Page 132 - Life of Gertrude Bell

n8 GERTRUDE BELL

scat in the Abbey), which was the most splendid thing I ever
beheld, and the naval review.5 Her cousin Florence Lasccllcs had
married ‘Springy5, Sir Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, a Foreign Office
Under-secretary. Elsa as well as Molly now had a family, Valentine
Chirol had retired from The Tims with a knighthood and had
gone to the Far East to establish a base in Delhi as a freelance
contributor to the paper. Maurice, whose collar bone had caused
him a good deal of trouble since he returned from the Boer War,
had gone off to Germany for a cure. Hugo was finally ordained
in 1908 and he was now about to join Bishop Fursc in Pretoria,
after four years as the curate of Guiseley Parish in Leeds where he
worked hard for an annual stipend of ten pounds under the
incumbent, the Reverend J. F. Howson. And her childhood
companion Horace Marshall, now a successful lawyer, was
anxious to spend some time with her, as were Janet Courtney and
Lisa Robins among her devoted and widely scattered friends.
The garden at Rounton and her book about the palace of Ukhaidir
also took up a lot of time. Her letters to Chirol provide the clues
to her activities and intentions at this time. By November 1912
she was caught up again in the women’s suffrage controversy.
‘My dearest Domnul... Life was nearly wrecked for a month by
arranging an anti-suffragist meeting in Middlesbrough on the
largest scale. It was interesting but it took an appalling amount
of time.5 She was also involved in the world-wide fund for the
relief of Constantinople following the great fire in the city and the
subsequent outbreak of cholera early in the year. ‘My preoccupa­
tion now is Asiatic Turkey,5 she told Domnul in the same letter.
‘What will happen now that Ottoman prestige has vanished into
thin air? It’s a curious problem, and I should not be surprised if
we were to see, in the course of the next ten years, the break-up
of the empire in Asia ... 5
But there was a more intense preoccupation in her life at this
time, the ‘charming young soldier5 Major Charles Hotham
Montagu Doughty-Wyhe of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, known to
his friends as Richard or Dick. He had found himself drawn to
the effervescent intelligent woman who called on him to collect
{
her mail and present her compliments soon after her arrival at
Konia. She too looked forward to his frequent visits to Maden
Sheher where he watched the ardent team at work. He was a
strong, sensitive man, the nephew of Charles Doughty, the
greatest of all the outsiders who went to Arabia and wrote about