A First Rate Tragedy Read online

  Of course, money was an important consideration. Could they actually afford to marry? At least a quarter of Scott’s modest income of some £800 a year (reduced by a half when he was between naval appointments) was spent supporting his mother. Kathleen had very little money of her own. She could make money from sculpting, which she enjoyed, but Scott was anxious that she should not commercialize her art for profit. It also wounded his pride to think that he could not keep a wife and he made calculations with all the precision of planning equipment and rations for a sledging trip. He sent Kathleen an ‘Estimate for 2 persons living in a small house in London in this year of grace’10 and it was very detailed, showing the depths of his anxiety – he allowed 10 shillings a head per week for food, and an annual expenditure of £25 for laundry, £15 for coal, £6 for stationery, papers and other necessaries and £45 for a servant. The total came out at £329 a year.

  Scott knew he should not let such considerations prevail and he took comfort from Wilson’s happy marriage, which he admired as ‘a glaring example of how happiness may be achieved without a large share of worldly gear . . .’11 However, his family’s past was against him. He tried to explain it to Kathleen: ‘Yet oh my dear, there is another side to me, born of hereditary instinct of caution and fostered by the circumstances which have made the struggle for existence an especially hard one for me. Can you understand? I review a past – a real fight – from an almost desperate position to the bare right to live as my fellows.’12 He was afraid she would think him a feeble, spineless being – her maxim was ‘Reality is in the present, not in the past or future’, and it was not in her nature to fuss and fret over what had been or might be.13

  The correspondence between the lovers shows how their thoughts and emotions ebbed and flowed. Sometimes one was downcast only to be rallied by the other. At other times both were in despair. In early January 1908 Kathleen had written ‘Dearest Con. Don’t let’s get married . . . I have always really wanted to marry for the one reason, and now that very thing seems as though it would only be an encumbrance we could scarcely cope with.’ She also touched on the more fundamental problem. ‘We’re horribly different you and I, the fact is I’ve been hideously spoilt . . . let’s abandon the idea of getting married . . .’14 Scott’s response was pensive and very honest – ‘I want to marry you very badly, but it is absurd to pretend I can do so without facing a great difficulty and risking a great deal for others as well as for myself.’15 He begged her to work with him, not against him.

  On 25 January 1908, Scott took command of HMS Essex. Worries about his relationship with Kathleen mingled with worries about assembling his own new Antarctic expedition. In March he was preoccupied with testing motor sledges in France. An engineer called Belton Hamilton had designed a motor sledge for Polar travel with financial backing from Lord Howard de Walden. The French explorer, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, had also developed a prototype and the idea was to test the two designs, together with a third invented by Michael Barne. The tests were only partly successful and there was clearly more to be done. However, of greater concern to Scott was the news which reached him while he was in Paris that Shackleton had reneged on his agreement. Unable to find a way through the pack ice to Edward VII Land he had turned back and had landed in McMurdo Sound, making his base close to Scott’s hut. According to Shackleton this had been his only option and had caused him much soul-searching. Scott saw it as a breach of an agreement and a downright dishonourable action – a view shared by Edward Wilson – and, of course, Sir Clements Markham was furious.

  Kathleen, meanwhile, continued to procrastinate. At the end of March she was writing to Scott again to break off the marriage, though adding: ‘Goodbye, dearest. I love you very very much.’16 Her brother Rosslyn thought it was strange behaviour: ‘She’s frighteningly in love with him I should think but tells me that she never writes to him without saying let’s put it off again and forget and forgive!’17 Scott continued to steady and reassure her, perhaps what she was seeking through her wild correspondence, but he was feeling desperately insecure himself. In May he wrote: ‘Darling. I don’t know what to think. Another post has come and not a word from you . . . what does it mean?’18

  Their relationship was at a critical point. Kathleen was being wooed by a former acquaintance, the young writer and lawyer Gilbert Cannan, described by Henry James in 1910 as one of the most promising young writers in England in company with D.H. Lawrence, Hugh Walpole and Compton MacKenzie. He had an attractive crooked smile and bright corn-coloured hair. He was also to spend the last thirty years of his life in a lunatic asylum suffering from delusions, one of which was that he was Captain Scott the great explorer. However, Kathleen, on the brink of stepping into an unknown world, was attracted by this reminder of her old bohemian life and she allowed him to pay court to her. In April she also allowed him to meet Scott, who was home from sea and who was disturbed and upset to find this man intruding on the scene. Cannan seems to have been contemplating a ménage à trois, hardly likely to appeal to a man like Scott, who was confused and hurt but still desperate to marry Kathleen.

  When Kathleen decided to go on a walking holiday to Italy with her cousin’s husband, outwardly at least, Scott took the news stoically saying simply ‘Write to me often, and don’t stay too long.’ She was delighted calling him ‘. . . a grand man; no self-pity, no suspicions, no querulousness, no recriminations. Perfect man!’19 She did write to him – of the freedom and irresponsibility of ‘vagabonding’ and of how precious it was to her. This struck a deep chord in Scott and he responded with some of his most revealing comments:

  Knock a few conventional shackles off me, you find as great a vagabond as you but perhaps that won’t do. I shall never fit in my round hole. The part of a machine has got to fit – yet how I hate it sometimes . . . I love the open air, the trees, the fields and the seas, the open spaces of life and thought. You are the spirit of all this to me . . . I want you to be with me when the sun shines free of fog.20

  Scott knew he was too ‘buttoned up’ and it was an appeal to Kathleen to help him break free.

  In Venice Kathleen met Isadora again and her description of the encounter prompted another agonized response. Could he ever satisfy her? He believed he could, but it would require an enormous act of faith from her: ‘Do you realize that you will have to change me . . . infuse something of the joyous pure spirit within you? A year or two hence it would have been too late. I should have been too set to admit the principle of change . . . oh the grinding effects of a mechanical existence – in the end, I am half fearful. Shall I satisfy you?’21

  Kathleen saw the absurdity of Scott’s abasing himself like this. Perhaps the evidence of weakness and vulnerability worried her. Her man must be a champion, a dragon-slayer – she had had enough of tortured, sensitive men and she responded in suitably rallying tones: ‘Here am I a little ass of a girl who’s never done a thing in her life allowing a real man to talk to her of superiority. My sense of humour can’t be doing with it.’ She also provided a spur to his ambition. ‘You shall go to the Pole. Oh dear me what’s the use of having energy and enterprise if a little thing like that can’t be done. It’s got to be done so hurry up and don’t leave a stone unturned.’22 The young Norwegian Tryggve Gran, who was with Scott’s final expedition, later described Kathleen as ‘a very, very clever woman very very pushing . . . very ambitious . . . I don’t think Scott would have gone to the Antarctic if it hadn’t been for her.’23

  They decided to make their engagement public at last and the months of painful indecision ended. Practical problems such as where to live after they were married took over. They purchased the lease of a Georgian House in Buckingham Palace Road where Victoria Coach Station now stands for £50 a year. It had eight rooms and a garden studio where Kathleen could sculpt. However Scott continued to worry, writing: ‘Girl, I’m a little frightened, vaguely. You’re so uncommon and I conventionalized.’ It was, he admitted, self doubt, not doubt of her. She was free-thinking
, he was crippled by ‘the reserve of a lifetime . . . not easily broken’. He confessed that he had once been a dreamer, an enthusiast, an idealist but that the memory of this made him feel he was growing old. In a particularly poignant admission he wrote that ‘the dreaming part of me was and is a failure.’24 Now it was Kathleen who reassured and steadied him. It was a paradox that this man of action had an almost feminine sensitivity – Cherry-Garrard was to remark that he ‘never knew a man who cried so easily’ – while several of Kathleen’s contemporaries commented that she had a masculine turn of mind and outlook on life.

  It was decided that the wedding would be at Hampton Court where one of Kathleen’s aunts, the widow of an Archbishop of York, had a grace and favour apartment. Scott wrote to Kathleen’s brother Rosslyn that ‘from male man’s point of view it seems as pleasant a place as can be chosen for a trying ceremony’ but he was no doubt pleased to have such a prestigious venue.25 He wrote careful instructions to Kathleen about the invitations reminding her that ‘single cards can be sent to husband and wife plus daughters but sons have separate cards – also sisters and brothers living together separate cards – Look out to get details right as regards titles and forms in general.’26 He also appears to have been anxious about the wedding cake, writing to her that ‘Mother says it wouldn’t do not to have a wedding cake. People would think it odd.’27 Kathleen was obviously indifferent to such proprieties.

  It was also typical of Kathleen that she was totally unconcerned about wedding clothes and trousseau and the other appurtenances of marriage considered indispensable in polite society. Even Rosslyn was surprised by her indifference. He was himself something of an eccentric, rumoured to have kept an elephant at Oxford because the college rules stipulated no dogs. He also devoted a large part of his life to breeding mice of exotic hue from lavender to bright green. But even he now wrote that ‘Kiddie’, as he had called Kathleen since childhood, was going too far: ‘She won’t let him give her any jewellery not even a ring nor will she submit to the usual veil and orange blossom.’28

  However, Scott knew exactly how to appeal to his bride: ‘The serious consideration is that when we are married you mustn’t only look nice (which you can’t help), but you must look as though there wasn’t any poverty . . . just think of my feelings when I am so to speak “expensively” dressed whilst your costume shows a saving spirit . . . am I dreadfully sensitive to appearances?’29 The incident again brought into sharp relief the differences between them. At root it was a question of confidence and Kathleen was by far the most self-confident. But of course she weakened. As the press reported she was married on 5 September 1908 in a white satin dress trimmed with Limerick lace with a chiffon bodice and a tulle veil. Rosslyn conducted the service, choristers warbled and the 150-strong congregation included Rodin and his wife. As the service proceeded a violent storm thundered overhead but the skies soon cleared and as the congregation streamed out, one of the guests, Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont, exclaimed: ‘Gad, what a salute from heaven,’ which would have amused Kathleen.30

  The brief honeymoon was spent in France. Kathleen described that it passed ‘as confusedly and insecurely as most honeymoons’, presumably a reference to the sexual side. However, it was soon clear to curious onlookers that this marriage of opposites was a success. In Kathleen, Scott had found ‘the only woman to whom I can tell things’.31 At last he had someone to whom he could confide his faults. He knew for example that he was bad-tempered and irritable and made her promise that she would never compromise her own ideas just to humour him. He continued to worry that he was unworthy of her. ‘I’ve a personality myself, a small mean thing besides yours . . . I’m obstinate, despondent, pigheaded, dejected, there’s something growing bigger inside that keeps shouting the greatness of you . . . You’re so exalted, I somehow can’t reach up.’32 She in turn had found a man she could trust, respect and love ‘desperately, deeply, violently and wholly’, though she was not yet truly ‘in love’ with him. That was to come later. She certainly understood him. When a Miss Madeleine Morrison told his fortune at tea and commented on his laziness, untidiness, touchiness and tendency to look on the gloomy side, Kathleen cheerfully remarked that Miss Morrison must have been married to him for years instead of just reading his palm.

  Scott returned to sea to captain HMS Bulwark and Kathleen resumed a life perhaps not so different from before. She went out to dinner, parties, plays, danced a lot and pursued her sculpture vigorously. She was delighted when she sold a mask for 18 guineas and wrote triumphantly to her more equivocal husband that she loved making money not because she did not wish to spend his, but because she did not wish them to have to think about money. Her private correspondence with Scott at this time provides some further insights into their lives, characters and motivation. She cajoles him to further his career, to make himself indispensable: ‘You must have the first ship in the Fleet or what’s the use of you?’ He is sometimes melancholy or depressed and regrets what were clearly arguments when they last met. ‘Girl, I can’t describe what comes over me. It’s too indefinite . . . I’m obsessed with the view of life as a struggle for existence. I seem to be marking time, impotent to command circumstances. The outward signs are the black moods that come and go with such apparent disregard for the feelings of those dear to me . . . Wife dear, my own wife, for every lapse believe there is repentance.’ A few weeks later he wrote ‘I think you hurt me unintentionally and then perhaps meanly. I strike back with vague intention to hurt. My sweetheart . . . try to understand – I want someone to anchor to, someone sweet and sound and sure like yourself and how I long to be up and achieving things for your sake.’33

  Kathleen too wrote of such tiffs. ‘Oh my darling, I’m so sorry, how persistently and brutally we do hurt each other and would it hurt so each time if we were not all important to each other?’ Their letters are also full of their wish to meet more frequently to ‘make a baby’ and of their disappointment when each month Kathleen proved not to be pregnant but in January 1909 Kathleen learned that she was indeed expecting a baby, to be born in the autumn. Scott’s reaction when he heard the news was to roll a fellow officer to the floor in jubilant horseplay. Shortly afterwards he was delighted to be told that he was to be given a desk job in the Admiralty. His pay would be increased and he could live at home.

  In March 1909 news came that Shackleton had made an astoundingly successful journey south but that he had not reached the South Pole. Scott saw the newspaper headlines at a railway station and came running along the platform, paper in hand, to say excitedly to Crean, then his coxswain, ‘I think we’d better have a shot next.’34

  In June Shackleton returned to a hero’s welcome. His achievements were inspiring. Though he had failed the final hurdle he had crossed the Ice Barrier, found a way up the mighty Beardmore Glacier, named for his sponsor, and got within ninety-seven geographical miles of the Pole. However, here he had deemed it wiser to turn back, commenting that he assumed his wife would rather have a live donkey for a husband than a dead lion. He had accomplished his great odyssey using ponies, not dogs, a fact not lost on Scott.

  Scott agonized about how he should greet his fellow explorer. In the end common sense and generosity got the better of animosity – although Shackleton’s broken promise was not forgotten – and he joined the crowds thronging Charing Cross Station to greet the returning hero. It was a far cry from the Discovery’s muted reception and of course Shackleton revelled in it. He was as keen to court publicity as Scott had been to avoid it, reflecting the profound difference in their temperaments – one of them the flamboyant showman, the other the reserved naval officer. Scott added his voice to the chorus of praise. At a dinner he referred to ‘these great works of Mr Shackleton’.35 He also promised to profit from Shackleton’s discoveries before some other country intervened. However he took the precaution of writing to Shackleton explaining his intention to return to the Ross Sea and there was more than a little irony in his letter: ‘. . . of course I sho
uld be glad to have your assurance that I am not disconcerting any plans of your own.’36

  On 13 September 1909 the Antarctic Expedition was formally announced. Scott told an eager public that ‘The main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and to secure for The British Empire the honour of this achievement’. He declared that the journey would be made with motor sledges, Manchurian ponies and dogs. The very next day, and it must have seemed like an omen, his son was born. Kathleen had spent the latter stages of her pregnancy on the south-west coast, bathing by moonlight and sleeping on the beach, determined that her child would love the nights and the sea. It was a defining moment for both husband and wife, but particularly for Kathleen who later wrote: ‘Very large, very healthy, quite perfect was my boy baby; and then a strange thing happened to me. I fell for the first time gloriously, passionately, wildly in love with my husband. I did not know I had not been so before but I knew now. He became my god; the father of my son and my god. Until now he had been a probationer, a means to an end.’ The object of this passionate joy was named Peter Markham, after that perpetual little boy Peter Pan, and Sir Clements Markham, who, with Barrie, was one of his godparents.

  As the year drew to a close each of the Scotts now had a grand purpose. Kathleen to nurture the child she had dreamed of for so long and Scott to return south and finish what he had begun.

  9

  A Matter of Honour

  And so the die was cast. The coming months were to introduce new characters and reunite former comrades. As far as Scott was concerned, Wilson was the cornerstone of the expedition so he was delighted by his agreement to serve as chief of the scientific staff and official artist. Wilson’s motivation was complex. He wrote to his wife about his fear that ‘I am getting more and more soft and dependent upon comforts, and this I hate. I want to endure hardness and instead of that I enjoy hotel dinners and prefer hot water to cold and so on – all bad signs and something must be done to stop it’. He also believed he would survive to write and publish all the things in his head. ‘This conviction makes me absolutely fearless as to another journey South, for whatever happened I know I should come back to you.’ Most powerful of all, though, were his feelings for Scott. He confessed that ‘I should not feel it was right now to desert Scott if he goes . . .’1 His task was to pull together the largest, best-equipped scientific team ever sent to Antarctica.