Gertrude Bell (25 page)

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 she 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.”

Reminding him that the words for “garden” and “paradise” were the same in Persian, Gertrude had invented the metaphor of a fantasy garden where only the two of them could enter. There they could always be alone together:

You give me a new world, Gertrude, you give me the key to your heart, though I have friends, some of them women, even a wife, they are as far removed from the garden where we walk as east from west . . . I have often loved women as a man like me does love them, well and badly, little and much, as the blood took me, or the time or the invitation, or simply for the adventure—to see what happened. But that is all behind me.

At the end of January 1914 Dick visited Hugh again, then set off for Addis Ababa. As he left, he wrote a letter that was less rhetorical and more sensual than any he had sent her: “Where are you now? By the Belka castles,
*
working like ten men, tired and hungry and sleepy . . . Like that I love to think of you: sometimes, too (but it's beastly of me), I love to think of you lonely, and wanting me . . .” Finally, he wrote the words she had waited so long to hear:

You said you wanted to hear me say I loved you, you wanted it plain to eyes and ears . . . I love you—does it do any good out there in the desert? Is it less vast, less lonely, like the far edge of life? someday perhaps, in a whisper, in a kiss, I will tell you . . . love like this is life itself . . . Oh, where are you, where
are you? . . . Well, I go. Africa draws me; I know I shall have things to try for . . . But of them I scarcely think: it is only that I love you, Gertrude, and shall not see you . . .

Sitting in her small tent, she read the words again and again, and her heart leapt. He had made a commitment to her at last. He had admitted to himself as much as to her that he loved her. And yet she had never felt further from him. Could he even remember what she looked like? she wondered. There were terrible moments when she tried to conjure up
his
face, and could not do it. She was nearly at the end of her journey, she could almost say that she had survived it, but facing her was perhaps a vaster loneliness than she had already endured. He was physically as distant from her as ever, and no nearer to leaving his wife. Weeping from sheer exhaustion and sadness, she asked herself what she had gained:

I try to school myself beforehand by reminding myself how I have looked forward . . . to the end, and when it came have found it—just nothing. Dust and ashes in one's hand . . . dead bones that look as if they would never rise and dance—it's all just nothing and one turns away from it with a sigh and tries to fix one's eyes on to the new thing before one . . . Whether I can bear with England—come back to the same things and do them all over again—that is what I sometimes wonder.

She returned to an England without Dick Doughty-Wylie—but not to do the same things all over again. The summer was hot and full of political foreboding. His letters continued, their tone intensifying and becoming less guarded than ever: “What wouldn't I give to have you sitting opposite in this all-alone house?”

At Rounton on the outbreak of war, on 4 August, she was propelled into war work—at first, temporarily, at Lord Onslow's hospital at Clandon Park near Guildford in Surrey. She had written to the Red Cross asking if they could find a job for her. She had not been at Clandon for more than three weeks when she received a telegram in reply, asking if she would go at once to Boulogne, to work in the Wounded and Missing Office there.

In October the German army had marched through Flanders, and a British expeditionary force sent to Ypres to stop them had been virtually
massacred. The casualties were huge. There were still wounded men on stretchers waiting at the docks and at the station when Gertrude arrived at the end of November.

She checked into her tiny attic room in the town, and went at once to the office, setting to work filing and indexing, making lists of the wounded and missing for the War Office. Working eight or nine hours a day, she would go to a restaurant for her dinner, then sit down, dead tired, to write to Dick and to her family. She was less unhappy now that she was at full stretch again, well into her stride and beginning to work at a pace that her office colleagues could hardly believe, still less keep up with. His letters were now as passionate as she could wish; she took them with her to the office so that she could reread them over her snatched lunch:

Tonight I should not want to talk [he wrote]. I should make love to you. Would you like it, welcome it, or would a hundred hedges rise and bristle and divide?—but we would tear them down. What is a hedge that it should divide us . . . ? You are in my arms, alight, afire. Tonight I do not want dreams and fancies. But it will never be . . . The first time should I not be nearly afraid to be your lover?

Deprived of sex, he could sometimes think of little else.

So much a thing of the mind is the insistent passion of the body. Women sometimes give themselves to men for the man's pleasure. I'd hate a woman to be like that with me. I'd want her to feel to the last sigh the same surge and stir that carried me away. She should miss nothing that I could give her.

She answered him from the depths of her heart:

Dearest, dearest, I give this year of mine to you, and all the years that shall come after it . . . Dearest, when you tell me you love me and want me still, my heart sings—and then weeps with longing to be with you. I have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for you; it floods out to creep up the high mountains where you live.

But in December came unwelcome news. Judith had arrived in northern France, and was not far away, working in a hospital. All too
soon a letter arrived, suggesting they meet for lunch. Panicking, unable to consult Dick, Gertrude decided that it would look odd if she did not respond. She would go through with it.

If Judith already had her suspicions that Dick and Gertrude were in close contact, they were likely to have been confirmed by the encounter. Gertrude was no dissembler. Asked the question, she would have told the truth. It seems, from Gertrude's subsequent letter to Dick, that Judith, trembling with anger and misery, had told her that Dick would always stick to his marriage, and that Gertrude must accept that in the end he would abandon her. She wrote to him: “I hated it. Don't make me have that to bear . . . You won't leave me? . . . It's torture, eternal torture.”

From the very beginning, each encounter, each letter, had snatched her up to the heights before dropping her once more into the depths. Almost predictably, she now lurched from one extreme of feeling to the opposite. The lunch with Judith had thrown her into turmoil. Now, she suddenly found herself elevated to a state of sublime happiness—Dick had written that he was coming home. He would reach Marseilles in February, call in on Judith on his way through France, then journey on to London. Gertrude could join him there. She should wait for his message, and be ready to go. But he would not stay long. He had volunteered for the front line, “with joy,” and was on his way to Gallipoli.