A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby (Text only)

by Mary S. Lovell

  He asked her about the Mezrabs and she recounted a recent occasion when the entire tribe had descended on her in Damascus, believing Medjuel had summoned them. They filled the house sleeping on the stairs and in all the rooms, she said, intending to amuse him. He asked her if she had not been afraid.

  She immediately retorted that she was greatly alarmed, but not as I appeared to think, at anything her husband’s tribe would do. Her fear was that some of the many Turkish soldiery near her house would make some remark derogatory to her, in which case, she said, not a Turk in the neighbourhood would have been left alive.

  On mentioning this story to my friend he said he entirely believed it because the attachment of the Bedouins to her was passionate, and each would have been ready to die for her. She was the only woman whom the Arabs would permit to ride upon a horse … I gained the impression that under different circumstances she might have exerted a most valuable influence in any society into which she had been thrown.8

  Jane’s stepson Afet often stayed at the house. He proudly owned Jane as his mother, and indeed described himself as half-English. He had three wives by the time he was twenty but the first, whom Jane thought the best, died young of some nameless illness in the desert. ‘And now he has two, an increase and bother in every way. He has come with debts of £30 which he expects his father to pay,’ Jane grumbled. But in fact she was very fond of him and fretted a great deal when he became ill, terrified that Medjuel would lose his remaining son. There are many references in her interminable lists to small gifts for Afet and his wives, and for Aafteh, Medjuel’s daughter, who was married to the young Sheikh Meshur of the Gomussa tribe which, like the Mezrab, were allied with the Sebbah.

  Age had scarcely diminished Jane’s horsemanship. ‘I rode Missouada to Salhiyeh at quite a canter. She is very pretty and has many good qualities as to character, but her legs and back are defective in strength which does not suit me and I fear I must try to get another,’ she wrote at the age of seventy. The result was a pretty white mare, in foal and ‘a bit frisky’, which became for a while her favourite and named Nourah in honour of a previous good horse.

  Mr Jago, the consul, and his wife became good friends of Jane’s and took over the ordering of commissions from Europe which they shipped through the consulate. Nothing seemed too much trouble for them. Privately Jane was not impressed with the new-style dresses that arrived, with narrow underskirts and horse-hair bustles with demi-trains. ‘I think the present fashions detestable from their expense and heaviness, and they are impractical into the bargain,’ she wrote.

  In January 1878 a young English couple came to Syria to locate the best Arab horses for an Arabian stud. They were Mr Wilfred Scawen Blunt and his lovely, intelligent wife Lady Anne, who were making an extended honeymoon tour. Anne Blunt was the only granddaughter of the poet Byron, and in common with Jane she had a great knowledge of, and affinity with, horses. Her husband, a mesmeric personality, was a poet; he was also a womaniser and eventually made his wife’s life deeply unhappy.

  The Blunts’ strategy for obtaining breeding stock was to go into the desert to buy from the bedouins who bred the horses. They wished to acquire the original old blood-lines with a provenance beyond dispute. In March 1878 they were the guests of one of the Anazeh tribes of whom the chief was Jane’s old rival, Mohammed ebn Dukhi. While travelling with ebn Dukhi’s tribe the Wuld Ali towards Damascus, the Blunts came upon the Gomussa and Mezrab tents. Afet was with the tribe and in the belief that he was a British subject through his stepmother naturally introduced himself to his compatriots, and invited them to stay with his parents in Damascus.9 It was not the first time the Blunts had heard of Jane. Several weeks earlier they had found a young boy, the son of a sheikh, playing with an exquisitely decorated gun; he told them he had been given it by the Sitt el Mezrab.

  we have constantly heard her spoken of in the desert, and always in terms of respect … Medjuel himself is talked of as a supremely fortunate man, the possessor of boundless wealth, though some think his marriage a mésalliance as the lady is not of Arab blood and therefore not asil.10

  A week later they arrived in Damascus and met Medjuel and Jane while they were visiting Abd el Khader. Medjuel, who was aged about fifty at the time, was described as ‘a slight man … with extremely small hands and feet … carefully well dressed and has extremely good manners’. Of Jane, who had decided that the latest fashions were not for her and dressed in a simple though old-fashioned style, Lady Anne wrote:

  Mrs Digby has the traces of great beauty and now, even with the most unfavourable style of dress, she appears a person of distinction. She makes the great mistake of adopting the Arab fashion of blacking the rim all round the eyes and darkening the eyebrows, and I believe dying her hair … black. She wore a cap with some lilac and white flowers … and a dress of ecru-coloured soft silk with bows of its own shade, and with an underskirt of dark plum colour. In the street she wears a black lace Spanish veil over her head.

  Her manner is perfectly quiet, dignified and unassuming and I found her extremely amiable and even cordial … she invited me to her house tomorrow to see her drawings of Palmyra and other places. We had much interesting conversation.11

  Jane told Anne Blunt a great deal about Arab life and customs, as well as describing the Governor Midhat Pasha’s behaviour within his harem – ‘depravities,’ wrote Lady Anne, ‘things that cannot be written, and of the generally rotten state of Moslem society as far as women are concerned’.12 Jane had never been able to accept the lot of women in harems, who were kept in ignorance and fear in an unhappy hothouse of sexual rivalry.

  The Blunts spent just over two weeks in Damascus. When the time came for them to leave, Jane and Anne were already starting to become fast friends. Lady Anne visited Jane and Medjuel’s house frequently during their time in Damascus, and was always received in the pretty drawing-room. Her marriage to Blunt was to be a disaster and she was envious of the obviously tender relationship between Jane and Medjuel, marvelling at how ‘he appeared to me, to pay great attention to her smallest wish and this without any particular show, noticing what she wanted before she asked for it’.13 After viewing Jane’s Palmyra sketches ‘we went down to the yard and saw the pelican, which has lived there for three years, feeding on liver. It is not winged or clipped but never tries to go away and is in capital plumage.’14

  The Blunts also interrogated Medjuel, drawing heavily on his comprehensive knowledge of the history of Arab horses and of the bedouin tribes – information that was subsequently used by the Burtons in several books. The pedigree of the old breeds were passed from generation to generation in oral form; there was no other record. Medjuel gave them ‘a great deal of valuable advice’ and is acknowledged as a major source in the magnum opus of the Blunts’ daughter (Judith, Lady Wentworth), The Authentic Arabian Horse. Anne Blunt saw and respected in Medjuel the qualities that had caught Jane’s interest. She commented that his build was that of a desert nobleman: ‘the Bedouin Arab of pure blood is seldom more than five feet six inches high’.

  Desert matters occupy all his thoughts, and are of course to us of all important interest at the moment … I understand he is so much disgusted by the course of tribal politics … that he might resign in favour of his son Afet. In that case they might continue, as now, living partly at Damascus and partly in tents, and always a providence to their tribe whom they supply with all the necessities of Bedouin life, and guns, revolvers, and ammunition besides. The Mezrab, therefore, though [a small tribe] are always well mounted and better armed than any of their fellows, and can own their own in all the war-like adventures of the Sebbah.15

  When the Blunts left it was with the reluctance of parting friends. But they left a promise that they would return to Damascus at the end of the year when they intended to make a longer journey around the desert.

  24

  Sunset Years

  1878–1881

  Jane’s letters to her family are packed with chatt
y information. She wrote of the tribe, the desert politics that were so annoying to Medjuel, gardening matters and riding, threats of plague or cholera which were an annual worry, and European politics in which she took an intelligent interest.

  These had become the fabric of her life. She no longer joined the tribe for the long winter scherrak [trek into the Baghdad desert], even though she was still reasonably fit and upright. In the desert she had always made a point of eating and drinking only when the bedouin did. During Ramadan this entailed no food or drink between sunrise and sunset. At other times she lived for weeks on irregular meals of camel’s milk, rice and dates, tasting meat only on the rare occasion when an animal was slaughtered for a celebration, or to welcome visitors. But though she enjoyed camel’s milk it is a purgative, and her constitution could no longer function for long periods on this diet, to which the bedouin with their evolutionary inheritance were tolerant. Occasionally the old rumours of Medjuel having another wife resurfaced and when he was away on business and the tribe were in their summer encampment, still the spectre of Ouadjid worried Jane.

  Friday May 14th, 1878. The post came but there was no letter for me. Medjuel has not received my last letter on account of the post being robbed. An abyss of jealousies pass through my head, with Ouadjid … so near Horns!

  Her passionate love for Medjuel was undiminished by the years and on the day after this diary entry the jealousy she was never able to control soared to a crescendo. She learned from Afet that, before Medjuel’s marriage to Ouadjid, Schebibb had quarrelled with his father, saying he thought it was not right for Medjuel to marry Ouadjid without first telling Jane. As a result Medjuel had ‘cursed poor Schebibb and even wished him dead!’ Many in the tribe had heard the quarrel. Medjuel’s guilt after the death of his son must have been great, for curses are highly regarded by the bedouin. But Jane’s mind ran on a single track where Medjuel was concerned, despite the fact that the younger woman had been divorced in Jane’s favour. ‘All this proves to me how he, Medjuel, must have loved her!!! I sent him a telegram today, half maddened by suspicion and jealousy.’1

  To crown the misery she was feeling, Anton, her French gardener, seeing her upset and guessing because of the servants’ gossip that it was because of Medjuel, suddenly declared he was madly in love with her. ‘Preposterous and ridiculous!’ Jane exploded in her diary. ‘His head has been turned by novel-reading! I earnestly pray that God will take this trial from me.’ It did not occur to her to regard the declaration as a compliment; she merely worried that a difficult situation was now bound to occur between her and the best gardener she had had for many years.2 In fact Anton remained in her employment until her death.

  Despite Jane’s angry cable, Medjuel was away for a further three months, and his late return in mid-September was only partly explained by a fever he had caught in August. He was nursed on that occasion by a Scottish missionary friend of Jane’s, Mary Mackintosh, who wrote that he had been desperately ill when he came to her for help en route to Damascus. Prior to that date, he explained, tribal business and ophthalmia had delayed his return.

  That year, 1878, was the most bloodthirsty anybody would remember, and Afet took an active part in the fighting. At one point in a battle the chief of one of the noblest families in the desert, Sheikh ebn Jendall of the Roallah tribe, hereditary enemies of the Sebbah, was pursued by Mohammed ebn Dukhi’s men into a group of tents commanded by Afet. As there was a blood feud between the Jendall and Dukhi families, his case was desperate. However, according to bedouin tradition, a man can yield honourably and ask an enemy for asylum, and ebn Jendall knew Afet to be of an old and honourable family who would respect the old traditions. Afet immediately accepted the man’s surrender and covered him with his cloak to indicate that ebn Jendall was his prisoner and under his protection. But, to the great horror of everyone, one of Mohammed Dukhi’s sons decided that in a blood feud no asylum was sacred. He dragged ebn Jendall out of the tent and slew him before Afet’s eyes. It was undoubtedly cold-blooded murder and the tribes were outraged and apprehensive at the indifference towards the code of honour of ebn Dukhi’s men.3

  Medjuel’s own part in these battles left him tired and ill. Even so, Jane worried that he had been seeing Ouadjid. Why else, she asked herself, should he not have sent for her when he knew he was going to be apart from her for such a long period?4 It did not occur to her, apparently, that Medjuel may have thought a desert war conducted in summer temperatures of up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit was beyond his seventy-year-old wife. In fact Medjuel was still ill with fever when he arrived in Damascus and Jane had to send for a doctor. In his company and his loving attentiveness her fears subsided, and the following weeks were as delightful as ever, Medjuel escorting her to Saliyeh to visit friends, look at gardens, or offer veterinary advice.

  In December 1878 the Blunts returned to Syria. During the journey to Damascus, Anne read Isabel Burton’s book, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land. Jane knew of this book, which had been published in 1875, and indeed had written to Isabel several times during its gestation, prior to the cooling of their friendship. Possibly she had even approved what was said about herself, for these passages were considerably more restrained than Isabel’s subsequent recollections of Jane. It was, and remains, a fascinating account of life in Damascus lived by a European woman at that time. ‘There is much of interest [in it],’ wrote Anne Blunt, ‘but it is all coloured by the constant fulsome praise of Captain Burton, his wisdom and courage, all of which must have done his prospects harm rather than good.’5

  The Blunts reached Damascus on 6 December and stayed at Demetri’s hotel. Medjuel called on them almost immediately, riding his lovely white mare. ‘He gave us a message from Mrs Digby who is as anxious to see us as we are to see her.’6 The next week was spent in constant visits between the two couples, and by the end of it the Blunts had acquired further invaluable material for their book. Wilfred suggested buying a house in Damascus as a base for future explorations of the country. As things stood they had to make a camp in Damascus in one of the many ‘gardens’ available for travellers, so that their camels and horses could graze and their attendants had accommodation. In the winter months this made a dreary base.

  When Jane and Medjuel mentioned that a small house next door to them was for sale for £350, Anne Blunt wrote, ‘we all looked over the wall by means of a ladder … at the little house just mentioned … it has a good piece of ground at the back, and is … modest and suitable.’7 Wilfred Blunt was fired with enthusiasm, and the decision was made to buy it. Jane was delighted at her new neighbours. ‘I enjoy her energy and horsemanship and nerve,’ she wrote of Anne Blunt, who reminded her of a much younger Jane Digby.8

  During their long conversations, Medjuel advised them that for the journey they planned to make, through the western side of the desert, the best person to deal with was Mohammed ebn Dukhi. It was Wuld Ali territory, and ebn Dukhi would be sure to give them the most accurate information regarding grazing and wells. Jane grimaced at placing her new and valued friend in the hands of her old enemy, but Medjuel thought ebn Dukhi would honour important European travellers under his protection. Jane warned Anne that ebn Dukhi was clever, but not to be trusted – information which Anne subsequently found to be sound advice.

  Medjuel provided letters of introduction to all the sheikhs they were likely to encounter, placing himself in their debt if they would assist his great friends the Blunts. ‘Both of us are struck by his intelligence and way of putting things, besides his refinement and good-breeding equal to the best of any of the noble families,’ Anne Blunt wrote. ‘I remark this particularly because it has often been said that Medjuel was a camel-driver, and nothing more, and Mrs Digby enriched him and made him a Sheikh. Whereas it is really a fact that he is of an ancient family … one of the oldest tribes.’9

  All too soon the visit to Damascus was over and the Blunts left on 13 December. However, Anne suggested that they write to each other, and
through these long and detailed letters we know more of the final years of Jane’s life than from her diary, entries in which from this point become intermittent.

  A French visitor who called on Jane at this time reported that Jane looked no more than sixty, and was still a remarkable rider. She remained elegant and charming, indeed, ‘still resembled the portrait Lawrence made of her when she was called Lady Ellenborough, which was recently disposed of at the sale of the Wilson collection’.10 On her table she had current European newspapers and reviews, and she questioned the visitor closely about the Parisian theatre, authors and politicians.

  Another visitor, Sir Valentine Chirol, met her briefly and commented that, though Jane was ageing,

  so long as her Turkish yashmak concealed the lower part of her face, her ivory white and almost unwrinkled brow, her luminous eyes and the fine line of her aquiline nose still preserved traces of the beauty which had captured so many hearts in many lands and in the highest places.

  Not only was she well-read, but the world had been to her a strangely interesting book, of which she seemed to enjoy turning the pages, with a disarming simplicity, as if they belonged not to her own, but to someone else’s life. She also had a keen sense of humour, and when I once suggested to her that she ought to write her Memoirs, she replied with a chuckle that she was afraid they would be ‘a rather naughty edition of the Almanach de Gotha’, and then added rather primly that a prayer book was more suitable to her declining years.11