by Diana Cooper
Arlington Street
October 13
The papers this morning intoxicated only. How disinterested the English are. I assure you that I walked out with an honest expectation of bunting and gaiety and of conductors asking their passengers their views, of more loungings at street-corners and civility from taximen, but both among the People and the Ritz the crowd wore the same look and talked as detachedly as they did when Paris was near being held by the enemy. I had to lunch with Their Graces and Wolkoff, but for all my stirrings of hope and optimism, he said nothing brightening except a funny confession, that I believe all the world would confess at Judgment Day, that after such a disaster as the Leinster one scours the casualty list with more hope than apprehension, for a name one knows.
I prophesy the laying down of the German arms, a super-Sedan, almost immediately, if only to disappoint the Foch schemes. Besides, what men will fight, feeling they may be the last to be killed, peace perhaps declared and the news not penetrated?
B.E.F.
October 18
Amiens is rather depressing after Paris. The best rooms that we can get have neither windows nor doors, which compares so unfavourably with the Ritz. But there are beds and sheets. We are now waiting in the hotel where Orpen lives and we hope he will be able to lend us a motor tomorrow.
This is not a nice letter, darling, but I am feeling ever so little depressed and I am harried and hemmed in. I wish I shared your optimistic view of the war. I think people are intoxicated by victory and unless the old hope of revolution in Germany comes true I don’t see how it can end for a year or two. Has Mr Wilson committed us to “unconditional surrender and no peace with the Hohenzollern”? If he has there is no hope but German revolution.
Arlington Street
October 14
I have a confession tonight, my bird of the golden feather, for you are that. Leaving, you gave me a key, to be used only under stress and necessity. Tonight for the first time since April, dining with Bouch, Ivo,‡‡‡‡ Philip, Hugo and four strangers, we were in despair for an evening’s entertainment. An empty house was found and lobsters packed from the Ritz, but it was 9.30, “too late for everything.” I hesitated, darling, and disinterestedly, for I wanted none myself as it happened, I thought that you would like me to do a Christ and convert a dry situation into wine, and that wine the best, so I sent Ivo packing with the golden feather of 88, and he returned with four Binet 1914, which will be replaced with great relish and a tender touch tomorrow. You will be pleased, or I do not know you.
Arlington Street
October 15
This is my last quite peaceful night. Tomorrow I shall start the old weary season of tormenting days and nights—fears for your body, sadness for your mind and brave spirits, too fine and elect to suffer the tired despair of the war.
Arlington Street
October 19
I had lunch with Dudley Coats today, and he depressed me about the war, and told me that Peter Broughton-Adderley was killed and that it would last some months. I feel near tears and despairing this evening, perhaps because I have not been to bed till 2 a.m. for so many nights that my nerves are feeble. Dudley told me you had lost £200 at Mr Dod, of all idiotic games. O darling, it isn’t faithful of you. I ask no other whimsical boons. Do humour me there. Is it to be an obstacle to happiness all my life?
Arlington Street
October 20
After I wrote last night, half-crazed with sleep and longing to be in the dark and alone, the full horror of Her Grace’s last lonely years seemed to stare at me, so I made her comfortable with lights and occupation by my fire, and read aloud to her till 2 a.m. Nights at home wear one down more than nights out. I read about eight Maupassants and enjoyed it very much. You had read them all to me, I think, L’Inutile Beauté and Mouche, and one about a woman too frightened to say goodbye to her son dying of smallpox, and going mad, illusioned always into thinking her face was pitted—and many others.
Arlington Street
October 22
No letter today and Peace fading into dimmer future. They think here that the last note was humility exemplified. Your leave will be my armistice. Does it loom?
Arlington Street
October 24
Today I sold produce and orchids and made a great quantity of money—£100 from Bouch, £25 from Max, £150 from Caillard. I was proud but then beaten with fatigue and despair as I read an evening paper proclaiming Wilson’s impossible note and making it only possible for the Germans to die hard and honourably, where the alternative is the same with dishonour. British killed from today I consider murdered, and the overthrow lengthened out for three years. Then, worse, I read of the Third Army’s part in yesterday’s attacks and a famous Division’s fine work, and I turned sick, remaining so till now, when returning from Lady Ridley’s bud ball next door, partially calmed by darling Ivo, I find a letter which liberates my soul from hell. It announces my heaven. Write news of it every day. I don’t want you to walk in on me unprepared. I must lose no flavour of anticipation. Ivo thinks he is going to France next week and speaks of it with an illumined King Arthur expression.
Your mother was so sweet and came with £1 to the Red Cross shop. I flung her in some partridges. She’s so excited.
Arlington Street
October 27
This pneumonia plague is ferocious. Lovely Pamela Greer, née Fitzgerald, dead in three days and my poor Alan pretty bad, though so far not pneumonia. I have at last had a real qualm of perhaps being struck (since there are seven cases in the house).
I am very perturbed about Alan, seeing what a frail subject he is and already breathless with asthma. Life is a procession of differently clothed fears led by the greatest, that is always shadowing you, but on you there is a shaft of light too, and when as now sometimes it illumines you out of the shadow, these conditions thrust out all the minor terrors crowding round me.
Arlington Street
October 28
I had looked forward greatly to today, for it was to carry Mother off to Beaudesert, and without anticipating anything illicit, by this remove made possible, I knew that I should walk with a freer step and read over my fire with more delicious calm. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that the poor darling got into the railway carriage, packed and tucked herself into the evening papers (Austria’s peace to preoccupy her) and tea and solitude, and on trying her temperature and finding it normal (she considers it feverish for her) bundled home again and found me, I’m thankful to say, poring over my army forms.
B.E.F.
October 28
They have just come and told me that I go on leave on the 1st. It comes from the Adjutant and is probably true though it sounds too good to be. I will send you every breath of rumour of news about it every hour, but if I am lucky I may outspeed my letters.
The Montagus opened their house in Norfolk for Duff’s leave, and it was there that we heard of the Kaiser’s abdication. Had Duff still been in France I would have exulted with the rest, but with him beside me and safe the Peace did not give me a compensating relief. After so much bitter loss it was unnatural to be jubilant. The dead were in our minds to the exclusion of the survivors. Back in London, the Armistice so prayed-for seemed a day of mourning. Duff went to bed with the Black Death—influenza that was to kill as many as had fallen in the war, while I with my mother and whatever dull friends could be found dined at the Ritz Hotel. I could not bear the carnival and slipped secretly away to St James’s Street to moan with Duff on his fever bed, and from there to push my way disconsolately through the happy crowds to a house of sorrow where I remained till next day. The battle was over. Its toll made triumph heavy-hearted. My own battle had now to be fought. With Duff recovered and immediately demobilised by the Foreign Office, our resolve to marry could have no obstacle but one.
* All my letters in this chapter are headed simply with an address, and Duff’s with B.E.F. They were all written in 1918.
† Hamlet, act
ii, scene 2.
‡ The Montagus’ house in Norfolk.
§ Treasury notes.
¶ An adaptation of Horace, Odes, i, 24, line 10.
|| “Wait and See.”
** Two Gentlemen of Verona, act iii, scene 1.
†† Coventry Patmore: A Farewell.
‡‡ Arras. See Hamlet, act iii, scene 4.
§§ Lord Ribblesdale.
¶¶ A Storyteller’s Holiday (1918).
|||| A Midsummer-night’s Dream, act v, scene 1.
*** India in Transition by the Aga Khan (1918).
††† The Chevalier De Boufflers: a Romance of the French Revolution by Nesta H. Webster (1916).
‡‡‡ General Sir John Cowans, then Quartermaster-General.
§§§ This has disappeared. Duff also wrote a diary account of the battle.
¶¶¶ Colonel Sir Henry Streatfeild was the Colonel commanding the Grenadier Guards 1914–19.
|||||| By George Meredith.
**** Shakespeare: Sonnet lxvi.
†††† The S.S. Leinster, a passenger ship on her way from Dublin to Holyhead was sunk by a German submarine on the 10 October 1918.
‡‡‡‡ Ivo Grenfell, Lord Desborough’s youngest son. His two elder brothers had both been killed.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Happy Altar
IT seems strange looking back that Duff, the love of my life, my cause, should ever have spelt anathema to my mother. He had never failed in anything he had undertaken, he had won glory in the war, he was popular with his generation and most of his elders. He was cultured and could quote her two favourite poets, Meredith and Browning, ad infinitum. Some scales had dimmed her dreamy blue eyes that were not to fall from them for many a day.
True, he had no money and was only a Foreign Office clerk, but with his pay of £300 a year and my allowance of the same amount and his mother’s allowance of £600 (which she could ill afford) it was not too black a prospect. Had he been taller, more like Apollo, had he been more flattering towards her, more winning in his ways and generally more debonair, could we both have been more demonstrative and openly proud of our attachment, the ordeal might have been avoided. But his position irked him and I discouraged him from coming to Arlington Street.
Because of my inborn devotion to my mother I found myself shamefully afraid to tell her of our irrevocable resolve. One night, tired of my cowardly procrastination, Viola Parsons offered to come to Arlington Street and tell her what I found impossible to tell.
The telling was more terrible than we had feared. My mother, who should have been expectant, was incredulous. She could not accept the razing of her castle in the air. I could hear her screams and moans and a night nurse being called from the hospital below with sedatives to calm her. I felt a murderess and could do nothing but wait sleepless for the unhappy morning. I think both I and Duff coped with it badly. I should have told her I was desperately in love and thrown myself sobbing on her mercy. Instead some silly pride forbade me to admit that I loved Duff. She would beg me to say that I did. I could not frame the words. Could she not see for herself that it was not for his wealth or titles that I wanted him as my husband? For what then but love?
Duff talked to my mother at an Albert Hall Victory Ball, of all unlikely places, probably dressed in motley, and was advised to request an interview with my father. In his diary Duff wrote:
At twelve o’clock I went to see the Duke. There was something grotesquely old-fashioned about the solemn interview with the heavy father. He received me very civilly, listened to all that I had to say, complimented me on the way I had said it, added that he had always liked me, and concluded by saying that he could not possibly allow the marriage and preferred not to discuss it. I asked him if he could give me any reason for his attitude and he refused to. I asked, was it money? He practically said it was not. I asked whether he had heard anything against me. He said he had heard nothing. I tried to make him see the silly unreasonableness of his attitude and hinted that it could only drive one to take the law into one’s own hands, but he would say nothing except “I am sorry I can say no more.” We were both very polite and parted with every civility.
I was rebelliously intolerant of this intransigence and suggested elopement. Duff counselled patience and persuasion. Had they but seen into the future, seen this despised hero housing me in the gilded rooms of the Admiralty, sailing the seas in H.M.S. Enchantress and laying me to sleep in Pauline Borghese’s eagle-crowned bed in our Paris Embassy, how happy and proud they would have been.
My sister Letty was my ally, so up to a point were my brother and my uncle Charlie Lindsay. The friends of course were encouraging, though some there were who thought Duff had chosen unwisely. After many unhappy bedside talks with my mother I from pity agreed to abandon the thought of marriage for six months. Separation was not insisted upon, so the old life before Duff’s war began again. The hospital was still full of wounded and 88 St James’s Street again a refuge from tribulation. On the top floor, looking down Pall Mall, we would meet and read and plan our future life. It might have been a happy phase had I not felt that the cruel wound inflicted on my mother must not be allowed to heal. Every month I had to probe and turn the knife and plunge her back into her grief. I did it with the greatest reluctance, for truth to tell I loved her again with almost all my heart.
By March, the six months passed, she begged for another delay. To this unkind move I played an ace that always wins. I agreed in cold sorrow to have a winter wedding, honeymoon in the rain, be wretched in the interim and only hope that one of us did not die before the marriage day and send remorse to break her peace for ever. Then came a complete reversal of the tussle, when I was insisting on a November wedding while my mother begged for one in June.
In April Duff again asked my father for my hand and again let him tell of both our interviews:
April 30. In the evening Diana had her interview with her father. I met her afterwards at the Ritz. They have given in completely and are willing for us to be married as soon as we wish. It seems too wonderful, and hard to realise. The Duke, she says, was perfect and gave away the whole case by saying to her after the interview, which lasted only about ten minutes, “Don’t go upstairs for a little. I don’t want your mother to think I gave in at once.”
May 1. At 6.30 I went to see the Duke, fortified with whisky but feeling almost as nervous as on the occasion of our last interview. He was extremely charming, could not possibly have been nicer or made it easier. He said a word or two about settlements…. Our interview only lasted about twenty minutes, for half of which he succeeded in talking about other things such as the growth of Bolshevism and the future of the Territorials.
My five weeks of engagement were a little sad. My father chose June 2 for the wedding. He wanted to get away for Whitsuntide before the trains were too crowded. He was a generous father and meant me to have a fine trousseau. Dresses, hats, coats and linen were bought, but a little in the tone of “The life you have chosen needs durable unfrivolous clothes.” Except from the friends there was little rejoicing, and my own spirits suffered from feeling myself to blame and from the Cassandra predictions and warnings of troubles unforeseen—doctors, dentists, bailiffs, accouchements, debts, disease, and being “brought home on a stretcher.” (This last was to happen only too soon.) Sympathy for our inauspicious romance fired all those we knew and all our parents knew, and strangers and tradesmen, to load us with silver and gold and all it buys: fat cheques, jewels from the family, a motor from Lord Beaverbrook, furniture to fill a house and a library of books—from Maurice Baring the only copy of a specially edited anthology called A Century of Phrases and Verses. Duff’s mother gave me her mother’s gold-and-turquoise dressing-case that must surely have belonged to La Dame aux Camélias. Venetia sent frilled sheets and monogrammed linen that have lasted till now, and there was gold plate and silver, clocks and chandeliers, a bigger though not better gilt dressing-case from Lord Wimborne, a picture of Duff by La
very and one of me by Shannon and another by McEvoy, statuettes by Frampton, Mackennal and Reid Dick, a Gainsborough drawing, cabinets and carpets and mirrors, cellars of wine, objets de vertu. There was hardly room in the big house to show what was enough to establish us for years to come in comfort, luxury and beauty. But my mother’s face was sad.
It was in June, as I had always hoped it would be, that my father drove me to St Margaret’s. Too early dressed in my “state” of palest gold lamé covered with a rare lace of lilies, on my head a crown of seed-pearl orange-blossom, in my hand a rose that Ellen Terry herself had brought me in the morning, I sat in the familiar morning-room, immobilised beneath a vast tulle veil like a clock beneath its globe of glass. At last the hour struck. Old Nixon packed us into the car saying “You’ll be late” as he had said to every guest leaving Belvoir for the train, and I left my dear long-sheltering home with a high heart. There were wedding crowds surging as there are today in Parliament Square, and the wedding bells were crashing, and fatherly mounted police were imperceptibly controlling the jolly riot, but my father was rattled as the car got held up by smiling multitudes of well-wishers. Impatiently he thrust his tall body and top-hatted, eyeglassed head through the window protesting “What’s all this about? We must get on. What in the name of heaven is it all about?” Beneath the church porch a man rushed up, for all the world like the soothsayer Artemidorus on the Ides of March. “Read this,” he said menacingly, presenting me with a missive. My heart stopped. I stayed to read. It was only some fan’s good wishes. My two sisters’ children were waiting to carry my train, three angels in misty gold and white. The organ pealed and pealed again with the Meistersinger march as we passed through the wide west door where Viola and Alan’s three children were scattering roses. St Margaret’s bells were ringing as we left the happy altar to rejoicings at home and to all the fulfilment of our honeymoon. My mother was smiling. That day had no shadow. As I drove away among showering rose-petals I knew that I need never lie again.