CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was a smaller Rounton that Gertrude returned to in June 1923; not the omnipotent universe as viewed through a child’s eyes, but the dwarfed and vulnerable world that an adult discerns. The shifting needs of twentieth-century industry, the great postwar Depression and the searing costs of labor strikes had taken their toll. The Bell family fortune was slipping away. In order to keep the costs down, part of the house had been closed off, some of the staff had been let go and a frugal accounting was being kept of all expenses. Gertrude’s own world, too, was slipping away, and even as she sat for her portrait by John Singer Sargent or corresponded with T. E. Lawrence about the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, she pondered her future. Percy Cox’s retirement had left her feeling at loose ends. She had known his successor, Henry Dobbs, from the early days of the war when, as Revenue Commissioner at Basrah, he had shared her dislike for A. T. Wilson. But unlike Cox, Dobbs was neither her mentor nor a master statesman. Not that such a man was needed anymore in Iraq. The reins of government were resting more firmly in the hands of the Arabs.
Another matter also weighed on her mind. Her frequent dealings with Faisal had nudged her closer to his trusted adviser, Cornwallis. She and Ken sympathized with each other’s frustrations and strategized over their plans. As they worked together in stride, pushing the King along the path to power, her admiration for Ken had begun to blossom into something more. His tall, lean frame, his moral strength, his gentle manner appealed to her sensibilities. She not only sought his advice; she yearned for his company and hungered for his love. At Rounton, strolling across the fields with a family friend, she compared Cornwallis to Doughty-Wylie. There would never be another man like Dick, she stressed, nor any correspondence that could ever soar to the level of passion theirs had attained. But Dick was gone; Ken was alive and vital. He was seventeen years her junior, and he had sparked the fire that lay in embers inside her.
Henry Dobbs was pleasant and amiable, much easier to talk to than Percy Cox, Gertrude reported in September, soon after her plane touched down at Baghdad. “Yes, the atmosphere of the Residency has undergone a remarkable change,” she noted. “If we haven’t Sir Percy’s wisdom, neither have we Lady Cox’s folly and Sir Henry brings a geniality of his own. Sir Hon-ri, the Arabs call him.”
Gertrude’s life, too, was undergoing change. Instead of toiling for endless hours at the office, she fluttered around the palace arranging the English furniture she had ordered from London, despairing over the fake French antiques commissioned by someone else, still devising a heraldic coat of arms for the King. She hosted evenings for Ken or the King, fretted over Cornwallis’s well-being and stood near Faisal as he cut the ribbon on the new train line leading to Karbala. She attended shooting parties and polo matches, engaged in tennis matches, bridge games, mah jong, chemin de fer, luncheons and teas, and shared dinners almost every evening with Ken. And when Ken moved into a new house, Gertrude spent the whole Sunday helping him arrange his belongings. “My existence is one of prolonged gaiety,” she announced giddily at the end of November 1923.
Even Christmas, so often tinged with sadness, became a glorious time once again as she and Ken took off with friends for a week of hunting at Babylon. Before they left, the maid Marie, as she packed Gertrude’s riding habits and evening clothes, insisted on including her prettiest pink crêpe de Chine nightgown. “But why?” Gertrude asked. “It’s a shooting party.” Yes, said her maid, but Ken’s Sudanese servant would see them. Perhaps Marie thought he would describe the gown to Ken, or perhaps she thought there was something more; that not only his servant but Ken himself might see the nightgown. And then, after six days of relaxation and archaeological visits, Gertrude returned contentedly and announced, “I think no more delightful expedition has ever been made in Iraq.”
Despite her cheerfulness, her waning power was evident, and indeed crudely described by a railway official. In a letter to St. John Philby, the functionary wrote: “Certain it is that the ‘uncrowned queen’ is no longer first and last in the land; just where she gets off is uncertain, unless in an advisory capacity of dishing out concessions to a bevy of tell-tale tel diggers from all continents and countries.”
Unlike Cox, Dobbs neither asked for her advice nor allowed her to initiate actions on her own, and it wasn’t long after her return from the trip that ennui set in. Her thoughts drifted back to the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and, daydreaming about a future empire ruled by Faisal, her attentions shifted again to antiquities. In early January 1924, when the dreaded cold weather had dampened her spirits even more, she sat in her office, shivering and wrapped in a fur coat, and fancied a visit to Kish and Ur. On the way down, she planned to take a jaunt by herself in the desert. “I want to feel savage and independent again,” she declared.
The brief but adventurous journey revived her mood. She and her assistant, J. M. Wilson, had hardly driven very far when the front wheel of their car crossed over the edge of a narrow bridge and nearly fell into a canal. As they motored on, the car slid more out of control, and by the time they reached an open plain it spun around like a top. Her assistant refused to risk his life any further. It had started to rain, but she and Wilson pulled up their boots, plunged into the mud and, after trudging for more than an hour, reached the site of Kish. Mr. Mackay, the archaeologist, was waiting, and they spent the rest of the evening looking at his finds. With her baggage left behind in the car, she had only a cake of soap, a borrowed hairbrush and someone else’s pyjamas. But it didn’t matter. She went to bed in her tent and slept soundly, content to be in the desert.
The next day she set off on her own. Arriving at Warka, once the Sumerian city of Uruk, the Babylonian capital of the south, she found the archaeological mound thick with natives scavenging for treasure. Rounding up the Arabs, she asked sternly, amid their screams of fear, “Have you any anticas?”
“No,” they answered, “by God, no.”
“What are those spades and picks for?” she demanded to know. She would give them baksheesh for anything they had. The promise of money produced a marked change. One man discovered a cylinder hidden inside his shirt, another a seal, another a piece of terra cotta in his pocket. After paying a few annas for each, she took the objects for the museum.
At her office, back in Baghdad, she marveled at a box from England delivered to her desk. There had been some difficult days, disagreements with Dobbs, who, she felt, had little understanding of the Arabs, and a package was a pleasant surprise. On slitting the cardboard open and sifting through the paper, she was delighted to find a silver frame with a photograph of Percy Cox. “To the best of comrades,” it was signed. “Isn’t that the nicest thing he could have written?” she asked. “I still miss him. We had worked together on and off for six years, and through difficult times. It had become a habit that he should always want to talk things over with me. Sir Henry doesn’t always do that,” she confessed; “there’s no reason why he should. Often he does the thing first and then tells me about it.” It was true that she lunched with Dobbs every day, but the conversation was light and frothy, hardly the meaty talks she had had with Cox.
Just before she left again for Ur in March 1924, an American journalist came to meet her. Gertrude stood up from behind the mounds of papers piled on her desk, and with her willowy figure showing off a smart beige knitted dress, she reached out a manicured hand to say hello to Marguerite Harrison. Gesturing for the visitor to sit, she pushed away the stacks of documents covering the sofa and swept them onto the floor to join the overflow. Harrison looked around at the messy room, “the most untidy” office she had ever seen, its chairs, tables and sofa “littered with documents, maps, pamphlets and papers in English, French and Arabic.” Yet Gertrude herself was as finely presented as a piece of Wedgwood china. “Her delicate oval face, with its firm mouth and chin and steel-blue eyes and with its aureole of soft gray hair, was the face of a grand dame. There was nothing of the weather-beaten explorer in her looks or bearing. ‘Paris frocks, Mayfair manners.’ And this was the woman who had made sheikhs tremble at the thought of the ‘Anglez!’ ”
The writer had come for an interview, but Gertrude had her own agenda. Intent on extracting information, the Khatun fired one question after another to her about Turkey, from which Harrison had just returned after a six-month stay. Kemal Atatürk’s intentions were still worrisome to Gertrude. What was Turkey’s attitude about Iraq, Gertrude wanted to know. Officially? And unofficially? How did they feel about Mosul? What did they think about the internal situation in Iraq? What was the political situation like? Eager to hear more, Gertrude invited Harrison to dinner. Among the guests were Ken and a few officials, and as the hostess, in her blue velvet gown, presided over the elegant table with its linen cloth, its gleaming silver and sparkling crystal, the Baltimore woman told of her wild endeavors. “I never had such an uproarious dinner party,” Gertrude wrote home happily; “extraordinarily amusing but the tales she told us … would make the hoariest official blush.” She was glad to have good company, pleased to meet a female who equaled her in intellect and capacity for adventure.
Early the next morning Gertrude left for Ur. She was devoting more of her time now to her new museum, collecting ancient objects that gave credence to her dreams for a grand Iraq. The more proof she had of the achievements of the early Mesopotamians, the more she could substantiate her claims that Iraq would return to its former greatness. Archaeology meant tedious work, with hours spent in the broiling sun supervising the digs, examining even the most minuscule finds, but the ancient history of the country had captured her imagination. With the digging season at its end, she had, as Honorary Director of Antiquities, first rights to any treasures for the Iraqi Government. The process of dividing the finds began with the toss of a rupee, and Gertrude won a scarab, worth a thousand pounds. Among the larger pieces, she allotted the bronzes to the archaeologist Leonard Woolley but kept for herself an important bronze milking scene depicting early life in Mesopotamia.
She brought the booty to Baghdad and toiled with scholarly patience at the small museum—temporarily housed in a room at the palace—glueing fragments, cataloguing objects, identifying implements and overseeing people who had not the vaguest idea of what an archaeological institution was all about. On one occasion she found an old worker mending objects with plaster of Paris, drowning the ancient stone flower petals in the cement. Another morning, as she edited labels, she picked up a small marble fragment of a horse’s neck and mane. Looking at the label she read: “This is a portion of a man’s shoulder, marble object.” She turned to the helper: “But does a man grow a mane on his shoulders?” she asked.
“True, by God,” murmured the man.
Her eyes pierced him in disgust.
The museum was her creation, and she proudly brought anyone she could, from a former professor to visiting British officials to Arab Ministers, to admire it. When Woolley came to lecture on Ur in March 1924, she dragged along the King, translating for Faisal’s uninterested ear every word the archaeologist uttered.
The treaty with Britain still had to be ratified by the National Assembly, and the process was taking its toll. Sheikh by sheikh, sayid by sayid, the representatives of the entire country had to be persuaded to cast their approval. Tensions were running high, and the assassination of one representative in February did little to calm the air. Stormy debates continued through May 1924. At the start of the Id, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, Gertrude planned a holiday with the King’s physician, Dr. Harry Sinderson; a colleague, Iltyd Clayton; and Ken. Their plan was to pitch tents near the stream at Qarashan, a junction point on the Diyala River, and for three days they would fish, swim, read poetry and play bridge. “The real reason for the scheme is Ken,” Gertrude explained caringly, “so worn out and exhausted that I’m afraid if the acceptance of the treaty is delayed much longer he will break down.” The respite was a success, but it took yet another month of arguing, until June, when, at the last possible moment, the treaty was ratified. “We beat Cinderella by half an hour,” Gertrude announced.
She and Ken were almost always together now, he spending much of his time in her comfortable house, and the twosome celebrated the successful conclusion of their work, enjoying dinner and a quiet talk as they usually did before going to bed at ten. This was their last evening together before he took off for a difficult summer in England. His wife was filing for divorce and Gertrude shared his apprehension. Scrawling a hasty note to her sister Molly, she asked her to please look after Ken. “I have a very great affection for him and I think him one of the finest creatures I’ve known,” she wrote. Would Molly invite him to lunch? she begged. “What a blessing it is to have a sister of whom one can ask anything.… I really think that except fathers, sisters can be the greatest gift in the world.” She had omitted mothers from her list, but nonetheless she remembered to send off another shopping request to Florence. Among her recent needs: a tussore-covered sun helmet, a blue-ribboned straw hat for the morning, a dark-colored bathing dress, a few yards of lace and three pairs of brocade mules from the Galeries Lafayette—“not for riding, for wearing on the feet.”
The torpid heat of July smothered the city. Gertrude spent an “infernal” fifty-sixth birthday, suffering through wind that raged like a furnace, enduring loneliness that burned like acid. So many people had gone away—among them Henry Dobbs, her assistant J. M. Wilson and her friend Iltyd Clayton—“but Ken I miss most,” she moaned; “we’re so hand in glove over everything here and we work together so much. I never really know what is going on in the Palace and the Cabinet when he isn’t here.”
Rising each day before dawn, she exercised for fifteen minutes with a routine Ken had taught her, and then worked in her garden, pulling weeds, snipping zinnias, cutting great bunches of roses and double jasmine to fill her porcelain bowls. Dressed as lightly as possible, in stockings and a minimum of clothes—a silk chemise, a crêpe de Chine sheath and a loose muslin gown—she breakfasted on an egg and fruit, ordered dinner from her cook and, grabbing her hat, slipped into the waiting car for the five-minute drive to the office.
A pile of routine work awaited her, and at her desk, while the ceiling fan shifted the waves of heat, she scrawled memoranda to the ministries, made explanation notes for the acting High Commissioner, Nigel Davidson, translated the Arabic newspapers and handled the Arabs’ petitions. By eleven o’clock beads of perspiration dotted her brow and a servant brought in a cup of iced broth on a tray. She continued working nervously, smoking one cigarette after another, careful not to make any errors as she wrote her reports for the Secretary of State. At lunch with Nigel Davidson she went over the pressing matters, and for the first time in months she felt like “a Person,” if only because there was no one else around who knew the issues. Nevertheless, her confidence had slipped: “I hope I shall not make any dreadful mistakes,” she noted anxiously, “but there’s always Nigel to stop me. He is very cautious.” It hardly made her feel better when he whipped out a copy of the Westminster Gazette; it contained a damning story about the 1921 arrest of Sayid Talib, leaked by Philby.
Instead of the ten-hour days she used to spend at the office, she now worked only three or four hours. After lunch she retreated to her house, but the empty rooms reverberated with loneliness; there was no Ken and little to do until teatime except to lie on the big sofa under the ceiling fan and write letters or read. Florence had sent her three new plays, Saint Joan, Men and the Masses, and The Adding Machine, but as she read Elmer Rice’s account of Mr. Zero and his joyless existence, she could hardly help reflecting on her own.
There were few people around to talk to, and although once in a while she dined informally with the King, she almost always ate by herself. On Saturday evenings when the mail arrived, she sat at her table sipping cold soup or eating a bit of fish, reading the letters from England, lingering over the ones from Ken. At ten o’clock she climbed the stairs to the roof and went to sleep, numbed by the feeling that the next day would be much the same. “You know,” she wrote, “I have grown into a very solitary person with all these months of living almost completely alone.”
It had been “a trying summer”; besides the aching desolation, the Westminster Gazette had chafed at an open sore, charging her and Cox with conspiring against the Arabs, plotting the abduction of Sayid Talib and whisking him off. “It raked up the whole Talib story,” she groaned, “accused us of having foisted Faisal on Iraq [and] of having intimidated the Assembly.” The combination of hurtful accusations, loneliness and crushing heat brought her to the point of nervous exhaustion. She tried to slough it off when writing to her family, but by the end of August she was bedridden and seriously ill. Fearing for her life, Dr. Sinderson came twice a day to see her, and when Nigel Davidson paid a call, he was taken aback. Weak and thin, she lay under the covers in utter despair. Would he pray for her? she pleaded. Black depression, she told him, had settled over her like a dark cloud.