Gertrude Bell Read Online Free PDF

governess, her brother, and the numerous household staff for her father’s attention. Florence could so easily have made an enemy of the child. On the contrary, she was an affectionate step-parent, always gentle, encouraging, and sympathetic. She was attentive to both children, inquisitive and humorous. Lively herself, she liked them to be similarly busy: when they were not doing something active, she liked them to be reading and not “loafing around.” She would always have a story or two ready to read aloud to the youngest. Maurice, who was rather deaf, cannot have had any memory of his own mother, but took to Florence immediately.
    Gertrude was divided in her opinion of her new stepmother, whom she was encouraged to address as “Mother.” Her father would undoubtedly have done his best to encourage her to make Florence feel welcome, and to do whatever she was asked, but the child must have smarted at the introduction into their close relationship of a woman that she must have seen initially as an interloper. Hugh and Gertrude’s bond was extraordinary. They were all-in-all to each other, and would always remain so, even when living on other sides of the world. As Florence was to write, “The abiding influence in Gertrude’s life from the time she was a little child was her relation to her father. Her devotion to him, her whole-hearted admiration, the close and satisfying companionship between them, their deep mutual affection—these were to both the very foundation of existence until the day she died.” Florence’s words about Gertrude also reveal the woman’s noble and generous instincts: she never gave way to jealousy, never tried to divide the devoted father and daughter.
    The artist Sir Edward Poynter, RA, painted a double portrait in 1876. The subject is not, as might be expected, a wedding portrait of Hugh and Florence, but the eight-year-old Gertrude, red curls falling onto the shoulders of her lace-trimmed pinafore, being ushered forward by a proudly smiling Hugh. Having had his first wife, Mary, painted at their marriage, Hugh may well have had the idea of commissioning a portrait of Florence when she became his second wife. It would have been typical of the thoughtful Florence to suggest the change of subject.
    Whether Gertrude would have appreciated this tactful gesture is anotherquestion. Florence was too kind and discreet to betray the fact that she was having a difficult time with her stepdaughter, but there are plenty of clues that this was in fact the case.
Angela
, a play she published in 1926—significantly, perhaps, after Gertrude’s death—tells the story of the second marriage of a Yorkshire industrialist in which his new wife tries to cope with the exceptionally strong bond already formed between father and motherless daughter.
    â€œGertrude was a child of spirit and initiative,” wrote Florence in her introduction to
The Letters of Gertrude Bell
. Sometimes this spirit and initiative were too much for her:
    Full of enterprise, [Gertrude] used to lead her little brother, whose tender years were ill equipped for so much enterprise, into the most perilous adventures, such as commanding him, to his terror, to follow her example in jumping from the top of the garden wall nine feet high to the ground. She used to alight on her feet, he very seldom did.
    On one occasion, a crash and an ominous tinkling brought Florence running from the drawing-room to the greenhouse. Gertrude had led Maurice on a climbing expedition along the ridge of the roof. She had made her way deftly and rapidly along while her little brother, sick with fear, had stumbled after her. Gertrude had clambered down safely, but Maurice had put his boot through the roof and followed it to the ground, landing in the broken glass. On another occasion, she played the garden hose down the laundry chimney and put the fire out. When Florence on this occasion lost her temper, Gertrude