Page 173 - Life of Gertrude Bell

THE ARAB BUREAU D5
have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for
you; it floods out to creep up die high mountains where you
live.
Then there was silence, and depression. Tear is a horrible thing,
don’t let me live under the shadow of it.’ Then the meeting in
London. Whatever happened or was said on that occasion it was
certainly coloured by the knowledge that he must depart again in
a few days to join Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff as the Gallipoli force
assembled. It is some weeks later, when he has left for the
Mediterranean, that we pick up the threads of correspondence.
His letters were censored and necessarily brief. On February 26th
she wrote to him:

I can’t sleep — I can’t sleep. It’s one in the morning of Sunday.
I’ve tried to sleep, every night it becomes less and less possible.
You, and you, and you are between me and any rest; but out of
your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me, and fire. I
flame and am consumed. Dick, it’s not possible to live like this.
When it’s all over you must take your own. You must venture
—is it I who must breathe courage into you, my soldier?
Before all the world, claim me and hold me for ever and ever.
That’s the only way it can be done. No: I don’t permit an
ultimatum; whatever you wish I shall do. But it will come to
the same in the end. Do you think I can hide the blaze of that
fire across half the world? or share you with any other?

And so the passion spilled on to the page, pleading, exhorting,
imploring. ‘The day shall be made light for you, and the night a
glory,’ and finally, ‘If it’s faith you think of, this is faithlessness —
keep faith with love—Now listen—I won’t write to you like this
any more. Take this letter and lay it somewhere near your heart
that the truth of it may bore its way into you through the long
months of war. I’ve finished. If you love me, take me this way —
if you only desire me for an hour, then have that hour, and I will
have it and meet the bill... and if you die, wait for me—I’m not
afraid of that other crossing; I will come to you.’
And so, in the end, in her forty-seventh year and in the despera­
tion of a longing she had not known in such intensity before, she
turned, for the first and last time in her life, to the supernatural.
His replies were guarded. His own wife had seen him off to the j
war tearfully, and had written that if anything happened to him