Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Having paid her family dues, Gertrude moved up to London for her “coming out.” At the series of receptions, weekend house parties, and balls to which they were invited, the young ladies would be presented with an array of eligible bachelors from an official list, from which it was assumed they would find husbands. In her obligatory white gown and train, with tall white feathers securely pinned in her red hair, Gertrude drove to Buckingham Palace with Florence and Hugh in a slow-moving line of carriages, and made her formal curtsy to the ageing Queen. Heavily chaperoned, she attended assemblies at dozens of great houses, including the Duke of Devonshire’s, the Londonderrys’, and the Stanleys’; stayed in Audley Square with Lord and Lady Arthur Russell, of whose many children Flora was her special friend; went to Ascot in a magnificent hat; attended the Eton and Harrow cricket match; and did the full round of country-house weekends. She wrote to Florence: “Do you remember discussing what other girls do with their days? Well I have found out—they spend their entire time rushing from house to house for cricket weeks, which means cricket all day and dancing all night . . .”

  She was enjoying talking to all kinds of people. “Lord Carlisle came and sat by me and we discussed football and the Church! He was very surprised to find what a lot of ecclesiastical gossip I know, and I that he should know about football. I must tell you I had on a very pretty gown which had a great success.”

  Just as Oxford had seemed restrictive after the freedoms she relished at home, now London society bound her to conventions that had not been so strictly enforced in Bucharest. Since aristocratic families such as the Cecils, the Howards, the Cavendishes, and the Stanleys ruled society, the receipt or absence of invitations from these social arbiters determined the degree of a girl’s acceptability. Most onerous for Gertrude, as it had been at school and at university, was having to be accompanied by a chaperone whenever she passed beyond the front door, even to visit a picture gallery or a church. Used to galloping about all over Yorkshire and leaping fences on the hunting field, at country-house weekends her riding was reduced to the sedate pace of a cavalcade, with fellow guests, grooms, and family coachmen all lumbering along together. She had even to be careful which books she was seen to be carrying, and was reproved for reading Bourget’s Le Disciple. The fact that she was reading it in French did not protect her from disapproval: the novel concerns a pupil who applies his master’s naturalistic theories to everyday life.

  Occasionally she broke away. Her good friend Mary Talbot from Lady Margaret Hall days, a saintly woman who would marry the future Bishop of Chichester, was devoting her tragically short life to working in the slums of the East End of London. No doubt reflecting on the different directions their lives were taking, one day Gertrude gave her chaperones the slip and incurred Florence’s displeasure by going off by herself on the new underground railway to Whitechapel, where she spent a fascinated day accompanying Mary on her rounds.

  Florence had expressed her disapproval of Gertrude’s flirtation with Billy Lascelles. The fact that they were cousins, she said, did not permit Gertrude to waive the conventions, especially because Billy was much in London at the time and his family were abroad. Gertrude was on her honour to behave well, irritating as it often was. “Billy and I sat in the garden and had a long talk . . . he wanted to take me with him to Paddington and send me back in a hansom, don’t be afraid, I didn’t go—what would have happened if I had, it was ten o’clock?” she wrote. There was another man, one Captain X, who took her to an exhibition and brought her home alone in a hansom: she told Florence, “I hope that doesn’t shock you.” If he had hoped for a flirtation, he was disappointed. “I discussed religious beliefs all the way there and very metaphysical conceptions of truth all the way back . . . I love talking to people when they really will talk sensibly and about things which one wants to discuss.” When Florence wrote to reprimand her for this indiscretion, Gertrude disarmingly replied: “I don’t think many of our watchful acquaintances saw me on Sunday, it was a streaming afternoon. I felt sure you wouldn’t like it, but you know, I didn’t either!”

  When in the course of time it was Gertrude’s turn to chaperone Elsa and Molly to London dances, she immensely enjoyed helping them dress up in their finery, but soon became bored when required to watch over them from the sidelines. Remembering a remark of Florence’s at the May balls about how old the function of chaperoning had made her feel, Gertrude wrote to her: “I sat on a bench and watched them dancing round and knew just what you felt like at Oxford.”

  What was Gertrude like in her early twenties? It is fascinating to think that we may have a partial description of her by that fine analyst of character, Henry James. The author was a good friend of Florence and of Elizabeth Robins, and Gertrude met him several times, sometimes as a guest of the Bells and more than once at a dinner party of the Russells, where he was also a frequent guest. Hearing him make fun of a novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s, she judged him “the critic—so moderate, so just; and so contemptuous! Every sentence hit the nail right on the head, and every nail ran down into the coffin of Mrs. Ward’s reputation as a novelist.” Of the novel’s protagonist James had remarked: “A shadow, a character indefinitely postponed, he arrives nowhere.” It is hard to believe that Gertrude’s guileless and very direct personality went unnoticed by James then or afterwards, and very tempting to compare her with the character of Nanda, the heroine of his novel The Awkward Age, published several years later in 1899. Gertrude may well have been one of the young ladies serving as his inspiration. Florence Bell was a strong supporter and confidante of James in his pursuit of success in the theatre, and in 1892 he based a leading character on her in his short story, “Nona Vincent.”

  The Awkward Age is drawn from a slightly earlier period of James’s life when he was an inveterate diner-out in London society. It concerns “the sometimes dreaded, often delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront” of the debutante, and “the ‘sitting downstairs,’ from a given date, of the merciless maiden previously perched aloft”—a situation that “could easily be felt as a crisis [because of] the account to be taken, in a circle of free talk, of a new and innocent, a wholly unacclimatized presence.” His comedy shows the sophisticated circle of adults “put about by having, of a sudden, an ingenuous mind and a pair of limpid searching eyes to count with.” In the Jamesian world of dim drawing-rooms and subtle subtexts, Nanda stands out as an uncompromising figure, questioning, characterful, honest to the point of awkwardness. “Not so pretty” as the lovely little Aggie, she is “self-possessed . . . downright . . . curiously wanting . . . in timidity and in levity . . . not easily abashed,” and shows “a crude young clearness” in conversation. From beneath a “disposition . . . of fair hair,” her eyes are fixed on her interlocutor with “a mild straightness,” which “makes the beauty of the remainder.” She chooses, whenever possible, to walk rather than take the carriage.

  Gertrude had reached the age of twenty-four without really falling in love—a state of affairs that could not be expected to continue. She had been out in society for three years, but her character was already too decided, her mind too sharp and her critical sense too finely tuned to mesh easily with the less developed personalities and intellects around her. So many people of her age were in awe of her, if not for her social standing then for her intellect, and in a manner often typical of daughters of powerful and famous fathers, she failed to hide a felt superiority to men who could not measure up to Hugh. She must have recognized this, and felt unable to release herself from a certain pressure of expectation from—and because of—her family. She was feminine, attractive, lively; she was ready to be happy; but Bucharest lived on in her mind as the place where she had had the most fun and felt most admired. When Aunt Mary invited her to join the Lascelleses again, this time in Persia, she was ecstatic. It would be her first encounter with the East.

  As soon as she heard that “His Ex” Sir Frank was going to take up his ambassadorship in Teheran, she had begun to
learn the language. Lord Stanley of Alderley—of the family into which Aunt Maisie had married—was her first teacher of Persian and afterwards she attended the London School of Oriental Studies. By the time she got to Persia, six months later, she was able to understand what she heard. Travelling with her cousin Florence, she took the train from Germany through Austria to Constantinople, then by Tiflis and Baku round the Caspian Sea. Her sense of escape and exhilaration increased with each country that she crossed, and from the moment she set foot in Persia, she felt reborn.

  On her first day there, riding out of Teheran as the sun was rising, she was led by her guide to the crest of a mountain. She saw, spread out beneath her, the landscape she found more beautiful than any other. The moment is crystallized in a letter to her cousin Horace Marshall dated 18 June 1892, a moment of sheer delight, ecstatically described, in which, as her eyes travelled the limitless horizon, there is almost a note of mysticism as she ventured into the edges of the wilderness that would become her spiritual home:

  Oh the desert around Teheran! Miles and miles of it with nothing, nothing growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here; it is a very wonderful thing to see; and suddenly in the middle of it all, out of nothing, out of a little cold water, springs up a garden. Such a garden! Trees, fountains, tanks, roses and a house in it, the houses which we heard of in fairy tales when we were little: inlaid with tiny slabs of looking-glass in lovely patterns, blue tiled, carpeted, echoing with the sound of running water and fountains . . .

  Constrained and compartmentalized at home, in the East Gertrude became her own person. Her spirits soared and her receptiveness to nature and life expanded so that she was forced to recognize within herself two Gertrudes. Part of the sense of difference was that here there were few rules, few expectations. She had emerged from the shadow of the Bells into the light of independence. It had the effect of humbling her, and led her to conclusions and realizations that would not have occurred to her at home:

  Are we the same people I wonder when all our surroundings, associations, acquaintances are changed? Here that which is me, which is an empty jar that the passer by fills at pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I have never heard of . . . How big the world is, how big and how wonderful. It comes to me as ridiculously presumptuous that I should dare to carry my little personality half across it and boldly attempt to measure . . . things for which it has no table of measurements that can possibly apply.

  Each enchanted day began with a two-hour ride into the countryside, followed by a cold bath scented with rosewater, then breakfast spread out in a tent in the embassy garden. Ahead lay a wealth of pleasure: expeditions and sightseeing, delicious long lunches, lying in a hammock with a book in her hand, games and entertainments, and heady evenings dancing and dining in fabulous palaces and pavilions until the cool early hours. Just riding or driving through the streets was a revelation:

  In this country the women lift the veil of a Raphael Madonna to look at you . . . I felt ashamed almost before the beggars in the street—they wear their rags with a better grace than I my most becoming habit, and the veils of the commonest women (now the veil is the touchstone on which to try a woman’s toilette) are far better put on than mine. A veil should fall from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, of that I feel convinced, and it should not be transparent.

  And love came at last, in the form of an agreeable legation secretary, Henry Cadogan, the eldest son of the Hon. Frederick Cadogan and the grandson of the 3rd Earl Cadogan. Gertrude described him in her letters with a wealth of detail that might have given Florence an early warning of her interest. He was thirty-three, “tall and red and very thin . . . intelligent, a great tennis player, a great billiards player, an enthusiast about Bezique, devoted to riding though he can’t ride in the least . . . smart, clean, well-dressed, looking upon us as his special property to be looked after and amused.” He was well educated—scholarly, even—and his attentions to Florence and Gertrude soon focused particularly on the latter. He read and spoke the language, and brought her piles of books to get through. He found her a teacher who would continue her lessons in Persian.

  It certainly is unexpected and undeserved to have come all the way to Teheran and to find someone so delightful at the end—he rides with us, he arranges plans for us—he shows us lovely things from the bazaars—he is always there when we want him . . . He appears to have read everything that ought to be read in French, German and English.

  Aunt Mary, perhaps not entirely well during Gertrude’s long visit, was easy-going where Florence would have been zealous. On their frequent rides and picnics, Gertrude and Henry would canter off on their own to sit by streams and in gardens, to read and talk. They searched for treasures in the bazaars and played backgammon with a merchant friend. They visited the treasure house of the Shah, fished for trout, and hunted quail with falcons. When it became too hot in Teheran, the foreign legations moved to their summer quarters, to the cool of Gulahek, where meals were served under the trees in the gardens or in open tents. By then, their wandering through the bazaars had been curtailed by an outbreak of cholera. With the supreme confidence of youth, Henry and Gertrude continued to ride everywhere they wanted to go. Henry had decided views, and tended towards the didactic. He could hold his own against Gertrude, and on at least one occasion they had “a serious difference of opinion and I sent him away goodnightless!” . . . “Mr. Cadogan and I went for a long walk on Sunday and talked vigorous politics. His views with regard to Home Rule leave much to be desired, but I think I have made him modify his opinions with regard to the Unionists!”

  They were most alike in their fascination with Persia and its romance and mystery. Henry read Sufi poetry, and would produce a book from his pocket and read aloud to Gertrude the swooning stanzas of Hafiz, the fourteenth-century Sufi master and Persia’s most famous poet, describing that yearning for the Beloved that filled the vacuum between the profane and the divine. One morning they got up before dawn and rode north to a desolate mountainside where stood the Citadel of the Dead. “Before we had gone far,” Gertrude wrote, “with a flash and a sudden glitter, the sun leapt up above the snow-peaks, and day rushed across the plain . . . A stony valley led us to the heart of desolation and the end of all things.” Here they found the Tower of Silence, gleaming white, the first stage in the journey of the afterlife, where the Zoroastrians used to leave their corpses for the sun and the vultures to purify and pick clean. “Here they come to throw off the mantle of the flesh . . . before their souls, passing through the seven gates of the planets, may reach the sacred fire of the sun.”

  The two travellers circled the tower, climbed to the platform at the top, and listened to the great silence of the wilderness. Then they descended, and giving the horses their heads, they raced each other across the barren landscape with all the exuberance and passion of youth. She describes the moment, expressing all the happiness and liberation of being in love:

  Life seized us and inspired us with a mad sense of revelry. The humming wind and the teeming earth shouted “Life! Life!” as we rode. Life! life! the bountiful, the magnificent! Age was far from us—death far; we had left him enthroned in his barren mountains, with ghostly cities and outworn faiths to bear him company. For us the wide plain and the limitless world, for us the beauty and the freshness of the morning!

  One moonlit evening as they lay on the grass by a stream, the air scented with violets and roses, distant music mingling with the hooting of an owl, Henry proposed and Gertrude accepted. She wrote home immediately to tell Hugh and Florence that she and Henry were engaged, and waited for the reply. When, at length, it arrived, she was told that it was impossible. Not only must she break the engagement, she must come home at once—or at least, as soon as Gerald, Billy’s brother, would be free to accompany her. It was the end of the happiest time of her life, she felt; and the end of her hopes of marri
age to Henry. Hugh had made enquiries, of Sir Frank and others, and had concluded that Henry’s income was “entirely insufficient” to set up a household. As Hugh so devastatingly remarked, Henry’s “charm and intelligence had not prevented him from getting into debt.” Although Hugh did not say so to his daughter, he had heard worse—that Henry was a gambler.

  Robust as the Bells’ finances seemed to be, Hugh was still a salaried manager-director of the steelworks. His father and uncle held the reins as well as all the capital. Hugh maintained an expensive household of wife and five children in what was still a fairly modest house, Red Barns, and had one son at Eton and another soon to start. Lowthian lived in his five-storey country mansion, Rounton Grange, and maintained his London house at 10 Belgrave Terrace, largely for his own use. The iron industry, in company with other staple industries, had recently undergone a downturn, and profits had begun to fall. Late in 1889 Gertrude had been an interested eavesdropper on a conversation between two men on a train, discussing whether ironmasters were “making a roaring fortune”: she had remarked to Florence, “They thought they must be, poor deluded wretches; I didn’t undeceive them!” Now, in July 1892, her hopes dashed, a broken-hearted Gertrude wrote a most touching letter to Chirol:

  Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically a bankrupt, and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do . . . I hope he will now see Mr. Cadogan in London and arrive at least at some conclusion. Meantime, Henry Cadogan and I are not allowed to consider ourselves engaged and I’m afraid the chances of our eventual marriage are very far away somewhere in the future. I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence . . . it’s easier to appear happy if no one knows you have any reason to be anything else. And I care so much . . . I’m forgetting how to be brave, which I always thought I was.