CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the seaside town of Boulogne, France, Gertrude rented a room in a small hotel and settled into a daily routine, taking a brisk walk each morning near the water, then hurrying along the cobblestone streets to 36 bis Rue Victor Hugo. Her work was at the Red Cross; the call of the suffragists (for and against) had been blotted out by the cries of war. Like many, she had volunteered to help and followed her friend Flora Russell to France.
She found her office dreary and choked with papers, and try as she might to cover over the drabness with wallcloth and chintz, or brighten it with jars of fresh lilac and narcissus, the job itself was too gloomy to allow much room for cheer. Each day was a painful struggle to trace soldiers who were wounded or lost in battle. From nine in the morning to nine at night, and sometimes later, she filed and indexed names and corresponded with the families of missing soldiers. Heart-rending letters from parents drove her to search for their loved ones. Often the task was impossible—their sons were missing or, worse, no longer alive—but she wrote to the families, gently, struggling to find any good news to report. And by Christmas 1914 she had taken charge of the office and reorganized the files.
It was only a way of marking time. She still ached for Dick, and no amount of work could numb the pain of being apart from him. He remained at his post in Ethiopia, and although her family encouraged her to return to Rounton, Gertrude rejected the notion of going home without him. “I shall not come to England for the present,” she wrote to Domnul. “At any rate I can work here all day long—it makes a little plank across the gulf of wretchedness over which I have walked this long time. Sometimes even that comes near to breaking point.”
If she wished to be anywhere else, it was in the East. The Turks were now in alliance with Germany (despite attempts by the British Government to neutralize them), and by December 1914, British troops in Egypt were prepared for a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal. In Mesopotamia, a fleet of forty-seven troop transports—the largest ever—sent from India, had already seized the vital city of Basrah from the Turks, and the British army was now on its way to try to take Baghdad as well. Only a few months before, Gertrude had felt so at home in Iraq; now there seemed to be no place for her out there. She wrote to Domnul, who was traveling through the Orient: “If only I were arriving in Mesopotamia at this moment! I do so long to hear of the occupation of Baghdad. You will see there will be little opposition.… I pine for details.”
What details she did hear were the grisly fragments of the bloody tapestry of war. At her desk in the dreary office or over lunch at the cafés in town where some of the soldiers gathered, she listened to wrenching stories about the men at the front. They are “knee-deep in water in the trenches, the mud impassable,” she reported. “They sink in it up to the knee, up to the thigh. When they lie down in the open to shoot they cannot fire because their elbows are buried in it to the wrist.” Although the women who worked for the Red Cross were not allowed at the local hospital, Gertrude talked her way in and saw the horrors: adolescent soldiers, too innocent to grasp what the bombs had blown away, missing arms or legs or blinded by shrapnel. “A happier New Year,” she wished her parents on January 1, 1915. She celebrated the evening at work at her desk, pausing only to eat some chocolates.
A few doors down from the office, in her small room at the Hôtel Meurice, she spent most nights overwrought, reading letters. A note from Dick arrived, filling her with ardor, and she answered feverishly:
“Dearest dearest,” she wrote, “I give this year of mine to you and all the years that shall come after it. Will you take it, this meagre gift—the year and me and all my thought and love.… You fill my cup, this shallow cup that has grown so deep to hold your love and mine. Dearest when you tell me you love me and want me still, my heart sings—and then weeps for longing to be with you. I have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for you; it floods out, measured to creep up the high mountains where you live. And when you walk in your garden I think it touches your feet. No, don’t thank me. Take your own, hold it and keep it—fold me into your heart.”
As poetic as her words were, his were filled with lust and wanting. But in his own crude way he tried to respond to her fears. “Is sex so much?” he asked, “and the senses and the contact and those bewildering things. They can be much—but not the best, they are only the landscape, the other thing is the sun we see it by—You once said you would still love me if I had a dozen wives—they would not matter—and that is true my dear that thing you knew by sunlight.… it’s not a great thing sex—not really—it’s always grossly overrated like chastity—which is only the faint beginning of a virtue and often a positive view.…”
“Ah Dick love me,” she answered. “I live only for you.”
And then, like a starving waif suddenly handed a box filled with chocolates, she turned from despair to joy. Dick was coming back from Ethiopia. He would probably stop in France before going on to England to receive new orders, he wrote, but it was his wife whom he would see in Boulogne (ironically, Judith was working in the same city as a nurse). Never mind: there was no reason for concern; Judith would not leave her work, he reassured Gertrude, urging her to be with him in London.
Thrilled with the news, she left for England in mid-February so that they could have four intoxicating days together. Seeing him, touching him, she was enraptured, more certain than ever that he was everything she ever wanted: intelligent and understanding, gentle and caring, protective and strong. She took refuge in his arms. As they embraced, her smoldering dreams of the last year burst into flame. His lips pressed against hers, and she melted against his soldier’s muscular body. He told her she was life itself, a fire that burned with passion. He needed her. He hungered for her. She listened in ecstasy, and more than anything, she wanted to give herself to him. Willingly, she began to yield, but as she did, some force, even stronger than all the desire burning inside her, rose up and held her back. In a panic, she recoiled. Then once more the yearning and the lust overwhelmed her, and they embraced and kissed. But again the force rose up and held her back. At the end of their tryst their love remained unconsummated.
In agony, a few days later she wrote to him:
Someday I’ll tell you, I’ll try to explain it to you—the fear, the terror of it—oh you thought I was brave. Understand me; not the fear of consequences—I’ve never weighed them for one second. It’s the fear of something I don’t know: no man can really understand it; you must know all about it because I tell you. Every time it surged up in me and I wanted you to brush it aside—it’s only a ghost, the shadow of a ghost. But I couldn’t say to you, Exorcise it. I couldn’t. That last word I can never say. You must say it and break this evil spell. Fear is a horrible thing—don’t let me live under the shadow of it. It’s a shadow—I know it’s nothing.… Only you can free me from it—drive it away from me, I know now, but till the last moment I didn’t really know—can you believe it? I was terribly afraid. Then at the last I knew it was a shadow. I know it now.
Tormented, she continued:
I can’t sleep—I can’t sleep. It’s 1 in the morning of Sunday. I’ve tried to sleep, every night it becomes less and less possible. You and you are between me and any rest, but out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me—fire. I flame and live and am consumed. Dick it’s not possible to live like this. When it’s all over you must take your own. You must venture—is it I who must breathe courage into you, my soldier? Before all the world claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever.… Furtiveness I hate—in the end I should go under, and hate myself and die. But openly to come to you, that I can do and live, what should I lose? It’s all nothing to me; I breathe and think and move in you. Can you do it, dare you? When this thing is over, your work well done, will you risk it for me? It’s that or nothing. I can’t live without you.…
The people who love me would stand by me if I did it that way—I know them. But not the other way. Not to deceive and lie and cheat and at the last be found out, as I should be. Yet I shall do that too, use all the artifices and run to meet the inevitable end.… If it’s honour you think of, this is honour and the other dishonour. If it’s faithfulness you think of, this is faithfulness—keep faith with love.… Because I held up my head and wouldn’t walk by diverse ways perhaps in the end we can marry. I don’t count on it, but it would be better, far better for me.…
Now listen—I won’t write to you like this any more … I’ve finished. If you love me take me this way—if you only desire me for an hour, then have that hour and I will have it and meet the bill. I’ve told you the price. Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I will come to you and have that—I’m not afraid of that other crossing.… But don’t miss the camp fire that burns in this letter—a clear flame, a bright flame fed by my life.
Horrified, Gertrude found herself facing the one person she did not want to see; Dick’s wife appeared in her office in Boulogne. The two women had corresponded since the days in Turkey, and now they lunched together, talking casually about their work. Judith gave no hint that she knew of the relationship between her friend and her husband, but the meeting took a terrible toll on Gertrude. She begged Dick to discourage his wife from coming again. “I hated it,” she wrote him; “don’t make me have that to bear.” She was torn with regret and desire and guilt. “Don’t forget me—you won’t leave me? It’s not possible. It’s torture, eternal torture, which loses its edge. Oh my dear it might be ecstasy.”
Over and over she wrestled with what had happened in England during those four exquisite, excruciating days; questioning what she had done, trying to reconcile her feelings with her own behavior. If pregnancy had once been a fear, it now seemed a blessing. Gertrude, for years an atheist, now suddenly sounded devout: “And suppose the other thing had happened, the thing you feared—that I half feared—must have brought you back. If I had it now, the thing you feared, I would magnify the Lord and fear nothing.… Not only the final greatest gift to give you—a greater gift even than love—but for me, the divine pledge of fulfilment, created in rapture, the handing on of life in fire, to be cherished and worshipped and lived for, with the selfsame ardour that cherishes and worships the creator.”
Her letters reached him while he was on his way to war. When Turkey announced its alliance with Germany, the British reacted at once. A campaign was organized by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to cut off Turkish forces on their way to Baghdad: thirty thousand Australian troops were sent to make a surprise landing at Gallipoli. The purpose was to open the Dardanelles for the British navy, capture Constantinople, and provide supplies for allied Russian troops while cutting off Turkey from German assistance. Dick Doughty-Wylie, already familiar with the Turks from his days as vice-consul in Anatolia, and decorated for his heroic actions in saving Armenians from Turkish slaughter, was chosen as one of the British officers to lead the attack.
In mid-March 1915, as Dick made his way to the Dardanelles, Gertrude was asked to supply the War Office with her unpublished maps of Syria. By the end of the month she was in London, called back to brief officials about the East; and at the behest of her friend Lord Robert Cecil, the Red Cross director, she was organizing the main Red Cross office in England. Once again the days were long and tiring, and as she walked from her gray townhouse at 95 Sloane Street to Norfolk House, her office across Piccadilly, she was haunted by memories of Dick.
A letter arrived from Doughty-Wylie just as his troops were about to embark for Gallipoli, and she knew he still cared deeply: “So many memories my dear queen, of you and your splendid love and your kisses and your courage and the wonderful letters you wrote me, from your heart to mine—the letters, some of which I have packed up, like drops of blood.”
For Gertrude their love was a genesis. On April 21 she revealed to him: “ … there is an eternal secret between you and me. No one has known, no one will ever know, the woman who loves you. Mind and body, a different creature from her who walks the common earth before the eyes of men—new born and new fashioned out of our joined love. Only you know her and have seen her … you gave her life but I made her, bone by bone; having begotten her you may love her without fear. And you will.”
Little information came from the front. War Office censors blocked out reports that might even have hinted at events, and letters that reached England were so blackened with ink that, except for the salutation and the signature, they were hardly legible. But at a dinner party with friends on the first day of May 1915, a casual conversation brought Gertrude shocking news of Gallipoli. The landing had not gone well. British forces had been unable to carry off the surprise attack; as they landed on the crescent of open beach, they were met by Turkish troops, who riddled them with machine-gun and rifle fire. In the bloodbath that followed, Dick Doughty-Wylie had been shot in the head and killed.
Gertrude was stunned. Quickly and quietly, she left the table and rushed off to see her sister Elsa. Months ago, Elsa had reassured her that, in spite of the difficulties, Gertrude had kept her integrity and done the right thing. Now, in the comfort of her sister’s home, Gertrude allowed herself to weep.
After a while the crying stopped and a calm seemed to come over her, but a few minutes later she turned her head away, losing control again. She had coped with death before: at the age of three she had lost her mother; at twenty-five she had lost her fiancé, Henry Cadogan, and by the age of thirty she had lost both her favorite aunt, Mary Lascelles, and her closest school friend, Mary Talbot. But now the loss of Dick Doughty-Wylie was more than she could bear. She had lost the greatest gift that life had given her. She could hardly keep from speaking of Dick, and she shared her secret with Domnul, Lord Robert, her sisters Elsa and Molly, and her chum, Elizabeth Robins. No one revealed a word. Yet there was no one among her friends or family who could give her solace, and for days she refused to see anyone except Domnul. “I can’t, I can’t bear the anguish of it, except alone,” she wrote to Lisa Robins.
For a few brief day, Gertrude retreated to Rounton. For her, the familiar lair in the northeast was always a place of respite, its gardens a source of repair. It was her England, a bulwark graced by brushwood in leaf, pear trees in blossom. It was home, and as her grandfather’s friend John Ruskin had written, “the place of peace; the shelter not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.” In her childhood, Rounton had been the home of her grandparents, a comforting place for a child who was forced to wear black at the age of three.
Now, with Hugh and Florence to console her, Gertrude tried to regain her strength. She seemed a little better, Florence noted to Lisa Robins, but she was still “speaking hopelessly of the situation.” Florence had little tolerance for such an attitude: “It’s no good doing that. It’s the business of the women of England to say ‘Never say die’—and to stiffen up the whole country by saying ‘yes, it’s very bad—but will be better.’ ” But Gertrude was in far too much pain to mouth platitudes.
On a day when Lisa came to Rounton, Gertrude strode with her across the moors. She confided to her friend how much Dick had wanted her to go away with him; his greatest sorrow had been that she had refused to live with him, even while he was married to Judith. Gertrude stopped for a moment and paused. Her throat wrapped in a pink scarf, her arms crossed, her face tense, she looked up and described a recent dream: “I was falling into that pit of blackness, piercing a sword against my breast—and going down, down, me and my sword.…”