Gertrude Bell by Georgina Howell Page A

owls screamed in the trees, and the warm scented night with all its sounds was so like those other nights in a far away garden where the owls scream. I cried and cried in the Temple, and filled the Roman baths with tears which no one saw in the dusk.
    Not a year after she left Persia, and from a brief illness caused by falling into an icy river while fishing, Henry Cadogan died of pneumonia. A tragic pattern in her love life had been set. Succeed as she might in so many extraordinary ventures, this was an event from which Gertrude would never entirely recover.
    Partly to distract her, it was Florence’s idea that her stepdaughter publish a travel book, making use of her diaries and almost daily letters home from Persia during the first happy months of her stay there. Gertrude was opposed to the idea, but it is probable that Florence approached the publishing house of Bentley, and in response to their letter Gertrude unenthusiastically capitulated. She wrote to her friend Flora Russell:
    Bentley wishes to publish my Persian things, but wants more of them, so after much hesitation I have decided to let him and I am writing him another six chapters. It’s rather a bore and what’s more I would vastly prefer them to remain unpublished. I wrote them you see to amuse myself and I have got all the fun out of them I ever expect to have, for modesty apart they are extraordinarily feeble. Moreover I do so loathe people who rush into print and fill the world with their cheap and nasty work—and now I am going to be one of them. At first I refused, then my mother thought me mistaken and my father was disappointed and as they are generally right I have given way. But in my heart I hold very firmly to my first opinion. Don’t speak of this. I wish them not to be read.
    Her feelings were as emotional as they were rational, but still her own judgement was probably right. Denison Ross, head of the London School of Oriental Studies and a great admirer of his pupil, was to write the explanatory preface for a later edition. He admitted that in the chapters written in Persia there was “a something . . . which is wanting from the later ones.”
Persian Pictures
was published anonymously in 1894, acompromise between Florence’s wishes and Gertrude’s reluctance, and was soon forgotten.
    Persia had been made infinitely more interesting to her by her knowledge of the language. But as Florence wrote, “She had not yet reached the stage in which the learner of a language finds with rapture that a new knowledge has been acquired, the illuminating stage when not the literal meaning only of words is being understood, but their values and differences can be critically appreciated. It was not long before Gertrude was reading Persian poetry by this light.”
    Gertrude continued her lessons in London, with a particular view to studying the love poetry of Hafiz. Henry had introduced her to Hafiz’s work, and had discussed with her its rhythms and mystical import. The work was begun as a way of keeping alive her love for him. She had determined to produce a book of real value this time: a collection of her translations into English of the poems of Hafiz, together with a biography of the Sufi poet set in the context of his contemporary history. It became, perhaps, a secret monument to Henry.
    Denison Ross wrote a preface in which he modestly related that in teaching Gertrude he had had “the healthy experience of realizing in the presence of such a brilliant scholar my own limitations”; to have pieced together the biography of Hafiz from manuscript sources, he said, was a tour de force, there being no history of Islamic Persia at the time.
    The Divan of Hafiz
, an anthology of his poems, was published by Heinemann in 1897, the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee—and, more sadly for the Bells, of the death of Aunt Mary, provider of so many welcome interludes in Gertrude’s life. The book was