Page 42 - Life of Gertrude Bell

30 GERTRUDE BELL
included the Blenncrhassets, Lord Carlisle, ‘some Strachcy
people’ and ‘some stray men’. She sat next to Leo Maxse, the
editor of the National Review, with her cousin Flora Russell on the
other side of him. ‘We talked and laughed merrily the whole
dinner through. We played a delightful game, which consists in
reciting in order of demerit all the people you dislike —the person
who keeps it up die longest wins. The great point is to pick
somebody whom you know the other players like — we all agreed
on Lady Carlisle.’ After dinner she talked to Lady Blenncrhasset.
‘She told me the best tiling she had done was to burn a complete
book which was quite ready for the press—after reading one of
her published works I can readily believe it. I alluded to Madame
de Stael —she seemed surprised that I had seen it; I daresay it
would be radier a shock.’ Examples of Gertrude’s self-confidence
and die catholic nature of her interests when she was just twenty-
one abound in this long and rambling letter. She was joined after
dinner by another Russell boy, ‘a brother of Lord Ampthill’s,
who ... knew Maurice at Eton ... we talked about games and
schools and I liked him’. Then came Aunde Maisie and Lord
Carlisle: ‘We discussed football and the church! He was very
surprised to find what a lot of ecclesiastical gossip I knew, and I
that he should know about football.’ She ended the letter: ‘I have
been reading Mr Morley’s Walpole which Sir Louis Mallet says is
supreme—it is most brilliant and interesting.’
When she first came down from Oxford Gertrude had taken to
needlework, not so much to mend her clothes since she constantly
bought new gowns (dresses were worn by the lower classes at
that time), as to occupy her hands when she sat and talked. By
now she exhibited another of the traits that seemed to carry her
from extreme decorum to the verge of Victorian social censure;
she started to smoke cigarettes, a habit that remained with her for
the rest of her life, though such was her savoir faire, it seems to
have caused little comment among her friends or, in later years,
her political superiors.
The year 1890 marked her introduction to Ibsen’s plays.
‘Mother and I went to see The Doll’s House,’ she told her father.
‘We were very much struck by it. It is extremely good in some
places and extremely bad in others, ludicrously and crushingly
bad. But above all it is original, one has seen nothing the least like
it before and I feel about plays that it is such a comfort to get out
of the stereotyped type of plot — the husband and the wife and the