Gertrude Bell (67 page)

The profound love for her father that Florence called the foundation of Gertrude's existence had always set the two of them slightly apart from Florence, though she had forbidden herself to feel any jealousy or to stand between them in any way. This time, Gertrude had found a Hugh pained and harassed by the Bell misfortunes. Had the doctors told her in private that her heavy smoking had at last taken its toll and that she had only months to live, then she might have spared him that knowledge.

On the other hand, something of significance certainly did pass between Gertrude and her stepmother in those last few weeks at Rounton, and it resulted in a closer bond between the two of them than had ever existed before. Perhaps Gertrude, finding that she now needed support and affection of the kind that she had always half shrugged off, was able to tell her what she had not felt able to tell her father. Florence, with that unflinching contemplation of the verities of life and death natural to an experienced mother and grandmother, would have met Gertrude's revelation calmly and stoically, and perhaps conspired, gratefully, to keep Hugh in ignorance. They talked many times, and it was a changed Gertrude who set off once more for Iraq, writing to Florence of “this last summer” perhaps in more senses than one:

Darling Mother

. . . I do so love to think that you liked me to come in to the library [at Rounton] in the mornings, even though I was interrupting you horribly. You know I feel as if I had never known you
really
before, not in all the years. It was perhaps because of the general crisis we were going through and my immense admiration for your courage and wisdom. Whatever it was I feel certain that I have never loved you so much, however much I may have loved
you, and I am so thankful that we were together this last summer and that we both have the sense of its having been a wonderful experience.

In February 1926, after contracting typhoid on his voyage home from South Africa, Gertrude's half-brother Hugo died, a shattering blow for the family, and one from which Florence, in particular, would hardly recover. Gertrude's poignant letter suggests her own sad and regretful preoccupations. At times of great misery or danger, she had called out almost involuntarily to God; at all other times, her pragmatic intellect left her facing an uncompromising universe. Florence may have pondered the letter for longer than Hugh.

My darling Father and Mother,

I am writing to you with the heaviest of hearts. It is so dreadful to think of what you have gone through . . . My mind has been so full of Hugo but the thing which comes uppermost is that he had a complete life. His perfect marriage and the joy of his children and then at the last his seeing you again . . . I wonder if we should be happier too if we thought we were all to meet again. I never could bring myself to it even when I lost what was dearest to me. The spirit without the body would be as strange as the body without a spirit. One feels the lovely mind behind, but what one knows are the little gestures, the sweet smile, the expression of the mind. But it's no good wondering or thinking why one can't believe in the unbelievable; one just can't.

In Baghdad, she went straight to the office, and immediately a stream of people queued to see her. She could do no work at all for two days. Some kissed her hands and called her “Light of our eyes.” She admitted to her parents that it went to her head a little—that she almost began to think she was a Person. But scarcely had she settled in again than she fell ill. Sylvia, to her disappointment, had proved unable to stand even the winter climate of Iraq, and had soon been forced to return to England. Shortly afterwards Gertrude, wrapped from head to toe and with a hot water bottle on her knees, went up in icy weather to the King's farm at Khaniqin in a Christmas shooting party that included Ken Cornwallis. With them travelled some new furniture that she had ordered for the King from London, and she spent the first evening speculatively shunting it around the room with him. Exhausted, she went to bed. The next
day she stayed there. Faisal and Cornwallis joined her in the bedroom in the evening for a game of bridge on the bedspread. When Ken looked in on her the following morning, he immediately telegraphed to Baghdad for a doctor. “By that time I wasn't taking much notice, except that I had a general feeling that I was slipping into great gulfs,” Gertrude wrote later. The doctor arrived with a night nurse, and within twenty-four hours she was in hospital in Baghdad with pleurisy. She was still unwell when she wrote the letter of commiseration about Hugo.

As her office duties had diminished during the last few years, a new source of work presented itself. It had been the King's idea, before Cox left. Already in August 1922 she had discussed the need for a “law of excavations” with him—“he is going to make me provisionally Director of Antiquities as there's no one else,” she had written.

Her first job was the writing of an antiquities law giving due weight to the rights of the nation and the excavator. She constructed it in careful consultation with the legal authorities, for wholesale looting stretching back hundreds of years had hugely depleted the immense archaeological wealth of Iraq. Now scientific expeditions from many countries were trying to reconstruct the history of the region.

Once Gertrude had begun to think in terms of establishing an Iraq Museum she was zealous in exacting the country's rights to its own past. Very soon she acquired the richest collection in the world of objects representing Iraq's early history. She came up against an old friend, Sir Leonard Woolley, former intelligence chief at Port Said, who had worked on the Carchemish dig with Lawrence. Now he was heading a joint expedition organized by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania to dig Ur of the Chaldaes, with its royal tombs, temple, and ziggurat of the Sumerian dynasty. In her official capacity, she felt obliged to claim for Iraq a particular artefact that surfaced at this time—the famous plaque showing a milking scene, found in the temple. She “broke his heart.” “[Woolley] values it at ten thousand pounds, at least. I'm not going to tell the Iraq Govt. lest they decide to sell it and thereby blacken my face and theirs. The gold scarab is worth one thousand pounds, but Providence (the toss of a rupee) gave it to me!”

She began to make short archaeological expeditions with the architectural adviser to the Ministry of Public Works, J. M. Wilson. These expeditions were at first no more than office excursions, the faintest echoes
of her earlier adventures. She would be energised when their car ran into a ditch or her luggage failed to follow her, and often could not resist borrowing a horse from a village elder and travelling on alone into the countryside for a day or two while Wilson went back to Baghdad. Of a trip to Kish, one of many with an Oxford University expedition, she wrote: “My sole possessions for the night were a cake of soap, a hairbrush from the Professor [Langdon] and a pair of pyjamas from an unknown benefactor. We spent the time before dinner in looking at their wonderful finds, and after dinner in discussing ancient Babylonian sites.” There she bargained to be allowed to send some fine painted pots to Oxford for expert treatment. She also claimed a Semitic statuette of 2800
BC
by her favourite expedient of tossing a coin for it.

In 1926, she turned her full attention to archaeology. With the frontier problem solved at last and the Treaty accepted by the Iraqi parliament, she concentrated on her next project: to get her museum lodged in appropriate premises, instead of the Ministry of Works where it had begun. The museum's Babylonian Stone Room was opened by the King in June. As always, once she was committed to a project, she took on even the most uncongenial tasks. Alone or with a clerk, sometimes with an RAF officer who was a keen amateur archaeologist, she laboriously catalogued the finds from Ur and Kish. She sometimes got up at 5 a.m. to do the day's work before midday—the heat in the fanless museum rooms could be overwhelming.

She was still taking on political work, still passionate about the metamorphosis taking place around her. When the League of Nations' Boundary Commission had arrived in January 1925, finally to determine the border between Iraq and Turkey, it was Gertrude who had entertained and briefed the members. These were eminent men from Sweden, Belgium, and Hungary—accompanied, however, by a Turkish assessor and three Turkish “experts”: she told Dobbs she feared their expertise would include intrigue and intimidation. In due course, the Commission's report was published. It recommended that the whole of the Mosul
vilayet
should come within the boundaries of Iraq, provided a new treaty kept Britain's partnership with Iraq in operation for twenty-five more years. Britain and Iraq agreed, both sides hoping that Iraq would be an independent member of the League of Nations long before that time had elapsed. Meanwhile, the Turks resumed their
atrocities against the Assyrians, and attacked thousands of Kurdish proindependents.

The Constituent Assembly having been democratically elected, the Organic Law, or constitution, was framed and passed. An electoral law was created so that legitimate political parties could take part in elections to the first parliament. With the assurance to Faisal of a British financial contribution sufficient to establish an effective defence force, voting began, and the results were in by June. On 16 July, Faisal would inaugurate the first genuinely democratic government in Iraq. In a worthy conclusion to that chapter, the British ambassador in Constantinople, working face-to-face with the Turks, managed to conclude a tripartite treaty between Iraq, Turkey, and Britain to bring some hope of a permanent peace on the borders.

It was time for celebration. On 25 June 1926, the King gave a state banquet to mark the signing of the treaty, at which he expressed his profound thanks to the British government and its representatives for all that they had done for Iraq. Henry Dobbs wrote afterwards: “Miss Gertrude Bell was one of the most prominent of the guests at this banquet and shared conspicuously in the general atmosphere of congratulation which marked the close of the first stage in the existence of Iraq. It was the last State function which she attended.”

Although her letters to her parents reveal her underlying, less positive, feelings at this period, Gertrude was still the spirited and stimulating woman that she had always been. In the early spring Vita Sackville-West came for the weekend. In her subsequent book
A Passenger to Teheran
, she has left an energetic description of Gertrude and her domestic life.

To reach Gertrude's house, the visitor made her way through “a dusty jumble” of mean buildings and a quagmire:

Then: a door in the blank wall . . . a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden-path edged with carnations in pots, a little verandah and a little low house at the end of the path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell . . . here she was in her right place, in her own house, with her office in the city, and her white pony in a corner of the garden, and her Arab servants, and her English books, and her Babylonian shards on the mantelpiece, and her long thin nose, and her irrepressible vitality. I felt all
my loneliness and despair lifted from me in a second . . . I found myself laughing for the first time in ten days. The garden was small, but cool and friendly; her spaniel wagged not only his tail but his whole little body; the pony looked over the loose-box door and whinnied gently; a tame partridge hopped about the verandah; some native babies who were playing in a corner stopped playing to stare and grin . . . Would I like breakfast first, or a bath? and I would like to see her museum, wouldn't I? did I know she was Director of Antiquities in Iraq? wasn't that a joke? and would I like to come to tea with the King? . . . 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.

Gertrude had, she wrote, the gift of making everyone feel suddenly eager, of making you feel that life was full and rich and exciting; and it is clear that, whatever her state of health and mind, she utterly refused to languish or complain. She spoke as if the two of them might visit Ctesiphon together in the autumn.

As she worked on in the museum, Gertrude contemplated her existence, the smallness of her income if and when she retired, and the loss of all those friends who had already left Iraq. She wrote to Hugh:

I think it is extremely unlikely that I can afford to come back and out again this summer—it's a very expensive business . . . I find myself really 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 . . . I'm not at all necessary in the office . . .

But it is too lonely, my existence here; one can't go on for ever being alone. At least, I don't feel I can . . .

The afternoons, after tea, hang rather heavy on my hands.

On Sunday 11 July, having joined the usual afternoon swimming party, she returned home exhausted by the heat. She went to bed, asking to be woken at 6 a.m. or, perhaps, not to be disturbed before then. Perhaps she had said something unusual to Marie, or was looking ill again. In either case, Marie was worried about her, and looked in during the night. Gertrude was asleep, a bottle of pills beside her. Whether there
were any overt signs of suicide, whether the bottle was empty, whether Marie at once called the hospital, is not known. What
is
known is that the day before, she sent a note to Ken Cornwallis to ask if he would look after her dog Tundra, “if anything happened to her.”

Gertrude had told Domnul, some years before, that death was no longer a thing she feared, that it had been robbed of its sting. “I wonder . . . what it will be like after, if there's any sort of an ‘after' ” she had said. Now, she had set out one final time into the unknown, and this time she would never wake up.

Her death certificate, made out by the director of the Royal Hospital in Baghdad, one Dr. Dunlop, stated that she had died from “Dial poisoning.” Dial was the name for a preparation of diallylbarbituric acid, or allobarbital, used at the time as a sedative and later discontinued partly because of its frequent use in suicide attempts. Dunlop writes that death had taken place in the early hours of 12 July. It was a couple of days before her fifty-eighth birthday.