Page 272 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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246 GERTRUDE BELL
all with her ability to move among those most defiant and class­
less of human beings, the Arabs of the desert. It ill becomes our
own age to look on her actions with censure or ridicule, however.
An age which readily exchanges cloth caps for coronets, in which
Maharajas become tax collectors for socialist governments with-
out a moment’s hesitation, should not try too hard to find
:: psychological explanations for such things. Inconsistency cuts
1
across time and class, and those who are without it are the duller
for being so.
Two years after the coronation of Faisal she wrote to her father:
‘Darling, I want to tell you, just you who know and understand
everything, that I am acutely conscious of how much life has
given me. I’ve gone back now to the old feeling of joy in existence
and I’m happy feeling that I’ve got the love and confidence of an
entire nation; it’s a very wonderful and absorbing thing—almost
too absorbing perhaps ... I don’t for a moment suppose that I can
make much difference to our ultimate relations with the Arabs and
with Asia, but for the time I’m one of the factors in the game. I
can’t think why all the people here turn to me for comfort and
encouragement... ’ Her father was now turned eighty and he,
with the family to whom she was so devoted, seemed ever more
remote. But the aged Sir Hugh Bell maintained a regular and
affectionate correspondence with his daughter while continuing to
travel up and down Britain delivering his Free Trade lectures. In
i 1923 Asquith called on uncle Lyulph, Lord Sheffield, at Alderley
and found Gertrude’s father there, ‘a strippling of 80 ... the only
man in England who could talk Lord Sheffield down’.
Anxious to see her family again, Gertrude returned home in
May of that year, along with Sir Percy who was retiring after
forty years’ service in the East. It was a brief visit and the occasion
was marked by the drawing of the best-known portrait of her by
John Sargent, an artist whom she had known and admired since
her youth. It showed her as a fit and alert-looking woman,
certainly no older than her fifty-five years. While in England, she
corre sponded with Lawrence who sought her advice on the pub­
!i! lication of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Otherwise it was a quiet,

J mainly domestic stay.
The grip of the new Iraq was irresistible by now. For the
moment it had become the family she longed for throughout her
adult life, and like any other family it soon began to grow apart
from its devoted and watchful parent. If, as Rihani and others