At length it was time for Miss Nightingale, having seen off the last of her nurses, and filed the last of her inventories and accounts, to leave also. The Government had offered her a British man-of-war for the voyage home. The view she was likely to take of such a proposal had been correctly surmised in the House of Lords some weeks before. On May 5 Lord Ellesmere moved the Address on the conclusion of peace. He was something of a poet, as well as a statesman, and this was his last appearance in the House. In a speech, which was much admired at the time, and which may still be read with pleasure as a specimen of the more ornate kind of parliamentary eloquence, he paid a tribute to the memory of Lord Raglan, and then passed by a happy transition to the heroine of the war: “My Lords, the agony of that time has become matter of history. The vegetation of two successive springs has obscured the vestiges of Balaclava and Inkerman. Strong voices now answer to the roll-call, and sturdy forms now cluster round the colours. The ranks are full, the hospitals are empty. The angel of mercy still lingers to the last on the scene of her labours; but her mission is all but accomplished. Those long arcades of Scutari in which dying men sat up to catch the sound of her footstep or the flutter of her dress, and fell back content to have seen her shadow as it passed, are now comparatively deserted. She may probably be thinking how to escape, as best she may on her return, the demonstrations of a nation's appreciation of the deeds and motives of Florence Nightingale.”
III
The offer of the man-of-war was declined; and Miss Nightingale, with her aunt, sailed in the Danube for Athens, Messina, and Marseilles. A Queen's messenger was in attendance to help the travellers with passports. They stayed a night in a humble hotel in Paris (August 4), and travelling thence, as Miss Smith, she reached London next day. The “return of Florence Nightingale is on every one's lips,” said a letter of the time, and all the newspaper-world was alert to discover her movements. “Weary and worn as she is,” wrote her aunt, “I cannot tell you the dread she has of the receptions with which she is threatened.” It became known that on her arrival in England she would proceed at once to her country-home. Triumphal arches, addresses from mayors and corporations, and a carriage drawn by her neighbours were at once suggested; but Miss Nightingale had prudently withheld information of her time-table even from her family, and the public reception was avoided. It had been proposed, too, that the reception should be military. “The whole regiments” of the Coldstreams, the Grenadiers, and the Fusiliers “would like to come, but as that was impossible, they desired to send down their three Bands to meet her at the station and play her home, whenever she might arrive, whether by day or by night, if only they could find out when.” But the attention even of her soldiers was eluded. She lay lost for a night in London, and at eight o'clock next morning she presented herself, according to a promise given to the Bermondsey Nuns, at their Convent door. It was the first day of their annual Retreat, and she rested with them for a few hours. Then, taking the train, she reached her home on August 7, 1856, after nearly two years' absence in the East, arriving at an unexpected hour, having walked up from the little country station. “A little tinkle of the small church bell on the hills, and a thanksgiving prayer at the little chapel next day, were,” wrote her sister, “all the innocent greeting.”
Florence's spoils of war, as Lady Verney wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, arrived in advance, and were characteristic. There was, first, William, a one-legged sailor boy, who was ten months in her hospitals. Occupation was found for him. Next there was Peter,[218] a little Russian prisoner who came into hospital, and of whom, as he was an orphan, she took charge. “One of the Lady Nurses was his theological instructor, and asked him where he would go when he died if he were a good boy? He answered, ‘To Miss Nightingale.’ Thirdly, there was a big Crimean puppy, given her by the soldiers. He was found in a hole in the rocks near Balaclava, and was called ‘Rousch,’ which is supposed to be ‘soldier’ in Russian. A little Russian cat, a similar gift, died on the road; but the three remaining are the happiest things I have seen for some time, careering about in the intervals of school, where they are made much of, and ‘glory’ is more agreeable to them than to their mistress!” But Florence had another Crimean spoil, unknown, perhaps, to her sister, which she accounted one of the most sacred of her possessions. It was a bunch of grass which she had “picked out of the ground watered by our men's blood at Inkerman.”
IV
“If ever I live to see England again,” she had written in November 1855, “the western breezes of my hill-top home will be my first longing, though Olympus with its snowy cap looks fair over our blue Eastern sea.” It was to Lea Hurst, then, that she went on her return. It was there, ten years before, that she had found a fortnight's happiness in the humble work of parish nursing and visiting, and had thought to herself that with a continuation of such life she would be content.[219] The aspirations of her youth were to receive, as this second Part of the volume has shown, a larger, a fuller, and a more conspicuous attainment. Yet it would be a mistake to regard Miss Nightingale's mission in the Crimean War either as the summit of her attainment or the fulfilment of her life. Rather was it a starting-point.
Her work in the East did, it is true, attain some great ends, and satisfy in some measure the aspiration of her mind and heart. “She has done a great deed,” wrote a friend in December 1854, “not less than that of those who stood at Inkerman or advanced at the Alma; and she has made the first move towards wiping away a reproach from this country—that our women could not do what others do, irreproachably, and with advantage to their fellow-creatures.” She had proved that there was room for nurses in British military hospitals. She had shown the way to a new and high calling for women. “What Florence has done,” wrote Lady Verney to a friend (April 1856), “towards raising the standard of women's capabilities and work is most important. It is quite curious every day how questions arise regarding them which are answered quite differently, even when she is not alluded to, from what they would have been 18 months ago.” Lord Stanley, in the speech at Manchester already mentioned, had made the same point. “Mark,” he said, “what, by breaking through customs and prejudices, Miss Nightingale has effected for her sex. She has opened to them a new profession, a new sphere of usefulness. I do not suppose that, in undertaking her mission, she thought much of the effect which it might have on the social position of women. Yet probably no one of those who made that question a special study has done half as much as she towards its settlement. A claim for more extended freedom of action, based on proved public usefulness in the highest sense of the word, with the whole nation to look on and bear witness, is one which must be listened to, and cannot be easily refused.” Lord Stanley was mistaken in supposing that Miss Nightingale thought little of the effect of her mission upon the position of women; for, though she had misgivings about “woman's missionaries,” yet to make “a better life for woman”[220] was an object very near her heart. When she was in the Crimea, working as hard as any of the men, confronting disease and death with the bravest of them, administering, reforming, counselling as energetically as the best of them, this resolute woman felt that she and her companions had raised their sex to the height of a great occasion. “War,” she wrote to her friend, Mr. Bracebridge (Nov. 4, 1855), “makes Deborahs and Absaloms and Achitophels; and when, if ever the Magnificat has been true, has it been more true than now, every word of it? My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden.” The words, which had often been in her mouth in moments of despondency and thwarted yearning,[221] came to her with the sense of happy fulfilment when she had been able to act as the handmaiden of God in the service of the sick and wounded soldiers. Her sister, understanding her better in the years of attainment than in those of aspiration, wrote to her (Nov. 15, 1855): “What anxious work you have upon you, my Greatheart, and yet in spite of it all have you not found your true home—the home of your spirit?”
All this was true. Yet Miss Nightingale's Crimean mission was, in the scheme of her life as she had planned it, and in the facts of her life so far as failing health permitted, not so much a climax, as an episode. It was an episode remarkable in itself, and it had given her a world-wide reputation; but in reputation she saw nothing except an opportunity for further work. “The abilities which she has displayed,” said Mr. Sidney Herbert in Willis's Rooms, “cannot be allowed to slumber. So long as she lives, her labours are marked out for her. The diamond has shown itself, and it must not be allowed to return to the mine.” Her friend well knew that he was only expressing the feelings of her own mind. What she sought on her return to England was to utilize her reputation and her experience for the furtherance of her ideals. Her experiences during the Crimean War had enlarged the scope of her work. She had gained an insight into military administration, and had shown a grasp of the subject, which had caused the Queen and Prince to “wish we had her at the War Office.” Her first duty, then, was to use her experience, so far as opportunity offered, to improve the medical administration of the Army. But the main desire of her life had been to raise nursing to the rank of a trained calling. Her mission to the East had not accomplished this object. It had only advertised it, and for the rest had shown how urgently the thing needed to be done. The world praised her achievement. She was rather conscious of its shortcoming, and of the obstacles and difficulties with which it had been attended. She came back from the East more resolved than ever to be a pioneer in the reform of nursing.
But first she needed rest and seclusion. Rest, in which to recuperate from the long strain of labours, hardships, and anxieties. Seclusion, in which to hide herself from publicity and applause. The world praised her self-sacrifice. She felt that she had made none. Rather had she been privileged to attain that harmony between the soul of a human being and its appointed work, in which, according to her philosophy, lay the union of man with the Divine Spirit. She shrank from glory in dread of vain-glory. “‘Paid by the world, what dost thou owe Me?’ God might question.” “I believe,” she had written to her father in 1854, shortly before her Call to the Crimea came, “that there is, within and without human nature, a revelation of eternal existence, eternal progress for human nature. At the same time I believe that to do that part of this world's work which harmonizes, accords with the idiosyncrasy of each of us, is the means by which we may at once render this world the habitation of the Divine Spirit in Man, and prepare for other such work in other of the worlds which surround us. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us. Those words seem to me the most of a revelation, of a New Testament, of a Gospel—of any that are recorded to have been spoken by our Saviour.” Her period of rest was to be very short, as we shall learn; but let us leave her communing silently in her chamber with such thoughts, till another Part opens a new chapter of activity in her life.
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