CHAPTER THREE
As Oxford had been a school for her mind, Romania would be a school for her manners. As Oxford had allowed her into the world of diplomas, Romania would allow her into the world of diplomacy. Or so it was hoped. With these goals, Gertrude was sent to Bucharest, and although at the Paris train station she bade farewell bravely to her father, she left with fear and trepidation. “I felt very sad at leaving you,” she wrote Hugh the next day, “and hoped you missed me a little.”
Accompanied on the train by her cousin Billy, she arrived in Bucharest in time for Christmas and the winter season. Until now she had defined herself as a student, and if her agenda included parties, they were secondary to her work. But her role had changed; she was now available for marriage and her primary task was to find a mate. As Florence and Hugh Bell’s daughter, she was expected to make an excellent match. And if there wasn’t one here, at least she would learn how to conduct herself for the chase.
The social season in Bucharest followed on the heels of New Year’s Eve: lavish dinners, concerts, theater, balls followed by suppers that lasted till sunrise, an endless round of parties in a city with little else to do. For three hundred years, until 1829, Romania had been a vassal state in the Ottoman Empire and, for half a century after that, a protectorate of Russia. Only in 1881, seven years before Gertrude’s arrival, did it receive its independence, and the young country had yet to exert its influence on the world. But its geographical position, next door to Russia and across the Black Sea from Turkey, made it an excellent listening post, while its resources of agriculture and oil gave it excellent potential as a friend. For the diplomat Frank Lascelles, Romania was a propitious assignment. From here he could develop strong contacts in both the East and the West.
Invitations arrived nonstop at the British Embassy, and along with her uncle and aunt and Billy, Gertrude took part in a whirlwind of events. Mary Lascelles had proven to be far more relaxed than her sister, and under “Auntie Mary’s” wing, Gertrude gained a graceful air. Corseted in whalebone and steel, pushed and pulled into an elaborate decollete gown, she learned how to flirt with her ostrich fan, puff on her cigarette and dine on caviar and champagne, to refrain from biting her nails (a family habit) and from twirling her bangs around her finger, and to keep from blurting out everything that came into her mind. With all of this, her aunt hoped, she would change from a snobbish intellectual into a polished ingenue.
But Gertrude continued to comment snidely on events. Of the guests at one dinner, she wrote home, Mr. Mawe was “very conceited,” and M. Demos, an elderly diplomat, was so tiny and bent “no country could possibly take the trouble to claim him.” Of the food at another dinner she wrote, “The fish we smelt the moment [it] left the kitchen, the meat was the consistency of cork.” And in the company of a group of diplomats she announced to a distinguished French statesman that he had no understanding at all of the German people. Her aunt was appalled, and Gertrude learned her lesson. When, a few weeks later, a British diplomat came to stay with the Lascelleses, she was “very discreet!”
Bucharest gave Gertrude her first real taste of society, but more than that, it gave Gertrude her first real taste of the world. A world that went beyond British boundaries. At the palace, she met King Carol, a Hohenzollern by birth, and chatted lengthily with his mystic wife, Elizabeth, known as the poet Carmen Sylva. She was introduced to Count von Bülow, who would become the Chancellor of Germany, and to Count Goluchowski, who would become the Chancellor of Austria. She dined with European aristocrats and Asian envoys, and spent a day with the British diplomat Charles Hardinge (later the Viceroy of India), whose enormous knowledge about the East and the Ottoman Empire opened her eyes to problems she knew little about.
She spent weeks with Valentine Chirol, a close friend of the Lascelleses who was also visiting them in Bucharest. Now a foreign correspondent for The Times, the thirty-seven-year-old Chirol, born in Paris to English parents, brought up Catholic and educated mainly in France, had graduated from the Sorbonne, trained in the Foreign Office and traveled (with no apparent assignment) for sixteen years throughout the Continent and the East. Highly intelligent and well informed, he spoke a dozen languages, made impressive contacts and provided information to Whitehall. No one called him a spy, but he served his government well. The portly five-foot-ten, red-haired, red-bearded Chirol, who loved good food and good wine, was nicknamed Domnul during his stay in Romania, and would become one of Gertrude’s closest friends.
For four months during the winter of 1889 Gertrude laughed, danced and flirted her way through Bucharest, and although no one asked for her hand in marriage, she was pleased by the attention she received. And almost always near her side was the blue-eyed Billy Lascelles, a good dancer but a bit too aloof for her liking. “He rarely confesses himself amused,” she complained in a letter home. “As for me I dance from the beginning of any ball to the end and I am genuinely amused all the time.” Nevertheless, the two were becoming close. As the winter snows melted, their friendship warmed. Then, at the end of April, with the well-traveled Domnul leading the way, they left Romania for a visit to Constantinople.
East across the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor and west into the Balkan peninsula of Europe, the Ottoman Turks had advanced, expanding from a thirteenth-century Turkish state, with Constantinople at its head, into a sixteenth-century empire that stretched from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Danube in Austria. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans controlled Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia and Turkey in the East and Hungary and the Balkans—Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Greece and Romania—in the West. For hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire had served as a stabilizing force, balancing the Russian power in the East with the British and French in the West. For Britain and France it provided protection against Arab attacks on Western traders conducting lucrative commerce: the British in the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia, the French in Syria.
But by the nineteenth century, weakened by corruption, greed and too loose a management style, the Ottoman Empire had diminished and decayed. The loss of Egypt and Greece, along with a depleted economy, had forced the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman Government was called) to rely more on the West. When the Russians marched toward Constantinople in 1878 in search of a warm-water port, the Turks, aided by Britain and France, were able to hold them off. But the Turks had fought a costly war. And when a surge of nationalism swept through the Balkans, the Turks lost Bulgaria and Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the West the Ottoman Empire had become “the Sick Man of Europe”; its fate in the Balkans, the critical “Eastern Question.”
What worried the British most was that Russia would once again menace Constantinople, a threat England could not afford. Turkish protection was essential along the route to India, and an Ottoman defeat by the Russians could doom the jewel in the British crown. And thus the British held out a generous hand of financing to prop up the Turks.
But the Eastern Question mattered little to Gertrude, at least for now. Her curiosity centered on Constantinople, the cosmopolitan city that straddled Europe and Asia; the splendid city on the Bosporus, ancient capital of Byzantium, seat of the Muslim Caliphate and symbol of Ottoman strength. In Bucharest, she had sampled a soupçon of Turkish flavoring; here, in Istanbul, she could savor an Oriental feast. A banquet of gorgeous colors and exotic shapes unfolded before her, “perfectly delicious” she wrote, as the low sun glittered on the water, bringing color back to the faded Turkish flags, “turning each white minaret in Stamboul into a dazzling marble pillar.” She watched the Sultan Caliph, putative leader of the Muslim forces that had swept through East and West, emerge in all his glory on a rare trip from his palace to his mosque. She eyed the spires of the Seraglio, a place at once luxurious and licentious, bringing to life Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio; and she saw the flat dome of Saint Sophia, a miracle of Byzantium.
She and Billy took a caïque and rowed slowly up the waters of the Golden Horn; they climbed the snows of Mount Olympus and looked out on the dazzling Sea of Marmara; they mounted donkeys and bumped along the narrow passages of the bazaars. She loved seeing the people dressed in Turkish clothes, the men in turbans and loose-fitting pants, the women in silks, their faces covered with veils. She liked the closely latticed Turkish houses, the Turkish restaurants with strange foods, and she liked drinking Turkish coffee while Billy smoked a narghile, a water pipe. Swept up in the exotic romance of it all, by the end of the trip she and Billy were nearly engaged. The two set off for home, splendidly content, on the Orient Express. This was, observed her sister Elsa, “the last chapter of absolute happiness in Gertrude’s life. She was twenty, she was brilliant, she was charming, she had an attentive cavalier.… The future with all its possibilities lay before them.”
Billy Lascelles fit all the requirements: son of a diplomat, grandson of a famous physician, rakish and rich, educated at Sandhurst and about to begin his military career, he was the ideal candidate for marriage. In London, where Gertrude stayed after they returned in the summer of 1889, he flattered her with his advances. They took afternoon tea together, dined together and sat together in the moonlit garden, talking and playing bezique, their favorite card game, till two in the morning. But Billy offered neither the mental stimulation nor the emotional exuberance she needed. He was too limited in his outlook and too blasé in his approach to life. She was used to the depth and daring, the intelligence and adventurousness of the Bell men. Even on her return to London from Constantinople, she had longed for her father’s company. “Dear, dearest Father,” she had written, “I do wish you were here. I half hoped you might be. Do come soon.” As for Billy, after a few months her interest strayed.
In July she turned twenty-one, a coming-of-age that tremored with meaning. She was now three years older than most young women who had entered British society; her introduction could no longer be postponed. She had smiled her way through Bucharest’s balls, but it was time for her official coming-out. A presentation at court and a formal party by her parents announced to the world that she had been transformed from an accomplished young girl into an eligible young woman. For the 1890 season, and for the two that would follow, Gertrude waltzed through the marriage market, from one ball to another, escorted by either Florence or an aunt. Pink-cheeked and fleshy-bosomed, she joined the line of other young women standing in front of their chaperones, waiting until young men asked them to dance. She smiled, she laughed, she looked deliciously indifferent, and she inspected the men even more carefully than they inspected her. For Gertrude, this was a difficult time. Few of the men were as brilliant as she. Few had attended Oxford or Cambridge. Few had traveled as far as the East. Few had her curiosity or her knowledge or her bluntness or her audacity. Few could match the standards set by her father and grandfather, and, most painful of all, few would desire her.
One of the few was Bertie Crackenthorpe. For at least a week he was in hot pursuit, inviting her to dine at his parents’ house and paying her unending attention, even to his father’s chagrin. “I do like him,” Gertrude wrote to Florence, assuring her that she had been well behaved. Bertie begged to see her, but Gertrude played coy, refusing to say she would be at home if he called, but crossing her fingers about the future. “We shall see how everything happens,” she said wistfully. Yet less than a week later, when she and Bertie were both invited to visit a friend, she hoped he would not go. Bertie already bored her.
In the autumn she returned to Red Barns, a damp retreat, cold and dull. Pretending to be happy, she was often admittedly “miserable,” with little to do. She tutored the younger Bell girls (Hugo was off at school), did social work with the wives of the colliery workers and read voraciously. At least her imagination could take flights of fancy. She lapped up biographies of Browning, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, followed the explorations of Livingstone in Africa, recited Kipling’s poetry of the Empire and savored FitzGerald’s 1859 translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Dreaming when dawn’s left hand was in the sky
I heard a voice within the tavern cry,
“Awake, my little ones, and fill the cup
“Before life’s liquor in its cup be dry.”
When spring arrived and unmarried women were once again in season, she returned to her family’s London flat. To fill the time, she took fencing lessons at MacPhersons’ gym, shopped at Harvey’s and on the Brompton Road and, to her mother’s horror, took the underground to see Mary Talbot doing welfare work in Whitechapel. Florence was “beside herself,” Elsa wrote later, that Gertrude had gone on such an “orgy of independence.” More to her mother’s liking, she went to art exhibits with the family maid and, similarly chaperoned, paid calls on friends: Caroline Grosvenor, an artist; Norman Grosvenor, her husband; and Flora Russell, daughter of Lord and Lady Arthur Russell. The Russells’ at-homes were the envy of London. Their Mayfair drawing room on Audley Square (where the windows were washed, extravagantly, once a week) attracted such well-known figures as Leslie Stephen and his daughters, Virginia and Vanessa; Mrs. Humphrey Ward; and Henry James, who sometimes brought along his friend, the controversial painter of “Madame X,” John Singer Sargent. But aside from an interesting conversation here and there, the days seemed to pass, she noted, “without much to show for them.”
Three seasons were all that a young lady was allotted to find a husband. Gertrude had used up her time. No one had asked her to marry him, nor was there someone she wished to wed. Not that she did not enjoy the company of young men; she did. But her sharp tongue sliced through their egos and her intellectual thirst quickly soaked up what drops of knowledge they shed. She refused to bow to them in her 'margin-top:3.6pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:3.6pt; margin-left:0cm;text-align:justify;text-indent:12.0pt;line-height:14.4pt'>Three years of the mating game had made her miserable, yet the prospect of a life alone seemed worse. At the end of an evening at the Russells’, she wrote despondently to Florence: “It is so flat and horrid without you. I hope you find your husband a consolation to you, you see I haven’t one to console me.” Fearful of living her life as a spinster, she ended her letter: “Mother dearest, three score years and ten is very long, isn’t it?”
Travel seemed the only solution; Persia the place she had always longed to see. At the age of twenty-three, having spent the winter months learning to speak the language, Gertrude waved goodbye to damp, cold England and left with her aunt Mary Lascelles for the East. Traveling on the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople, and from there by boat to Persia, she arrived in Teheran on May 7, 1892, to visit Frank Lascelles, recently appointed the British envoy to Shah Nasiraddin. In her first letter home, she rejoiced: Persia was “Paradise.”
The legation grounds were like “the Garden of Eden,” Gertrude exclaimed to her parents. “You can’t think how lovely it all is—outside trees and trees and trees making a thick shade from our house to the garden walls, beneath them a froth of pink monthly roses, climbing masses of briers, yellow and white and scarlet, beds of dark red cabbage roses and hedges of great golden blooms. It’s like the Beast’s garden, a perfect nightmare of roses.” She stepped inside the rambling, pale stone house and walked through long hallways, where liveried servants bowed as she passed. Peeking around, she discovered capacious dining rooms, drawing rooms and billiard rooms, countless sitting rooms and bedrooms for family and guests, and everywhere she could smell the scent of roses and hear the songs of nightingales.
The month-long journey to Teheran earned a welcome from the entire Embassy: counselors, military attachés, telegraph coders, first, second and even third secretaries turned out to greet her, including one who seemed to catch her interest. “Mr. Cadogan, tall and red and very thin, agreeable, intelligent, a great tennis player, a great billiard player, an enthusiast about Bezique, devoted to riding though he can’t ride in the least I’m told, smart, clean, well-dressed, looking upon us as his special property to be looked after and amused. I like him,” she wrote at once to her family.
She met others too, in Teheran, whom she liked, particularly the German chargé d’affaires, Friedrich Rosen, and his wife, Nina. Mrs. Rosen, the daughter of friends of her stepmother’s, was intelligent and amusing; Dr. Rosen, a charming man and an Oriental scholar, who soon taught her about Persian culture and stirred her interest in the Arabs as well. The Rosens would become close friends, and when later they were assigned to Jersualem, she would make her first trip to that city, visiting them while she studied Arabic.
But one man in Teheran stood out from the rest. A week after she arrived, she wrote home again: “Mr. Cadogan is the real treasure; it certainly is unexpected and undeserved to have come all the way to Tehran and to find someone so delightful at the end. Florence [the Lascelleses’ daughter] and I like him immensely; he rides with us, he arranges plans for us, he brings his dogs to call on us … he shows us lovely things from the bazaars, he is always there when we want him and never when we don’t.” Not only was he charming but highly intelligent, well read in everything worthwhile in French, German and English.
Astride their horses, Mr. Cadogan led her into the desert, and she gasped at the power of its vastness and vacancy, the beauty of its jeweled oases. “Oh the desert round Tehran! miles and miles of it with nothing, nothing growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here; it is a very wonderful thing to see.…”
They went riding together, she always sidesaddle, to the Shah’s camp, and found a garden filled with wild animals and an anderun, a special palace for the royal ladies. When one of the gardeners opened the palace door, they stepped inside and found themselves “in the middle of the Arabian Nights.” Thin streams trickled across the tiled floors and reflections of the water danced in the tiny mirrored pieces of the roof, and all the way was roses, roses. “Here that which is me,” she wrote, “which womanlike is an empty jar that the passerby fills at pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I had never heard of.”
She was roused by the sensuality of the East and seduced by the attentions of her suitor, handsome, ten years older than she, and worldly. He read her the mysterious lines of the Persian poets and slipped his arms around her. He took her to strange sights, like the whitewashed Tower of Silence, where the Zoroastrians threw their dead, leaving them for birds to devour, and he held her tightly when she shivered in fear. He showed her hawking and they watched together as the servants released quails into the sky and let loose the hawks to pounce on them. He brought her to a garden where they lay in the grass under trees, dangled their toes in a little stream, and kissed, then watched the lights changing on the snowy mountains. From his pocket he pulled out a tiny volume of Catullus and read aloud the lyric pieces of the Roman poet. “It was very delicious,” she wrote dreamily. A few days later they spent an afternoon in a garden tent, and in between their kisses they read the voluptuous quatrains of The Rubáiyát:
With me along the strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown.
Where name of slave and sultan is forgot,
And peace to Mahmud on his golden throne! …
A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!
While a cholera epidemic raged through the country, killing thousands, she and Cadogan celebrated life. They recited the poems of Browning and Kipling and read the short stories of Henry James. They played tennis, they rode into the mountains, they took walks, and on one August afternoon, they strolled two miles down the River Lar to a place where Mr. Cadogan’s servant had spread a regal tea. Hungry and wet from a sudden shower, they hid under waterproof sheets and munched on bread and butter and raspberry jam. After tea they wandered along the stream, Cadogan fishing, she talking, until they walked home together. “It was the loveliest afternoon,” she purred.
By now they were speaking of their future, spending hours blissfully planning their life together: as a diplomat, he could be posted anywhere in the world; he had been to South America and did not like it, and they both hoped he would stay in the Middle East. It was easy to imagine herself like her aunt Mary, the charming, admired wife of an influential ambassador, with her Parisian wardrobe, traveling in luxury on steamer ships and sumptuous trains, meeting interesting people like prime ministers and kings, living in exotic places like Damascus and Baghdad. Her days were like dreams floating out of Oriental fables.
They had both composed letters to her parents, he to ask Hugh Bell’s permission to marry Gertrude, she to tell them of the news. After two weeks, when her parents did not respond, she wrote again, knowing for certain that her father would want to check her young man’s credentials. She guessed that the long wait did not augur well; her father was extremely particular about whom she could marry, and Mr. Cadogan did not really fit the bill. Hugh Bell expected a rich husband for his daughter, one who had a good income and good prospects for the future. Henry Cadogan was the eldest son of the Honorable Frederick Cadogan and the grandson of the third Earl Cadogan, but he had not inherited any family fortune. His salary as a junior diplomat was insufficient to support Gertrude, and to make matters worse, he was a gambler who had mounted up significant debts. He was well read and worldly, but as Hugh Bell learned when he contacted family and friends in Teheran, Cadogan was also arbitrary, strong willed, and intolerant of any interference with his wishes.
Even before her father’s reply arrived, Gertrude wrote to her mother that if Hugh refused to give his permission, the only thing Cadogan could do would be to stay in Persia and hope for a promotion. If he received an ambassadorship or something similarly remunerative, then the wait would have been worthwhile. “The consolation is that people really do get on in this profession and make enough to live on before so many years. But then,” she acknowledged, “the kind of life is rather expensive of course.”
At last in September her father’s letter came. With a quickened pulse, she opened the envelope, but her deepest fears turned out to be true. Hugh Bell refused to give his consent. He hoped that a separation would make Gertrude change her mind. She was heartbroken. She wrote to her stepmother for solace: “I care more than I can say and I’m not afraid of being poor or even of having to wait, though waiting is harder than I thought it would be at first. For one doesn’t realize at first how one will long for the constant companionship and the blessed security of being married, but now that I am going away I realise it wildly … our position is very difficult and we are very unhappy.”
In spite of their passion, they respected the social rules. They saw less of each other, feeling they no longer had the right to meet. Still she begged her mother to understand Henry Cadogan as she did. She could not bear that her parents think of him as anything less than “noble and gentle and good.” This was the loving side he had shown her. “Everything I think and write brings us back to things we have spoken of together, sentences of his that come flashing like sharp swords; you see for the last three months nothing I have done or thought has not had him in it, the essence of it all.”
She would choose to do it all over again, she assured them, despite the current pain and the awful separation that was coming. It was worth it all, she told them, “more than worth it. Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing; at least I have known it and have seen life’s possibilities suddenly open in front of me—only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again.… Oh Mother, Mother,” she wailed.
On the boat journey home she wrote to her trustworthy friend Domnul Chirol, revealing her pain and confusion. “I think you know vaguely about my affairs—vaguely is all I know about them myself at present, but I fear they look very bad. It’s a threatening, stormy vagueness, not a hopeful one. Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically bankrupt and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do.” She and her father had not yet had a chance to discuss the situation, but she hoped he would see Henry Cadogan’s father and arrive at some sort of decision. In the meanwhile, she and Cadogan were not allowed to consider themselves engaged and the possibility of their marriage remained in the distant future. “I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence.”
She arrived in London in late October and, after the long absence, embraced her waiting mother. To her father, who was in Yorskshire, she wrote that, as unimaginable as it once had seemed, this experience had brought her even closer to him. Perhaps it was because she had known real love, she explained, that she could appreciate her father’s love even more. When finally Hugh appeared in London a few days later, she poured out her hopes and fears, her doubts and desires, while he listened quietly. As she had allowed to Domnul, somewhere deep inside her she knew her father was right; for the time being, at least, Cadogan was not an acceptable husband. Yet she yearned to be his wife, and she would wait; she would wait as long as she had to.
Then, for eight months, she endured, existing from day to day, and with Florence’s encouragement she worked on Persian Pictures, a book about her experiences in the East. In August 1893 she and her mother visited Kirby Thore in Yorkshire. It was there that she was reading aloud to Florence about the cholera epidemic, from the chapter she had called “Shadow of Death,” when, like some sort of Persian sorcery, the shadow stepped out from the pages of her book. A telegram arrived from Teheran. Excited and unknowing, Gertrude unfolded the paper and began to read the message: Henry Cadogan had been trout fishing when he slipped into the icy waters of the River Lar—whether by accident or intention it did not say—and, chilled to the bone, was stricken with pneumonia. They were sorry to inform her that Cadogan was dead.
That year Gertrude published a translation of the poems of Hafiz; her interpretation of the Persian poet’s writings is still considered one of the best:
Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot,
Songs of a cup once flushed rose-red with wine,
Songs of a rose whose beauty is forgot,
A nightingale that piped hushed lays divine:
And still a graver music runs beneath
The tender love notes of those songs of thine,
Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death!