Читать книгу The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake - Graham Travers - Страница 11

“26th. Friday. I am afraid I don’t care near so much for—as I did—am I changeable or is she changed? or is my standard altered? … I read once of a person whose physical condition was such that he could not love one person intensely for long—not many years if thrown much together. … I sometimes fear I am similarly constituted. For even those nearest and dearest I have experienced those fluctuations. … It is like a frightful trance to know that I cannot keep a warm deep love equal; and yet in a manner the real undercurrent of love flows on even in these estrangements—I cannot in myself cease to love one who has ever been the object of that wild adoring love, though in my outer mind and heart this tormenting, fiendlike malady makes me hate and shrink from them while its fearful influence reigns. God grant there is no touch of insanity in it; no words can tell how I dread and deprecate it. There is a loathsome horrible fear in my mind of its coming ever and anon. My … , my beautiful, whom I used to think mysteriously close to my soul, it has come on her. Oh, God pity me! I fear I shall go wild. Every action, every word of her’s seems to anger me unreasonably—I feel the fiend on me and yet the wild resistless love will not quite be swept away, and comes back in floods of passing tenderness for a moment. And I can’t tell her, make her understand, and she will lose her love for me and—oh, dear I am very miserable. God grant in pity it may never fall on my Mother! I have a horrible dread of it. I could not live without her love—my love for her. And I feel such wild maddening love now, as if I knew it would soon be out of my power to love her.”

This, of course, is morbid, and yet here again one is forced to say that her depression is neither feigned nor wholly without reason. Many people have experienced in some degree the elemental fitfulness which she describes, and she probably understood it better than most. And yet how many can testify to her fundamental and self-sacrificing constancy! But there is no doubt that at this period she was living far too self-absorbed a life—dreaming too much, thinking too much of herself. It was time for something to happen, and fortunately something did happen. Two breezy wholesome girl cousins—half Irish, half Norfolk—came to Sussex Square on a visit. They were the daughters of Ferrier Jex-Blake, S. J.-B.’s uncle, but it chanced that she had never met them before. She was out dining with friends when they arrived.

“When I did come home, I went to take off my things, then to the drawing-room, kissed them coolly enough, said, ‘How d’ye do, cousins?’ and sat down to rattle. Tried hard to shock them with all sorts of nonsense, and then carried them to see my room, and made them some coffee. They, Elinor and Sarah, knew nothing of me, and did not much admire me, I guess, that night.”night.”

By degrees, however, a very warm friendship sprang up.

“Oh, dear, those two girls!” she writes a fortnight later. “What a flood of happiness they have brought into the house. And made me behave a little too. Sarah makes me attend to my hair. Oh, dear, home is a different place since they have been here. I am so happy. All my gloom and troubles swept off like cobwebs.”

When they are gone, she writes pages of analysis of their characters, and very able analysis it is. This is how it concludes:

“I feel as if I mean to love Ellie most, and Sarah forces me to love her most. I love Ellie most in my mind, and Sarah most in my heart. Sarah clings to me so, leans on me. Ellie walks upright beside me, a companion, a guide, and gives me a hand. There certainly is something of the angel about Ellie, with much of the woman. You don’t connect the idea of angel with Sarah.

Sarah will do almost anything for me. I do not think she has refused me one thing since she loved me. She rode with me when no one on earth could get her to mount a horse; she went in a boat with me, though she never will enter one. Oh, she is so good, so loving to me. I wish I had her always.

And I am going to them at Dunham, my darlings.”

When it became known that she was going on a visit to Great Dunham, a number of Norfolk relatives on both sides of the house asked her to visit them also, and the result was that for the next two months she had quite a gay time—beginning with her Mother’s elder sister, Mrs. Taylor, and going from her to the Ferrier Jex-Blakes, the Evans, the Blake Humfreys, the Cubitts and others. As a rule—not without exceptions—she captivated her girl cousins, proved very attractive to her uncles and elderly male cousins, and contrived to rub along with her aunts. “I never appreciated my old Daddy till now,” she writes on one occasion, “I really believe, as Mummy says, he never said an un-nice thing in his life, or approached a coarse or ungentlemanly joke. He is certainly a beau-ideal gentleman, ‘Chevalier sans reproche.’”

Of one family she says, “Not very quiet and not specially dutiful. Rather reminds me of us, only they are more good-tempered over it.”

“Uncle Evans amused me exceedingly at lunch yesterday, giving his opinion in quite energetic style, and as if he had studied the subject, that not only I should marry, which I said I shouldn’t, but very soon. … Heaven knows who it could be. … I never saw the man I would have.”

At Wroxham she made the acquaintance of a cousin, Robert Blake-Humfrey, who was deeply interested in questions of pedigree, heraldry, etc., and he found in the creator of Sackermena an apt pupil.

“Hurrah! Going in for a good morning’s work at the pedigree. 9¼.

Near one! well, well! I certainly have had pedigree to my heart’s content. Been hard at work for 3½ hours till my back aches and I am properly tired. Never mind, I have learned a good deal and secured a good deal. It is very kind of Robert to trust me with his valuable pedigrees, so beautifully emblazoned.”

Mr. Blake-Humfrey was good enough to consider that he too derived benefit from the lessons. “Your observant eyes,” he writes when she is gone, “have done good service in sundry ways towards the correction of errors, which may atone in some measure for the mischief they are well-calculated to cause in other ways.”

On May 28th she visited her Mother’s old home, Honing Hall, and made the acquaintance of an elderly uncle who was something of a character.

“He offered lunch, and then took us up to see the rooms. All shutters up, and had to be re-opened and re-shut. In an upstairs sitting-room I unluckily wanted to see a Family Bible, and said, ‘Is that the Family Bible with the names, etc.?’ ‘Yes, it is. You leave it alone—unless you want to see it.’it.’ I persisted I did and he took it down. Then out came Burke’s Gentry and alia. … I thought I should have been eaten up the way he roared at me. I asked if he hadn’t a pedigree, and he almost roared again, wanting to know what I could want better than Burke. I might have told him there were no shields, no intermarriages, etc., but I held my peace, he really frightened me. I got him to show me my dear old Mother’s room as a girl, and kissed the bed and furniture. Thought of her as a girl there, her fun and her troubles, her courting-days perhaps and the letters and thought and hopes that room had witnessed. My precious darling Mother!”

In July she returned to Brighton, “much better and better-tempered” as she expresses it, for the outing. Richer, too, she was, in her whole outlook on life, and particularly in the knowledge of her girl-cousins, Elinor and Sarah Jex-Blake, and Mary Evans, with all of whom the friendship was to prove a lasting one.

A month later, to Sophy’s great joy, Cousin Ellie accompanied the Sussex Square party on a holiday visit to Wales.

Primary education at Bettws-y-Coed was at a low ebb in those days, the village school being in the hands of a cobbler whose acquirements were not great, and whose idea of discipline was primitive in the extreme. Caroline and Sophy Jex-Blake became deeply interested in the children and gradually fell into the habit of taking a class in reading, arithmetic, geography, etc. It was an arrangement that gave great satisfaction to all concerned, and one into which Sophy entered with whole-hearted enthusiasm. One is not surprised to gather from the letters of the period that she awakened a feeling deeper than interest in one of the professional men with whom she was brought in contact, but the diary makes no reference to the fact, and she may not even have been aware of it.

“To me and to others as far as I can judge,” writes Cousin Ellie about this date, “she is the warmest-hearted person ever I came across.”

And six months later, reviewing the events of an eventful year, S. J.-B. writes:

“But among the events of the old year, first and chief, my becoming friends with my darlings, my stars, and getting acquainted with the Evans and all the Norfolk folks.”