Louisa Young - A Great Task of Happiness - The Life of Kathleen Scott

There were admirers, and admirees. In November 1901 she went to a play of Sherlock Holmes. She noted that the lead, William Gillette, was forty-five, and ‘oh so gorgeous, could love him heaps and heaps’. On December 5 she ‘met the Russian Goldarbeiter in a bus. Clever of him to contrive to make such a meeting romantic.’ One Watts had no such trouble at the Slade ball that Christmas: they danced many times and he proposed to her ‘with great élan’. ‘Percy’ merited only the comment ‘well I wonder’. Cousin Hener the pianist was reduced to ‘oh the silly ass of a child’.

Someone by the name of Wilfred, however, caused her slightly more grief.

Oct 3: Hideous jealousy. She’s not as fair I know, nor is her intellect to be compared. Had I modelled the statuette I would not have been so far inferior. It’s not severe enough to be unrequited love and thus an experience, simply irritating. Still it has the virtue of being the only thing so far that has occurred, and it has occurred in most lives that have been lived, and tis best to know and feel—it’s really only a pity that it isn’t more.

She was too proud, and too strict with herself, to allow much in the way of girlish moonings. Besides, as Herbert Spencer said and Kathleen copied down in her notebook: ‘Every pleasure increases vitality, every pain decreases vitality.’ Suffering was never her idea of a good time, and this is the only expression of jealousy of another female in all her diaries.

In August 1901 she went to Germany with her sister Presh. ‘Every prospect pleases, only man is vile,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Here alas there are women too, they are worse.’ Not Presh, of course. Kathleen was very fond of Presh. This is typical of her ‘dislike of women’ throughout her life: she would claim to dislike all women heartily, and yet there always seemed to be a couple present whom she liked very well.

For Christmas that year she went to the Hervey Bruces at their English pile, Clifton, near Nottingham. Sir Hervey’s late wife had been Marianne Clifton, whose family had lived there since Domesday, and the house included a renaissance ‘pages’ hall’, redecorated with Dutch painted panels in honour of a visit by Charles I; an octagonal Georgian hall; a Chinese drawing room; a scaled-down copy of the Crystal Palace as conservatory; two dozen bedrooms and no bathrooms, peacocks, bestatued balustrades and seven terraces. ‘Uneventful, physically and mentally,’ Kathleen wrote, which was about as damning as it could be. The only high spot was on 28 December when someone was overheard to say: ‘Heavens, child, be careful not to marry a Bruce, they are dreadful people with scarcely a redeeming virtue.’ Kathleen rather agreed. It was time to get away from all these Bruces.

‘I wish it were correct to live all alone,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘It’s far the best form of existence.’ It was the sort of thing that you could do in … oh, Paris, say.

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