CHAPTER II

LAST ILLNESS OF MRS. JEX-BLAKE

So far S. J.-B.’s success in Edinburgh had been on the whole greater than most of her friends had anticipated. The experiment could never have been made, had not Mrs. Jex-Blake agreed to spend her winters in Edinburgh. S. J.-B. was a good deal blamed by other members of the family for urging this arrangement; but it must be borne in mind that although Mrs. Jex-Blake was in fairly good general health, she was subject to sudden alarming attacks of illness which had repeatedly brought her daughter hundreds of miles in hot haste to the sick bed, regardless of the studies, or the still more important affairs she was leaving behind.

Modern methods would have grappled with the illness at its source long before the patient had reached her present age, and a radical cure might have restored her to perfect health: as it was she lay under a sword of Damocles, and was regarded as a more delicate woman than she really was.

It was impossible for S. J.-B. to embark on medical practice under these conditions; so the Sussex Square house was given up, and the old lady— who elected to have her own _ménage_—divided her time between her daughter in Edinburgh and her son at Rugby.

“You have always been different to me from my other children,” she said to S. J.-B.; and, if she spoke with a consciousness of the sword in her heart, the words were mainly a tribute to her younger daughter’s untiring devotion, and remained in later days the source of comfort they were meant to be.

Towards the end of April 1881 Mrs. Jex-Blake went south, leaving her daughter more reluctantly than usual. It was only those who knew S. J.- B. very intimately who were at all aware of the effort it sometimes cost her to get through each “day’s darg,” and to keep a bright face turned to her patients and a brave face to the world at large. She was more tired than usual at the end of that winter, and Mrs. Jex-Blake was well aware of this.

The usual series of love letters passed between Mother and daughter:

“Eastfield, April 30th. [1881].

OWN DARLING,

I am really well, but feel only half of myself without you. I am _very_ good,—I sleep well, eat well—_two_ hot dinners a day,—but, as I was very tired, keep my room, it is so much easier to be quiet there. Florence quite mothers me....

You may be sure Dobbs is most attentive—and backs anything she advises with the

_Dr.’s wishes_....”

“4 Manor Place, Edinburgh. May 1st.

... Many thanks for your dear little letters, but you mustn’t scribble too much to anybody!—Such sweet leaves in today’s note!

Yes, my darling, I miss my dear old lady _very_ much, but we are both going to be very good, and get quite strong for our reunion in September. I shall be very grateful to you if you keep up your ‘two hot dinners’ honestly, and all the rest of it.... It breaks my heart to find you run down as I do year after year when I come to fetch you back again.

I don’t know exactly when Ursula comes, but you will hear from her.

Dr. M‘Laren is back,[143] and so vexed to have missed saying ‘Goodbye’!

Yours lovingly, SOPH.”

Footnote 143:

Dr. Agnes M‘Laren had taken the house adjoining S. J.-B.’s.

Towards the end of June Mrs. Jex-Blake was less well, but the doctor who attended her saw no cause for anxiety. On the 28th, however, alarming indications of the old enemy showed themselves suddenly, and he telegraphed to S. J.-B. to come immediately. There was one more rush south “on eagle’s wings,” but fortunately this time S. J.-B. had the companionship of Miss Du Pre, with whom she reached Rugby at 2 a.m.

The patient had been given up by the doctor and by all, and even S. J.- B., when she saw her, thought she was dying; but she fought for the precious life with every fibre of her being, refusing to own defeat and absolutely regardless of her own health. For ten days and nights she scarcely left the room. The doctor in attendance was only too glad that she should have a free hand, and after a few days they sent for Dr. King Chambers, in whose skill S. J.-B. had almost unlimited faith. His visit proved reassuring.

“Her life hung so evenly on the balance when I left,” he wrote next day, “that I was obliged to acknowledge to myself that my trust in her recovery was a sanguine one. Please one line about her, and, if it is a favourable one, I shall answer it by a little advice to yourself, which you will in that case be in a condition to take.”

On July 7th all looked well, and S. J.-B. felt the wonderful supporting power of hope, but, on the following day, there was a sudden turn for the worse, and at half past six in the evening, the patient passed quietly away.

* * * * *

The event is recorded in the diary by a great sheaf of blank pages, with a pathetic notice from the _Times_ in the middle of them.

That is all, but constantly for a year, intermittently for many years, the diary recurs to the old longings and regrets, the gropings and questionings, the heart-searching and tears, that have followed every great bereavement. The reader of the preceding pages will not need to be told that S. J.-B. drank the cup to the dregs.

There were not a few who had lost in Mrs. Jex-Blake their dearest friend, but everyone’s first thought was of her younger daughter.

“I do hope,” writes that wise Heron Watson, “that you are not overborne by over much sorrow.”

“No human being loses what I do in her,” S. J.-B. wrote to her friend, James Cordery, and this was perfectly true. No one had loved her Mother as she had; no one else had the same cause; and no one else had the same appalling capacity for suffering.

It is interesting to note that of many beautiful letters of sympathy there is not one that strikes the reader as more truly comprehending than does Mrs. Anderson’s:

“4 Upper Berkeley Street, W. July 13th, 1881.

DEAR MISS JEX-BLAKE,

I have seen with very great regret the notice of your sorrow.

Knowing as I do how very close and tender was the tie between you and your Mother and also what a fine and ennobling influence she must have been to all within her range I am very full of sympathy for you. It is always very sad to break away from the past by losing one of these main links with it, but in your case there is very much to increase your sense of this. You have not (as so many others unhappily allow themselves to do) outlived the tenderness of the relationship. I hope that after a time it will be a comfort to you to remember this and to recal how happy she was in having so much affection from you.

I was very sorry to find I had written on business last Sunday at such a time.

Yours very truly, E. G. ANDERSON.”

S. J.-B.’s own letters are calm and restrained, of course. To her assistant in Edinburgh she writes,

“July 11th.

... Thanks for your kind note, and [your Mother’s] kind thoughtfulness.

But nothing would grieve me more than needlessly to part a Mother and daughter who still have each other, and I beg her to remain with you at least as arranged until the end of this month during which time I shall almost certainly remain here and try to get rested.

It was a hard battle,—it was bitter to fail just when we seemed winning, but I believe it was her wish to go. On Thursday I heard her murmur quietly, ‘Oh, Father, I pray Thee take me home,’—and now all is peace.

Yours sincerely, S. J.-B.”

About the work in Edinburgh S. J.-B. had no anxiety at all. It was her way, when she trusted people, to trust them whole-heartedly, and she had absolute confidence in the assistant who had worked with her for more than a year. Well, indeed, she might, for she was extraordinarily fortunate in that gallant-hearted and faithful young helper, whose only fault seems to have been that she threw herself too completely, too conscientiously, into everything she undertook,—her chief’s work and interests, together with her own studies and laboratory experiments.[144] S. J.-B. never realised what a responsibility her very trust was to one wholly worthy of it.

Footnote 144:

She was working at the solubility of fats, and the ether fumes were supposed to have proved insidiously poisonous.

In any case the double burden on the young shoulders proved too great, and there was a sudden and tragic breakdown ending in death.

One wonders how S. J.-B. bore the double shock. She had fancied herself “girt with the girdle of him who has nought,” when the second blow fell. She always said herself that she never could have won through but for Miss Du Pre, who simply carried her off to quiet places and tended her and brought her gradually back to the possibility of beginning again.

The practice in Edinburgh was given up for the time. There was nothing else to be done. Miss Ellaby took up the threads and finished them off as well as a stranger might; but there was no medical woman free to remain and fill the niche. It was hard on the practice.

* * * * *

In later years S. J.-B. met Mr. Frederick Myers, and she was induced by her impression of him to read his _Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death_, when it appeared some time later. She was deeply interested in the book, and her mind was open on the subject always; but she “tried the spirits” severely. “No human being,” she said one day in the course of an earnest talk, “could strive to come into touch with one gone before more earnestly than I tried to come into touch with my Mother. I used to lie awake at night concentrating every faculty on the effort. But I got no response.”

Her diary became her great outlet again in those dark days, in some places almost, as of old, a very cento of beautiful or poignant thoughts from the treasure-house of her memory; but that was never the side she turned to the world, though intimate friends got glimpses of it that startled them. One guessed it too from her anxiety to spare others the pain she had suffered herself.

“Don’t you ever go through the farce, dear, of thinking you haven’t been good to me,” she said to a friend years after this; and, although throughout life she often spoke hastily and over-sharply, she never spoke a word that might poison the night-watches for those she left behind. Coventry Patmore’s terrible poem[145] could never have been inspired by her.

Footnote 145:

“Poor Child.”

To one of her nieces she writes:

“Sept. 2nd, 1881.

DEAR ——,

I found the enclosed treasured among Grandmamma’s most valued papers, and I am sure you will like to have it back and to see how she kept and cared for it through so many years....

I think all your life it will be a pleasure to you remember how much you added to her happiness and helped to take care of her during the last few years. She always said you were ‘a little mother’ to her.

Your affec. aunt, S. J.-B.”