Yet with thankfulness that she had been able to show the way to others, there was mingled something of the wistful regrets of old age. There was much in the administrative conduct of the nursing service at the front which she could have ordered better. There was a paragraph in a newspaper about the attractions of “afternoon tea in the nurses' tent” which pained her (though the reference here was not, I think, to any of her own Nightingale nurses). Encouraging, cheery, helpful to others, she was in herself sad and almost sombre. It was in vain that Mr. Jowett still enjoined her to dwell upon all that she had been able to do, upon the many blessings which had attended her work. “You will have felt General Gordon's death,” he wrote (Feb. 22), “as much as any one. What poor creatures most of us seem in comparison with him! But not you, not you!” But the note which she struck in her next Address to the Probationers was all of humility. Old friends and comrades were dying. In 1882 a dear friend of her girlhood—Madame Mohl—died in Paris. In the same year Dr. Farr died—one of the founders in this country of her favourite science of statistics, and an associate of hers in work with Sidney Herbert. One of the most valued of her allies in later Indian work—Sir Bartle Frere—died in 1884. In the previous year a yet older friend, and one of her wisest counsellors—Sir John McNeill—had died. He had sent her a copy of the last piece he wrote; the preface to a new edition of Sir Alexander Tulloch's Reply to the Chelsea Board, in which Sir John in turn replied to the version of that affair given by Mr. Kinglake.[216] Her letter to him, sent “with the deepest affection and veneration,” was in a sombre vein. The correspondence recalled old days, but again “How little permanent progress had been made!” She only, she began to feel, was left; and she so unworthy! What opportunities she had been given! How little use she had been able to make of them! There were “dark nights of the soul” when such self-reproaches were grievous. But some years of life would perhaps still be granted to her. She would consecrate them the more devotedly to higher service. “To-day,” she wrote (Christmas Day, 1885), “let me dedicate this poor old crumbling woman to Thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord. I was Thy handmaid as a girl. How have I back-slidden!”
CHAPTER VII
“THE NURSES' BATTLE”; AND HEALTH IN THE VILLAGE
(1885–1893)
Nursing cannot be formulated like engineering. It cannot be numbered or registered like population.—Florence Nightingale (1890).
What can be done for the health of the home without the woman of the home? In the West, as in the East, women are needed as Rural Health Missioners.—Florence Nightingale (1893).
The period of Miss Nightingale's life covered in this chapter includes the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee; which was also what Miss Nightingale used to consider her Jubilee Year. She fixed her effectual call at February 7, 1837. In 1887 she had thus completed fifty years vowed to service. In August, a month of many memories to her, she looked back over the past and around her in the present, and was in a despondent mood:—
(Miss Nightingale to Mrs. S. Smith.) Claydon House, Aug. 5 [1887]. Dearest Aunt Mai—Thinking of you always, grieved for your suffering, hoping that you have still to enjoy. In this month 34 years ago you lodged me in Harley St. (Aug. 12). And in this month 31 years ago you returned me to England from Scutari (Aug. 7). And in this month 30 years ago the first Royal Commission was finished (Aug. 7). And since then, 30 years of work often cut to pieces but never destroyed. God bless you! In this month 26 years ago, Sidney Herbert died, after five years of work for us (Aug. 2). In this month 24 years ago, the work of the second Royal Commission (India) was finished. And in this month this year it seems all to have to be done again. And in this month this year the work at St. Thomas's Hospital seems all to have to be done again—changing Matrons—after 27 years. And in this month this year my powers seem all to have failed and old age set in. May the Father[354] Almighty, Irresistible—for Love is irresistible—whose work and none other's this is, conduct it always, as He has done, while I have misconducted it. May He do in us what He would have us do. God bless you, dearest Aunt Mai. As ever your old loving Flo.
And in this month, too, Florence Nightingale was to die; but nearly a quarter of a century of life was first granted to her, and for the greater part of the time she remained in full possession of her faculties. Though she might be an “old lady” to young nurses, others remarked that she looked wonderfully fresh and youthful for her years. If old age had set in, her powers had by no means failed, and in many directions her work, though sometimes sore beset, continued to prosper. We will take first in our survey her work in the nursing world.
The “change of matrons” at St. Thomas's Hospital, caused by the retirement of Mrs. Wardroper, was hardly such a tragedy as it seemed to Miss Nightingale. Mrs. Wardroper had done her work, and there were younger women competent to fill the place. Mr. Jowett often begged Miss Nightingale to remember that “there is no necessary man—or woman”—“not even,” as, greatly daring, he once added, “yourself.” But in this case the Chief of the Nightingale School was not yet retiring, and she would still be able to supervise it—perhaps even more closely under a new Matron. For many years Miss Nightingale continued to maintain the intimate touch with her School that has been described in an earlier chapter: seeing the Sisters constantly, making the personal acquaintance of nurses, conferring with their medical instructors, reading their diaries and examination papers. Her heart was even more closely in the work when she secured the appointment, as Mrs. Wardroper's successor, of her dear friend, Miss Pringle. Presently, however, there came what was a heavy blow to Miss Nightingale. Miss Pringle joined the Roman communion, and it was necessary that she should retire from the Matronship of St. Thomas's. The months of unsettlement before the conversion was made were full of grief to Miss Nightingale. Indeed her notes and meditations suggest that the “loss” of her favourite pupil was one of the heaviest griefs of her life; but she loved her friend too well for the sorrow to leave any abiding bitterness. Over and over again in her meditations she wrote down lines from Clough's Qua Cursum Ventus. Miss Pringle was succeeded by Miss Gordon, an old pupil of the Nightingale School; she and Miss Nightingale speedily became the best of friends, and things went on much as before in the School. All these changes, with the delicate weighing of rival claims and sometimes with the worrying conflict of personal ambitions, caused Miss Nightingale heavy anxiety. Intensely conscientious, acutely sensitive, and seeing in every change a great potentiality of good or evil, she could not treat such things as mere matters of business. There have been Prime Ministers who could not sleep of nights under the sense of responsibility caused by ecclesiastical preferment; and to Miss Nightingale the selection of a Superintendent or a Home Sister was even as the appointment of a bishop.