Page 79 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION <>7
stood in any language except his own.’ However, they got
around together quite happily and went on conducted tours
with Dr I-Iogarth and the illustrious Professor Doerpfeld, head
of the German school of archaeology in Athens. ‘He is a most
agreeable person, extremely good looking and he consents with
alacrity to our request that we be allowed to attend his lectures/
On her way back she visited the Vatican and saw the Sistine
Chapel, wondering where else in the world one could spend such
a morning, and then they went on to Arcadia. ‘Arcadia, I regret
to say, is not the Arcady of the poets. The mountains are bare and
rocky... ’, but she took a knowledgeable delight in the flora of
the region, the blue stylosa iris ‘which we forced last winter’,
anemones of scarlet, white, purple and blue and great colonies
of cyclamen.
Perhaps the most enjoyable experience of the year was the
journey to Bayreuth in the company of Hugo, now a grown
young man whom she found ‘one of the most delightful people
in the world’, though she argued with him constantly, except on
matters of music in which subject he was vastly her superior.
Donald Tovey joined them and gave a performance of part of
Die Meistersinger after tea, on a very bad piano. At supper after a
performance of Parsifal they were joined by Hans Richter, along
with Frau and Siegfried Wagner. ‘It had been a splendid per­
formance, Richter conducted and the whole thing swung along
magnificently. Frau Wagner and he came in to supper arm in
arm and they had a tremendous reception.’ Only Sir Frank
Lascelles, carrying on his official duties bravely following the
loss of his wife, failed to enjoy the excitement of musical debate
and fine performance as much as he might have done in the past.
For Hugo and Gertrude it was ‘thrilling to see the home and be
in the atmosphere of it all*.

For Gertrude, however, those enjoyable summer months were
no more than an interlude in her preparation for the assault on
the Meije. She arrived at the first camp on the afternoon of
Friday August 25 th, 1899 where she was joined by her French,
German and English companions at the Refuge de l’Alpe after a
two-hour walk from the base. After an early supper she went to
bed and set off at 4.30 the next morning, arriving at the top of the
clot at 8.10 in the evening. ‘The Meije looked dreadfully for­
bidding in the dusk,’ she wrote. She slept on straw that night