Page 64 - Life of Gertrude Bell

52 GERTRUDE BELL
young lady esquire” ... The conversation ended, as all conversa­
tions do end in Japan, with peals of laughter.’ The piquant
observations fall one on another in the pages of her letters:
theatres decked with flowers and coloured streamers, a Shinto l
version of the baptismal ceremony, her first glimpse of Fuji, the
sacred mountain seen through a cluster of trees, a Buddhist
temple ... ‘gateway after gateway of carved and lacquered
wood, court after court cloistered with lacquered pillars, planted
with pines and here and there an exquisite plum or almond ... ’ It
was a joyous, blissful world which Gertrude inhabited at the
end of the nineteenth century. Then came the long journey home,
described as minutely as the outward trip: fellow guests at the
Captain’s table, a dance on board, golf on deck and a piquet
tournament, onward to Hong Kong and across the oceans and
seas to England. And then, hardly stopping to collect herself,
more journeys to Bayreuth, Switzerland and the Dauphine.
Surely by now Gertrude had begun to question the point of all
n this roaming? Was this life of endless, restless travel what she
really wanted, or was she perhaps merely escaping, or searching
for a husband or a challenge for her keen intelligence? Or was
wandering an adjunct to her passion for languages; preparation,
perhaps, for tasks of which she was as yet barely aware?