He had his photograph taken, looking like the smouldering matinée idol he had not yet become. Off the stage he tried out the part of ‘host’, laying on one hilarious tea party at his book-strewn rooms in Claremont Square, where the company (Nellie, Maggie, Jessie Thomas, Theodore Beck, and a Mr Nicholson) had to make do with an ‘average of one knife to 3 persons’. They then all crowded on to the little first-floor balcony and ‘speculated on the different deaths [they] should die if it gave way’. Within the merry flow of group activity his particular bond of understanding and attraction with Nellie Cobden quietly strengthened.98
There was a brief interruption to these pleasures when, after the Shoreditch residency, the Rignold Company moved down to Exeter on the final stage of the tour. Walter delayed his departure to the last moment in order to snatch an extra day with the Cobden girls. Having told his family that he was travelling down with the rest of the company on the Sunday morning he snuck off instead on a jaunt to Richmond with Ellen and Maggie. It was scarcely a quiet Sunday outing. Walter was ‘uproarious’ throughout the journey, shrieking Irvingesque snatches of dialogue out of the railway carriage window, and down the communication tube into the next carriage. And when they reached Richmond he insisted on them all racing down a steep field. Then they hired a boat and rowed up stream for an hour. Walter’s hair, which had grown into a long golden mane, provoked considerable comment. The holiday fishermen were ‘roused from silence at the sight of the yellow locks’, and wanted to know ‘why he robbed the barber’. Walter remained unfazed by the general interest in his coiffure. He was too busy noting the resemblance of the fishermen on their punts to Leech’s drawings of such scenes.99
They came home on the bus after stopping at an inn where Walter and Ellen shared a ‘tankard of amber ale’. The beer did nothing to quell Walter’s spirits. That evening at York Place, where he stayed till midnight, he was, according to Maggie’s account, ‘more or less mad’, and spent at least some of the time ‘pouring eau de cologne on everyone’s heads’. As if unable to bear the prospect of separation, he turned up again first thing the next morning on his way to the station. Ellen accompanied him as far as Piccadilly before saying a final farewell.100
He looked a romantic figure beneath his flowing mane; his luggage comprised a small carpetbag, a sword, three books, and an Arab blanket. The effect was probably well calculated. Walter was beginning to weave elements of theatricality into his life – to adopt roles, don costumes, and assume guises. By the time of his return to London six weeks later, he had struck a new pose. ‘His appearance was a shock,’ Maggie told Dolla Richmond. ‘All his beautiful locks cut off and the stubby remains brushed straight up his head like a French boy’s’, or a ‘costermonger[’s]’. He was, she remarked, altogether ‘a changeling’.101 He had left a Byronic wanderer, and returned as a barrow-boy. Other changes soon followed. He appeared next as a metropolitan dandy in a very smart frock coat.102 It was but another role in what would become a large – and ever revolving – personal repertoire. In the first instance these masks revealed rather than concealed. They were projections of his own character, dramatizing his interests and his aspirations. The frequent changes, if they suggested a certain restlessness, reflected too a love of variety and of fun. Sickert enjoyed creating a dramatic moment: he knew that his quick changes, outlandish outfits, and extravagant poses had the power to surprise, confuse, even shock.
Despite the mutability of his appearance, he remained constant to the Cobdens. He spent so much of his time with them that his mother finally protested that when next he came to London he should live at York Place altogether. While looking for a new engagement after the end of the Rignold tour, he was free to spend his days chez Cobden, and his evenings going to the theatre.103 He went one evening with Ellen to see Madame Modjeska at the Royal Court (then in Lower George Street, Chelsea); she had gained her desire and, in an echo of that summer’s experiment, was playing Romeo and Juliet opposite Johnston Forbes-Robertson. At Edwin Booth’s Hamlet he saw Ellen Terry sitting in a box surrounded by Forbes-Robertsons and attended by Oscar Wilde; they were too busy talking to pay much attention to the play – or any to Walter. These were tantalizing glimpses of a familiar world that remained – even after a year of effort – still just outside his grasp.104
That December also revealed, for the first time, the limits of Ellen Cobden’s constitution. For all her energy, gaiety, and wit she was prone to sudden collapses and bouts of scarcely defined ‘ill-health’. Although she was happy to go with Walter to the theatre, she was less willing to go on to the parties afterwards. Walter would go without her. His high spirits always added ‘much to the pleasure’ of such occasions, at least according to Maggie Cobden – though some hostesses might have been slightly alarmed at his behaviour. At the Masons’ dance just before Christmas he was ‘excessively wild’, attempting, amongst other antics, to tie some trimming from Maggie Cobden’s dress around his head while quoting the lines from Iolanthe – ‘thy scarf I’ll bind about my plumed helm’. On the way home in the Cobdens’ carriage in the early hours, he roused the neighbourhood by shouting out the ‘curse of Rome’ speech from Bulwer-Lytton’s play Richelieu ‘in an Irving voice’, ending in ‘a sort of frenzied shriek’. The performance startled a timid youth to whom they were giving a lift home. The boy’s alarm, Maggie reported, was only compounded when, on setting him down, Walter ‘was all suavity and enquired tenderly if we couldn’t have the pleasure of taking him right home’. Faced by this sudden and unexpected change in manner the poor fellow fled.105
If Walter’s frustrated energies sometimes found vent in wildness, he could also direct them into acts of kindness. He charmed the Cobden sisters with improving little gifts: Maggie received, as a Valentine present, a volume of Hans Andersen fairy stories – in German.106 At Easter 1881 he went down to Midhurst, where the Cobdens had a cottage close to their old family home at Dunford, and made a considerable impression on the locals, who thought he must be Maggie’s beau rather than Ellen’s.107 He escorted ever-shifting combinations of sisters to social and cultural events. He was with Maggie at William Morris’s riverside house on Boat Race day, together with a large crowd of other guests (including most of his own family). After the excitement of the race – and the lunch – he captained one side in what Helena remembered was ‘a delirious game of Prisoner’s Base’.108 And on another memorable excursion Walter led Maggie and Annie to the stage door of the Lyceum and introduced them to their idol, Ellen Terry. They presented her with a little bunch of red and white roses, and were rewarded with thanks and kisses. To help them recover from this great excitement he then took them to a little Italian coffee house where they had hot chocolate and ‘maccaroni’.109
When the Sickerts hosted another party that summer, Walter delivered a bunch of sweet peas to York Place in the morning to be divided up between the four sisters, who – ‘contrary to all rule’ – had agreed to attend en masse. On his way over to Baker Street he had, much to his amusement, encountered an old family friend, who, seeing the flowers, remarked, ‘Oh, those are for the beloved. I shall see who wears them this evening.’ He relished the prospect of her confusion when she was confronted by not one but four ‘beloveds’. (There were in fact five ‘beloveds’, as Jessie Thomas was staying at York Place and came to the party wearing her share of Walter’s sweet peas.110)
Despite his small successes with Rignold and at Sadler’s Wells, Sickert’s acting career