Page 271 - Life of Gertrude Bell

faisal’s kingdom *45
his young son Ghassi, organising receptions, advising him pri­
vately, accompanying him on tours, always curtsying to him and
referring to him with studied deference as ‘Your Majesty’. It is
said that when she bathed with members of the High Commission
staff on one occasion, she spotted the royal launch approaching
and immediately left the river and stood to attention in her
swimming costume, water dripping from her, as it went by.
Shades of that day at Oxford many years before when she
hurriedly changed her dress on hearing of the death of the
Emperor! She even went so far as to suggest magisterially that the
other women of Baghdad, wives of government officials and
High Commission staff, should curtsy to the King, but some of
them adamantly refused to do so, insisting that he was an Arab
chief unaccustomed to receiving women in audience much less to
having them curtsy to him.
Gertrude’s inconsistencies in matters of status and preferment
are not easily rationalised. She was not a conventional woman;
indeed, throughout her life she had mixed with the great and the
famous on a footing of social equality and, in the main, of intel­
lectual superiority. In girlhood she had expressed disappointment
at her grandfather’s acceptance of a baronetcy, wishing that he
could have the honour without the title. Then there were those
quips with emperors and queens. Few ever read more widely or
with less constraint. She was as familiar with Stuart Mill and
Morris and Marx as with Sir Joshua Stamp or Sir Ernest Benn, or
Sir Edward Grey on fly fishing. Her outspoken atheism and her
habit of smoking in public hardly point to a woman hidebound
by the conventions of her day. Yet in her deference to position
and status she sometimes exhibited a formality, an almost affected
admiration, which made nonsense of her own convictions and
attitudes. She was of course the daughter of one of the leading
capitalists of the age, but the Bells were unusually articulate
capitalists. Grandfather Lowthian was essentially an academic
among industrialists, one of the first in a country where it was
not unusual for leaders of industry to be illiterate, and where
high intelligence was deemed anything but a virtue among the
very rich. Unlike many of their neighbours, the Bells mixed easily
with the ‘gentry’, yet even to some of their relatives they were
‘trade’. Perhaps in childhood Gertrude had subconsciously
acquired that almost ostentatious awareness of status which was
so at variance with her catholicity of mind, her habits, and above