MELANCHOLY CAME OVER Phyllis when she returned to Mirador in the autumn of 1913, homesick for Nancy and England. “I simply dread our partings,” she told Bob of her sister. “They seem to shake everything up just wrong.” Mirador had little charm now as a place of winter solitude, and she found the evenings especially “sometimes very long.” The old crab of her on-and-off depressions, which Bob Brand romanticized as “a capacity for sorrow and suffering,” had some real cause in her surroundings. She confided in Bob, needing his letters and attention. The embargo broken, they wrote to each other at least once a week.
Winkie, aged three, and Peter, aged eleven, were her only permanent companions apart from Aunt Ann, the old cook. Phyllis had to cope with her un-Virginian dislike of her relations, who “bore me to death,” and the neighbors, with their “apple talk.” “I am not unsociable really,” she wrote, “but you know that sort of disintegration of the soul one feels when continually surrounded by uncongenial people.” Her carping father, across the road, was a menace, too. She wouldn’t see the captain for many months, and meanwhile her divorce proceedings, the hours of legal talk, were weighing on her. She longed to go off, she said, “to foreign parts where new faces and new languages and new breezes will help to blow the old remembrances all away. They somehow always lurk around here.”
That autumn she sent Peter away to boarding school, the Fay School in Southboro, Massachusetts, at the worst possible moment. He was already showing signs of anxiety after this first summer of shuttling between his father and mother, and on the day of his departure, “we clung desperately to each other when the parting hour came.” When Peter’s first letters arrived from the Fay School, they were heavy with homesickness and yearning for his mother: “It is half after eight o’clock and I am just wondering how you are and what you are doing. I feel very dreary and lonely. Goodnight my dear Mother. Goodbye from your one son, Peter Brooks.”
However, the fame of the Langhornes kept Phyllis supplied with a surprising range of visitors to keep her company. There is a letter in the Richmond archive, written in a shaky hand by John Singleton Mosby, the most glamorous officer of the Confederacy, the feared guerrilla tactician who had grown up in Charlottesville. “I am anxious to see Chillie Langhorne,” he wrote to a friend. “His daughters Mrs. Astor & Mrs. Brooks are my friends.” As if directly to rival Nancy’s Round Table, Phyllis also managed to bring the cream of Washington’s young intellectuals to her doorstep, notably Herbert Croly, whose book The Promise of American Life, published in 1909, was a landmark in the history of ideas and now considered a foundation stone of American liberalism. He was in the process of founding the New Republic with Walter Lippmann, who at twenty-six was already on his way to becoming the most powerful and influential American journalist of the century.
“I have just been entertaining The New Republic here, Mr. Croly and Mr. Lippmann,” Phyllis wrote proudly to Bob Brand some weeks later.“They came for a few days and I enjoyed their intellectual conversation, at least as much of it as I could understand. They are making headway they say with their Anglo American Alliance…. Mr. Croly arrived looking pale and anaemic, but left after 4 days with rosy sunburnt cheeks and a double chin. He is quite a good tennis player.”
The Progressive Era was at its peak in 1912, a reforming force as strong in the Democrat as in the Republican Party, and Phyllis had caught the mood. She had voted for the ex-president Teddy Roosevelt—the most radical of the main candidates in the election that year, which he lost to Woodrow Wilson—even though she had a soft spot for Wilson, the man who went to church on foot.
Roosevelt’s new breakaway Progressive Party, the “Bull Moose” party, had stood on a platform not dissimilar to that of Lloyd George, of comprehensive reform. The New Nationalism that he proclaimed promised to enforce the commandment “Thou shalt not steal” and denounced the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics. It was prolabor, up to a point, in favor of votes for women, for restrictions on working hours, for government intervention and urban renewal. But it was also conservative, partly motivated by a defensive fear of syndicalism and revolutionary socialism: Roosevelt’s campaign had received funding from J. P. Morgan, the powerful American banker and financier.
Bob Brand had teased her: “I thought you were a Socialist but you still seem pretty keen on private property and running your own little show at Mirador.” Phyllis indeed liked to see herself as passionately committed to high-mindedness and social reform. But progressivism for Phyllis didn’t mean a change in the status quo. The idea was Christian-based, as she saw it; exercising righteousness, being fairer to the poor, but without necessarily enfranchising them. Phyllis kept to a particular and paternalistic view of politics in Virginia, for example. She wrote to Bob from the Greenwood train, “I am on my way to Richmond. The colored porter, Ben, and I have just been chatting, also the conductor who tells me he brought the party up from Richmond when I was married 10 years ago and ‘your father invited me to the luncheon, but I couldn’t git off and I’ve been regretting it ever since!’ he said. Virginia is really the only true democracy that I know of—it’s a delicious place.” There were those around, of course, who hadn’t grasped the principles of the new enlightenment. There was always Ava Astor, Nancy’s original social pilot in England, who was a handy marker against which a Langhorne sister could measure personal improvement, a luminous figure on the path of true selfishness. “I was walking in Fifth Avenue one very hot day,” Phyllis wrote to Bob Brand, “when just ahead of me I saw a lady in a long velvet coat with a huge fur collar, very thin stockings and high heel slippers, and little dashes of crepe worn here and there about her person. It turned out to be none other than Ava. She heaved a sigh or two and then began a tale of woe, chiefly about having to spend a week or two in Philadelphia, her old home, with her sister, to settle up her brother’s estate, who has just died. I forgot to add she had a low neck dress, which would have put me to the blush to wear in the evening, much less on the street. I can’t say that she gives me a sense of peace and calm. I’ve got no worldly courage perhaps! … It would be like having to eat delicious looking ice in the evening, all frozen and pink and white, then having to eat it again for breakfast, all melted and sweet and sloppy. That is an unchristian criticism but at the moment she has excited my wrath.”
Phyllis was eager to fill the gaps left by her years surrounded by sporting gentlemen. Bob Brand represented, as she thought, “the intellect.” To keep him “up to scratch,” to give purpose to their correspondence, she now ordered him to take care of her education. The reading lists were already under way, some of them recycled to Douglas Pennant for his education, under Phyllis’s secondhand direction.
“That’s a pretty difficult job,” Bob Brand wrote. What did she have in mind? “Do you want to learn history, philosophy, chemistry or what? I used to be frightfully keen, and am still, on the pursuit of knowledge & truth for their own sakes, as I thought that they wd. solve the riddle of existence & make the universe plain. But you realise after a time that the enigma will never be solved & that all the knowledge you can ever get is an infinitesimal fraction of the whole.” It would certainly make life more interesting; she could appreciate more sides of it, he wrote, but “the soul is the important point & not the brain even in education so I don’t see I have anything to teach you.” There were two sources for this new attitude of Bob Brand’s: the impact of the Langhornes on his Englishness and the impact of romantic love. It was especially the “capacity for feeling and emotion” in the Langhorne family that gave them “their exceptional fascination and charm” in his eyes and which he now believed was “a more fundamental quality in a human being than even reason and intellect.”
But he sent Phyllis the All Souls fellowship examination paper for 1913, which included the question: “Compare the achievements of Germans and Greeks in the task of civilising the Slavonic peoples.” “Dear Mr. Brand, Heavens!” she replied. “What a stultifying effect on my brain the mere sight of that examination paper from Oxford had upon me. Were you ever really able to answer all of those questions? Surely you never reach those heights and then fall so low as to choose the profession of money lending?”
Bob sent her a flow of books. The likeliest combination for success—with Nancy, too—were works of strong religious feeling, mixed with pastoral imagery and symbolism and a touch of the Psalms. Bob had an early success with Tagore’s Gitanjali. He took a risk sending Thaïs, by Anatole France, a skeptical moral parable of an early Christian monk who tried to convert an Alexandrian courtesan and ended up being seduced by her. He compared the monk to Philip Kerr, deluded that his love was platonic and heavenly. “I feel very much for the people who get caught by Circe on her island,” Bob wrote. “By the way did you read Manon Lescaut?”—another tale of sexual moths and flames.
Bob Brand’s finest success was with an extraordinary work called The Roadmender, by Michael Fairless (the author’s real name was Margaret, although she preferred “Bill” in real life). It was a best-seller for twenty years—a book, to a modern reader, so cluttered with whimsy, fake poetic effect, and affected sentiments that it is difficult to extract its meaning. But it certainly promoted the peace of God through humble physical labor, lamented the rural exodus, and extolled the virtues of rose-covered cottages.
Phyllis did not enjoy Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Think how much more amusing the knowing Eve could have been about men,” she wrote, “—but perhaps Sylvia Pankhurst is getting off her chest all the things Eve would like to have said.” That November, Nancy had sent the suffragette leader to Mirador. Brand wrote,“I am sure Mirador must be the home of everything new just now, New Art, New Thought & new women—This present age is a strange one & cd. hardly be more interesting. Everyone is getting loose from the old moorings in religion, social life, morality, art, politics & everything is floating off into an uncharted sea. It leads to great trouble but it’s far better than stagnation.”
In his competitive jealousy of the captain, Bob could not avoid slipping items of self-advertisement into his letters: “I spent most of the week in Newcastle. I’ve become a director of an electric power company, much the biggest in the world.” “Dear Little Bright Eyes,” Phyllis responded. He described playing golf with Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty and already a central political star, and being taken on consultative trips on the Admiralty launch. Bob had a go at Herbert Croly, too, stung by a rival think tank across the water. “I really do think we are now getting an influence, & I believe we shall have more,” he wrote. “It will be a ‘great adventure’ in the next few years uniting the British Empire & reconstructing England. There is such a terrible lot to do … . The advantage of the R.T. group over most other people is that they have sufficient experience to be constructive … . I think they have some advantage over your friend of the New Republic.”
For the chronic illnesses—the nerves, the anxiety, the brain fag—shared by the Astors and most of the Round Table, the presiding doctor was Sir Bertrand Dawson, doctor to the king, the landed, the famous, and the titled. His highly expensive “cures”—they obeyed his every order, however extravagant or clearly absurd—were prescribed according to the patient’s means. He would have done well as a travel agent, which perhaps he was. Thus, Bob Brand, a salaried banker, never got farther than the Black Forest spas. Philip Kerr, heir to a marquisate, was sent for some therapeutic tiger shooting in India in mid-1913. Sir Bertrand prescribed marriage as an energizing, anti-stress cure for the Round Table, the prospect of which, in Philip Kerr’s case, had almost deprived him of his sanity. Brand was ordered to St. Moritz to meet more women. At first, it was only Phyllis who saw through Dawson, foremost as a snob and worse as a poor diagnostician. Despite the fact that he was highly regarded by his own profession, who considered him a particularly talented diagnostician, Dawson’s public reputation—after he was elevated to the peerage—was commemorated in the jingle “Lord Dawson of Penn/Has killed many men.”
“You are right about D. being a snob, I’m sure,” Bob Brand wrote to Phyllis. “He pays gt. attention to Philip as P. has a chance of being a Marquis, very little to J. Dove & not much more to me, only I have the merit of being a friend of the rich, having been found at Glendoe.” By pure chance, Sir Bertrand made an inspired suggestion to Bob Brand, to go back to the Black Forest, to Freiburg, to the care of a certain Dr. Martin. As well as being a physician, Dr. Martin was an analytical psychologist, who followed the school of Carl Jung—whose break with Freud had occurred that year, 1913. It was the first time Bob Brand, or anyone in his circle, had encountered these theories about the irrational side of human nature, of the conscious and the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams, or had heard the word “complex” mentioned in terms of psychology. It had a profound effect on him and he wrote exhilarated pages to Phyllis from his clinic, thrilled with his discoveries and the newfound jargon. He was not suffering from a bad heart, which he had believed for sixteen years, but from a “sympathetic nervous system” that was exceedingly sensitive to pain, pleasure, beauty, etc., which caused his pulse to race. All geniuses had suffered similar symptoms, Martin had told him.
“I am sure my sub-conscious self—which has really come up to scratch in my dreams since I’ve been here—is much cleverer & more amusing certainly more imaginative than anything which appears in the daytime as my conscious self,” he reflected. “It’s only when the two begin to come into serious conflict that there may be trouble.” “I wonder if you have any complexes,” those mechanisms caused by painful events in early life, he asked Phyllis. But any revealing answer was cut short: Phyllis had sent a letter asking him to accompany her on a six-week trip to Paris, to perfect her French, as if their platonic friendship were a fait accompli and the captain an absent beau whose feelings and situation she felt at liberty to ignore entirely. Bob Brand replied hotly in the new vernacular:
Dear Mrs. Brooks,
I am told by Dr. Martin that one ought to avoid internal conflicts between one’s conscious & subconscious self. The very idea you suggest almost produces a storm between the intense wishes of the one & the repression of the other, between the ideas of what might under ideal conditions be & what can’t be. It’s only saints apparently who finally effect a complete reconciliation between their two selves & I am far from that consummation.
The idea of Phyllis’s traveling to France with Bob Brand would have caused no less amazement to Douglas Pennant, particularly since the trip would have coincided with his English leave between expeditions to Persia and Kashmir.
Then, before Christmas 1913, their letters crossed. Phyllis wrote to Bob on December 8 to say that Douglas Pennant, “fresh from the wilds of Mongolia,” had, like Bob, fallen off his horse on a recent Mirador visit, adding, “It was very nice seeing him again, but no sooner do I begin to enjoy his society than he is off again. He left last week for Persia on another shooting trip, but not such a long one this time. I begin to suspect that this hunting life is beginning to pall upon him, I should be disappointed to think he could go on at it much longer.”
A letter from Bob was on its way telling Phyllis that he knew from Nancy all about the captain’s visit: “I suppose after all that has happened such a piece of intelligence oughtn’t to touch my feelings or interest me—But I can’t help it. It does … I don’t know what the present position is, or whether you will or will not be free to marry again—But if you will be or if you have FINALLY made up your mind, you can let me know.”
Phyllis spent Christmas night with her two sons on either side of her bed. “It is wonderful to see children’s faces on Christmas morning, I wish I had ten to sleep with me,” she wrote to Bob.
In late January 1914, she sent Peter back to boarding school and came to England with the four-year-old Winkie. She planned to hunt and to see the captain, who was on leave—the French trip abandoned. The captain was invited for four weekends to Cliveden in February and March. A third suitor was Geoffrey Dawson, now editor of The Times, with whom, as Bob said later, he “changed guard” at St. James’s Square in their pursuit of Phyllis. Bob and the captain shared one weekend at Cliveden—with Winston Churchill: that at least gave Bob rights of attendance. They skirted around each other. Phyllis would send Bob notes of warning that would surely have ended the captain’s courtship if he had discovered them: “Come in if you can before lunch about 12. I can’t say stop for luncheon—I will explain why later,” and “I am afraid Sunday here will not be much use as Henry Pennant is coming also Foxie McDonald and Fido, and I think it would be best if you didn’t. You don’t mind my being quite frank and telling you this, do you? But I am sure you will understand.”
In the face of this irritating competition, Douglas Pennant, hunting in Stony Stratford, changed tack again, this time to a lofty patience and understanding in which—as he hardly needed to say but did so nevertheless—he put his trust in Phyllis as “a high class well bred woman who has a sense of what honour means” not to waver from their contract; and not to be unfaithful in her heart. The captain left in March for Kashmir, planning to return sometime in the summer of 1914.
Philip Kerr was also exiled, but for reasons of health. Tortured by insomnia, incapable now of work, he had been sent under doctors’ orders to India, to Lucknow and to Delhi, where he stayed with Lord Hardinge, the viceroy. In his earnest and much-discussed search for his soul, for some certainty or even some leader he could follow, Kerr investigated Buddhism; he became fascinated with Gandhi, whom he met, and with the politics of Gandhism. But there was nothing he could convincingly latch on to. He sent frequent bulletins back to Nancy. He read The Brothers Karamazov and found that it coincided “wonderfully with my present view of the universe and where truth in it resides” in its portrayal of the evil passions and mystic ideals that combined in the human heart. He wrote to Nancy: “I sometimes think that Hell is this world with love left out, only efficiency and progress and passion and wealth left in.”
In February 1914, while Kerr was on his way home and Phyllis was traveling between Cliveden and hunting in Market Harborough, Nancy became seriously ill. She had developed what even Sir Bertrand managed to diagnose as an internal abscess. He ordered an immediate operation, warning of a second one. The aftereffects of the first were acutely painful: Nancy recalled many years later that she had never suffered such agonies or been so miserable. She was taken to Rest Harrow, Sandwich, to convalesce with a nurse in attendance. “I had a nurse to look after me and I lay in the sunshine on the balcony that looks out over the sea,” Nancy recalled fifty years later. “The world was so lovely and so peaceful I began to argue with myself as I lay there. This I thought is not what God wants. It is not what he meant to happen.”
Ironically, it was Phyllis who had first mentioned Christian Science, the religion of Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, who had died four years earlier. “She told me,” wrote Nancy, “that there were people in America who believed, as I did, that God never meant there to be sickness and suffering, and who could be cured by prayer.” Phyllis had also sent her a copy of Mrs. Eddy’s Science and Health and Nancy had sent a copy to Philip Kerr, but neither of them seemed to have read it at this point. When Nancy returned to Cliveden after her convalescence, as she wrote later, “a wonderful thing happened. Whenever a soul is ready for enlightenment, and awaits it humbly I believe that the answer is somewhere to hand: the teacher comes.” The “teacher” was the unlikely figure of Mrs. Maud Bull, a Christian Scientist who knew many of Nancy’s friends in America and had been invited, by chance, to Cliveden.
Bob Brand was staying that weekend and wrote later, “My recollection is that Nancy went up with her to have a talk one night before going to bed and came down a Christian Scientist, a case of sudden conversion.” Nancy herself wrote in her memoir, “It was just like the conversion of St. Paul. Here I found the answer to all my questions, and all I had been looking for. If I was spiritual I would not have to suffer in the flesh, I learned. My life was really made over. Fear went out of it. I was no longer frightened of anything.” From Cliveden, Phyllis described the phenomenon to Bob Brand a few days later: “I found Nancy playing in the nursery with the children, transformed by her Christian Scientist friends into a perfectly well woman—she had been up most of the day and looked VERY well—I feel as if a miracle had happened, and a very ‘spooky’ atmosphere pervades!”
Nancy had tumbled into the most successful of all the American mind-over-matter, self-reliance, self-healing cults ever devised, and it fitted her perfectly. Mary Baker Eddy had cannily pulled together many strands of various nineteenth-century movements and medicine shows—she had taken much from Émile Coué’s popular New Thought, although she denied it—and labeled it “Science.” It was the key word that attracted so many of her, at first, uneducated followers, with its prototype psychological jargon and kitchen philosophy.
The “divine metaphysics” of Christian Science, conceived by Baker Eddy, and of which Nancy was to become a famous convert, made some breathtaking speculations on the nature of God. They explained away why, to most mortal men except Christian Scientists, God seemed so unpredictable and unreliable. Born out of her own ill health, from which she also believed herself miraculously cured, it centered on the idea that since he is made “in the image and likeness of God,” man is a spiritual, not a material, being. What God has made cannot be evil, Baker Eddy preached, only good and harmonious. Thus, sin, sickness, and death are illusions, shadows of reality. Every form of “error” or evil can be overcome, therefore, on the basis of its unreality. Death, the “King of Terrors,” is a mortal illusion: “For the real man and the real universe there is no death process.” “I deny disease as a truth,” said Mary Baker Eddy, “but I admit it as a deception.” It was, quite simply, a denial of the physical world.
The “insight” given exclusively to the Christian Scientist (“Knowing the Truth”) could itself only come from a close and repeated reading of Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy—one of the most phenomenally successful books of all time. Nancy identified with Mary Baker Eddy; she probably never knew of her megalomaniac and paranoid tendencies. They had suffered from the same classic nineteenth-century psychosomatic ailments, above all, “nervous prostration” and colic, which had kept them bedridden. A part of the cure was the religious euphoria produced by repetition—excluding everything else from the mind—of Eddy’s texts and certainties. This served as a wholesale distraction of Nancy’s attention, which cleared away all doubts and fears.
Her new religion enabled Nancy quite simply to leap, in her mind, from the material to the spiritual world and to pitch camp there permanently, on the high ground, armed with a dogma that, intellectually, it was useless to argue with. The proof of its efficacy for her was that she had hardly a day’s illness for the rest of her life.
Nancy never wavered from the faith nor from her daily catechism, “The Scientific Statement of Being,” which begins unscientifically: “There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter …” and asserts, “Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God and man is his image and likeness. Therefore man is not material—he is spiritual.” This was the mantra that her children would be brought up to chant later on when something went wrong, when they felt pain, fell off their bicycles onto the gravel, suffered reversals in the illusory material world. This was perhaps their only hope for recovery, since Nancy turned absolutely, like all Christian Scientists, against medical science from this moment.
More telling, perhaps, than Nancy’s joining the Church of Christ Scientist was the way she hijacked its doctrine for her own purposes with all its assumptions and simplicities. Her yearning for goodness, and the struggle between good and evil, were simplified at a stroke by the notion that evil was an illusion, a mere shadow. Nancy could now use her textbooks to reduce everything to right and wrong: no more complexities of human nature. The key, perhaps, was her discovery that: “If I was spiritual I would not have to suffer in the flesh.” Nancy had always wanted to embark on the road to sainthood—a fantasy from childhood—and now she saw the path to be a healer, too, like Jesus Christ or Mary Baker Eddy or the Archdeacon Neve. Many burdens were lifted; all those worldly problems like sex and romance were now fallacies (although she had temporarily deviated by getting married) and illusions, to be authoritatively talked down. Her conversion relieved her deepest conflict, that between her Bible-punching conscience and her Langhorne sister worldliness, although to the outside world it accentuated these two aspects: the missionary on the one hand, and the bigot on the other. Her life was simplified and energy was released. Instead of making her solemn, her new religion added a few degrees to her sense of gaiety.
The captain, naturally, treated the whole episode with scathing contempt, when the news reached him. “If anyone tells me that Christian Science has done so and so much good,” he wrote, “—well I know then for a fact that so & so’s complaint was almost entirely one of the imagination. I can’t take a better example than your sister.”
Phyllis had now been in England for two months, and Bob was running out of patience with this polite platonic friendship. Two or three days before her departure to America, he proposed marriage again. When he was turned down, he declared a moratorium on the whole affair. They must break off any meetings, he said, and end their correspondence. After this apparently final meeting on March 2, Phyllis returned to St. James’s Square and wrote to him: “One seems always to be hurting the people one least wants to hurt … I have tried very hard, in my feeble way perhaps, not to encourage you with any hopes of my changing my mind as to my affections, but I see now that one has to be as careful with one’s words, looks and actions as a painter is with his brush, for fear one wrong stroke will change the whole look of his picture … . If I should never hear from you or see you again, I should quite understand, but I hope with all my heart this will not be the case.”
She followed it with another message, asking to see him in person, adding, “I would like to say good-bye to you in less incongruous surroundings … so come to St. James’s Square if you can—I will quite understand if you don’t.” But Bob refused this melodramatic gesture. Instead, he sent her a cable to the RMS Olympic, docked at Queenstown, and she sent a letter thanking him, adding the words, “My heart feels heavy, and my eyelids burn with a longing to cry,” and ending, “Remember your philanthropic work.”
The excuse, on both sides, for breaking the embargo a month later, was the death of Moncure Perkins, followed, less than two weeks later, by that of Lizzie. Moncure’s death had long been expected, but that of Lizzie, who was forty-seven years old, was a severe shock, especially to her children, Nancy, who was seventeen, and Alice, aged twelve. Moncure was laid out in the front parlor of Lizzie’s house for the Virginian all-night vigil by his four closest friends. Then an overwrought Lizzie buried him at All Saints Church, putting on her deep black veil with, after some debate, a white organdy collar and cuffs. Then, as Nancy Lancaster described it, “She went up to aunt Irene in New York, a week after the funeral. She borrowed a little hat from me—she didn’t want to wear a long crepe veil—and they said that she’d never looked so well and her friend was coming for her and they went to the dressmaker to take these feathers that she’d brought up to put on a hat. And she dropped dead. And I was with Grandfather at Greenwood and we got the message and we drove across the mountains (to Richmond) and he was very sad and he said ‘I can’t remember a time when Lizzie wasn’t there.’”
Lizzie, according to Phyllis, “died exactly the same way as mother—a stroke and never spoke,” similarly induced by “worry and nerve strain.” “I think she felt father’s treatment very keenly,” she wrote to Nancy, “& said to me just a few days before she died with her lip quivering how he tried all that winter to hurt and embarrass her.” Back went the family to the parlor in Richmond and into the black crepe veils to bury Lizzie Perkins. Phyllis described the three children “sobbing and begging for Lizzie to come back once more. They were truly fond of their mother & Lizzie certainly adored them and did the best she knew for them.”
Nancy didn’t seem to apply Christian Science when it came to Lizzie’s death. She acknowledged to Phyllis how “wretched” Lizzie had been, and how her attempts to help her had only made her “more restless and miserable.” “I look back on her life and always it seems to have been agitated & unhappy with only lots of social moments and no real peace or happiness … . Poor poor Liz I hope and pray she will find comfort and peace in the next life.” To Bob Brand, she wrote, “Lizzie’s death came as a great shock, you see we are such an intimate family.” Phyllis wrote to him,“I feel as if I had suddenly been pulled down to earth from out of the skies somewhere, and I cannot yet believe it can be true … . Although my sister was years older than me and I had not seen her a great deal lately, yet now she has gone I feel the strongest link to our childhood has gone too as she always seemed a sort of second mother.” Phyllis offered to care for Lizzie’s youngest child, twelve-year-old Alice.
Weeks later came the captain’s own peculiar condolences from Kashmir: “Very sorry to learn how upset you all have been about your sister. It is refreshing to find a family so fond of each other; the death of certain members of mine will not be mourned by those who are left … .”
Putting her grief aside, Phyllis demanded that Bob urgently report to her on Philip Kerr, who had just returned from India. Bob took up his pen again and reported that Philip had visited Nancy at St. James’s Square within two hours of his arrival and had then gone immediately to Sandwich, on Sir Bertrand Dawson’s instructions, to get some “East Coast air.” His trip had done nothing to alleviate his nervous depression. Phyllis had predicted that Nancy would convert him to Christian Science on his return, but Bob wrote, “She won’t succeed in that.”
To his amazement, the wisest man was wrong about the person he thought he knew best in the world. Within a matter of days, after years of intensely researched studies of Catholicism, Buddhism, Gandhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and so on, the cleverest member of the Round Table group was converted to Mary Baker Eddy. Now Phyllis wrote to Bob, “Didn’t I tell you she would get P.K. into her way of thinking about C.S.? … I have come to the conclusion that he is ruled far more by his heart than his head, and that it is his subconscious self which is going stronger than his conscious self … . I should think his family would very likely feel inclined to murder N. ifhe really took up C.S. … but I believe by now he must know that his affection for Nancy is a FACT.”
Almost immediately, Philip Kerr came down with acute appendicitis, complicated by Sir Bertrand’s misdiagnosis: it was “poison caught in India,” he said, and “would soon go off.” Philip Kerr was not advanced enough as a convert to see appendicitis as material error, so he, too, went under the knife and was out of danger in a few days. His mother, Lady Anne Kerr, and his sisters—the sentinels of his soul—gathered around his convalescent bed at Sandwich.
His family knew Philip Kerr was experimenting with Christian Science but they didn’t know how far down the road he had gone. His deliverance from death, at first with Nancy by his bedside, had heightened the sense of “vision” and revelation between them. Nancy had left to join Waldorf at Plymouth, but subsequently she and Philip Kerr wrote to each other every day. “Sin and pain are lies,” Philip Kerr announced to her from his convalescent bed. “They cease to affect you directly you know they are lies. Only it’s difficult to be sure in my heart at first that they are lies.”
The feel of the letters between Philip Kerr and Nancy, although only Philip Kerr’s survive, is one of euphoria and excitement, very similar to the exchanges between two people who have discovered an intense love for each other, but also of two people who have found an “ecstatic connection with God,” a vision on the road to Damascus. They express fears that the love will disappear—although this, too, is expressed only in the process of discussing their shared new faith. Philip’s conversion, which Nancy saw as a second divine intervention, was clearly connected very closely with his love for Nancy, and hers for him.
He wrote on April 13, 1914, “Dear Nancy, I’m going on flourishing. Only it makes the day much longer not having you to talk to and see. I’m only just beginning to realise how much you’ve helped me—that morning before the operation and every hour since … I don’t miss you—only as I should miss a great pleasure—no aching or real loneliness—that’s the wonder of it. We shall never be alone again … Philip.”
Bob remembered Nancy giving Philip a book around this time and writing in the flyleaf:
You and I have found the secret way,
None shall hinder us nor say us nay.
All the world may stare and never know
You and I are twined together so.
“I think really she is wonderful about you,” Philip Kerr wrote of his mother. “Just think what you would feel about Bobbie if a siren got hold of him as you’ve got hold of me … .” And yet there was, almost certainly, never a kiss, barely a holding of hands in all the years their intense affinity lasted. Phyllis was right to be skeptical. “Nancy was furious with me for asking you if PK was in love with her,” she wrote to Bob from Mirador, “but she kept saying it was nonsense, yet I felt in my bones it must be so—in fact just the expression on Nancy’s face in those Kodaks you sent me of her made me suspect … .”
“Platonic friendship is such a reasonable and easy thing in theory,” Phyllis revealed, “but I have seldom seen it worked out successfully in actual practice, but I will say for Nancy, she is one of the few women I know that could have tremendous friendships on that basis—I call it tempting providence!” The irony of this must have struck the lovelorn Bob, but Phyllis hadn’t accounted for the exceptional combination of the characters of Nancy and Philip. The sublimation of their feelings for each other into religious energy was genuine. “There isn’t any question that they were in love, and also that it was never consummated in any way,” was the belief of one of her sons. Nancy said later that without Christian Science, she would have lost Philip instantly. And she told Nancy Lancaster that she would have lost him, too, had there been any hint of sex. Not that Nancy would have welcomed the sexual aspect of any affair. But Philip Kerr was too full of deep psychological inhibitions when it came to the opposite sex, unwilling to enter into any conventional relationships with women. And he was never to get closer to any woman than he became with Nancy. He was happier pursuing the monkish ideal.
Their religion gave them many of the benefits of a close love affair: the freedom to share their intimate feelings; reasons and excuses to talk at great length, but always with the brakes on. They had the advantage of spending a great deal of time together on the golf course, a game they both played well, and in which none of their other friends or relations had any interest.
Nancy thus acquired a spiritual guide, a replacement for the Archdeacon Neve, and from now on, she treated Philip Kerr as a saint, as well as the most privileged person in her life, a privilege that included the unique right to contradict her. In all the correspondence between Nancy and Phyllis and Bob, there was hardly a mention of Waldorf, the provider, the self-contained, restrained, immensely hardworking figure. His hours were consumed by work for his constituency, parliamentary reform committees, the Observer, or his racing stud. Phyllis described him only once in a letter to Bob, when Nancy was staying with her at Mirador: “Waldorf writes her long long letters of social reform news, and schemes of how much work he puts into the 24 hours and etc. I am afraid that young man has not much capacity for enjoying life … . His letters to me sound very detached from human beings, and as if he were working with and through machines only. I do admire his desire to serve, though. When one thinks of old Mr. A. it is quite remarkable.”
But Waldorf, who might have been, and perhaps at first was, threatened by Nancy’s relationship with Philip, behaved with a cleverness, tact, and intelligence that seems extraordinary in any devoted husband, however confident. There was clearly an intimacy, a kind of joy, between Philip Kerr and Nancy that he didn’t share. Not only did he endure it, seeing it for what it was, but he also kept Philip Kerr as his close and valued friend and political collaborator. He trusted him completely and never showed a hint of embarrassment. Nancy wrote to Phyllis, perhaps defensively, “I must say Philip comes nearer making Waldorf talk than anyone I have ever known. That is a Godsend.”
It was made easier for Waldorf by the fact that Nancy and Philip never showed, or apparently felt, a trace of guilt, and therefore concealed nothing. Bob Brand described to Phyllis, for example, the arrival of members of the Round Table to Cliveden on May 30, 1914. “Nancy & Philip arrived by motor later & N said she was very sick to see us, as she thought she was going to have a tete a tete with Philip, which she was longing to have. However we had to meet to discuss an article. So we cdn’t help it. Nancy says she doesn’t care a hang for any of us. We mean nothing to her in comparison with Philip’s pure love. Besides as she says he’s so very good-looking.”
Bob Brand remained skeptical: “I sd. like to change Nancy so that she suddenly became 20 stone in weight & infernally ugly too & see what happened. It is no good the handsome & beautiful people saying that their beauty & handsomeness only reflect an interior spiritual beauty … I believe he still thinks too that his affection for Nancy is quite different to other men’s love for creatures of the other sex & that there is no ‘mortal dross’ at all about it. But it isn’t really so very different.”
Bob was still deeply puzzled by his friend’s adoption of this religion. But explanation was close to hand. Bob eventually realized that it was Philip Kerr’s only means of continuing his close relationship with Nancy. “I am sure Philip has great need of her,” he wrote to Phyllis.“Don’t think I don’t really know what their affection means. I hope Philip will get clear about all these religious things. It will be hard because of his family. But he isn’t really altogether to be pitied, is he,” he added pointedly, “since he is loved by the woman he loves?” In later years, Nancy’s close family were never in doubt about this. Christian Science was the sine qua non of their relationship and Philip Kerr had no choice. It was a sublime example of the human ability to believe with absolute sincerity what, for other reasons, it is expedient to do.
In the early days of 1914, the novelty of Christian Science generated as much comedy as mystification in Nancy and Philip’s entourage. Bob Brand, whom Nancy was at pains to convert, referring to him in the meantime as “Anti Christ” because of his “pernicious” influence over Phyllis, remained a protagonist, if an ironic observer, although Nancy did manage to get him to a Christian Science church one evening. He described the dinner beforehand to Phyllis. “Nancy had the very newest kind of dress on … very tight underneath, anyhow round the feet rather like a Turkish woman’s trousers & with a flowing garment above it, rather like what I think Circassians wear.” Dinner, he reported, was interrupted by a flow of telephone calls and social visitors. “Then it was announced that someone from Mr. Cartier was outside. So a bowing & scraping familiar gentleman was shown in, who said M. Cartier was sending over from Paris two gentlemen with some wonderful jewels that had belonged to the Royal family of France. Nancy said she was sure they were rotten anyhow; she no longer cared about those sort of things. It was no good their coming. Besides Waldorf wd. never buy the things. However it was finally arranged that, while it was all useless, they sd. call at 10 the next morning & I gathered afterwards it was on the cards that altho’ Nancy absolutely despised jewels now, Waldorf mt. make a mistake about her wishes & give her something.”
Bob related a typical discussion at Cliveden, between himself, Hugh Cecil, brother of the Marquess of Salisbury, and Nancy on the new religion. “I asked Nancy whether as a good C.S. & since she hadn’t a body she wd lie down in front of a steam roller & let it pass over her soul. Nancy was doubtful, but said with the real believers it wd be all right. Hugh Cecil then became philosophical & was very good, I thought, but philosophy didn’t appeal to Nancy. He said that everything no doubt was only an idea. That Nancy’s idea of a steam roller wd pass over Nancy’s idea of her body & tho it was quite possible neither existed in real matter yet Nancy’s idea of what happened when her idea of a steam roller passed over her idea of herself wd be what other people wd call being squashed. For practical purposes the result wd be the same.”
* * *
That spring and early summer of 1914, Bob Brand’s letters to Phyllis were charged with new excitement. He was able to report in great confidentiality (“I will tell you our secrets, as I know you won’t tell a soul”) that the Round Table was trying to broker a deal with all political parties to solve the Ulster crisis, which in April and May 1914 threatened to explode into full-scale civil war in Ireland. This was the classic role the Round Table had sought for itself: influence behind the scenes, the idea of “intimate and private exchanges between leading statesmen” and what Bob Brand described as “inciting editors.”
Winston Churchill, who had put the navy on standby off the coast of Ulster—for which he had been bitterly attacked by Tories, including Waldorf Astor—asked Lionel Curtis, Edward Grigg, and Bob Brand aboard the Admiralty yacht, The Enchantress, steaming around the coast of England, to discuss the Irish question for three days. “It’s no good being a sort of professional mugwump,” wrote Bob Brand grandly, “unless at a crisis like this you are prepared to do whatever you can to help … Nancy is very angry with us for staying with Winston.” After three days of “incessant talking,” the Round Table came up with a scheme. “Winston was very pleased with it, & so were other high Liberal authorities,” Bob Brand wrote some days later. “None of the politicians know what they are talking about when they discuss it, so we are going to tell them. We want the R.T. to be in at the death.”
Despite its sensitivity, Bob even revealed the details of the scheme to Phyllis: “What we suggested—in its main outlines—was pass the Bill [for Home Rule], leave Ulster out, call an Irish convention elected throughout all Ireland to discuss whether there were any terms on which Ireland cd come in as a single unit into a federal or devolutionary scheme, or in the alternative whether any amendments were possible to the HR Bill, which wd satisfy Ulster, ie leave Ireland to discuss the Irish problem by herself outside the English party game.” It was a sensible, feasible plan, not wholly unlike the proposals made after the IRA cease-fire of 1994, but it had less influence than the Round Table imagined. Needless to say, this and other such plans failed. Back-bench anger reached a level where concessions between the leaders became impossible.
Phyllis passed on much of the political intrigue, except the secrets, to Douglas Pennant—the news reached him surprisingly quickly with his network of runners. Perhaps she felt that this was all cheerfully to be shared between friends. But in her subconscious mind, as she would say about Philip Kerr, she seemed to be trying to cause a rift between herself and the captain. This, certainly, was the effect of her news bulletins about the goings-on of the Round Table. The captain’s mood switched now from patience to anger and sarcasm. At first, on June 22, he wrote from Persia, “I am glad your Brand is writing you again—he is a cultured young man and I can quite understand your missing his letters. It means however that he will return to the charge again—you can be sure of that.”
One day, after three nights on a mountain unsuccessfully chasing a she-bear, the captain suddenly let loose with his pen, in a torrent of hot temper, against the whole caboodle. The message was clear. Phyllis’s friends were almost beneath his contempt. Would she read nothing that came from the Liberal side?
The captain knew, because he had met him, how J. L. Garvin, the Astors’ Observer editor, dominated the political scene at Cliveden, and knew, like everyone else, how powerful he was as the Tories’ mouthpiece and policymaker. Ironically, Nancy never quite took to Garvin—he was too powerful, too much the center of attention when he came to Cliveden. But Ulster exercised the captain like nothing else. He saw the Tories as betraying the Empire through their anti-Home Rule policy. “It is really difficult to see the depths to which the party of snobbery must now descend with their ill conditioned jungle man Bonar Law and their flighty, ill balanced & irresponsible oracle Mr. Garvin,” he wrote to Phyllis. “I was glad I caught a glimpse of him at Cliveden; it fully confirmed the opinion I had formed as to his unsoundness.” He was “disgusted” by the “rabid partisanship” of The Times over the Ulster question. “I can only conclude that G. Robinson [Dawson, the editor and Round Tabler] is after a peerage and Northcliffe an earldom.”
To their lasting shame, he said the Tories had “seized on the benighted prejudices of the most narrow minded set of people of all the Anglo Saxon race—a people that has got no further in its notions than the Battle of the Boyne and the Siege of Derry—to endeavour to bring themselves once again to power at the expense of all that is vital to our imperial welfare.”
Phyllis must have been alarmed by his passionate outburst on behalf of Liberals, the Labour Party, and the Irish nationalists, and the attack against the unassailably correct-thinking Round Table: she may have been a Progressivist, but she was also an honorary Tory. The captain was straying from his role as the silent sportsman, so attentive and dependable. Evidently, she sent a mild corrective, and the captain replied, “Please do not think I am prejudiced against Round Tablers, why should I be? I despise people who are prejudiced; toleration to all sections is my creed … I will say this tho, that I just cant abide PRIGS at any price and let those whom the cap fits wear it!”
Perhaps the one thing the captain didn’t know—since Phyllis seemed to tell him everything else—was that she had turned to Bob Brand and not Nancy for advice on her marriage problems, swearing him to secrecy. Phyllis was contemplating becoming a resident in France, briefly, which would enable her to get a divorce on some grounds of incompatibility. Yet, incompatibility was not recognized by the Church, which was important to Phyllis. She was in a moral dilemma. If she waited, she could possibly get the divorce on grounds of adultery at the end of the separation period. This put Bob Brand, potentially, under further pressure: should he give her advice that would hasten her divorce and remarriage, perhaps to Douglas Pennant; or would this, by making Phyllis free, raise his own chances? Or since the decisions Phyllis had to make were morally almost evenly balanced, should he counsel delay, believing that Phyllis would come to her senses about the captain?
Bob advised holding on to obtain the divorce on grounds of adultery by any means, that incompatibility was no real grounds for divorce, and she must take into account “her old moorings”—the Church, particularly, and other people’s opinion, since it would “make everyone treat you in a wrong manner.” Phyllis replied, “You are good to write as you do, but I am afraid, Bob, I am leading you into paths of thoughts that I don’t want to lead you into. Please be an angel and think of me only as your very grateful friend. I need an unbiased friend so badly now. I can almost hear you say ‘that is impossible,’ but try to be, anyhow for the present.”
What did she mean, “for the present”? “Do you mean until you are free and then we will have to part?” Bob questioned. And it was not Phyllis who led him down these paths, he said, but he himself. How could they be friends as they were now if she was married to someone else, and living in England? “Nancy and Philip may manage it in the very exceptional circumstances of both their lives. But I hardly think you cd. I know I couldn’t … I cannot give you only my friendship and if you want that you must take love too.”
Bob now turned up the campaign a few degrees and took it into the enemy camp. He suggested that he understood Phyllis better than she did herself; he could see the situation more clearly. She was, in fact, deluding herself, he said, about her feelings for the captain. “You told me that you were in love but I don’t believe you are and refuse to believe it … I don’t and won’t believe your future is already decided. That’s my ultimatum.”
In late June, a batch of delayed letters arrived from the captain, reacting to the latest news of the slowness of the divorce. They were full of spite and jealousy. Ironically, he seemed to agree with Bob Brand about Phyllis’s future. “Meanwhile,” he ended one of these messages, “I am and always will be more than grateful for yr interest in my most unworthy self—but at the same time the confirmation of what I had expected compels me to review my peculiar relationship with the lady I have so longed to marry. I see most of what has passed dissolving into cloudy space, still pleasant enough to look upon but leaving only a cold and foggy platonic present, but little indeed in sympathy with a nature unfortunate enough to be inflammable.”
Phyllis had inflamed him again by mentioning gentlemen admirers that she had obviously found pleasant and charming, both at Cliveden and on the boat coming over. She may have mentioned them only to mock them for their futile advances and to reassure him, but he reacted badly. The names the captain gave them: “the gentleman from Sydney,” “HPW,” “the looker,” are—apart from “the brand”—not identifiable. Perhaps Phyllis had, finally, read the copy of Manon Lescaut that Bob had sent her. She was showing the same toying indifference to the captain’s love and suffering as the heroine of Abbé Prévost’s tale. Her doubts about the captain were certainly growing, and now it seemed, unable to make up her mind, she was manipulating her two admirers into a battle of wills whose outcome would make the decision for her.
“I am glad you found time for another conquest, that was a pretty rapid one,” the captain wrote. “I suppose you are getting to know more of the tricks as you get older. I suppose next time I come to Mirador I may have perhaps the pleasure of meeting the looker as well as the brand—about the latter don’t fret yourself about him not rolling up with his letters—it takes more than that to extinguish the particular fire-brand, and you will find passion as deep seated in a buttered bun as in people on whose faces you can see their temperaments more plainly written—He will be in correspondence with you again, principally because you wish him to …”
And then, unforgivably—but apparently deranged with jealousy and frustration—the captain began to tease Phyllis with his own female admirers: “I have by this mail 13 pages from my acquaintance in Paris, mostly saying how nice & charming I am! and how she would value my friendship if she cant have anything else! Why am I served like this? Women really are impossible once they decline to remain as acquaintances, anyhow for me … . You don’t seem to have done much with HPW aboard the packet, perhaps that was because of the looker! I don’t suppose you are old enough yet to want any old thing hanging around! I certainly am not, so perhaps I may be able to pair off the gent from Sydney with the person from Paris!” He ended this apparently fatal letter, which would have shocked and enraged Phyllis, despite her callous behavior, “Do you love me still?”
On June 28, 1914, the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand was murdered at Sarajevo. On August 4, Germany declared war against France. England entered the war the same day. Bob wrote to Phyllis: “As you know, Armageddon is upon us. All Europe except Italy & ourselves is at war & I think we shall be within 48 hours. It is impossible to tell what will happen. It is an appalling catastrophe, & if one measures the loss in economic wealth, almost immeasurable—I believe that war will bring with it enormous changes not only in the balance of power, but in social & political affairs as well … . We shall have social revolutions in a great part of Europe, I expect. Pray God we beat the Germans at sea. If we don’t, it will be hell, & a fateful hour for the British Empire. If we do, we shall be fairly comfortable, tho it will be disastrous in any case. I have this moment heard we have given Germany a few hours to reply about Belgium, so we are practically at war. Well, we must go right ahead & see it through now & win—We live in tremendous times.”
Douglas Pennant was already on his way back from India, to rejoin the Grenadier Guards. He had written somberly to Phyllis on August 15, “It is an appalling thing to think that all our speeches and writings and institution of societies, and even boastfulness of natures working together for peace and the advancement of all that goes with modern civilisation, should now be boiled down to the most bloody mess the world has ever seen.”
The British Expeditionary Force landed in France on August 17. At Cliveden, on those hot, bright weekends, they waited for news to see if the German navy would come out and fight. Within two weeks came the first news of the bloodbath, the fierce initial slaughter and the British retreat at Mons.
Typically of the home-based letters of the time, Bob Brand described the unreality of the glorious, still weather, the “lovely evenings” at the end of August. He wrote to Phyllis from Cliveden again: “Everything is quiet & one can hardly believe that a few miles off men are being slaughtered in tens of thousands. It makes one feel ashamed somehow of enjoying oneself, playing tennis & so on—I suppose it is good for all of us to feel we must be willing to die for the state immediately the call comes.” The consensus of the Round Table at first was that “the only respectable thing to do is to go at once to France & at any rate kill one German.” That gave way to the more sensible plan to go about their respective business, for the time being. Except for Philip Kerr, all the Round Table members were above the recruiting age.
Contrite now that selfish questions of romance had so occupied him when the world was blowing up, Bob wrote to Phyllis: “I have been thinking too over what I wrote you last week. In these times one tries to fathom what life really means & what it should mean. As I have pondered over things, I have felt I was selfish in what I wrote you & that in my love for you I merely looked at my own wishes & what wd make me happy. Therefore I want to write & tell you that you have, because you have asked for it, my friendship, all of it that I have to give, without any conditions on my part.”
Phyllis, her spirits low and depressed, thanked him in reply and ended melodramatically. “Good-bye, make your countrymen stick to the Germans until they have crushed and made this spirit of militarism an impossible thing for them to ever again indulge in. Bless you all—I hate to think what tragedies you will all have to see and feel and hear.”