Gertrude Bell (12 page)

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!

The debate was jocular at first, when Gertrude told a story about the former Bishop of London, Dr. Temple. He had once taken a cab to Fulham and given a tip that had not satisfied the driver, who said: “If St. Paul were here he would give me one and sixpence.” “If St. Paul were here,” the Bishop had responded with great dignity, “he would be at Lambeth, and that is only one shilling to Fulham.”

She and Hugo talked about utilitarianism, Gertrude maintaining that the pursuit of personal happiness was the most persuasive motivation for mankind's actions—always remembering that it must not compromise the happiness of others. People had to use their brains. Poetry was a better pastime than croquet, she said, because it was more likely to
be of use to the community. To Hugo, every action was either moral or immoral, and man must struggle to follow the moral path. When she climbed a mountain, Gertrude said, it was for her pleasure alone and it hurt nobody—it was neither moral nor immoral. The debate grew warmer when she declared that Christ ranked with Muhammad the Prophet and the Buddha—all great men, but no more than men. Hugo became upset, Gertrude flippant and more provocative. When she declared that if the poor got hold of the idea that all men were equal there would be no more servants, he stalked off, and for a while they went their separate ways.

Gertrude was an avid sightseer. No temple, museum, or ruin within reachable distance went unviewed by her. Nor did she stop working on her languages or reading. Denison Ross was startled one day to receive a telegram from her on the Rangoon leg of the journey, asking: “Please send first hemistich of verse ending ‘a khayru jalisin fi zaman kitabue.' ” In whatever distortion of telegraphese the message arrived, he was able to reply, “A'azz makanin fiddunya zahru sabihin,” and she was able to complete the verse:

The finest place in the world is the back of a swift horse,
And the best of good companions is a book
.

Gertrude and Hugo ended their global travels in the United States and Canada, where Gertrude spent a day or two climbing in the Rocky Mountains before visiting Chicago. “We went on a switch-back that looped the loop. I can't say it was nice,” she wrote to her parents, “. . . I only knew a rush and a scramble and my hat nearly off.”

On her grandfather Lowthian's death in 1904 when Gertrude was thirty-six, Hugh succeeded to the baronetcy and the family upscaled from Red Barns to Rounton Grange. This substantial country house with massive chimney-stacks set in its own 3,000-acre estate had been completed by architect Philip Webb in 1876 as a showpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture. The house, honey-coloured with red pantile roof—a Bell hallmark—was set amongst old trees that Lowthian had not permitted to be cut down. There was hardly a person in the two villages situated on those
acres who was not employed at Rounton. The labourers were housed a short walk from the house in a terraced village development, also by Webb. Florence employed several of the daughters of the Clarence steelworkers, training them as housemaids and laundresses, and made sure that the “rest house,” built to give their families a break in the country, was always occupied.

The house, Webb's largest project so far, employed elements of post-medieval decoration and Gothic motifs. A broad staircase spiralled up from the hall, with its enormous fireplace, and an arched gallery ran down one entire side of the house. The drawing-room, with its Adam fireplace and two grand pianos, had a carpet so large that it took eight men to carry it out of doors for its annual beating. Groupings of chairs and tables were arranged across the room to accommodate the largest of house parties. The dining-room, richly decorated by William Morris, featured a tapestry frieze designed by Morris and Burne-Jones to illustrate Chaucer's
Romaunt of the Rose
, executed over several years by the first Lady Bell and her daughters, Hugh's sisters. There was accommodation for a butler, a housekeeper, and a chief cook, plus a two-storey laundry and a servants' hall. Every quarter-hour the “Rounton chimes” rang out from the stableyard. Hugh was soon to introduce a “motor house” for the chauffeurs and the fleet of Bell cars.

A Christmas list of 1907 in Florence's writing registers twenty staff and their presents: handkerchiefs, brooches, belts, cardigans, and hatpins for the women; tie-pins, handkerchiefs, and knives for the men. For the family, purses and books, boas, scissor-cases, the
Larousse Encyclopaedia
, gloves, and tool-cases, with little wheeled horses and rattles for the babies. In the same year, there are also presents noted for the permanent London staff of four. In 1900, after the death of Lady Olliffe, in whose house it appears the family had always preferred to stay when in the capital, Florence had taken over 95 Sloane Street and redecorated it from top to bottom, even altering the floors. Gertrude, who had her own suite of rooms there, wrote to Chirol on Christmas Day: “95 grows apace. When you come back you will find us established in the most beautiful house in London!” A month later, she was delighted to report that her friend Flora Russell was “much impressed” by it.

Gertrude was thirty-six by the time the family moved into her grandfather's house. Her life was far from spinsterly, but Rounton expanded her world in two important ways. As co-hostess with Florence, she was able to invite large numbers of people to stay, and her spells in England were now punctuated with friends' and relations' house parties. The social round began in 1906 with a splendid New Year Ball for all their friends and acquaintances.

Immediately she took charge of the extensive garden with its sweeping lawns, daffodil wood, rose garden, and two lakes—one of them big enough for boating. She took enormous pleasure in laying out new areas of special plant interest, working with Tavish, the Scottish gardener, and his team of a dozen assistants, and it was not long before she had turned Rounton into one of the show gardens of England.

Flowers had been precious to her since her ninth birthday, when she acquired her own plot and grew “primroses and snodrops,” her first diary revealing how often she “went into the gardin” to look at flowers. Once she started writing travel books she gave free rein to her love of wild flowers and their effect in the landscape: describing an ancient wall, for instance, she would dwell on the knots of wild violets tucked into the crevices. The watered desert was astonishing to her, with its miracle of instant colour and scent. “I pitched my camp in a grove of apricot trees, snowy with flowers and a-hum with bees. The grass was set thickly with anemones and scarlet ranunculus,” she would write; then:

When we reached the level of the Jordan plain, behold, the wilderness had blossomed like the rose. It was the most unforgettable sight . . . waist deep in flowers. I found the loveliest iris I have yet seen—big and sweet-scented and so dark purple that the hanging-down petals are almost black. It decorates my tent now.

Climbing in the Alps, she wrote home to ask her sister to send her a book on alpine flora, so that she could identify the “entrancing” flowers she saw there. In a Swiss meadow at Glion, she wrote of “meadows full—full of flowers. Whole hillsides were white as if snow had fallen on them—white with the big single narcissus. I never saw anything so beautiful . . . Isn't it odd how the whole flora changes from one valley to another . . .” Toiling up the lower slopes of the Schreckhorn in 1901, she
was distracted by the scent of violets: “I walked over the tiny alp botanizing while my guides cooked the soup. Every sort of Alpine plant grows on the cultivated alp; I found even very sweet pale violets under the big stones. I had it all to myself.”

When she was staying with her friends the Rosens in Jerusalem in 1899, she fell to “gardening violently” at the consulate. In her letters to Chirol the frequency with which she mentions plants and gardening suggests they were a shared interest: “My Japanese trees are coming into flower and all my Syrian roots are coming up finely—when you come home I will present you with a bundle of black irises from Moab!”

She brought back with her, sometimes sent back, the most sensational botanical specimens. Once it was cones of Lebanon cedars—one planted at Rounton, another still visible at Wallington Hall, the seat of the Trevelyan family into which her half-sister Molly married. Another time it was the mandrake, or mandragore, the mysterious plant whose tuberous and divided roots beneath a rosette of leaves resemble the human form. When pulled up the root was thought, from medieval times, to “shriek”—a sound that was said to drive a man mad. Early drawings show men covering their ears while a dog is chained to the plant; when the mandrake was pulled up, it was the dog that would go mad. Rounton received its own mandrake: “I am sending you a little packet of seeds,” she wrote home. “They are more interesting for association's sake than for the beauty of the plant—it is the famous and fabulous mandrake. By the way the root of the mandrake grows to a length of 2 yards, so I should think somebody shrieks when it is dug up—if not the mandrake, then the digger.”