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 they found that bread and cheese and eggs sufficed they became, with scarcely an exception, animated and delighted to bring out their best. Almost always they refused payment at first, and often at last too. Sometimes, if there was a beautiful daughter, or an attractive child, or a characterful old man, they took pay for food in the form of a watercolour sketch. This in some places was tremendously popular. Quantities of lovely creatures presented themselves as possible models offering food and shelter in exchange.
My heaven was so many sided! Never before had I seen fireflies. In some places the woods in the early night were bright with them. They would even settle for a moment on my arm. One such lovely night we made our camp in a small wood. I spread my mackintosh sheet, wrapt my blanket over me, and turned the spare half of my mackintosh sheet over me to keep off the dew. Suddenly I felt something moving under my pillow.
It was a mole, wriggling about underground, and Herbert had to come from his bivouac, a gentlemanly distance away, to help her find what it was that could be felt but not seen. By the time they had tracked it down and laughed about it they had attracted the attention of two country carabinieri who were patrolling the road.
We simple innocents were tracked down by these vigilant sleuths, themselves even more simple and innocent than their victims. Followed a conversation that nobody understood. Finally we arranged to explain that though we couldn’t explain ourselves in Italian, we could in French. ‘Ah, Enrico,’ said one policeman to his mate, ‘you’ve always said you could speak French, now’s your chance. Ask them what they’re doing here.’ A considerable pause, while everybody turned hopefully to Enrico. Finally, very slowly and deliberately, Enrico addressed me. ‘Quel est le prix du beurre à Paris?’ With elaborate composure I replied that butter, when I left Paris, cost two francs a kilo. Enrico turned triumphantly to his colleague. ‘It’s clear we must take them to the police station.’
Our detention was abbreviated by Herbert’s suggestion of a bottle of Chianti in the adjoining café before it was too late. This idea seemed easy to grasp and was fallen in with. A good deal of laughter ensued, and we wayfarers were allowed to disperse, with the injunction that we must never sleep out again. To this injunction we complied for about half an hour.’
‘It’ll be a bore not being able to tell people our lovely adventures,’ she said to Herbert.
‘Won’t we be able to? Why not?’ he replied.
‘Because we mustn’t tell anybody. Well, you could perhaps, because you could pretend you were with another boy, but I wouldn’t pretend I’d been with another girl—too dull.’
‘I shan’t pretend. I shan’t need to tell anyone. I’ll just put it by and hoard it,’ said Herbert very gently and slowly.
And
