Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 17

Embley was now a large house, with accommodation enough to receive at one time, as Florence recorded in a letter, “five able-bodied married females, with their husbands and belongings.” The large number of Mr. Nightingale's brothers and sisters, some of whom had many sons and daughters, made the family circle of the Nightingales a very wide one. Between four of the families the intercourse was particularly close—the Nightingales, the Nicholsons, the Bonham Carters, and the Samuel Smiths. One of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. George Thomas Nicholson, of Waverley Abbey, near Farnham, Surrey.17 Among their children, Marianne was as a girl a great friend of her cousin Florence. In 1851 Miss Nicholson married Captain (afterwards Sir) Douglas Galton, who, some few years later, became closely and helpfully connected with Miss Nightingale's work. To Mr. Nicholson's sister, “Aunt Hannah,” Florence was greatly attached. Another of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. John Bonham Carter, of Ditcham, near Petersfield, for many years M.P. for Portsmouth. His eldest daughter, Joanna Hilary, was a particular friend of Florence Nightingale, who said that of all her contemporaries within her circle, her cousin Hilary was the most gifted. One of the sons, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, was, and is, Secretary of the Nightingale Fund, and Miss Nightingale appointed him one of her executors. Between the Nightingales and the Samuel Smiths the relationship was double. Mrs. Nightingale's brother, Mr. Samuel Smith, of Combe Hurst, Surrey, married Mary Shore, sister of Mr. Nightingale; moreover, their son, Mr. William Shore Smith, was the heir (after his mother) to the entailed land at Embley and Lea Hurst, in default of a son to Mr. Nightingale. The eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith, Blanche, married Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, who, as we shall hear, was closely associated with Miss Nightingale. There were many other relations; but without being troubled to go into further details, which might tax severely even the authoress of the Pillars of the House, the reader will perceive that Florence Nightingale was well provided with uncles, aunts, and cousins.

The fact is of some significance in understanding the circumstances of her life at this time, and the nature of her struggle for independence. Emancipated or revolting daughters are sometimes pardoned or condoned if they can aver that they have few home ties. To Mrs. Nightingale it may have seemed that in the domestic intercourse within so large a family circle, any comfortable daughter might find abundance of outlet and interest. And so, in one respect at least, her daughter Florence did. The maternal instinct in her, for which she was not in her own person to find fruition, went out in almost passionate fulness to the young cousin, William Shore Smith, mentioned above. He was “her boy,” she used to say, from the day on which he was put as a baby into her arms when she was eleven years old. Up to the time of his going up to Cambridge, he spent a portion of his holidays in every year at Lea Hurst or Embley. Florence's letters at such times were full of him. She was successively his nurse, playfellow, and tutor. “The son of my heart,” she called him; “while he is with me all that is mine is his, my head and hands and time.”

It generally happens in any large family circle that there is one woman to whom all its members instinctively turn when trouble comes or help is needed. Florence was the one in the Nightingale circle who filled this rôle of Sister of Mercy or Emergency Man—taking charge of one household when an aunt was away, or being dispatched to another when illness was prevalent. In 1845 she spent some time with her father's mother, who was threatened with paralysis, and whom she nursed into partial recovery. “I am very glad sometimes,” she wrote from her grandmother's sick-room to her cousin Hilary, “to walk in the valley of the shadow of death as I do here; there is something in the stillness and silence of it which levels all earthly troubles. God tempers our wings in the waters of that valley, and I have not been so happy or so thankful for a long time. And yet it is curious, in the last years of life, that we should go down-hill in order to climb up the other side; that in the struggle of the spiritual with the material part of the universe, the material should get the better, and the soul, just at the moment of becoming spiritualised for ever, should seem to become more materialised.” She made a similar reflection a little later in the same year (1845), when tending her old nurse, Gale, in her last illness. “The old lady's spirit,” she wrote, “was in her pillow-cases, and one night when she thought she was dying, and I was sitting up with her, she said, ‘Now, Miss Florence, mind you have two new cases made for this bed, for I think whoever sleeps here next year will find them comfortable.’ ” The death-bed of the nurse of the Queen of Nurses deserves some note. The last words of Mrs. Gale, as reported in other letters, were, “Don't wake the cook,” “Hannah, go to your work,” and “Miss Florence, be careful in going down those stairs.” If the spirit of this old servant was materialised at the moment of passing, the materialising took the form at any rate of faithful service and of consideration for others.

Florence's sympathy with those in distress is shown in the letter of condolence which she wrote to Miss Clarke upon the death of M. Fauriel:—

Embley, July 1844. I cannot help writing one word, my dear Miss Clarke, after having just received your note, though I know I cannot say anything which can be of any comfort. For there are few sorrows I do believe like your sorrow, and few people so necessary to another's happiness of every instant, as he was to yours. … How sorry I am, dear Miss Clarke, that you will not think of coming to us here. Oh, do not say that you “will not cloud young people's spirits.” Do you think young people are so afraid of sorrow, or that if they have lively spirits, which I often doubt, they think these are worth anything, except in so far as they can be put at the service of sorrow, not to relieve it, which I believe can very seldom be done, but to sympathise with it? I am sure this is the only thing worth living for, and I do so believe that every tear one sheds waters some good thing into life. … Dear Miss Clarke, I wish we had you here, or at least could see you and pour out something of what our hearts are full of. That clever man of Thebes, one Cadmus, need never have existed, for any good that that cold pen and ink of his ever did, in the way of expressing oneself. The iron pen seems to make the words iron, but words are what always takes the dust off the butterfly's wings. … What nights we have had this last month, though when one thinks that there are hundreds and thousands of people suffering in the same way, and when one sees in every cottage some trouble which defies sympathy—and there is all the world putting on its shoes and stockings every morning all the same—and the wandering earth going its inexorable tread-mill through those cold-hearted stars in the eternal silence, as if nothing were the matter;—death seems less dreary than life at that rate. But I did not mean to say that, for who would know the peace of night, if it were not for the troubles of the day, “the welcome, the thrice-prayed-for, the most fair, the best beloved night,” when one feels, what at other times one only repeats to oneself, that the coffin of every hope is the cradle of a good experience, and that nobody suffers in vain. It is odd what want of faith one has for one's friends. We know what soft lots we would have made for them if we could; and that we should believe ourselves so infinitely more good-natured than God, that we cannot trust their lots with Him!

It must not be supposed, however, that Florence was in request among the family circle only at times of sad emergency. She sometimes took her place no less effectually on festive occasions. Waverley Abbey, the house of Uncle Nicholson aforesaid, was the scene of family reunions at Christmas-time; and in letters to Miss Clarke from both Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter Parthe, there is a lively account of private theatricals there in 1841. The Merchant of Venice was chosen, and Macready volunteered some assistance. Parthe's artistic gifts were requisitioned, and she was “scene-painter, milliner, and cap-and-fur maker.” The powers of command and organization, which Florence was afterwards to exhibit in another field, seem to have been divined by her cousins, for she was unanimously appointed stage-manager. Miss Joanna Horner, who was one of the party, remembers that the usual little jealousies about parts and costumes used to disappear in presence of Florence. “Flo very blooming,” reported Mrs. Nightingale. “The actors were not very obstinate, and were tolerably good-tempered,” wrote Parthe, “but it was hard work for Flo. There was a Captain Elliot, fresh from China, who could by no means be brought to obey. He was Antonio, and would burst out laughing in the midst of his most pathetic bits, to the horror of Shylock, who was very earnest and hard-working.” The Lady-in-Chief in later years in the Crimea had a rather peremptory way with obstructive military gentlemen. On this occasion, however, she was perhaps satisfied with the assurance given at a well-known pantomime rehearsal, that it would “be all right on the night.” But it was not. “Your flame, Uncle Adams,”18 continues the letter to Miss Clarke, “was very fine in Lancelot! but, oh, desperation, forgot his Duke's part in the most flagrant way, tho' Flo had been putting it into him with a sledge-hammer all the week.” In the intervals of rehearsing, the girls and their cousins danced and sang, and took large walks, sixteen together. After the performance, dancing was kept up till five in the morning. “Next day,” continues Lady Verney, “we were debating whether ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ went on with a bag or a pocket full of rye; and warming on this interesting subject, we young ones dragged in all the old people, sought recruits high and low, and had a regular election scene. Uncle Adams made a hustings speech, giving both parties hopes of his vote; then the boys slunk out after the counting, and came in with large outcries to be counted a second time, with many other corrupt practices much used at such times; then we bribed a little boy to go and make disturbances in the other faction; but you will be happy to hear the pockets had it by a large majority, and we beat the base baggites out of the field. After the holloaing was over, and the alarming rushings and screamings we had made, M. Kroff (a Bohemian), who had listened and assisted, came to Mama, and said, ‘This do give me the great idea of the liberty of your land, your young people are brought up so to understand it in your domestic life; if we were to make such a noise we should have the police in with swords and cutlasses to divide us!’ ”