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Authors: Janet Wallach
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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
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
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