Page 63 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ROUND THE WORLD 5i

for the most part they don’t look as nice as we doP Maurice had
bought a book called Manners for Women with the help of which,
according to Gertrude, he hoped to be able to give her some
useful advice. Apparently its most illuminating item was the
revelation that Englishwomen of the right sort could use a needle
as skilfully as they could ride a bicycle —thus ‘encouraging
Maurice to hope that his buttons may be sewn on during the
journey’.
To her sister Elsa she wrote one of those long and affectionate
letters which interspersed her voluminous correspondence with
her parents: ‘You can’t think what a joy it was to hear about all
your doings ... I am glad Moll went to the ball... Now I am
going to tell you about San Francisco. I must tell you that San
Francisco is not finished; the streets are the oddest jumble, first a
tall building 25 storeys high, then a wooden lean-to, then another
great elaborate place, and so on. Moreover the roads except for
the tramlines are either a sea of mud or a wilderness of inlaid
cobblestones. Directly you get outside the town you find yourself
in great tracts of sand overgrown with green shrub ... To the
right of you is the bay, a constant delight to look upon, studded
with islands, filled with ships, its exquisite shores retreating
further and further away from the Golden Gates until it looks
almost like the sea itself except for the vaguest lines of land in the
far distance ...9
In March they were in Tokyo. A lengthy and effusive letter
from Yokohama to her stepmother depicts the Japanese capital:
‘Dearest Mother, Where, where shall I begin! If I were to tell you
all the delicious tilings we have seen and done during the last
three days, I should write a letter as long as from here to Redcar ... ’
She describes a journey by rickshaw: ‘You get into a little peram­
bulator, a blue man in a mushroom hat picks up the shafts and
trots off with you ... His name was written on his hat in English
and his address (I imagine) in large white Japanese letters on his
blue cotton back.’ There are minute descriptions of Yokohama
and Tokyo, shops, prices, people, scenes. It was winter when they
were there and people sat ‘bundled in their wadded clothes over
a pan of charcoal’, and Gertrude had in a few days picked up
enough Japanese to converse with them quaintly. ‘Say I: “It is
cold,” then seeing that he is mopping his brow with a cotton
handkerchief, I remarked, “Isn’t it hot?” He took off his ... hat
and tucked it under the seat saying, “It’s very hot, honourable