Page 112 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

9 6 GERTRUDE BELL
into Jerusalem where her first caller was the British Consul,
Mr John Dickson. He told her that an Englishman named Mark
Sykes and his wife were nearby, and she quickly went in pursuit
of them. ‘They received me with open arms, kept me to dinner
and we spent the merriest of evenings. They arc perfectly charm­
ing. I’ve got a dog, an extremely nice dog of the country. He
sleeps in my tent, and he is perfectly charming. He is yellow. His
name is Kurt, which is Turkish for Wolf.’ Gertrude’s light­
hearted account of the meeting with the Sykeses was not by any
means complete. The young Englishman who at that time
traversed the same paths as she in Syria and the Levant was a near
neighbour of the Bells in Yorkshire, son of a baronet and one of
the county’s richest landowners. But they had little in common
besides wealth and proximity of birthplace. Eccentric, mercurial
and opinionated, Sykes was to wander confidently through the
corridors of power in the years ahead, always to turn on his heels
at the last moment. Staunch Catholic, Tory-democrat by self-
applied political label, brilliant and vituperative in his writings
and speeches, and contemptuous of desert Arabs and all subject
peoples, he soon turned on the woman whom he saw as a com­
petitor on His eastern travels. He described her as a ‘Bitch9 and
‘an infernal liar’. Their dinner in Jerusalem, it seems, became an
exercise in showmanship, each trying to outdo the other in
Oriental learning, knowledge of routes and the prices of animals
and guides, with Mrs Sykes, Edith, trying stoutiy but ineffectually
to keep the peace. Soon after their meeting Edith returned to
England and Sykes wrote to her apropos Gertrude’s suspected
desire to go ahead of him and thus pre-empt his Syrian journey:
‘Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing,
flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blether­
ing ass!’ The unseemly exchange reached a climax when Gertrude
was alleged to have told the Wali of Damascus that Sykes s
brother-in-law was the Prime Minister of Egypt, thus ensuring
that he, Sykes, was denied permission to go on into the desert.
In fact, the brother-in-law, Sir Eldon ‘Jack’ Gorst, had been
adviser to the Khedive on financial matters before becoming the
Resident in Cairo in succession to Cromer. When Sykes did
eventually obtain permission to move on, with the help of the
British Consul, he found that Gertrude had taken his proposed
route. He described her as ‘the terror of the desert’ and said she
left every place she visited in ‘uproar’. In fact either party to this