Page 91 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION 77
and nest on the chandelier l’ There were two kindly old Americans
staying at the same hotel, professors of divinity, and Gertrude
could not resist the temptation of putting them together with her
Persian instructor Mirza Abdullah, who promptly asked one of
the Americans what he considered were the proofs of Christ s
being God. ‘The American answered in the most charming
manner/ writes Gertrude, but Mirza Abdullah was not satisfied.
‘He speaks as a lover, but I want the answer of the learned/ said
the Persian. The two men debated for an hour and at the end
Abdullah was unable to understand why the professor accepted
one prophet and rejected another. ‘I am bound to say I quite
sympathised with him/ remarked Gertrude. This was cosmo­
politan Syria, swarming with sightseers and students of divinity
and horse traders of all nationalities, some of whom Gertrude had
already met in the course of her travels. She rode every afternoon,
read for between five and seven hours a day, had Persian and
Arabic lessons, entertained parties of European and Oriental
notables to tea and still found time to write the most explanatory
and descriptive letters home. Having read the back copies of The
Times which were sent to her by her father each day wherever she
happened to be, she wrote to her stepmother: ‘Read old Timeses
all the evening. Though I haven’t alluded much to politics, I am
really thrilled by the Liberal split. I wonder if Lord Rosebery will
be strong enough to re-form the party?’ Her politics seem to have
been undergoing some re-appraisal at this time. In her letters to
Valentine Chirol, which were almost as copious as those to her
parents, she entered into long discussions about the rise in the
power of organised labour and the increasing influence of the
trades unions, and seems on the whole to have taken a favourable
view of those developments.
In another letter home from Haifa she remarked: ‘I have called
on all the missionaries! Heaven preserve us, what a collection of
scarecrows!’ On another occasion: ‘Two clerics to dinner, one a
Syrian, and the other the vicar of an East End parish.’ Again:
‘Dearest Mother, I now take my meals with a black. He’s a fellow
lodger in this hotel. He’s a very pleasant black, and since he talks
Arabic to me his colour leaves me quite indifferent.’
She rode the length of Mount Carmel to the Druse villages at
the south-east, and there she received news of her old friends
among the Druses of the Hauran. She rode over to Acre and
along the Nazareth road where she was joined by a guide called