Her own wardrobe, despite its share of Worths and Molyneux, was suffering from a lack of financial underpinnings: the company with which her father had merged was holding back its dividends, and she was scrimping to save. “I have been very economical and I haven’t had a new gown for eighteen months,” she commended herself. “I am feeling a little dingy this winter but I hope my bankbook looks brighter.” She had spent five hundred and sixty pounds above her salary for the year, much of that on housing, servants and food; the rest had gone for books and papers, seeds and bulbs, accessories, and fabrics for Marie to make into clothes. “On the whole I don’t think it has been an extravagant year,” she wrote to her father. “Do you?”
The Frontier Commission, sent by the League of Nations to determine the borders between Iraq and Turkey, arrived in the middle of January 1925. Although the Turks still claimed the Mosul vilayet for themselves, the area was of vital strategic interest to Britain: the mountainous region provided defense against a Turkish invasion; the northern air bases offered protection for the oil fields in Persia and the refineries at Abadan; and the oil fields near Kirkuk not only would yield vast supplies of petroleum for Britain but they would fuel the Iraqi ecomony.
It was essential to present a show of Iraqi solidarity to the commission, and Gertrude was given the task of organizing the Arabs. There could be no sign of dissension within the Iraqi camp. Dobbs sent her to advise the King on his speech to the Commissioners, and a few days later she called on the Prime Minister to hear what he had told the Commission. She spent hours at the palace arranging the seating for the fifty-eight guests—all male except for her—and was decidedly pleased when, as a show of protest against the Turks, the Iraqis appeared, to a man, without a fez. “The Baghdadis are standing to their guns, Ministers, officials of all sorts, notables, all are testifying to the indivisibility of Iraq. Men of all parties have dropped their differences,” she reported victoriously. Now all they needed was for those from Mosul to do the same and speak with one voice. “At any rate,” she noted, “the Commission has realised that it’s a struggle for life on the part of Iraq, not an effort on the part of the British Government to expand its dominions.”
By early March, when the Commission announced its decision to give Mosul to Iraq, she busied herself in the negotiations over oil. The Turkish Petroleum Concession, a consortium of British, French and American interests, was the only group big enough and rich enough, she believed, to be able to build the pipelines from Iraq to the Mediterranean, but the local politicians were scurrying to support small local investment groups, and progress was being stymied. “If only the Iraq Cabinet wouldn’t be so asinine,” she complained. “I think there are better prospects before us than we have had for a long time.… The great thing from our point of view is that the development of the country should begin and foreign capital developed.” On March 14, 1925 a seventy-five-year accord was granted to the Turkish Petroleum Concession.
A few weeks later Gertrude finished a major report for the Secretary of State and left the office with a sense of satisfaction. But by the time she arrived at home, Ken was pacing the floor. Ibn Saud’s two thousand Wahhabi raiders, who had already seized the Hejaz, had now attacked the Iraqi border: the King was extremely anxious, yet the High Commissioner, who spoke poor Arabic, refused to believe that the raid had even taken place. What were they to do? It was her job as liaison to explain the situation to Dobbs, and she and Ken agreed on the line she was to take; but troubled over the events, she spent a fitful night. By four in the morning she was up and about, writing a long letter home, arranging bowls of flowers, mulling over her usual breakfast. At last it was time to walk to work. At the office more reports had come in: in days she would learn that almost two hundred men, women and children had been killed; twenty-six thousand sheep and thirty-seven hundred donkeys had been captured; and floods of tribal refugees were rushing into Iraq. It didn’t require much effort to convince Sir Henry that an attack had really occurred. But there was no way of avoiding the fact that the gap had begun to spread between Gertrude and the High Commissioner.
Edward DeGaury noticed it soon after he arrived as an army official in the spring of 1925. He had seen the Khatun riding out of a cloud of dust on the road to Kadhimain, sidesaddle on an Arabian mare. Next to her thumped the heavy black car of the High Commissioner waving its Union Jack, preceded by two Indian guards on horseback. As DeGaury approached the Ford, he saluted the passenger, Sir Henry Dobbs. Gertrude put up her riding whip and returned the salute, touching the whip to the brim of her tricorne. Then, her salukis beside her, she dug in her spurs and galloped off, leading the way for Dobbs. Her “very enthusiasm could be an embarrassment,” DeGaury wrote later. “Dobbs did not always see eye-to-eye with Gertrude Bell.”
He recalled another incident, a day when the King was inspecting the troops. Dressed in his khaki uniform and mounted on a white horse, Faisal was riding slowly out of the palm gardens to take his place for the military inspection. As he reached the saluting post, Gertrude appeared, wearing a white riding habit, galloping at full speed. As she reined in her black mare to his side, Faisal looked askance. She had made “an unforgettable sensation,” wrote DeGaury, and behind her back the King complained to Dobbs that the Khatun was ubiquitous.
In truth, she had become almost irrelevant. Except for the death of two dogs—hers and Ken’s—which had made her depressed, her days were “uneventful.” In the evenings she went walking with Lionel Smith, the Education Adviser, or riding with Iltyd Clayton or motoring with Ken. Her letters, once fifteen pages long and brimming over with political news and anecdotes, were now merely brief notes home about duck shoots, picnics and bridge with the King, who, she was pleased to report, had improved enormously, “his only difficulty being that he can’t remember which are clubs and which are spades.” The highlight of the Easter season was a trip along the Euphrates, a “surprise,” she wrote, adding dejectedly, “so many of my plans have come to nothing.”
Packing the car with food, camp beds and baths, she and Ken and a few friends motored out to the Euphrates and indulged in a meal she had brought along: caviar, tongue and Stilton cheese. On the following day they drove to Karbala, and then it was off across the desert, passing lizards two feet long, to see the ruins she had first discovered at Ukhaidir. Her early find of the ancient palace had been one of the most thrilling events in her life, but, usurped and written about by French archaeologists before she had had a chance to publish her work, it had turned into one of her most painful memories. She had not been back since 1911. “It made me feel rather ghostlike to be in these places again, with such years between, and I was glad I wasn’t there alone,” she wrote to her father. “As for my plans, I’m thinking of coming home for a couple of months towards the end of July.”
She arrived in London after the season, deliberately wanting to avoid the rush, she said, in a state of mental and physical exhaustion. The family doctors advised a great deal of care and pronounced her unfit to return to the climate of Baghdad. Visitors came and went and saw her thinner and frailer than ever. Chilled even in the summer heat, she stood in the drawing room at Sloane Street, the windows closed, her back to a roaring fire, her long fox coat pulled closely around; smoking her Turkish cigarette through the long holder, she glared as she held forth on a range of subjects. Terrified young nephews and nieces were brought to meet her and remembered long after how “very fierce” she looked. Janet Hogarth came to dine, and Gertrude pulled her aside. “It’s lovely out there,” she told her wistfully. “What shall I do here, I wonder?” Run for Parliament, Janet suggested, and she toyed with the idea.
At Rounton, she watched her life being packed away. The house had become too expensive to maintain, and her parents were moving out. She knocked on the library door, as she did each morning, and found Florence at work at her desk. Over the years they had had their quarrels and their resentments, but now her mother put down her pen, and they talked about the family’s financi
al crisis, Florence’s playwrighting, Gertrude’s work and her disappointment over never having married, about Doughty-Wylie and Ken Cornwallis, her father and her future. “I feel as if I had never known you really before, not in all these years,” Gertrude wrote her later. “I feel certain that I have never loved you, so much, however much I may have loved you.”
She took walks across the moors, ruminated over Janet Hogarth’s suggestion and wrote a dejected note to her friend: “No, I’m afraid you will never see me in the House. I have an invincible hatred of that kind of politics and if you knew how little I should be fitted for it you would not give it another thought.… I have not, and I have never had the quickness of thought and speech which could fit the clash of parliament. I can do my own job in a way and explain why I think that the right way of doing it, but I don’t cover a wide enough field and my natural desire is to slip back into the comfortable arena of archaeology and history and to take only an onlooker’s interest in the contest over actual affairs.”
She visited her sister Molly and confided in her about Ken. She was deeply in love with him, she revealed, and had hoped that after his divorce they would marry. But her dream was a fragile flower that he had crushed in his fist. He had refused to marry her, had flatly turned down her pleas. What would she do? she cried. How could she go back to Baghdad and face the humiliation? Yet how could she come back to England and face the emptiness? The talk with her sister was comforting. Molly made it all seem easy. “You have somehow given me my bearings and I feel as if I could steer straight,” Gertrude wrote the next day; “you have taken all the bitterness out and encouraged me to feel that whatever I do it shall be fine and generous, and worthy of the people I belong to.”
She tried to avoid Cornwallis, and when he arrived in London in August, escorting the King, she did not let him know that she would be in town. But her father offered to give a dinner for Faisal at the Automobile Club, and there was no way to escape from inviting Ken. When Gertrude took the train to London she found a note from Ken at her Sloane Street house. He would telephone the following morning. Might he come that afternoon? he asked when he phoned. They sipped tea and chatted lightly about his business affairs, his children, the King. Could he come again tomorrow? he asked in his slow, deep voice. No, she replied, her day would be full. She was meeting with Faisal, and besides, they would see each other that night at the club. At the dressmaker’s the next day he came to pick her up, and after they lunched, he saw her off at Victoria Cross for Yorkshire. It had all gone well. But it was different. “Somehow,” she explained to Molly after returning to Rounton, “I felt as if we had got into a new basis of friendship and I can’t help hoping that as far as I am concerned the fire has burned out. Perhaps it was talking to you that did it.… Anyhow, Dearest, don’t be afraid about us.… I leave England on the 30th.”
A stream of turbaned visitors kissed her hand, called her “the light of our eyes” and welcomed her back to Baghdad. Ken came the first night for dinner, and at the office and at the museum her work continued. But Cornwallis refused to hear her continued pleas for marriage, and Dobbs refused to share her enthusiasm for the Arabs. Her influence was all but gone. “You must please remember that I am not a Person,” she reminded Hugh, sadly. Nevertheless, her passion had not died out.
“The truth is,” she wrote to Molly, “that I care for Ken as much as ever and for no one else in the world so much. Not like that, at any rate. After I came back we had some terribly bitter talks—I don’t see him often alone—and I know that that only puts him at his most stony.… So now I’m bent on showing him what he really knows, that he can’t do without me, and he can’t any more than I can do without him.” In their working together, she said, she had given him “inspiration after inspiration.” If he did not marry her, she told him, she would leave Iraq.
“I know that if he will let me I can make him very happy and that he can make me happier than I could be any other way. For I want to stay here and do nothing but archaeology in my museum which is a full-time job and my passion; but I can’t except on my own terms with him.” If he couldn’t return her love, she would go back to England “and try to make something of life.… But it cannot be any better than a half life.” Not because she didn’t love her family, she assured her sister, but because “the other sort of love is so overwhelming—It’s that other love and the mother and the sister all combined. You understand, I know. I shant write this any more till I have something definite to tell you—whether I go or whether I stay. Ken will know what either means.”
Her friend Harold Nicolson, diplomat and author, came to visit in November 1925, and after he stayed a night in her house he remarked that she was “adorable … a rich generous mine of information about conditions in the Middle East.” Nonetheless, at the office her relationship with Dobbs had not improved. They had spoken only recently about Syria, and it was a difficult talk. Their aims were diametrically opposed, and though she tried to be tactful and not antagonistic as she presented her point of view, she found a world of difference between Henry Dobbs and Sir Percy. She and Cox may have had contrasting thoughts about details, but their overall perspective was the same. “We were absolutely at one on the spirit of the thing we are doing. Sir Henry not only doesn’t share that spirit, but thinks it nonsense.”
The end of the year found her on her way to the King’s country house, suffering from a head cold, bundled up in more clothes than she had ever worn, a hot water bottle resting between her knees. The following day, bedridden, with a high fever, she was diagnosed with pleurisy; but with nurses on call night and day, and with Ken at her side, she pulled through. And then, just one month later, only weeks before her parents moved out of Rounton, her brother Hugo succumbed to typhoid. His death came as a shock; his image clung to her mind. She had ridiculed him when they were young, had done what she could to stop him from joining the church, but in spite of her mockery, he had gained what she had wanted most in life and had never achieved. “The thing which comes uppermost,” she reflected, “is that he had a complete life. His perfect marriage and the joy of his children.”
It was a Saturday morning in March 1926 when the writer Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson’s wife, came to Baghdad. She had struggled by train from Basrah, had bumped along the dusty roads in an old Ford, then skidded through the mud to Gertrude’s house. Pushing the door in the blank wall, Vita limped along the path, past the pots of carnations lining the edge, past the white pony peeking out of the stable door, past the dogs—gray salukis and a little yellow cocker spaniel—and hobbled up to the verandah, where a peacock strutted about. Gertrude called out hello. They had known each other in Constantinople, had lunched in Paris and dined in England, but it was clear to Vita that it was here in Iraq that Gertrude was at home. Gertrude’s spirits were up: she had been given a free-standing building for her museum, and her plans, she said, were to make it like the British Museum, “only a little smaller.”
As soon as she spotted Vita she let flow a stream of questions; “Had it been very hot in the Gulf?” she asked. Did Vita have fever? Did she have a sprained ankle as well? “Too bad!” Would Vita like porridge first, or a bath?
“She had the gift of making every one feel suddenly eager; of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting,” Vita observed. When her guest expressed a wish for a saluki, Gertrude rushed to the telephone and ordered a selection of the slender, silky-haired dogs to be brought over at once. “Then she was back in her chair, pouring out information: the state of Iraq, the excavations at Ur, the need for a decent museum. What new books had come out? What was happening in England? The doctors had told her she ought not to go through another summer in Baghdad, but what should she do in England, eating out her heart for Iraq? Next year, perhaps … but I couldn’t say she looked ill, could I? I could, and did. She laughed and brushed that aside. Then, jumping up—for all her movements were quick and impatient—if I had finished my breakfast wouldn’t I like my bath? and she
must go to her office but would be back for luncheon. Oh yes, and there were people to luncheon; and so, still talking, still laughing, she pinned on a hat without looking in the glass, and took her departure.”
Later that day they went to visit the King, who looked, Vita said, “as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost Byronic, melancholy.” As Vita listened, Gertrude and Faisal discussed the kitchen lineoleum for his new country house and the virtues of his new cook and the latest troubles in the government. Then, driving back to Baghdad, Gertrude spoke of Faisal’s loneliness. “He likes me to ring up and ask to go to tea,” she told her friend.
The news from England a few weeks later, that her father was deeply depressed over Hugo’s death, and that Rounton had finally been abandoned, left Gertrude dazed. “All this sorrow,” she wrote to Molly, “has made me feel very numb.… I don’t think I have any other strong feelings left.” Her romance with Ken had dissolved into companionship, a relationship she now called “comforting,” and she clung to her quotidian work to keep her going. At least the new museum captured her thoughts.
When, in May 1926 her parents asked if she was coming to London, she refused to commit herself to any plans. Her finances had suffered as a result of a general strike in England, and a trip for just the summer was too expensive. She wanted to finish her work and then go away, she told Florence. Besides, she admitted, she was afraid to leave everything she had been doing to find herself “rather loose on the world. I don’t see at all clearly what I shall do, but of course I can’t stay here forever.” Once in a while Ken stopped by, but for the most part she was alone, shunned by the younger and newer members of the male British staff. Mornings she worked at the museum, and every day Dobbs still kindly invited her to lunch, but, she confessed to her father, “The afternoons, after tea, hang rather heavy on my hands.” She ached with loneliness, and the doctor had given her Dial, a sleeping potion, to help her fall asleep.
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