For early in 1892 her attention was drawn by her old friend, Mr. (now Sir James) Thursfield, who lived near Berkhamsted, to the fact that some five miles farther from London, in the heart of a district as rural and unspoilt as any that could be found in England, stood a comfortable eighteenth-century house of medium size which happened recently to have come into the market. Sir Edward Grey had just inherited it through his mother under the will of old James Adam Gordon, its possessor in the ’forties and ’fifties; but since the place was far from any trout-stream he did not propose to live in it, but wished instead to find a tenant to take it for a term of years. Its name was simply “Stocks,” and though the house itself was only 120 years old, a far older manor-house had been pulled down to make way for it; while the little estate—“the stokkes of the parish of Aldbury”—is mentioned in a fifteenth-century charter as forming an outlying part of the huge diocese of Lincoln. Mr. Thursfield persuaded Mr. and Mrs. Ward to come and see it, winter though it was. They fell in love with it there and then, and within a few weeks it was decided that Grayswood should be sold and Stocks taken for seven years. Mrs. Ward felt that she had found at last the home she had been seeking.
“You know how we have always hankered after an old place with old trees,” she wrote to her brother Willie, “and when the Thursfields made us come down and see the place and declared we must and should take it we couldn’t in the end resist! It has such an old walled garden, such a beautiful lime avenue, such delicious old hollies and oaks, such woods behind it and about it! The house is bigger in the way of bedrooms than Haslemere, but otherwise not more formidable, and though the inside has no particular features (the outside is charming) we shall manage I think to make it habitable and pretty. One great attraction to me is that it is so near Euston and therefore to the Hall and all its works. I don’t mean to say that we are taking it on any but the most ordinary selfish principles!—but still, I like to think that I can make Marchmont Hall, and the people who congregate about it, free of it as I cannot do of Haslemere, and that there is a hungry demand in that part of London for the fruit and flowers with which the place must overflow in the summer. I believe also that the change will help me a good deal in my work, and that at Stocks I shall be able to see something of the genuine English country life which I never could at Haslemere. But we had got to love Haslemere all the same, and it is an up-rooting.”
The little house on Grayswood Hill was indeed loath to let her go. She went there alone at the end of February, when plain and hill lay steeped in a flood of spring sunshine. “If only the place had not looked so lovely yesterday and to-day!” she wrote. “We have been hung in infinite air over the most ethereal of plains.” But when Stocks finally received her, at midsummer, 1892, she knew in her heart that all was well; that “something” deep down in her nature “that stands more rubs than anything else in our equipment” was satisfied—satisfied with the quiet lines of the chalk hills, with the beechwoods that clothed their sides, and stretched away, she knew, for miles beyond the horizon; with the neighbourhood of that ancient life of the soil that surrounded her in village and scattered farm. She had found her home; she was to live in it and love it for eight-and-twenty years.
CHAPTER VI
THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH—MARCELLA AND SIR GEORGE TRESSADY—THE BUILDING OF THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT
1892-1897
THE acquisition of Stocks in the summer of 1892 was a landmark in Mrs. Ward’s life for more reasons than one, for it coincided with the advent of a mysterious ailment, or disability, from which she was never to be wholly free for the rest of her life. She had hardly been in the new house a fortnight before she succumbed to a violent attack of internal pain, showing symptoms of gastric catarrh, but also affecting the nerves of the right leg. It crippled her for many weeks and exercised the minds of both the local and the London doctors. Some believed that the cause of it must be a “floating kidney,” others that the pain was merely neuralgic, while Mrs. Ward herself, with that keen interest in the human organism and that instinct for self-doctoring which made her so embarrassing a patient, watched the effect of each remedy and suggested others with pathetic ingenuity. She had her better days, when she was able to go down to the old walled kitchen-garden—about 300 yards from the house—in a bath-chair, but whenever she tried to walk, even a little, the pain returned in aggravated form. Only those who watched her through those two summer months knew what heroic efforts she made to master it and to throw herself into the writing of her new book, Marcella, or how her “spirit grew” as the days of comparative relief were followed ever and again by days of collapse. While she was still in the thick of the struggle she received a visit from her American friend, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, whose impressions of the day were written immediately to Mrs. Whitman, in Boston, and give a vivid picture of Mrs. Ward as she appeared at that time to so shrewd and sympathetic an observer.[17] (Aug. 20, 1892).
“Yesterday we spent the day with Mrs. Humphry Ward, who has been ill for a while and is just getting better. Somehow, she seemed so much younger and more girlish than I expected. I long to have you know Mrs. Ward. She is very clear and shining in her young mind, brilliant and full of charm, and with a lovely simplicity and sincerity of manner. I think of her with warmest affection, and a sacred expectation of what she is sure to do if she keeps strong, and sorrow does not break her eager young heart too soon. Her life burns with a very fierce flame, and she has not in the least done all that she can do, but just now it seems to me that her vigour is a good deal spent.”
The “spent vigour” was only another word for bodily illness, but some weeks after Miss Jewett’s visit the first signs of relief appeared. Her London doctor introduced her to a new drug, phenacetin, which worked wonders with the sore side and leg. Phenacetin and all its kindred “tabloids” came into common use at Stocks from that time onwards, in spite of the mockery of her friends. Mrs. Ward developed an extraordinary skill in the use of these “little drugs,” and would often baffle her doctors by her theories of their effects. At any rate, they bore a remarkable part in the complicated struggle between her work and her health, which was to occupy the next few years, and Mrs. Ward always staunchly believed in them.
The improvement continued steadily, so that she was able, that autumn, to undertake a speaking-tour in Lancashire and Yorkshire on behalf of University Hall, finding wherever she went the most astonishing welcome. At Manchester she went, after her own meetings were over, to a great Unitarian gathering in the Free Trade Hall, stipulating that she was not to speak; but at the end she was entrapped, nevertheless. Her husband received the following account of it.
‘Then at the very end, to my sorrow, the chairman announced that Mrs. Humphry Ward was present, and had been asked to speak, but was not well enough to do so! Whereupon there were such groans from the audience, and I felt it so absurd to be sitting there pleading illness that I could only move up to the desk, wondering whether I could possibly make myself heard in such a place. Then they all rose, and such applause as you never heard! It was a good thing that a certain number of people had left to catch early trains, or it would have been still more overwhelming to me. I just managed to say half a dozen words, and I think I said them with sufficient ease, but whether they carried to the back of the hall I don’t know. It certainly must be very exciting to be able to speak easily to such a responsive multitude.”
At Leeds the same kind of experience awaited her, though on a smaller scale. “I should not have been mortal if I had not been deeply touched by their feeling towards me and towards the books,” she wrote. “And what a strong independent world of its own all this north-country Nonconformity is! I feel as though these experiences were invaluable to me as a novelist. One never dreamt of all this at Oxford.”