Gertrude was asked to lunch by Dick and Judith Doughty-Wylie when she came to Konya to pick up her mail. She was tanned and wisps of her hair, escaping from her straw hat, had turned blonde. She exuded energy, and she talked volubly. She laughed a lot and made other guests laugh with her descriptions of the absentminded professor losing track of time and his luggage, dropping papers wherever he went, while Mrs. Ramsay ran along behind him with his Panama hat and a cup of tea. On one occasion Sir William Ramsay had turned to Gertrude and asked, “Remind me, my dear, where are we?” Dick Doughty-Wylie recalled this lunch: “GB walking in, covered with energy and discovery and pleasantness.” Gertrude and he had left the table to discuss the Sufi philosopher and theosophist Rumi, whose tomb is at Konya. The Doughty-Wylies met and helped her several times at Konya. She invited them to visit her one day at Rounton.
Educated at Winchester and the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, Captain, later Lieutenant Colonel, Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie VC, CB, CMG was the same age as Gertrude. Known as “Richard” or “Dick” to his friends, he was a quiet war hero with a chestful of medals. He had been severely wounded in the Boer War and again in Tientsin during the Chinese rebellion. He was the nephew of the traveler Charles Montagu Doughty who had written the sonorous Arabia Deserta, one of the books that Gertrude always carried with her when she went on expeditions.
A military photograph shows Doughty-Wylie thin and mustached, tanned, taller, broader, and more handsome than many of his contemporaries. He had enjoyed many affairs but married Judith only three years before meeting Gertrude. Judith had been widowed. She was ambitious, and appreciating Dick’s need for breathing space, she had motivated his transfer to diplomatic work. In 1906, he was appointed the British military vice-consul at Konya.
Konia, May 12, 1907, Letter to Chirol*
I wish you could drop down here for a few hours that we might have a good talk, but you would find me so preposterously sunburnt that you would scarcely recognize me.
Well, to Turkey. You know there is an English v. Consul [Dick Doughty-Wylie] here now, a charming young soldier with a quite pleasant little wife. He is the more interesting of the two, a good type of Englishman, wide awake and on the spot, keen to see and learn. . . .
Konia, from Her Diary
[I] lunched with the Wylies and spent the afternoon with them in their new garden. . . . They are dears, both of them. . . . [I] talked long to Captain DW of things and people.
May 1907
It makes me laugh to think I could ever have had the idea of leaving things to the Ramsays. They had arrived at Konia entirely without tents or camping possessions. “Nevertheless,” writes Captain Wylie, “Ramsay was most eager to set off to join you at once—in the wrong direction. I lent him two tents and headed him off towards you.”. . . Ramsay, bless him, is perfectly helpless in such matters as concern the management of a camp; and Lady Ramsay is completely helpless in everything, but one thing, which is that she is essential to his comfort. She is as deeply as she is ignorantly sympathetic about our doings. . . .
The good Ramsays have just been begging me to let them share the expenses, but I’ve persuaded them to leave things as they are. I don’t want their time here to cost them a penny. It’s an inestimable privilege and advantage to have Sir William to work with, and indeed I could not have ventured upon anything at all without him. I think I can do the whole thing within the sum I intended to pay.
While in Konya, Fattuh fell ill. The “Wylies,” as she called them at this stage, invited her with Fattuh to leave their tents and stay at the consulate.
From the British Vice-Consulate, July 18, 1907
I am very much afraid I shall be delayed a few days. Fattuh is ill. He gave his head a horrible blow on a low doorway two years ago when he was with me, and he has been ill on and off ever since. He suffers from acute pains in the head, and I fear there must be something wrong. I cannot leave him in this state, and had therefore determined to take him with me to C’ple to see a very good doctor there. . . . Yesterday the authorities here said they had no power to allow him to go to C’ple with me. . . . I telegraphed at once to the Grand Vizier and to the Embassy asking for a special permit for him. . . . I would do a good deal for Fattuh, and this is not much. It’s a great alleviation to be staying with the Wylies, they are dears, both of them.
Constantinople, July 26, 1907
I arrived last night—with Fattuh! . . . I can’t leave Fattuh all alone here till I am satisfied that he is out of the wood.
At home again, Gertrude began a scrapbook in which Doughty-Wylie’s latest heroic adventure figured large. In the volatile mood engendered by the Young Turks’ nationalist rebellion, fanatical mobs had turned on Armenian Christians, leaving corpses scattered over the countryside around Konya. Donning his old uniform, Doughty-Wylie had collected a posse of Turkish troops and led them through Mersin and Adana, pacifying the murderous crowds. Wounded by a bullet, he went on patrol again with a bandaged right arm. For this initiative, he was decorated both by the Queen and by the Turkish authorities. Gertrude’s letter of congratulation was only one of many he received, but he answered hers. A year later they were in regular correspondence. Gertrude usually addressed her letters to Dick and Judith but sometimes to him alone.
Gertrude engineered a visit from Dick to Rounton. Concealing the fact that she had invited him, she wrote to tell Florence that he would be coming.
Holyhead, April 18, 1908
Captain Doughty suggests himself for two nights on Wednesday next. It’s rather a bore but I can’t say anything but do come for they were so exceedingly kind to me. He is very nice.
According to her diary, the Doughty-Wylies did visit the Bells at Rounton in 1908; she added no details.
In 1909, Gertrude was exploring the banks of the Euphrates and photographing and measuring the ruined palace of Ukhaidir. A new warmth entered the correspondence between the two of them as it shuttled to and fro between Mesopotamia and Addis Ababa, where Dick was now consul. Then, in spring 1912, he arrived in London to take up the appointment of director-in-chief of the Red Cross relief organization. He was without Judith, who was visiting her mother in Wales. As always when his wife was not with him, he stayed in his old bachelor flat on Half Moon Street. Gertrude decided immediately that she had to be in London, too, to give a lecture and see her cousins, and be fitted for a lot of new summer clothes. She shot up to town and launched herself into one of the happiest times of her life.
Her large circle of vivacious cousins and wealthy friends provided her with a perfect opportunity to absorb the weary soldier into her orbit. He met through her a more lively, stimulating group of people than he had ever known. In congenial groups, Gertrude and he went to exhibitions, museums, plays, the music hall, and concerts. He went to hear her lecture, something she did with style, her humor as much as her erudition carrying the audience with her. On a walk in the park or on the way to a restaurant, they would fall behind the others, absorbed in conversation. After dinner, too, they would draw apart, talking and laughing late into the night, veiled in the smoke from her ivory holder. Seeing Gertrude in her pearls and diamonds, her beautiful hair pinned up, and wearing one of her new French gowns, her family must have seen how pretty and flirtatious she could be.
This was becoming the most important relationship in her life. The flicker and pulse of sexual attraction between them grew stronger with each meeting. That summer she turned down an invitation to go on a scientific expedition to the Karakoram mountains in China, so that she could remain in London. It was easy, for a while, to forget the existence of Judith.
95 Sloane Street, London, February 6, 1913, Letter to Chirol
I must tell you I have given up the Central Asian plan, and written to tell Filippi*. The nearer I came to it, the more I could not bear it. I can’t face being away from home for fourteen months. My life now in England is so delightful that I will not take such
a long time out of it.
Judith was expected, and in due course she arrived in London. Gertrude left for Rounton and threw herself into gardening and studying, doing anything and everything to pass the time. The highlight of every day was the arrival of the post that might, and frequently did, bring letters from Dick.
There were few moments in Gertrude’s life when she did not tell her parents the whole truth; if she hid something from them, it was always to shield them from anxiety. This time it was different. She knew that an affair with a married man would be completely unacceptable to them and to society in general. She began a chapter of duplicity by deciding to ask the Doughty-Wylies to Rounton at a time when she knew perfectly well that Judith was away. He would be just one of the crowd at a Rounton weekend house party. She did not intend to start a sexual relationship with him, just to continue the mutual delight of his attractive and attracted presence. She had her own sense of honor, one so inviolable that it would compromise the affair at every stage.
Florence, if she suspected anything, may have reflected that Gertrude at forty-four was not of an age when she could be told how to behave. So Dick came to Rounton for a few days in July 1913. After the day’s excursion, the gallop across the fields, the noisy, cheerful dinner followed by card games, guests drifted upstairs in ones and twos while Gertrude and Dick sat by the fire, looking at each other. She must have let him know, obliquely, where her room was, because subsequent letters refer to their being together there, on the bed, and to a deeply intimate conversation they had. It is also clear that their night together went no farther—that at the final moment she pulled away. He left, pursued by her letters full of an agonized regret.
How did Gertrude remain a virgin so long? Twenty-three years had passed since her presentation at court when she was twenty-one, and twenty-one since her failed engagement to the legation secretary Henry Cadogan. With her green eyes, long auburn hair, and beautiful clothes, Gertrude was an attractive, feminine, confident, humorous, and energetic woman, but she had failed to find a man who interested her. Her character was too decided, her mind too sharp, and her critical sense too finely tuned to mix easily with less-developed personalities and intellects. She failed to hide a felt superiority to men who could not measure up to her father, and she was too much of a bluestocking for most of society. When Florence reprimanded her for traveling in a hansom cab alone with a “Captain X” in the year she came out, she wrote back that Florence need not worry. “I discussed religious beliefs all the way there and very metaphysical conceptions of truth all the way back,” and added disarmingly, “I felt sure you wouldn’t like it, but you know, I didn’t either!”
At an age when hopes of meeting a man she could love with all her heart had become unrealistic, she had found exactly the kind of man she had always been looking for. Dick was a man who would not be frightened by her intellect, a man with accomplishments the equal of hers. He was a brave soldier who could fight and hunt and quote poetry, who had read the great books of civilization, spoke foreign languages, who appreciated the theater and the National Gallery, who was equally at home in London and in foreign society, who was well traveled and knew the distinguished politicians and statesmen she knew herself. She had set her heart on a hero—and why not? She was, after all, a heroine.
His thank-you letter for the weekend at Rounton was deeply unsatisfactory to Gertrude, revealing that what had been a momentous weekend for her had been far less important to him. From London he thanked her for her letters but failed, as usual, to address her questions: “Wonderful letters, my dear, which delight me. Bless you. But there can be no words to answer you with. Well—let’s talk about other things. . . .”
Dick, in his fond but confusing letters, never gave the slightest indication that he would leave his wife. It was only in letters to her dearest friend Chirol that Gertrude revealed the pain she was in. She knew there was no future for this relationship. She had hidden so long behind her lines of defense that she was caught unawares by his hold on her.
Sloane Street, London, October 30, 1913, Letter to Chirol
You know I am the more fortunate of two unfortunate people because I have had the opportunity to gather such delightful friends about me. But that only warms my heart more to the other unfortunate person, you understand.
Then came the hammer blow. He had accepted a post in Albania, with the International Boundary Commission. “My wife is in Wales. She’ll come up when I wire to her and go with me—till we see the hows and whys and wheres . . . I have turned in to my old bachelor quarters in Half Moon Street, no. 29. Write to me there . . . while I am alone, let’s be alone.” He signed the letter “Dick” for the first time. Then, a warning: “Judith knowing you well and having always before seen your letters would find it very odd to be suddenly debarred them and on voyages our lives are at close quarters. . . . Of course call me Dick in letters, and I shall call you Gertrude—there is nothing in that . . . tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is right—one might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me. . . . If I can’t write to you, I shall always think of you telling me things in your room at Rounton . . . the subtle book eludes, but our hands met on the cover.” “The subtle book,” she knew, was his metaphor for sex.
With the courage that characterized her entire life, she accepted that she had broken the rules and that the rules were on the side of the marriage vow. Gertrude had reached the crossroads of her life. She searched for escape and found it, as always, in the desert. She decided that she would depart on a long, hard expedition. He would have to focus on her and be aware of the dangers she ran. She left six weeks after his own departure followed by his letter—“. . . you very clever and charming person—and you in your desert.” She resolved that if she could not write him private letters, she would keep a diary just for him. It would be the account of the adventures and dangers she intended to search out, and she would send it to him later, when she could do so.
Damascus, December 11, 1913, Letter to Chirol
I shall be glad to go. I want to cut all links with the world, and that is the best and wisest thing to do. The road and the dawn, the sun, the wind and the rain, the camp fire under the stars, and sleep, and the road again—we’ll see what they can do. If they don’t cure, then I know of nothing that can. . . . Oh, Domnul, if you knew the way I have paced backwards and forwards along the floor of hell for the last few months, you would think me right to try for any way out. I don’t know that it is an ultimate way out, but it’s worth trying. As I have told you before, it is mostly my fault, but that does not prevent it from being an irretrievable misfortune—for both of us. But I am turning away from it now, and time deadens even the keenest things.
THE PRISONER
On the eve of his departure to Albania, Gertrude wrote to Doughty-Wylie of her plans to undertake an epic journey in one of the most dangerous parts of the desert. Dick was as worried as she could wish. He wrote back, “I am nervous about you . . . south of Maan and from there to Hayil is surely a colossal trek. For your palaces your road your Baghdad your Persia I do not feel so nervous—but Hayil from Maan—Inshallah!”*
Her destination would be Hayyil, the almost mythical city described by Charles M. Doughty, Dick’s uncle, in his famous Arabia Deserta, the book that had accompanied her on all expeditions. She proposed to travel sixteen hundred miles by camel, taking a circular route south from Damascus to central Arabia, then east across the interior and the shifting sands of the Nefud, becoming the first Westerner to cross that angle of the desert. She would make her way to the Misma Mountains, a coal-black landscape with flint pinnacles as high as ten-story buildings. She would then descend into the plateau of granite and basalt at the heart of which the snow-white medieval city of Hayyil floated like a mirage. Her return journey would be north to Baghdad and west across the vast Syrian Desert, back to Damascus. Much of the journey would be through unmapped territory and areas where her
caravan was likely to come under tribal attack.
It was as daunting a prospect politically as geographically. Britain was supplying arms and money to the chieftain Ibn Saud, allied to the puritan Wahhabi sect of Islam. The Ottoman government supported the opposing dynasty of Ibn Rashid of the Shammar federation, perhaps the cruelest, most violent tribe of Arabia, centered on Hayyil. The trip would allow her to provide the Foreign Office with detailed new information at a critical moment, with both sides poised to strike to take control of the Arabian Peninsula.
She had already warned the British government that Ibn Saud was better as a friend than as an enemy. She set out with the ultimate intention of reaching Ibn Saud and making contact with him in his stronghold of Riyadh.
Among the distinguished men who warned her against the journey were Sir Louis Mallet, future ambassador to Constantinople; her old friend David Hogarth; and the Indian government’s resident in the Persian Gulf, Lieutenant Colonel Percy Cox, a name that would come to mean much to her later. Defiantly, Gertrude decided that she would go nevertheless.
Her first weeks in Damascus were taken up with organizing the most elaborate caravan she had ever undertaken, hiring her crew, buying gifts for sheikhs in the bazaars, and choosing seventeen camels. She wired her father for an extra £400 ($55,000 RPI adjusted), a not inconsiderable sum. She also visited the Rashid’s sinister agent in the city, to whom she paid £200 ($27,500), getting in return a promissory note that she intended to cash in Hayyil to fund her return journey.
She had started keeping parallel diary entries. The first would be a cursory memorandum written daily while the memory was fresh. Reading these factual, ill-organized jottings, full of Arabic words and phrases, gives a vivid picture of Gertrude, tired and dirty after a day’s march, her hair falling out of its pins, scribbling away at her folding desk while Fattuh put up her bedroom tent, unpacked, and arranged her possessions. These notes contained positions of water holes and Turkish barracks, routes through unmapped areas and other information that she would pass on to the Foreign Office. They were also the raw material for her upbeat letters home.
A Woman in Arabia Page 15