by Diana Cooper
So I went back to England to the pretty Gower Street house, with more dollars in hand for new curtains and for Rex Whistler (of his generation my most loved) to paint us trompe-l’œil on the wall. The same delightful life continued, always improving, with plenty of work and play, outings and country Sundays. In spite of this liberty The Miracle was my liege lord, and I followed where it led me, faithfully and willingly.
It led me in 1927 to Dortmund in Germany to a gigantic exhibition-hall that dwarfed Olympia. Rosamond Pinchot rallied loyally. The Professor himself was directing it. So big was the hall that the Nun and the crowds used motor-cars in the outer corridors to arrive at the several entrances. Running the length of this huge cathedral at the dress rehearsal, Rosamond sprained her ankle. Consternation! No understudies, no written part! For the first night her foot was bound and injected, and somehow she limped her way gracefully enough through the exacting part, made doubly exhausting by the ground that must be covered, but it was clear at the end that she would be out of the cast for the week’s run. There was no one but me to fill the bill. I must take both parts simultaneously. Some girl must be stuck into the niche while I first mimed, then danced, then rampaged round the aisles in an hysterical desire to batter my way out of the prison-church. When the Knight appeared and carried me away to pomps and vanities, the sudden and total darkness allowed me to slip into the niche, panting and trembling from exertion, and to assume with what calm I could the slow-motion of the statue’s gradual incarnation. In the second act of six episodes the unfortunate Nun made quick changes in the motor that carried her through different entrances to meet Love, Abduction, Rape, Satanism, Revolution, Crucifixion, Prostitution and Childbirth, while through this pandemonium the Devil stalked and Death danced. In the third act, once more the serene Madonna, I regained the holy niche, returned to stone and, as the light darkened, my place was taken by the static understudy while I, derelict and broken in spirit, crawled back to Mother Church clutching my dying baby. It was a tour de force and one that cost me dear in health. At every performance, before going on and after it was over, a doctor would inject me with a glassful of camphor. It made a lump that could be seen through my clinging habit. I played the two parts twice a day. My legs got ill and cramped with running, and I had to be carried into my hotel.
Maurice Baring came to the play, and Henry Bernstein and a few others who could get to Germany but not to America, and I regretted that for them I could not do my best in either part, and some fond friend found Maurice Baring’s review of The Miracle cold:
I think the Major [Baring] only says fair about you as the Madonna. You know I don’t much admire The Miracle and it gives me no emotion at all. But when you come off your perch it makes me catch my breath—“Hats off, gentlemen, here’s genius.” A doe* moving gracefully on the stage may not be the noblest thing in life. All I say is that millions would give their eyes to do it well. With effortless ease you surpass them all—quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi. Sarah Bernhardt was an ugly old bitch but the terrible gift of beauty is yours. Maurice doesn’t mention that.
Reinhardt’s message was my reward:
Diana, geliebte Freundin, wunderbare seelensgute tapfere Frau, zartester nobelster Künstler, bester Kamerad, ich umarme Sie und bin Ihnen für dieses Leben verbunden. R.†
Duff met me at Annecy and we had a week’s rest that did me no good. I was worn out and fell into a low fever that kept me in bed in London, treating myself with potions and spells to enable me by May to join The Miracle in Prague, Budapest and Vienna. I went but I went ill. The whole chapter was unpropitious. I coughed until the pillar shook. I went to a doctor who would cocaine my throat before each performance, but it was no cure. I wanted to enjoy, but could not, the baroque bridges and palaces of Prague, its music and Counts and peasants. In Budapest things were no better, and there (or was it in Vienna?) a new doctor who had treated Alfonso XIII brought me my grandmother’s bronchitis-kettle. It had two compartments, one for plain and one for Vichy water. It soaked me with sizzling spittings out of its long spout and the doctor said: “Sie müssen einen Gummimantel kaufen,” so I would sit by the hour over the spout in my mackintosh being spat at. To make matters worse I had invited, in a fit of parvenu generosity, Viola and Alan Parsons, Hutchie and Mary Hutchinson and Curtis Moffat to be my guests in Vienna at Sacher’s Hotel. We were all fractious and Viola and I often in tears. We all pulled different ways, a tug o’ war on a cat o’ nine tails. I knew that they were seeing me act for the first time, and I was at my very worst. Sacher’s was all that it was painted, but with a hidden squalor and spartanism that no one had drawn. Frau Sacher, famous throughout Europe for despotic treatment of emperors and clowns, who cuffed her waiters in public for any laxity in their subservience, or for not knowing the correct Gotha appellation of the Hochgeboren, would favouritise me, bringing me bonnes bouches of foie gras or wild strawberries, with her little bulldogs yapping round her button-boots, and a cigar in her mouth. The only private bath was mine, and from all over the hotel my friends came to use it. Beds of iron, and a service of another century that caused one to wonder, did not soothe our frayed and fluffy nerves. I was glad when it was over.
With The Miracle buried (as I thought, never to be exhumed) I could return to a happy convalescence in London with Duff and my friends. They said: “What are you going to do next?” but I was not looking for drama of any sort. The stage never drew me back. I knew that The Miracle had taught me nothing. Such art as I had practised was inborn. Least of all had I learnt diction, since the play was silent. Urged by Kaetchen, I had been in New York to see Mrs Carrington, a rich lady who as a hobby tuned raucous voices into music of the spheres. She had taught John Barrymore to speak Hamlet better far than anyone I had ever heard. In London he had vaguely suggested that I should play Princess Anne to his Richard III and, probably buoyed up by this hollow hope, I asked Mrs Carrington’s help. She was willing, and we started on a system that bewildered me utterly, but with which I blindly persevered until my voice cracked temporarily and I returned to England.
There was talk of another pantomime written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and it seems that I went to America the following winter to hustle and sharpen the organisers, unnecessarily as the piece was never written, but I had got into the habit of an ocean journey once a year. I have the letters that this one brought forth—Duff’s unchanging letters of devotion and goodness and zest and remorse for petty sins. One night he made a fool of himself at a casino. I do not remember the occasion, let alone the loss, but the reformed gambler wrote like a shamefaced child:
I cannot forgive myself for my two mad nights at Cannes. I go on and on regretting and building castles based on how differently I should have behaved. I meant so firmly to do nothing of the kind and seem to have done it so insanely without giving a thought to my resolutions. I feel it humiliating and vile to you who are so good and wise about money. At thirty-eight one really ought to know better, and what makes it more maddening is that I was sure I did. My only consolation is in the theory of the even distribution of fortune. I have so much, so much—love, health, work. Money certainly matters least. This loss which has worried me more perhaps than it ought to have, and has spoilt my holiday, has made me realise more than ever, if it were possible, how much I love you and depend on you, and how in any trouble I turn to you.
Bobbety [Cranborne] and I shared a double berth coming home. Knowing that it was impossible to find out from him which he liked best and that if I insisted on his choosing he would take the one he liked least, I took the one I liked best which is the upper. Come home soon but not sooner than you want to, and know that I am utterly yours so long as this machine etc.
Impossible even to reprove, it was (I think) his swan’s flutter. My heart was Highland-Scotch and in this year, with The Miracle salary lacking, I was still trying to build a bulwark against want and the workhouse, and for ever enjoining poor Duff to “scrape and save” while I looked for opportunities.
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* A dated synonym for a female.
† Diana, beloved friend, wonderful, good, brave woman, most sensitive and noble artist, best companion, I embrace you and am grateful to you for life. R.
CHAPTER FOUR
St George and the Dragons
THERE was a child called Rosemary, daughter of the famously beautiful Duchess of Sutherland. Her father’s Stafford House gave on to Green Park as our house did, and there with our nannies we used to meet. She had lank primrose-coloured hair, a raucous voice, a laugh that quickened the sad to gaiety, a wide mouth and a general look of bedraggled apple-blossom. Her appearance never changed in her short lifetime. She and Eric Ednam married the same year as we did. They lived in great happiness in Worcestershire, blessed with three boys. Duff and I were often at Himley and, like everyone her beams lit, we loved and admired Rosemary. In January 1928 she and Eric invited us to go for a few weeks to Biskra. It was a winter heyday with laughter all the way—laughter smoking a hubble-bubble in Algiers with the very beautiful Countess Charles de Polignac and her husband, both dressed native with veil and scimitar; laughter to find impassable floods in the Sahara; less laughter (from all but Rosemary) when the miscalculating doctor decimally plugged Eric with ten times the injection dose of streptococci. (Eric had no reaction at all, and I was sorry, since he had refused my Guy’s-trained ministrations.) There was laughter too as we rode in the desert and ate on eiderdowns under palms with Clare Sheridan and sheikhs and bushagas.
When there was still a week to go in this second Garden of Allah a telegram arrived offering Duff the post of Financial Secretary to the War Office. It might, for all we knew, have become outdated, as it followed us from stage to stage in Africa, but hope was high and we packed him off cheering in the good ship Timgad while we went south to Timgad too. All was well and never too late. Sir Laming Worthington-Evans was the cheerful Secretary of State, and our boy was already on a stout conspicuous rung of the fearful ladder. Duff loved “Worthy,” who was one to delegate responsibility gladly. Duff wrote:
He would sometimes hand me a formidable file and say, “This seems to be a complicated question. I haven’t looked into it and don’t propose to do so. You can settle it as you think right.”
This must be the subordinate’s dream if he feels capable, and Duff never felt otherwise. He was always unfaltering, and I never outgrew my surprise at his self-confidence. So certain am I always of defeat for myself and those I love, that generally when Duff came home from his back bench or his Ministry I would ask: “Any bloomers?” Worthy liked Duff and was very pleased with his first speech on Army Estimates, delivered, as were all his speeches, without notes, and said that he had made a “splendid dayboo.”
We could ask no more of life. No more could my mother with her four children all happy, and her sixteen happy grandchildren. She repudiated age, disliking its perpetual obstructions to active plans and schemes. Like Bess of Hardwick, who was told that she would die when she stopped building, my mother found brick and stone rejuvenating. She had sold the majestic old house in Arlington Street for a king’s ransom and therefore had money that burnt her pocket while she hesitated whether to settle it on me or to build me a home. For her happiness and mine she built.
Mrs Fisher of Bognor had died, aged ninety, and the house, that by rights belonged to the Duke of Portland, as he had lent my mother the money to buy it (she had honestly repaid him a yearly £150), now belonged to me. It was Duff’s terrestrial paradise, and it became one of mine after some of the saved-and-scraped hoards had gone into furbishings and paint and baths and a gardener to garnish it. My mother’s foundation-stone was laid, and a wing of two rooms, larger than the others and lighted by Gothic-topped windows in character with the house, was erected. We could, with squeezing and using the lodge, house thirteen people. Now began the Sundays and holiday weeks that have left a memory of sunlight and agrément (I do not like to use French words, although this book is pretty well peppered with them) to everyone who stayed with us. Chiefly I remember Maurice Baring there, reading his new novels aloud—C and Cat’s Cradle. I was, as usual, agonised by my friends’ or Duff’s literary chefs-d’œuvre and quite incapable of fair criticism. For some reason I felt this discomfiture less about Maurice’s poems, which he loved to read, particularly one to the memory of Lord Lucas, killed in the first war, and one to his nephew, Cecil Spencer, lost at sea. I never felt it at all with Belloc, who would recite his ballads as though they were songs, and his sonnets and nonsense rhymes, and later his Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine, which he dedicated to Duff.
At Bognor on a Sunday morning I would sometimes, to please Maurice, go with him to Mass. Then, Mass over, we would buy as many little lobsters as there were people to eat them. Before lunch there was bathing, and after the Channel-shock the bag of big Bognor prawns, bought on the beach with the lobsters from the local character Billy Welfare, was produced. These we would eat on the grass, clad in bath-towels with wet hair, and drink rum (“rum for the sailor”) shaken up with real limes and sugar, and hear the sea, a blue background to the lupins and roses. After lunch there was sleep for the early birds, and bracing walks over the Downs for the lie-abeds, reading aloud, crosswords and Spectator competitions. Duff was a constant competitor and was often first or second prize-winner. The following entry, a sonnet-receipt for an excellent cocktail (later engraved on a crystal shaker), brought him a first prize:
RECIPE FOR THE MIXING OF “SUNSHINE,”
A WEST INDIAN COCKTAIL
Rum, divine daughter of the sugar cane,
Rum, staunch ally of those who sail the sea,
Jamaican rum of rarest quality!
One half of rum this goblet shall contain.
Bring Andalusian oranges from Spain,
And lemons from the groves of Sicily,
Mingle their juice (proportions two to three)
And sweeten all with Demerara grain.
Of Angosturan bitters just a hint
And, for the bold, of brandy just a spice,
A leaf or two of incense-bearing mint
And any quantity of chinking ice.
Then shake, then pour, then quaff and never stint
Till life shall seem a dream of Paradise.
It was at the end of this year of 1928 that King George V, very near to death, recovered and chose Craigweil House, Aldwick, as his place of convalescence, and Bognor was dubbed Regis, and soon afterwards the cornfields gave way to villadom.
After this disaster we would often move our Sundays to the Shell House at Goodwood, a temple-folly guarded by two stone sphinxes. We would take our lobsters and meats, fruit and wine, roses and candles, to this delightful pavilion, and there by sun or moonshine revel and sing. I can hear Olga Lynn and Jimmy Smith singing descants, and Belloc I can hear too, and Duff acting Browning’s “Light Woman” or intoning the sonnets of Shakespeare and Keats, and Maurice puling atonal Chinese scraps translated to fit the occasion. The young would crown the sphinxes with red roses and mount them on race-days, and when the candles guttered out we would go home to the garden, and at last to bed to the sound of the eternal waves.
Later, when the guests (all but Maurice) grew older, they got very out of hand and would voice their complaints loudly. The poor little house was breaking under them. There would be messages: “Tell Mr Johnston to have his bath in the less good one,” “Mr Johnston says he won’t,” or perhaps a telegram: “Arriving 6.15 won’t have room top of stairs,” or worst of all an aside to another guest, but meant for my ears: “Bedtime! I suppose I must go to Ironers” (a reflection on the mattress). Lord G. complained that there was no room for his knees in the downstairs lu, he being so very tall.
The Bognor cottage is crumbling, and few today remember gathering rosebuds and making hay there.
*
Maurice never got older or laughed less or resisted the lighted candles at any grand London ball. Almost nightly in the summer season we ate our quail and drank our champagne together, whil
e his trembling hand wrote verses on the back of menu-cards. Here are some of them:
He drank too deeply of your eyes too kind:
Small wonder that the god of love is blind.
The presage of all beauty that shall be,
The ghost of all dead beauty in the past,
Have met together in mortality:
This is incarnate beauty come at last.
Diana, wise and watchful at the feast,
I love you: you the loveliest, I the least.
The god of love, to his fair mother’s isle,
Took you to be his playmate for a while.
His mother looked, and wept, and weeping she
Resigned to you her lost supremacy.
When Beauty with the gods left Jove’s high place
She wandered homeless till she found your face.
Maurice always called me Mrs C, because once I had referred to Duff as Mr C to get a laugh, so now I have shelves of his books (everything he ever wrote) each inscribed in his shaky calligraphy “Mrs C’s collection.” Once outside the Embassy Club, some London wedding or Ascot day (for I remember him in a grey top hat), he snatched a large basket-tray full of gardenias and violets from the rich one-legged flowerman and threw the lot into my open car. The Times was twice the paper to me when Maurice was alive, for any morning the Personal Column might have a message: