Young, later Lord Kennet), Kathleen claimed ignorance:
I thought this great fun and most exciting. I had no notion of the purpose of the firearms, nor why they should be sent thus. One day when the young man came round to my studio with a couple of suitcases full of I knew not what, saying that the police were going to search his rooms, I very gaily said, ‘Rather, leave them here. Stuff them out of sight somewhere.’ Later these young men introduced me to a middle-aged Englishman who, they told me, shared my enthusiasm for the Greek dramatists and philosophers. He was a prim little man, always neatly and conventionally dressed, but he seemed even poorer than me and I therefore took to making an evening meal at home and letting him share it, in return for which hospitality he would read the Greeks aloud to me. I knew little, indeed nothing, about him, so I was not in the least ruffled to hear that a bomb had been thrown at the King of Spain in a Paris street and that the Englishman had been arrested as the maker of this murderous bomb. All my standards of right and wrong had suffered such an upheaval since I left England that this seemed no queerer than many other things. Perhaps this sort of thing was quite usual, like having lots of mistresses and yet being quite nice. Perhaps it was only a matter of getting used to it. Still it was rather a ruffling affair to get a letter from the courts of justice to ask me to appear at the trial, as I was understood to be one of the accused’s few friends in Paris. The trial lasted several days. I crept off each morning, returning in the evening. I dared tell no one what I was up to. I was terrified that my name would get into an English paper, and I imagined aunts and uncles toying with the word anarchist. I hadn’t the foggiest notion what the word meant. But it made me feel uncomfortable.
This sounds to modern ears almost unbearably naive, but Kathleen was not political, not a newspaper reader. Her world was apart from such things, and she was dangerously cavalier about it all. ‘I was young enough not to have discerned the difference between knowledge and wisdom,’ she admitted later, ‘and nearly got myself into very hot water.’ As it was, all she had to do was stand up in court and say yes, she knew the accused, that he visited her studio and read Sophocles. Laughter in court. Did he ever talk about the King of England? Oh dear no. What did he talk about? Socrates. More laughter in court, and it was all over.
Her other adventure with the mysterious German Jew was a trip to the hotel where Oscar Wilde had died. Kathleen had read some Wilde, and found it ‘very amusing’. She still didn’t know what it was that he had done. Rosslyn had known Wilde’s lover Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, at Oxford (he had once appeared on the football pitch wearing a wreath of flowers and patent leather shoes) and had met Oscar Wilde, but he had not enlightened his little sister. Nigel Playfair told a story of how in 1894, when Kathleen had been visiting Rosslyn at Oxford, a clergyman had been hideously embarrassed when she, aged sixteen, had asked whom Holman Hunt had married. ‘My dear fellow,’ said the clergyman later, out of her earshot, ‘I could hardly tell a young lady that Holman Hunt had married his deceased wife’s sister!’ ‘Deceased wife’s sister’ became a joke term among them for something unmentionable. Times had changed and she was in very different company, but homosexuality still dared not speak its name.
The German talked about Wilde with awed voice as about a prophet or a martyr. I, amiable and acquiescent, said I would love to come down with him to the little place, where he was acquainted with the hotelkeeper. After a few preliminary civilities we were shown a rough wooden box full of books with a coat and waistcoat on the top of it. These were Oscar Wilde’s. In the coat pocket was a hypodermic syringe and a used handkerchief. Underneath were several signed photographs, and about fifty books, many of them signed by their authors. The hotelkeeper said, if the English lady would like the contents of the box she was welcome. I hesitated, and then went through it and took a selection of half a dozen of the most interesting. Would I not like the syringe? No thank you! It would be better to throw that away.
This adventure I innocently recounted to Hofbauer, who, to my amazement, detonated in violent rage. What right had the damned German Jew even to speak of Wilde to me, and to let me rummage about with his disgusting possessions, that, it seemed, was too much. Sales gens! (Disgusting man!)
Not unreasonably, Kathleen thought that her Rabelaisian painter, with all his mistresses, might be the person to clear up the mystery. ‘Oh, ne demandes pas ça h un français’ (Oh, don’t ask that of a Frenchman), he replied, with a ‘furious gesture’, and she was none the wiser.
Kathleen was to spend the rest of her time in Paris in the studio with the roof and the mackintosh, but that is not to say that she was always there. She had already acquired a taste for ‘vagabonding’: putting some hard-boiled eggs in a bag and going off for a long walk—preferably one lasting several weeks. Given the choice between sleeping indoors or out she would take out any time, and travel and adventure were next only to sculpting as her pleasures.
Late in 1903 a new adventure, a major one, opened to her. Noel Buxton, a young and fervent English politician (later a Labour MP and Lord Noel-Buxton), a friend of Rosslyn, visited her in Paris and made her feel that her existence there was something of a waste of time. He talked to her of the troubles in Macedonia.
In the first years of the twentieth century Macedonia was under Turkish rule, and armed bands known as Komitadjis had been supporting Bulgarian nationalist priests and teachers in Slav Macedonia. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, formed in 1896 for all Macedonians ‘regardless of sex, nationality or personal beliefs’ was loosely pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turkish. On the night of 2 August 1903, 750 of these rebels took over the small town of Krusevo, fighting under the skull and crossbones, the symbol of the uprising. When the Turkish garrison fled, the red flag was raised instead and Krusevo, population 15,000, was declared a socialist republic, the first in the Balkans. The republic lasted nine days: on 11 August 15,000 Turkish soldiers, plus the Bashi Bazouks (irregulars), moved in to put a stop to it. Despite deeds of heroism, the red flag gave way to the white.
The whole uprising was suppressed within three months, and a bitter vengeance taken: according to conservative Bulgarian figures, 9,830 houses in Macedonia were burned down and 60,953 people were left homeless. Whatever the true complexity of the political situation, to the West Turkey had put itself deeply in the wrong and the Bulgarians were innocent victims. And winter was drawing in.
Buxton told Kathleen of disease and starvation, torture and cold. He told ‘how the Turks were massacring the Bulgarians, how direly they were in need of help, how good was the organization in London to collect necessities for them but how there was nobody on the spot to see to the distribution of food, money and clothes.’ He told her that ‘the plight of the people there is unspeakable. Babies are being born, quite untended, that nobody wants, and quite unprovided for; terrible cases …’
Well, to Kathleen that was it. Babies, untended, unprovided for, unwanted? She would tend and provide for them. She wanted them. ‘My heart beating loudly against my chest, I said, “Couldn’t I go?” And so it came about that the very next day my work was again discarded, the key turned in the studio door, and off I went to England to see the austere lady who was looking for an assistant to undertake on-the-spot relief.’
Lady Thompson was ‘more than twice my age, and very sad’—her husband had dropped dead a year before. She engaged Kathleen ‘as if she were engaging a kitchen maid’, and on 4 December they were on their way to Salonica, Kathleen teaching herself Turkish and writing to Rosslyn: ‘Lady Thompson is fagged out… but I could face a massacring Turk with a cheerful rebuff.’
Dec 12: Set off about daybreak with Mr. Hazkell, the American missionary, to Monastir. All the way from Uskub the line was guarded by poor miserable-looking soldiers in tents surrounded by mud and water, they had been there some eight or nine months. Trains are not to run at night, as frequent attempts are made to blow them up. The day before we crossed the frontier 2 Servians (sic) being searched in the customs were found to be stuffed with dynamite. There is much smallpox in various districts. Dined excellently in a corner of the bar room at the Hotel Constantinople, where quantities of Turks were smoking, playing billiards and backgammon, and drinking. A Mussulman, mark you, may not drink wine, but he may drink spirits, for that was not mentioned in the letter of the law, not then being known. Much nonsense is talked of the dirt of these places. The cabinet is truly not pleasant but in no way worse