Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  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!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Flight

  Gertrude had lost more than a lover; she had lost her hopes, lost hold of an entire life. For nearly a year she had been in limbo; fearful that her father’s demands would force her plans to unravel, she continued to weave her dreams. Now, at the age of twenty-five, she faced the cold reality that her future was shredded to bits. Henry was dead. The only panacea was work and travel. For the next five years she would rush around the globe, making frequent trips to France and Italy and Switzerland, making longer journeys circling the world, as if the very act of fleeing would force her to forget. But haunted by his memory, she saw Cadogan everywhere: in the blissful faces of newlyweds on the train in France, in the perfect figure of the David in Florence, in the pots of pomegranates lined up outside a Swiss hotel. Always restless and easily bored, she felt her nervous energy reach a new level. Throwing herself into her work, she studied Persian and feverishly did research for another book, trying to release the ghosts, yet continually reconnecting herself to Cadogan. The language and the writing only reinforced her sorrow.

  “Life! life! the bountiful, the magnificent!” she had rejoiced in Persian Pictures, published in the spring of 1894. But she had written the words while she was still in Persia, Cadogan still at her side.

  Death had come too soon. No longer able to experience joy, she sought consolation, and she found it in Billy Lascelles. Friendship substituted for their former romance; empathy took the place of passion. He visited her on Sloane Street, and as Florence looked stonily on, wishing perhaps that they had married years before, the two young people went off for a private talk. Gertrude poured out her heart, comforted by his listening.

  On a family holiday in the Alps, she shared her pain with Friedrich and Nina Rosen, her friends from Teheran. With Dr. Rosen she discussed Persian Pictures and Persian literature and her Persian days with Cadogan; and at night, alone in her room under the duvet, she read the letters of Jonathan Swift and his love, Vanessa. She doubted that any man could appreciate the emotions expressed by Vanessa and felt certain that no woman could fail to understand them. “Swift did not care for her,” Gertrude observed; “that’s how a man writes who does not care. And how it maims and hurts the woman! One ought to pray every night not to write letters like that—or at least not to send them.” She had known the words of a man who cared so much, and on this, the first anniversary of Henry Cadogan’s death, they scorched her memory. “I thought of him much last night, and of all he had been to me, and is still.” It would be many years before she would know such fervor again, and the letters that were to come would shake the depths of her body and soul.

  Of all the Persian writers that she and Cadogan had read together, it was the passionate poet Hafiz who was the most complex. His mystical lyrics are still read out loud in Teheran tea rooms and salons, his allegories discussed and interpreted for hours on end. His words require the most sophisticated understanding of the language; his intricate message demands analysis that few can convey; yet eager to plunge into work, Gertrude took up the challenge to translate his poems.

  For most of the next two years, she worked on the translations of Hafiz, completing them in 1896. The following year, with the addition of her definitive essay comparing the thirteenth-century Hafiz to Western poets such as Dante and the more contemporary Goethe, the book was published. It won rave reviews. As recently as 1974, a noted scholar, A. J. Arberry, commented, “Though some twenty hands have put Hafiz into English, her rendering remains the best!” With the image of Cadogan still vivid in her mind, she could easily relate to the poet’s wrenching heartbreak over the death of his son, expressed in his poem the Divan of Hafiz:

  Light of mine eyes and harvest of my heart,

  And mine at least in changeless memory!

  Ah! when he found it easy to depart,

  He left the harder pilgrimage to me!

  Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start,

  For God’s sake help me lift my fallen load,

  And Pity be my comrade of the road!

  He sought a lodging in the grave—too soon!

  I had not castled, and the time is gone.

  What shall I play? Upon the chequered floor

  Of Night and Day, Death won the game—forlorn

  And careless now, Hafiz can lose no more.

  Still savoring the taste of life in the East, and at the suggestion of Friedrich Rosen (who had learned the language as a child in Jerusalem), Gertrude was now studying Arabic. She found it easy at first, and during the days, reading the tales, she
relived her romance with Cadogan. On spare afternoons and evenings, alone in London, she dined with her well-placed friends the Grosvenors, the Stanleys and the Ritchies, made calls on the Portsmouths and on Mrs. Green and Mrs. Ward at their smart at-homes on Russell Square. Momentarily, at least, she could bask in the limelight of the reviews of Persian Pictures.

  Yet in spite of her achievements as an author, in spite of her success in society, and in spite of the fact that she was now twenty-eight years old, she still faced the constraints of Victorian England. “I didn’t go to Lady Pollock’s on Tuesday,” she complained; “I had promised to go to a party at Audley Square and I couldn’t combine the two unchaperoned.”

  Only marriage could save her from the shackles of chaperones and escorts. In the middle of the season of 1896, her Oxford colleague Mary Talbot was liberated when she married the Reverend Winfrid Burrows. Mary was thirty-four, soon pregnant, and “radiant,” Gertrude reported to Janet Hogarth when they met at a tea in London. Janet’s brother David Hogarth, an archaeologist, had just published A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, his first important book, and the two women had a delicious afternoon, comparing notes on friends, on writing, on travel in the East.

  Mary Talbot had been Gertrude’s closest female companion. They had spent endless hours together in London, had traveled together to Italy, and now, taking the train to Yorkshire, Gertrude visited her friend in Leeds. She watched the newlywed couple setting up house in the English countryside and recalled the image of marriage that she and Henry Cadogan had sketched. The future might provide other suitors, but few could fulfill the dream she had shared with him, a life so different from Mary’s, a life of exotic adventure in the East. Still, she held on to the hope of marriage.

  But there were no eligible men in her life. Instead, she fled with her father to Italy, where she walked through the narrow streets of Padua and nearly cried when she entered the square of Saint Mark’s. “The band played,” she wrote in her diary, “and the Piazetta was full of people, and it seemed too silly, but the whole place was full of Henry Cadogan, and too lovely not to be sad.”

  Back in England, months later, she came face to face with her dreary plight. Her younger sisters used to watch in awe as maids helped Gertrude prepare for a ball, hooking her corsets, lacing up her petticoats, fastening her wasp-waisted gown, smoothing on her long white gloves. But now Elsa and Molly were old enough to be invited to their own balls; Gertrude helped choose their dresses, but it was they, not she, who waltzed at the parties. “I sat on a bench and watched them dancing round and knew just what you felt like at Oxford,” Gertrude wrote to Florence. Of course, after being her chaperone at the Oxford balls, Florence had gone home to Hugh. Gertrude went home to an empty house.

  When Mary and Frank Lascelles invited her to their embassy home in Berlin, she jumped at the chance to escape. Like people all over Europe, the Germans were celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The enormously popular Queen, grandmother of both Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czarina Alexandra of Russia, related by marriage to the monarchs of Romania, Denmark and Greece, was viewed as the embodiment of England and the symbol of the Empire; 1897, her sixtieth year on the throne, was commemorated throughout the Continent. At home in England, officials were brought in from every part of the world; dignitaries partied, troops paraded, rich men gloated over brandy and cigars, and everyone congratulated himself on being part of the world’s largest and richest Empire.

  In Germany, Gertrude enjoyed the round of balls, banquets, concerts and operas in celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee, but despite the royal ties, the British were viewed with some doubt. In South Africa, the two countries were fighting the Boer War; in the East, Germany lusted after India and hungered for the remains of the collapsing Ottoman Empire; and in Europe, Germany and England vied for commerce and communications.

  When, as a guest of the court, Gertrude attended a play with her Aunt Mary and Uncle Frank, she watched as a sheaf of telegrams was delivered to the Emperor. A heated conversation ensued between the German ruler and her uncle, the British Ambassador. Gertrude caught scraps of the Emperor’s remarks: “Crete,” “Bulgaria,” “Serbia,” “mobilizing”; he was convinced that Europe was on the brink of war. The Russians, the French and the Germans were all eager to grab the spoils that would come with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. When war came, the Germans and the British would fight on opposite sides.

  Talk of war sent a shiver of excitement through Gertrude, but the rest of her stay in Germany was boring, and by the beginning of March she was glad to be back in England. Four weeks later she learned, to her dismay, that Mary Lascelles, her favorite aunt, the one who had brought her to Persia and enabled her to meet Henry Cadogan, had died. Gertrude’s emotions rocked like a seesaw when good news followed: Mary Talbot, her closest friend, had given birth to twins. Then came word that, after suffering from complications of childbirth, Mary Talbot was dead.

  It was overwhelming: the deaths, the sorrow, the grieving; a dark cloud showering her with tears. Save for the Queen’s Jubilee, which put an eerie glow on her sadness, there was little reason to stay in England. By autumn, when the sun had stopped baking the London streets, and the brisk winds returned with her gloom, she could hardly help fleeing. Yet, still a traditional woman, she took the traditional course: she and her brother Maurice signed up for a Cook’s tour around the world. They left in December 1897 on a steamship voyage that was more a rest period than an adventure.

  They sailed from Southampton, across the Atlantic, wrote home from Guatemala and sailed the Pacific Ocean. They docked in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and on the way home she stopped in the French Alps for mountain climbing. The physical challenge of the climb itself, the test of endurance and strength, the quest of conquering something new and difficult attracted her. “Obstacles were made to be overcome,” her father had often said, and she believed him. After six months away from home, she came back to England in early summer.

  Life was vacuous, a series of parties and fittings for clothes; and once in a while, using lantern slides, she gave a lecture on Persia. She celebrated her thirtieth birthday at home with her family; no prospects of marriage seemed near. She yearned to bury her pain with serious work, yet she could not let go of Cadogan and, seeking his spirit in the East, for most of the following year she studied Persian and Arabic. She hoped to visit Friedrich Rosen, now consul to Jerusalem. But studies took up only so much time; she filled her empty hours in London drawing rooms, where the gossip was laced with talk of the Dreyfus Affair, the case of the Jewish officer court-martialed for treason in France.

  Now for Gertrude life was little more than a round of social calls. In Rome she visited Mrs. Humphrey Ward; in Athens she joined her father and watched while David Hogarth worked at a dig, extracting six-thousand-year-old vessels from the earth. She met a colleague of his, the handsome Mr. Dorpfield, and hung on his words as the archaeologist re-created the ancient world from his excavations: with pots and shards pulled from the earth, and with rocks strewn on the ground, he brought antiquity to life. It made her “brain reel,” she exclaimed, as the seeds of her interest in archaeology were planted. She returned home through Constantinople and Prague and then Berlin, where her uncle was still the ambassador and the “endlessly cheerful” Domnul Chirol was based as correspondent for The Times. She listened to Domnul, who had been living in Berlin for five years, argue against the German Government and its aggressive young emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II; she confided in him about her loneliness, and she heard his cautionary words as she talked enthusiastically of her newest interest, mountain climbing.

  From Germany she went to France to climb the Meije, 13,081 feet, her first big mountain and an undertaking far more difficult than she had imagined. By November 1899, she was off to Jerusalem; she would greet the new century in the part of the world where many people believed that life itself had begun, and where, despite the ghost of Cadogan, her own life would begin again.

 
CHAPTER FIVE

  First Steps in the Desert

  Jerusalem. To Christians it was the way to God, the site of Christ’s Crucifixion and Ascension, the scene of the Last Supper, the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross, close to Bethlehem, where Christ was born. To Muslims it was the opening to Allah, the third holiest city in Islam, the place where Muhammad was carried from Mecca on his legendary steed and where he rose mystically to heaven. To Jews it was the symbol of their homeland, the capital of ancient Israel, created by King David when he united the Hebrew tribes, and the resting place of the Ark of the Law, their covenant with God. To some people, such as sixteenth-century German mapmakers, it was the center of the world. To the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it now, it was a prized possession.

  She arrived in Jerusalem to study Arabic, her goal to enter the Arab world. She had come to Palestine by ship, sailing from Marseilles with her steamer trunks, a new fur coat and a camera, docking first at Athens, where a friend of David Hogarth’s escorted her to the Acropolis and dined with her at the Grande Bretagne Hotel, then on to Smyrna, where dependable Domnul Chirol had notified the British Consul, Mr. Cumberbatch, to smooth her way past Turkish customs. She had booked herself, the only passenger with a cabin, on a dirty Russian boat crossing to Beirut, and looked on with amazement at three hundred peasants of the Czar camped out on the deck, the women huddled in wadded coats and high boots, babushkas wrapped around their heads, the men in thick coats and boots, their heads topped with astrakhan hats. Like tens of thousands of others—Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, Sunnis, Shiites and Jews—they were making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate their sins. She, an atheist, had faith only in her family and the British Empire. Her doctrine lay in the righteous destiny of England, her conviction in the belief that the British were chosen to lead the world. At thirty-one, she was seeking a purpose for her life.