Page 64 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

50 GERTRUDE BELL
deep curtseys and kissed the Empress’s hand, and then we all sat
down, Florence next to the Emperor and I next to the Empress ...
The Emperor talked nearly all the time; he tells us that no plays
of Shakespeare were ever acted in London and that we must have
heard tell that it was only the Germans who had really studied or
really understood Shakespeare. One couldn’t contradict an
Emperor, so we said we had always been told so ... ’ It was a
moment of unusual reticence on Gertrude’s part.
There were the inescapable Court balls and gargantuan meals,
and Gertrude cycled round the Embassy in the rain to keep her­
self in trim. They had dinner before their departure with Cecil
Spring-Rice of the Foreign Office, later to become her cousin
Florence’s husband, and with Lord Granville. As they departed
from their last meeting with their royal hosts, the Emperor and
Uncle Frank sat and examined a sheaf of telegrams that had been
handed to the former. The girls pretended not to listen, but they
heard references to Crete ... Bulgaria ... Serbia ... mobilisation,
and so forth. The Empress kept looking at Wilhelm anxiously —
‘she is terribly perturbed about it all and no wonder for he is
persuaded that we are all on the brink of war ... ’
Yet another cloud came to darken a life of such material com­
fort and ease. In April, soon after Gertrude’s return from Germany,
Lady Mary Lascelles died after a brief illness. Her aunt had seemed
in good health when they were together and the news came as a
great shock.
At the end of 1897 came the first of two round-the-world
voyages Gertrude was to make in that well-worn and often
tedious tradition of the rich in Victorian times. But journeys were
seldom tiresome or without incident for her. This time she
enjoyed the company of her brother Maurice, of whom she had
seen little in recent years, chiefly because he was content to spend
most of his time in the North working among the steelmen. He
was said to be a young man of great charm and unpretentiousness
who moved easily among the workers at the Bell factories and
who knew literally hundreds of them and their families person­
ally. They travelled on the Royal Mail Steamship City of Rio de
Janeiro. On December 29th she wrote to her father: ‘We are safely
aboard with all our belongings and we have magnificent state
rooms to ourselves ... so you see it’s quite perfect... We are both
much excited ... and amused. It’s awfully interesting watching
the people who come aboard. Some look rather nice I think, but