Page 28 - Life of Gertrude Bell

i6 GERTRUDE BELL
on the stage or in some corner of the room where they could be
kept under observation. Her earliest companions were Mary
Talbot, the gentle daughter of John Talbot, the distinguished
Burgess of the University, and niece of the Warden of Keble;
Edith Langridge, who had been at Queen’s College before her
and had been asked by Miss Croudacc to look after her; and
Janet Hogarth, sister of the archaeologist and Arabist David
Hogarth, the first link in a chain of events that was to lead her
inexorably to an eastern stage of which she as yet knew nothing.
Her tutor was the ‘decidedly clever’ Arthur Hassall, and the first
impression of Gertrude at Oxford is provided by his wife, who
after entertaining the new girl to tea, said that she foundher ‘prim’.
It is to Janet Hogarth, however, that we owe the most intimate
glimpse of Gertrude in her two years at university.
... she came up ... I think, partly to work off the ‘awkward
years’ before being launched fully into London Society, but
also because of her obvious aptitude for historical study. She
was, I think, the most brilliant creature who ever came
amongst us, the most alive at every point, with her timeless
energy, her splendid vitality, her unlimited capacity for work,
for talk, for play. She was always an odd mixture of maturity
and childishness, grown up in her judgement of men and
affairs, child-like in her certainties, and most engaging in her
entire belief in her father and the vivid intellectual world in
which she had been brought up.
According to her aunt Florence, she was somewhat podgy at
this time and given to stooping, which caused her to have rounded
shoulders. Photographs of the period bear out the impression,
which is not a surprising one in a girl of her age. In any case the
puppy fat and the stoop soon disappeared. Gertrude, like her
half-sisters then growing to womanhood at Red Barns, was
renowned for her erect carriage and for the deportment which
her stepmother insisted on with the authority of her close associa­
tion with the stage and the leading actresses of her day. Janet
Hogarth spoke of this ‘half child, half woman’ as being ‘rather
untidy, with vivid auburn hair, greenish eyes, brilliant complex­
ion, curiously long and pointed nose, and a most confiding
assurance of being welcome in our society’. Gertrude’s family,
especially her stepmother and, in later years, her sister Elsa,
always took care to stress her essential regard for the conventions

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