Page 114 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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GERTRUDE BELL
She set oft again in December 1906 to join Ramsay in Anatolia.
She was accompanied as far as Cairo by her father, who was sick
for much of the time, and Hugo who joined them on his way back
from Australia. She spent a ‘most successful* afternoon with Lady
Anne Blunt who was dressed in badawin costume among her
horses, chatting in her garden, with wolves and foxes for com-
panions, about her errant husband Wilfrid Scawcn; and she
dined with the Cromers:

Lady C., Lady Valda (Machell) and I were the only women so
I sat on the other side of Lord C. and had a quite enchanting
talk with him. He is the nicest person in the world, without
doubt. He was very eager to know if there was anything I
wanted and when I said I wanted to have a good talk with a
learned shaikh, he was much concerned about it, saying to
Mr Machell, across the table, ‘Look here, Machell, you must
find us a good shaikh. Just think who is the best.* So they are
thinking.

Her father’s ill-health, though he was recuperating by the end of
January, made it necessary for her to return to England with
him. They arrived home in early February 1907 and Gertrude
departed for the East again a month later, again travelling via
Cairo and the hospitable Cromers and meeting en route Lady
Ottoline Morrell, ‘preposterously clothed’ and Salomon Reinach’s
brother Theodore, ‘stupendously learned’. She moved on through
Smyrna and Miletus, discovering the Greece of Asia, ‘the Greece
that Grote didn’t know’. She wrote: ‘The seas and hills are full
of legend and the valleys are scattered over with the ruins of the
great rich Greek cities. Here is a page of history that one sees with
the eye and that enters into the mind as no book can relate it.’ Her
thoughts turned abruptly homeward at this stage, however, as the
result of a telegram from her sister Elsa telling her that she was
about to marry her naval officer fiance, Herbert Richmond. ‘It is
un satisfactory for the family rather, still I wish I were with you
all the same,’ Gertrude wrote to her stepmother, somewhat
mysteriously. She reconciled herself to missing a wedding which,
she said, she viewed ‘with mixed feelings’, because she could not
leave Sir William Ramsay in the lurch. On Saturday May nth,
1907 she noted: ‘Ramsay arrives in three days and I’ve got a
hundred thousand things to do so I’ll write no more now,