Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  “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 l
ightly 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  To Sleep

  In the autumn of 1924, after recuperating from her bout of depression, Gertrude was invited by the King to his new estate near Khanaqin. Only a short while before, with Ken still away, she and Faisal had spent an evening together at the theater in Baghdad. The occasion had perked up their spirits. “The King laughed and laughed,” she reported, “and as we motored back (incidentally with the King’s arm tightly enfolding my waist!) he observed that it had been like spending an evening in London.”

  Now, taking the overnight train, she arrived in the country early on Saturday morning and immediately joined the King for a partridge shoot; by noon it was too hot to do anything else but rest. She retired to her tent (his country house was not yet built), opened two of the side flaps and, undressing as much as she decently could, lay on her bed reading Thackeray’s Pendennis. They were light years away from London’s literary life, but after tea, riding with Faisal across miles of his empty land overlooking the Persian hills, hearing his dreams for the future, she felt part of an even more special world.

  In the evening she dressed to dine with the King, and as they sat at the table under the stars, Faisal, a doleful look in his eyes, confessed that he was still unhappy. Baghdad could never replace Damascus, and though he left it unsaid, it was there, in that flowering desert capital of Greater Syria, that he yearned to rule. Patient and quiet, he kept his thoughts well hidden from most people and rarely exposed his emotions. But on this intimate evening he complained again to Gertrude of how lonely he felt; he had looked forward to coming up to this country place to escape the dull round of palace and office which was all that Baghdad offered. She realized how alone he would have been if she had not come. “He wanted someone to talk to about his plans, to say what fun it would be and how they would all come shooting with him and be keenly interested in what he was doing. I was glad I had come,” she wrote. “Besides, I enjoyed it enormously; I too felt like a prisoner escaped.”

  The following day they celebrated together as the city turned out to welcome the King’s only son to Baghdad. Twelve-year-old Ghazi had arrived, the first of Faisal’s family to flee from Mecca, where Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi warriors were about to attack on the way to conquering the Hejaz; even more people lined the streets than when Faisal had appeared in 1921. The boy seemed a miniature replica of his father, small and shy, with a long, sensitive face and a dignified air. Gertrude warmed to him at once. Taking him under her wing, she rushed to the palace to choose his clothes; suits and shirts had to be made, and she flitted around selecting stripes and tweeds from an English tailor called from Bombay, while, she said, the tailor behaved like a character in Thackeray, skipping about, pointing his toe, handing her patterns “with one hand on his heart.” When Ghazi came in to be measured, he was “half shy and half pleased.” The boy had been raised in the desert, barely educated but bright, and under her supervision, she had no doubt, he would learn fast. She found him a governess and a tutor to teach him English, and for Christmas she ordered a set of toy trains from Harrods. “He has been very much neglected in a household of slaves and ignorant women,” she clucked. Still, she confessed, she could not do as much as she liked. She did not have the authority and would have to wait for Ken to come back.

  Only recently Cornwallis had sent her a letter from England describing his divorce. The picture he gave of his wife and his in-laws revealed a painful relationship. “They must be inhuman people,” she remarked. “He will be much better when he gets back to his work and to us who know him and love him.” She could do a far better job of taking care of him than his wife had done, she felt sure, and in the deepest corner of her heart she hoped that she would become the new Mrs. Cornwallis.

  For the moment, however, Gertrude had the company of her sister and brother-in-law. In November, Elsa and her husband, on their way to Ceylon, had stopped in Baghdad, but Gertrude was too ill with bronchitis to shower them with attention. Nevertheless, she begged her family not to bother about her health. The doctor had told her she had “the most surprising power of sudden recovery,” and, indeed, by the time that Cornwallis returned at the end of the month, she was up and about, pronouncing herself “perfectly well again.” Now it was Ken who needed attention.

  The divorce had been a messy affair, with trumped-up charges for evidence and a decree that barred his legal rights to his children. “I’m dreadfully sorry for my dear Ken,” she wrote; “[he] has been through a hell of a time and is miserable.” Nevertheless, she was sure that he would soon be feeling better, now that he had returned to his work, his colleagues and his devoted friends, “of whom I am the chief. I do love and admire his salient, his almost aggressive integrity and I prize more than I can say the trust and affection he gives me in such full measure.”

  New Year’s Eve came on the heels of a heavy snow, the first in fourteen years, and t
he holiday was one of the “nastiest” she could remember, followed by rains that mired the ground in mud and ice. As Gertrude made her way to the palace, she hardly felt cheered that she was about to meet the Queen. The arrival of Hazaima was as pleasing to her as the weather, but Gertrude slid across the slippery mush to see the royal consort and at once pronounced her “charming.” Hazaima’s two eldest girls, around eighteen years old, were just like their mother, she noted, “rather shy but eager to be outgoing,” and within a matter of days she assigned Ghazi’s governess, Miss Fairley, to teach them English, tennis and “European behavior.” As for the Queen, Gertrude had few further comments; she was soon discovered to be a coarse, uneducated woman.

  When, in the first week of January, it was decided that the Queen would hold her first tea, Gertrude drew up an A list, and invitations were sent to the most important Arab and British women. A few days before the event, she was called to the palace to arrange the tables for the King, and for the first time saw him interact with his family. “The girls were on very good terms with him but the Queen was mute in his presence,” she observed, having noted that Faisal was none too pleased by Hazaima’s arrival.

  Gertrude had asked the wife of Ali Jawdat, chief of the royal household, to take on the job of Mistress of Ceremonies, but it was an uncomfortable role for the inexperienced young woman, and with the Arab ladies too intimidated to talk and the British ladies unable to speak in Arabic, a circle of silence surrounded the Queen. But, as always, Gertrude took things in hand, and, plumping down one guest after another, she managed to draw out the consort. She cringed, however, at the sight of the Queen and the two princesses, “abominably dressed,” and announced she would “have to take their clothes in hand.”