Page 82 - Life of Gertrude Bell

70 GERTRUDE DELL

reasonably expect to be, she seemed to feel less need for circum­
spection in her letters home, though she maintained the somewhat
farcical habit of asking her father’s permission to move on from
place to place, even in those lawless parts of the East to which
she was attracted and of which Hugh Bell knew little or nothing.
She announced that she would be dining with a young man, a
fellow climber, on the way home and that they would be joined
by another mountaineer whom she had ‘picked up’ casually in
Paris.
The rest of the year 1900 was spent mostly at Rcdcar in die
company of Hugo, her parents and sisters then being in London.
She had brought some cedars with her from Lebanon —‘Shall
we try to make them grow at Rounton? It would be rather fun to
have a real Cedar of Lebanon —only I believe they don’t grow
more than about 20 feet high in 100 years, so we at least will not
be able to bask much under dieir shadow.’ She supervised the
planting of one on the lawn at Rounton and gave others to
members of the family. She spent Christmas with Hugo, and her
young brother seems to have been put through a severe pro­
gramme of physical training. Hunting figured largely in her
scheme. ‘I looked after him to the best of my ability,’ she told her
parents, ‘which is a difficult thing to do in the middle of a run.’
He fell off his horse at one stage and appears to have lost a few
teeth for a litde later she reports that at the beginning of the
month there was another hunt in which ‘Hugo fell off... but lost
no more teeth’. According to Gertrude he ‘bore himself like a
man’.
In the absence of Florence, Gertrude stepped into the breach
at Middlesbrough and arranged teas, lectures and Christmas
festivities for the families of the workpeople at the Bell factories.
On Christmas Eve she wrote to her stepmother: ‘Hugo and I are
very happy. He’s delightful to be near, and we feel extremely
peaceful and comfy.’ She wrote almost daily letters to her brother
Maurice in South Africa, and she kept in constant touch with
Chirol who had just succeeded Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace as
director of the Foreign Department of The Times after twenty-
eight years in the Foreign Office, in which period he had served
in several parts of the world.
The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 left almost everyone of
whatever degree of prosperity with a feeling of personal loss and
profound uncertainty. Even Gertrude, who was seldom thrown

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