Gertrude Bell (9 page)

The Lascelleses provided plenty of the improving sightseeing that Gertrude had been brought up to. She was entertained by the passionate, almost violent debates she was taken to listen to in the chamber of government, and the many late-evening entertainments and balls were all she had hoped. She was a good dancer, knew all the steps, and even taught the legation secretaries to do a new dance, the Boston. She wrote to Florence of the different Romanian way of taking a partner:

You dance nothing through with one person. This is what happens: your dancer comes up and asks you for a turn. You dance three or four times round the room with him and he then drops you by your chaperon with an elegant bow and someone else comes up and carries you off . . . The officers all appear in uniform, of course, with top boots and spurs, but they dance so well that they don't tear one in the least . . . I can't attempt to tell you whom I danced with for it was impossible to remember them all.

After these evenings, when she danced without stopping until three in the morning, they went home in a pair of carriages through the moonlit snow, wrapped in blankets, the harnesses of the trotting horses jingling as they passed through the icy cobbled streets. Back at the legation they found sandwiches and hot drinks in the warm drawing-room, and would sit another hour or so by the fire, discussing everyone they had met. Here Gertrude was thrown into a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan circle than she had encountered under the watchful eye of Florence. She expressed her surprise at finding divorced women integrated into society. Unadorned with cosmetics, like all proper young ladies of the time, she was rather impressed by a flirtatious maid-of-honour to the Queen who powdered herself quite openly—and then proceeded to powder the faces of all the young men hanging round the door of the dressing-room. Among the throngs of counts and princes, secretaries and ambassadors, Gertrude met two men who would be of great importance to her: Charles Hardinge, from the British Legation in Constantinople, later Viceroy of India, and the thirty-six-year-old Valentine Ignatius Chirol, foreign correspondent of
The Times
. Chirol, already an intimate of the Lascelleses, would become one of Gertrude's closest friends; she would write to him from all over the world, and their relationship would last to the end of her life. To her beloved “Domnul” (Romanian for “gentleman”) she could reveal the emotions and dilemmas she could not expose even to her parents. It was the breadth of his international knowledge that first captivated her. He, in turn, was amused at the enquiring and confrontational style of her conversation, to which he quickly responded in kind. He had begun his career as a Foreign Office clerk; then, equipped with a dozen languages, he embarked on a lifetime of travelling, lecturing, and writing, while passing sensitive information to Whitehall. He became an expert on all aspects of Britain's imperial power and the threats to it, and later, foreign editor of
The Times
.

Gertrude's independent mind sometimes got her into trouble. On one occasion, listening to a discussion her uncle was having with a foreign statesman concerning European problems, she broke into the conversation to tell the Frenchman: “Il me semble, Monsieur, que vous n'avez pas saisi l'esprit du peuple allemand.” A ripple of disapproval ran round the group, except for Chirol, who turned away, smiling. A horrified Aunt Mary whisked Gertrude away and told her off. When she reflected on the incident some twenty-five years later, Florence agreed with her sister's response: “There is no doubt that . . . it was a mistake for Gertrude to proffer her opinions, much less her criticisms, to her superiors in age and experience.” But she added: “The time was to come when many a distinguished foreign statesman not only listened to the opinions she proffered but accepted them and acted on them.”

The end of the Romanian holiday came at last, and Gertrude's happy four months would end in a trip to Constantinople with the Lascelleses. Adding to her pleasure, Chirol accompanied them, picking out many wonderful and exotic sights that tourists would normally have missed. Billy rowed her in a caique up the Golden Horn: “It was perfectly delicious with a low sun glittering on the water, bringing back the colour to the faded Turkish flags of the men of war and turning each white minaret in Stamboul into a dazzling marble pillar,” she wrote home.

Gertrude was soon to “come out” as a debutante in London—the ritual for well-heeled girls emerging from the schoolroom to join “society”—and be presented to the Queen at a reception, called a “drawing-room.” But back at Redcar, Florence now put into action her threat of domesticating Gertrude. For intelligent people like Florence and Hugh, men were not moral because they went to church, or women because they kept a clean and orderly house. But intellectual women who filled their lives with “men's work”—political debate, meetings, campaigning—while neglecting their children, husbands, and homes were quite definitely immoral. Charles Dickens had characterized this type unforgettably as Mrs. Jellaby in
Bleak House
, written thirty years previously. She was a lady of “very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public” and especially to “the African project.” Her dress was undone at the back and her hair unbrushed. Her dirty room was strewn with papers while her hungry children milled and whined around her, and the mild and silent Mr. Jellaby, his virility in shreds from long exposure to this virago, sat in a corner with his aching
head pressed against the wall. Gertrude might be a bluestocking, Florence thought, but she would not be a Mrs. Jellaby.

Having some travelling of her own to do, Florence put her stepdaughter in charge of the three youngest children. She was to teach them history, run the house and the servants, balance the books, and have everything in order when Hugh came home from Clarence each evening. Maurice was at Eton, where he would stay until he was nineteen. Gertrude, who enjoyed the company of children and was deeply fond of all her brothers and sisters, did her absolute best, scowling over the accounts, visiting Clarence wives and organizing events for them, attempting needlework, and sending Florence bulletins of their daily activities. “I went into the gardens to be cool, but presently came the babies who announced that they were barons and that they intended to rob me. I was rather surprised at their taking this view of the functions of the aristocracy . . . We all played at jumping over a string . . . Molly shocked Miss Thomson [the governess] dreadfully the other day by asking her what was the French for “This horse has the staggers!”

Not a very distinguished cook herself, she taught Molly and Elsa to make scones and gingerbread. In between domestic duties she took dancing lessons, read Swinburne's
Jonson
, and occasionally left the children to the servants and travelled up to Lady Olliffe's in Sloane Street for fittings for dresses for her London season. Her struggles with the accounts suggest the emphasis that Florence placed on home economy, and her insistence that her stepdaughter should learn the value of money. No one would have thought from Gertrude's letters at this time that they were from a scion of the sixth-richest family in Britain.

About the little girls' frocks, Hunt [the nursemaid] would like to have one for Molly made of cambric matching the pattern of Elsa, 16d. a yard 40 in. wide; the other two of nainsook which will wash better, 13d. and 38 in. wide. There are two insertions, one at 6¼[d.] not so very pretty, one at 10½[d.] very pretty indeed. However it is 4d. a yd. dearer . . . Mr. Grimston says that he cannot supply us with mutton at 9d. a pound, it is so dear now. I have asked the other butchers and find they are all selling it at 10d. or 10½[d.] a pound . . .

I paid everything but the butcher with what you sent and had over one pound balance which I have kept for next time . . . I went to Clarence today
and arranged about the nursing lecture to-morrow . . . Then I paid some visits and came home with Papa at 4:35. Molly and I have since been picking cowslips.

Having paid her family dues, Gertrude moved up to London for her “coming out.” At the series of receptions, weekend house parties, and balls to which they were invited, the young ladies would be presented with an array of eligible bachelors from an official list, from which it was assumed they would find husbands. In her obligatory white gown and train, with tall white feathers securely pinned in her red hair, Gertrude drove to Buckingham Palace with Florence and Hugh in a slow-moving line of carriages, and made her formal curtsy to the ageing Queen. Heavily chaperoned, she attended assemblies at dozens of great houses, including the Duke of Devonshire's, the Londonderrys', and the Stanleys'; stayed in Audley Square with Lord and Lady Arthur Russell, of whose many children Flora was her special friend; went to Ascot in a magnificent hat; attended the Eton and Harrow cricket match; and did the full round of country-house weekends. She wrote to Florence: “Do you remember discussing what other girls do with their days? Well I have found out—they spend their entire time rushing from house to house for cricket weeks, which means cricket all day and dancing all night . . .”

She was enjoying talking to all kinds of people. “Lord Carlisle came and sat by me and we discussed football and the Church! He was very surprised to find what a lot of ecclesiastical gossip I know, and I that he should know about football. I must tell you I had on a very pretty gown which had a great success.”

Just as Oxford had seemed restrictive after the freedoms she relished at home, now London society bound her to conventions that had not been so strictly enforced in Bucharest. Since aristocratic families such as the Cecils, the Howards, the Cavendishes, and the Stanleys ruled society, the receipt or absence of invitations from these social arbiters determined the degree of a girl's acceptability. Most onerous for Gertrude, as it had been at school and at university, was having to be accompanied by a chaperone whenever she passed beyond the front door, even to visit a picture gallery or a church. Used to galloping about all over Yorkshire and leaping fences on the hunting field, at country-house weekends her riding was reduced to the sedate pace of a cavalcade, with fellow guests,
grooms, and family coachmen all lumbering along together. She had even to be careful which books she was seen to be carrying, and was reproved for reading Bourget's
Le Disciple
. The fact that she was reading it in French did not protect her from disapproval: the novel concerns a pupil who applies his master's naturalistic theories to everyday life.

Occasionally she broke away. Her good friend Mary Talbot from Lady Margaret Hall days, a saintly woman who would marry the future Bishop of Chichester, was devoting her tragically short life to working in the slums of the East End of London. No doubt reflecting on the different directions their lives were taking, one day Gertrude gave her chaperones the slip and incurred Florence's displeasure by going off by herself on the new underground railway to Whitechapel, where she spent a fascinated day accompanying Mary on her rounds.

Florence had expressed her disapproval of Gertrude's flirtation with Billy Lascelles. The fact that they were cousins, she said, did not permit Gertrude to waive the conventions, especially because Billy was much in London at the time and his family were abroad. Gertrude was on her honour to behave well, irritating as it often was. “Billy and I sat in the garden and had a long talk . . . he wanted to take me with him to Paddington and send me back in a hansom, don't be afraid, I didn't go—what would have happened if I had, it was ten o'clock?” she wrote. There was another man, one Captain X, who took her to an exhibition and brought her home alone in a hansom: she told Florence, “I hope that doesn't shock you.” If he had hoped for a flirtation, he was disappointed. “I discussed religious beliefs all the way there and very metaphysical conceptions of truth all the way back . . . I love talking to people when they really will talk sensibly and about things which one wants to discuss.” When Florence wrote to reprimand her for this indiscretion, Gertrude disarmingly replied: “I don't think many of our watchful acquaintances saw me on Sunday, it was a streaming afternoon. I felt sure you wouldn't like it, but you know, I didn't either!”

When in the course of time it was Gertrude's turn to chaperone Elsa and Molly to London dances, she immensely enjoyed helping them dress up in their finery, but soon became bored when required to watch over them from the sidelines. Remembering a remark of Florence's at the May balls about how old the function of chaperoning had made her feel, Gertrude wrote to her: “I sat on a bench and watched them dancing round and knew just what you felt like at Oxford.”

What was Gertrude like in her early twenties? It is fascinating to think that we may have a partial description of her by that fine analyst of character, Henry James. The author was a good friend of Florence and of Elizabeth Robins, and Gertrude met him several times, sometimes as a guest of the Bells and more than once at a dinner party of the Russells, where he was also a frequent guest. Hearing him make fun of a novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward's, she judged him “
the
critic—so moderate, so just; and so contemptuous! Every sentence hit the nail right on the head, and every nail ran down into the coffin of Mrs. Ward's reputation as a novelist.” Of the novel's protagonist James had remarked: “A shadow, a character indefinitely postponed, he arrives nowhere.” It is hard to believe that Gertrude's guileless and very direct personality went unnoticed by James then or afterwards, and very tempting to compare her with the character of Nanda, the heroine of his novel
The Awkward Age
, published several years later in 1899. Gertrude may well have been one of the young ladies serving as his inspiration. Florence Bell was a strong supporter and confidante of James in his pursuit of success in the theatre, and in 1892 he based a leading character on her in his short story, “Nona Vincent.”