Page 138 - Life of Gertrude Bell

124 GERTRUDE BELL
There was a strangely oblique reference to sexual intimacy
which seems to have hovered in their correspondence without
ever finding explicit expression: ‘Last night, a poor girl stopped
me —the same old story—and I gave her money and sent her
home ... So many arc really like me, or what I used to be, and
I’m sorry for them ... These desires of the body that arc right and
natural, that arc so often nothing more than any common
hunger - they can be the vehicle of fire of the mind, and as that
only are they great; and as that only are they to be satisfied ... *
And an abrupt warning in another letter, which otherwise
conveyed the passion of past weeks: ‘My dear, if I can’t write to
you, I shall always think of you telling me tilings in your room at
Rounton, showing me something of your mind and something
of mine ... The subtle book eludes, but our hands met on the
cover. And you’ll go on being the wise and splendid woman
that you are, not afraid of any amazement and finding work and
l
life and the fullness of it always to your hand. And I shall always
be your friend.’
The Doughty-Wylie letters were kept under lock and key for
the lifetime of his widow, who lived until i960, and access to
them was carefully guarded by Gertrude’s family. One of the
first outsiders to see them after her death, Mr Seton Dearden,
asked: ‘Was this all this emotional, sex-starved woman, reaching
her climacteric, wanted? Was this all that love, coming late in
life, could offer her? And why this constant variance in tone in
his letters from talk of physical love, to mere friendship?’ It is a
question to which, even in the light of ensuing correspondence,
there is no clear answer. There was time for one more letter
before Doughty-Wylie left England.

Judith has not turned up, she is coming by the night train. I am
swallowed up in friends from every side that seem to grow in
this Club — from Abyssinia, China, the Sudan, Iceland, Cairo,
and my own regiment. I have to dine —and play —there’s no
escape. But I snatch a minute to greet you ...

It was the last letter from London. The next letters were from his
ship as it sailed through the Mediterranean and between the
Greek islands. They became down-to-earth, descriptive of places
only occasionally showing the fervour of a few weeks ago. And
now that he had gone she began to prepare urgently for the desert