Desert Queen (10 page)

She arrived in London in late October and, after the long absence, embraced her waiting mother. To her father, who was in Yorskshire, she wrote that, as unimaginable as it once had seemed, this experience had brought her even closer to him. Perhaps it was because she had known real love, she explained, that she could appreciate her father’s love even more. When finally Hugh appeared in London a few days later, she poured out her hopes and fears, her doubts and desires, while he listened quietly. As she had allowed to Domnul, somewhere deep inside her she knew her father was right; for the time being, at least, Cadogan was not an acceptable husband. Yet she yearned to be his wife, and she would wait; she would wait as long as she had to.

Then, for eight months, she endured, existing from day to day, and with Florence’s encouragement she worked on
Persian Pictures
, a book about her experiences in the East. In August 1893 she and her mother visited Kirby Thore in Yorkshire. It was there that she was reading aloud to Florence about the cholera epidemic, from the chapter she had called “Shadow of Death,” when, like some sort of Persian sorcery, the shadow stepped out from the pages of her book. A telegram arrived from Teheran. Excited and unknowing, Gertrude unfolded the paper and began to read the message: Henry Cadogan had been trout fishing when he slipped into the icy waters of the River Lar—whether by accident or intention it did not say—and, chilled to the bone, was stricken with pneumonia. They were sorry to inform her that Cadogan was dead.

T
hat year Gertrude published a translation of the poems of Hafiz; her interpretation of the Persian poet’s writings is still considered one of the best:

Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot
,
Songs of a cup once flushed rose-red with wine
,
Songs of a rose whose beauty is forgot
,
A nightingale that piped hushed lays divine
:
And still a graver music runs beneath
The tender love notes of those songs of thine
,
Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death!

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Flight

G
ertrude had lost more than a lover; she had lost her hopes, lost hold of an entire life. For nearly a year she had been in limbo; fearful that her father’s demands would force her plans to unravel, she continued to weave her dreams. Now, at the age of twenty-five, she faced the cold reality that her future was shredded to bits. Henry was dead. The only panacea was work and travel. For the next five years she would rush around the globe, making frequent trips to France and Italy and Switzerland, making longer journeys circling the world, as if the very act of fleeing would force her to forget. But haunted by his memory, she saw Cadogan everywhere: in the blissful faces of newlyweds on the train in France, in the perfect figure of the
David
in Florence, in the pots of pomegranates lined up outside a Swiss hotel. Always restless and easily bored, she felt her nervous energy reach a new level. Throwing herself into her work, she studied Persian and feverishly did research for another book, trying to release the ghosts, yet continually reconnecting herself to Cadogan. The language and the writing only reinforced her sorrow.

“Life! life! the bountiful, the magnificent!” she had rejoiced in
Persian Pictures
, published in the spring of 1894. But she had written the words while she was still in Persia, Cadogan still at her side.

Death had come too soon. No longer able to experience joy, she sought consolation, and she found it in Billy Lascelles. Friendship substituted for their former romance; empathy took the place of passion. He visited her on Sloane Street, and as Florence looked stonily on, wishing perhaps that they had married years before, the two young people went off for a private talk. Gertrude poured out her heart, comforted by his listening.

On a family holiday in the Alps, she shared her pain with Friedrich and Nina Rosen, her friends from Teheran. With Dr. Rosen she discussed
Persian Pictures
and Persian literature and her Persian days with Cadogan; and at night, alone in her room under the duvet, she read the letters of Jonathan Swift and his love, Vanessa. She doubted that any man could appreciate the emotions expressed by Vanessa and felt certain that no woman could fail to understand them. “Swift did not care for her,” Gertrude observed; “that’s how a man writes who does not care. And how it maims and hurts the woman! One ought to pray every night not to write letters like that—or at least not to send them.” She had known the words of a man who cared so much, and on this, the first anniversary of Henry Cadogan’s death, they scorched her memory. “I thought of him much last night, and of all he had been to me, and is still.” It would be many years before she would know such fervor again, and the letters that were to come would shake the depths of her body and soul.

O
f all the Persian writers that she and Cadogan had read together, it was the passionate poet Hafiz who was the most complex. His mystical lyrics are still read out loud in Teheran tea rooms and salons, his allegories discussed and interpreted for hours on end. His words require the most sophisticated understanding of the language; his intricate message demands analysis that few can convey; yet eager to plunge into work, Gertrude took up the challenge to translate his poems.

For most of the next two years, she worked on the translations of Hafiz, completing them in 1896. The following year, with the addition of her definitive essay comparing the thirteenth-century Hafiz to Western poets such as Dante and the more contemporary Goethe, the book was published. It won rave reviews. As recently as 1974, a noted scholar, A. J. Arberry, commented, “Though some twenty hands have put Hafiz into English, her rendering remains the best!” With the image of Cadogan still vivid in her mind, she could easily relate to the poet’s wrenching heartbreak over the death of his son, expressed in his poem the
Divan of Hafiz
:

Light of mine eyes and harvest of my heart
,
And mine at least in changeless memory!
Ah! when he found it easy to depart
,
He left the harder pilgrimage to me!
Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start
,
For God’s sake help me lift my fallen load
,
And Pity be my comrade of the road!

He sought a lodging in the grave—too soon!
I had not castled, and the time is gone.
What shall I play? Upon the chequered floor
Of Night and Day, Death won the game—forlorn
And careless now, Hafiz can lose no more.

Still savoring the taste of life in the East, and at the suggestion of Friedrich Rosen (who had learned the language as a child in Jerusalem), Gertrude was now studying Arabic. She found it easy at first, and during the days, reading the tales, she relived her romance with Cadogan. On spare afternoons and evenings, alone in London, she dined with her well-placed friends the Grosvenors, the Stanleys and the Ritchies, made calls on the Portsmouths and on Mrs. Green and Mrs. Ward at their smart at-homes on Russell Square. Momentarily, at least, she could bask in the limelight of the reviews of
Persian Pictures.

Yet in spite of her achievements as an author, in spite of her success in society, and in spite of the fact that she was now twenty-eight years old, she still faced the constraints of Victorian England. “I didn’t go to Lady Pollock’s on Tuesday,” she complained; “I had promised to go to a party at Audley Square and I couldn’t combine the two unchaperoned.”

Only marriage could save her from the shackles of chaperones and escorts. In the middle of the season of 1896, her Oxford colleague Mary Talbot was liberated when she married the Reverend Winfrid Burrows. Mary was thirty-four, soon pregnant, and “radiant,” Gertrude reported to Janet Hogarth when they met at a tea in London. Janet’s brother David Hogarth, an archaeologist, had just published
A Wandering Scholar in the Levant
, his first important book, and the two women had a delicious afternoon, comparing notes on friends, on writing, on travel in the East.

Mary Talbot had been Gertrude’s closest female companion. They had spent endless hours together in London, had traveled together to Italy, and now, taking the train to Yorkshire, Gertrude visited her friend in Leeds. She watched the newlywed couple setting up house in the English countryside and recalled the image of marriage that she and Henry Cadogan had sketched. The future might provide other suitors, but few could fulfill the dream she had shared with him, a life so different from Mary’s, a life of exotic adventure in the East. Still, she held on to the hope of marriage.

But there were no eligible men in her life. Instead, she fled with her father to Italy, where she walked through the narrow streets of Padua and nearly cried when she entered the square of Saint Mark’s. “The band played,” she wrote in her diary, “and the Piazetta was full of people, and it seemed too silly, but the whole place was full of Henry Cadogan, and too lovely not to be sad.”

Back in England, months later, she came face to face with her dreary plight. Her younger sisters used to watch in awe as maids helped Gertrude prepare for a ball, hooking her corsets, lacing up her petticoats, fastening her wasp-waisted gown, smoothing on her long white gloves. But now Elsa and Molly were old enough to be invited to their own balls; Gertrude helped choose their dresses, but it was they, not she, who waltzed at the parties. “I sat on a bench and watched them dancing round and knew just what you felt like at Oxford,” Gertrude wrote to Florence. Of course, after being her chaperone at the Oxford balls, Florence had gone home to Hugh. Gertrude went home to an empty house.

When Mary and Frank Lascelles invited her to their embassy home in Berlin, she jumped at the chance to escape. Like people all over Europe, the Germans were celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The enormously popular Queen, grandmother of both Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Czarina Alexandra of Russia, related by marriage to the monarchs of Romania, Denmark and Greece, was viewed as the embodiment of England and the symbol of the Empire; 1897, her sixtieth year on the throne, was commemorated throughout the Continent. At home in England, officials were brought in from every part of the world; dignitaries partied, troops paraded, rich men gloated over brandy and cigars, and everyone congratulated himself on being part of the world’s largest and richest Empire.