Page 61 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ROUND THE WORLD 49

By mid-January 1897 Gertrude was in Berlin. On the 22nd she
wrote to her sister Elsa: ‘I made my bow to the Kaiser Paar on
Wednesday. It was a very fine show. We drove to the Schloss in
the glass coach and were saluted by the guard when we arrived.
We felt very swell... We all hastily arranged one another’s
trains and marched in procession while the band played the
march out of Lohengrin. The Emperor and Empress were stand­
ing on a dais at the end of the room as we walked through a sort
of passage made by rows and rows of pages dressed in pink. The
“Allcrhochst” looked extremely well in a red uniform — I couldn’t
look at the Empress much as I was so busy avoiding Aunt Mary’s
train. She introduced me and then stood aside while I made two
curtseys. Then I wondered what the dickens I should do next,
but Aunt Mary made a little sign to go out behind her, so I
enjawheel her train and fled I’
All over Berlin there was Knnst and Kultiir to mark the sixtieth
year of sovereignty of Wilhelm II’s grandmother Victoria: plays,
music, banquets; the British in Berlin were, for the moment,
favoured guests. Gertrude and cousin Florence spent hours on
end at concerts and plays and the opera, followed usually by
dancing late into the night. ‘Do you know they are giving John
Gabriel tonight l’ The same morning the two young women went
to a concert. ‘They played a quartet of Mendelssohn’s quite
deliciously and a great Beethoven quartet, do you know it,
Op. 132—it needed a lot of knowing I thought and far more
intelligence than I could give it.’
They were lent a sledge and went for a snow-ride into the
Griinwald — ‘it is really a magnificent forest... it looked too
lovely under the snow. All the pine trees were covered with a
thin white frost ...too delicious.’ And another concert: ‘We
heard a thing of Haydn’s and a thing of Brahms ... There were
not many people, mostly students from the Hochschule, and oh
how those men played! I never enjoyed music more.’
Then came an invitation from the Emperor to share the royal
box at a performance of Henry IV. Gertrude went with her
cousin Florence, chaperoned by Countess Keller, a lady-in-
waiting at the Court. ‘The play was very well done. The Falstaff
excellent and the whole thing beautifully staged,’ Gertrude wrote.
In the interval after the second act, the two young women were
sent for and they were conducted to the Kaiser Paar. ‘We made