ST. MORITZ WAS ONE OF the standard cures for weariness prescribed for the rich, and Philip Kerr was ordered there for yet another “long rest” early in 1913. Nancy, suffering another of her recurring bouts of “nervous debility,” was staying at the Palace Hotel with Waldorf and invited Philip Kerr to join them. And here, on the ice rink, in the ballroom, in the alpine air, an adventure, a mutual fascination began.
It was to Phyllis that Nancy innocently confided her new preoccupation, writing on January 30, “I am becoming a better woman since seeing so much of Philip Kerr. I fear he will eventually become a priest. He certainly has the true spirit of a Christian, such sympathy, such understanding. You wd. like him.” And a day or two later, “You will read a lot of Philip Kerr in my letters…. He is really a most unusual creature.” Philip Kerr, in turn, wrote excitedly to his mother, “The bracing air, and the still more bracing company, has entirely removed the depression which has weighed on me for a long time past …,” adding somewhat selfishly, “I no longer sympathise with suicides. It is a real work of mercy on N.A.’s part to bring me here. You must go and see her as soon as she returns—Feb 1st—and thank her for rescuing me from a depression which was worse for my nerves than anything else. Write and tell me about your interview with Mrs. A. She’s not quite like anybody you’ve ever met before.”
In the mornings, they skated around the hotel ice rink, working at their inside edges, hands behind the back. Nancy worried that she was “too old and too timid to become a swallow on ice.” Philip, of course, was as charmingly good at skating as he was at everything else, in Nancy’s eyes. There were many dances at the hotel, for which Nancy made a special effort with her appearance, despite her physical state. She wrote, “My headgear hasn’t come for the fancy dress ball. I shall go as Night in black velvet with a star in my hair. What a boring thing it is to try to look pretty. I never tried for so long a time before.”
She sent health bulletins on Philip to Bob, thrilled at the therapeutic effect she was having on this chronic invalid. “You would rejoice to see how much more cheerful Philip is,” and added, encouragingly, “Phyllis says ‘if Mr. Brand liked me he is certainly a marvel at disguising his feelings.’”
Bob had confided only to Philip and in great secrecy that he had fallen in love. Meanwhile, his only excuse for writing to Phyllis was to accompany the copies of The Round Table she had asked for. He even sent her the first portion of Lionel Curtis’s massive ‘Egg’—his blueprint for unifying the Empire—telling her that he disagreed with most of it and that Curtis had asked him to refrain from further comments.
Bob also told Phyllis that Nancy had invited Philip and himself to Biarritz in March for a drive through Languedoc and Provence, but that he would be too busy to accept. When he discovered that Phyllis had been invited also, he canceled his work and joined the party only to find that Phyllis’s divorce proceedings had forced her to stay at home, bitterly disappointing Nancy, too, who declared herself “weepy on the subject.”
Bob wrote to Phyllis from the Villa Notre Dame, rented by the Astors: “The most morose individual cd. hardly help being cheerful & happy, when your sister is about. She has a genius for making other people feel happy. A great deal of conversation & prattling goes on all day about all things in Heaven and earth. Philip Kerr & I are both rather unused to female society, especially of the standard your sister supplies. Instead of the solemn boring discussions about the Empire & other stupid subjects we have all day long at other times, we are enjoying something much more amusing & personal. Nancy has done wonders for Philip Kerr & kept him very cheerful for 2 months. He is now your sister’s devoted slave—& I am afraid will be very depressed, when the journey comes to an end.”
Phyllis received a flow of letters from Nancy praising Philip: “I can’t tell you what [he] is … so brilliant, so understanding … He & Bob Brand are like you & me.” Not only was he “nearer a saint on earth than anything that I’ve ever seen,” but at golf he was scratch; and “you sh hear [him] strumming the piano … Mima Cecil was an ass-poor soul she has given up a life in the stars!” (In fact, Philip Kerr had been too preoccupied with his own sufferings to notice that Mima had married William Ormsby Gore, later Lord Harlech, who was soon to become Milner’s parliamentary private secretary, only a few weeks after Kerr’s final parting from her.) Nancy added, “R. Brand asks hectically after you. I must say that was quite speedy work on your part.” Here was the first confirmation Phyllis received that Bob had fallen for her.
Nancy took the newfound saint and Bob Brand to Cartier in Paris on their way home and bought them gifts. Bob remembered his own as a “consolation prize”-a set of gold buttons for a white waistcoat. He still had them fifty years later. The following morning, he left early for England. He went into Nancy’s room at the Ritz to say good-bye and found her writing a letter. “And then a sudden thought seemed to strike her,” he recalled. “She got up and came to me as I was standing by the mantelpiece and said ‘Are you in love with me?’ and I said ‘Yes’ and then said goodbye.” It was the complete absence of any real sexual flirtatiousness that allowed Bob to give what was, in fact, the only possible response. He knew that she only wanted to collect “another, even if unwanted scalp.”
“Is Philip Kerr in love with Nancy too?” Phyllis asked Bob Brand in April. “Answer me truthfully. I shall see myself as soon as I see them together, so you might save me perhaps a month or so’s curiosity!!” She added, “Please do not think you have to have an excuse for writing to me, let the mere fact of my liking to get your letters be enough-please.”
Was Philip in love with Nancy? An intimate question that Bob Brand replied to at length. He concluded, “Yes, on thinking it over I wd. certainly say he was in love with her, tho’ it doesn’t yet take away his appetite, his sleep, or his placidity of temper, or make him depressed & morose.” He declared himself a bad judge but revealed, at least, “Nancy told me Philip had a great idea of platonic friendship & that so had she, & that I cdn’t understand this. She then told him & me that she had been so cocksure of herself for 6 years & now she was beginning not to be so cocksure. I told her that surprised me as I always thought that the great thing about platonic friendship was that it was so safe & cocksure.”
This letter advanced Bob’s intimacy with Phyllis, but it showed, too, his closeness to Nancy. Bob, secretly in love with Phyllis, Nancy, bowled over by Philip, needed each other. On her side, she needed information—of a kind she had never bothered about since her days as a debutante Belle in Richmond. “Tell me what you think Philip thought of me,” she had written, after their trip. “Tell me the Truth.” Bob was taken into the inner circle, commissioned to stock her new library at Cliveden, told to purchase “French classics and enjoyable reads.” As a sign of her affection, she began to tease him in her bullying way, with her nerve-hitting attacks—to subject him to Langhorne truth game techniques, accusing him randomly of “selfishness” and “incompetence.” At first, Bob fell into the trap and wrote a pained letter, asking whether this meant that their friendship was over. Nancy wrote back, without any apology, “You are nice but you are cracked. It’s a lunatic asylum you need, not a rest cure. Really you are an old silly. I was only chaffing you. All men are selfish or they wouldn’t be men and loved by women. The most unselfish man I ever met was despised by women. Please don’t take my light words to heart—you like us all have faults but I find you a charming companion and a most true and loving if incompetent friend.” Bob learned fast and was soon writing to Phyllis, “If everyone took notice of her insults we sd. be having trouble all day long.”
He finally confided to Nancy his love for Phyllis, just before Phyllis came over for the summer of 1913, bringing Peter and Winkie. She would travel, via Cliveden, to the Astors’ rented house at Glendoe, overlooking Loch Ness. Nancy, for once, didn’t put herself between Phyllis and a male admirer. She partly saw Bob as a good way to divert Phyllis from the hated captain, who was away on a long expedition that summer. Her campaign of abuse against the captain had never let up, in his absence. After a letter from Phyllis, giving some innocent news of his whereabouts, Nancy had replied, “My dear you can’t rouse my interest in the C…. Surely you realise how stupid he is. It’s not possible that you don’t. I don’t believe anyone whose mind & soul are alive can ever be happy with a stupid mate no matter what fine qualities they possess.” Although she did not believe that Bob stood a chance with Phyllis’s affections, she decided to promote his cause. “You can come to Scotland,” she wrote, “so don’t fret—only you are not to be trusted. I long to see you and want you to come down [to Cliveden] if you can. I have a plan. ’Tis deep and dark.”
He met Phyllis in the hall at Cliveden, eight months after his visit to Mirador, and was struck again by her beauty, soulfulness, gaiety, and charm. The quality that particularly affected Bob was what he called her ability to “feel happiness as well as sorrow intensely.” His infatuation was reprimed. Punctilious and controlled, unable to declare himself, Bob invited her to Oxford, a visit she canceled. They went once to the theater and he sent her books—more poetry. She thanked him by letter. “You are very good to want to ‘entertain’ me, but you must not have me on your mind,” she wrote warily. Bob waited for his invitation to Scotland, ready to leave work at a moment’s notice. But there were delays. Nancy had overbooked the house with guests, health practitioners, and do-gooders.
What Phyllis loved in the captain was his beaulike attentiveness, his friendship and physical attractiveness. At the same time, he needed managing and reassuring with his self-confessed “lack of understanding and bitterness.” After the captain had visited Phyllis at Mirador in secret in February 1913, she wrote to Nancy, “I do find his absolute devotion [“servility” was another word she used] very comforting and I do love him very much for that but he knows the situation I am in and if I were free tomorrow I told him I should not think of marrying anyone until I had gone about for several years. He has it pretty badly & I can’t say I’m untouched!”
In Bob, whose attentiveness and “understanding” company she greatly appreciated, she had acquired a flattering friendship. Soon after his visit to Mirador, she had described him to Nancy as “the most livable sort of creature, like a cosy livable room and as you say a clever being … but ofcourse not so clever or farseeing as the C!!!” Nevertheless, she now saw Bob as a valued teacher in the self-improvement crusade.
Like Nancy, she had discovered in the intellectual aura of the Round Table an exotic “drug.” And soon, instead of being wary, she encouraged him, sending almost flirtatious news bulletins from Glendoe. “You would have been amused to see a Cliveden footman on the train in livery,” she wrote, “with his arms full of Cliveden sheets and pillow cases for us to use—all the railway blankets ripped off the beds and Cliveden rugs put on instead—maids and servants falling over each other, Kyte [the butler] scraping and bowing and saying ‘Thank you, Madam’ whenever asked to do you a favour.” In this first letter, she asked him whether, with all the outdoor activity he was in for, it would embarrass him among his city friends to return with “pink cheeks.”
The Astors traveled on the train with their own cow for the children’s milk, but also for the cream on which the chef based the rich sauces he served with almost every dish, causing Phyllis to see “black patches in the atmosphere.” She found Nancy in the grip of a health adviser, talking incessantly about “nerves”—“If I hear the word nerves again,” she wrote, “I shall fly out of the window.” Nancy still spent much of the day in bed, suffering from exhaustion, rheumatism, colitis, getting up for the rich sauces, and being forbidden from taking exercise.
“Yesterday,” Phyllis related to Bob, “feeling perfectly well and strong, I started out for a stroll (not even a walk). I was called back by both Nancy and Mrs. Williams and told I would wreck my nerves too if I overexercised! I was made to loll in an easy chair instead! I have a headache in consequence this a.m.—for not having taken an innocent little stroll.”
Phyllis felt she already knew Philip Kerr, “the soul’s companion,” intimately. When he arrived, she reported her mixed impressions to Bob Brand. She was put off by the way he plunged headlong into the nerves and health seminar, he and Nancy spending a great deal of time together, comparing ailments and applying theories, until it seemed to Phyllis that she had joined a convention of hypochondriacs. In all this, there was little mention of Waldorf, who spent much of the time fishing and stalking—taking exercise, nerves or not—with the children.
Finally, in late August, Bob Brand arrived at Glendoe. For his own ailment—undeclared love—there seemed no solution as the days passed. But then, on a Sunday afternoon, at the very end of his stay, he made a clearly “incompetent” move that ended in a muddle of embarrassment and misunderstanding, crushing all the careful months of preparation and hope into a blank panic of retreat and apology.
It is impossible to tell from the agonized letter, written on Bob’s way home, precisely what happened. It is written in the code of a different era—the correspondence provides a textual puzzle as well as a piece of social history. It seems that Bob Brand had declared his love, totally misreading the circumstances and the response and pressed his luck further, perhaps attempting an embrace, or, worse, demanding one. It is clear that Phyllis said something reserved for all beaux, something flippant and encouraging in the Virginian style. She certainly gave a very mixed signal at a moment when Bob’s state of tension had been at a pitch for many days. “A man feeling as I did then ceases to be able to judge things and clutches at any straw,” he wrote to her. To spare him pain, he said, she had been “kinder to me than you ought to have been … You didn’t know what an effect your kindness was having on me. Overcome with joy … I said what I would give anything not to have said … I quite realise I ought never to have done what I did, but it was innocently meant. I felt I wanted in some way to seal a contract.”
Bob knew that Phyllis was, in her phrase, “willingly bound” to the captain, and it must have seemed to her that he had willfully ignored this situation, appearing to her “in a bare light.” “You told me you wd. forget & forgive & I am sure you will,” he wrote two days later, “but I cannot & shall not for many a long day forget or forgive myself…. The love that I have for you is not an unworthy one. You are my ideal & tho’ you say that is foolish, I can’t help it. The very thought that I shd. have done anything which mt. be construed as wanting in respect to you, when I revere every hair of your head, tortures me.” He ended his letter, “I do not think I can cut myself off wholly from your friendship. I can undertake, as I did on Sunday that we shd. act as friends. I know now how matters stand & shall not misinterpret you again.”
In reply, Phyllis wrote:
Dear dear Mr. B. Brand,
How can I not answer your letter? The thought that you should be suffering through fear of my not understanding anything you might have said or done tortures me also. I do, honestly, realize and understand so perfectly how you meant what you said to me, and anything further from my mind than thinking the less of you for it, could not be. How can I make you believe this? I wish I knew.
You say that you understand the feelings that prompted me to give you unconsciously more encouragement than I intended. I should not have done this for ANYTHING in the world if I had known what it meant to you. It was a stupid way on my part of trying not to throw back into your face the love which you wanted to give me. I cannot say that I do not value your love, for I do, indeed, very much, and while I want to keep the real and true affection of it I cannot accept what men call love, but I will accept “the love that the heart lifts above and the heavens reject not.” May I do this which means a friendship that years and distances and silences cannot disturb. I am so glad I have had it, it has certainly been one of the pleasantest I have ever had in my life.
It was odd to describe their new friendship as one of the pleasantest she had ever had. Apart from the letters, its history could be counted in mere hours. But having conquered Mr. Brand, Phyllis was not going to let him go. She wanted to see if he valued “the better side of her nature” enough for friendship, unaffected by infatuation, by looks, by Eros, even though, as Bob’s relieved reply revealed, she had coolly and conceitedly warned him of the danger. “My love may be doomed to be, as you say, ‘the desire of the moth for the stars’ but, if I get my wings singed by seeing you every now & then & writing to you sometimes that is my own look-out.” He would accept a deal of friendship, he said; he greatly appreciated this, “but I can’t help going on loving you so it is useless to pretend that I don’t … I don’t love like a boy of 18.”
“You know, Mr. B. Brand,” Phyllis replied, “I have not had in my life many companions like you. They have all, more or less been a peculiarly nice, kind, thoughtless lot of human beings, but I can’t say they have been very understanding. Nancy and a few women that I know have that understanding, but very few men, therefore, you see, I value it in you as a friend very much…. Should you have nothing to do on Monday night, you might take me to see Barrie’s new play. I should love that, but of course if you have any other engagement don’t hesitate to say so.” Phyllis had already told Bob Brand that she didn’t think platonic love—of the kind that Nancy and Philip professed—was anything more than playing with fire, and now, almost coquettishly, she was promoting it.
Phyllis had made the classic mistake of suggesting that further meetings—in the time she had left in London after her return from Glendoe—would help to blunt the edges of Bob Brand’s infatuation and keep the friendship alive. There was always a touch of the allumeuse in Phyllis: “If I have given you pain,” she wrote, “I do most earnestly regret it. If I have given you even a little bit of happiness, I am thankful.” She sent Bob Brand a book of prayers with a sprig of white heather in its leaves to remind him of their moment in Scotland. Nancy saw it all clearly: “Oh that Bob Brand I pity him,” she wrote to Phyllis, “only I would have more pity if he would have more competence. He writes that he can’t give up hope but he really must—so don’t encourage him and have that on your conscience. I see he means to bombard me with letters trying to get me to encourage him.” For someone who, as Phyllis said, “didn’t understand about love,” Nancy’s postcard to Bob Brand showed a rare compassion: “I hope you are not blue and troubled. I am sorry you have set your affections on such strange and difficult ladies. But you like overcoming obstacles so perhaps had you loved the vicar’s daughter you wd have been miserable. Nancy.”
Phyllis booked her return passage to America in mid-September 1913: Peter had to go back to school. Nancy, still in Scotland, was almost as distressed as Bob, writing to Phyllis, “You see when you go you leave such a tremendous gap that even 4 houses 4 children one husband & 86 intimate friends don’t even cover the bottom of that gap. Still I am happy about you now & I don’t mind anything so long as I feel that you are happy- G[od] … what a dull dog the C [captain] is—I wd be happy to see you married to a blacksmith provided he made the best in you happy. I only want yr well being NOT my own—I can honestly say my love for you is as selfless as it is possible for a human love to be. Now enough of my NOBLE selfless feelings….” She advised Phyllis to go on stuffing herself with three “square nourishing meals a day” and above all never to exercise.
On the eve of her departure, Bob wrote to Phyllis, enclosing a book of Matthew Arnold’s poems, marked with his selections. Try as he might, he told her, he couldn’t accept a deal of friendship, although he would abide by the rules. “I suppose happiness & pain are generally very near together,” he wrote. “Forgive me … I promised to behave in future simply as a friend & I have tried my hardest this time in London to do so, & I will in the future. But I don’t think I can forget. You cannot prevent me loving you & I am ready to take the consequences.”
Phyllis replied, alarmed now, as the RMS Baltic was leaving, “I simply cannot take it in that I could mean to anyone’s life what you say I do to yours…. I do hate to think I have caused you a moment’s suffering. I am so DREADFULLY sorry for that and wish I could undo any damage I have done….” She sent him a further plaintive telegram—and not one designed to dampen thoughts of romance—from Queenstown, Ireland: GOODBYE HOPE THE SKIES ARE NOT AS LEADEN AS MY SPIRITS.
Love letters from the captain dating back to July were waiting at Mirador. They were postmarked from the railhead at Biysk, in Russia, two hundred miles north of the Chinese and Mongolian borders. By August, the captain had traveled several hundred miles farther south to the remote valley of the Tekes River, in foothills of the mountains of Tien Shan. He was preparing another hunting expedition that would take him across the mountains into Chinese Turkestan and Sinkiang—his most ambitious journey so far, one that would occupy him until November of that year, 1913. His hair was cut “as short as clippers can make it,” giving him the look of a “speckled ostrich,” his valuables strung around his neck with fishing line as he swam his horses across rivers with his Kalmuck and Turcoman companions.
He and Phyllis had last met at Mirador in April that year, an intense moment between them given the months of separation ahead. He had written from the departing train, “I watched your carriage as it walked away … I felt that all your best was coming along with me, and you can be so absolutely sure I will so guard and cherish what is of priceless value. Dearest, dearest, you have me now and for always and I will think and feel the same of you.” He had given her, as a parting present, a set of pearls valued then at £1,500.
The captain wrote with a new intimacy from this moment even though their affair, it seems, was not yet consummated. He wrote, describing a poem she had sent as “warming and caressing.” “It makes one think in parts of things that perhaps one didn’t ought to (yet). How long has that got to be?” He had, he said, “derived more comfort from looking at yr stocking! which I keep in my writing case along with other relics. It reminds me of some pleasant moments, aren’t they ever going to come to LAST? DO hurry up. What long legs you have. It reaches nearly to the top of mine.” Phyllis dabbed scent on her envelopes, at his request.
The captain knew about Phyllis’s new interest in “yr clever young men,” as he called them, and that Bob Brand had been corresponding with Phyllis but that, until now, was all. He had imagined this first love of his, with its pacts and secrets, to exclude the world, but now he began to sense an intrusive rivalry. He was touchy about these fashionable intellectuals who, with Nancy’s encouragement, surrounded Phyllis while he was away. Phyllis had persuaded him to take several copies of The Round Table, her new source of wisdom. The captain thought much of their content “savours of the backstairs and the boudoir” and sent letters back written on their torn-out flyleaves. Phyllis also wrote so much news about the group. He saw unfavorable comparisons with himself. “Thank goodness my education in the way of meeting people has been a wide one,” he wrote to Phyllis, “—I do not refer to the very distinguished company that gather at times under yr sisters roof; they are not the sort that count….”
Douglas Pennant had ample cause for paranoia—although he had acted, up until now, with soldierly control. Nancy had attacked him from the first moment he appeared and had made no secret of her disapproval. “I cannot forget the glad light that filled your sisters eyes when I announced my plans of being away for the summer,” he wrote. Nancy followed him to Sinkiang with letters, addressing him as “Dear Capt.,” containing phrases such as “Do you ever think of anything else, in your solitude, except love?” He drafted and redrafted letters of indignation, but for the moment didn’t send them. He took the view that Nancy was dangerous but a little crazy, the sort of woman who needed “a firm hand,” and whose craving for public attention was “an incurable disease.”
Only marriage to Phyllis would finally stop Nancy, but now there was a shadow over its prospect and he believed Nancy had something to do with it. The timing of Phyllis’s divorce depended on Reggie, but contrary to Phyllis’s certain predictions, Reggie did not seem to be coming forward, demanding his freedom. She was therefore at the mercy of Reggie’s mother, who was playing out the process, fearful of her son’s reputation and trying to avoid a financial settlement. If Reggie refused to set a divorce in motion, Phyllis would have to wait two years, until late 1915, when she had the right to automatic divorce. All this was depressing to Phyllis, and irritating to Pennant, who had advised her originally to get a divorce on grounds of adultery.
There were other, longer-term worries on his mind, communicated to Phyllis by relays of runners slogging back to the post station at Kuldja or Biysk. They had often talked about “playing the game” and becoming man and wife but never, it seems, of the practicalities of marriage. Where would they live? Would Phyllis give up Mirador when Peter and Winkie’s schooling, under the separation agreement, perhaps under the divorce, would be in America? How could he provide on his soldier’s half pay, or afford to hunt with Phyllis in England? He began to express the exiled soldier’s fear of civilian life, of the contradictions he had left behind in England.
Phyllis had assumed that he would give up the dangerous life of hunting that took him away for so long. However glamorous, she didn’t rate it as a serious profession. She assumed that he would drift into politics, become a gentleman MP, and she took it for granted, ignoring his radical Liberal sympathies, that he could get a safe Tory seat with the combined contacts at their disposal. But now, in a veiled attack against the Round Table, Cliveden, and Phyllis’s new circle of admirers, the captain wrote, “If it’s public characters and the like that you prefer there is no chance of your finding them in the likes of me.”
The Irish Home Rule Bill, which the captain passionately supported, and was due to be enacted the following year, would be violently opposed by the Tories, who mostly supported the Ulster Protestants. There was a major crisis ahead, a test of loyalties, possibly rebellion and civil war. “I rather doubt the policy of chucking ones friends by appearing as a Radical lobby trotter,” the captain now told Phyllis, “but that is the only one I could go through now. Heavens. Fancy one of the family a Home Ruler, yet so I am but don’t tell anyone please…. I wish I could look at things from a conservative standpoint but altogether cannot. In fact I would not voice their opinions for anything that could be offered me. I look upon its devotees as strange relics of a bygone age as only indeed fit for a museum like my faunal specimens.”
There was something callous—even provocative—about the way Phyllis began to give unnecessary information to each of the two rivals about the other. She told the captain of Bob’s frustrated courtship—information no doubt magnified in the captain’s imagination as he lay in his tent in Mongolia, suffering from “fly sickness.” He had written in October that year, “I think BB must be a nice man. I could not behave like that I am afraid at least I don’t think so. I think people who can are happier but I think with me I should keep away from what I wanted and could not have.”
The captain saw his happiness slipping away. His tone began to change. He wrote defensively about marriage—a new tack for the captain, but a ploy to punish Phyllis, to vent his frustrations at the legal holdups and to counter the suspicion that Phyllis was vacillating under the constant pressure of Nancy. Perhaps it was better after all that he continued, at least for part of the year, to wander the earth. Marriage now was “all so uncertain it sometimes seems quite silly to seriously think of it. The more time goes on the more I feel my hunting is part of one’s nature [sic] and that one’s nature would be the worse if altogether shut off from it.” He predicted that it would threaten their happiness if he were hemmed in. “This is just to say could I go off with my rifle for, say, 3 or 4 months while you did ditto with yr stud of hunters? But all this is looking far ahead I fear—perhaps too far.” He added somewhat harshly that she would probably be “middle aged” before any change between them could take place, close on fifty when Winkie left school, “a time of life when none but very tough old stirabout sort of ladies care about going far from home.” He wrote, “I am deeply grateful for your affection but shilly shally is repugnant to ones nature, and unnatural positions … never can go on for ever.” The warning messages were mixed with others of longing and love: “yr love for me is the opium and agent and the most precious of all that I possess in this world.”
He might have further doubted his unwritten contract with Phyllis if he had read her letter to Bob written around this time: “I can’t believe I was meant to live as I have done these last ten years; I feel there must be something better waiting for me somewhere. Hope has never failed me yet, it came very near it once.” These were not the words of someone who saw her future clearly mapped out with the captain. He would have been incensed, too, if he had discovered that Phyllis, seeing a crisis coming, had idly asked Bob Brand to think up some job the captain might usefully do. What to do with the captain? Bob replied wearily, and with almost superhuman patience, like a housemaster abstractedly writing off one of his dimmer old boys: “There are very few jobs he wd. like or countries he cd. stand, I sd. think … I wonder if he has any job in his mind.”