Desert Queen (21 page)

She was pleased to have come close to Carchemish, where David Hogarth was still carrying out his excavation of the Hittite site. The remains of the once-thriving city had been discovered more than thirty years earlier, but interest was reawakened when work on the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway reached this area of the Upper Euphrates. The German-financed train line was a clear threat to British trade and influence in the entire Persian Gulf. With Carchemish less than a quarter of a mile away from where the Germans were building a bridge across the river, it was a convenient watching post for English archaeologists to report back home by letters and photographs. Hogarth was a serious scholar doing work for the British Museum, but like other Englishmen in the region, he carried out observations of the Germans that were valued by the British government.

The night before Gertrude was to visit, the local authorities informed her that Hogarth had left the dig. Nonetheless, they noted, his assistant, Mr. Campbell Thompson, was still working at the site. By now, after four months of travel, she was eager to see almost any English colleague, and was curious to revisit the Hittite ruins she had written about in
Amurath to Amurath.

At the age of forty-two, preceded by her reputation, and accompanied by her servant Fattuh, Gertrude set out early on the morning of May 19, 1911, dressed in her desert costume: a long divided skirt, linen jacket, and
kafeeyah
draped around the brim of her canvas hat. Carrying a haughty air of self-assurance, she rode to Carchemish and, at their lodgings in the village, came upon two fledgling archaeologists, Thompson “and a young man called Lawrence (an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveller) who had for some time been expecting that I would appear.”

Campbell Thompson, Hogarth’s assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, was a tall, quiet academic, soon to be married, who taught linguistics and enjoyed deciphering ancient codes. His junior colleague, Thomas Edward Lawrence, destined to be a myth-maker and a legend himself, was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student with a specialty in medieval pottery. Looking him over she saw a short fellow, strongly built, with yellow hair, intense blue eyes, a high forehead and a straight nose. An eccentric dresser fascinated by Oriental things, he favored a gray flannel blazer piped in pink, white flannel shorts, gray stockings and red Arab slippers; around his waist he tied a bright red tasseled Arab belt, which marked him as a bachelor. Since he was obviously eligible, his cause had been taken up by the local villagers, who were eager to find him a wife; hearing of Gertrude’s pending arrival, they assumed she was coming to be his bride.

Thompson and Lawrence had not only been expecting her; they had been anxiously awaiting her arrival. She was famous and famously outspoken, and the two men welcomed her warily; this was their first venture in excavating and, having found few antiquities, they knew she was perfectly capable of sending back damaging reports. With studied politeness, they took her into their house, an abandoned licorice warehouse suffering from a leaky roof and damp mud floors, and charmed her, pouring coffee into ancient cups of thin unglazed clay, filling her ears with stories, lamenting the lack of valuable finds; so far they had discovered not much more than a slab of warriors carved with headless captives, a five-foot-high basalt relief and some champagne cups found in the Hittite graves.

After lunch the threesome walked to the
tel
to observe the digging. Gertrude had described the northern mound of Carchemish in
Amurath to Amurath
: “covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field form the high ridge.… It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound.”

As she reached the hill, she saw that trenches had been cut out; below the Roman remains could be seen foundations dating to prehistoric times. Still, she opined, there was “precious little” and the work was “bad.” Only a few weeks earlier she had observed the precise excavations and elegant reconstructions of some German archaeologists; now she watched as, under English tutelage, some eighty natives shoveled the earth, hacking away at the remains of ancient civilization, eager to find a treasure and receive a promised bonus. Gertrude was taken aback. “Prehistoric!” she exclaimed, and proceeded to lecture the two young men on the modern techniques of digging.

The young scholars had readied themselves for the challenge.

And so [Lawrence wrote the next day to his mother], we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite and French architecture (my part) and over Greek folk-lore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian ethnology (by Thompson); prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, Bronze Age metal techniques, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octoberists (by me): the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway (by Thompson). This was a kind of hors d’oeuvre: and when it was over (she was getting more respectful) we settled down each to seven or eight subjects and questioned her upon them. She was quite glad to have tea after an hour and a half, and on going told Thompson that he had done wonders in his digging in the time, and that she thought
we
had got everything out of the place that could possibly have been got: she particularly admired the completeness of our notebooks.

So we did for her. She was really too captious at first, coming straight from the German diggings at Kalat Shirgat. Our digs are I hope more accurate, if less perfect. They involve no reconstruction, which ruins all these Teutons. So we showed her that and left her limp, but impressed. She is pleasant; about 36, not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps). It would have been most annoying if she had denounced our methods in print. I don’t think she will.

Gertrude was indeed impressed; the conversation continued animatedly through dinner, and after pleasing Lawrence no end by presenting her hosts with two Meredith novels, which she had already finished, she spent the night at Carchemish. She awakened before dawn and rode out of camp at five-thirty
A.M
., somewhat bewildered by the villagers who came out to jeer; she had no idea that, in trying to calm them, Lawrence told them she was too plain to marry. Years later she laughed when she found out from Hogarth that Lawrence had given them such an excuse to keep his bachelorhood.

The evening after she left Carchemish, Lawrence sent Hogarth a note, far more sympathetic than the one to his mother: “Thompson has dressed tonight and something of the sadness of the last shirt and collar is overtaking him, for Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one. She called him prehistoric! (apropos of your digging methods, till she saw their result—an enthusiast … young I think).”

At almost the same time, back in her own camp, Gertrude was writing to Florence, giving no hint at all of either the rivalry or the newfound friendship with T. E. Lawrence: “They showed me their diggings and their finds and I spent a pleasant day with them.”

C
HAPTER
T
EN

Dick

A
t home again in England in 1911 and 1912, Gertrude worked on her book about Ukhaidir, taking time out to write articles for academic journals on archaeology and book reviews for
The Times
, attend the coronation of George V in London and make speeches for the Anti-Suffrage League. But now it was Asiatic Turkey that consumed her interest. The Ottoman Government was suffering a quick decline, succumbing at home to the will of the Young Turks (the reformist group that rose against it in the name of nationalism), and in Europe to the fervor of independence of the Balkan states. During the costly Balkan Wars of 1912, the Sultan lost his hold over Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro. What would happen to the Ottoman interests in Asia? Gertrude worried. Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia would all be up for grabs. “I should not be surprised if we were to see, in the course of the next ten years, the break-up of the empire in Asia also, the rise first of Arab autonomies,” she wrote presciently toward the end of 1912 to Domnul, just knighted and traveling in India after his recent retirement from
The Times.

She had been hearing much about Turkey from Richard Doughty-Wylie, who was now living in Constantinople. They corresponded frequently, she and he and his wife, Judith: Gertrude filling them in on her trips and her books, congratulating him on his heroic efforts to stop the Turkish massacre of Armenians at Adana; they telling her about events in Anatolia and in Constantinople, where he was posted during the Balkan Wars. Gertrude had seen him in England in 1908, when he came home for a brief visit, and again in 1912, when he was called back to London for a change in assignment. But before long, he went off again, in charge of the Red Cross relief effort in Turkey, where the Balkan states were allied and fighting to yank Macedonia away from Turkish rule. On Christmas Day 1912 she received a letter from him from the Turkish capital, and weeks after, in the early spring of 1913, Doughty-Wylie and his wife arrived in London. Gertrude took tea with them on an occasional afternoon, dined with them on an evening, chatted with them about events in the East.

The more she saw of him, the more attracted she was. No one she knew intrigued her like Doughty-Wylie. He was the consummate male of the British Empire, a decorated soldier-statesman, a sensitive, literate scholar who loved to quote poetry, a shrewd political analyst, a lustful man who roused her deepest desires. In July, she invited him to her Yorkshire house, and in a prurient moment when his wife was away, he accepted her invitation and came. It was a daring move for Gertrude. Rounton was home, intimate. She would be bringing him into her most personal world, showing him her most emotional treasures, revealing herself in a way that she never would have done in London.

She introduced him to her family, showed him around the favorite house of her childhood, the flower beds she had nursed, the rock garden she had created, the library where, even as a young girl she had read voraciously. They talked and talked, she, about the loneliness of being unmarried; he, about the loneliness of being unhappily married; she, about the joy she found in solitude; he, about the joy he found in sex. She sensed his profound hunger and felt the thrill of his passion. They stood in her bedroom, close to each other, her heart pounding, her cheeks turning hot, and as his blue eyes burned with desire, he took her in his arms. He wanted her, but she refused.

A few days later he wrote from London to thank her for the visit. It was to be the first of dozens of letters between them, each an intense display of fervor and passion. There were never love letters like these between other couples, she would later tell a friend; never letters of such depth and pain and beauty. In this first round of their new correspondence, Dick told her how he loved seeing her in her “vital setting,” surrounded by the people, the house, the gardens that meant so much to her. He loved talking to her, hearing what she cared about most. He had always wanted to be her close friend, he said, ever since they met in Anatolia. “Now I feel as if we had come closer, were really intimate friends.… I must write something, something to show you how very proud I am to be your friend. Something to have meaning, even if it cannot be set down, affection, my dear, and gratitude and admiration and confidence, and an urgent desire to see you as much as possible.… Yours ever, R.”

But as quickly as he roused her hopes, he dashed them. A note came the following day to say that once again he was being posted abroad. She sat in her room at Rounton and wrote, telling him of the pleasure she felt in the early morning hours in her garden, of the joy she felt at being near him. Her letters reached him at his old bachelor quarters in London, where he was staying while Judith was away in Wales.

“While I am alone, let’s be alone,” he teased in reply. “Ah yes, my dear, it’s true enough what I said about solitude, on every hill, in every forest, I have invoked, and welcomed her.… And you, too, know the goddess well, for no one but a worshipper could have written what you did about the hush of dawn in the garden. But for all that, we shall meet and say nothing, and go on as before.”

But he was troubled, he said, by a recurring dream: “Rounton ghosts visited me the next night also. Is there any history of them?… some shadowy figure of a woman, who really quite bothered me, so that I turned on the light. It wasn’t your ghost, or anything like you; but something hostile and alarming.” He ended the letter, “Dick.”

She was a spinster of forty-five, alone, aching for a husband, yearning for children. He was a married man, grounded to a woman of wealth and social position. The situation seemed impossible, ridden with ghosts and guilt. Yet even as he spoke of the hopelessness of it all, her desire grew. When was he leaving? she wanted to know. What would happen to them? Should she still write to him after he left? Should she write only to him or to Judith too?