Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  All the good luck in the world,

  Yours ever, R.

  “All the good luck in the world!” She was mortified, humiliated. Where did such a letter leave her? She read and reread his words, turning and twisting them to extract the last drop of meaning. She tried to compensate for the coolness of the letter by dwelling on the words “we all really live alone.” This must be a reference to the unsatisfactory state of his marriage, but it told her nothing new. Her spirits plummeted again. Was he really saying, “Don’t be embarrassed, I appreciate the depth of your feelings, I’m glad you weren’t inhibited, let’s be friends?”

  But she wanted to be so much more than friends. In a flash she saw that the intimate evening at Rounton was momentous for her in a way that it was not for him. He was so much more experienced than she was: he had told her of his numerous encounters with women. Her own love life had not been successful. She felt things too deeply and had suffered too much over Henry Cadogan to lightly repeat the experience. Twenty years had passed, but it remained by far the most important affair in her life, a poetic, heartfelt engagement that had prompted Florence and Hugh to investigate his past and his finances, and to turn him down—or at least to counsel several years of waiting. Then had come his death from pneumonia as a result of falling into the icy river, which left a question mark over what had actually happened. It would have been traumatic at any age to have committed yourself to a person you loved, to have had to break that commitment, and then to hear that your lover had died in a way that would always raise agonizing questions.

  Cadogan’s death had left her wounded: she would flirt, but she would not commit. Attractive as she was in her warmth and energy and perfect health, lovely as she could look with her red hair and slim, strong body, few men could break through her reserve. She had had one particular admirer, one Bertie Crackenthorpe, whom she first noted was “very devoted”—and then, with mounting irritation, she found him “always at my elbow listening.” Soon after this, she wrote him off: “I’ve seen quite enough of him for the moment!” Then there was the short-lived but deeply felt relationship with Florence’s nephew Billy Lascelles, kept on the boil by several family holidays. When that was over and she had grown up, she examined her feelings in a detached way: “. . . how odd it is to realise that those fires are ashes now, no vestiges of spark, thank goodness! No excitement, no regret. All that remains is a memory of sadness that aches curiously at times, but which is far and far from demanding his presence.” Later, she had a flirtation with a charming Yorkshireman, Will Pease. Her watchful half-sister Molly wrote: “Gertrude flirts awfully with him,” and Elizabeth Robins, the family friend, thought that they would become engaged. But whatever Pease intended, Gertrude evaded him. The affair proceeded no further than affectionate banter.

  Love came only twice to Gertrude. This time it had moved her to the depths of her soul. The effect it had on her was perhaps due, in part, to her almost complete lack of sentiment and to her formidable intellect. She was not likely, as another woman might have been, to confuse affection with passion. As Florence, who knew Gertrude better than any other woman, was to write: “In truth the real basis of Gertrude’s nature was her capacity for deep emotion. Great joys came into her life, and also great sorrows. How could it be otherwise, with a temperament so avid of experience? Her ardent and magnetic personality drew the lives of others into hers as she passed along.” She had learnt, long before her thirties, to live without a lover, and no woman was better equipped to compensate, filling her life with adventures of so many other kinds. At the same time the longings that had not been fulfilled were expressed in her extraordinary aptitude for poetry that she had had since her schooldays, when reading Milton made her “want to stand on her head for joy.” The expression of the most distilled emotions, poetry was the only dimension in her that her stepmother was disappointed not to see fully realized. Had the lack of a lover and husband, Florence would wonder, inhibited this powerful source of feeling in her stepdaughter?

  Doughty-Wylie had proceeded from Rounton to Suffolk. From there he wrote again to add a strange corollary to his letter:

  . . . By the way, talking of dreams—Rounton ghosts visited me the next night also. Is there any history of them? Some shadowy figure of a woman who really quite bothered me, so that I turned on the light. It wasn’t your ghost, or anything like you; but something hostile and alarming . . . She . . . was a long, shadowy woman thing that swept and swept across my bed like a hawk, stooping and said nothing, and I didn’t know who the devil she was, but she meant attack, and I wanted the light . . .

  Rounton was only forty-one years old, and had been occupied by Hugh and Florence since 1905.*

  Dick returned to London to find a stack of letters from Gertrude. Undoubtedly he was flattered by the attentions of this much respected woman, and didn’t want to lose her friendship; but while her letters addressed the issues that tortured her, his responses stopped short of any sense of commitment. “. . . Wonderful letters, my dear, which delight me. Bless you. But there can be no words to answer you with. Well—let’s talk about other things . . .”

  And then came the hammer blow. A letter from him at his club told her that he had accepted a post in Albania, with the International Boundary Commission. “My wife is in Wales. She’ll come up when I wire to her and go with me—till we see the hows and whys and wheres . . . I have turned into my old bachelor quarters in Half Moon Street, no. 29. Write to me there . . . while I am alone, let’s be alone.” Perhaps in recognition of what this news would mean to Gertrude, and to comfort her a little, he signed himself “Dick” for the first time. Any hope she had of seeing him again soon, or of distancing herself from the despair she felt after his visit to Rounton, was gone at a stroke. His letters were her lifeline. She had read them so many times she knew them all by heart—but now she wondered, had he allowed their correspondence only out of pity, saying to himself, “I’ll soon be gone, and that will be that?”

  She expressed her misery to him, and he tried to comfort her. “My dear, this shall go to speak with you—to give you my love and a kiss as if I were a child or you were.” She was only a beginner where love was concerned. Perhaps she made mistakes, pouring out her longing for him too early, urging him to leave his wife. In his oblique way he tried to communicate to her the link between these longings and the frustrations of self-imposed chastity. From the kindness of his heart, and somewhat clumsily, he was trying to tell her that she should not be ashamed of any of these emotions: “Last night, a poor girl stopped me—the same old story—and I gave her money and sent her home . . . So many are really like me, or what I used to be, and I’m sorry for them . . . These desires of the body that are right and natural, that are so often nothing more than any common hunger—they can be the vehicle of fire of the mind, and as that only are they great . . .”

  Then, a warning: “Judith knowing you well and having always before seen your letters would find it very odd to be suddenly debarred them and on voyages our lives are at close quarters.” Gertrude was frantic. Didn’t he want her letters? She would put it to the test. She stopped writing, and he rose to the bait. Reassurance came from him at once, at the end of August: “A blank day, my dear. I am tempted to wonder—did I say too much? Or was it that you thought the time had passed? Or were you too occupied? Away with all such things. In the chains we live in—or I live in—it is wise and right to wear them easily.” She built on her small victory, by asking how she could best write to him in Albania. He replied:

  Of course call me Dick in letters, and I shall call you Gertrude—there is nothing in that—many people do—my wife doesn’t see my letters as a rule, but as she often writes to you herself we have always passed them across—but oh how I shall miss them . . . There is another thing that has to be done—tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is right—one might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me.

  Nothing, she felt, could be worse. It was a good
bye, and it was followed by another: “. . . if I can’t write to you, I shall always think of you telling me things in your room at Rounton . . . the subtle book eludes, but our hands met on the cover.” “The subtle book” was always, she recognized, his metaphor for sex. “. . . And you’ll go on being the wise and splendid woman that you are, not afraid of any amazement and finding work and life and the fullness of it always to your hand. And I shall always be your friend.”

  She had reached the crossroads of her life. At an age when it was realistic to relinquish hopes of meeting a man she could marry and with whom she could have children, she had met exactly the kind of man she had always been looking for—one who could not be belittled by her own achievements, a man she could compare with pride to her powerful father and grandfather. Less likely than most women to have an unwise affair, she was still very vulnerable. Nonconformist, mould-breaking—feeling, being, and making it plain that she was superior to almost all the men she met—she had hidden for so long behind her lines of defence that she was caught unawares by his hold on her. In her few melancholy moments hitherto, it was only the lack of a husband and family that gave her pain. There was never the slightest bitterness or jealousy in her references to Elsa’s and Molly’s children, whom she found enchanting. Valentine Chirol had noticed how, on a holiday visit to Wales, she had reduced a group of lively children in his garden to spellbound silence with a ragbag of stories, some serious, some ridiculous. Children brought out her playful side, and Florence had shown her how to be silly with children in the best possible way. At her Stanley cousin’s coming-out dance, there were about twenty little girls with whom she had danced wildly all evening.

  With all her erudition Gertrude was still the same person she had been at Oxford when, feeling too hot one day, she had jumped into the river with all her clothes on. She would be the first to leave a lunch table at which the children had been fidgeting and bickering, to chase them into the garden or collect a bat and ball and start a loud and argumentative game. At Mount Grace Priory, she had recently arranged a splendid picnic party for all the children in the family, and her letters are littered with affectionate comments about her little nieces. “I don’t think I ever saw anything more adorable than Moll’s children. There’s no question about Pauline’s being pretty, I think she’s quite charming.”

  Her last chance for happiness seemed to evaporate as Dick and Judith packed their trunks for Albania. Aching head in hands, Gertrude accepted that she could neither forward the affair nor communicate with him directly. It seemed that her pleasure in all things was at an end. She did not mind, now, if she lived or died. It was not her first reverse, nor would it be her last; but she was, after all, a spoilt heiress who had been denied very few of the things that she had wanted in life. She had rarely heard the word “No,” but it was her fate to meet denial at the very times it was hardest for her to accept it.

  With the same courage that characterized her entire life, she decided once and for all to detach herself from the seesaw of hope and despair. Gertrude was no Victorian moralist—she was too intelligent for that—but she accepted that she had broken the rules, and the rules were on the side of the marriage vow. But she would show Dick that the love she felt for him could be diminished by neither time nor distance. To exorcise her anguish, she would undertake some life-threatening project and consecrate it to him. She would go back to the desert and undertake a journey that had killed other travellers before her. He told her that he loved her writing. Well, she would write a book for him of her daily trials and triumphs and send it to him in instalments as she reached each staging post. It would be rigorous in its focus on her journey. He, in Albania, perhaps not getting on very well with Judith, would be forever reminded that she was out there on account of him, loving him, risking her life—she could already be dead—and that he might never see her again. She would follow in his uncle’s footsteps, she suddenly thought, her spirit quickening, and take the hard road through warring tribes to Hayyil, a venture that others had not survived.

  Gertrude left for the East six weeks after the Doughty-Wylies’ departure. Just before her own, she sent Dick a bundle of her books and review articles. He responded:

  I do like your writing—you very clever and charming person—and you in your desert . . . I don’t know if this will reach you before you push off—if it does, my dear, it is to wish you all the luck and success, all safety and reasonable comfort (both of those last your fiery soul is apt to despise) . . . Have a good journey—find castles—keep well—and remain my friend. P.S. As to procès verbaux, the great thing is to put in my colleagues and leave out myself.

  It was a cool letter and a coded way of reminding her to write to Judith and not to him. She braced herself against the pain. The book, she thought, would be a love letter in itself. Like Scheherazade, she would win his attention and then his love by her spellbinding storytelling and the sheer force of the adventure.

  In London Dick had intended to bring the relationship to a close, but he had not been a month in Albania when he was once again writing to Gertrude every few days. Perhaps he had wanted to put more of himself into his marriage, and it had not worked out. Perhaps, with Gertrude out there, he felt more secure from Judith’s scrutiny. Perhaps, after dinner and when Judith had gone to bed, after a day of tricky boundary negotiations with the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Montenegrins, he sat down with a decanter of port and allowed his inner feelings to surface. He seemed, in one letter, to admit as much, writing of the occasion at Rounton when she had kept him at arm’s length: “It was right . . . and the sober part of me does not regret—the drunk part regrets and remembers until he goes to sleep.” In any case, a new warmth now entered his communications.

  “Yes—I’m very fond of you—I think, I have thought for a long time, that you are delightful and wise and strong, and such as my soul loveth. And in thought, on a swifter camel, into the desert I go with you . . . I shall go on writing.” On another occasion:

  It’s late and I’m all alone, and thinking of . . . love and life—and an evening at Rounton—and what it all meant . . . You are in the desert, I am in the mountains, and in these places much could be said under the clouds. Does it mean that the fence was folly, and that we might have been man and woman as God made us and been happy . . . But I myself answer to myself that it is a lie. If I had been your man to you, in the bodies we live in, would it change us, surely not. We could not be together long, and there’s the afterwards sometimes to be afraid of . . . And still it is a great and splendid thing, the birthright of everyone, for woman as for man, only so many of them don’t understand the simplicity of it. And I have always maintained that this curious, powerful sex attraction is a thing right and natural and to be gratified, and if it is not gratified, what then; are we any worse?

  The Doughty-Wylies did not stay long in Albania, but returned to London for Christmas, when Dick called on Gertrude’s parents in Sloane Street and found Hugh at home. In Suffolk for New Year, it seems that things were not well between the Doughty-Wylies. Dick wrote:

  Tonight . . . should I want to tell you . . . of the disappointment of my relations and my wife that I have not acquired any more letters after my name? . . . Where are you? It’s like writing to an idea, a dream . . . Is it that gloom that is so black tonight? Or is it the regret for things lost, great and splendid things I find in your book, your mind and body, and the dear love of you, all lost . . . Would you like me to write you a love letter—to say how glad and gratified and humble I am when I think of you . . .

  Soon he was writing that he would be going to Addis Ababa, alone this time: “There’s anarchy out there, complete and beastly . . . Perhaps I can hear in Cairo. Your father will let me know . . .” Gertrude, at Ziza, had just been denied protection for her journey by both the Turkish officials and the British government. She was to all intents and purposes an outlaw, and as she turned towards the desert to begin the more hazardous part of her journey, she began the book s
he would write exclusively for him. She would now be parcelling it up and posting it in instalments to Addis Ababa, together with her letters. She no longer had, at least, to fear that they would fall into Judith’s hands.

  She had received, through Dick, wishes for a safe journey from the author of Arabia Deserta himself. Nothing could have meant more to her at that moment, except the sense she was now getting from Dick’s letters that the emotional tie between them was intensifying, even if nothing fundamental had changed:

  The desert has you [he wrote], you and your splendid courage, my queen of the desert—and my heart is with you. If I was young and free, and a very perfect knight, it would be more fitting to take and kiss you. But I am old and tired and full of a hundred faults . . . you are right—not that way for you and me—because we are slaves, not because it is not the right, the natural way—when the passions of the body flame and melt into the passions of the spirit—in those dream ecstasies so rarely found by any human creature, those, as you say, whom God hath really joined—in some divine moment we might reach it—the ecstasy. We never shall. But there is left so much. As you say my dear, wise Queen—all that there is we will take.

  Difficult as his letters were for her to translate into her own clear perceptions, he was, at least, writing to her every day or two from London. There was no reserve, no evasion or calculation in her own communications. She told him again and again what she wanted. He replied: “I cannot tell you how much it moves me . . . to see it written by you, that you might have married me, have borne my children, have been my life as well as my heart.”