Page 106 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

Inheritance

Hitherto Gertrude’s travels had been little more than sightseeing
tours, the gratification of the wish of a wealthy and greatly
indulged young woman to see the world and to soak up impres­
sions and knowledge as she went. She was thirty-two years of age
at the turn of the century. She was, like her stepmother, fluent in
English, French and German, and in addition she could speak and
write Arabic and Persian, was passably proficient at Turkish and
could hold a tolerable conversation in most parts of India, and in
China and Japan. If she was an historian by formal learning, she
was by inclination and acquired knowledge a wide-ranging
scholar with an almost intuitive understanding of ancient archi­
tecture and archaeology. She had proved herself a woman of
immense courage in her mountaineering exploits, and a writer of
real ability. She could have rested on her laurels at this stage of
her life in the assurance that she had seen as much of the world as
any human being could reasonably wish to see, and achieved a
great deal more than most; that she had come to know almost
everyone who mattered in government service and was related
to a good many of them, and had received a warm welcome at the
courts of emperors and the hearths of ordinary mortals. She
could, like several of her well-known contemporaries in London
society, have slipped comfortably into one of those cosy and
exclusive London ‘sets’. But she was too active by nature to
become part of any fixed group. A dinner-table conversation was
as much as she could endure of those discussions which always
began with ‘I think’ and ‘In my opinion’, and she would usually
go away to lampoon her fellow guests in letters to the family.
She delighted in the company of the Stanleys and Russells, the
Maxses and Cecils, and the theatrical friends of her stepmother