CHAPTER I

DRIFTING

S.J.-B. landed at Queenstown on November 27th, 1868, and “came rushing through Cork, Dublin and Holyhead on that weary 24 hours’ journey” back to the home in Brighton, to find that she had arrived too late. Her Father had died some three weeks before, and outwardly the household had already settled down to the old life—as households do—in a way that to her ardent nature must at first have seemed passing strange. There was the joy and pain of meeting her Mother again,—the joy and pain of finding that that Mother was too fine a Christian to be broken-hearted at the prospect of so brief a parting,—and then, little by little, there came for S.J.-B. the realization of all she had left behind.

On board the _Java_ she had written to Dr. Sewall:

“The first thing of all I want to do is to write and tell you what I said so very imperfectly in my hurry and worry when you left,—how much your kind thought for me in arranging even the little things of my cabin has touched me.... Even now when I am going home—and going under such circumstances—the thought of all you have done for me and of all I owe you, comes uppermost....

Mrs. Browning says,—

‘God gives what he gives—be content, He resumes nothing given, be sure,’

and your love and help have been given to me, and I _know_ it is not all over now....

I am going home now to try and be a child once more,—simply to love and serve my Mother, as God will help me (for I do believe in Him in my pain and my love in my heart of hearts) and I believe that by being a child I shall learn to grow a better woman.”

Such was her resolve, and for months she struggled hard to carry it out, with no small success when one considers the complexity of the elements involved. She had come from a busy bustling beneficent life, with an outlook that appealed keenly to her energetic and ambitious nature, and she found herself in the quiet, smoothly-ordered home of her childhood, where she was only “Miss Sophy,” where her medical books and microscope slides were roughly classified as “nasty,” and where she was expected to conform to a rule of life which had never given scope to her possibilities, and was little likely to do so now that all its music was set in a minor key. The free life in America had developed her capabilities; quite possibly it had also rubbed off some few of those superficial elegancies that were regarded as a primary essential in the Englishwoman of her class.

There was another side to the question too. Glad as Mrs. Jex-Blake always was to see her “youngest little one” again, one can imagine that in the circumstances so electrical a presence in the house was not an unmixed boon. “I had much rather _know_ you well and happy there [in Boston] than see you ill and know you worried here,” the Mother had written years before, and there is no reason to think that her feeling in the matter had changed. Nothing could alter the deep undercurrent of love and understanding between this Mother and child, but neither of them had a naturally equable temperament, and one gathers that on the surface things were not always smooth.

“Poor little woman,” S.J.-B. writes to Dr. Sewall, on receipt of the first letter from Boston, “I do feel so sorry for you all alone and dreary, but don’t you think I am even worse off than you are? You can fancy what this house is now,—so silent and mourning,—and so much cut off even from outside, and at any rate no people or work or occupation of any interest outside ourselves.

M. and C. have their regular ways and plans, I suppose, but it is so long since I have been at home except for a visit, that it’s hard for me to fit in anywhere, and of course everybody’s feeling more or less sad and pained doesn’t make matters smoother. Just at present I am getting my books and drawers, etc., to rights, and after that is done I mean to try and read some Medicine at least,—perhaps if we stay here all winter I may apply to visit at the Hospital, etc.—only it would be rather disagreeable all alone.

Oh, Lucy dear, I do think it’s too bad to be expected to go on with Medicine, and not have you to help and interest me in it. If I didn’t believe you would after all come and start me in practice when I do get through, I don’t think I should have any heart to go on at all. But we _will_ be together again some day, old lady, won’t we? Oh, dear, I am getting so tired of living and fighting and hoping! As soon as one hopes one has got a little foothold it is all knocked away from under one!”

The letter then plunges into the question of money and accounts, which were not Dr. Sewall’s strong point.

“Poor little girl!—she has so many accounts, and I am dreadfully afraid she will get into a dreadful mess with them all! Do tell me if you got your accounts anything like straight after New York.”

Dr. Sewall was overwhelmed with work, but her letters came as fast and frequently as mails could bring them. “I do hope you do not miss me as much as I miss you,” she wrote, and again:

“I do hope this New Year that begins so sadly may not be a very hard one for you, though I fear you will have to fight hard before you can settle down at home. Do try to get some visiting at the Hospital or some medical work as soon as you can. It will do you good and your Mother too.”

But she too, when it comes to a question of “business,” relapses delightfully into the child. “Do say you are contented with me, and that I have done well.”

* * * * *

For three weeks S.J.-B. drifted, uncertain of her course, and then she set her sail.

“Today—after three weeks of doubt, indecision and rather negation—I was suddenly inspired to get up out of the dining-room arm-chair, walk to the Hospital, and ask Mr. Salzmann to read Medicine with me,—so Thursday and seq.—Histology!

It’s quite odd how pleased I am at the prospect of ‘shop’!”

On the last night of the year, as was her wont, she made her summing-up:

“Within a few hours of eight years ago,—the window,—and

‘May the New Year cherish—’

I don’t think there are any ‘hopes that now are bright.’ I believe I have been growing downwards in some ways. The simply quiet and comfortable, with no bother of any kind, seems to be about my ideal now.”

And this on the eve of the ‘Edinburgh Fight’!

The truth is S. J.-B. was in one of those backwaters of life which may at any moment give place to the swift rush of the current. She was living a great deal, of course, in the life she had left behind. On January 4th she writes to Dr. Sewall:

“When I find time I mean to write to your cousin.... I am sorry for W., he is a very nice boy. But, dear me, they do seem such a pair of children.

I don’t think she will get a _nicer_ man, but of course that is nothing if she doesn’t love him. I quite agree with you, ‘Never marry if you can help it’!”

And, in the depths of her mind she was constantly pondering the problems and mysteries of our being.

“Jan. 21st. [Diary] 29!—‘et praeterea nihil’!”

“Jan. 25th.... Yesterday Martineau’s fine definition of atheism,—the mind that venerates nothing, aspires to nothing.”

“Jan. 31st. Came tonight across old Trench’s line,—‘When God afflicts thee think He hews a rugged stone, which must be shaped or else aside as useless thrown.’

And then those true sad pale lines of Martineau’s (‘Child’s Thought’) about youth’s eagerness for truth, sometimes productive of dark agonies of doubt and loneliness drearier than death,—leaving the soul exposed upon the field of conflict without a God to strive for or a weapon for the fight.

Yesterday his ‘Immortality’ helped me again to seize that idea,— apprehend, ‘hang on to’ (Trench). That the negative testimony was stronger for than against—far harder to realize soul extinct than immortal,—that instinct for immortality grows stronger in sorrow, bereavements and on confines of death,—more likely teachers than the dust and glare of Vanity Fair. That the strange ‘caprice of death’ in selection, etc., inexplicable except in belief of future to which this is the ante-chamber. ‘Simply migrations of mind.’”

Of course the outward stagnation of life, the want of a definite object and purpose, renewed the old regrets for the friendship by means of which “we might have done anything together, we two.”

“Feb. 3rd. 4 p.m.

‘Are not the letters coming? The sun has almost set.’

I seem to have two such abiding ideas (presentiments?—hopes?) 1st. That somehow, somewhen the old door must be reopened,—light in the eventide,... 2nd. That some medical way will open—perhaps in Scotland,—and at length some one take pity on me and really teach me and push me.

Oh, dear, how I wish I had anyone with whom I could really take counsel and make common cause.

Well, I believe I am learning silence and patience at least somewhat, but how ‘bleak and bare’! Everything so grey and so dim.

Feb. 4th. In the night I woke and found M.’s head was ‘dreadful.’ So I laid one hand on her forehead and one on her hand and willed and willed the pain away,—till she slept quietly.

Curious how weary and achy that arm was even next morning,—how ‘washed out’ I was!

She says,—‘How do you explain it?’

‘Nohow.’”