Sir Richard Burton's Wife: The Gypsy's Prophecy

VOLUME 167

NUMBER 5

MAY 1941

BY JEAN BURTON

A WOMAN as bravely colorful and intense in her own right as Isabel L. Burton should never be known merely as someone’s or anyone’s wife, but in this case she was the one to insist upon it. ‘I wish I were a man,’she declared with her usual emphasis. ‘If I were, I would be Richard Burton; but, being only a woman, I would be Richard Burton’s wife.’

It took her ten years to achieve it, but she did not rest until she was Richard Burton’s wife. And thereafter she kept indefatigably on — though this second feat took longer, another twenty-seven years to be exact — until she was Sir Richard Burton’s wife.

She was nineteen when she met this dubiously regarded adventurer home from India and already known to be under a mysterious cloud at the War Office. He was of disquieting reputation and still more disquieting appearance, but from that moment Isabel was a creature obsessed. ‘I have got to live with him night and day,’ she wrote her mother in a desperately scored and underscored letter, ‘for all my life.' And her idolization changed only to grow. When she wrote her enormous Life of Richard it was not dedicated but ‘consecrated’ to his memory: ‘To My Earthly Master, Who Is Waiting for Me on Heaven’s Frontiers.’ She even apologized for mentioning her own name so often beside his: ‘I have never needed anyone to point out to me that my husband was on a pedestal far above me, or anybody else in the world. I have known it from 1850 to 1893, from a young girl to an old widow, i.e., for forty-three years.’

She could put it that way if she chose, but she was the only woman in England who would have considered it in any way an enviable fate to follow his fortunes during those forty-three years.

Isabel Arundell was born in London at 4 Great Cumberland Place in 1831, two years after the Catholic Emancipation Act had reinstated her family after one hundred and forty years of rigid exclusion from English public life. Socially, though her father was the younger son of a younger son and not wealthy, she was vastly above the Burtons, for the Arundells of Wardour were of the great world — more specifically, of course, of the great Catholic world. Arundel Castle is still the seat of the Dukes of Norfolk, England’s foremost Catholic peers, and

Copyright 1941, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

The impressive Arundell name notwithstanding, the distressing fact could not be denied that Isabel’s father, always financially cramped, was engaged in trade. The family’s poverty was strictly of the genteel variety, and its chief consequence was that Isabel’s strong-minded mother directed her children’s thoughts the more firmly towards their illustrious ancestry. But Isabel, for one, needed no urging.

When she was ten, Isabel was sent to the Convent of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at New Hall in Chelmsford, where for six years she was a happy schoolgirl. She always retained the kindest memories of this convent, and many times during her wifehood and widowhood returned to it for retreats. This was the extent of her formal schooling. When she was sixteen her parents warnted her at home with them, and home she went.

Home by this time was in Essex, at Furze Hall near Ingatestone, where the unprosperous family was retrenching and gathering its forces as well, for the imminent period when something would have to be done about the girls’ prospects. Isabel remembered a white farmhouse buried in bushes, ivy, and flowers; stables and kennels; a few woods and fields. ‘The place could boast no grandeur,’ said Isabel modestly, ‘but it was my home, I passed my childhood there, and loved it.’

Despite the idyllic quality of these reminiscences, Isabel at sixteen was developing into a fearless, passionately imaginative, adventure-craving girl of tireless energy and increasingly stubborn independence. Her tall body was built for the coordination and endurance that later stood her in such good stead, and it was hardened the year through by outdoor exercise with her brothers such as few young misses of the day were allowed— in the winter with ‘sledges, skating, and sliding’ and in the summer with ‘scampering all over the country with long poles and jumping over the hedges.’ With sick and injured animals she was as good as a vet, while as for squeamishness she never knew the meaning of the word. But all this healthy, hearty outdoor life, though it absorbed her physical energy, could not dispel an increasingly potent daydream wherein she would pursue unspecified but thrilling enterprises in some exotic and far-away region whence she would return (a) famous, (b) dominant, and (c), above all, quite different from anyone she had so far encountered. And more and more intensely she wished (it was inevitable) that she had been a man. Now she made a solemn resolution: her life was not going to remain insignificant and uninteresting one single day longer than she could help.

How the change was to be brought about remained vague, but she did contrive for herself an increasing degree of privacy — no small feat in that overflowing household — the better to ponder the possibilities. Her abounding extrovert enthusiasm for action, excitement, and daring was already exhibiting its obverse side: ‘I passed much time in the woods reading and contemplating.’ She went straight for what she wanted: ‘Disraeli’s Tancred and similar occult books were my favourites; but Tancred, with its glamour of the East, was the chief of them.’ It remained her choice always, and indeed this peculiar book gave to all her thoughts, so to speak, their pitch and tone to such an extent that when she went to Damascus as Richard’s wife she could truthfully say, ‘I felt as if I had lived that life for years. ... It [Tancred] lived in my saddle-pocket throughout my Eastern life. I almost know it by heart, so that when I came to Bethany, or the Lebanon, and to Mukhtara — when I found myself in a Bedawi camp, or amongst the Maronite and Druze strongholds, or in the society of Fakredeens — nothing surprised me.’

But at the time she was aware of no more than a confused yearning for ‘gypsies, Bedawin Arabs, and everything Eastern and Mystic; and especially a wild and lawless life.’ And the best substitute available in Essex was to take to the Stonymoore woods by herself.

Isabel’s predilection for going her own way was to take her future out of Mrs. Arundell’s control for good and all. Preposterously enough, this was brought about by nothing more or less than an old-fashioned gypsy prophecy.

As it happened, the prophecy was literally fulfilled, by one of those coincidences anyone is free to explain as he likes. Of more significance is the point that, whether it had come true in just that way or not, the whole tenor of it had utterly and conclusively captured Isabel’s imagination so that she could never thereafter have accepted a life which did not in some degree resemble her jealously guarded vision of what awaited her. Isabel’s account of her experience was this: —

Very often, instead of going to the woods, I used to go down a certain green lane; and if there were any oriental gypsies there I would go into their camp and sit for an hour or two with them. I was strictly forbidden to associate with them, but it was my delight. . . . Wild horses would not have kept me out of the camps of the oriental, yet English-named tribes of Burton, Cooper, Stanley, Osbaldiston. . . . My particular friend was Hagar Burton, a tall, slender, distinguished woman who had much influence in her tribe. . . . The last day I saw Hagar Burton in her camp she cast my horoscope and wrote it in Romany. The horoscope was translated to me by Hagar. The most important part of it was this: ‘You will cross the sea, and be in the same town with your Destiny and know it not. Every obstacle will rise up against you, and such a combination of circumstances that it will require all your courage, energy and intelligence to meet them. . . . You will bear the name of our tribe, and be right proud of it. You will be as we are, but far greater than we. Your life is all wandering, change, and adventure. One soul in two bodies in life or death, never long apart. Show this to the man you take for your husband. — HAGAR BURTON’

This was solace for the prosaic fact that she was entering upon the most unattractive period of her girlhood. ‘I was tall, plump, and meant to be fair, but was always tanned and sunburnt.’ Also, to her mother’s outspoken disapproval, from her gypsy tastes she preferred a picturesque toilet to a merely smart one. Isabel added defensively at this point that she had large, dark blue, earnest eyes, and long black eyelashes and eyebrows; beautiful hair, very long, thick, and soft, with five shades in it, and of a golden brown; very white regular teeth, and very small hands and waist; but none of this made up for her being too fat to slip into what was usually called ‘our stock size.’ She used to envy ‘maypole, broomstick girls,’ who could dress much prettier than she could. All together, it was a familiar enough state, but. none the less painful to live through, and only the promise scrawled on Hagar’s twist of paper sustained her.

II

In 1849, Isabel’s debut at Almack’s (‘which was then very exclusive’) was most auspicious. Her own description of the event is typical: —

The scene was dazzlingly brilliant to me as I entered. The grand staircase and antechamber were decked with garlands, and festoons of white and gold muslin and ribbons. The blaze of lights, the odour of flowers, the perfumes, the diamonds, and the magnificent dresses of the cream of the British aristocracy smote upon my senses; all was new to me, and all was sweet. Julian’s band played divinely.

She herself wore white tarlatan over white silk, ‘the first skirt looped up to my knee with a blush rose,’ her hair ‘tressed in an indescribable fashion by Alexandre, and decked with blush roses. I had no ornaments; but I really looked very well, and was proud of myself.’ Her mother was showing a quite new side to her nature these days, and at first Isabel innocently marveled at the change. ‘One may think how vain and incredulous I was, when I overheard someone telling my mother that I had been quoted as the new beauty at his club. Fancy, poor ugly me!’

Her parents had taken it easily for granted that she would marry into the Old Catholic cousinhood without much delay, but, as the season wore on, Mrs. Arundell was chagrined to discover that this smooth arrangement had struck a snag. Isabel was proving obstinately uninterested in eligible young men. In London as in Essex, in fact, her imagination was busy with quite another species of male, and the diary of this early Victorian debutante began to receive singular confidences: —

As God took a rib out of Adam and made a woman of it, so do I, out of a wild chaos of thought, form a man unto myself. . . . This fastidiousness has protected me and kept me from fulfilling the vocation of my sex — breeding fools and ‘chronicling small beer.’ . . . My ideal is about six feet in height; he Las not an ounce of fat on him; he has broad and muscular shoulders, a powerful, deep chest; he is a Hercules of manly strength. He has black hair, a brown complexion, a clever forehead, sagacious eyebrows, large, black, wondrous eyes — those strange eyes you dare not take yours from off them — with long lashes. He is a soldier and a man; he is accustomed to command and to be obeyed. . . .

I speak of the ideal man ’tis true, and some may mock and say, ‘Where is the mate for such a man to be found?’ But there are ideal women too. Such a man only will I wed. I love this myth of my girlhood — for myth it is — next to God; and I look to the star that Hagar the gypsy said was the star of my destiny, the morning star, which is the place I allot to my earthly god, because the ideal seems too high for this planet . . . and may never be found here. But if I find such a man, and afterwards discover he is not for me, then I will never marry. . . .

‘And if he marries somebody else,’ added Isabel abruptly, as a more hideous possibility occurred to her, ‘I will become a sister of charity of St, Vincent de Paul.’

On this note the season drew to its unfruitful close. By August the baffled Mrs. Arundell, her resources exhausted in more senses than one, felt the need of change of air, sea bathing, French masters to finish her children’s education, and economy. Accordingly — with her husband, Isabel, and the younger Arundells — she set off for Boulogne, city of debts. Their house in the Haute Ville was barnlike and furnished chiefly with bellows and brass candlesticks; Isabel, who had dreamed so much of travel, grumbled largely at her first experience of it. She did not like the town, she did not like the food, and she used to lie down in the afternoons on the shiny horsehair sofa and cry herself to sleep. ‘I felt so sorry for us all.’

When she did emerge and begin to look about her and cultivate acquaintances, they turned out to be of a class calculated to make her mother swoon. The most interesting people in Boulogne, she declared annoyingly, were the poissardes, or fisherwomen, who had a queen named Carolina, with whom she struck up a great, friendship. (She had found a Hagar all over again.) Thenceforth as much time as she could manage was spent surreptitiously with Carolina, or, if Carolina were occupied, with the shrimping girls (‘as vulgar as Billingsgate and as wild as red Indians, with their clothes kilted nearly up to their waists and nets over their backs’).

Otherwise her only diversion was when Mrs. Arundell would collect her daughters and walk them sedately up and down the Grande Rue or the Ramparts, where the local English colony lounged of an afternoon.

The Arundells lingered on in Boulogne for two years, which conveys the measure of their extremity. Isabel found it dreary to the point of despair. ‘Mother kept us terribly strict, and this was a great stimulant to do wild things; and though we never did anything terrible, we did what we had better have left alone. For instance, we girls learned to smoke.'

After a desultory fashion the girls studied French and music at the Convent du Sacré C&3339;eur next door. They were not allowed to go out alone except on the Ramparts, — ostensibly to do their reading, — but they kept their eyes open and knew more than Mrs. Arundell suspected. Perhaps even the memory of Hagar had dimmed. But it was just when her life seemed most unendurable that Isabel was for a time ‘in the same town with her Destiny and knew it not.’ And in due course, ‘one day, when we were on the Ramparts, the vision of my awakening brain came towards me.’

Considering the meticulous exactitude with which he met her specifications, this must have been literally how Richard appeared to her. ’He was five feet eleven inches in height, very broad, thin, and muscular; he had very dark hair; black, clearly defined, sagacious eyebrows; a brown, weather-beaten complexion; straight Arab features; a determined-looking mouth and chin, nearly covered by an enormous black moustache. . . . He had a fierce, proud, melancholy expression; and when he smiled, he smiled as though it hurt him, and looked with impatient contempt at things generally.’ And in final proof of identification there were his famous ‘gypsy eyes — those eyes which looked you through, glazed over, and saw something behind.’ No one ever described Richard without some such reference as this, and there is no doubt that they did produce an extremely memorable and compelling impression on all classes and varieties of people. There is equally little doubt that Richard was at some pains that it should be so.

At any rate, ‘he looked at me as though he read me through and through in a moment, and started a little,’ reported the entranced Isabel. ‘I was completely magnetized, and when we had got a little distance away, I turned to my sister, and whispered to her, “That man will marry me.’”

Here again it is not necessary to lean too heavily on Hagar’s prophecy. Richard was a man at whom people invariably turned to look (he saw to that); and on his part he must have been caught by Isabel’s intent, startled, blueeyed stare of something like recognition. If Boulogne was dull for her, it was a thousand times more so for him, so it was not surprising that he made it his business to be on the Ramparts again the next day at the same time. ‘And he followed us,’ said Isabel breathlessly, ‘and chalked up, “May I speak to you?” leaving the chalk on the wall; so I took up the chalk and wrote back, “No; mother will be angry”; and mother found it, and was angry; and after that we were st ricter prisoners than ever.’

It was some weeks before they encountered each other again, through a cousin of Mr. Arundell’s who had a pretty girl of his own. ‘ Richard (agony!) was flirting with the daughter.’ But when for the first time they were formally introduced it seemed to her that omen was being piled on omen, for ‘his name made me start. Like a flash came back the prophecy of Hagar Burton, “You wall bear the name of our tribe.” ... I thrilled through and through.’

From that point Isabel was lost. She went through the motions of living, but in a chronically bemused state, inventing any excuse to be where she could see him or hear the sound of his deep voice; turning red and pale, hot and cold, dizzy and faint, sick and trembling (her mother and doctor prescribed for migraine); wearing a scrap of paper with his handwriting next her heart; putting away, never to be worn again, the sash and gloves his hands had touched in their one waltz: ‘that was a Night of nights; he spoke to me several times’ — in short, going through genteel hell. She dwelt upon the price she would be willing to pay for such bliss. ‘I asked myself then if I would sacrifice anything and everything for Richard, and the only thing that I found I could not sacrifice for him would be God.’

At the same time she had to admit that there seemed no immediate demand for any sacrifice, great or small. Richard was barely conscious of her existence, and certainly ‘I could not push myself forward or attract his notice. It would be unmaidenly — unworthy.’ She was almost glad when Mrs. Arundell at length signified that they might as well return to England, for by now she would have welcomed any change. Isabel debated painfully with herself as to whether it would be permissible to say good-bye to Richard too. She decided against it, so that he probably did not even know when she left Boulogne.

But, once in London, her mother set about the quest for a suitable husband for Isabel with renewed determination, and instantly Isabel fled as before to her diary: —

I could not live like a vegetable in the country with a good and portly husband (I detest fat men!) with a broad-brimmed hat and a large stomach. . . . God help me! A dry crust, privations, pain, danger with him I love would be better. Let me go with the husband of my choice to battle, nurse him in his tent, follow him under the fire of ten thousand muskets. I would be his companion through hardship and trouble, nurse him if wounded, work for him in his tent, prepare his meals when faint, his bed when weary, and be his guardian angel of comfort — a felicity too exquisite for words!

Two more years went by when — at twenty-three! — a fresh nightmare beset her: namely, the imminent approach of old age. ‘My beaux jours will pass away, and my Ideal Lover will not then think me worth his while.’ Wildly unhappy, self-dramatizing, too juvenile and too mature by turns, she filled book after book of the small pages. In 1854 she summed up her feelings in a vehement outburst: —

How worthless I should be to any other man but Richard Burton! I should love Richard’s wild, roving, vagabond life. ... I am sure I am not born for a jog-trot life. . . . Why, with spirits, brains, and energies, are women to exist upon worsted work and household accoimts? It makes me sick, and I will not do it.

Isabel meant it. She meant it enough to hold out against her mother’s commands and entreaties for another seven years, and with absolutely nothing to sustain her but her own flaming inner conviction that this was not for her. Of Richard’s whereabouts she had at first no knowledge beyond what she could piece together from the newspapers. One year he had been briefly in England, but she did not learn of it until he had left again for the Crimea.. For all she knew, Richard did not so much as remember her name. There could not conceivably have been a more one-sided infatuation. And all the time, as Mrs. Arundell never ceased to remind her with mounting anger and incomprehension, her marriageable years were slipping by.

III

Richard’s childhood had been grim, his young manhood turbulent, but from totally different backgrounds he and Isabel emerged with a surprising number of ambitions in common.

Briefly to sketch his life to the point where it converged with Isabel’s, he was born in 1821 at Barham House, the home of his maternal grandparents. His father was Joseph Netterville Burton, an Anglo-Irish Colonel in the 36th Regiment. Richard’s father had married money, and in consequence soon gave up soldiering to settle down to a full-time career of hypochondria. He was a tall, sallow, rather striking-looking man, with the notably dark and piercing eyes that Richard inherited.

Much was written later regarding Richard’s so-called Oriental cast of features, and there are esoteric Theosophical speculations extant as to this and indeed as to the whole story of his and Isabel’s affinity. Though ingenious, these are beside the point. Richard could look equally convincing, varying with costume and make-up, as a Hindu, an Arab, a Chinese, or a respectable English squire. For his Oriental impersonations he had the useful foundation of the singular eyes before mentioned, high cheekbones, and a skin deeply tanned long before he ever saw India or Africa; his Aunt Georgina remembered him as a child lying on his back one broiling day in France and telling her ecstatically, ‘How I love a bright burning sun!’ And then his hair, originally red, turned jetblack as he grew older — which, it seems, was also fraught with occult significance of some kind.

Richard had one brother and one sister. In their disorderly childhood they were three against the world and very close, but their lives soon diverged. His sister, Maria Catherine Eliza, in 1845 married General Sir Henry William Stisted of Lucknow fame and became very much the haughty Mem Sahib. His brother, Edward, gentlest of the three, was the one marked for tragedy, losing speech and memory after suffering a head injury in India. He was a Major in the Queen’s Regiment.

Richard never knew a time when they had a settled home or the slightest sense of security or permanence; the family was forever bad-temperedly on the march, scouring Europe for that elusive spot where the Colonel thought he might be able to breathe. Tutors, when there were any, were broken-down drunken Irish clergymen. By the time he was ten, Richard had learned to defend himself fairly adequately against them by his fists and his wits. When he was sent back to England for a short interval of school, it turned out to be in the worst Dickensian tradition; he left it tough, stoical, and far too tight-lipped for his age. Fifty years later he still remembered a certain Miss Morgan who occasionally visited them on the Continent with his Aunt Georgina as ‘ the only one who ever spoke to us children as if we were reasonable beings, instead of threatening with the usual parental brutality of those days.’

It is easy enough to understand what it meant to him to find himself the fixed centre at least of Isabel’s world. He wrote once: ‘It is a great thing, when you have won a battle, or explored Central Africa, to be welcomed home by some little corner of the Great World, which takes a pride in your exploits. In the contrary condition you are a waif, a stray; you are a blaze of light without a force. Nobody outside your own fireside cares.’

In Italy, at any rate, he knew only Italian medical students and his father’s Irish grooms.

As the boys passed out of adolescence, the situation at home grew more unwholesome still: ‘Father was perfectly happy as long as he was the only man in the house, but the presence of younger males irritated him. He could no longer use the rod, but he could make himself very unpleasant with his tongue. ... It was evident that the Burton family was ripe for a breakup.’

When the family finally did break up at Lucca there were few regrets on either side. ‘Italians marveled at the Spartan nature of the British mother,’ remarked Richard, ‘who after fifteen years could so easily part with her children at the cost of a lachrymose last embrace, and watering her prandial beefsteak with tears.’

There were items on the credit side of this upbringing, of course. First came physical endurance and adaptability, and second, languages, including a variety of patois. Richard was an expert at swimming, marksmanship, boxing, and fencing, showing great promise in the last and at one time having Cavalli of Naples as fencing master. He knew all there was to know about horses, from blacksmithing to vetting; was a selftaught falconer; knew first aid; could sew, patch, and repair equipment; and could find his way around any kind of city or country. He had paid his initial visits to the prostitutes of Naples and Rome with the medical students, and had even had one tearful experience of falling in love.

When he was nineteen he made up his mind to join the army. At the same moment the Colonel put forward an inspiration of his own — both his sons were to become clergymen. Edward was to go to Cambridge, Richard to Oxford; both were to take honors, and he wanted no arguments. He hurried them over to England before his ardor had time to cool, entered Richard at Trinity for the next term, and went back to Italy rubbing his hands.

It is as well to pass over the whole Oxford episode. Richard himself said that the devil entered into him there, and, whatever his provocations, the fact remains that no more tiresomely boorish, violent, and unmannerly misfit was ever found within its portals. But he kept his main object well in view: with a fixed determination to get out to India he looked for classes in Hindustani or Arabic, and, when he found none, impatiently attacked Arabic by himself, evolving a system of his owm that cut ruthlessly across the difficulties. Like his father, he was always stony broke and he made few friends. He hated the English and elaborately cultivated everything that was foreign in his appearance and dress (though he had to yield in the little matter of mustachios).

He would probably not have lasted at Oxford even as long as he did had it not been for the London vacations he spent ostensibly at his grandmother’s house in Cumberland Street, but for the most part doing the town with Edward, down from Cambridge, or pursuing his owm solitary interests. Thus he worked further at Hindustani with Duncan Forbes and sought out John Varley to have his horoscope cast. A sidelight on his preoccupations at this period is afforded in the casual note: ‘It is curious how little London knows of what goes on in the next-door house. A book on Alchemy was printed, and the curious fact came out that at least one hundred people in London were studying the philosopher’s stone.’

One long vacation was spent on the Continent. The Burtons had temporarily come to rest in Wiesbaden, which did not hold Richard long. He moved on to Heidelberg, where he had heard of gory student duels fought with a straight pointless blade called the Schlager. Before going back to England he brought up the army question once more with his father. In the general rage and confusion that ensued, Richard was joined by Edward and they signed up together, as lowly cadets. Richard chose a regiment bound for Bombay. He sailed in 1842 — without a father’s blessing but with the last-minute parting gifts of a bull terrier and a wig, the Colonel having decided that in a hot country the bright thing to do would be to shave the head.

Richard was in India for six years. During that time he laid the foundation for all his future achievements and simultaneously ensured that these would always be offset by the consistent distrust of the highest authorities in both the War Office and the Foreign Office.

He learned Hindustani, Sanskrit, Persian, Multani, and Arabic, beginning on the passage out with the native servants and continuing in India eight to ten hours daily. A Parsee tutor, one Sahrabji, proved a lifelong friend. Sanskrit was studied under a Brahmin named Him Chand, who instructed him in the Hindu faith as well and, after the final tests, allowed him to wear the thread of the twice-born. He loved religious initiations, and this — apart, of course, from his involuntary Christian baptism —was the first of many to come.

In 1843 he took the examination in Hindustani at the Presidency and passed first, but he was anything but popular. His leanings, curiosities, and sympathies were too bizarre for either messmates or officers. He himself was not too proud at this stage to learn from half-naked blacks. Thus, “while the army horsemen clung so trustfully to the rules they had learned back home at cavalry school that each formal review turned sooner or later into a burlesque rout, he set to work to find a native jockey to teach him the Indian art of riding. It might not look dignified to English eyes, but it enabled him to stay on the horse’s back. He approached native philosophy in much the same spirit, and, though brusque among his own people, he became endlessly patient and watchful in studying these others.

‘I think,’ decided Isabel, ‘that Mr. Kipling must have taken his character of Strickland from my husband, who mixed with and knew all about the natives and their customs, as Strickland did. My husband talked exactly as Mr. Rudyard Kipling writes.’

For relaxation, instead of the usual heavy tiffins and pig-sticking he went in for shooting — any game except monkeys; their deaths were ‘too horribly human.’ A slightly eerie venture was his organizing a household of monkeys and compiling a monkey vocabulary, which led him to claim that he could not only think with them but carry on quite extended conversations. To round out his education he took lessons from a snake charmer, then turned to investigate the matter of natives’ burying themselves alive. He also conducted experiments with opium, hashish, and aphrodisiacs, testifying to the effects of each in generous detail. His reports of subjective phenomena were exceedingly scrupulous. He began early to make a study of Yoga, summarizing its methods of breath control and the postures involved, and producing one of the first detailed and factual accounts to appear in English.

It seemed at first as if Richard had found his niche in India. In 1843 Sir Charles Napier, one of the few AngloIndians whom he admired, conquered the province of Sind and chose Richard as his regimental interpreter. The following year Napier appointed him his assistant in the Sind Survey.

It was to be Richard’s part to impersonate a native and mingle with all classes of Sindians; this was his great chance and he recognized it as such. He adopted native dress and opened a shop in Karachi as the Mirza Abdullah of Bushiri. Occasionally he roamed the country as a peddler, having entree to harems, mosques, markets, and brothels. He was never detected; and it was this entire success of his impersonation that proved his undoing.

One of Napier’s (oral) inst ructions had been that on his expeditions Richard was to compile a full account of the extent of homosexuality and other perversions among the Sindians. Richard did such a thorough job of it. that when he turned in his final report the War Office rocked from top to bottom and he barely escaped being cashiered from the service. (Even Napier had no way of knowing in advance how liberally Richard would interpret that invitation to submit a ‘full’ account.) It had been stipulated between them that the report was to go only to Napier, but in the interval Napier had been replaced and it fell into other hands in Bombay. The official mind was extraordinarily naive about such practices in those days; one might have supposed that Richard had invented them. Barring a miracle, all hope of promotion in the ordinary way was shot to pieces.

Men without the hundredth part of Richard’s worth as an interpreter began to be passed over his head with pointed regularity. In 1848 he fell ill of fever and went to recuperate in the old Portuguese colony of Goa, and when he returned the authorities leaped gladly at the chance to ship him home to England.

He and his shivering Moslem servant Allahdad went to visit the Burtons at Pisa for the winter. He tried to settle down to writing, but his first books were total failures. He made another trip to England and loathed that too. Then his father and mother moved to Boulogne, and in 1851 he crossed over to meet them and, though he did not know it, Isabel.

IV

The only redeeming feature of Boulogne was its Salle d’Armes, which was crowded whenever it was known that Richard would fence. Letchford painted him rapier in hand, a darkly towering and lowering figure. Fencing was, in fact, invaluable to him as an outlet for violence in socially acceptable form.

Colonel Arthur Shuldham, when asked by Miss Stisted for reminiscences of Richard, replied in part: ‘In the year 1851-1852 I met the late Sir Richard Burton at Boulogne, and he asked me to accompany him to the Salle d’Armes where he was going to have a fencing bout with a sergeant of French Hussars, a celebrated player. The sergeant donned his guard to protect his head, and a leather fencing jacket, while Burton bared his neck and stood up in his shirt sleeves; on my remonstrating with him he said it was of no consequence. They performed the customary salute and set to work. It was a sight to see Burton with his eagle eye keenly fixed on his adversary, shortly followed by a very rapid swing of his arm and a sharp stroke downwards when the Frenchman was disarmed. He did this seven times in succession, when the sergeant declined any further contest, saying that his wrist was nearly dislocated by the force with which the Englishman struck his weapon. . . . Burton with the exception of a prod in the neck was untouched.

. . . To me it was a marvelous display of fencing skill, and the strange magnetic power that he seemed to possess over everybody present was equally surprising.’

Neither his meeting with Isabel nor her departure made any impression on him. He was living only for the day when he could take up his interrupted life of Oriental disguise where it had been broken off, and it was in this hope that he offered his services to the Royal Geographic Society for exploring Central Arabia. Through the unexpected offices of a deputation from the R. G. S. consisting of General Monteith, Sir Roderick Murchison, and Monckton Milnes he was granted a year’s leave of absence — he had hoped for three — to the cautiously worded end that he might ‘pursue his Arabic studies in the lands where the language is best learned.’ His journey to Mecca in the role of a Moslem pilgrim was the result.

This always remained the most celebrated single exploit of his career; his Pilgrimage to Mecca and El-Medinah told the whole story and, some believed, rather more. Thus Mr. Charles Edmonds observed that Richard was ‘no hero to T. E. Lawrence, who despised his boastfulness and his affected style of writing.’

The point that most readers could not bring themsel ves to grasp was that Richard might not so much ‘stoop to’ the level of those who believe in an irrational universe as belong rightfully on that level himself. They either forgot or did not know that when he knelt to kiss the black stone, when he spent the night in the mosque, when he joined in prayers and ritual sacrifices at the holy well Zemzem, it was as an initiate — and not wholly a perjured one, not wholly a cheat. Isabel wrote with much truth: ‘He had brought his brain to believe himself one of them. He never profaned the sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina.’

Richard deliberately sought out mysteries, and of course he found them: he saw the dead raised, he saw magicians call down fire from heaven. But during his first years in the East he could not decide how much of the evidence of his senses he could credit, and the probability is that he never did fully decide. Instead he became a virtuoso at putting it all down in enigmatically rationalistic terms. ‘I must confess to believing in the reality of these phenomena, but not in their “spiritual origin,’” he would say.

He returned by way of Egypt to write up his notes and to look further into the Cairo magicians’ spirit summonings, jinn, potions which, placed on the wearer’s eyes or forehead, rendered him invisible, and the use of ink mirrors for observing events at a distance. For the most part he still kept to his Eastern disguise, and Arthur Symons could effortlessly imagine ‘Burton’s excitement when in Cairo he joined in the shouting, gesticulating circle of Dervishes and behaved as if to the manner born; he held his diploma as a Master Dervish.’

His book caught the imagination of England and, for that matter, most of Europe; Richard could have returned a made man. Instead, with the fatal hesitancy of timing that marred his career, he remained in Egypt working on his long, confused, but haunting poem Kasidah. When his leave expired he rejoined his regiment in Bombay.

Isabel’s diary at this became a study in mixed emotions: ‘Richard has just come back with flying colours from Mecca; but instead of coming home, he has gone to Bombay. ... I glory in his glory. God be thanked! But / am alone and unloved. ... Is there no hope for me? Is there no pity for so much love? There is a dull gnawing always at my heart.’ Her only consolation was that the coincidences that linked their lives continued to put in an appearance. On the first boat Richard boarded, her cousin Father William Strickland was also a passenger, and they held a brief, though profane, encounter.

Back at Bombay, where the rich and ripe dislike Richard managed to inspire in all quarters made it clear that the past was far from forgotten, he began to plan an expedition to the forbidden city of Harar in Somaliland. His superiors had no objections to parting with him, and he obtained furlough in 1854. The party besides himself was to consist of Lieutenants Herne, Speke, and Stroyan; Richard, as the only one of the four with a knowledge of Arabic, was to be in charge of the actual entry into Harar in the character of Haji Abdullah, a Moslem merchant. Many experienced travelers thought it a greater exploit than the journey to Mecca, though less spectacular.

From Isabel’s diary: ‘And now Richard has gone to Harar, a deadly expedition or a most dangerous one, and I am full of sad forebodings. Will he never come home? How strange it all is! I still trust in Fate.’

The four men reached their goal in under three months, and Richard made a lone entrance into Harar successfully. Then he returned with the others, but this time the outcome was disastrous: Stroyan was killed, Speke badly wounded, and Richard suffered a lance thrust through the jaw.

For the second time Richard was now invalided home, and for the second time Isabel could find no way to bring herself to his notice. His mother had died the preceding year and the Colonel was now living at Bath. Richard went down to see him; he visited innumerable specialists; he read a paper on Harar before the Royal Geographic Society and worked up his First Footsteps in East Africa; but, since the Crimean War was at its height, no one could be found to listen to his ambitious proposals for the annexation of Somaliland. He therefore considered the Crimean War a calamity on all counts, but at the same time he wanted to be in it, and finally managed to prize from the War Office a grudging appointment to General Beatson’s Horse as organizer of the irregular cavalry, or bashibazouks.

News of this was the signal for the watchful Isabel to begin importuning Miss Nightingale for a chance — any kind of chance — to do any kind of nursing at Scutari, but Miss Nightingale politely regretted that she appeared ’too young and inexperienced ‘ to be an asset. Isabel wrung her hands. But she was spoiling for action and had to find some outlet, and before long this appeared in a project for feeding soldiers’ families in London left to the mercies of private charity. Isabel organized a group of girls, rather self-consciously called the Stella Club ‘in honour of the morning star — my star,’ but the net experience gained was both sobering and enlightening. They got lists from the different barracks: ‘No destitute woman was left out, nor any difference made on account of religion. . . . Some people,’ added Isabel, ‘have been a little hard on me for being the same to the fallen women as to the good ones. But I do hate the way we women come down upon each other. ... I like simplicity and large-minded conduct in all things, and I think the more one knows the simpler one acts.’

Richard’s part in the Crimea was not distinguished. In point of fact, though he was attached to the army for nearly twenty years, he never once saw action in the field, all his battles being waged with his own superiors. He and General Beatson were about equally in disfavor with the War Office, and he was recalled to England before the war ended to testify at the famous Beatson trial. This was not precisely a hero’s return, but all that mattered to Isabel was that he had returned: ‘I hear that Richard has come home, and is in town. God be praised!’

Her spirits plummeted again when the trial was no sooner out of the way than Richard announced his next expedition. This was to lead to central Africa for the ‘Unveiling of Isis,’ the search for the sources of the Nile; again his companion was to be Speke.

Naturally Richard was not responsible for the singular churnings in the soul of Miss Arundell that were occasioned by every chance mention of his name. But in June 1856, Isabel was vouchsafed one word of hope: she went to Ascot, and there she ran across a very old friend.

Amid the crowd of the race course I met Hagar Burton, the gypsy, for the first time after many years, and I shook hands with her.

‘Are you Daisy Burton yet?’ was her first question. I shook my head. ‘Would to God 1 were!’ Her face lit up. ‘Patience! it is just coming.’ She waved her hand, for at that moment she was rudely thrust from the carriage. I never saw her again; but I was engaged to Richard two months later.

It happened as simply as that. Their paths crossed again in London and they became engaged almost at once. ‘If ever anyone had an excuse for superstition and fatalism,’ wrote Isabel, awed, ‘I have. Was it not foretold?’

She had been walking in the Botanical Gardens with her sister Blanche. ‘Richard was there. We immediately stopped and shook hands, and asked each other a thousand questions of the four intervening years; and all the old Boulogne memories and feelings returned to me.’ He asked her what she was reading and ‘I held up the book I had with me that day, an old friend, Disraeli’s Tancred, the book of my heart and taste.’ Of course that day it would bo Tancred; and Richard ‘explained’ it to her.

‘We were in the Gardens about an hour, and when I had to leave he gave me a peculiar look, as he did at Boulogne. I hardly looked at him, yet I felt it, and had to turn away.’

They were bot h at the Gardens again the next morning, and the next, and ‘about the third day his manner gradually altered towards me; we had begun to know each other, and what might have been an ideal love before was now a reality. This went on for a fortnight. I trod on air.’

The confidences Isabel poured out in that fortnight must at least have convinced Richard that she was like no other girl in his experience. Still his proposal, when it came, was coupled with an admonition: —

‘Do not give me an answer now, because it will mean a very serious step for you — no less than giving up your people and all that you are used to, and living the sort of life that Lady Hester Stanhope led. I see the capabilities in you, but you must think it over.’

To Isabel this seemed ‘just as if the moon had tumbled down and said, “You have cried for me so long that I have come.” But he, who did not know of my long love, thought I was thinking worldly thoughts, and said, “Forgive me; I ought not to have asked so much.” At last I found voice, and said, “I don’t want to think it over — I have been thinking it over for six years, ever since I first saw you at Boulogne, I have prayed for you every morning and night, I have followed all your career, I have read every word you ever wrote, and I would rather have a crust and a tent with you than be queen of all the world; and so I say now, Yes, YES, YES!”’

She showed him Hagar’s horoscope, of course, and he called on the Arundells as a casual acquaintance remembered from Boulogne days, Isabel reporting optimistically that he ‘fascinated, amused, and pleasantly shocked my mother, but completely magnetized my father and all my brothers and sisters.’

But Richard was not deceived. ‘Your people will not give you to me,’ he warned.

Isabel, still treading on air, dismissed this blithely. ‘ I know that, but I belong to myself— / give myself away.’

Since Richard was due to sail any day now, they decided that the engagement had better be kept secret until he returned from Africa. He did not tell her when he was to sail, but on the eve of his departure Isabel had the first of the odd little psychic experiences, trivial singly but cumulative in effect, which were to recur throughout the rest of her life. She was with a party at the theatre and once she thought she caught sight of Richard in another box, but when she beckoned he did not come. That night she slept badly and had fitful dreams:—

The door opened, and he came into my room. A current of warm air came towards my bed. He said, ‘ Good-bye, my poor child. My time is up, and I have gone, but do not grieve. I shall be back in less than three years, and I am, your Destiny. Good-bye.’

He pointed to the clock, and it was two. He held up a letter, looked at me long with those Gypsy eyes, and put the letter on the table, and said in the same way, ‘That is for your sister — not for you.’ He went slowly out, shutting the door, and I saw him no more.

Isabel awoke in agitation and ran to rouse one of her brothers, who reminded her sleepily of their lobster supper after the theatre. But Isabel sobbed, ‘If you will wait till the post comes in, you will see that I have told you truly,’ and sure enough, a letter from Richard did come in the morning — enclosed in a note to Blanche enjoining her to break the news that he was already on his way. * He had left his lodgings in London at 10.30 the preceding evening (when I saw him at the theatre) and sailed at two o’clock from Southampton (when I saw him in my room).’

It would seem to be a typical and not very exciting instance of what psychical researchers term ‘veridical hallucinations.’ Isabel herself regarded it and all succeeding experiences quite matter-offactly: ‘I believe there is a strong sympathy between some people, so strong that, if they concentrate their minds on each other at a particular moment at the same time, and each wills strongly to be together, the will can produce this effect, though we do not yet understand how or why.’

It was a faint comfort to remember that the day before he left she had given him a miraculous medal to wear around his neck. But she did have Richard’s farewell letter to wear around her neck — ‘in a little bag. It assured me we should be reunited in 1859, as we were, on May 22 that year.’

(To he continued)