Lawrence’s command of English is amazing, by reason, of course, of his familiarity with the classics and his knowledge of both ancient and modern languages. His vocabulary is wider than that of most learned professors, and he has great descriptive powers, as we have observed from his description of the death of his friend Tallal el Haredhin of Tafas.
While in London and at All Souls, he lived much as he did in the desert. Indeed, from force of habit after his long experience in the East, he has become much like the Bedouins and has no desire for luxuries. He rarely eats or sleeps regularly, and says it is fatal if you are caught in an emergency to have formed regular habits. He usually goes without sleep one night a week and eats like a bird. It is his custom to sleep from three to ten in the morning and then take a long walk until three in the afternoon. Upon his return from his walk he would work until two in the morning, when he would go out for his dinner. The only places in London open at that unusual hour were the station restaurants, where he would tell the waiter to bring him anything he liked. He hates to order food, and a few minutes after he has had a meal he has forgotten what the dishes were. When walking along the streets in London he is usually absorbed and pays no attention to anything until he comes to with a start and finds that a bus is about to run him down.
In avoiding the network of modern complexities he seldom has to worry about the countless things that crowd the joy out of our ultra-civilized modern life. He has no private income and scorns money except what he needs for the simple necessities of life and for his one luxury, books. His mother once told me that he had always been a trial to her because she never knew what he was going to do next. He himself declares that he probably will never marry because “no woman would live with me.”
Yet despite his scorn of money in private life, and his well nigh complete lack of it, while in the desert he had almost unlimited credit and could draw on his government up to many hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was by no means an uncommon sight to see him stuffing ten thousand pounds in gold sovereigns in one camel-bag and ten thousand in another. Then off he would go with it, accompanied only by ten or twelve Bedouins. On one occasion Lawrence drew a paltry six hundred pounds from Major Scott “to do a bit of shopping.” Major Scott kept the boxes of sovereigns in his tent at headquarters in Akaba. Major Maynard, who was in charge of some of the records, heard of this and asked for a receipt. When Scott informed Lawrence, the latter nearly doubled up with laughter and said, “He shall have it!” And so far as I could find out that was the only receipt he ever signed. As for the letters he received in the desert, he usually read them but then burned them and never bothered about answering.
His has indeed been a strange existence, full of individual experience. Fond of Oriental rugs, Lawrence picked up many rare ones during his wanderings. On the floor of his tent at Akaba were two beauties. Lawrence slept on one of them, while his companion, Major Marshall, used a camp-bed. One of the two rugs is now in the possession of Lady Allenby, while Marshall has the other. One day in the bazaar in Jedda, Lawrence saw a barber kneeling on a prayer-rug that he liked. It had two holes in it three or four inches in diameter. The barber offered it to him for two pounds, and Lawrence bought it. When he took it to Cairo and had it appraised by one of the leading rug merchants of Egypt he found that it was worth about seventy pounds after being repaired. So Lawrence sent the barber a five-pound note. At his mother’s home in Oxford he had a pile of Oriental rugs and carpets still covered with the dust of the East. A friend of the family got married at a time when Lawrence was away, and his mother sent one of the rugs as a wedding gift. When the colonel returned she told him about the incident and said she presumed it was not worth much. “That one you gave away cost me 147 pounds” ($665), replied Lawrence. But he was not the least bit vexed and promptly forgot all about it.
When the year was up during which he had promised to serve as Near Eastern advisor at the Colonial Office, Lawrence put on his hat and walked out. Since then he has found a new exhaust for his surplus energy. He met an army officer who had a high-power motor-cycle which was too much for the latter to handle. So Lawrence bought it and streaks it about England much as he formerly raced across the North Arabian Desert in the “Blue Mist.”
When an undergraduate at Oxford, he and another student made a solemn compact that if either ever did anything particularly noteworthy he would wire for the other to come so that they could celebrate. In 1920 Lawrence telegraphed his friend as follows: “Come at once. Have done something.” This was the first word that had passed between the two since their pre-war college days. When the friend arrived this is what Lawrence had done that he thought worth celebrating: he had just finished his bungalow on the edge of Epping Forest, and was keeping cows!
Epping Forest is a semi-national preserve of some sort, and there is a law that forbids the erection of non-movable structures. After Lawrence had finished his bungalow the police came and pointed out to him that he had broken the law because his house was a stationary edifice. So Lawrence bought some paint and made four camouflage red wheels on the sides of the cottage. This so amused the authorities that they said no more about the law. But not long afterward a fire wiped out nearly everything he had.