A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young

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СКАЧАТЬ remembered her as ‘a very spirited and attractive young woman. I doubt if she had ever been on horseback before. That was like her. Nothing daunted her.’ But even riding was generally accompanied by the spies in uniform: ‘We are never allowed outside this little town without 12 or 15 Turkish Cavalry, an officer and several policemen. Even in the town we have always to have an armed escort, and a policeman is stationed in our passage… Yesterday we had to pass through a favourite brigand pass—we were forty-two, all armed! … A real-live gorgeous staff major never leaves us,’ she reported in a letter, being cheerful. When she did escape alone, she found dismembered limbs out on the mountainside, arranged like the limbs of a starfish.

      No relief was found either with the wives of the local notabilities with whom they stayed when doing the rounds of the villages.

      En route we stopped for half an hour chez un Bey and were forced to go to his Harem. The women there were the worst things made in creation, hair dyed scarlet, teeth absolutely black, and fat, ma chère! fat to such a degree that one became physically unwell in seeing them—barefooted, and hideously indecent in word and gesture. It was indeed a relief to go back to the rough cavalry after that den of harpies.

      On New Year’s Day 1904 they mounted their horses and rode to Smrds. ‘Don’t comment that there are no vowels in their words: there is no water in their houses, no streets in their towns and no justice in their land.’ Smrds had been one of the wildest and fiercest of the rebel towns. Small boys refused to study in school; a five year old explained that studying wouldn’t help them to shoot Turks. The ambition of the people there was to survive through winter so that in the spring they could fight the Turks again, and no doubt get killed that way. ‘It seems a false economy,’ Kathleen wrote to Rosslyn. ‘Once begun however one must go on, so heaps and heaps more money must be sent.’ It was getting very cold: Kathleen wore five layers of wool, and slept in a sleeping bag, two blankets, a fur coat, two golf capes and a fur cloak, with hot water bottles, and still froze. And it was damp. And ‘Mud, mud, mud, oh dearie man,’ she wrote, ‘do you know you have never seen mud never in all your life.’ She kept warm on the affection and gratitude of the people she helped, and longed to bring the babies home with her, but made do with supplying bundles of cloth for their mothers to dress them in.

      Her other pleasure was the landscape. ‘This is the most detestable country I ever knew… nothing attractive in all the land except the views which are exquisite.’ She marvelled at the ice: ‘perilous and wonderful, but beautiful white mountains stood against a deep clear blue sky, too impressive for fairyland, but too brilliant to be true. Ice, snow, eagles, vultures, the sound of the bells of trains of mules in the valley below, the soldiers singing their weird songs, a good smell of horses—enfin, every sense gratified.’ When Rosslyn went to Macedonia he taught his infidel escorts to sing hymns—they particularly liked ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.

      On 17 January Kathleen heard that her brother Wilfrid was ill. On the 18th she cut out 19 shirts, 12 pairs of knickers and 16 babies’ outfits, and noticed that she was covered with an extraordinary rash. ‘I don’t want to die out here. I can’t die without seeing Wilfrid. I say “die” because I could not be ill out here and not die, of that I am convinced.’

      20th: Set out at 7.30. No sooner had we started than a terrible storm of wind and rain came on. Snow! It was rather great slabs of frozen horror that hit you in the face, and cut. It blinded and choked me and made me so numbed I was incapable of resisting the infuriated gallop of my little animal, who sought to extricate himself from the horror that surrounded him. This lasted for miles, over horrid ridges, streams, boulders, everything ...

      The next day ‘I was a little ill, but would not be so.’ That night she ran a fever of 105°; then followed delirium, haemorrhage, coughing up blood, and a temperature of 107°.

      She was nursed at first by a Greek carpenter, Nico, who spoke no English and only a little French. He did his best for her, but only once did she rave in French, and all that he could make out was that she wanted him to bring her old white pony to her. The room was at the top of a steep, narrow staircase, and realizing that he really could not satisfy the only wish he had been able to understand, he wept. Rats ran around her bed at night, but they gave her comfort because they reminded her of Rosslyn’s rats from her childhood.

      The disease was ‘a malignant type of influenza with symptoms like typhoid’ as Brailsford described it; it was epidemic and many died of it. Kathleen was not one of them, largely because of the reappearance of Jane Brailsford, who ‘descended as if from heaven, and the will to live was supported by the dear devotion of this young Englishwoman’, as Kathleen wrote years later. At the time she wrote in her diary, ‘It is splendid to have someone. She is most good and thoughtful.’ Mrs. Brailsford acquired clean sheets for her, and slept in her room throughout the delirious nights.

      By 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 СКАЧАТЬ