Page 51 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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By the dawn of 1893 Gertrude’s natural ebullience had come to
the fore and the only apparent evidence of her recent torment was
her growing irritation with the attentive Billy Lascelles. He
suffered amiably the backlash of her ill-fated romance. ‘How odd
it is,’ she wrote, ‘to realise that those fires are ashes now.’ It was
the first real indication that her feelings for Billy had ever
amounted to more than cousinly affection. ‘... no vestige of a
spark, thank goodness! no excitement, no regret... we can never
be any nearer, never, never.’ But she had not forgotten or grown
distant from the scented gardens of Persia.
She spent much of the winter in London and the summer in
visiting. During August she was in Canterbury: ‘We spent a
madly amusing five days ... we danced every night, saw a good
deal of cricket... you discuss byes and wides and Kemp at the
wicket and Hearne’s batting ... a restless sort of summer.’
Back in London she was able to re-establish links with school and
Oxford: with Edith Langridge now doing good works among
London’s poor for the Lady Margaret Hall settlement; Maggie
Benson, youngest of Archbishop Benson’s daughters, an out­
standing classical scholar who was soon to join the Sisterhood of
the Epiphany, eventually to become its mother superior in India;
the dark-eyed Mary Talbot about to embark on a supremely
happy and tragically brief marriage; and Janet Hogarth, her
lifelong friend who married her own Oxford tutor W. L. Courtney,
‘the tall figure that must always turn down New College Lane’,
critic and editor of the Fortnightly Review.
At Redcar, where she continued with her Farsi and Latin
studies and embarked on Arabic, she enjoyed the companionship
of her sisters and her young brother who had just won a scholar-