CHAPTER VI
LORD RIPON AND GENERAL GORDON
(1880–1885)
I thank God for all He is doing in India through Lord Ripon.—Florence Nightingale (1884).
General Gordon was the bravest of men where God's cause and that of others was concerned, and his courage rose with loneliness. He was the meekest of men where himself only was concerned. You could not say he was the most unselfish of men: he had no self.—Florence Nightingale (1886).
“South Street, Feb. 2 [1880]. Dearest—My dear mother fell asleep just after midnight, after much weariness and painfulness. The last three hours were in beautiful peace and all through she had been able to listen to and to repeat her favourite hymns and prayers, and to smile a smile as if she said, ‘I'm dying: it's all right.’ Then she composed her own self to death at 9 last night: folded her hands: closed her own eyes: laid herself down, and in three hours she was gone to a Greater Love than ours.… Do you remember what Ezekiel says: ‘And at eve my wife died: and I did in the morning as I was commanded.’”[194] Miss Nightingale's mother had almost completed her 93rd year. Queen Victoria sent a message of sympathy to which Miss Nightingale replied with particulars of the last hours such as Her Majesty was known to like, and she asked leave to address a letter to the Empress of India on the condition of that country. Permission was granted, and “doing in the morning as she was commanded” Miss Nightingale turned from thoughts of her mother's death to the grievances of the Indian peoples and composed in general terms a plea for their redress. The Queen made no response, but presently she sent a copy of the Life of the Prince Consort. The Life contains much information about the famous Proclamation to the People of India, in which the Queen and the Prince Consort had been personally concerned, and Miss Nightingale made use of the fact when she next had an opportunity of addressing her Sovereign on Indian subjects.
Meanwhile, Miss Nightingale was suffering from nervous collapse, and the doctors ordered sea air. She went for three weeks to the Granville Hotel, Ramsgate, but the change did her little good. “The doctors tell me,” she wrote to Miss Pringle (March 28), “I must be ‘free’ for at least a year ‘from the responsibilities which have been forced upon me’ (and which, they might say, I have so ill fulfilled) and from ‘letters.’ But when is that year to come? I believe, however, I must go away again for a time, if only to work up the arrears of my Indian work, which weigh heavily on my mind.” She went in April for a few weeks to Seaton, where Lady Ashburton had placed Seaforth Lodge at her disposal. She was not to be disturbed, but her hostess came from Melchet for a few days, and had, as she wrote, “the deep joy of communion with my beloved.” In the following month Miss Nightingale spent some days at Claydon, where in subsequent years she often stayed for a longer time, taking much interest in local affairs there. Her sister was now and henceforth an invalid, suffering sadly from rheumatic arthritis. Nothing cheered her so much, said Sir Harry Verney, as her sister's society, and now that Mrs. Nightingale's death made visits to Lea Hurst less imperative they hoped that Florence “would treat Claydon more as a home” than heretofore. She did as she was bidden, and for several years paid an annual visit to Claydon, where “Florence Nightingale's room” is still shown. For the rest, Miss Nightingale's life continued on the old lines,[195] and whether at Claydon or in South Street the Sabbatical year of freedom from responsibilities, letters, interviews, and Blue-books did not come.
II
In the spring of 1880, Miss Nightingale was intensely interested in the elections. Her dislike of Lord Beaconsfield's policy, her recent intercourse with Mr. Gladstone, her hopes for India, her interest in the Verneys, as well as her own sympathy with liberal ideas and the Liberalism traditional in her family, made her a stout partisan. “I hope, dearest,” she wrote to a nursing friend (March 28), “you care about the elections. You are in the thick of them. Sir Harry with patriotic pluck is in his 79th year fighting a losing battle at Buckingham.[196] But what delights me is that the Liberal side find that the labourers and the working man have waked up during the last 6 years to interests entirely new to them. Then, 6 years ago, we could hardly get a hearing: now men jam themselves into small hot rooms, struggling for standing-room while for 3 hours they listen to political talk. Whether we win or not, such interest will never die.” When the Liberal victory was complete, she was eager, like the rest of the political world, to know who would be Prime Minister, and more anxious than other people (except the few personally concerned) to know who would succeed Lord Lytton as Viceroy of India. Sir Harry Verney sent her the latest rumours from the Row in the morning and from the Clubs in the afternoon. She must have been greatly pleased when Lord Ripon's appointment to India was announced; but curiously there is no note about it, nor any record of a visit from him, nor at this stage any correspondence. They were, however, old friends; and as soon as Lord Ripon set to work in India, correspondence, at once cordial and confidential, began. Advocacy of Lord Ripon's Indian policy was indeed one of the absorbing interests which occupied Miss Nightingale during the years covered in the present chapter. Her other main preoccupation was the state of the Army Medical and Hospital service—a matter which became urgent in connection with the campaigns in South Africa, Egypt, and the Soudan.
These two branches of work now occupied the front; but they did not cause Miss Nightingale to abandon other responsibilities, and the reader must supply a background of the various kinds of work described in earlier chapters. She was still busy with details of Indian sanitation, for the Sanitary Annual was still submitted to her revision. She was still consulted on questions of nursing administration and hospital construction. “They are in difficulties,” wrote Sir Harry Verney (Jan. 30, 1881), in forwarding an application of this kind; “so they appeal to you—the Family Solicitor to whom we all turn when we get into a scrape, but your Family is a large one—the whole human race.” She still filled the part of Lady Bountiful, with more than that lady's usual care for detail, to her poorer neighbours in the country. The Working-Men's Institute at Holloway (near Lea Hurst) referred to her the question whether playing-cards should be admitted. She was in favour of the cards, but a majority of the Committee were against them, and, before giving her opinion, she conducted an inquiry as elaborate and far-searching as if it were a case of cholera. And more assiduously, rather than less, did she devote herself to the affairs of the Nightingale School and its old pupils. There are years at this period during which as many as 400 letters from nurses were preserved in this sort, and there are Sisters to each of whom more than fifty letters were written. She introduced the innovation of sending her probationers to the National Training School of Cookery, and she looked over their notes on the lessons, founding thereon hints to the teachers. The extension of trained nursing in workhouse infirmaries called for more Nightingale nurses. “Yesterday,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (June 30, 1881), “we opened the new Marylebone Infirmary (760 beds). We nurse it with our trained nurses, thank God! I have each of these women to see for three or four hours alone before she begins work.” It was during this period that Miss Nightingale paid her first visit to the new St. Thomas's Hospital. She drove there on January 27, 1882, and inspected the quarters of her Training School and one of the Hospital wards. “Just one week has elapsed,” wrote the Matron (Feb. 4), “since you honoured us with your more than welcome presence, and I cannot go to bed to-night until I have thanked you for all the admiration in which you speak of your Home and the pretty Alexandra Ward. No words of mine can ever express the delight it gave us to welcome you, our dearly loved Chief, to the Home and School which has for more than 20 years borne ‘her honoured name.’” The time was drawing near when pupils of the School were to follow in the footsteps of their Chief and do nursing service in the East.