Читать книгу The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake - Graham Travers - Страница 18

May 10th. “Own darling, you write me such charming long letters, you quite spoil me. … I suppose your work in Edinburgh has been very intense while it lasted, and proportionately exhausting—and then you don’t, as a schoolboy does, get any reaction the other way. You have no one to play with—no positive recreation. I always think the games and perpetual ‘outings’ in public schools such a fine arrangement; and then an Oxonian or Cantab. has his boat or his ride, My darling has positively nothing. Don’t little one overwork herself: such concentration of thought as you give in one hour is very exhausting.”

May 11th. “I fear it is impossible for me fully to appreciate your child, and, even had you done differently, I question whether she and I ever would have got at each other, but I quite believe in the noble-heartedness you speak of. I would with avidity seize any opening she offered, but I fear she will not make it. In the present distortion of vision, she is more likely to suppose I am inclined to alienate you from her. Had your’s been a common friendship, I should have thought it possible that ‘Art might conceal too much,’ but she knows you in spite of all your faults and independently of them—and surely the wine was a messenger of love. You dared not have sent it had you not been bound up in her.”

On a previous occasion Mrs. Jex-Blake had written on this subject:

“How very remarkable and interesting is Mr. Pulsford’s statement about valued friends apparently lost for a time. I had no idea that your’s was a case that ever occurred—I mean of increased love—a stronger, deeper, truer love: it is really very grand.” “I fancy I like ‘Sorrow’ better than ‘Fidelis,’^[24] but the latter is wonderfully your picture. I can scarcely grasp it, though I wonder and admire.”

May 13th. “I have nearly finished Jane Eyre, and like much of it exceedingly. What I object to is the personal handling she allows … and, grand as her conduct is, she marries a man of very exceptionable conduct, and who to the last had a relish for swearing. … I think she makes St. John very unfairly disagreeable—his icy coldness very unnatural. …”

May 15th. “Well, darling, you and I must wait to talk it out about Jane Eyre. I shall never be able to write it out. It appears to me you have built up a wall to knock down.^[25] I don’t at all ask a different code of morals for men and women. But I do wish a woman to be refined and pure, not because I am conventional, but because I think it essential to self-respect and dignity. … I don’t believe high-toned governesses fall in love with their employers. … I think it very cruel upon the race of governesses to put it into people’s heads they are to fall in love. I always, since I took a district in 1836 felt the tenderest, most motherly pity for any misguided girl. … I certainly never did or will read impure things in books or newspapers. I consider familiarity with impurity rubs the bloom off the plum, which never can be restored. Minds differ, some almost enjoy to read queer things. Impurity does not seem to me to find any response in you: you can come in contact and it runs off like quicksilver—leaves no print. I don’t think that is common.”

“A letter from Elinor. She talks of enjoying your letters so much. … I am very glad Plumptre has sent you a testimonial you like. I fully expected he would send (if asked) a very handsome one.

The world has many kind hearts, has it not?—none like my own child.”

And again, talking of a sermon she had heard:

“I thought of my precious child when he pictured a strong character with exceeding depth of tenderness and gentleness.”

One understands more and more fully the fervour with which S. J.-B. was wont to say in her later years—“No one ever had such parents as mine!” “How I wish you had known my mother!”

One naturally treats S. J.-B.’s religious life at this time as something apart from her questionings about dogma, for indeed the two belonged to different categories of her being. The following is one of the few letters of this period that have been preserved:

8 p.m. March 17th, 1862.

“Darling Mother—I know you care to hear all your child’s thoughts and hopes and feelings—I know you will not condemn for conceit and egotism what might seem so to other people.

I want to talk to you—I feel so sure you want to hear. I want to tell you what a glorious Strength and Power has come out of all the sharp pain—how I feel that I am a better person, a stronger and more real one, than I ever was before. …

Some one says that it is ‘not pain undergone but pain accepted’ that bears fruit an hundredfold. You know the acceptance has not been easy—you know sometimes the flints have cut my feet deep enough, but thank God for two things—I never for any single moment lost the absolute certainty of Infinite Love and Wisdom ‘brooding over the face of the waters,’—the certainty of my Father’s arms around me—and secondly that no suffering or pain could shake the love that has never been half so strong, so real, so ideal, so unselfish as now. I doubt if I ever half knew what being a friend was before—I think I have earned the knowledge now—some of it.

And, Mother, about my work. I cannot tell you the strong exulting feeling that seems to set God’s seal to my work, in that through all the personal agony I have held firm to that: at no moment, I believe, would I have purchased what I longed for most on earth at the price of that—that I have felt through all ‘The light may be taken out of my life (and thank God how far that is from being so!) but the object never can!’ Don’t you know how the lines that reminded us of the oath upon our head, that bade us ‘never again our loins untie, or let our torches waste or die’ was the strong helpful thing through it all.

And though I did believe in myself—and thou ever didst believe in me, Mother!—yet so long as my work ‘walked in silken shoon’ and lay side by side with the pleasantest life possible for me, there was a certain thought about fair weather sailing—a certain (not doubt, but) diffidence in looking on to the time of breakers—a feeling as of David, ‘I have not proved them.’ But now I feel that I have come to the proof—that my armour has not failed in the battle—something the sure happy confidence (farthest of all from presumption) ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ You can’t think how it ‘heartened’ me (you know that nice old word?) to find that truly as well as verbally my work does hold the first place. …

I am beginning to have hope, Mother! If I only suffer enough—and I don’t believe mine will ever be a smooth or easy life—I may yet be fit to be the head for which I am looking so earnestly. …earnestly. …

But all seems centred in the one thought, ‘Lead Thou me on!’—or rather, not ‘me’ but ‘us,’—all the wanderers.

Yours very lovingly,

Soph.”

Not that S. J.-B. was ever conventional even in her religion. Here is a characteristic extract from the diary of the same period:

“You never have the common honesty, Jack, in this most private journal (they say hardly anyone has) to put down the thought if it crosses your mind ‘Well, I think I am rather a fine fellow’ or its equivalent. Because it never comes? Oh, dear your precious ‘humility’! I wish Miss W. could look into you:—do you? Not you, you humbug!

‘Well, but,’ (retorts S. J.-B. accused) ‘I do work with a single purpose—I have tried very hard, and, am sure, succeeded somewhat in this hard battle of these months—what is the good of pretending to call myself names? Did not Job ‘maintain his integrity’?

You coward! You must skulk behind Job. Looks respectable, does it? Say honestly ‘I do try harder than some people do,’ for in truth I believe that is all your conceit does amount to.

I know from my heart I do recognize and reverence holiness and purity as far above mine as Snowden to a mole-hill. And is that conceit? I don’t believe it is. No—‘Not guilty, S. J.-B.’ Plead boldly, and don’t give in for shamefacedness. And besides you have no right to deny His triumph ‘Who giveth us the victory,’—by fighting modest on the sham. You have won some victories. Thank God quietly, and pressing on to the things before. ‘I press towards the mark.’ God knows—and you know—there are enough to win. Oh, how far away lies doing even what is our ‘duty to do.’ But I don’t know that the realest soundest life limits itself to calling itself ‘miserable sinner.’ Zacchaeus told Christ what he tried to do. He did not rebuke him as man does and say, ‘No, believe yourself utterly vile (for the glory of your Maker?)’

There—go to bed, S. J.-B.”

A few days later she recurs—as often—to the broken friendship:

“… Well, I note markedly how, with all this light, all this growth—respecting the suffering—(and I think all this would have brought a ‘right judgement’ too) I do not swerve one iota from my judgement of facts. I cannot conceive it one hairsbreadth more possible that any but a mental cloud can have worked in the way it has—that under any possible circumstances my child, with her glorious nature and heart, can have acted as her image has. … ^[26]

But while I have at last manfully and honestly and cheerily faced the possibility of never seeing her again on earth—while I believe my loins are girded for the way quite irrespective of any future fate regarding her and me—while, having put my hand to the plough, God shall grant me grace never to look back even for her (who, God knows, is far enough before me) never to linger irresolute with thoughts that should and shall urge me to double speed—yet it is curious how the whole fashion of my life shapes itself with the arrière-pensée of being ready for her ‘at midnight or cock-crowing or in the morning,’—saving with the thought of her as well as myself—looking at every path as it opens to see that it is wide enough to tread together if she joins me ere its end—making the most of the working time now that a pause of rest may fall due whenever she comes to claim the ‘moon.’

And I think, could she see my thoughts, my plans, my work, my resolves, she would not have them otherwise.”