Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  There was nothing for Henry to do but stay on in Persia for a year or two, and try to work his way into a more remunerative post. A lesser soul than Gertrude might have rebelled against her father’s decision, but she wrote a letter to Florence that is remarkable for its sense of honour, and even in its extraordinary sympathy for her parents:

  Our position is very difficult, and we are very unhappy. We have not seen much of each other . . . since my father’s letter we don’t feel that we have any right to meet. The thing I can bear least is that you or Papa should ever think anything of him which is not noble and gentle and good. That is all of him I have ever known.

  It’s very horrid of me to write like this, it will only make you sorry quite uselessly and needlessly. You must not think for a moment that if I could choose I would not have it all over again, impatience and pain and the going which is yet to come. It is worth it all . . . Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing . . . only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again—Oh Mother, Mother.

  There could be no doubt that Gertrude was in love. And Henry may well have truly loved her in return. Perhaps they would have been happy together; he would have given up his gambling and she would have learnt to subject herself to the rigours of his modest career, following him from post to post. But they were not to have the chance. The painful goodbyes were somehow endured, and she returned to Sloane Street, where a loving Florence was waiting to comfort her. A day or two later, Hugh arrived from the north, to fold his beloved daughter in his arms and talk her through her tears.

  Subdued for once in her life, Gertrude wrote few letters in the following months. Her feelings were deep, and she was slow to recover. Nonetheless, the spring found her in France, writing home of a romantic garden in Nîmes whose beauty reminded her of a certain garden in Persia, where she had once been so happy:

  Took a carriage and drove to the garden where lies the Temple of Nymphs. The frogs croaked and the little owls screamed in the trees, and the warm scented night with all its sounds was so like those other nights in a far away garden where the owls scream. I cried and cried in the Temple, and filled the Roman baths with tears which no one saw in the dusk.

  Not a year after she left Persia, and from a brief illness caused by falling into an icy river while fishing, Henry Cadogan died of pneumonia. A tragic pattern in her love life had been set. Succeed as she might in so many extraordinary ventures, this was an event from which Gertrude would never entirely recover.

  Partly to distract her, it was Florence’s idea that her stepdaughter publish a travel book, making use of her diaries and almost daily letters home from Persia during the first happy months of her stay there. Gertrude was opposed to the idea, but it is probable that Florence approached the publishing house of Bentley, and in response to their letter Gertrude unenthusiastically capitulated. She wrote to her friend Flora Russell:

  Bentley wishes to publish my Persian things, but wants more of them, so after much hesitation I have decided to let him and I am writing him another six chapters. It’s rather a bore and what’s more I would vastly prefer them to remain unpublished. I wrote them you see to amuse myself and I have got all the fun out of them I ever expect to have, for modesty apart they are extraordinarily feeble. Moreover I do so loathe people who rush into print and fill the world with their cheap and nasty work—and now I am going to be one of them. At first I refused, then my mother thought me mistaken and my father was disappointed and as they are generally right I have given way. But in my heart I hold very firmly to my first opinion. Don’t speak of this. I wish them not to be read.

  Her feelings were as emotional as they were rational, but still her own judgement was probably right. Denison Ross, head of the London School of Oriental Studies and a great admirer of his pupil, was to write the explanatory preface for a later edition. He admitted that in the chapters written in Persia there was “a something . . . which is wanting from the later ones.” Persian Pictures was published anonymously in 1894, a compromise between Florence’s wishes and Gertrude’s reluctance, and was soon forgotten.

  Persia had been made infinitely more interesting to her by her knowledge of the language. But as Florence wrote, “She had not yet reached the stage in which the learner of a language finds with rapture that a new knowledge has been acquired, the illuminating stage when not the literal meaning only of words is being understood, but their values and differences can be critically appreciated. It was not long before Gertrude was reading Persian poetry by this light.”

  Gertrude continued her lessons in London, with a particular view to studying the love poetry of Hafiz. Henry had introduced her to Hafiz’s work, and had discussed with her its rhythms and mystical import. The work was begun as a way of keeping alive her love for him. She had determined to produce a book of real value this time: a collection of her translations into English of the poems of Hafiz, together with a biography of the Sufi poet set in the context of his contemporary history. It became, perhaps, a secret monument to Henry.

  Denison Ross wrote a preface in which he modestly related that in teaching Gertrude he had had “the healthy experience of realizing in the presence of such a brilliant scholar my own limitations”; to have pieced together the biography of Hafiz from manuscript sources, he said, was a tour de force, there being no history of Islamic Persia at the time.

  The Divan of Hafiz, an anthology of his poems, was published by Heinemann in 1897, the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee—and, more sadly for the Bells, of the death of Aunt Mary, provider of so many welcome interludes in Gertrude’s life. The book was published to as large an acclaim as a book of poetry can elicit. Edward G. Browne, the greatest authority on Persian literature of his day, said of her translations: “though rather free, they are in my opinion by far the most artistic, and, so far as the spirit of Hafiz is concerned, the most faithful renderings of his poetry”; and, with the single exception of Edward FitzGerald’s paraphrase of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, “probably the finest and most truly poetical renderings of any Persian poet ever produced in the English language.”

  The intentional vagueness of Hafiz’s poetry, the play on words and the musicality of the Persian language in its form, metre, and rhyme, all make it almost impossible to translate. Her solution was to write free poetry which could be said to take off from the originals, capturing their essence and function—then soaring up and away. Denison Ross demonstrated the problem, and her solution, in his preface, offering a literal translation of the beginning of one of the poems for comparison with Gertrude’s rendering.

  The first four lines of his translation read:

  I will not hold back from seeking till my desire is realized,

  Either my soul will reach the beloved, or my soul will leave its body.

  I cannot always be taking new friends like the faithless ones,

  I am at her threshold till my soul leaves its body.

  Gertrude wrote:

  I cease not from desire till my desire

  Is satisfied; or let my mouth attain

  My love’s red mouth, or let my soul expire

  Sighed from those lips that sought her lips in vain.

  Others may find another love as fair;

  Upon her threshold I have laid my head . . .

  Particularly poignant are her last lines of the poem, which depart rather noticeably from the original:

  Yet when sad lovers meet and tell their sighs

  Not without praise shall Hafiz’ name be said,

  Not without tears, in those pale companies

  Where joy has been forgot and hope has fled.

  She was fortunate in her teachers of Persian and Arabic: as well as Denison Ross, there was the eminent linguist S. Arthur Strong, whom she refers to as “my Pundit.” “My Pundit kept congratulating me on my proficiency . . . I think his other pupils must be awful duffers! . . . He brought me back my poems [her translations of Hafiz] yesterd
ay—he is really pleased with them.”

  All her life Gertrude read and reread both the classical and the modern poets, collecting every edition as it was published, and including poetry in her travelling library. To the surprise and disappointment of Florence and Hugh, after all the praise that was heaped on her as the translator of Hafiz, she appeared to consider her own gift of verse as a secondary pursuit and abandoned it altogether. “That gift has always seemed to me to underlie all she has written,” said Florence. “The spirit of poetry coloured all her prose descriptions, all the pictures that she herself saw and succeeded in making others see.” This spirit, thought her stepmother, was a strange and interesting ingredient in a character “capable on occasion of a very definite hardness, and of a deliberate disregard of sentiment: and also in a mental equipment which included great practical ability and a statesmanlike grasp of public affairs.”

  It is perhaps unreasonable to have expected Gertrude to produce more books of poetry as well as her stream of wonderful letters, diaries, and books. On this unique occasion the yearning for the unattainable beloved, whether metaphysical or human, struck that chord in her aching soul capable of producing a superlative vein of poetry. It seems that the pure creative power ignited in her was a response to something already out there, but felt within her on a different level. All aspects of her life work were, in a sense, passionate responses: her travel books, her exploration, her archaeology; her learning, especially of languages; her mountaineering; her work for the British Empire; her ultimate wish to re-create an Arab civilization. Reading her translation of Hafiz’s poem on the death of his beloved son, it is impossible not to hear the voice of Gertrude, or to draw comparisons with her own cruel loss.

  Good seemed the world to me who could not stay

  The wind of Death that swept my hopes away . . .

  Light of mine eyes and harvest of my heart,

  And mine at least in changeless memory!

  Ah! When he found it easy to depart,

  He left the harder pilgrimage to me!

  Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start,

  For God’s sake help me lift my fallen load,

  And Pity be my comrade of the road!

  Four

  BECOMING A PERSON

  In December 1897, at the age of twenty-nine, Gertrude set off with Maurice on the first of her round-the-world voyages. She was devoted to her brother, as were the whole family; he was much liked, too, by the steelmen at Clarence, before the army took over his life and carried him far from Cleveland. They travelled in style, taking staterooms on the Royal Mail steamship City of Rio de Janeiro. Maurice had soon asked the captain’s permission to mark out a golf course on board, which was a great success with the other passengers. He was the life and soul of the captain’s ball, while Gertrude made immediate friends with the children on board and organized a piquet tournament.

  Maurice was a tease. He had brought with him a book for Gertrude entitled Manners for Women, and took much pleasure in reading improving passages to her while she sat in a deck-chair smoking and staring at the horizon. “ ‘The Englishwoman of today,’ ” he read, “ ‘should be able to use a needle with the same skill as she can ride a bicycle’ . . . so would Gertrude be sewing on his buttons for him during the journey?” At which she might well have plucked the book out of his hands and thrown it at him.

  Back in Yorkshire in June the next year, she returned to her work with the Clarence women, giving travel lectures and arranging events. She played tennis and golf, hunted and fished. On visits to London, she and a group of friends would take long walks on moonlit nights, along the embankment to the Strand, through the City to Tower Bridge, then home to Sloane Street via Holborn Viaduct and Oxford Street. She kept her old bicycle in the front hall, and rode across Hyde Park to the British Museum, to her Arabic lessons and the London Library, books piled into the basket on the handlebars. She cycled across Kensington Gardens to ice-skate at Prince’s Rink, and to her fencing and dancing lessons. When she told her father what hard work it was, peddling against the wind, he sent her a cheque for a new machine. “I went to the stores this afternoon, mounted my bicycle and rode away on it. It’s a dream!” she wrote to him. “I took it right to the other side of London . . . I have qualms because I feel I have far too many things that I want. It isn’t good for me and I should like you to try a system of denial for the next few months.”

  In 1901, after prolonged setbacks in the coal, steel, and ship-building industries, the ailing Sir Lowthian, now eighty-five, took action to protect the Bell interests. He could see that despite all his efforts, Britain had not achieved the technical advances that Germany had; America and Japan were also surging ahead in the manufacture of iron and steel. He decided to amalgamate his companies with the longtime Bell competitor Dorman Long, in order to provide the necessary resources for the future. The sale of the shares and the chemical companies, together with the amalgamation of the Bell rail interests with the North East Railway, released huge amounts of money into the family. The grandchildren, nephews, and nieces received £5,000 each. This good fortune was no doubt a factor in Gertrude’s and and her half-brother Hugo’s decision to attend the once-in-a-lifetime event of Lord Curzon’s durbar in Delhi, to announce the accession of Edward VII as Emperor of India. They would then extend their journey for a further six months: it would be Gertrude’s second round-the-world trip.

  The event, in January 1903 at the height of Empire, was something that no one who saw it would ever forget. In Delhi, Gertrude and Hugo met up with their party—the Russells, Valentine Chirol, and a cousin, Arthur Godman—and everywhere they went, as Gertrude said, they met all the world. They stayed at the Viceroy’s superb visitors’ camp, and watched the spectacular procession from the best seats. She wrote in her diary:

  It was the most gorgeous show that can possibly be imagined . . . First soldiers; then the Viceroy’s bodyguard, native cavalry; then Pertab Singh at the head of the Cadet Corps, all sons of Rajas; then the Viceroy and Lady Curzon, followed by the Connaughts, all on elephants; and then a troop of some hundred Rajas on elephants, a glittering mass of gold and jewels. The Rajas were roped in pearls and emeralds from the neck to the waist, with cords of pearls strung over their shoulders, and tassels of pearls hanging from their turbans; their dresses were shot gold cloth, or gold embroidered velvet. The elephants had tassels of jewels hanging from their ears.

  But whether she was accepting the gift of a new bicycle or allowing herself the most fabulous of holidays, it often occurred to Gertrude to question how her time and resources should properly be used. She fluctuated between pursuing personal fulfilment and devoting her energies to serving the community for no reward. She would do this all her life. An avowed atheist, she was in the forefront of the new thinking that was looking afresh at man and society. Utilitarianism, expressed as a basis for moral philosophy by Jeremy Bentham, emphasized the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain and distress as the fundamental aims of man. It recognized that only a free man could pursue these aims, but stated that freedom should not be enjoyed without a corresponding sense of personal, moral responsibility to his fellow man and the world around him. John Stuart Mill faced the practical issues of achieving responsible freedom, proposing possible forms of government that would enable society to develop cohesively while the individual remained free.

  Questions concerning the way a human being should conduct himself in society were constantly being debated, and the conclusions arrived at applied as the moral dimension to all aspects of life. To what extent, for instance, should a person going out to play tennis worry about whether his time is well spent, about whether he should let his opponent win, or about whether it is right that he should be playing tennis while others are at work? Or should a game of tennis be just a game of tennis?

  This was the core of the argument that raged intermittently between Gertrude and Hugo on their travels. At Redcar, before they left for India, they had been visited by
the Trinity College don who had taught Hugo at Oxford and fostered his wish to go into the Church. This ambition had come as a surprise to all the Bells, who were what Gertrude called “happily irreligious,” and was a considerable disappointment to Florence, who had wanted Hugo to follow his talent for music and become a concert pianist or composer. Gertrude, rooted in scientific argument, found herself poles apart from Hugo in his religious convictions. Their visitor, the Reverend Michael Furse, later the Bishop of Pretoria and of St. Albans, was taken around the garden after lunch by Gertrude, who suddenly rounded on him with the question, “I suppose you don’t approve of this plan of Hugo going round the world with me?” “Why shouldn’t I?” asked the perplexed Furse. “Well,” she replied, “you may be pretty sure he won’t come back a Christian.” “Why?” “Oh, because I’ve got a much better brain than Hugo,” she responded with her usual effrontery. “A year in my company will be bound to upset his faith.” Furse burst into laughter, then told her that she should not be too sure of it.

  It was a challenge she could not resist. Hugo told his parents:

  Gertrude is an excellent person for a travelling companion, for besides the fact that she . . . takes a great interest in things Oriental, she also (which is of great interest to me) holds strong atheistic and materialistic views, the effect of which will be, as Michael Furse says, to put me on my mettle. She holds them sometimes aggressively: I think that aggression on her part will probably be met by aggression on mine and that we shall thereupon be rude and quarrel!