Sargent's Women

by Donna M. Lucey

  Belle craved excitement. Before departing on their Nile cruise, the Gardners went to the Mosque of the Howling Dervishes in Cairo to witness members of that Muslim religious fraternity perform their ritualistic, ecstatic dancing. Belle described the whirling dancers who drove themselves “into a perfect frenzy,” some nearly fainting, one foaming at the mouth. She’d never seen anything like it.

  For their cruise, they hired and outfitted a dahabeah—a shallow-bottomed sailboat resembling a barge, the type of vessel used on the Nile since the time of the pharaohs. Their quarters included a parlor, dressing rooms, bathrooms, and a “sky parlour,” which they sumptuously furnished with Turkish rugs, couches, awnings, and plants, where the rich Americans could survey the passing scene. (A fellow tourist noted that new furniture was an “incalculable” advantage in that climate “where vermin are not rare.”) Belle waxed poetic over the sight of palm trees on the shore and the silhouette of camels plodding across the desert, but she also enjoyed spying on the crew members as they crouched in their colorful robes and turbans, making strong, sludgy café turc over an open fire, and chanting. She admired the great care they took with their turbans “always washing them, fingering them and helping each other to wind their heads up in them.” The crew—“a very jolly set,” in her words—loved to sing, sip coffee, and smoke hashish. But when the dry khamsin wind blew in from the desert, “filled with sand, the puffs coming as a fiery furnace,” the mood changed among the men and a terrific fight broke out. The fighting overflowed onto the riverbank and the men dispersed; the captain and the dragoman, the Gardners’ official tour guide, couldn’t restore order until the evening cool descended. Tempers flared on another occasion between the crewmen of the Ibis and another boat and it was Belle who intervened then. “I was obliged to take away their weapons with my own hands,” she wrote.

  After months on board ship, the crew members became a kind of second family to Belle. She wrote in her diaries of her favorites: the sweet young “cookboy” from Nubia named Alee; the very handsome Abdul Mulee who was the master of all trades onboard ship; and the solitary figure of “Rei,” meaning “captain,” who crouched all day and night on a corner of the deck in silence, wrapped in layers of cloaks. One day, however, he suddenly emerged from his somnolence, leaping up, and crying temseh—or crocodile. Belle then got her first look at that grotesque scaly creature as it slithered into the Nile.

  A monkey, housed in a claret box and named “Coco” by the crew, was adopted by Belle during the trip. The pet wandered freely around the boat getting into mischief. One day Coco made off with one of Rei’s precious cigars and tried to eat the old man’s breakfast. “When she couldn’t be satisfied by dipping her fingers into the dish, she sat in it and had to be slapped and tied up.” A sheikh onboard one day, deep in conversation with the Gardners, was unaware that the monkey was carefully examining and peeling back layers of his skirts. Belle could barely contain her laughter, waiting at any moment for Coco to bite the sheikh’s uncovered leg.

  “Arab swells” entertained the Gardners when they stopped at various points along the river. Belle described a visit to a prominent sheikh whose retinue included two slaves. One slave had a “white napkin embroidered with gold” on his shoulder; the other carried a tray covered with a red velvet cloth “embroidered and fringed with gold.” Beneath the velvet cover were glasses containing sherbet. Belle wrote of the serving protocol: “Slave no 1 handed me a glass, which I sipped; then the napkin for my lips—and on to the others. By and bye [sic] came coffee—same performance.” The Gardners invited the sheikh and his friends back to the Ibis. “And we started, I between two Arabs, leading the procession, with guns, spikes, battle axes and poles.”

  Belle loved such pageantry, but she also commiserated with the have-nots. (The poor in her own country did not trouble her quite so much.) The Egyptian government was, in her words, “tyrannous,” toward the common people, with taxes “levied under the lash,” and forced conscription into the military. During the Gardners’ voyage it was “conscription time,” and Egyptian agents scoured the countryside looking for men to fill the ranks of the army. There was no set term of service; once drafted, a soldier was sent to far-off regions and likely separated from his loved ones forever. When agents approached villages, the population emptied as all the young men fled into the desert to hide. Fathers were arrested and tortured for information on the whereabouts of their sons. If they didn’t tell the authorities, their soles were beaten—a type of torture called ­bastinado—and if they continued to resist, the fathers were paraded naked down the street. (In her diaries Belle took a particular interest in the exquisite forms of punishment meted out around the world, from hangings in the American West, whippings by policemen on the docks of Hong Kong, chaining criminals to ancient gates in China, and crucifying those condemned to death in Canton. Belle and Jack toured the “Execution Ground” there, saw crosses leaning up against a wall, and even met the executioner.)

  While the Ibis was moored in Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes, conscription agents were prowling nearby. On their final day, the Gardners visited a temple and the home of the American Consul. Nubar Pasha, one of the most powerful politicians in Egypt (a few years later he became the country’s first prime minister), was also a guest. Nubar and Belle fell into conversation on the balcony, each one charmed by the other. But when she and Jack returned to the Ibis, they witnessed the arbitrary cruelty of the government. Conscription agents were trying to force their way on to the boat to capture one of the sailors who was hidden below deck. In a dramatic moment, the Gardners’ dragoman defied the authorities and prevented them from boarding the ship. The Ibis set sail immediately.

  Belle imbibed everything around her: the people, the landscape, and all the sensory pleasures. Her Egyptian diary records sunsets softened by the haze of the desert sand; groves of palm trees “with the earth more green than it was ever painted elsewhere”; women walking gracefully with water jars atop their heads; naked or barely clad monks swimming up to the Gardners’ boat (“I hope they were as innocent of sin as of clothes,” she wrote). She gazed on Cleopatra and Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, in relief portraits on the wall of the Hathor Temple at Dendera. Coming upon a crumbling grotto with Technicolor decorations dating back thousands of years, she sat with her diary and made a watercolor of one of the decorative patterns. “The Desert, the rocks and the air were exactly tuned to my nerves. It was the most delicious thing I ever felt. . . . And all the time the wonderful mirages, that were not less real than everything else; it actually seemed an enchanted country and . . . once I saw an Efreet [a supernatural creature in Arabic folklore] rise in the cloud of sand”; “we had truly ‘come abroad and forgot ourselves.’ ”

  Nights aboard ship were so quiet that “when the Muezzin’s call to prayer was wailed through the air . . . the tears would come.” Taking a small boat to the massive rock temples of Abu Simbel at night, she wandered through its inner passageways with lighted candles until “the moon rose directly opposite the Temple, in at the very door so that all the lights were put out and the great hall was the strangest thing I have ever seen with its shadows and ghostly light. . . . I felt our way into the inner room and seated on the knees of the stone gods watched the moon through the distant door of the Temple. . . . Then we went and I climbed onto the foot of one of the Colossi and we feasted our eyes once more on the wonderful place.”

  As the boat headed south into Nubia (now northern Sudan and southern Egypt), the voyage grew more dangerous. The calm waters turned swift, with narrow channels, rocky outcroppings and islets, and white water rapids, or cataracts. A group of shellalee, or cataract men, came on board. For generations—perhaps back to ancient times—this group had the monopoly on piloting boats through the tricky labyrinth. “The Shellalee were like the inmates of an insane asylum let loose,” Belle wrote. As many as fifty of them crowded the deck of the Ibis, maneuvering the boat with ropes and cables in an incomprehensible manner, w
ith “universal shrieking, howling, and cursing in choice Arabic.” One day when the men were positioned on rocks, pulling the Ibis through treacherous waters, a fight broke out and they dropped the ropes controlling the boat. The group leader restored order by jumping “up and down, waving a stick and shrieking.” Somehow, the boat managed to stay upright.

  The shellalee piloted tourist boats only when the river was low, generally from November to March. Inevitably, dahabeahs stacked up waiting their turn through the series of rapids. There were weather delays, wind delays, and delays due to status. The Ibis was shunted aside when Prince Arthur, Queen Victoria’s third son, arrived with a fleet of boats and the waterway was cleared for the royal duke. There was also the problem of fickle hired help. Having passed the first “gate,” or narrow point, the Gardners were stranded when their pilot jumped ship to work for a German prince.

  Though some travelers were exasperated by the seemingly endless delays during their voyages, Belle found it liberating. The clock had stopped. “Strange to say one can’t feel very actively impatient [when] there is such a delicious laziness in the atmosphere,” she wrote. By day there were expeditions into the outback, and at night much socializing among the select group of American, English, and European aristocrats. Belle and Jack hosted the German prince who’d taken their pilot. The aristocrat was very apologetic. The Gardners also exchanged visits with an American eminence—George B. McClellan, the former Union commander and the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 election, much to Belle and Jack’s disappointment.

  During one dinner aboard the Ibis, conversation came to a halt at the sound of piercing cries from the opposite bank of the river. At around ten o’clock that night, Belle and her companions went to investigate the screams. The father of their shellalee pilot had died. In the darkness, a single light shone upon a group of dancing women “who looked like witches—one arm, and shoulder bare, hair disheveled, heads and bodies covered with sand and dust—each with a long stick and dancing up and down, singing to the beating of a drum.” And throughout their dance, “that fearful death cry” went on and on. The next day she and a few others attended the funeral, watched as the body was wrapped in a red cashmere shawl and placed atop a bier. Howling dervishes rolling their heads surrounded the corpse. Relatives wandered about wailing and throwing dust on themselves. The widow, set apart from the others, performed a solo dance while dressed in her dead husband’s fez and red coat. Belle and her companions went to a reception afterward at the family’s home. Chairs were quickly brought out for the foreign visitors and coffee served while the mourning cries and dancing continued. The shellalee pilot, grateful to Belle for having come to the house, shook her hand and thanked her. Belle was struck by the extraordinary events she’d witnessed and in her diary entry the next day she wrote, “I mustn’t forget a superb looking woman at the funeral, who leaned on a long sword and was a very Judith,” the smoldering Old Testament widow who saved Israel by beheading their enemy’s commanding general.

  It took a month for the Gardners to navigate the cataracts and reach the southern end of their journey. On the day they were to turn around and make the reverse trip to Cairo, Belle and Jack woke before sunrise for a pilgrimage to Abouseer, a two-hundred-foot-high promontory looking out over Nubia and the cataracts and rock outcroppings of the Nile. They arrived at the base of the bluff and climbed to its summit. The rock walls were etched with names of tourists who’d preceded them; several of the names they found were friends of theirs. While Jack scratched “Gardner” into the wall to mark their visit, Belle was more pensive. “I had the top of the mountain all to myself,” she wrote, “and there was nobody to laugh at me for being absolutely unhappy because our journey was over and our faces were to be turned to the north even in ½ an hour.” Not long after their Nile voyage, Belle and Jack left Egypt with the purchases they had made—and with her vials of sand.

  The Gardners continued on to the Holy Land, Greece, and Turkey. When they arrived at their hotel in Constantinople in mid-July 1875, several telegrams were waiting for them. Jack’s older brother Joseph, a widower, had taken his own life (he “blew his brains out,” in Henry Adams’s description), and left behind three sons—Joseph “Joe,” fourteen; Amory, eleven; and Augustus “Gus,” nine. The Gardners made their way home, pausing in Paris long enough for Belle to buy some mourning gowns at Worth’s.

  Belle and Jack returned to Boston and took over the care of their three orphaned nephews, all of whom were “religious types” who had “inherited a supernormal sensitiveness of nervous structure.” Belle raised them with a degree of seriousness and care that perhaps surprised even her most fervent critics in Boston. According to one of the boys’ friends, she enforced a discipline and training “as one connects with the idea of a British nation.” Belle taught her towheaded nephews how to ride bareback and survive a fall or two without turning fearful (after all, one had to get back on the horse in order to succeed); she went to all of their sporting events; she brought them to the symphony to encourage their interest in music; she read Dickens aloud to them. While the eldest was preparing for Harvard in 1879, she took the two younger nephews to England and France, for a summer of touring cathedrals—perhaps in deference to their religious leanings. Their tour was briefly interrupted by sporting events such as the Oxford-Cambridge cricket match and the Ascot races.

  While overseeing the education of her nephews, Belle grew interested in filling in the gaps in her own knowledge. She yearned to understand more about the Old World and its treasures. Drawing on the brainpower at Harvard, she turned her house on Beacon Street into a serious salon for intellectuals. In the late 1870s, Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard’s first art history professor and its resident genius on Dante and Italian culture, became Belle’s muse. She attended his lectures and was invited to join the Dante Circle that met privately in his study at “Shady Hill,” his rambling Cambridge home. Norton greatly influenced Belle with his vast knowledge, as well as his aesthetic snobbery. (He was particularly enamored of the Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages, so the joke went around Harvard that upon entering heaven his response would be, “Oh! Oh! Oh! So Overdone! So garish! So Renaissance!”)

  Belle became a devotee of Dante—and her devotion to the medieval Italian poet increased when a handsome young man named Francis Marion “Frank” Crawford arrived in Boston in late 1881. Raised in Italy, the newcomer shared Belle’s passion for Dante. Crawford would read the poet’s work aloud to her in her sitting room. Years later, as a gift for Belle, Crawford had their individual copies of Dante’s La Divina Comedia interleaved. The book, bound in green leather, has two silver clasps inscribed with the words, “The two are one.” The inner cover has a silver and enamel display of flowers and curling stems within a quatrefoil—a design created by Crawford and produced by Tiffany.

  The six-foot-two unmarried Crawford was a gorgeous physical specimen, a terrific athlete, and a boxer—all of which added to his allure. Perfectly proportioned and vain about it, “he would pose before a mirror quite openly,” according to a Boston cousin, “rejoicing in his strength and beauty like any other vigorous young animal.” (Belle’s husband, Jack, on the other hand had grown rather portly.) Though he was fourteen years younger than she was, Belle carried on a rather conspicuous flirtation with Crawford. Even the Boston newspapers reported that Belle was seen “chandeliering” with him on the dance floor—that is, making a spectacle of herself.

  Crawford was at a crossroads in his life, and Belle encouraged him to write fiction. She read early drafts of his first novel, which was set in India, where Crawford had lived for a time editing a newspaper. He’d studied Sanskrit there and become fascinated by Buddhism. He told Belle about the wonders of Asia and before long the two began plotting a trip to the Far East—with Jack in tow to pay the bills. Rumors spread that Belle was having an affair with Crawford. In a sudden about-face, the young man left for Italy. The Gardners—armed with an itinerary lar
gely drawn up by Crawford—departed for a yearlong trip to Asia in the spring of 1883.

  Belle, as usual, sought out the most unusual—and at times, most dangerous—experiences during their travels. She attended a sumo wrestling match in Japan, walked atop the walls around Peking (present-day Beijing); ate boiled sea slugs and ducks’ feet in China, and peacock in Phnom Penh. She gained special permission to visit Canton (present-day Guangzhou), which was off-limits to travelers because the locals had just sacked the foreign quarter in response to the killings of two Chinese—one, a mere boy—by Westerners. Belle wandered about Canton’s teeming, narrow streets, “the spice of fear” heightening the experience. Carried on sedan chairs by sixteen bearers, Belle, Jack, and their guide took an excursion from Canton to the monasteries atop the nearby White Cloud Mountains.

  In Cambodia they traveled by boat, elephants (courtesy of the governor), and buffalo carts, to make their way through the jungle to Angkor Wat, the vast twelfth-century Hindu and Buddhist temple complex, and then on to Angkor Thom, the nearby ancient capital of the Khmer Empire. They nearly got trampled when one of the elephants went berserk. At an audience with the king of Cambodia, Belle tried to impress him with her “glitter” by wearing a diamond and pearl necklace, two white diamonds in her bonnet, and a yellow diamond on her dress. The king, similarly arrayed in diamonds, an emerald, and a sapphire ring, let her know he coveted Belle’s yellow diamond.

  Struck by the beauty of the hand-painted sarongs she saw everywhere in Java (an island of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), Belle went to a mud-floored, bamboo house to watch women make them. Three days later she visited the emperor of Java, who sat on a sofa wearing a sarong, red slippers embroidered with gold, a diamond-studded jacket, and a handkerchief on his head. Squatting on the floor around him were his women attendants, each one holding something he might need—a cuspidor he could spit in, a sword, a shield, and a cane. A group of women dwarfs were also present, while an orchestra in the shadows played the “most strange music.”