Next day I went to see Mrs. Carstairs. I told her that I thought her little friend charming and very pretty. Mrs. Carstairs told me that she was the daughter of Thomas Barnardo, the founder of the Barnardo Homes. She had married a man more than twenty years older than she was, Wellcome by name, a partner in the firm of Burroughs and Wellcome, and very rich. He had treated his young wife so brutally that after five years of marriage she had left him. Terms of separation were settled by lawyers and Wellcome agreed to give his wife an allowance of, it was said, five thousand a year. Mrs. Wellcome had had a child, a boy, by her husband and, by the terms of separation, she had the right to have him with her for some part of the year.
A few days later I happened to be at the opera and I saw Mrs. Wellcome sitting in the stalls. In an interval I went to say how d'you do to her. She seemed pleased to see me. She told me that she couldn't ask me to come to see her as she was living in an odious flat that she had rented while a house she had recently bought in Regent's Park was being decorated, and she said that she hoped I would come to the housewarming party she intended to give as soon as she moved in. I have no recollection of our meetings after that, but they must have been frequent since we soon became on Christian name terms. Hers was Syrie. In January a play I had written called "The Land of Promise" went into rehearsal. By a coincidence the first night1 was on the day that Syrie was having her housewarming party and I gave her two seats in the front row of the stalls. She did not arrive till the curtain had been up for some minutes. I was so vexed that I decided not to go to the party. But I had refused various invitations that I had had to celebrate the occasion and rather than go home by myself I went after all to the party. There were a great many people there. Syrie had engaged an orchestra and we danced. I received the congratulations of those who had been to the play and enjoyed myself. I went home in the small hours of the morning. After that I saw Syrie almost every day. A few weeks later she told me that she was going to Paris where she had an apartment on the Quai d'Orsay and suggested that we should go over together. By some mischance we got on different boats, but when I arrived in Paris I called her up and arranged to take her out to dinner. After dinner we went back to the apartment and I spent the night with her. I was busy in London and obliged to return on the following day, so did not see her again until she came back. I used then to dine with her every night in her new house and after a decent delay we went to bed. It was all very delightful. I laughed when Syrie told me that she was madly in love with me, but I was flattered and I thought it might be true. I was different from the men about town who were her friends. They were the men, young, middle-aged or elderly, who dined at Ciro's or supped and danced at the Four Hundred. Life was gay in those days and everyone seemed to have money to burn. I was a change. I was a successful dramatist and my connection with the stage gave me a sort of romantic glamor.
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One day when we had driven to Richmond and were strolling in the park she took me aback by suggesting that we should have a baby. I thought she was joking. I pointed out the difficulties it would entail. She brushed them aside. She had a younger brother, recently come back from Canada with his wife, and, since they were childless, when the baby was born they would be glad to take it and we could go to see it whenever we wanted. After three or four years she could adopt it and no one would know that she was its mother. I must confess that I was tempted; she made it all so simple and easy, and the idea of being the father of a child amused me. I was well enough off to know that if need be I could provide for it handsomely. All the same, I didn't like the project and I told Syrie I would not be a party to it. When the spring came she went to Biarritz, where she had friends, and after a little I joined her.2 We enjoyed ourselves there. I had talked to her about Spain: I had spent long periods there on several occasions and loved the country and the people. Syrie suggested that she should send to London for her car and we could drive along the north coast. Perhaps she fancied there was a hint of hesitation in my reply because she said, "You needn't be afraid of anything, you know. By my agreement with Wellcome we're both absolutely free in every way." I didn't pay much attention to what she said. I told her I thought it would be fun to have a jaunt in Spain, so she wired for her car and as soon as it arrived we started off. She took her maid with her and we had a very pleasant trip.
She still wanted to have a baby and she had an answer to all the objections I made. She could be very cajoling and at last I yielded. We returned to Biarritz and arranged to drive to Paris. We spent the first night of the journey at Bordeaux. It was there for the first time we had sexual congress with the intention that Syrie should conceive. It gave me a peculiar feeling to realize that I was engaging not only in a pleasant physical act, but, absurd as it may seem, in a solemn, almost sacred one. When we got back to London we resumed the life of parties. In the circles in which we moved it was an understood thing that I was Syrie's lover. She was very pretty, gay and always beautifully dressed. I was proud of her and pleased with myself. Then she told me she was pregnant. It was not till then that I was really convinced that she wanted to have a baby. I had vaguely harbored the idea that she liked the excitement of deciding to have one, but when it came to the point would be frightened and give the plan up. Some weeks passed. One morning she called me up and asked me to go to her. She was lying in bed, very pale and worn, and she told me she had had a miscarriage. I said I was very sorry. Then she asked me if I wouldn't like to bring our affair to an end. I was taken aback. She was ill and dispirited. What could I say but that it was for her to decide? She asked me if I wanted to finish with it; I told her I didn't, and indeed it was true. She was soon up and about once more.
Syrie had the right to have her little boy with her for a couple of months in the summer and she arranged to go somewhere in the country with him and her mother. I rented a house in Capri for July and August and asked my old friend Gerald Kelly to stay with me. We spent July bathing, playing tennis and wandering about the beautiful, and at that time little-frequented, island. On the fourth of August the First World War broke out. It seemed very far away and we decided to stay a week or two longer before returning to England. Suddenly I received a telegram from Syrie, sent from Rome, to say that she was coming down to Capri. I wired back to ask her not to do so as we were about to leave. She ignored my telegram and came. Three or four days later we left the island and went back to England. The first thing I did was to write to Winston, then First Lord, and asked him whether he could do something to make use of me. He sent me a letter to deliver to a V.I.P. at Whitehall. I was forty, with nothing to recommend me beyond the fact that I could speak and write French better than most Englishmen. I couldn't expect to get any better than a clerk's job at the Admiralty. Like many people at that time I thought the war would not last more than a few weeks. So far as I was concerned the prospect was dim. Then I happened to hear that the Red Cross was sending to France a number of Ford ambulances and if I applied in the proper quarter I might be taken on as interpreter. I took the necessary steps with the result that within a reasonable time I was wearing Khaki and crossing the Channel with the ambulances. We were a mixed lot, some of us ranking as officers, others as private soldiers. For some weeks we wandered about the north of France, making ourselves more or less useful, and eventually were stationed in Flanders at Poperinghe. One afternoon, when there was nothing doing, I asked one of my companions, a doctor, if he would like me to drive him over to Ypres to see the Cloth Hall, built in the thirteenth century, which was said to be well worth seeing. It was, in fact, a magnificent building, enormous, rather florid in style and five hundred meters long. It was framed, as it were, by two high brick walls at right angles to it. I parked the ambulance and we walked all the way along its great length till we came to the further wall. We stood against it and gazed for a while at the splendid edifice. Then I said, "Let's go and look at it from the other end." We strolled back to the wall and again had a good look at what we had come to see. Suddenly we were startled by a fearful bang and a shell burst against the wall we had just left. "Rather a near thing," said my companion. He was right. If we had stood five minutes longer at the further wall we should both have been killed stone dead. There was no reason why we should not have stopped at the wall nearest the ambulance, walked along the vast facade of the building and stood by the further wall. It was pure chance.
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Shortly before leaving England Syrie told me that she was once more pregnant. I was dismayed. She burst into tears. She sobbed that it was only because she loved me so much that she wanted to have the baby. She made me feel an awful brute. At last I promised that when she could no longer conceal her condition I would fetch her and take her to some place where she could be confined. I had not been long in France before I realized that the war would last a long time. I wrote to Syrie and told her that this was no time to have a baby. She took no notice of my letter. She was determined to have the child. I could not leave her in the lurch and sometime in January I told the head of the unit that for urgent reasons I had to go to England. I met Syrie at Dover, where she had been staying, and took her down to Rome where, I thought, she could be delivered without anyone knowing anything about it. We went to a hotel and I rented an apartment near the Pincio. She expected the baby in May.
We knew no one in Rome except the English doctor who attended Syrie. We lived alone. It was easy for me because I was writing a play, and once or twice a week I could play golf. But it was hard on Syrie. She was not interested in the sights of Rome. She was no reader. Nor was she a needlewoman. The days seemed interminable. We talked. I knew very well that I was not her first lover. It amused her to tell me about her admirers. I did not know what to believe and what, with the hope of impressing me, she invented. When she was living in Paris, she told me, the Duc de Gramont had made her a sumptuous offer to be his maîtresse en titre and all he demanded was that she should dine with him at a restaurant every Thursday; one of the Bourbon princes, whose name I forget, had asked her to go round the world with him in his yacht. Gordon Selfridge had fallen madly in love with her and had offered to settle five thousand a year on her. She refused. She was very amusing about him and on what she told me I created a character in a play called "Our Betters." One day, Syrie said, Selfridge had arranged to come over to Paris just for the day, but, not wanting to be bothered with him, she had gone out and left him to spend it with her mother. I did not find that as funny as she did, but did not say so.
Living as intimately as we did with nothing to do, it was natural that Syrie should talk to me often about her father, who had died in 1905 and whom she had admired and loved. I have had since then the curiosity to read a couple of books that have been written about him. I found them in parts somewhat puzzling owing to the fact that the authors for some reason had taken pains to slur over the fact that he was of Jewish origin. He was in fact the son of a German Jew who had fled from Hamburg after 1846 when there was a wave of anti-Semitism in Germany and settled in Dublin, where he was converted to Christianity and married a Dublin girl. They had a large family and their circumstances were modest. Thomas Barnardo, their eldest son, was put to work in a lawyer's office at the early age of fifteen. He is said to have been till then an agnostic, but at seventeen was converted to Evangelism. He decided then to become a medical missionary in China and with the pecuniary help of his friends in the sect he entered a medical school in London. he finished the curriculum at a London hospital. During his student days he had been horrified at the condition of the neglected children in the slums of Dublin and London, and when he was qualified he gave up the idea of going to China as a medical missionary and made up his mind to do what he could for the wretched children of the poor. He was immensely energetic. With the financial help of Lord Shaftesbury he founded the first of the Barnardo Homes. He married and had a large family, five sons, three of whom died early, and two daughters.
On his marriage, a generous supporter, John Sands, gave him a house at Illford, in Essex, called Mossford Lodge. Adjoining it was a coach house which Barnardo promptly turned into a home for destitute or orphan girls. Their number increased and, to house them, little by little he built cottages in the immediate neighborhood. In the end there were sixty-five of them scattered over sixty acres of land. Since there is in the biography no mention of a move we may presume that the Barnardos continued to live at Mossford Lodge. When, however, Syrie, then known as Queenie, was seventeen, Mrs. Barnardo, who was a simple, not very bright woman, persuaded her husband that their very pretty daughter must be given a chance to meet people, and perhaps a suitor, which she could hardly hope to do if they went on living at Ilford among the Homes. Dr. Barnardo saw her point and rented a house at Surbiton. With his large family to support on an income of only six hundred a year, which the trustees granted him for his great services, even though life was cheap in those days it was difficult to make both ends meet. To help, the Barnardos took in as paying guest a Mr. Wellcome who was greatly interested in the doctor's philanthropic activities and had for some time, through his firm, Burroughs and Wellcome, been very generous in providing medical supplies for the Homes. The result, as I have said, was that eventually he married Syrie. She was twenty-two and he was forty-eight.
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When Syrie was approaching her delivery, Mrs. Barnardo came to Rome and settled down in the apartment I had rented. I had never seen her before and was rather nervous. I did not know how she would take the situation. I was relieved that she took it as the most natural thing in the world. One evening, Syrie had the first labor pains and I sent immediately for the doctor. It looked as though everything would pass off quite easily, but Syrie, unfortunately for her, had not told the doctor that some years before she had had to have a serious operation which made normal delivery impossible. She was in terrible pain and the doctor said that the only way to save her life was to take her to the hospital and put her in charge of an obstetric surgeon. I got Mrs. Barnardo's consent to this and we sent for an ambulance. It was by then the middle of the night. The surgeon performed a Caesarean operation and the child, a girl, was safely born. A few days later the doctor, to my mind unnecessarily, told Syire that she could never hope to have another child. She cried bitterly. I did my best to console her. That was all I could do. But she had marvelous resilience, and when she had resigned herself to the fact the doctor had felt bound to tell her she recovered very quickly. In another three weeks we were able to go back to London. Syrie resumed her normal life.
The war was still raging. I was at a loose end; I could not go back to my ambulance unit and nobody seemed to want me. Syrie had a friend who was the mistress of an important man in the Intelligence Service. I shall call him R.3 She told me that perhaps he could do something for me. I met him. To all appearances he was a very ordinary man on the fringe, I would have said, of the upper middle class. I had no doubt that he was astute. We dined together, the four of us, two or three times, and I perceived that he was excessively flattered to be the lover of a handsome woman whom, in his simple-minded innocence of social conditions, he took for a great lady. He was willing to please her and she was willing to please Syrie. When R. knew that I could speak French fluently and German adequately he told me that he thought he could make use of me. After a while it was arranged that I should go to Switzerland, ostensibly to write a play in the peace and quiet of a neutral country, and take the place of an agent whose nerve had failed him. I was not, however, wanted immediately.
One morning Syrie rang me up to ask me to go to her at once. She was living then in a hotel in one of those streets that run from Piccadilly to Curzon Street. I went. I found her distraught. "What on earth's the matter?" I asked. She handed me a lawyer's letter. "Wellcome is going to divorce me," she said. I was aghast.4 "But you told me that by your separation agreement you were free to do what you liked," I said. "I didn't know," she moaned. "I thought it was all right." I read the letter. I was named co-respondent. "Well, we can't defend it," I said. "You'd better get hold of your lawyer." I had an old friend , a solicitor, whom I went to see. I told him the whole truth. He advised me to put the matter in the hands of Sir George Lewis, who had a great reputation for dealing with such matters. I did so. The next few days were harassing. It appeared that Wellcome had been having Syrie watched for a long time. The detectives had proof of her adultery with a number of men, among others, Gordon Selfridge, and I had been chosen among them to be co-respondent because I was unmarried and well-to-do. One evening, I was dining quietly at home with a friend when Syrie, who was staying at a hotel close by, rang me up. She said she had just taken a whole lot of veronal cachets and was frightened at what she had done. Fortunately my friend was a doctor and we went immediately to the hotel. She repeated what she had said and I asked her why she had done it. "I don't know," she said. The doctor went to work. Meanwhile I called up Mrs. Barnardo and asked her to come at once. She was as usual calm and composed, as though Syrie's attempt to commit suicide was just one of those things that people do. In forty-eight hours she was quite well again and (to the manager's relief) moved to another hotel. I could not guess what had caused her to do such a silly thing. I wondered whether she had been taken aback by my momentary dismay when she told me that Henry Wellcome proposed to divorce her and had taken the veronal to scare me.
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During the next two or three weeks I had several interviews with George Lewis. I learned much that I had not known before. When Syrie and Wellcome had parted he had agreed to give her not, as was generally supposed, five thousand a year, but two hundred pounds a month. It was obvious that on this she could not have bought the lease of a house in Regent's Park, furnished it as she did, dressed as she did and given the parties she did. She had a car and a chauffeur, a cook and a kitchen maid, a butler and a personal maid. It was Selfridge who provided the money. I was not so shocked by this as George Lewis expected me to be. Until her marriage Syrie was in very modest circumstances, and when on the separation Wellcome had agreed to give her two hundred pounds a month it must have seemed affluence, but when she entered the society which the French delicately call la haute galanterie she soon found her allowance inadequate. She needed an expensive wardrobe to meet on equal terms the kept women she consorted with, a car, a maid, and somewhere to live. There were rich men only too anxious to provide her with what she wanted. It was not surprising that she should give them the pleasure of doing so. It was perhaps not very pretty, but it was understandable. I realized how tactless I had been. Once we happened to be talking about the successful party she had given as a housewarming and I asked her why didn't give another. "I can't afford it," she said. "It cost two hundred pounds." Of course I should have said, "Don't let that bother you, I'll pay for it." It never occurred to me. On another occasion, when we had been lunching together, Syrie said that she had some shopping to do and asked me to go with her. I thought it would be amusing and agreed to go. We went to a smart shop in Bond Street where all kinds of things for women were on sale. We spent an hour there. Syrie chose a couple of summer frocks, with her neat little figure she was easy to fit, some pajamas in dark green silk to lounge about the house in, a thin silk coat to wear in bed when she had breakfast and one or two things more. She had them all to be sent to her house in Regent's Park and left the shop. Two or three days later I asked Syrie if they had arrived safely. "Oh, I sent them back," she said. "When I looked at them again, I didn't like them." I know now that at the time I should have said, "You must let me settle up for al this. It'll be your birthday present." To pay Syrie justice, I must add that she gave no sign that she was disappointed with me. She was as lively and charming as usual. My behavior was not due to meanness, but to ignorance. I thought Syrie had plenty of money and it no more occurred to me to pay for her frocks than it would have occurred to me to pay the bill when a friends had invited me to lunch with him at the Savoy. I was like a man who had played bezique for years and is then induced to join in a game of bridge in complete ignorance of the conventions. He is bound to make a hash of things.
The case was not to come on for some time, and George Lewis, whom I had long known, asked me to spend a weekend at a house he had in Rottingdean in Sussex so that we might talk things over at leisure. I was anxious that there should be no mention of the child in court and this Wellcome's lawyers agreed to. They had the evidence of the English doctor in Rome and that of the nurses at the hospital so that they had all they needed.5 George Lewis had formed a very bad opinion of Syrie. "After all," he said, "she's not a girl, she's a middle-aged woman." That was an exaggeration: she was thirty-seven. "Selfridge has broken with her," he went on, "and she's got heavy debts. She's up against it and you're to be the mug to save her. You're cruelly trapped and you'd be a fool to marry her." "What else can I do?" I muttered. At that time it was generally expected that the co-respondent in a divorce case must marry the woman with whom he had committed adultery. "You could afford to give her twenty or thirty thousand pounds, couldn't you?" asked Lewis. "I suppose I could," I answered. "Wellcome's solicitors have told me that if you don't marry her, he'll give her a thousand a year. She won't starve." I sighed. "D'you want to marry her?" Lewis asked irritably. He was getting impatient with me. "No," I said, "but if I don't I shall regret it all my life." He shrugged his shoulders. "Then there's nothing more to be said." I did not tell him that I was chiefly concerned with the baby. I could not bear to think that its future would be if I didn't marry its mother.
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Shortly after this I had to leave England. I was instructed to go to Lucerne, where there was an Englishman living with his German wife, and the Intelligence Service wanted to know what he was up to. After I had done with that job I went to Geneva, which was to be my headquarters. When the case was about to come on Syrie joined me. It was natural that she shouldn't want to be in London just then: at that time the newspapers were in the habit of reporting divorce cases in full and when our case came on the Daily Mail people spread themselves. Syrie stayed in Geneva for some weeks. She was bored. She had no resources in herself, but depended upon others for her entertainment. I had work to do. Once a week I had to take a clandestine trip into French territory. I had on occasion to go to Berne. Left much to herself, Syrie was irritable and made me tiresome scenes. At last she decided to go back to England. It was a relief to me.
After a year in Switzerland I found that there was nothing much more that I could usefully do there and I asked R. to release me. I returned to London. I was willing to marry Syrie, but, the circumstances being as they were, I was not prepared to be rushed into it. I wanted to go to America to arrange for the production of the play, "Our Betters," which I had written in Rome. In any case the divorce had not been made absolute, and I could not have married Syrie just then even had I wanted to. I sailed for New York. My head was then full of the novel founded on the life of Gauguin which I had been mulling over for years and I decided that, as soon as I had arranged for the production of my play, I would go to Tahiti. I had not been settled more than three or four weeks in New York when I received a cable from Syrie to say that she was arriving. I engaged rooms for her at a hotel and met her at the dock. She brought with her the child and a nurse. When a day or two later I told her what my plans were she made a scene. I pointed out to her that I was an author and was going to Tahiti in the pursuit of my profession. I added that I should not be gone for more than three or four months and that on my return, the divorce by then having been made absolute, we could get married. When she saw that I was determined to go she resigned herself to it. As I did not want to make the journey by myself I had asked a young American called Gerald Haxton to come with me. I had met him first in France at the beginning of the war when he was a member of the ambulance unit. I had been attracted to him by his immense vitality and his adventurous spirit. I had met him infrequently in the interval. He was at this time in Chicago at a loose end and was glad to accept my invitation.6 We started off on our trip and after I had got all the material I could hope to get I returned as I had promised. On my way back to New York I left Gerald in Chicago to get a job. I had found him a very useful companion. Syrie and I were married in New Jersey. After spending a short time in New York we went to a seaside place, the name of which I have forgotten, and took a cottage, with the nurse and the baby, in the grounds of a hotel.
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We had not been there long when an old friend of my family's, Sir William Wiseman, called me up and asked me to go to see him at his office in New York. I went. I was staggered by the proposition he made me. I do not expect anyone to believe me, but what I now write happens to be true. The long and short of it was that I should go to Russia and keep the Russians in the war. I was to be provided with a lot of money, half of which was supplied by the United States and half by Great Britain; with this I was to enable the Mensheviks to buy arms and finance newspapers in support of their plans. Four Czechs were to come with me and, on my arrival in Petrograd, besides giving me any help I needed, were to put me in touch with Masaryk who controlled sixty thousand devoted Czechs. I told Wiseman that I did not think I was competent to do the sort of thing that was expected of me. He answered that it had been decided that I would do as well as anyone else. I knew, of course, that in Switzerland my cover as a writer of light comedies, who for his work had found it useful to live in a neutral state, had been of service to me. The Swiss authorities had accepted it as very sensible. I asked Wiseman to give me forty-eight hours to make up my mind. During the winter I passed in Switzerland I had been exposed now and then to some very rough weather and had had a mild attack of bronchitis. In New York I had a hemorrhage. I remembered enough from my student days at St. Thomas's to know what that indicated and, on leaving Wiseman, made an appointment with an acquaintance of mine who was a lung specialist. I saw him next day and he examined me. I told him what I thought it necessary for him to know. He found that the upper lobes of my lungs were affected. He said, "If it were peace time I'd send you to a sanatorium for a few months, but with a war on I don't see why you shouldn't risk it." On that I went to see Wiseman and said I was prepared to take on the job.
Syrie took my departure without a murmur. One of the four Czechs came to see me. It was arranged that we should go by train to San Francisco, then take a ship to Vladivostok and from there go to Petrograd on the Siberian railway. The instructions were that the Czechs and I should appear to be entire strangers to one another and communicate, if necessary, only with precaution. We started off. There were on the train three Americans also bound for San Francisco, and I soon grew acquainted with them. They were going to Petrograd to join the staff of the United States Embassy. They knew me by name and were interested to learn that I was going to Russia to write articles on conditions there for the Daily Telegraph.They were jovial, pleasant fellows. We had our meals at the same table and drank cocktails together. It was on the second day out, when I was having a quiet Martini with the oldest of the three, that he asked me, "Did you know an English tart called Mrs. Wellcome who was at the Devon last winter?" I hadn't the courage to say, "Yes, she's my wife." I answered, "Oh, I wasn't in New York last winter." It was just an idle remark that the American had made and we went on to talk of other things.
At last I came to the end of the long journey. I arrived at Petrograd and went to the hotel in which a room had been reserved for me. Next morning I went to the Embassy. I was ushered into a room and after I had waited for some time Mr. Bruce, the Ambassador's First Secretary, came in. He could not have been more frigid. I was conscious that I made a very poor impression on him. I was nervous and stammered badly. I learned that the Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, had been instructed to send on my cables in a private code that had been given me, and he looked upon it as a grave affront that he should be asked to forward them without knowing their contents. I realized that I could not count on much help in that quarter. However, I had not been in Petrograd more than a week or two when one of the American attachés told me that his Ambassador, a Mr. Francis, was angry with Sir George because, he said, Sir George had high-hatted him. Mr. Francis was a very rich man who had been given the post in Russia as a reward for his financial help in the last presidential election. He was something of a roughneck and sensitive. He was determined to get even with Sir George sooner or later. The attaché asked me if I couldn't do something to ease the situation. It was no business of mine, but I said I would do what I could, so, taking the risk of being soundly snubbed, I called up Bruce and asked if I could see him on the following morning. He received me coldly. He was taken aback when I explained the situation. He assured me that Sir George had no idea that he had offended Mr. Francis. To hurt somebody's feelings, especially the American Ambassador's, was the last thing he wished to do. "After all," I said, "Francis only wants Sir George to be matey." Bruce melted at this and began to laugh. "But my dear fellow," he said, "Sir George has the most beautiful manners in the world, but he simply wouldn't know how to be matey. What does Mr. Francis mean by being matey?" I explained in as simple words as I could what I thought Mr. Francis meant and when I had finished Bruce said, "D'you mind waiting here for a few minutes? I'll go and see Sir George at once." I was left to twiddle my thumbs for about half an hour and then Bruce came back. "Sir George has got in touch with Mr. Francis," he said, "and it's all settled. Sir George has asked me to thank you. We don't know what you're up to here, but he wishes me to say that if you want our help, you've only got to ask for it." On that we parted and the same afternoon Sir George drove to the American Embassy in a carriage and pair, and, I should like to think, outriders, to make a state call on Mr. Francis. I learned afterwards that the visit had been a success and the two ambassadors had got on like a house on fire. When it was time for Sir George to take his leave, Mr. Francis escorted him to the carriage and as it drove off he turned to such members of his staff as were present and said, "That's no stuffed shirt, boys, that's a regular guy."
Soon after my arrival, Sasha Kropotkin, hearing of my arrival, came to see me. She was the daughter of Prince Kropotkin, the anarchist, who, when I knew her, was living in exile in London. Long before I knew Syrie I had had a brief, but pleasant affair with her which had ended without acrimony on either side. We were glad to meet again. She was very much in with the Kerensky government and when I told her what I thought proper for her to know she said she would help me. She made me acquainted with Kerensky and the members of his government; these on her advice I invited to dine with me once a week at the Medvied, the best restaurant in Petrograd. With Sasha acting as hostess and interpreter, I provided my guests with quantities of caviar at the expense of the two governments who had sent me to Petrograd and they devoured it with relish. I think Kerensky must have supposed that I was more important than I really was, for he came to Sasha's apartment on several occasions and, walking up and down the room, harangued me as though I were a public meeting for two hours at a time. I saw Masaryk and was deeply impressed by his good sense and determination. But the most remarkable man I met through Sasha was Savinkov. He was a genial, likable fellow and we soon made friends. He was by way of being a terrorist and had assassinated the Grand Duke Serge and Trepov, the Chief of Police. When I asked him if it wasn't rather nervous work he laughed and said, "Oh, it's just a business like another." He had written a novel which I read with interest. He was a leader of the Menshevik party and a bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks. He said to me once in his casual way, "Either Lenin will stand me up in front of a wall and shoot me or I shall stand him in front of a wall and shoot him." He approved of my mission and we discussed over and over again what should be done. I arrived in Petrograd in August. It was not long before I came to the conclusion that Russia was doomed. The Germans were advancing; the Russian soldiers at the front were deserting in droves, the Navy was restless and there were stories bruited that officers had been cruelly butchered by their men. The people at large wanted peace. Everybody talked: nobody did anything. Masaryk was deeply pessimistic. I spent my mornings with my Russian teacher and long hours at night coding my somber impressions. If I had been sent to Russia six months sooner, I might have done something; as it was, I could only look on.
I forget if it was at the very end of October or at the beginning of November that I was sent for early one morning by Kerensky. He gave me a message to Lloyd George so secret that he would not put it in writing and asked me to go forthwith to London and deliver it in person. I agreed to go. I left that day on a train for Norway and at Oslo embarked on a destroyer which put me ashore, after a stormy passage, in the north of Scotland. I took a train to London. On arriving, I called up the Prime Minister's secretary and an appointment was made for me to see Lloyd George at Downing Street on the following morning. I found the Prime Minister waiting for me. He was very cordial. He told me how pleased he was to meet me and how much he had enjoyed my plays. Then he began to speak of the general state of things. He talked interestingly and with eloquence. Presently I received the impression, I don't exactly know for what reason, that he had an inkling of what I had to say to him and was determined not to let me say it. He went on talking. The only thing I vividly remember was his remark, "Whatever the result of this war, France will come out of it as a second class power." I didn't believe him. Now I know he was right. I had no notion then that a second war would bring the same fate to Britain.
I had taken the precaution to write out exactly what Kerensky had told me to say to Lloyd George and, interrupting him in the middle of a sentence, I took the short document I had in my pocket and handed it to him. He read it hastily and handed it back to me. "I can't do that," he said. It was not my business to argue. "What shall I say to Kerensky?" I asked. "Just that I can't do that," he repeated. I attempted to speak, but he rose to his feet and said, "I'm afraid I must bring this conversation to an end. I have a Cabinet meeting I must go to." He shook my hands with me warmly and again said how glad he was to have met me.
Back in my hotel I considered what I should do next. I supposed the only thing was to go back to Russia, but I didn't think I need make arrangements to do that for a day or two. I was not feeling at all well, I was coughing my head off, and my temperature was well above normal. I went to St. Thomas's Hospital and asked the secretary to give me the name of a lung specialist. The specialist examined me and told me what was the matter with me, which I knew already. "A sanatorium is the place for you, my boy," he said cheerily. It was all very well to say that, but I had to get back to Petrograd. Then the news came that the Bolsheviks had seized power and Kerensky had been overthrown. That settled me.
I dawdled about in London. One day I received a summons to go at a certain hour to 10 Downing Street. I went and was taken to a room where I found a number of men seated on each side of a long table. They looked very important. Though I recognized Rufus Isaacs7 who was in the chair, I knew no one there except Willie Wiseman, whom I saw with surprise because I thought he was still in America. I was asked to read a report I had written on my activities, such as they were, in Russia. I was nervous and afraid I would stammer, so I asked Willie to read it for me. When he had done, there was a pause and then it transpired why I had been summoned. With Russia out of the running, a plan had been evolved to safeguard Romania and the suggestion was that I should go there and do the difficult job that I had failed to do in Russia. I was assured that I should be provided with all possible help. I was taken aback. I was surprised to find that these important men seemed still to have confidence in me and I didn't want to let them down. Besides, the idea excited me. I thought, however, that it was only right, since I might crack up, to say that I was suffering from tuberculosis and the doctors advised me to go to a sanatorium, but if they could find no one more trustworthy to do the job, I was perfectly willing to risk it. Rufus Isaacs looked at me. He smiled. "In that case I don't think we ought to ask you to go," he said. "Go to your sanatorium and I hope you'll get well very soon." There was a faint murmur of approval and I retired.
A few days later I went up to Banchory in the north of Scotland, where there was the sanatorium I had been advised to go to, and was promptly put to bed. I stayed there for several weeks. By the spring I had so far recovered that the doctors agreed that I could leave the sanatorium for the summer on the understanding that I should return in the autumn. Syrie, who was back in England by then, came to Banchory to see me and we arranged to rent a house for the three summer months at some healthy place not too far from London. She found what was wanted, and I joined her when she had moved in with our daughter. The house was commodious and there was a large garden. I had a nice study in which I could work. During those three months I wrote the novel I had had in mind for so many years and called it "The Moon and Sixpence." We lived together amicably enough. Very occasionally, one or other of my old friends came for a day and a night to see me, but Syrie did not welcome them and they did not come again. There is one circumstance which at the time I regarded with a certain irony, but which now I think was pathetic. Syrie had received very little in the way of education, and it happened that a firm of publishers had issued and widely advertised a series of pamphlets by which people could educate themselves. Syrie bought them and for two or three weeks spent the mornings in bed diligently reading them; but after that she grew bored and threw them away.
We talked often about where we should settle down after my next sojourn in the sanatorium. Syrie wanted us to live in her house in Regent's Park, which she had rented, but it went against the grain with me to inhabit the house which Selfridge had bought for her and I insisted on our living in my house in Chesterfield Street. My old friend, Walter Payne, who had lived in it during my long absence from London, moved out and at the end of August, by which time our lease of the house in the country was at an end. We moved in for September and October, after which I was to go north. In October four German planes came over London and dropped their bombs. Syrie was in abject terror and in the hope of taking her mind off the bombing, and knowing how keen she was in redecorating the house, I took her to the stairs and put before her various ideas I had on the subject. I was none too pleased when I heard later that she had told her friends as an example of my brutality that I had forced her to remain on the stair when she was in imminent danger of being killed. At the end of October I went to Banchory and in the following spring returned to London with a clean bill of health. Syrie had in the meantime got rid of her house in Regent's Park. My house, however, turned out to be inconvenient: I had given up my writing room to Syrie as a bedroom for her, and to write had only a small room on the first floor looking out on the street, so after a while I sold the house in Chesterfield Street and bought one in Wyndham Place. It was while we lived there that Syrie, moved by some atavistic instinct to buy and sell, with the furniture she still had from the Regent's Park house, started a shop in Baker Street. She had great taste and it was an immediate success. It pleased her to go to the various auction rooms in London, pick up odds and ends for next to nothing and sell them at a handsome profit. "The Moon and Sixpence" was published in 1919 and was well received. In America it became a best seller. I have never kept a diary, and for those recollections I have had to trust to my memory; the facts are as I relate them, but the chronology is dubious. I have had to consult "Who's Who" to find out exactly when "The Moon and Sixpence" was published. I think it was in 1920 that I decided to go to China which I had for long hankered to visit. Once more I crossed the Atlantic and after spending a short time in New York, set out for the Far East. I picked up Gerald Haxton to go with me. I had thought he was dead. On my departure for Russia he had got a job in Java and from San Francisco sailed in a ship that was never heard of again. It was presumed to have sunk with all hands. In point of fact it had been captured by the German raider, Wolf, its cargo, the crew and the passengers taken on board the raider, and was then sunk. Crew and passengers were eventually taken to Germany and there held as prisoners of war. It was not till hostilities ceased that we learned they were alive. On my journey to Tahiti I had found Gerald of great service. Owing to my stammer I have suffered from a shyness which, even now in my old age, I have never been able to surmount. On a journey by sea, however long, I would never have spoken to anyone unless someone had first spoken to me. Gerald, with his vitality and good humor, knew everybody on board ship before we had been twenty-four hours at sea. But for him I should never have got the material on our journey to the South Seas that had enabled me to write the short stories which later I published in a volume called "The Trembling of a Leaf." I had not written short stories for twenty years; these I wrote with ease and pleasure. It seemed to me that this was a form that exactly suited me. I had always been something of a traveler, but I traveled because I was of a restless nature and enjoyed it. I began now to travel with the idea at the back of my mind that I might find material that would be of use to me. China was a delight. I kept notes and eventually published a little book called "On a Chinese Screen." From then on I went on a journey, with Gerald as my companion, every year. I went to Australia because I had in mind a novel, "The Narrow Corner," part of which took place in Sydney, and I have always liked to see for myself the scene of action of my stories. I spent a winter in Guatemala, Mexico and Cuba, and wrote some stories there.
I had found that on these long journeys of mine I could after five months no longer absorb impressions and so returned to England. Gerald went to France and Italy, where he stayed with friends till I wanted him again. Syrie's business had so far prospered that she was able to give up the shop in Baker Street and take commodious premises in Duke Street, at the corner of Grosvenor Square. She had made quite a reputation for herself and was given commissions to decorate houses not only in England, but also in America, to execute which she went now and then to New York. She not only had great taste, but also a quick eye for the opportune. On one occasion she was taken to see a Mrs. Philipson who had furnished her house at Sandgate entirely in white. Syrie found the novelty pleasing and, somewhat to Mrs. Philipson's annoyance, proceeded to decorate houses with white walls, white curtains, white carpets, white sofas, white armchairs; this for a while was the rage both in England and America and it ended only when people discovered that white became grubby and the house had to be redecorated. Some of Syrie's activities made me nervous. She was none too scrupulous in her dealings with customers. I was afraid she would get into trouble and I did not fancy the publicity that might ensue. I need not have worried. Syrie was prudent and on receiving a lawyer's letter would return the money that had been paid her and take back the fake that she had sold as an antique. Once she escaped prosecution only by a hair's breadth. On my return from China I brought her a long string of jade beads. She was pleased with it, as well as she might have been, for it was a beautiful thing. She insured it for a lot of money. She was in the habit of going to Paris to buy materials for some house she was decorating, and one evening, on coming back to London, she said "I don't know how to tell you, I'm absolutely distracted." "What's the matter?" I asked. She sobbed, "I've lost my jade string. I had it on. I was in the Louvre, matching some silks, the place was crowded, and suddenly I realized that I hadn't got my chain. I can only suppose that when I was so frightfully busy some thief managed to slip it off my neck." "I am sorry," I said; and I was, for it was lovely and unique. "Fortunately you'd insured it," I said. The insurance people paid up. About a year later one of the officials in the insurance company was in Paris and happened to stroll along the rue de la Paix. He stopped to look at the window of a jeweler's shop. The first thing he saw, handsomely presented, was the jade necklace. He went in and asked the salesman how they had come by it. He was told that it had been sold to them by Madame Maugham. Syrie might have gone to jail for that, but luckily the insurance people, perhaps not unaccustomed to the dishonesty of smart women, were willing to listen to reason. They consented to take no further steps if the insurance money were paid back with a small sum for legal costs.
We lived in Wyndham Place for some years. I used, when I was in London, to give small dinner parties to my literary friends. I enjoyed them and I think my guests did too; but they bored Syrie, and after dinner she would slip away to spend the rest of the evening with friends of her liking. In 1921 I produced "The Circle" which is generally considered my best play. One evening when Syrie and I were spending the evening alone she surprised me by saying, "It's funny that people say 'The Circle' is your best play. I wasn't very nice to you while you were writing it." She wasn't indeed. She would make me scenes that lasted till two or three in the morning, and I went to bed exhausted to get up in the morning to write amusing dialogue. One of Syrie's more frequent complaints was that she had no influence over me. In vain I protested that so far as I knew no one had any particular influence over me. She would not hear of it. "Even Barbara," she said, naming a friend I had had for twenty years, "has more influence over you than I have." I could not persuade her that she was wrong. I wondered why Syrie took so much to heart a matter that didn't seem to me of great moment, and presently I conceived an idea that seemed to offer something of an explanation. Syrie's women friends, whether kept woman or a woman attached for long years to a man who either could not or would not marry her, were ever haunted by a sense of insecurity. Men were fickle. So long as a woman maintained her influence over him, which, when it came down to brass tacks, meant being able to persuade him to do something he didn't want to do, she was safe. Moreover, the influence she had gave her a pleasant sense of power mingled with a faint, good-humored feeling of contempt for the man who could be so easily cajoled. But this is more guesswork and, I daresay, not very plausible.
I have recently found the rough copy of a letter I wrote to Syrie and shall insert it here. I do not know when, or from where, I wrote it; nor do I remember anything of Syrie's letter which occasioned mine. Mine is very badly written. I wrote it au courant de la plume in misery and exasperation. I hope the fair copy I made was written in a less slovenly manner, and properly punctuated; and it may be that I toned down some of my expressions. It ran as follows:
My dearest Syrie,
I have read your letter very carefully three times and since you have said I do not answer letters of this sort I think it better to answer this one, though I have hesitated to do so because I have feared it will give you pain, but it seems to me absurd to write at all unless I write quite honestly, and perhaps it is best to write after all since when we talk about things you cry very easily and my pain at seeing you cry prevents me from putting things plainly and truthfully. I have a hatred of causing pain which makes me cowardly and I am conscious that in the past I have often refrained from pointing out to you simple truths for this reason, which I think it would have been better for the happiness of both of us if you had been forced to face. And now if I say things to wound you I beg you to believe that it is with distress and reluctance.
I hardly know where to begin, but it is very plain that since we married we have neither of us been very happy. We were both anxious to be and we have both tried and done our best, but the result of it all has been that we have arrived at a pitch of misunderstanding which I think as well as you cannot be left as it is. You say that you hesitate to come back and I for my part must confess that I returned from Paris with a sinking heart. I did not know what reproaches I should have to put up with, what pinpricks and complaints. You see, as far as I am concerned I seem to live in an atmosphere of complaints which I have never been used to and which I cannot think are reasonable. You cannot be surprised if I say to myself: Why should I put up with all this bother and misery? I do not want to go back to the past, but you cannot have forgotten the circumstances under which we married. I think under these circumstances you should be very well satisfied if you get from your husband courtesy and consideration, kindness and affection; but really you cannot expect passionate love. I am afraid that you have never understood exactly how I looked upon the position in which I found myself then, and the emotion which overcomes you whenever we have approached the subject has made it impossible for me to put it to you plainly. I felt that I had been put in a position which I did not for a moment anticipate was a possibility. I knew that I had made a perfect fool of myself, but I thought I had also been made a perfect fool of. I knew that you loved me, but I felt that you loved me for yourself rather than for me. You were a little regardless perhaps of my interests and my good and my happiness. I am afraid this will irritate you because you have always lived and acted on the assumption that if people didn't want what you wanted they were treating you cruelly and odiously, but, believe me, I say it not to irritate you but because that is how it seems to me. I married you because I thought you loved me and I could not bear to think that in a life in which I did not find much to praise you should suffer for something which was innocent. I married you because I was prepared to pay for my folly and selfishness, and I married you because I thought it the best thing for your happiness and for Elizabeth's welfare, but I did not marry you because I loved you, and you were only too well aware of that. Why now should you torment me with reproaches that I do not love you? When you married me it was with your eyes open and you accepted that–it is something that I bitterly regret, I promise you, I wish with all my heart I loved you–and yet you treat me as though I had caused you a wilful injury. I think that under all these circumstances your first thought should have been to make the tie so light that I should not feel it. I do not think you should have made many demands. I think it would have been tactful to accept all I did for you, and honestly I did a great deal, with gratefulness and ask nothing of me but what I was able to give willingly. But that was not your way. I have a recollection, as I look back on these years, of a woman constantly asking and never, never satisfied. All I did for you you took as your right and used it as a jumping ground to ask for something more. I did everything I could for you and when I couldn't do what you wanted I do not feel I deserved the hard and cruel things you said to me. You want my affection and I have given it to you–you do not know how much–but you seem to have done all you could to kill it. Do you know that no one in all my life has said the things you have said to me? No one has ever complained of me and nagged me and harassed me as you have. How can you expect me to preserve my affection for you? You have terrorized me. Just think that at the age of forty-six, a strong, healthy enough man, I should often have to go and have a cocktail in order to face you. My dear, I was forty-three when I married you. I was too old to be treated in that way. I am too sensitive. You have lived all your life among people who say the most awful things to one another, but I haven't. It humiliates me. It makes me miserable. You complain that I can't talk to you any more, but you killed my pleasure in conversation. You were always looking for a personal application in the things I said quite carelessly and making me little scenes about it, so that I learned to take the greatest care that nothing I said to you could give rise to any misconstruction. Until at last you have drive me to talk to you practically about nothing but frocks and furniture. And if you knew how sick I am of both these subjects. When I go to parties I have to watch my words with the greatest care in case I may say anything that will get back to you and that you can twist into something offensive to you. Can you wonder that I don't care to go? Oh, my dear, this absorption in yourself, what torture it is to you and what a torture it is to everyone connected with you. You resent the fact that I go on long journeys. You say there is nothing you long more than to do so, though when your first husband took you on them you were bored to death, and during the years you lived on your own with the one exception of a trip to see the Blakes in Tangiers, you just made the round of London, Paris, Biarritz and the Riviera. I venture to think that your eagerness to go on long journeys is not very sincere. You are very pleasant to travel with and if I went as a globe trotter, I should enjoy taking you with me, but I go with a special object, often to places under conditions impossible for a woman to go to and you unfortunately get between me and the impressions I am gathering. I go to seek ideas and when I am with you I get none. I am very sorry, but that is the brutal fact. You resent also that I do not take you into my life, as you put it; you feel that I leave you out of things. I am truly sorry that you should have this feeling, but you should surely remember that I was forty-three when we married. I was highly specialized, trained to a certain calling, it was hopeless to try and change myself. You were not very young either and you were specialized too, in a different direction; do not think it unkind of me if I say you had specialized in pleasure. You tried to enter in my life as Madeleine W. thought she could acquire taste when she lived with Arthur Cohen, and you thought you had only to wish to become artistic and literary. I am afraid it is not as easy as that. You lacked what was essential, an interest in the things of the mind and the spirit, and your pretenses could deceive nobody. My poor Syrie, when people are talking about books and you say, "How extraordinary," in different tones, do you really think you persuade them that you are suing words that have any meaning to you? Heaven knows I have tried to get you to take an interest in various things. In games, but you never cared anything about them; in books, but you read only because you have nobody at the moment to talk to; even in knitting. I remember how, thinking your affection might induce you to make a scarf and so get you into a habit which would rest you and ease your nerves, I bought wool for you and needles. After playing with the idea for a few weeks you bought me a scarf. I remember how eagerly I urged you to work at St. Dunstan's when you suggested it. You did, but very, very soon grew tired of it. You see, you have no resources of your own. It seems to me tragic. I am very sorry, but how can I help it. I have often thought that your attitude towards life is shown by the way you take a man's arm. Most women just rest their hand on it and the gesture is pleasant and friendly, but you throw your whole weight on the man so that in a little while he grows tired and releases himself. Because you have no resources of your own you want to adopt mine, but how can one do that? It is impossible. Mind, I have no word of disapproval because you take no very intelligent interest in art and literature. Plenty of excellent and nice people don't, and it is pure priggishness to demand it, but why not lead the life you like and in which you are a success? You like parties and certain kinds of people, well, why not? Why can't you go your way and lead the life you're used to and let me lead mine? You are constantly saying that you must have this and must have that, but do you ever think of what you offer? I wonder if it occurs to you ever what a man has a right to ask of his wife and how little you give. When it comes down to brass tacks about all you do is to sit about in beautiful clothes and look picturesque. It isn't very much, is it? Yes, you give me affection, but you are always asking for a return; you treat it as a commodity for which you are determined to have a fitting compensation. Do not thinkI am not grateful for all your love and sensible of your kindness. That is the worst of a letter like this. The mere fact of putting things down puts them out of all proportion. And you can surely believe in my affection. If it had not been very great two or three weeks ago, before you went to Le Touquet, that was the only thing that held me back. Believe me, I have never been nearer suicide than I was then. It was then that I made up my mind that at my age and in my circumstances a man who let himself be as miserable as I was, was a fool and deserved no pity. You know what I said to you then. I meant it. There are only two courses open to us now. You must either accept the claim I made then for freedom to go and come when I liked, for as long as I liked and as often as I liked in peace and without scenes; or else separation. Really I am not strong enough to live a life of unhappiness, scenes and complaints, I haven't the physical strength, I should only die; I have said little enough of Elizabeth, but you know how constantly she is in my thoughts, and how much I have done in these last years for her sake. For her sake, as well as for yours and mine, I should like us to continue to live together if you can only bring yourself to a willing compromise.8
I don't remember whether Syrie answered my letter. We continued to live together. She had begun to have social aspirations and was no longer satisfied with the house we had in Wyndham Place. She persuaded me to sell it and to buy in its place a large, imposing one in Bryanston Square. We gave parties and went to parties. They were gay, but not much to my taste. I remember one in particular because owing to its great success, it had an influence on Syrie's later designs. The hostess was a handsome woman, no longer in her first youth, who had led a tempestuous, but, as the pearls and diamonds she wore suggested, lucrative past. The other women were young and pretty. The men were of two sorts, middle-aged or elderly, stout and genial–the sugar daddies, and younger men, stockbrokers, ex-guardees, slim, tall and elegant, who were there on the chance of having a bit of fun on the cheap. There was a raffish peer who had squandered his patrimony and was looking for a ladylike woman who in return for being made a countess was prepared to pay his debts. I have never had a gift for small talk; I was a fish out of water. As I had work to do, I slipped away at midnight and left Syrie to come home in the small hours of the morning.
One day, out a blue sky, she said to me, "If you divorced me you wouldn't try to take my child away from me, would you?" She could not have told me more plainly that she had a lover. This did not surprise me since one of her bosom friends had already apprised me of the fact. In point of fact she had not one, but two. I knew them both and had a very poor opinion of either. They didn't last long. By this time Syrie had made so much money as a decorator that she was able to buy a piece of land at Le Touquet and build a house on it which she furnished with her usual good taste. Le Touquet at that time, owing to its easy access from England, its casino and golf links, had become very fashionable. To have a house there was a social asset. Syrie's American clientele obliged her to spend long periods in the United States. On one such occasion, when I was on my way back from the Far East and had written to Syrie in good time to announce my arrival in London, I received, when the ship docked at Marseilles, a letter from her secretary to say that Syrie had let the house in Bryanston Square and the tenants were not moving out for a fortnight. I was for the time homeless. I had spent the best of of the homeward journey in bed with a recurrence of the malaria from which I had nearly died in Bangkok. Ill and having nowhere to go, I went to Aix en Provence to recuperate. The house at Le Touquet was Syrie's property and I went there as a guest. It occurred to me that it would be pleasant to have a house of my own and the idea had no sooner occurred to me than I decided to put it into effect. I could do nothing about it just then and on Syrie's return to England I joined her. It was not till a year later, when I was once more at a loose end, that I went down to the Riviera to see if I could find something to suit me. The agents showed me house after house, but not one that pleased me. At last, in despair, they took me to see a house on Cap Ferrat that had been vacant for a long time because prospective purchasers jibbed at the cost of making it habitable.
Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a very clever man of business; he bought the whole of Cap Ferrat for, it is said, forty thousand pounds. He built himself a palatial residence in a large park and three houses for his three mistresses–A large one for mistress number one, a smaller one for mistress number two and a still smaller one for mistress number three. He was a very superstitious man and dreaded the possibility of dying without receiving the Sacrament of Extreme Unction at the hands of a priest. He engaged an elderly ecclesiastic, a bishop, who had been coadjutor to Cardinal Lavigerie in French Africa and was now retired; he gave him a handsome stretch of land and provided him with the means to build a house near enough to his own residence so that in case of an emergency a carriage could bring him in five minutes and the King, having made his peace with God, could die in peace. The Bishop had spent most of his life in Algeria and he built a Moorish house. There were horseshoes windows, a horseshoe colonnade in the patio, horseshoe columns in the drawing room, a great cupola on the roof, and, by some strange aberration of taste, a huge Renaissance portico on the side of the house that faced the sea. I saw that all these horrors were only lath and plaster and by scraping them off I could have a plain square house. I made an offer and it was accepted. I signed the necessary documents and paid the money on the eve of my departure for America whither I was going to produce a play. When I told Syrie what I had done she received my news in icy silence.
On my return to London I put my house in the hands of an architect to do what I wanted. By this time Syrie had grown dissatisfied with the house in Bryanston Square. She had in the course of years acquired a large circle of friends in the monde où l'on s'amuse and it was unsuited for the parties she hankered to give. She found a house in the King's Road, Chelsea, with an adjunct round the corner of a small house in Glebe Place. She asked me if I would sell the house in Bryanston Square and let her have the money to buy these two properties which she could then throw into one. I had no sooner consented than she found a purchaser for the house in Bryanston Square. I made the stipulation that I should be allowed to take my bedroom furniture, which I liked, not because it was pretty, but because I was used to it, my books, the theatrical pictures I had been collecting for many years and the various objets d'art that I had bought on my travels. I sent all these belongings of mine to Cap Ferrat and in due course Syrie moved into her new house. I spent the spring there. I had been allotted a room on the top floor which was nice enough, but had the disadvantage of being also the "gentlemen's cloakroom," so that when there was a party I had to put away all my writing things. Syrie suggested that as an office I should take a small flat which she would decorate for me and where I could write in peace. The idea did not appeal to me. With her usual ingenuity she had managed so to arrange the space at her command to make a spacious ballroom. As a housewarming party she gave a crowded dance. It was a great success. Syrie was an admirable hostess, amiable, lively and charming. The arrangements were perfect and everyone enjoyed himself. Syrie was triumphant. When the season ended she went to Le Touquet and I to the Riviera. We parted on amicable terms. Though a great deal remained to be done in my house and the workmen were still busy, I was able to live in it. When I heard a few weeks later that Syrie was staying at Antibes with an old friend of hers, Elsie Mendl,9 I wrote and asked her to come to lunch with me and see the house. She wrote back to say she would be glad to come and named a day. I sent a car to fetch her. We lunched tête-à-tête, and after lunch I took her over the premises. She was becomingly appreciative. After she had seen everything that was to be seen she said she had to get back to Antibes and I put her in my car. An hour or two later the car came back with a note from her. In it she said that she wished to divorce me and hoped I would put no obstacles in the way. It took me by surprise. I thought they matter over for a day and then wrote to say I would do what she wished if she would be satisfied with a French divorce. This I said because divorce in France is a simple matter and there is no publicity attached to it. Syrie agreed and the lawyers went to work. I had been in the habit of giving her three thousand pounds a year and as she lived rent free that was enough, even without the money she earned as an interior decorator, for her to live in comfort. Now I settled on her twenty-four hundred pounds a year, which was what Henry Wellcome had allowed her on their separation, and six hundred a year on her daughter. I gave her besides the house in the King's Road, fully furnished, and a Rolls-Royce, so she did not do so badly. The divorce went through without a hitch. Syrie continued to give large and successful parties. Her dances were in high favor and many people thought they were the best ever given in London. Invitations were sought after; indeed, on once occasion, the Duke of Kent, to whom on a journey across the Atlantic I had taught the elements of bridge, asked me why I had never invited him. I did not think it discreet to say that it was not in my province to do so.
From then on I saw Syrie but four or five times and then only to deal with business matters or for some function at which it was necessary for both of use to be present. She sold the house in King's Road after a while and bought or rented first one and then another in a more fashionable neighborhood. I presume she sold the house at Le Touquet at a handsome profit. The last years of her life were spent in a flat in Park Lane. She died in her later seventies and a memorial service was held for her in Grosvenor Chapel.
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