Page 81 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION 69
dispute with the Bodleys which was now reaching a very acri­
monious pitch. ‘I have just been reading the Bodley correspon­
dence/ she wrote after awakening from the long sleep which
followed the previous day’s climb * ... it seems as if the moment
has perhaps come to take action against diem. Evelyn’s last letter
looks like the beginning of more bothers which it would be best
to forestall. But it will be tiresome for you I am afraid, for there
seems such a lot for them to say to which people who know
neither you nor them will be inclined to listen. It can’t, however,
in the end be anything but satisfactory to you, and it would be a
great comfort if they could be silenced forever ... Grandpapa, I
observe, goes off on a side issue and considers only what concerns
himself. I suppose it’s natural but it’s not agreeable.’
She returned home to Redcar in the middle of September to a
domestic atmosphere heavy with dispute.

From July to September 1900 she was in the Swiss Alps. From
Chamonix she describes the build-up of an Alpine expedition,
‘meeting one’s guides, talking over the great ascents that looked
so easy on the map/ and laying out her clean new mountain
clothes. Her father had been unwell while she was at home, and
she promised him in her letter that she would go with him to Italy
for a short holiday when she returned. Meanwhile, she told him,
‘Mont Blanc mocked from across the lake’, and she went off with
that sense of exhilaration which always took hold of her when
she was faced with the physical challenge of a great mountain or
desert. ‘It’s a delightful place inhabited by English and American
climbers, the people are most close and understanding of one’s
wants.’ She wrote to Florence with that note of humility which
mountains can induce in the proudest of people: ‘I learnt a great
deal from the Dauphin^ last year, but oh dear! one’s self-satisfac­
tion is a good deal lessened when one is with people who really
can climb.’
She was driven by foul weather from Montanvert, her base for
further climbing, but she tackled the Mer de Glace before leaving
for home. She and her guide climbed up the great effluent glaciers
of the sea of ice: ‘They are a continuous mass of the most wildly
broken ice ... and great masses are constantly breaking away and
crashing down.’ She traversed the Grepon and Dru, and returned
to England in a reasonably contented frame of mind. Now, in her
thirties and as widely travelled as anyone of her age could