody rang up and said, ‘Come to lunch. I want you to meet a very charming lady.’

I went to lunch, and there were certainly several very charming ladies, but one knew them all before. Until, twenty minutes late, the door opened, and a little figure with blue eyes floated across the floor saying, ‘Du forgive me, will yiu? I feel I must be late.’ And then everything was changed.

There really ought to be some sort of musical notation for giving the exact timbre of people’s voices. Lady Russell’s is a delicious voice, like a dove that has become slightly demoralized by perching too long on a French hat. Her ‘U’ sounds are startlingly French, and yiu, pronounced _à la française_, is the only way you can write it. She does not really talk, she croons aloud. And here again, one comes up against the Austen-Brontë combination. No other woman could possibly deliver herself of such remarks in so utterly dulcet a tone.

It was at the time when her (?) book _In the Mountains_ was being so well reviewed, and there was just enough doubt as to whether she really had written it to lend piquancy to the discussion.

‘In the Mountains?’ she said. ‘It sounds like a Bliu Guide.’

‘You wrote it--you _know_ you wrote it.’

‘_Yiu_ may know I wrote it. I haven’t even read it.’ But if _yiu_ like it, it must be improper. So I shan’t read it.’

She swore till the very last that she did not write it.

‘I couldn’t have written it, could I, because I only published a book last year, and I write terribly slowly. Scratch out all the time. I want to write a play.’

‘Why don’t you?’

She sighed. ‘It’s so difficult to know what’s going to happen to a play. Yiu always know with a novel that it will be published, but with a play yiu never know, du yiu? I once had a play produced and I was so thrilled that I used to go every night and sit all by myself in the pit, thinking “What a clever girl am I.” But I think the little man at the door began to think I must be in love with him and so I stopped. And so did the play.’

Suddenly--(this was after lunch)--‘Let’s write a play _now_.’

‘What sort of a play?’

‘A play with heaps and heaps of tiny scenes, all lasting only about five minutes. With Bach fugues in between. Beautifully lit. Tiny tragedies. Tiny comedies. Like the things that happen in one’s life. Some of the plays might be silent. And then--oh, _du_ lets’--and then after each funny little emotion, one would always have the fugue to recall one back to life.’

It sounds a fascinating idea, and I wish she would do it. Perhaps she will. So that if ever a unique entertainment by an anonymous writer is produced in London, of the type sketched above, you will know who is responsible for it.

Lady Russell has her own way of administering criticism to bad writers--the sort of way which makes one swear never to do it again. In one of my novels, which she had read, there comes a passage of a very lurid and foolish nature, where a villainous vicar strikes an adventuress across the face. One develops fairly quickly, and I knew, almost as soon as the book was published, that this passage was rotten stuff. I met Lady Russell shortly after she read it and she said, ‘I _du_ like your book. And I _loved_ the bad old man who hit the girl on the mouth.’ Silence. Utter silence. And then a laugh. I went straight home and threw that silly novel into the fire.

But that is not nearly so damning as she can be. I shall never forget my thrill of delight when I heard of her quite classic rebuke to one of the world’s most tiresome women. The scene had better remain veiled in mystery, but one can say that she had several amusing people staying with her. There suddenly arrived in the neighbourhood Lady --, who, as everybody who knows her will tell you, will go miles in any weather to be near a celebrity. She was full of her latest discovery, a very decorative young soldier, who had won far more than his share of medals in the war. Lady -- talked about him till everybody felt inclined to scream: how she had lunched with him in Paris, how he had done this, that and the other. ‘And do you know,’ she added, in a vibrating voice, ‘he was wounded in sixteen places!’

Lady Russell looked at her with a plaintive smile. ‘I didn’t know men _had_ so many places,’ she said.

It would be interesting to know what she really thought of life, or failing that, what she really thought of her own work, but very few people have ever managed to get behind the mask of anonymity, and they all come back with different stories of what they have seen. One thing I do know, and that is that _Vera_ _had_ to be written. The terrible brute of a man, the feeling of suspense which hangs over the pages like a menace--they were as inevitable as a human birth.

‘Did you like writing that book?’ I asked her once.

‘I hated it,’ she said, in a whisper. And then, looking down at the floor, ‘Isn’t he a brute? An absolute brute? Have you ever known anybody so horrible?’ She shuddered as though she were talking of a very real person.

Whatever one may say of her, the fact remains that she occupies a place in modern literature that is unique, because to the public she is only a pen, and not a person. When they think of anybody like Sheila Kaye-Smith, they call to mind bobbed hair, black eyebrows, and a cottage on the Sussex downs. When they think (as they apparently sometimes do) of Hall Caine, they call up visions of a beard, private suites at the Savoy, and countless mysterious legends of his doings in the Isle of Man. When they hear of Stephen McKenna it is always with the knowledge that he has either just been to or returned from the West Indies and is either going or has gone to some party or other in London. But they never think at all of Lady Russell, because they simply do not know she exists. They are caught up in the fascination of her work, they wonder for a moment what manner of man or woman produced it. And all they have to guide them is a blank title-page.