Page 163 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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troubles were at another peak in their long history of bigotry and
vehemence; the suffragettes still pursued their cause with much
shouting and biting and chaining to railings; the German
Emperor rattled his sabre. A few months earlier London had
welcomed the chief minister-elect of Turkey, Hakki Pasha, in the
vain hope that if war should break out between the British
Empire and the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the
fourth great imperial force would at least remain neutral in
return for British favours. Domestic life had changed too. Her
sisters were preoccupied with their growing families. Her
parents had just returned from a visit to the United States, and
her letters to them had piled up at Rounton. They had left
Southampton on March 7th in company with Bertrand Russell,
who had been invited to deliver the Lowell lectures in Boston and
to act as temporary professor of philosophy at Harvard. The
voyage was not without its lighter moments according to
Russell:

I sailed in the Mauretania on March 7th. Sir Hugh Bell was on
the ship. His wife spent the whole voyage looking for him, or
finding him with a pretty girl. Whenever I met him after the
sinking of the Lusitania, I found him asserting that it was on
the Lusitania he had sailed.
No sooner had Russell parted from the senior members of the
Bell family than he found himself in a train compartment listening
to two fellow passengers discussing Gertrude’s brother-in-law,
George Trevelyan. Although they moved in much the same
circles and met frequently, Gertrude and Bertrand Russell were
too alike in sharpness of mind and assurance of opinion for their
mutual comfort. They gave each other a wide berth intellectually,
seldom referring to each other in their letters.
After her parents’ return Gertrude stayed with Florence in
London, busy with the captioning of her hundreds of photo­
graphs of central Arabia and her maps. Little interest was shown
in her achievement by a nation preoccupied with more pressing
affairs.
On June 7th the Times correspondent in Cairo reported that
Captain Shakespear had passed through at the end of his trans-
Arabian crossing and had called on Lord Kitchener, the Resident,
and Sir Reginald Wingate the army Sirdar and Governor of the
Sudan, a singularly unfruitful visit according to Shakespear. A