Читать книгу The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake - Graham Travers - Страница 7

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“I think the Lord has begun a good work in me.” Is there in the words a—very human and pardonable—suggestion of St. Augustine’s “Timebam enim ne me cito exaudires”? In any case, though doubtless the good work went on, it cannot be denied that the tares flourished abundantly with the wheat.

It happened most unfortunately at this time that the child’s physical health fell into a very unsatisfactory state: we hear of great digestive trouble and functional weakness of the joints. Modern hygiene would probably have made short work of both complaints. As things were, the weakness was “tinkered at,” and the child was encouraged to live the life of an invalid. We are startled to learn incidentally that she is going out in a bath chair!

Good Miss B. took her up to town to see a consultant, and sent the parents long detailed reports on the child’s health. We are not surprised to come upon the following under date July, 1851:

“You must not suppose, dear Mrs. Blake, that I overlook the self that you have rightly so much at heart. I see it too well, and it is commented on to Sophy so frequently that I sometimes check myself, … but the punishment that I might inflict on another I hold back in Sophy’s case, not only from my own knowledge of her character, but because Mr. S. cautioned me if possible never to disturb the even tenor of her brain. … Her case is peculiar and such must be the ends to meet it: they will require patience and may be long inin showing fruit, but we will not despair.”

The next vacation seems to have been disastrous. The child had grown more indolent and self-centred, and no doubt the parents were unable to deny her the sweetmeats which she loved and which the supposed weakness of her joints made it impossible for her to “work off” as healthy children should. Moreover, few houses are large enough to contain two chronic invalids.

“I received your letter,” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake when the child is gone, “and very glad we were to hear of your safe arrival—but, my own child, I could have cried over your words. They were nice and affectionate, but the very opposite of your acts. … Either my child means what she writes or she does not. Your conduct completely contradicts your assertions. More sad and foolish behaviour than yours it is difficult to imagine. You behaved so ill that I doubt if I could have borne it another day without being laid on a bed of sickness, and I might never have recovered. Your ever being with us again for three weeks at a time is quite out of the question till you have the good sense to understand (as other children of your age do) that to be happy and comfortable and to enable me in my weak state to have you at all, you must be good. When you seem really to feel how ill you have behaved, we will some time hence have you home for a week, and if I find you keep your word (which you do not now) we will have you home very often; and Papa says that he shall then think that he can never do enough to make you very very happy; but you now destroy your happiness and my health, and the medical men will not allow us to be together. Think of your great folly and sin, my dear child. Pray to God for grace, and He will give it to you for His dear Son’s sake. …

When you have read this letter, I wish you to tear it up.”

As ill luck would have it, this most unusually severe indictment found the poor little culprit seriously ill in bed. Her penitent reply is not forthcoming, but five days later, her Mother writes again:

“My own darling Child,

I trust this will find you much better; if you want me to be happy you must make all possible haste to get well, and write to tell me you are well. … I quite believe, my darling, that you are sorry, and will, in God’s strength, take pains that the same shall never happen again. I do particularly wish you to tear up my last letter at once.”

She didn’t tear it up: she never could tear up “Mummy’s letters.” She tied the two together with a piece of red wool, and slipped in with them a Sunday School “ticket” bearing the words, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right.”

By the same post as the second of these letters her Father writes:

“My darling Child,

We have been so grieved to hear of your illness, and do hope that before you receive this, you will be much better. It will please you to know that dear Mummy is much better for the quiet and Norfolk air. Everybody is so kind and trying to get her quite strong, and they all enquire so kindly after little Sophy, whom they call ‘little Sophy’ still, everybody saying what a very sweet and darling child you were six years ago; and I do trust that, when you see them next, they will find you a more darling child, and more loveable than ever. God grant it be so, dearest, for I want you to be very happy.”

The next letter from Miss B. that has been preserved is dated September, 1851, and is addressed to Mr. Jex-Blake. “I ought not to express sorrow at the sudden removal of your child, hoping and believing that it is ‘ordered by the Lord.’ She bears away with her my affectionate love and prayerful interest.”

No record has been kept of the precise steps that led to the “sudden removal.”

For the next two years the child went to a boarding-school in Brighton, where her parents had now gone to reside, and there are, therefore, practically no letters of the period. Two of her schoolfellows, however, have been good enough to contribute their impressions of her. For better and for worse, they call up a very vivid picture. Miss Lucy Portal writes:

“Being the junior of Sophy, as we always called her, she and I were not much in touch, though I never forgot her, for she had a strong personality, and was so clever—in fact, far above our school-mistress in natural intelligence, and she made a lasting impression on those with whom she associated. Whenever I heard her name in after life the vision of a young capable girl who asked questions that bewildered her governess rose before me.

One day when we were walking on the ‘Downs’ with [an assistant governess] in the rear, Sophy saw a large stone by the wayside and seated herself on it. ‘What do you mean by this?’ said the governess. ‘I am tired and must rest,’ replied Sophy. ‘Get up at once,’ said Miss——; ‘Do you suppose we are all going to wait your pleasure in this way?’ ‘Impossible to do what is beyond one’s capacity,’ was the rejoinder, and threats had no effect. At last Miss—— lost her temper and said ‘Sophy, distinctly understand that if you do not get up, I shall leave you here, and send a policeman to fetch you.’ ‘Ah,’ said Sophy, ‘that is a kind thought. I am sure he would prove of great assistance to me. But could you manage to procure two policemen, for I don’t believe one would be able to carry me, and two might do so.’ I need not say that the battle of words was soon over after that.”

Knowing as one does how anomalous was the position of an assistant teacher in those days, one can but admit that the child must often have inflicted far greater suffering and anxiety than she had the least idea of.

On the other hand, Mrs. Gover, widow of the late Canon Gover of Worcester, writes:

“Sophie set us a good example at school, and I shall always think of her as one of the most truthful girls I have ever known, the only girl I ever knew who would not allow her drawings to be touched up by her master. I had a very great respect for her high character.”

But nothing can show more clearly the futility of the educational methods of that day than the following letter from the headmistress herself:

“June, 1852.

Dearest Sophy,

I cannot tell you with what a feeling of anguish I heard the door close after you on Saturday when you departed, and I had not kissed or blessed you. … I saw you afterwards in the street, tho’ I was unseen by you, and I could not stop you, my dear child, lest the past should be renewed. On my return I saw your present of fruit, it was not as gratifying to me as the scrap of paper, which contained my Sophy’s acknowledgement of her fault.^[8] Yet I thank you for the kind thought, as I hope you know me too well to suppose that any little gift can bribe me to forgive;—without that scrap, my Sophy, I should have turned away from receiving your fruit. The same afternoon at a friend’s house I read a portion of your favourite Scott, and could not but think of you while I read the account of the ‘evil and good’ trying for Mastery in Harold the Dauntless’ heart, remember his first act of forbearance was noted as a step towards heaven. Beloved child! do I beseech you remember the duty of a child, be gentle and tender to your dear Parents, then the Lord will love you, and some day the Lion will give place to the Lamb in your bosom. Dear Mary Bayly’s has turned to whooping-cough. I hope yours is better. Until I find where to send her, I cannot leave home. God’s will be done.”

For a year and a half Sophy remained under this lady’s care, and then one or two equally unsuccessful experiments were made. Meanwhile Mrs. Jex-Blake remained so ailing that it was not possible for her to have the child at home for the long vacation, and a “dear kind” lady invites the refractory young person to visit her for part of the time. Mr. Jex-Blake writes to inform Sophy of the fact, and adds, “Now have we not in this great cause of thankfulness to our kind God and Father who never forgets us?” This was perhaps asking a little too much of the homesick child.

The truth is that the parents at this time were not growing younger (as many parents do), and certainly they were growing more staid and set in their ways. It was becoming increasingly difficult to them to adapt themselves to this riotous child. “Avoid excitement which is your great enemy,” writes her Father, unaware perhaps that his own weakness was a tendency to be rather too fussy and precise. With hearts full of love they were demanding of her a standard of excellence which for her was wholly artificial, and in the half-hearted, or at least intermittent, effort to attain it, she fell in the breach. And parents and child were not the only factors in the difficult problem of home life. So long as Sophy could by any stretch of charity be reckoned a child, it was comparatively easy for her brother and sister to put up with her volcanic ways. But from a schoolgirl one expects some conformity to recognized standards, and Sophy’s elder sister had been such a pattern in this respect that the contrast was necessarily acute.

“I really don’t think you would enjoy [a visit from] Carry much at school even if we could spare her,” Mrs. Jex-Blake writes in reply to an eager request for this privilege. “You would be tempted to be odd and excitable, and then Carry would be vexed and all would be uncomfortable” and no one who knew the elder sister can doubt that such demonstrations of affection would probably have “vexed” her more than most. On the other hand “Brother” was now a young man, and if his main desire for the child was that she should grow up like the sisters of other men, he only shared the attitude common at that time to the overwhelming majority of his sex. One can see that his younger sister must have tried him a good deal. The idea that she was plain and even ugly had been firmly impressed upon her: the exhibition of vanity in matters of dress had been discouraged on every ground: and it was natural to her boyish temperament to be careless of such things. When, in addition to these shortcomings, she added a propensity for making people “uncomfortable,” one can quite understand that her brother did not feel specially proud of her, and the strength of her character probably made it difficult for him to influence her through the passionate affection and admiration she had cherished for him all through her childhood. In any case the relation between them became somewhat strained, and it is not surprising if she sometimes attributed the strictures of her parents to his influence and representations.

It is delightful to record that, in spite of countless differences of opinion and much plain speaking on both sides, a fine loyal camaraderie existed between the sisters throughout life.

I don’t know whether it ever occurred to the child to compare her brother’s education with her own. If she had done so, the reflection might well have made her bitter. In athletics as in the schools he was bearing off laurels at every turn, while she was being curbed and thwarted to meet the requirements of pious and half-educated schoolmistresses. From the best of motives her parents refused for her the outlet for the “excitability” they constantly deprecated; in other words they simply sat on the safety valve. In the summer of 1854 she begged—probably not for the first time—to be allowed to have riding lessons. The father replied

“I like to do anything in reason to please my own child, but you are so very excitable and have at present so lamentably little self-command that I should fear riding for you very much. It would do you no good and might be injurious to you in many ways. When will you prove to me that my hopes and expectations of you are not in vain? … You don’t know how the hearing you censured goes to my heart, and the not being able to place the most unbounded confidence in you is very trying to me and the dear Mother—doubly so to her in her weak state.”

Of course it is easy now to see that he was wrong as regards the riding. Apart altogether from the physical exercise involved, the discipline of it would have been excellent. Big emergencies always braced her. She never lost her temper with a horse, nor her presence of mind in an accident.

Meanwhile the series of loving reproachful letters goes steadily on.

“Do you think, darling,” her Father writes, “that by divine grace you are less self-willed day by day? How earnestly do I desire to see you a loving happy child. Everybody seems to deprecate your presence as that which will spread discomfort all around. … God bless you and help you and give you His Holy Spirit to guide you continually.”

“Everybody” was an overstatement. At no time was the child without her own little circle of admiring friends. A schoolfellow with whom she remained on terms of intimate friendship throughout life says—“At our house she was always good and happy, and a very welcome guest. My father thought very highly of her.”

A fortnight later Mrs. Jex-Blake writes:

“I rejoice at the nice accounts I have of you from school, and I hope (against experience) that you will when we see you again, be a pleasant child, the comfort you might so easily be to me.”

“Day and night,” her Father writes, “you are on my heart. You know how I love you. Why will you thus be your own enemy?”

The faith and perseverance of the parents is astounding: not less so the fact that at bottom the affection and filial piety of the child never flagged.

One has to remind oneself constantly—what the daughter never forgot, though small trace of it appears in the letters of this period—that Mrs. Jex-Blake had a keen sense of humour. When she and Sophy were together, they had many a good joke in common. It was when the mesmerism of the child’s presence was removed that the sense of responsibility asserted itself in full force. It is impossible to read the long series of letters without being profoundly convinced—1. That the parents were devotedly attached to their youngest child (“Sophy was the favourite,” was the elder sister’s deliberate comment some sixty years later). 2. That their affection was returned with an intensity of which few children are capable. 3. That the warning that she was injuring her Mother’s health and must therefore be kept away from her dearly-loved home did not provide a motive strong enough to make the child run in harness like other people. The inference is that no motive would have been strong enough.

Did she ever really make an honest effort? One comes upon many impassioned scraps of prayer for grace to resist temptation. “Oh, that when a word irritates me I may remember how often I have said more unkind things and been forgiven.” “Oh, Lord, punish me, reduce me to submission in any way Thou seest fit, but oh, let me not alone, abandon me not despite my wickedness.” And, although these prayers are apt to run into conventional exaggerated language, it is impossible to doubt their sincerity. Her tiny booklets and papers were always kept with the strictest secrecy, and it is all but certain that no eye but her own ever saw them before her death.

Here is an isolated scrap of diary, recording probably a time of special effort.

“Feb. 26th, 1854. Oh, keep Thou my foot when I go up into Thy house of prayer. O how difficult it is to fix the mind for even that short time! Miss X. will treat me unlike any other human being, but that is no reason for transgressing the commandment of my God. She says she does not like to hear me name the name of Christ for I do not depart from iniquity, she thinks I had better not hold conversations on sacred subjects.

A complaint having been made of rudeness from one of the girls, Miss X. said it was just like one of Sophy’s tricks, heaven knows with what ground. All these things have aggravated me, and I fear I have sadly given way to temper and pride, not remembering Him who bare the contradiction of sinners against Himself though He never offended in word or deed. If sometimes unjustly spoken to, how often have I escaped my desert and how few are the faults the strictest find compared with an all-seeing God. Oh, for the charity that beareth all things. …

27th Monday. I must expect trials this day, humiliating to my pride and trying to my temper. …

Nothing special, though I gave way sadly at different times and again sinned in sending a letter to Mama [? Maria].

28th. Again, more and more against light, got sweets. Miss X. in her prayer speaks at poor Agnes who is just come. She prays that all may be kind to her, remembering the Fatherless and Widow are His special care, etc. How could she harrow up poor Agnes’ feelings so! The poor child was weeping under the infliction. … And in the prayer she announced her intention of expelling anyone who would make the others unhappy. O I could have knocked her down, and after prayers she really spoke kindly to me about beginning March afresh and any other time I could almost have promised to try. As it was I could not kiss her even. Oh how much I think of that which might and probably did proceed from a pure motive, and do not consider my unkindness often which I know does not do so.

March 1. Whole holiday. Gave way to passion to A. and B. tho’ perhaps they were provoking I should better have striven to retain my temper. Alas from my feelings since it seems as if it were the letting in of water. O preserve me from being so awfully passionate as I was. Overbearing and ordering in the afternoon. Oh for the Charity which ‘is kind’ which ‘is not puffed up’ ‘seeketh not her own’ and above all which ‘is not easily provoked’.”

She had no lack of self-control in other ways: why should she have failed so conspicuously in this? When all due weight is given to the reasons already assigned one is still forced to the conclusion that there was something elemental in her nature over which she not only had little control, but of which she was to a great extent unconscious. As a mere child she expresses her thankfulness in a letter to her Mother that she is less “irritable,” and at rare intervals all through life she would speak to intimate friends of the intolerable way in which the blood rushed to her head at times, making it all but impossible for her to weigh her words. But from first to last she was far less conscious of the moral aspect of the defect than one would have expected anyone of her sane judgment and essential humility to be. The severe self-analysis of the above extracts are on the whole exceptional. From childhood on, the thought that she had failed those she loved or had caused them anxiety and suffering, in a way that she understood, was a source of almost intolerable pain and compunction; but she seems to have rarely and inadequately realized the extent of the suffering she inflicted by her wilful ways and passionate temper.

“And yet there was always something loveable with it all,” a childhood’s friend reiterates. “She came bounding into a room, bringing with her an atmosphere of gaiety and glee that is indescribable.”

Nor are we as regards the judgments of contemporaries confined to the possibly idealized picture of later years. Fortunately for the accuracy of the picture, Sophy seems about this time to have originated in the school a practice of character-writing, in which the critics were encouraged to be absolutely frank. This is what she brought upon herself:

“Sophy is very affectionate and has more good in her than people think, she is truthful and can be trusted. She has an immense amount of self-conceit, self-sufficiency and pride. She will not be led by anything but affection, or a desire to make much of herself, and make herself well thought of. She has great talents and is very clever. She wishes to be thought an out-of-the-way character and is so. She lacks gentleness of feeling and manner.”

“Sophy is certainly excessively clever but unfortunately knows it, and makes a point of showing it off upon every possible occasion. She is truthfulness itself and can really be trusted. Very passionate but very penitent afterwards. Affectionate.”

“Clever, passionate, affectionate. Many bad habits but tries (lately at least) to get the better of them. Might be made a great deal of. Rather too fond of her own opinion. I think true.”

It is rather staggering to find how much wiser the young folks were in those days than were their elders!

Again Sophy propounds the question whether A. or E. is “the greater pet.” The discussion goes on in writing, and finally the originator ends it by saying:

“At any rate A. is the only friend I have got, and I don’t want to lose her.”

To which D. responds:

“You are wise, but she is not the only friend you might have.”

And Sophy all too proud:

“There are only one or two others I could have as a friend.”

And finally M.:

“As to your friends, I quite agree with D. I think you might have had many. I know you might have had me long ere this, had you tried.”

Of another schoolfellow under discussion Sophy explains that she finds the young lady personally “aggravating,” and adds:

“But I think she is very ingenuous, and would own to a thing, even to a little one, which is a great thing considering her pride.

That is what I do admire so ardently.

Sophy.”