Читать книгу What I Remember - Millicent Garrett Fawcett - Страница 13
ОглавлениеOUR DERBYSHIRE COUSINS
AND OTHER FRIENDS
When I went back to school without my sister Agnes I might have felt very lonely and bereft if it had not been that now for the first time I had as chief friend and companion my cousin, several times removed according to genealogy, but most closely allied in friendship, Rhoda Garrett. Rhoda’s father, the Rev. John Fisher Garrett, rector of Elton in Derbyshire, was grandson of the Richard Garrett, already mentioned, who died in 1787, leaving ten sons; my father being his great-grandson. Therefore the relationship was not very close. But that is the best of cousins, you can make much or little of the relationship, according to your taste and fancy; in Rhoda’s case it meant much, especially to Agnes and myself. Rhoda was a little older than we were, of brilliant capacity and great personal attractiveness, witty and very ready with her wit. Her mother had died in her early childhood, and after several years of widowhood her father had married again, and a fairly rapid succession of babies appeared once more in the Elton Rectory. The three children of the first marriage were almost by force of circumstances pushed out of the parent nest. One son went to New Zealand and stayed there; one was in an office in London; and it became a question what should Rhoda do? At that time governessing was practically the only professional career open to a woman. My eldest sister, Louie (Mrs. Smith), determined that if Rhoda had to be a governess she should at least have some preparation for her work, and sent her to Gebweiler, in Alsace, where she could learn both French and German; after a course of instruction there, she came for further tuition in English subjects to Miss Browning’s school at Blackheath. She immediately became my guide, philosopher and friend, and more particularly my protector, if she thought there was anything in the school management that was not satisfactory so far as I was concerned. She was far more ready than I was to perceive occasions for her active intervention. I might even have resented her aid if it had not been that she had such a pleasant way with her that it was impossible to take offence or to withstand her.[4]
Our school friendship, and especially that which Rhoda formed with Agnes, almost at the same time had important consequences. After my marriage, in 1867, Rhoda and Agnes determined to live together and get themselves trained as house-decorators, a thing quite as unprecedented then as women becoming doctors. Rhoda also took an active part in the agitation led by Mrs. Butler against the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866 and 1868 and in working for Women’s Suffrage. She became a speaker of extraordinary power and eloquence. Many of her hearers declared her to be quite unequalled for her combination of humour with logic and closely reasoned argument. Sometimes the newspaper comments were very droll. One which sticks in my memory ran thus: “The lecturer, who wore no hat, was youthful but composed, feminine but intelligent.”
One of the Elton Rectory babies, Fydell Edmund Garrett, Rhoda’s half-brother, distinguished himself greatly in after-life, becoming a real power in the troubled political waters of South Africa, Member of the Cape Parliament, and the very brilliant editor of the Cape Times. His life was written by his friend, the late Sir Edward Cook, so I will dwell no further upon it here, except to say that he possessed from his childhood the gifts of personal charm and personal beauty. He was greatly loved by us all, and one of the things we like to remember is that Rhodes, on one occasion when he was reckoning up the assets of South Africa, said, “Well, you see, there’s myself and Milner and Garrett.”
But to go back to Miss Browning’s school. It changed hands before I left it, but I again had the good fortune to be in the charge of a really competent teacher who was extremely good to me and to whom I was devoted. My school-days, however, were brought abruptly to an end before I was sixteen. From causes which I imperfectly understood, there was suddenly a financial crisis at home. I suppose that my father’s speculative and courageous temperament had brought difficulties upon him, and that a sort of Geddes axe of stringent economy had to be applied to his domestic expenditure. I was bitterly sorry to leave school; but my parents were very good in making it up to me as well as they could by allowing me undisturbed use of our old schoolroom for reading and study in the mornings. The financial difficulties, whatever they were, were not long-lived, as the brother next younger than myself, Sam, was presently sent to Rugby and afterwards to Cambridge; and, of course, there were plenty of opportunities for me to enjoy my home life, diversified as it was by riding, dancing, skating, walking, and boating on the Alde. So I did not regard myself as a martyr, though I did miss the good teaching I had had at Blackheath. I had a little bedroom to myself, and there I stored my favourite books, including a huge volume containing all Shakespeare’s plays (not the sonnets, which were a later discovery)—this my schoolfellows had given me as a parting present. I spent many Sunday afternoons with this beloved book, laughing over Benedick and Beatrice and weeping over Desdemona, though I was angry with her for allowing Othello to kill her when she ought to have known what anguish it would be to him after he had found out his atrocious blunder.
We all followed with keen interest my sister Elizabeth’s struggle to get her name inscribed on the British Medical Register, and sympathized with her in her absolute rejection of anything which would-be friends recommended as “just as good”; for her acceptance of this advice would have consigned women to a lower rank in the profession than that open to men.
We had from time to time delightful visits to London, where, in addition to dances, which we loved, we were taken to the opera for the first time and drank deep of the delights of glorious music. In this connection I must confess to a piece of wanton cruelty on our part: we made our Uncle Balls, our father’s brother, take us to a philharmonic concert. He asked us, kind old man, what we should like by way of a treat, and that was our choice, quite regardless of his feelings, for he cared no more for music than a mastodon would have done. How he bore it I cannot tell, but we enjoyed it hugely; there for the first time we heard Haydn’s quartet, the one which introduces the famous Hymn to the Emperor, from the time of its composition until 1918 the Austrian National Anthem.
In 1865 I was taken by my sister Louie and her husband to one of J. S. Mill’s election meetings. It will be remembered that from the moment of his being invited to become a candidate for the historic borough he had made it quite clear that he attached the greatest importance to the political enfranchisement of women. This alienated some supporters, but attracted others, among them my brother-in-law, who was an elector. It was the first time that women’s suffrage had been brought before English electors as a practical question, and in 1865 there was no country in the world which had adopted it. The room where the meeting was held was not large, but it was densely crowded. I do not remember Mill’s speech, but I do remember the impression made by his delicate, sensitive physique, united as it was with a very unusual degree of moral courage. I also remember very distinctly that when the heckling began a man rose in the audience and said he had a question to ask. He then proceeded to read a passage from a book in his hand, in which the statement was made that the characteristic fault of the British working man was untruthfulness. The heckler then personally addressed Mr. Mill and said, “The question I wish to ask is, did you write this?” Mill instantly rose and simply said, “I did,” and sat down again. The effect was instantaneous and electrical. The meeting cheered itself hoarse. Mill’s candour and directness were such a delightful contrast to the usual shiftiness of Parliamentary candidates. His personality added to the effect he produced; and I heard it stated afterwards that those two words, “I did,” won him the election. He was, of course, a staunch upholder of an extended franchise which should include the then voteless masses of working men and also women. I was a woman suffragist, I may say, from my cradle, but this meeting kindled tenfold my enthusiasm for it. The time of which I am now writing covered the years of the American Civil War. I, following my sister Elizabeth, was a staunch Northerner, and I studied all the arguments carefully which sought to prove that the question of slavery was the real cause of the war.
This was not so clear and obvious as it became as the war went on. Lincoln, in his inaugural address as President in March 1861, had said, “We had no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” It is not unnatural that this was misunderstood in England and represented as meaning that Lincoln, to say the least, was half-hearted in his opposition to slavery. We did not understand then, as well as we have been taught to do since, the series of checks and limitations which surround the great powers of the President of the United States. Lincoln’s power as President was limited, as he himself expressed it, to seeing that the laws of the Union were faithfully executed in all the States. When civil war broke out Lincoln became the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and in that capacity he issued, on 1st January 1863, the Proclamation definitely abolishing slavery in the rebel States. This was done by him as an act of war. These controversies are dead now that the whole of the facts are known, but they were very much alive at the time which I am endeavouring to recall. Then, early in 1865, came in rapid succession the carrying of the thirteenth amendment to the American Constitution abolishing for ever by constitutional machinery the institution of slavery in the U.S.A.; the final collapse of the Southern Army with the surrender of its noble leader, R. E. Lee, on 9th April; and on 14th April the assassination of the greatest man the North has ever produced, Abraham Lincoln.
I have recited all this rather in detail because of the influence these events had on my life. I was staying with Louie in London, and we were invited on the very day the news of the murder of Lincoln reached England to a party at Aubrey House, Campden Hill, the residence of Mr. P. A. Taylor, M.P., and his wife. They were both ardent Northerners, and represented the left wing of the party of political and social reform at that time. My future husband was there. I had heard of him; of his blindness, and of his heroic courage in overcoming its drawbacks, but till that evening I had never seen him. When we arrived at the party there was a great buzz of excited conversation, in which I joined, about the tragedy of Lincoln’s death. I was not yet quite eighteen, but the phrase “We are none of us omniscient, not even the youngest,” had not then been coined; so I expressed what I felt without hesitation and said that the death of Lincoln was the greatest misfortune which could have befallen the world from the loss of any one man. Challenged to particularize what I meant, I added, “Yes, greater than the loss of any of the crowned heads in Europe.” There was nothing but what was obvious in this; but the expression struck the ears of the blind man who, some two years later, became my husband. I was told many years afterwards that he had immediately asked Mrs. Peter Taylor to introduce him to me. In any case he kept them in his memory, cultivated the acquaintance of my father and sister when he met them at the British Association or elsewhere, and in 1866 accepted an invitation from my father to come down and spend a few days at Alde House. That settled my future life; we became engaged in October 1866, and were married in 1867 on St. George’s Day, which was also the day of Shakespeare’s and Wordsworth’s birth; and in future years the day of the breaking of the Zeebrugge mole in 1918. Therefore it is, of all the days in the year, my favourite.
[4] A very vivid picture of Rhoda is given in Dame Ethel Smyth’s Impressions Which Remain.
