Chapter Three

“On the purple granite altar of the Kanda Swany, at the age of thirteen I was initiated.... When I danced before the rajahs on the banks of the sacred Ganges....”

These and similar phrases were continually on the lips of Mata Hari as she sought to bind her audiences, or even individuals, for anything with ears to hear was sufficient audience for her, by the fascination of her intimate and secret knowledge of art, beauty, and love. However, there are two counterweights to her highly imaginative narrative which enable us to obtain a much truer picture of her earlier life and actions. One is her own Life and the other the brief, frigidly cold, official biography collected by the French police. With the aid of these and the accounts of friends and witnesses it is possible to construct a fairly comprehensive story of her life, the life of Mata Hari, Red Dancer and H21 of the German secret service.

The Life is a well-printed volume which enjoys the scarcity of some rare incunabula. It was published in 1906 and the title page reads, in translation: 16“Mata Hari: Mrs. M. G. Zelle MacLeod. History of my daughter’s life and my charges against her former husband, with portraits, documents, facsimiles, and supplements, by A. Zelle, czm—C. L. G. Velat, Amsterdam.” But in spite of the clear attribution of authorship to the mother, a naïve prefatory note declares that “the earlier chapters of this book have been entirely written by my daughter. As for the later ones, since she lacked the time to finish them herself, they were sent to me from America for completion.” The story is too obviously directed against the errant husband to carry much weight as a serious autobiography, and it has only been used by the present writer to corroborate other testimony or to illustrate her thoughts. While we must follow the creation of the legend of Mata Hari, the time has come when she should be stripped of all her improvised art and her specially invented sacred origins and to judge her as a woman. If she is guilty of the crimes attributed to her, if her deeds brought death and maiming to men, tears and mourning to their innocent relatives, then no artistry, no amorous frailty, no pseudo-sacred origin, no peculiar mental viewpoint can condone or mitigate her sin.

The real Mata Hari was born in the little Dutch 17town of Leeuwarden on August 7, 1876, and was given the baptismal names of Margaret Gertrude. Her nearest approach to Oriental ancestry was a strain of Jewish blood through her father’s descent. Adam Zelle was a prosperous business man, but the mother, a good-looking woman of the typical Dutch type, came from the better-class family of Van der Meulen. Margaret’s early life seems to have been no more distinguished by incident than that of the blond children who accompanied her to the Cammingha-State school, and who scampered through a happy innocent childhood on the banks of a grey canal. The girl whose dusky beauty was to enslave so many men in high places can recall no incident of these commonplace days other than a preference for one golden-haired little playmate. Doubtless it was the good Vrouw Zelle’s intention to have her daughter educated in a superior manner, more in keeping with the Van der Meulen pretensions, which urged her to send Margaret to a school where the girl would be taught to conduct herself becomingly. She was admitted to a Catholic convent at the age of fourteen, precisely the time when, from her own romantic tale, she was being rescued from the Kanda Swany. Thus, instead of being torn from the grasp of fanatical devotees of an unknown mystic cult, 18she was, in reality, entering the cloistered security of a religious house where young ladies are protected with zealous care.

There she remained until she had reached the age of eighteen and went to spend a vacation at The Hague, the Dutch capital. In this town, where life flows with the turgid tranquillity of its own canal waters, the romantic girl was noticed by a handsome officer whose elegance was turning the heads of the simple Dutch maidens home from school. Captain Campbell MacLeod was no longer a young man, but, said Margaret Gertrude, enthusiastically, “His age renders him still more adorable.” Margaret admitted later that she had always suffered from a weakness for officers.

“Anyone who is not an officer,” she said to a group of these men, “does not interest me. The officer is a being apart, a kind of artist breathing the grand air in the brilliant profession of arms, in a uniform that is always seductive. Yes, I have had a number of lovers, but they were always good soldiers, brave, ready for battle, and while waiting for it amiable and courteous. To me the officer is a separate race. I have loved only the officer and have never been concerned to know whether the man was German, Italian, or French.”

This quaint conceit might have been adopted to 19flatter the men to whom it was addressed, but its spontaneity would have been sufficient proof of its sincerity if her life had not substantiated her words. What gives this statement a curious tinge of cynicism was the fact that the man who married her in no way fits the standard she had adopted for her officer. MacLeod was of good, even distinguished, Scottish descent and held a commission in the Dutch Colonial Army. At twenty-one he was a vicious young satyr; at forty he was a satiated libertine who continued to flout all decency from acquired habit rather than from active desire. A handsome man of dandified appearance who caressed a tender growth of down on his lip with jewelled fingers, while he cast stealthy glances of admiration upon the shapely young convent-bred girl enjoying her holiday in a town that is not remarkable for its festal life. The inappeasable sex-hunger of the unhappy man could be read in his eyes, and it was this which called to the sensuous Margaret.

They were married and spent a joyous honeymoon among the sedate villas of Wiesbaden, where those drinking the vile waters (or pretending to) could, on occasion, inject no little gaiety into their cure. Walking in the pleasant and orderly public gardens or taking her aperitive at the Kurhaus she 20must have seen the resplendent type of creature whom she idealized as the officer, the aloof, dignified, and powerful officers of the garrison, so great a contrast to the man whom she had married. Who knows what promising glances she gave the uniformed gods beneath the sportive baskets of rosebuds which decorate the Hotel Rosenblume?

After an unsuccessful attempt at conjugal felicity in the house of MacLeod’s sister, where Margaret proved once again that if man is not made to live alone, women are not intended to live together, the newly married couple took a house in the more modern part of Amsterdam. Here their ill-fated son, Norman, was born shortly after their marriage. One of the events which left an ineffaceable impression on the luxury-loving bride dates from this same year. MacLeod had the privilege, as an army officer, of presenting his wife at court. Possibly it was on this occasion when she made her first bow before royalty that she conceived the idea of having kings and princes pay her homage.

Indeed, she now begins to cultivate a new pride. It appears that her husband was not as wealthy as he was supposed to be and his extravagant habits led to trouble. Margaret felt that she was being neglected, and in her loneliness found she was no more than a housekeeper for her gay husband.

21“My grandmother was the Baroness Winjbergen,” she reminds MacLeod when she revolts against this treatment.

But worse is to come. The accomplished libertine whose name she bore would not break off his acquired habits; he rarely was to be found at home. He preferred the companionship of fair but frail ladies, of good fellows with whom he could gamble with all he possessed and a little more. In a short time he had reached a stage of threatened ruin from which nothing but an act of repulsive dishonour saved him. The young wife was instructed to employ her coy glances, her strange Oriental beauty, and her nascent powers of fascination upon a certain wealthy man whose indiscretions made him a suitable object for blackmail. Margaret was not averse to making the attempt.

“But this man was a great admirer of my eyes,” she explains in recording this interview in her Life, “and I was able to collect several thousands of guilders without having to be unfaithful.”

The final qualification, if true, would not have been added, even as an afterthought, a short while later.

After this incident there is a gap in Margaret’s life, until we find her husband commanding a battalion of the Colonial Army Reserve in Java, 22where he is living with his wife and two children. The second child, a daughter called Jeanne Louise, had been born a short while before they left Holland. But, by the time their track has been picked up in this jungle clearing, their domestic relations are the scandal of the Dutch colony.

“It was at Benjoe-Biroe that I got my first whipping,” Margaret says, reminiscently.

Shortly after this Margaret began to bombard her father for assistance to secure a legal separation, and the prosperous burgher laid a formal complaint against the husband with the local authorities. At the same time he admonished his daughter to control herself with patience and to have a witness at the next whipping, as this would facilitate a divorce. In this humid atmosphere the flowers of evil germinate quickly and burst into abundant blossoms. Before long the half-demented officer was threatening his wife with a loaded revolver.

“He was in love with another woman,” Margaret writes, “and was willing to pay the price of murder for his liberty. He admitted it and warned me that unless we were divorced very quickly he would kill me.”

This consummation of folly was rendered unnecessary by the termination of MacLeod’s active 23service. When he was transferred to the reserve of officers the ill-assorted pair returned to Amsterdam and a petition for divorce was promptly instituted. But as if to show her desire for originality the petitioner continued to live with her husband in his sister’s home until his incessant drunken revelry led the good lady, or her respectable lawyer husband, to eject them. The MacLeod ménage then sought a refuge in a modest dwelling which was not at all in keeping with Margaret’s high ambitions. From here the husband went out one night on the familiar pretext of mailing a letter and took their sick child with him so that she might benefit from the air. He did not return. Or, rather, he only returned when Margaret had recovered the custody of the little Jeanne through the aid of the courts, pending a decision of her petition for divorce. When MacLeod did return to the Van Breestrat home he promptly installed a new mistress. He then proceeded to settle accounts with Margaret in a manner characteristic of a man who fails to give his wife any financial assistance. He caused a notice to be inserted in the newspapers that he would no longer be responsible for his wife’s debts.

This pious act of repudiation roused Margaret to a pitch of fury, for she declared that it was instrumental 24in closing the doors of all her friends, even that of her noble and virtuous aunt, Baroness Landes, where she had found a temporary refuge. But Dutch doors are not so puritanical that they close automatically upon those whose sole error is to have contemplated divorce from a savage, drunken husband. Dutch hospitality has a warmer reputation. Be that as it may, Margaret MacLeod found herself on the street with a sick child, without clothes, and for riches the sum of three and a half florins.

At this point we leave the old Margaret. Her apprenticeship among the cherubim of hell now begins. The Red Dancer begins to take form among the mists that blow in from the North Sea. It may be added, in passing, that the Dutch courts, having refused her the divorce for which she applied, granted it shortly after to her husband, to the profound indignation of her posthumous admirers.

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