Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Brooke’s dread of being alone had developed into yet another of his many phobias, as he admitted to James on 10 July in a letter containing a momentous confession. He described being visited by Daphne, least inspiring of the Olivier sisters, and then having the ‘horror’ of an evening and night in solitary misery. After supper, unable to face this grisly prospect, he changed into his best grey suit and bicycled off to see his elderly Cambridge mentor, A. C. Benson. Finding he was out, he wheeled round, in increasing desperation, to see if any of his other donnish friends were about. After failing to locate a brace of philosophers – Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore – and another pair of friends, he finally happened on a distant acquaintance, the historian E. A. Benians, who had grim tidings to tell: Brooke’s friend and former lover, Denham Russell-Smith, had died of prolonged blood-poisoning that very morning. Stricken, he rushed home and dashed off his detailed description to James of his seduction of Denham at the Orchard. His matter-of-fact tone belies a grief that would have been sharper had his senses not been dulled by months of largely self-inflicted suffering and the sedatives he was taking to alleviate his dumb misery.

  James was suitably sympathetic, offering to visit Brooke to share his sorrow, and hinting, none too subtly, that he would still like to take Denham’s place in Brooke’s Grantchester bed. Alone in the Old Vicarage, Brooke continued to brood over his loss, fancying that Denham had joined the long list of Grantchester spectres: ‘I may see his ghost – I thought there was something last night. It’s the only one I’m not afraid of.’ There was little else to distract him from returning to his malevolent obsessions. While expressing perfunctory concern for Ka, who was waiting on tenterhooks in the country for him to decide on the future of their ill-starred relationship, he nevertheless told James: ‘I suppose she’ll soon go to hell.’ His cold rage against Lytton showed no sign of abating. Accepting an invitation for a Scottish holiday with James, he cautioned: ‘Uncle Trevor’s cottage sounds almost too exciting. I suppose there’s no danger of your brother Lytton being in it or anywhere near. Because I shan’t come if there is.’

  His ‘bloody state’ of gloom was increased by a medical puzzle: ‘When I pumpship it’s bright green. What does that portend?’ A much more serious portent for his future then green urine came in a letter from Noel: ‘You mustn’t take on so about our having hooked in Hugh. We had to have him.’ This refers to Brooke’s having voiced jealous worries about rival suitors paying court to the Oliviers – James Strachey and Virginia’s cousin Adrian Stephen to Noel, and Hugh Popham to Bryn. Noel continued: ‘Margery was determined. She exclaimed vehemently the other day “I do wish Bryn wd marry Hugh!” & then there was no diverting her, but it must be carried through … He’s just gone off, with Bryn accompanying him to the station, and one of my cigars to cheer him in the train. He’s been very agreeable …’ Just how agreeable, Brooke was shortly to discover.

  During the course of his stay at Limpsfield Chart, Hugh Popham proposed to Bryn and was accepted. Bryn, having just passed her twenty-fifth birthday, had decided it was time to get married and settled on Hugh, who had begun a lifelong career at the British Museum, as a suitably stable suitor. She had seen far too much of Brooke at close quarters to have any illusions about his qualities as a prospective husband and father. However, she kept her engagement strictly secret from him, well knowing the likely effect on his fragile mental and emotional state, and only when he backed her into a corner did she disclose the news. For the time being, blissfully unaware, Brooke continued his archly suggestive postal flirtation with her, and began to plan a joint summer holiday together:

  Allerschönste [loveliest one], I’m so excited about August 4–11. I thought about sailing again, & get exciteder & exciteder.– I have had hundreds of proposals for those dates, – lots of other things to do —, as you said. But couldn’t we do something remarkable — but it must include getting into the water a lot. (Lord! It’s so hot!) … won’t you explore the Ouse in a yawl? – What is a yawl? Or go to Ostend & give concerts on the beach or fly (in the air) … Do think of a thousand things to do in August, please – Perhaps I’ll be real then – at last – instead of this palsied simulacrum – even now, about once every forty eight hours, for five minutes, I feel I could do everything in the world …

  In reality, Brooke’s chief activity was solitary, as he had daringly hinted to Bryn: ‘I daren’t tell you how I do occupy myself, you’d be shocked.’

  But not as shocked as Brooke would be to learn that dull old plodding Hugh had pipped him to the post and carried off the prize. It was a classic case of the tortoise and the hare, and one more massive blow to his battered self-esteem. The blow fell at Everleigh, a remote village on the edge of Salisbury Plain, where Maynard Keynes had organized a rolling party for his friends at the end of July and beginning of August. The surrounding open downland appealed to the rising economist because he could indulge his new hobby of horse riding. He rented the village inn, the Crown Hotel, a hostelry with a private garden. The idea was for Maynard’s friends to join him in relays in riding out on four hired nags, followed in the evenings by reading and parlour games.

  The guests included Brooke – partly invited for charity in Maynard’s capacity as the presiding deity of the Apostles, since he and Brooke were never really close – Geoffrey Keynes, Justin Brooke, James Strachey (though not Lytton, who was, Brooke would be grimly pleased to hear, enduring the horrors of a rainswept Scottish holiday in the company of a sick and irritable Henry Lamb) – and three Oliviers – Daphne, Bryn and Noel. The trinity was balanced by a trio of gay Apostles – Gerald Shove, Gordon Luce, a recently elected handsome young lover of Maynard’s, and Frankie Birrell.

  Maynard was grumpy at the intrusion of women into what would otherwise have been a cosily exclusive Apostolic occasion: ‘I don’t much care for the atmosphere these women breed,’ he grumbled to his long-time lover Duncan Grant; but he put up with it with sufficient grace, even flirting with Bryn while riding, and consenting to read Jane Austen’s Emma to his guests. As master of ceremonies, Maynard observed the antics of his most difficult guest with a somewhat jaundiced eye: ‘Noel is very nice and Daphne very innocent,’ he told Duncan. ‘But Bryn is too stupid – and I begin to take an active dislike to her. Out of the window I see Rupert making love to her – throwing a tiny ball in her face, taking her hand, sitting at her feet, gazing at her eyes. Oh these womanisers. How on earth and what for can he do it?’

  In fact, there was a clear reason beyond the obvious for Brooke’s open flirting with Bryn – Noel was at Everleigh too, and he hoped to rekindle her interest in him by a display of outrageous attention-seeking with her more beautiful sister. In fact he was burning his bridges – annoyed at his behaviour, Noel left the party early, while Bryn, who had accepted his invitation to go boating, revealed that the companion she had asked along as chaperone was none other than – Hugh Popham. Brooke, nettled by the news, voiced vehement protests; he had discouraged ‘Goldie’ Dickinson, who had wanted to come along as chaperone, only to find him replaced by a rival for Bryn’s hand. In addition, his odd notion that women were too frail to be allowed out on their own was aroused by Bryn’s plan to leave Everleigh on foot and walk across country to Poole Harbour to pick up their boat. The Victorian lurking beneath the superficial veneer of a modern man in Brooke was outraged: what was quite natural to a free spirit like Bryn was to him an unseemly and dangerous provocation.

  The pair wore each other out in a day-long argument over her plans – Bryn lamely tried to justify Hugh’s presence on their trip on the River Beaulieu on the slightly suspect grounds that he knew how to handle boats. Brooke knew better: Hugh had in fact visited him in Grantchester only the previous week, and had confided that he had broken off a love affair with Gerald Shove’s mother. The man was clearly another Henry Lamb – a practised seducer who could carry off Bryn as soon as look at her. Cornered, Bryn was at last compelled to admit the awful truth. ‘I found it almost necessary to gi
ve him some explanation of you and bless me if I didn’t make a comprehensive statement about my feelings and intentions such as would have amazed you to hear!’ she told Hugh. ‘So there’s another peg to this queer web one has drawn over oneself … I’m sorry about Rupert, but he knows his own bloody character best, I suppose.’

  Appalled, Brooke collapsed. This was nothing less than a reprise, albeit in a minor key, of the horror of Lulworth. Yet again a woman with whose affections he had carelessly toyed had been won by a rival he considered inferior in every way. His reaction, too, was the same: he fled to his bed and refused to stir, declining even to bid Bryn goodbye when she left the next day. Steeped in misery in his room that evening, Monday 29 July, he managed to pick up his pen: ‘Dearest Bryn,’ he began, ‘I’ve been too much of a hopeless wreck all day to finish talking to you. I’d further things to say, too – but one can’t say such things if one’s a broken horror …’

  At this point his friends, in a well-meaning attempt to revive him, got Brooke to come down to dinner, which was followed by a long poker game. At 1 a.m. he resumed: ‘Now I’m going to take a lot of bromide, & I hope I shall sleep … I wish I’d said goodbye to you. God only knows if I shall see you again. I was too dead. I’ve not felt or heard or seen all day. I’m in a mist; going mad – But that’s not what I’m writing about. If you like you may give Hugh my love: if you can do it prettily.’

  Brooke had not lost hope that his wheedling charm could win Bryn back from the clutches of her fiancé: ‘I do so wish I could see you again, before all closes down – that is, if I don’t relapse into bed, & all that long desperate disease again.’ Using heavy emotional blackmail, he begged Bryn to join him in Scotland after her sailing trip with Hugh: ‘But that’s if I’m a real person, not a wreck.’ Having been invited to stay by both James and Gilbert Murray, a sympathetic Cambridge don, Brooke told Bryn that it was only her he wanted to be with, adding: ‘We might have worked out something big – just in time, before life takes you too far in.’ He closed with a typical self-pitying bleat: ‘Oh, God; you can’t think how dead I am & wretched. Forgive & relinquish this corpse.’ But following this heavy hint that he was once again considering suicide – from which, he insisted, Bryn had narrowly rescued him in April at Bank – Brooke spoiled the effect of his theatrical climax with a bathetic curtain-call: ‘Don’t perhaps go too far out of reach. I shall write again, if ever I get back to sanity. Oh yes, Will you, or Margery, send my great BOOTS & my clothes brush here now?’ A Hamlet bent on self-destruction does not normally, Brooke should have known, worry overmuch about footwear and specks on his garments.

  He was now in a state of near-panic. He had apparently lost in one fell swoop both possible escape routes out of his crisis. Bryn was, as far as he knew, on a boat with Hugh – in fact, failing to find a maritime chaperone, they had gone rock climbing in north Wales with other friends – while Noel, accompanied by Daphne and a cousin of Ka’s, Ursula Cox, had decamped to Switzerland. Pathetically, that same night he wrote to her attempting to retrieve something from the wreckage: ‘Oh Noel if you knew the sick dread with which I face tonight – that bed & those dragging hours – And the pointlessness of tomorrow, the horror that it might just as well be this evening, or Wednesday, for all the pleasure, or relief from pain, I get out of it. The procession of hopeless hours – That’s what’s so difficult to face;– that’s why one wants to kill oneself.’

  He attempted to revive her affection by sentimentally calling up the best moments in their relationship:

  Oh, Noel, Noel, Noel, my dearest; think! Remember all that has been! It’s more than four years since that evening in Ben Keeling’s rooms, & the days on the river – when we were so swiftly in love. Remember those days on the river; and the little camp at Penshurst, next year, – moments then; & Klosters; and the Beaulieu camp; & one evening by that great elm clump at Grantchester; & bathing in early morning by Oxford; & the heights above Clifford’s Bridge camp; & a thousand times when we’ve gone hand in hand – as no other two people could; – & twice this year I felt your tears, Noel’s tears, on my hand. There are such things, such things that bind us. Half what you have grown to be, is my making: half of what I am is yours. It’s in the meeting of our hands, & lips, child. You must know it – I cannot live without you. I cannot indeed. You can make anything of me – For you I’ll do anything, or make myself anything – anything in the world … You must see what we are, child – I cannot live without you. – But remember, I’m not only in love with you; I’m very fond of you – Goodnight child – in the name of our love Rupert.

  In spite of this plea, sounding so passionately sincere, Brooke was continuing to investigate other escape routes. He had heard that Elisabeth van Rysselberghe was to visit England again, and wrote to her in hope of arranging a meeting: ‘If I can’t give you the love you want,’ he told her, ‘I can give you what love and sympathy and pity and everything else I have. And I have a lot … I’ve had a lot of pain, infinite pain – I know what it’s all like …’ But, he concluded honestly enough: ‘I’m not worth your loving, in any way.’

  Meanwhile there was one more painful duty to perform. At long last he had to face Ka in person. More than a month had passed since their separation in Germany. Ka had spent the time in the Sussex countryside, often in tears, waiting for Brooke’s decision on their future. As for herself, she told Frances Cornford, chief confidante to them both: ‘I love Rupert – I’m quite clear – and I’m waiting quietly now and getting as strong as I possibly can. To see if he has strength and love enough to heal himself and love me again.’

  It seemed that she had taken Brooke’s furious accusations to heart, for she was now accepting most of the responsibility for the breakdown of their affair:

  I have broken and hurt and maimed him – I see. O my dear – apart from me – it was wicked, it was awful to hurt so lovely a thing and so lovely a person. If I’ve destroyed love and strength in him (not for me particularly – but for everyone) there is no atonement and no help – I feel. I’m being very quiet – and I don’t want to bother him now at all. He knows what it is and what there is to decide.

  At last the shock of Bryn’s desertion jolted Brooke to a decision. He wrote to Ka, who was staying with two aunts at the Swan Hotel in the small Gloucestershire town of Bibury before she too joined the Everleigh party – tactfully after his departure. They should meet alone, Brooke said, and work out their future together – or rather, he had decided, their future apart. On the eve of the meeting, 1 August, he wrote again to Noel from Everleigh:

  O child, I’m so miserable. Tomorrow Justin (who has his car here) is going to drive me to Ka’s. I’m going to walk out, lunch somewhere with her; talk; & take a train on to Rugby. You see, it’s no good putting it off. One can’t go on waiting & waiting. It’s a horrible strain on her. We decided, when she left Berlin, to wait a month or two, till we – especially I – were better & healthy & sane, & then see – see if I loved her, if we should marry. Well it’s no good going on. I don’t & can’t love her. Things have begun to come back into that numb dank place that is the abode of my feelings: but not love for her. I couldn’t ever live with her, I know – from experience even. I should go mad, or kill her, in a few months.

  Finally, he assured Noel: ‘I love someone else.’

  Brooke felt huge guilt about the pain he was about to inflict on Ka, but his resentment of the pain he believed her to have put him through still rankled:

  You see child – Noel – there’s been so much between Ka & me. We’ve been so close to one another, naked to each other in our good parts & bad. She knows me better than anyone in the world, – better than you let yourself know me – than you care to know me. And we’ve given each other great love & infinite pain – and that’s a terrible, unbreakable bond. And I’ve had her.

  This terse admission of their sexual intimacy conveys the dual message that their lovemaking had formed a deep and unshakeable tie, and yet it had also rendered a relat
ionship – let alone marriage – impossible. Ka was indelibly besmirched:

  It’s agony, agony, tearing out part of one’s life like that – You see, I have an ocean of love & pity for her … I don’t hate & despise her – By God, I’m infinitely far from it. She did once what I, you know, thought & think a mixture of a filthy ghastly mistake & an evil crime. I’ve ‘forgiven’ that ages ago … I’d give anything to do Ka good. Only … she killed somethings [sic] in me. I can’t love her, or marry her …

  At the same moment as he definitively washed his hands of the defiling Ka, Brooke was beseeching Noel for another chance: ‘Noel, Noel, there’s love between you & me, & you’ve given me such kindness & such sympathy – in your own Noel way – I’m wanting your presence so much – I’m leaning on you, at this moment, – stretching towards you … I do suck help from you, child; your hands & face, & mind.’ But Noel was harder than Ka – no cushion she, still less a bottomless well of love from which Brooke could draw endless buckets of love and sympathy. Her oasis had dried up long ago.

  On the morning of the dreaded day, Brooke found the time to scribble a hasty note in pencil to Bryn, thanking her for having safely sent on his boots and brush. He added silkily: ‘Your presence is very lovely & comforting to me … and you’ve been very good to me. I’m apparently an ungrateful beast – I must see you again, once more – with love Rupert.’ In a postscript he added: ‘This is merely saying “do not entirely let me slip” – I’ve secrets to tell you.’