He was thrilled with the review, buying up the local newsagent’s entire stock of the paper and dispatching copies to relations and friends. Ellen Terry was at the top of his list. The notice, he proclaimed with mock pomposity, had made him a ‘public’ figure. He delighted in the position, and in the absurdity of that delight. ‘My enemies’, he informed Pollard, ‘say that now I may always be seen jerking my head at all hours of the day & this is a slander.’66 It was perhaps to fix the moment of his new-found fame that he had his photograph taken on an excursion to the Liverpudlian resort of New Brighton. Staring out from beneath the low brim of his bowler hat, his head thrown back, his jaw thrust out, he assumed a pose of mingled challenge and disdain.
The company was expected to help strike the set at the close of each week’s run, working into the early hours, dismantling flats, and packing up costumes. Nevertheless, life on tour also gave many opportunities for leisure. It was the first time Walter had been away from home since the unhappy days at his Reading prep school, and he savoured his independence. He devoted himself to learning Tennyson’s Maud (‘the most beautiful thing ever written’) on long country walks. He loafed around the Liverpool docks, taking an interest in the shipping. At Birmingham he visited a Turkish bath one afternoon. It had, though, an unsettling effect upon his constitution. He was ill all that evening and ‘in the character of the Bishop of Bourges’ threw up in his dressing room; he needed ‘raw spirits’ to ‘quiet his intestines’.67 He probably needed raw spirits again when, at Manchester, the stage began to give way under Rignold and his horse. Rignold hastily dismounted but Sickert was left holding the animal’s bridle as it stamped its way through the boards. He leaped clear just as the poor beast crashed through the stage.68 The incident brought the first part of the tour to a dramatic conclusion. There was to be a four-month break before the production was revived for a second set of dates.
Sickert and the rest of the company were free for the summer: free to take on other jobs. Sickert’s self-publicizing had not been in vain. One copy, at least, of the Liverpool Daily Post had found its mark. As soon as he returned to London he was engaged by Mrs Bateman to play Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Sadler’s Wells. That he felt confident to master such a large part at relatively short notice was, if nothing else, testament to his impressive (and much envied) verbal memory.69 The production, mounted by Edward Saker, had already been given at Liverpool, Dublin, and Brighton. It was distinguished by the fact that the fairies were all played by children under the age of eleven. The conceit was perhaps more charming in the conception than in the fact. Certainly Sickert’s memory of Oberon, Titania, and their fairy throng was of clumping footsteps rattling the boards of the stage – ‘so lightly, lightly do they pass’!70 The reviewer for Theatre magazine remained unenchanted by the spectacle, though he did allow that ‘the representatives of Lysander and Demetrius … acted fairly well’.71 Sickert appeared at Sadler’s Wells under his own name, or as nearly as the London printer would allow. In the programme his unfamiliar patronymic was rendered as ‘Sigurd’.72 It was a slight but perhaps telling reminder of his semi-alien origins.*
Back in London, Walter gathered up the strands of his social life. They were all plaited together on 1 July 1880, when the Sickerts hosted a dance at Pembroke Gardens.73 The family enjoyed creating such occasions, reviving some of the bohemian merriment of Munich days. Preparations were elaborate. ‘I often think,’ Helena remarked, ‘that rich people can’t know the full delight of giving dances so well as poor people.’
We began to prepare about a week or two beforehand. All the furniture was turned out of the biggest room which we habitually used as a dining-room, and we crowded into the front room. The carpet was taken up and the floor re-stained and polished with beeswax and turpentine. My father did the staining, but we all helped in the polishing. For a day or two beforehand, my mother, with the help of Mary and Emily Pollard (two of our best dancers [and the sisters of Alfred Pollard]) made aspics and consommé and jellies and galantines, while on the great day itself I was pressed into service to make ‘anchovy eggs’ and coffee, and cut sandwiches till my wrist ached. Walter wrote out programmes in his exquisite handwriting and sometimes illustrated select numbers.† The doors of the three ground-floor rooms were taken off, all fenders were removed and we decorated the fireplaces and marble mantelpieces with flowers stuck in banks of moss … It was my father’s job to hang the garden with Chinese lanterns, and so elaborate was my mother’s consideration for her guests that she insisted on having all the doorways and the balcony and steps leading to the garden elaborately washed, so that the ball-dresses should not be sullied.
After the paid musicians who had been engaged for the evening had packed up, Mr Sickert happily played on at the piano till dawn for those revellers – mainly the ‘newspapermen and actors’ – who still had legs to dance.74
Dorothy Richmond came, not in a ball dress but in a ‘white burnouse’.75 What Ellen and Maggie Cobden wore is unrecorded, but they were both there. According to his sister’s estimate, Walter was not a particularly good dancer (Bernhard being the only brother to show any aptitude in that direction), but he was certainly energetic.76 He flirted happily with all three girls, and probably others besides. Nevertheless, despite this generosity with his favours, it was becoming acknowledged in the Cobden-Richmond circle that Ellen Cobden was his especial favourite. And though all retained an easy and affectionate intimacy with Walter, they recognized that Ellen – or Nellie – had at least the first claim upon him.77 It is difficult to fathom how this came about. No early letters between them exist to illumine the origins and progress of their relationship, and on the surface they were not the most obvious pairing. Ellen was twelve years his senior (Maggie Cobden and Dorothy Richmond were Sickert’s almost exact coevals). She was, however, still only thirty-two, and beautiful. Sickert in later life always described her as ‘pretty, absurdly pretty’, though he struggled to define exactly in what her prettiness lay. When pressed, he recalled her wonderful golden hair: ‘That was hair,’ he would murmur. ‘It had lights, it had lights.’78 Other friends insisted that her eyes were her finest feature. Indeed amongst some of her circle she had the pet name ‘Matia’ – from the Greek for ‘eyes’.79 A small pencil sketch that Sickert made of her reveals those eyes set in a fine heart-shaped face, which he imbued with both the sweetness and the melancholy of a Botticelli Madonna.80 Even to Ellen’s contemporaries there seemed something ‘old fashioned’ about her manner and deportment, something suggestive of eighteenth-century France. She was enormously good and kind, but was not a prig. As one friend remarked, ‘like all those to whom men and women were more important than anything else she was a born gossip’;81 and behind her slightly formal exterior she could both enjoy and match Sickert’s challenge of convention. ‘[Walter] and Nellie are at present rowing on the Regent’s Park water,’ Maggie reported of one afternoon excursion. ‘It is pouring so they are doubtless enjoying themselves.’82