Yours sincerely,
A. Billing.”[[132]]
One last storm was raised in Convocation about the action of the Senate, on the ground that it dealt with the Faculty of Medicine only, but this final obstruction only proved the truth of Mr. Stansfeld’s wise dictum that when the hour for reform has come all that opponents can do is to widen its character or to precipitate its advent. On January 14th, 1878, a new Charter admitting women to all degrees was laid by the Senate before Convocation, and was carried by a majority of 241 to 132.
So much good that year had brought—that annus mirabilis 1877—one must not be surprised if it brought some evil also. And, to S. J.-B. personally, it dealt one heavy blow. The School, as her Mother said, was her living child. She had conceived it, brought it forth, tended it, fought for it,—done most of the daily work it involved, with the help of a lady secretary she herself had trained. Until she was a qualified doctor, however, she did not wish her name to appear either on the Council or on the Governing Body. In all the early papers it occurs only as Trustee.
But she had always looked forward to her registration as something that would initiate a new order of things. That platform gained, and the dust of the struggle and fight left behind, she expected to take officially, as Honorary Secretary, the position she had filled hitherto without any recognition at all. Up till now she had been constantly harassed, driven,—striving for something that always receded when it seemed within her grasp. No wonder if she had often been hasty, high-handed, difficult. Now all that, so she thought, was past. We recall the dreams and ideals of her youth,—how she had longed to organize some fine new school for girls, of which, conceivably, she might be worthy to be the head.
“I am beginning to 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.”
We have seen with what searchings of heart she laid aside this ideal for the long struggle of her medical career; but from first to last she never laid aside the sympathetic interest in her colleagues and juniors which was perhaps the most striking characteristic of her professional life. Is it strange if she now looked forward to a realization of the whole dream ?
In any case that realization was not to be. Her enforced absences in the matter of her examination had given people a chance to do without her. We have seen that they had not always found her particularly easy to work with. “You wouldn’t let me muddle, and you wouldn’t let me dawdle, and how could I be happy?” one of her “daughters” used to cry in the radiant success of later years: and although it would not be fair to generalize this into a solution of the whole difficulty, it goes a long way to account for it. There were those who were thankful that things should be done a little less efficiently and more easily,—thankful to have a little more say in matters for which they felt themselves partially responsible. There were those who looked forward with sinking of heart to the time when S. J.-B. would return and really take up the reins.
We have seen repeatedly that she never realized the strain of “difficulty” in her own nature, and she always had a cohort of loyal supporters; but she must have heard—or guessed—something of what was going on, for she wrote to Mr. Stansfeld that the task of being Honorary Secretary was too onerous to be undertaken except at the unanimous wish of those concerned. Perhaps Mrs. Thorne—Dr. Atkins—Mrs. Anderson—would care to undertake the task? Probably she knew for a fact that the two first named would refuse it; and it must have seemed impossible that Mrs. Anderson—overwhelmed as she was with other work—would entertain the suggestion.