Page 135 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ENCOUNTER I2T

traveller Cavalicrc Filippo de Filippi on a scientific expedition to
Karakoram. ‘The nearer I came to it, the more I could not bear
it. I can’t face being away from home for fourteen months. My
life now in England is so delightful that I will not take such a
long time out of it.’ It was something of a change of face for
Gertrude who had never before cast more than a brief backward
glance as she went off to the far corners of the earth. Miss
Elizabeth Burgoyne in her Gertrude Hell: from her Personal Papers
wrote: ‘The intensity of Gertrude’s nature, combined with so
much vitality and charm, made it inevitable that men should be
drawn to her, and she to them; and about this time her whole
being was dominated by her friendship with a man who was
already married. The fire, quelled for many years, blazed afresh,
and she was deeply in love; but, all too soon, an equally fierce
sense of honour forced her to turn away from the possibility of
happiness. She had for some time contemplated an expedition
to Hail; now, towards the end of 1913, it became a means of
escape, and passages in her letters to Sir Valentine Chirol show
her mental turmoil and her pain.’ In June she was elected to
Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society on the proposal
of Leonard Darwin. But Hail was not much in her thoughts
at this time. Doughty-Wylie came to London again and she went
to Sloane Street to be close at hand. She entertained thoughts
only for England and the soldier from Constantinople. In July
she invited him to Rounton, a daring thing to do since he was in
England without his wife, not a woman to take lightly what
would have been regarded as a social indiscretion in those days.
The visit seems to have survived any such hazard. On August
13th he wrote:

My dear Gertrude, I am so very glad you took me to Rounton.
I so much enjoyed it, the people, the place, the garden, the
woods, everything. They are a vital setting to my friend,
however many other frames she fits in. And I am so glad you
told me things, and found you could talk to me. It’s that I
like—just openness and freedom to say and do exactly what
one wants to do. In your mind I think there was a feeling,
natural at first openings of doors, that it wasn’t properly
appreciated. But it was—I love openness — I’ve always ever
since those early Turkey days wanted to be a friend of yours —
Now I feel as if we had come closer, were really intimate