Gertrude Bell (68 page)

Cornwallis did not look after Tundra. But Florence and Hugh must have asked Marie to arrange the dog's passage home. It arrived at Mount Grace, where the Bells soon received a remorseful letter from Cornwallis, explaining that he had been unwell at the time of Gertrude's death and had realized only subsequently the significance of the note she had sent him.

In her
Letters
Florence wrote that Gertrude's death brought “an overwhelming manifestation of sorrow and sympathy from all parts of the earth, and we realized afresh that her name was known in every continent, her story had crossed every sea.” A legendary personality had emerged from the Gertrude that her family had known. One of the first letters to arrive from Iraq was from her friend Haji Naji, who wrote: “It was my faith always to send Miss Bell the first of my fruits and vegetables and I know not now where I shall send them.” George V wrote:

The Queen and I are grieved to hear of the death of your distinguished and gifted daughter, whom we held in high regard. The nation will with us mourn the loss of one who by her intellectual powers, force of character and personal courage rendered important and what I trust will prove lasting benefit to the country and to those regions where she worked with such devotion and self-sacrifice . . .

The Colonial Secretary Leo Amery paid her the rare tribute of a statement in the House of Commons. Sir Valentine Chirol wrote a moving portrait of her for
The Times
. Lawrence wrote a brilliant if characteristically cranky letter to Hugh from India. Seeking anonymity and isolation, he had enlisted in the RAF as Aircraftsman Shaw and obtained a posting far afield, near Karachi. He had not known of Gertrude's death until Bernard Shaw's wife had sent him Florence's compilation of her letters. He wrote:

I think she was very happy in her death, for her political work—one of the biggest things a woman has ever had to do—was as finished as mine. That Irak state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without. Of course it is you who are unhappy, not having Gertrude any more; but there—she wasn't yours really, though she did give you so much.

Her letters are exactly herself—eager, interested, almost excited, always about her company and the day's events. She kept an everlasting freshness; or at least, however tired she was, she could always get up enough interest to match that of anyone who came to see her. I don't think I ever met anyone more entirely civilized, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy. And she was exciting too, for you never knew how far she would leap out in any direction, under the stimulus of some powerful expert who had engaged her mind in his direction. She and I used to have a private laugh over that—because I kept two of her letters, one describing me as an angel, and the other accusing me of being possessed by the devil—and I'd show her first one and then another, begging her to be charitable towards her present objects of dislike . . .

. . . her loss must be nearly unbearable, but I'm so grateful to you for giving so much of her personality to the world . . .

David Hogarth; Salomon Reinach, the editor of the
Revue Archéologique
; Leonard Woolley of the British Museum; and hundreds of sheikhs, British officers, and Iraqi ministers added their commiserations. In Baghdad King Faisal and his Cabinet designated one of the rooms in the museum the “Gertrude Bell Room,” and Henry Dobbs wrote on behalf of her friends there to say that they had commissioned a brass plaque, to be put up in the Iraq Museum:

GERTRUDE BELL
Whose memory the Arabs will ever hold
in reverence and affection
Created this Museum in 1923
Being then Honorary Director of Antiquities for the Iraq
With wonderful knowledge and devotion
She assembled the most precious objects in it
And through the heat of the Summer
Worked on them until the day of her death
On 12th July, 1926
King Faisal and the Government of Iraq
In gratitude for her great deeds in this country
Have ordered that the Principal Wing shall bear her name
And with their permission
Her friends have erected this Tablet

At the time of her death, Faisal was absent from Iraq. Amir Ali was acting as Regent. He immediately ordered a military funeral for her. She was buried the same afternoon in the cemetery outside Baghdad. Her body was driven in a “Health Service motor car” to the British cemetery from the Protestant church, her coffin draped with the Union Jack and the flag of Iraq and decked with wreaths from Faisal's family, the British High Commission, and many others. The cortège drove slowly through streets lined with soldiers of the Iraqi army, and was followed on foot by the Regent, the Prime Minister, the High Commissioner, and other state officials, both civil and military. Enormous crowds had assembled from across the country to watch her coffin pass by and to pay her silent homage; Islamic leaders side by side with Jewish merchants, effendis alongside the poor and ragged. It was reported in the newspapers that “the whole population of the capital participated in the procession of burial.” At the cemetery gates young men of the High Commission, openly grieving, shouldered the coffin to its resting place. The British army chaplain performed the burial rites and senior British officials scattered handfuls of soil over it. Surrounded by “a huge concourse of Iraqis and British”—including Sir Henry Dobbs and the entire British staff, the Iraqi Cabinet, and many tribal sheikhs—the coffin was laid in the plain stone tomb. Word had gone out across the desert with the habitual mystifying speed,
and the tribes had been pouring into Baghdad all afternoon: first the Howeitat and Dulaim, then sheikhs from near and far.

She had for the last ten years of her life [said Dobbs], consecrated all the indomitable fervour of her spirit and all the astounding gifts of her mind to the service of the Arab cause, and especially to Iraq. At last her body, always frail, was broken by the energy of her soul.

Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq. Her friends are left desolate.

The Times
leader wrote of her capacity for work:

Some power in her linked the love of the East with a practical aim that became a dominating purpose . . . that she endured drudgery, was never dismayed by continual disappointment and never allowed her idealism to turn to bitterness, shows a strength of character rare indeed among those of the English for whom the East has become a passion. She was the one distinguished woman among them and her quality was of the purest English mettle.

The many obituaries paid tribute to the fact that, thanks to her, Iraq was better governed than it had been for five hundred years, calmer, more prosperous, and evidently more contented, the British and the Arabs working together in friendly collaboration.
The Times of India
obituary offered a masterly summing-up of her character and work. While the British appreciated her as author, traveller, and archaeologist, it said, they remained to the end ignorant of the “astonishing position she had built up for herself in Iraq, a position which has made her responsible, more than any other single individual, for the shape and appearance of modern Iraq as it stands today.” Recognizing that some readily criticized her, her aims, and her methods, the writer reflected:

so challenging a personality could hardly escape enemies . . . To match the almost passionate devotion which she inspired in her immediate circle, she had to face a hostility almost as strong on the part of those with whom she differed. To the ordinary outsider—particularly perhaps the journalistic outsider—she was offhand and even rude . . .

Her great design was

the creation of a free, prosperous and cultivated Iraq, the mainspring for a revival of Arab culture and civilization . . . It was Gertrude who advocated day in day out the granting of as complete a measure of local autonomy as was compatible with some British hold on the country—not . . . on the score of expediency, but on that of the natural right of the Arab race to its “place in the sun.”

She had persuaded the British Government to take on the financial risks of Iraq, and had convinced local Iraqi leaders that it meant well by them; and that there would be no return to colonial methods.

In
The Times
, Chirol wrote in his obituary: “With all the qualities which are usually described as virile, she combined in a high degree the charm of feminine refinement, and though only revealed to a few, even amongst her intimates, great depths of tender and even passionate affection.” For those who loved Gertrude most, Florence's much earlier words remain unforgettable: “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.”

Hugh and Florence, bowed under the blows that fate had dealt them, moved with Maurice into Mount Grace, while Rounton turned a desolate façade to the winds off the moors.

In time, there would follow inexorably the demolition of the showpiece house, now too big and too grand for the Bells. All too soon, the splintering crash of iron on tiles and stone would silence for ever the Rounton chimes that had rung out on the quarter-hour from the stable bells, and turn to rubble the arched gallery where international affairs had been settled, and house guests had eaten eggs and bacon at midnight. Dead flies collected in the empty study where Gertrude and Professor Ramsay had once worked on
The Thousand and One Churches
. Out of the broken windows, the great rock garden that she had created sank back into dark woodland, the pond where children had iceskated
turned green and stagnant, and the tennis court grew high with weeds.

Eddies of draught through the dining-room rippled the Morris and Burne-Jones tapestry of the
Romaunt of the Rose
, that allegory of a lover knight battling to overcome all dangers, all obstacles and scruples, at long last to be united with the hitherto unattainable rose. And at the top of the house, the wallpaper dampened and peeled in the room where Dick Doughty-Wylie and she had once lain together, holding hands in the dark.

*
The name by which Ibn Saud's sect the Wahabis were now known.