Page 48 - Life of Gertrude Bell

3^ GERTRUDE BELL
her parents telling them that she had become engaged and asking
permission to marry Mr Cadogan. ‘Today or tomorrow I shall
get the much wished for letters from you and Papa/ she wrote.
The letter did eventually arrive but it did not contain the reply
she hoped for. For all its sympathy and understanding, it made
clear their disapproval of her intended marriage to ‘an impecuni­
ous diplomat’, and they doubted from what they had heard of
Mr Cadogan whether he would make Gertrude happy. They had
heard, it seems, that he had gambling debts and was of an arrogant
disposition. They asked Gertrude to return home, indeed insisted
that she should, so that she could think about the matter away
from the glamour and romance of Persia.
On a Sunday in mid-September she wrote to her stepmother: ‘I
can’t tell you how I long for these days to be over ... Yesterday
afternoon we sat in the Movara garden and discussed it in all its
bearings ... We talked much of you; I had given him several of
your letters to read for I wanted him so much to know you ...
“Perhaps when you go home she will write once to me,” he said,
which sounded so pathetic and made my own unhappiness seem
so endlessly selfish, for I have you for help and consolation when
I go home and he has nobody ... He was devoted to his own
mother who died a few years ago ... The thing I can bear least
is that you or Papa should ever think anything of him which is
not noble and gentle and good. That is all of him that I have ever
known ... I can’t call for more of your sympathy than you will
give, can I? Oh Mother, Mother.’
She had written despairingly to friends and relatives asking
them to intercede with her father and seeking their advice. In
July she had written an anguished letter to Valentine Chirol,
asking him what she should do. She returned home by way of
Constantinople and the first part of the journey was made by
boat across the Caspian Sea. ‘So we steamed away across the
Caspian, and the sleepy little place vanished behind the mists that
hung over its lagoons and enveloped its guardian mountains —
faded and faded from our eyes till the Shah’s palace was no longer
visible; faded and faded from our minds, and sank back into the
mist of vague memories and fugitive sensations.’ She arrived in
London late in October. Florence was waiting for her and soon
they were joined by a sympathetic but unmoved Hugh. Gertrude’s
sister Elsa was to write in later years: ‘But alas! beyond love and
sympathy he could not give her what she wanted.’