30 January Kathleen was writing to Rosslyn: ‘Sorry I couldn’t write the last week or two, I was too busy striving with death. But I won! So here goes. The Turks still put every kind of difficulty in the way of every step one takes. You think of some nice little scheme to help some people with something, and down come the authorities and put a stop to it, stating no possible excuse or reason …’ Though her tone is jolly, the litany of misery continues: a child with a face ‘which was already like that of a corpse, quite without colour or any look of intelligence’; the ‘hideous, most malicious’ influenza epidemic, walls falling down and burying people. She wonders rather pathetically if perhaps Rosslyn and Nigel might ‘come and fetch me and we [might] go home by Athens a little.’
On 2 February she is in bed, but cheerful: ‘There is a funny little Turkish girl of about fifteen sticking her nose into my letter in terrified wonder that I can write. Now she has discovered Lady Thompson’s stays (for all the world walks in and out of our bedroom—our officer, the post and all). She is holding them up and shrieking for joy.’ Later in the same post she reports having heard from Brailsford that soldiers were beating up ‘our ill people on their way to our hospital. Can you imagine anything so horrible?’ Stuck in bed, she felt useless and miserable, ashamed of not having finished her work even though all the relief workers were being warned that they would soon have to pack up and leave, as the spring approached and the Komitadji started action again. The expectation of renewed fighting was universal.
By 6 February she had had three more fevers, but by the 12th she was well enough to travel to Klissoura by ‘antediluvian cacique’ and ‘ramshackle open carriage’. The most upsetting thing about the journey was the moans and groans and ‘Mon Seigneur, c’est pour vous que je souffre’ (Oh Lord, it is for you that I suffer) of the French nun with whom she was travelling, as they passed through a snowstorm. At Klissoura she reported ‘the drollest of adventures, which may not even be written in a private female notebook. But ah! I shall nevertheless not forget’, which was very annoying of her.
In Salonica she stayed a week with the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul: ‘nice, good souls, absolutely without self-control, the most arrant chatterboxes I ever knew. I haven’t had a word of religion spoken to me, and that’s just as well or I should be obliged to go away. One can’t help mocking a little sometimes at the things which are attributed to the almighty, and the absolute lack of logic in their exclamations. But here is a subject on which I could mock for pages … à quoi bon?’ (To what good?)
To get away from too much Christianity she went to a mosque:
I had taken the precaution to put myself on excellent terms with the two men who guard the mosque, having spent half an hour sitting in their garden and picking their flowers … Outside there is a fountain at which each man washes his feet, his arms to the elbow, his face and behind his ears. Then he enters barefoot, carrying however his shoes. From within are called prayers and instructions, amongst which is a supplication that the powers of the world may never agree. They stand, kneel, prostrate themselves in turn, and sometimes they place their thumbs behind their ears; finally they turn their heads slowly to one side and then the other, and then get up and go away. All move as one man, very much superior to their military drill. I am told it is an exceptional favour to be allowed to be present on such an occasion.
She was still ‘preposterously weak, and I get hot and cold all about nothing. But I can walk now, thank god!’ At the end of February she left by sea, heading for Marseilles, looking forward to home. She felt as if she’d been away six months, but in fact it was not quite three.
Kathleen boarded her steamer for France in high spirits. But the boat was small, the sea was rough, and she was the only woman passenger. Though her health had returned ‘in waves of well being’, her seasickness was so terrible that by Naples she could bear it no longer and jumped ship. She had little money, no Italian, and no acquaintance in Naples, so she fled for peace and quiet to Capri. ‘There I engaged a tiny room at the top of a small hotel, and stayed until the earth grew steady again under my feet.’
When it did she realised that she was ‘magically and unaccountably’ in Italy, and decided to go to Florence to see the art. She knew students there who lived on next to nothing. After the long terrible winter in Macedonia, spring in Florence was a joy, as her autobiography tells.
At all times convalescence is a sort of delirium, tasting life again and tasting it abundantly. A slight guilty feeling that my studio lay empty, my work undone, my painter Hofbauer, Hener and Isadora, who all rather looked to me to stir them, all neglected; and neglected the Macedonian Committee, which should have been reported to personally. All these guiltinesses perhaps enhanced the glory of the weeks that followed. I found a little art school. I found too a band of light-hearted English students, some of whom I had known in London. I found Charles Loeser, a great connoisseur of things Florentine, eager to show me, to teach me, to explain to me carefully the distinguishing features of trecento and quattrocento mouldings, to make me look beyond the Donatellos and the Michelangelos, which might otherwise have satisfied me. I found a grand young singer, Von Warlich, who would walk home along the Lung’Arno with me at night, singing so gloriously that even the crotchetiest old maid, woken in her pensione, could surely not complain. I found an entrancing dwelling on the Via dei Bardi. It consisted of one room on the fifth floor up an old solid stone stairway, one room and a terrace. The terrace hung out over the Arno with the Ponte Vecchio on the left and straight opposite a high tower, which belonged to my middle-aged friend the connoisseur. When, as often happened, we had dined together in his lovely house or in some underground cellar restaurant, there was always a solemn ritual. We would wave our candle to each other across the river before turning in. I found bathing parties, dances, revels and copious sunshine. Health came back by leaps and bounds. There were queer and ugly things in Paris. There were ugly and terrifying things in Macedonia. Here, to me at any rate, all seemed as spontaneous as a Botticelli picture.
Another friend she found was Herbert Alexander, a sun-browned, bleached-haired English painter, with whom she danced by moonlight. He told her of his explorer brother who had been ‘destroyed by natives, probably cannibals’, and invited her to watch the sunrise from Fiesole, on the hill above Florence.
It was misty, almost foggy. Not a sign of Florence was to be seen, just an ocean of clouds, gold, blue and white, with the sun shining down on it from the east. We stood shyly, transfigured with the rare, the unusual beauty. Florence was lying hidden, ‘a bosomer of clouds’. Just as that thought ran through my mind, the clouds settled a little, and the great dome of the cathedral shone out firm and clear, as though the lovely Firenze had turned in her sleep, thrown aside her white linen and bared one shining breast. The lad and I held our breath with joy and wonder.
She slept, as ever, on the terrace. Across two rooftops on the right lived Herbert and another young painter. ‘One night about two o’clock, under a low crescent moon, I woke from sleep feeling something near me. I lay absolutely still; keeping my eyelids all but closed I saw kneeling by my bed, with hands together like a medieval saint, the quiet figure of Herbert. His hair as well as his clothes looked white under the moon, and his face very still and radiant. My heart knocked, thumped, roared in my ear, but I lay deathly still, scarce breathing. So we stayed. At last, very very stilly, with an athletic movement, he slipped back on to his bare heels, and raised himself to his feet and tiptoed to the buttress of my terrace, swung himself lightly on to it, and climbed with sure-footed agility over the roofs, his lithe figure showing up now and again against the sky.’ She never told him that she had been awake.
A few days later she and Herbert set off with knapsacks and bathing costumes to vagabond in the countryside. Initially she tried to disguise herself as a boy—her hair was still short after the illness—but no matter what she put on ‘I would look like nothing but a fat German boy of about sixteen, a risible figure’, so she borrowed peasant clothes from a lace maker who lived in her building. For three weeks they wandered, walking twenty miles a day, sleeping in haylofts and caves and riverbeds, bathing in lakes, hanging their clothes to dry on bushes.
‘Getting meals in these mountain villages was always in the nature of an adventure. I knew no Italian and Herbert next to none.’ Local people fed them, and assumed that they would want meat.
When