Читать книгу The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake - Graham Travers - Страница 16

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It has never been customary among students of human nature to attach great importance to the outpourings of a romantic friendship, save in the rare cases where these have achieved consummate literary form. The religion of the adolescent, too, is a thing that we are apt to take a good deal for granted. In S. J.-B.’s case, however, the ideal—the vision—to which this brief friendship gave rise throws a light on potentialities of feeling and expression which we should otherwise never have had. The fact that so apparently transient a gleam should have given rise to a great and lasting inspiration lifts the passages that follow quite out of the category of the great mass of similar experiences.

The effect of one personality upon another is a thing we can never predict and seldom explain. It is not a mere question of addition or even of multiplication. The process is a vital one which can never be mechanically reckoned out. We all see over and over again in life how the receiver may contribute as much as the giver—the pupil no less than the teacher. When the word of God went forth from Sinai, we are told, each man heard it in the tongue in which he was born.

In any case that strange and new experience came with the force of a ferment to S. J.-B. “She was never the same again,” says a lifelong friend, looking back on the whole history after more than fifty years: “it cut her life in two.” But the cutting in two—like the division of the primordial cell—was the earnest, not of death, but of life on a larger scale.

“My Mother’s full glorious sympathy! What could I do without that? God bless her, my darling—mine for ever.”

So writes S. J.-B. in the first days of her trial. If anyone knew the meaning of the words, “as one whom his mother comforteth,” it was she.

And never did she need that comfort more than now. She left the house in Nottingham Place at once, but she gallantly finished her term at Queen’s College and then went home to Brighton. “I must not get bitter and cynical,” she says. “I don’t think I shall. And yet the crash has been awful.”

As often before in lesser troubles she was thrown back on her own deep religious faith.

“Bankrupt?” she asks herself. “No, by God’s grace, no! No personal trouble, no trouble of any kind, can wreck a life in His charge. Still His—that the strong, the enduring thought.

From this very threshold of pain, whatever be its present issue, shall go forth an earnest patient life—to continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to my life’s end.

Yes, I—Christ’s soldier! Yes, earnestly, heartily, entirely, though speculatively this Christ I know not—though my mind asks in all uncertainty What and Who? …

Dogmas are one thing; life is another.

Doing is clear; ‘doing the will,’—‘knowing the doctrine’ shall come later. Not believing though. I mean understanding—receiving with reason and mind.”

So she prepared her altar, “and put no fire under,” but the flash came.

“Dec. 13th. Sunday. 11.45 p.m. Who could have believed what a happy holy evening has succeeded to all the pain, storm and whirlwind of the morning?

Dr. Smith’s death.^[22] The loss of Octavia’s day—her visit of one hour; the utter stupor of misery. Then, with all the pain, the perfect feeling of content and assurance of Rightness in things. Then this happy evening, lifting me altogether out of myself and my pain into the trials and struggles and efforts and interests of Lucy and Emily—and, thank God, the power of helping both. Now this calm perfect peace, which sends me to bed ‘resting.’ … Oh, God is most merciful, most bountiful. ‘Like as a Father pitieth his children’.”

“12 p.m. Sunday night.

Don’t chide me for writing late, Mother. I must speak to you. If I could give you an idea of the peaceful, happy evening I have had—sending me to bed with a heart full of love and joy and thankfulness. No, nothing has changed in outer things. I have no other news. But perfect peace has come. I can hardly tell you how happy I am, Mother.

I have had such a happy, holy evening with two or three of the girls. … And God seemed to give me such wonderful power to help them, and I believe He has helped them. And in all this—I know not how, but I wake up at their departing … to find that somehow God has rolled away my burden utterly.

I had forgotten it and myself altogether, and now I can find neither. I can hardly believe in the pain and misery of the morning, it seems a dim, far-off memory.

Is it not wonderful, Mother? Goodnight, my own darling.

Yours very very lovingly,

Sophy.

I do not know when I could so fully and entirely say, ‘I will lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou, Lord, only makest me to dwell in safety.’safety.’”

Follows an undated fragment, probably written to her Mother next morning:

“—passed other quiet wayfarers, just as heavily weighted. How gentle it ought to make one—to see how utterly ignorant one may be of sorrow at one’s elbow—how one can only be generally tender to people, if one would escape striking down an already tottering neighbour because one does not and cannot know his needs.

It is only God who sees which is the bruised reed, and cherishes that specially—or can do so.

I am thinking how near 4 o’clock is coming. It may bring me a kiss and a word from my darling. I am sure tonight’s post will at any rate.

Well, dear, I have you always and forever, and with you only I could never be desolate. And I have her too—though she doesn’t know it now.

Yours very very lovingly,

Soph.”

“4.30 p.m. Thanks, many, darling, for your loving little note. You will know before this that the cloud is not dispersing in the way you mean—that it has only more fully and certainly overspread the sky. Yet there is—and will be more and more, please God—a light in it too.”

“Dec. 16th 1861. 8.30 p.m.

My own darling Mother,

Thanks so many for the loving little scrap of letter which I knew would come to comfort me.

The sympathy is always delicious, but the active need for it is utterly gone. You will have got my last night’s letter, so Mother will not go to bed with a sad heart for her baby.

Yesterday I was wondering how it should be possible that I should ever live out the next three days till I got home to you. Now every sort of trouble seems to have fled utterly away. I never knew before the meaning of the words, ‘the peace that passeth understanding’. …

I every now and then wake up with a kind of start of wonder to find such a sunny smile of heart gladness all over my face. And people see it too. It would be very odd if they didn’t when the whole world is changed to me. It is the most wonderful separation of the inner from the outer world that I ever knew. I suppose nothing is changed in the physical world, but everything seems for me bright and golden—as in my Welsh tour with Octavia (I can speak of it and her now with perfect quiet peace), as in those days at Hurst.

Last night I thought it most glorious, but too delicious to last; but it seems now the atmosphere of life, as if nothing can touch or shake it. …

Mother, a grand solemn wonder comes with it all, whether it is that when we have actually and literally given up every will and wish to God—have rested utterly and entirely on Him with perfect trust—whether then pain loses its power, and only blessing, even now, can come.

… if so, what a glorious future one sees for all the sorrowful here—for all the tried and suffering. ‘For all the wanderers the home is one’. The pain only till it has brought the bliss; the All-loving Father that cannot wound but to heal.

Now my spirit is so perfectly at rest, all my strength seems to have come back to me like Samson. I feel as if Edinbro’ or anything else was nothing to me. ‘He hath set my heart at liberty’—that is the very truth. Mother, how naturally in every depth of sorrow or joy one turns to those words about which verbally we quarrel—not really or deeply, Mother.

Goodnight, my own Darling,

Yours very lovingly,

Soph.”

From diary:

“Dec. 16th Monday. ‘For as soon as ever thou hast delivered thyself to God with thy whole heart, and seekest not this or that for thine own pleasure or will, but fixest thyself wholly upon Him, thou shalt find thyself united and at peace.’

Thomas A Kempis.”

“Dec. 22nd. Sunday, 11 p.m. The last thread actually broken—the parting over.

Left London on Thursday evening by the 8 p.m. …

Well, it is all in hands that cannot err—speculative sceptic as I may be, practically my trust is as firm as the rock on which it rests. My Father doth do all things well—and even makes me feel it—even now. And surely, to take a lower ground, I have been an inapt pupil if the lessons of the last few months have not taught me the utter impossibility of calculating the possibilities of the future.

Should I have believed from man or angel on Tuesday the first the events of Thursday the last of October?

But we don’t want low ground. He is the rock—His work is perfect.

And He will care for my child.”

Of course this mood of exaltation could not go on unbroken, except at the cost of sanity itself. Hours of reaction had to come. “We might have done anything together, we two!”

“Dec. 29th Sunday. Tonight the bitterness seemed doubled in finding ‘my teachers removed out of my sight.’ I just feeling my way to truth—saved by her from so much doubt and possible infidelity. Well, God will teach me, will He not, Himself—so Mother said. I cannot (or feel as if I could not: cannot is not a word for ‘Christ’s soldier and servant’, is it?) put it all away. I seem so physically weak and rotten, so unable to exert will and force myself to be quiet.

But I have found something to do. I behave infamously to the dear old man. Well! I mean to throw my whole being into being a good child at home. I won’t be rude and bad to him!

Now record this vow for a week—don’t be superstitious, Jack; say ‘God helping me’ and go on—forget yourself. Just do this piece of work—and wait.

So be it.

What was the ‘chief evil’ to which the suffering must be directed to be sufficient?

‘Selfishness,’ said I.

Truly, Jack. And what is it but intolerable selfishness—this brooding over a ‘bootless bene’—this expecting sympathy and all sorts of kindness and excuse from my Mother and the rest, and talking about nerves and fiddle-de-dees—instead of forgetting myself and seeing to my work and to other people.

Well, God helping me, now for a new leaf—of strength and resolve instead of whining self-pity.”

It was with this inspiration that she wrote to one of her pupils:

“Dec. 31st. 1861.

Dear Lucy,

… My Modern History was all right, thank you—I forgot you had it. By the bye, your handwriting seems to me to have ‘suffered an improvement’—I must congratulate you.

I am very glad you think I have helped you, dear child—my life has been a very pleasant one in London—its memory will be pleasanter still if it has been too not quite useless to some of the people who have helped to make it so. I could not easily count the people who have helped me—some directly—some merely ‘by living.’ It is a glorious thing, is it not, to be a link in that chain of help which encircles the world—to pass on to another what one has given us—feeling how all our broken bits of help and gift are gathered up in the perfection of the Great Giver and ‘Father of Lights.’

I do heartily hope that you will go back to Queen’s just to take and hold your place in that chain. Only do quite resolutely take your part for the highest and noblest—remember ‘the soldier and servant’, and remember how very far we are from helping when we acquiesce in any wrong doing—in any low standard of right and wrong, even by silence.

I do not think it would be easy to over-estimate the importance of a high pure tone among the leading girls at such a place as Queen’s—perhaps such as you and L. hardly know what a power lies in your hands, for the very life of the College—and mayn’t we look higher than that, and say for our Master’s work?

And after all that is the true and simple way of looking at it—for consequences we can’t calculate—but we always can know right from wrong, and the rest is not our affair.

Well, dear child, God bless and guide you—that is the true help.”

And, finally, she writes in her diary:

“Dec. 31st. 1861. The last day of the year! Now to ‘take stock’. I have just finished, and balanced exactly my money matters (within a deficit of 2s. 8d. with which I left London). Now for the moral and historical. See the last volume for the beginning of the year. How well I remember the last day last year. Does she? How we did and sorted accounts till the chimes—and then leant together out of the window in our new house fresh with plans and hopes, saying so hopefully,

‘And may the New Year cherish

All the hopes that now are bright.’

And now truly almost,

‘For all my earthly hopes this (year) did kill.’

It is almost dreadful to look back and see how this book opens with a jest. How full of joke and spirit all seems! The ‘deep waters’ have come this year as never before. But it is a strange wild comfort to find in myself so much capacity for suffering. I had always despised myself as a weak shallow nature, to leave others to suffer and escape with a laugh. …

(Wrote one last letter to Frid^[23] tonight—for her birthday tomorrow. Weak? I think not.)

Well, now to ‘take stock’:

The opening of the year, bright, clear, hopeful. Octavia’s visit to the north, but that no real break. Our delight in our new house—its quiet and peace. Some disappointment is not letting, but that very endurable. No bar to happiness. …

Then the return of Frid and Florence. My unwilling acquaintance ripening gradually into love for Frid, called forth perhaps first by her great love for me.

Then our glorious Whitsuntide at Hurst—Octa and I. The few days (Thursday to Tuesday) pure unmixed heart sunshine. Purer and deeper if possible than that of Wales.

Then the strange double summons on May 21st., she to Mary Harris, I to the O’Briens. Coming like a thunderbolt on our week, but accepted by both obediently and willingly. Together to London. Then my mission to Tufnell Park. The hurried tea, the night mail, the parting hand pressure as the train moved, ‘in the sure and certain hope’—is it blasphemous so to use the words? I think not. There was a glorious churchlike solemnity always on our love. Well!—then the five months’ parting—hard it seemed then, but painless—heaven—to what came after.

Perhaps I am not yet meant to see the ‘why’ of all that followed. … We seemed so helpful heavenwards to each other. Never seemed our love truer, deeper, purer—I know though now that mine could be all three.

Yet with all this wondering, I do and have felt most solemnly.solemnly. Surely it is best. ‘We shall see in Heaven why it could not be otherwise.’

At least, Octavia, you have never had (in me at least) so true and deep and leal a friend as now—and yet quieter and so stronger.

And for her—God have her in His holy keeping!

I feel some work has been done when I can say as deeply, truly as now that no earthly blessing could seem to me (except relating to my Mother) comparable to her restoration to me (for every feeling of hurt or wound or injury seems merged in deep earnest love ‘beyond words’) yet I am ready, and God helping me able to go through the world—darkened and lightless as it seemed a few weeks ago—and feel it yet my Father’s own world, ‘very good’ yet: ready in it manfully and cheerfully to take up my burden, and again and forever as ‘Christ’s faithful soldier and servant’ to fight manfully till my life’s end—so help me God!”