Page 37 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat

EUROPE AND LONDON *3
Christmas. She wrote to her sister Elsa: ‘What an amusing
morning you must be having—I wonder what you have got for
Christmas presents? I came down to breakfast this morning with
my arms full of all the presents from Sloane Street which were
opened in the dining room ... The Roumanian language is so like
the French that one can understand all the words written up on
the shops. This evening Auntie Mary is going to have a Christmas
dinner party with a real English plum pudding
Two days later she was writing to her stepmother: ‘Today is
die great day-the first ball day. I am looking forward to seeing
all those people very much ... 9 In the next few weeks she came
to close quarters widi several men and women who were to
influence her future; widi Valentine Ignatius Cliirol, her ‘beloved
Domnul9 of later years, who became the Foreign Editor of The
Tims and the power behind a good many political thrones,
though he was sick for much of the time that Gertrude was in
Bucharest; Charles Hardinge, who as Lord Hardinge of Penshurst
was to become Viceroy of India at a critical juncture of her life;
the two Lascelles boys and their sister Florence; and of course
widi members of other diplomadc missions and the nobility of
Rumania. She began to display the expert interest in architecture
that was to enliven her journeys wherever she went: ‘It is almost
the only old piece of building in Bucharest, and to judge by the
carving on the capitals on the pillars and over the low doorway I
should think it could not be earlier than the fifteenth century,9
she wrote, with reference to a church she found. And she main­
tained her interest in home affairs, especially die eternal Irish
problem, while she travelled. ‘Cousin of My Heart,9 she wrote to
Horace Marshall who was about to take his finals at Oxford.
‘Your letter amused me immensely and made me feel that I must
be at Leeds talking to you—or watching you grappling with die
amazing coils of Theocritus. But no ... I must be thinking about
dressing for the ball to which we are going ... You, I know,
share with me that condition of general amusement with all the
world we have yet seen and you will not therefore be surprised to
hear that I am having a particularly good time and that I am
enjoying myself extremely.9 A few days later she wrote in less
frivolous vein apropos the discovery that a famous letter pub­
lished in The Tims in 1887 and purporting to come from the pen
of Parnell had been forged by the Irish journalist Pigott, who
was ruined by the discovery and subsequendy shot himself in