THE CONFLICT CHANGED its character for the worse. Fanny had begun by sincerely wishing for Florence's happiness, sincerely believing what she wished to do would ruin her life. That point was passed. There was justification for Miss Nightingale's sense of guilt: she did evoke the worst from each one of her family; normally kind, normally generous, they behaved to her as to no one else. The most furious opposition came from Parthe. Parthe was thirty-one, and the truth was that she had achieved only moderate success; the successes, the lovers, the popularity were Florence's, not hers.
She cast herself for the part of the adoring indispensable sister who could not be left out. "Her sense of existence is lost in Florence," wrote Mrs. Gaskell. "I never saw such adoring love." "Your own Flo," wrote W. E. N. to Parthe in 1849. "Your idolatrised wondrous Flo. . . ." Florence's growing celebrity and success were to be shared, but what if, instead of creating a brilliant, interesting life for Parthe, she went off to lead a sordid existence of her own? The possibility drove Parthe frantic.
Fanny and W. E. N. accused Florence of heartlessness: for nearly a year she had been away, at great expense, doing exactly what she pleased; Parthe had been left behind to mope, and her health had suffered. They demanded that she should devote herself entirely to Parthe for the next six months. "To this," wrote Miss Nightingale in a retrospect, "I acceded. And when I committed this act of insanity had there been any sane person in the house he should have sent for Connolly to me." Dr. Connolly specialized in diseases of the brain.
Until the spring of 1851 she was to be Parthe's slave. Parthe triumphed. She made little scenes and was coaxed out of them; she sketched with Florence, sang with Florence, wandered with her in the garden, chattered of Poetry and art. The effect on Miss Nightingale was devastating. She had left Kaiserswerth feeling "so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again"; within a few weeks she was sunk in the old miseries. "Dreaming" returned, and never had she been so hopelessly enslaved. Once more nights were spent in agonized self-reproach; once more stupid with misery and frustration she was carried on Fanny's merry-go-round from Lea Hurst to Embley, Embley to London and back to Embley again.
In October the Nightingales received tragic news. Henry Nicholson had been drowned in Spain. It was with "deepest relief" that Miss Nightingale received a summons to Waverley; Henry's mother wished for the presence of the girl Henry had loved. The house was in a hubbub, and she took charge, accompanying Mrs. Nicholson to Henry's chambers in London and packing his possessions. The Nicholsons besought her to stay on, but Parthe insisted she should return. She wrote asking for "an extension of leave," but was allowed only a week-end. "Thank you, thank you dear Mum for letting me stay until Tuesday," she wrote.
After three months she was in despair. "My present life is suicide," she wrote on December 31, 1850. "Slowly I have opened my eyes to the fact that I cannot now deliver myself from the habit of dreaming which, like gin drinking, is eating out my vital strength. Now I have let myself go entirely. Temporary respite only I have. Henry's death and Waverley was one. . . . My God what will become of me? . . . I have no desire but to die. There is not a night that I do not lie down on my bed, wishing that I may leave it no more. Unconsciousness is all I desire. I remain in bed as long as I can, for what have I to wake for?" Three months of subjection to Parthe had still to run. "Oh, how am I to get through this day, to talk all through this day, is the thought of every morning," she wrote in January, 1851. ". . . This is the sting of death. In my thirty-first year I see nothing desirable but death." She did not reproach Parthe---"she is a child playing in God's garden," she wrote on January 7, 1851, "and delighting in the happiness of all his works, knowing nothing of life but the English drawing-room, nothing of struggle in her own unselfish nature." The reproaches were heaped on her own head. "What is to become of me," she wrote. "I can hardly open my mouth without giving dear Parthe vexation---everything I say or do is a subject of annoyance to her." "Oh dear good woman," she wrote of Fanny, "when I feel her disappointment in me it is as if I were going insane . . . . what a murderer am I to disturb their happiness. . . . What am I that their life is not good enough for me? Oh God what am I? The thoughts and feelings that I have now I can remember since I was six years old. It was not I that made them. Oh God how did they come? . . . But why, oh my God cannot I be satisfied with the life that satisfies so many people? I am told that the conversation of all these good clever men ought to be enough for me. Why am I starving, desperate, diseased on it? . . . What is the cause of it. . . . Oh what do books know of the real troubles of life. Death, why it's a happiness. . . . My God what am I to do?"
In the spring of 1851 she unexpectedly met Richard Monckton Milnes at a party given in London by Lady Palmerston. She had not seen him since the day she refused him, and she was shaken. He came across to her and said lightly: "The noise of this room is like a cotton mill." She was deeply wounded---how could he speak as if she were an ordinary acquaintance? On March 16, 1851, she met him again. "Last night I saw him again for the second time," she wrote in a private note; "he would hardly speak. . . . I was miserable. . . . I wanted to find him longing to talk to me, willing to give me another opportunity, to keep open another decision."
She did not want to recognize the fact that her refusal of Richard was final. But he had waited for her decision for nine years, and he would not reopen the subject. Some weeks later he became engaged to the Honorable Annabel Crewe.
In April the six months of slavery to Parthe ended, and Florence went immediately to Wilton to stay with Liz Herbert. When she returned to Embley she brought with her Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, one of the first women to become a doctor. Dr. Elizabeth was the daughter of a Bristol merchant who had emigrated and become a citizen of the United States.
She had contrived to get herself accepted as a medical student at the University of Geneva in the State of New York, had taken a medical degree, and was now studying medicine in Europe. Her experiences confirmed Fanny's worst fears. She had been training at "La Maternité," the State School of Midwifery in Paris, where life was "infernal." It seemed that the female pupils were "pretty generally the mistresses of the students," and Dr. Blackwell's younger sister was going to Paris in "male attire" to "avoid improper advances." Finally, Dr. Blackwell had contracted purulent ophthalmia at "La Maternité" and lost an eye.
One afternoon Dr. Elizabeth admired the façade of Embley. "Do you know what I always think when I look at that row of windows?" said Miss Nightingale. "I think how I should turn it into a hospital and just where I should place the beds."
That summer her attitude to life began to change. The absurdity of her six months' slavery to Parthe, Richard Monckton Milne's decisive action, the encouragement of the Herberts forced her eyes open. In a private note she wrote: "There are knots which are Gordian and can only be cut." Her sense of guilt lessened, and at long last she saw herself as the victim not the criminal. On June 8, 1851, she wrote a private note on her family in a new vein. "I must expect no sympathy or help from them. I must take some things, as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must take them, they will not be given to me. . . ."
A fortnight later she had arranged to go to Kaiserswerth.
Opinion had changed since her attempt to enter Salisbury Infirmary in 1845. Interest in hospitals was in the air; Fanny could no longer assert that a plan approved by the Herberts, the Bunsens, and the Bracebridges was shameful. Forced to yield, she gave way with the worst grace. Everything was to be done in secret. Parthe was ailing---Fanny declared that worry over Florence was making her ill---and had been ordered a three months' cure at Carlsbad. Florence was to leave England with Fanny and Parthe, go on to Kaiserswerth, and join them again to come home. Fanny forbade her to tell anyone where she was going or to write any letters from Kaiserswerth---she was not to tell Shore on any account, because young men were so carelessly indiscreet.
W. E. N. stayed at home. He was beginning to find the perpetual conflict in his family unbearable, and he "retreated into the shadows." Parthe was transported with fury. Scene followed scene, reaching a climax in the hotel at Carlsbad the night before Miss Nightingale left. "My sister," wrote Miss Nightingale in a retrospect, "threw my bracelets which I offered her to wear, in my face and the scene which followed was so violent that I fainted." The following evening she reached Kaiserswerth.
In 1833 a young pastor named Theodore Fliedner and his wife placed a bed and a chair in a summerhouse in their back garden and converted it into a refuge for a single destitute discharged prisoner. From this beginning grew the Kaiserswerth Institution. In 1851 it included a hospital with a hundred beds, an infant school, a penitentiary, an orphan asylum, and a normal school for training school mistresses.
Life was Spartan, work rigorously hard, the food such as was eaten by peasants. "Until yesterday," wrote Miss Nightingale to Fanny in July, 1851, "I never had time even to send my things to the wash. We have ten minutes for each of our meals, of which we have four. We get up at 5; breakfast 1/4 before 6. The patients dine at 11; the Sisters at 12. We drink tea (i.e. a drink made of ground rye) between 2 and 3, broths at 12 and 7; bread at the two former, vegetables at 12. Several evenings in the week we collect in the Great Hall for a bible lesson. . . . I find the deepest interest in everything here and am so well in body and mind. This is life. Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life. . . . I wish for no other earth, no other world than this."
She slept in the orphan asylum and worked with the children and m the hospital. She was present at operations, which was considered almost indecent. "The operation to which Mrs. Bracebridge alludes," she told Fanny, "was an amputation at which I was present, but which I did not mention to Parthe, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have in playing in the puddles round a butcher's shop."
Prayer accompanied every incident at Kaiserswerth. Twenty years later Miss Nightingale told Sir Harry Verney: "We were all taught to pray aloud extempore before the whole community whenever it was called for. And, at all the little fêtes or whenever he appeared Fliedner and his wife did this themselves about everything. It was all prayed out loud to God before everybody. If a child did wrong it was recommended to God before all the others. . . . We should all have thought it wrong not only to allege shyness but to feel shyness. . . . For the children there were perpetual birthdays . . . every birthday was fêted, there was dressing up, with flowers, telling stories, singing, every birthday child asked its own guests and I was always asked. My bad German and foreign stories amused them.... There was of course popping down on knees and praying in the fête."
Miss Nightingale always denied she had been "trained" at Kaiserswerth. "The nursing there was nil," she wrote in 1897, "the hygiene horrible. The hospital was certainly the worst part of Kaiserswerth. But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion than there. There was no neglect. It was the more remarkable because many of the Deaconesses had been only peasants---none were gentlewomen (when I was there)."
Toward the end of her stay the Herberts visited her, and Herr Fliedner told them that "no person had ever passed so distinguished an examination, or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn as Miss Nightingale." She was completely satisfied, completely happy; her heart overflowed, and she made one last effort to be reconciled with her mother and Parthe. On August 31, 1851, she wrote a long humble beseeching letter setting out her point of view once again. She repeated what she had tried to explain a hundred times before but never so gently, so affectionately. "Give me time, give me faith. Trust me, help me. Say to me 'Follow the dictates of that spirit within thee'. . . . My beloved people I cannot bear to grieve you. Give me your blessing," she wrote.
Neither Fanny nor Parthe responded---she never appealed to them again.
On October 8, 185 1, Miss Nightingale joined her mother and sister at Cologne. They were furiously resentful---"They would hardly speak to me," wrote Miss Nightingale in a retrospect. "I was treated as if I had come from committing a crime." A miserable party traveled toward England. Parthe's health had not improved: the cure had failed, because, she said, she had been so anxious while her sister was at Kaiserswerth. Fanny made light of Parthe's condition but fussed herself into a state of nervous exhaustion over bandboxes. For her part, Miss Nightingale was seething with plans. Kaiserswerth had whetted her appetite. She was wild to train in earnest. She wanted a larger hospital, one of the great London hospitals.
Once more her plans were doomed. She arrived at Embley to find W. E. N. in pain from inflamed eyes. An oculist ordered him at once to Umberslade, in Worcestershire, for a course of cold-water treatment, but he would not go unless Florence went with him.
She could not escape. Parthe was better because her sister was at home. W. E. N. would only undergo his treatment if she were with him; her sense of obligation was enormous, and if the claims of family affection were strong the claims of suffering were stronger. She entered the cage, gave up all she had gained, and submitted once more.
"O weary days---oh evenings that seem never to end---for how many years have I watched that drawing-room clock and thought it never would reach the ten! and for twenty, thirty years more to do this!" she wrote in a private note of 1851. In a long private note headed "Butchered to make a Roman Holiday," she wrote a furious indictment of family life. "Women don't consider themselves as human beings at all. There is absolutely no God, no country, no duty to them at all, except family. . . . I have known a good deal of convents. And of course everyone has talked of the petty grinding tyrannies supposed to be exercised there. But I know nothing like the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family. And the only alleviation is that the tyrannized submits with a heart full of affection."
She was not only furious for herself: Hilary Bonham Carter was being sacrificed, betrayed by her unselfishness, gentleness, and sweetness. In 1850, Hilary had spent almost a year in Paris living with Clarkey and working in a studio; though her talents were pronounced remarkable, she had never returned. Her mother "could not be left alone," she was "needed at home."
In 1852, under the title Cassandra, Miss Nightingale wrote a description of the life of a girl in a prosperous comfortable home. Cassandra is herself, Cassandra's family the Nightingales. Cassandra was not published, but a number of copies were printed privately. She takes Cassandra through a day. The morning is spent "sitting round a table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work and reading little books." The afternoon is passed "taking a little drive." When night comes, Cassandra declares, women "suffer---even physically . . . the accumulation of nervous energy, which has had nothing to do during the day, makes them feel every night, when they go to bed, as if they were going mad. The vacuity and boredom of this existence are sugared over by false sentiment. "Women go about maudling to each other and preaching to their daughters that 'women have no passions' . . . if the young girls of the 'higher classes' who never commit a false step, . . . were to speak and say what are their thoughts employed on, their thoughts which alone are free, what would they say? . . .
"Is not one fancying herself the nurse of some new friend in sickness, another engaging in romantic dangers with him . . . another undergoing unheard of trials under the observation of one whom she has chosen as the companion of her dream?" Finally, Cassandra, "who can neither find happiness in life nor alter it, dies," slain by her family. 'Free---free---oh! divine freedom, art thou come at last? Welcome beautiful death!"'
Miss Nightingale never suffered more acutely than at the period when she wrote Cassandra, but her suffering was no longer despair; it was rebellion. In herself she was free. "Dreaming" tortured her no longer. "I have come into possession of myself," she wrote in a private note of 1852. On her thirty-second birthday she wrote to W. E. N.: "I am glad to think that my youth is past and it never never can return---that time of disappointed inexperience when a man possesses nothing, not even himself." She possessed herself now, and she was at peace. Fanny and Parthe frantically prolonged the struggle for another year, but victory had in fact been won when she went to Kaiserswerth.
W. E. N. became uneasy, for it was borne in on him that his wife and daughter were treating Florence badly. In the early spring of the following year Florence went with him to Umberslade for his eye treatment. When they returned he was secretly her ally. During the summer of 1852, he indicated that as Fanny required all letters to be handed round it might "avoid enquiry" if Florence wrote to him at the Athenaeum Club instead of at home.
March of this year brought the Nightingales to London for the season once more, and the restrictions imposed on Miss Nightingale reached absurdity. She was treated as a schoolgirl, her movements controlled, her letters read, her invitations supervised; yet she was a woman of over thirty with a distinguished circle of her own. Among her friends in 1852 were Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Palmerston, Arthur Stanley, later Dean Stanley, and his sister Mary Stanley, and the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. She was held prisoner by her belief in Parthe, by her affection for W. E. N., by her sense of duty. Where was there an outlet for her? Where in all England was there an opportunity for a woman of her class with her vocation?
In the summer of 1852 it seemed as if she might find what she sought in the Roman Catholic Church. At this time Manning was a priest of the Roman Church remarkable for his devoted work in the poorest districts of the East End. In the course of a charitable investigation Miss Nightingale came on a child of fourteen who was being forced into prostitution, tried to rescue the girl, but found no organization in the Church of England would receive her. The child was Irish and, as far as she had any religion, Catholic. Miss Nightingale applied to Manning, who acted instantly, taking the child under his protection and placing her in the Convent of the Good Shepherd.
She was deeply impressed, and a friendship sprang up which produced a vast correspondence. She confided her family difficulties to Manning; he consoled and advised her, "writing endlessly." She avowed freely that she had "Catholic yearnings," she signed her letters "your weary penitent."
She was fascinated by the organization of the Church of Rome. "If you knew what a home the Catholic Church would be to me!" she wrote "All that I want I should find in her. All my difficulties would be removed. I have laboriously to pick up, here and there, crumbs by which to live. She would give me daily bread. The daughters of St. Vincent would open their arms to me. They have already done so, and what should I find there. My work already laid out for me instead of seeking it to and fro and finding none; my home, sympathy, human and divine." . . . "Why cannot I enter the Catholic Church at once" she asked "as the best form of truth I have ever known, and as cutting the Gordian knot I cannot untie?"
But though she seemed on the brink of conversion to Catholicism, she was engaged on a line of thought totally at variance with Catholic teaching. During the summer of this year she began an attempt to formulate "a new religion for the Artizans of England," aiming at demonstrating that free thought is not incompatible with belief in God. She described God as the Absolute, the Perfect, the Spirit of Truth. The moral world, she contended, was ruled by laws as fixed in their operation as those which science had recently discovered ruled the physical world. She did not touch on the Christian doctrines of salvation, redemption, and the incarnation of Christ. She was not drawn to the figure of Jesus. Her God was God the Father, not God the Son.
When Manning read her manuscript, he decided that she was not in the requisite state of mind for admission into the Church of Rome. She craved an opportunity to exercise her powers, but she was very far from submission; indeed, she had no conception of submission in the Catholic sense---it was an idea utterly foreign to her. Submission to her meant endurance, not yielding. In the essence of her character she was a chooser, a heretic, and he refused to accept her as a convert.
Nevertheless, he continued to be her friend, and his friendship proved of enormous importance. In spite of the fact that she was a Protestant, he arranged for her to enter a Catholic hospital where the nurses were nuns, and therefore "moral danger" did not exist. In the summer of 1852, he told her she could be received either by the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin or by the Sisters of Charity in the rue Oudinot, Paris. She wished to do both, to go first for a short time to Dublin, later for a longer time to Paris.
Once again there was a storm. Fanny and Parthe had hysterics. All the old arguments and reproaches were revived: Parthe's health, Florence's heartlessness, Parthe's devotion, Florence's ingratitude. Once more she was forced to abandon her plans.
Her friends became alarmed. Fanny's treatment of her younger daughter was beginning to look like mania. Was Florence's life to be ruined, her remarkable talents wasted because Fanny had an obsession? Aunt Mai and Mrs. Bracebridge thought it their duty to interfere, interviewing Fanny separately and together. Fanny, with her world against her, bombarded with what the Herberts thought, the Bunsens thought, the Shaftesburys thought, took refuge in a new policy. She vacillated; she "could not make up her mind to a definite step." She would discuss the question of Florence's future, agree to a plan, and next day behave as if she had never heard of any such suggestion in her life before. During the summer of that year Miss Nightingale wrote an imaginary speech to her mother. She wrote gaily, she was not suffering as she had suffered in the past. "Well, my dear, you don't imagine that with my 'talents,' and my 'European reputation,' and my 'beautiful letters,' and all that, I'm going to stay dangling about my mother's drawing-room all my life! . . . You must look at me as your vagabond son. . . . I shan't cost you nearly as much as a son would have done. I haven't cost you much yet, except for my visits to Egypt and Rome. Remember, I should have cost you a great deal more if I had been married or a son. . . . Well, you must now consider me married or a son. You were willing enough to part with me to be married."
Parthe was growing steadily worse: in almost daily scenes she attacked Florence with violent reproaches. She declared she was dying---Florence's behavior was killing her. She complained of suffering agonies from mysterious pains. She was taken to see the Queen's physician, Sir James Clark, who was a personal friend of the Nightingales, and he diagnosed "rheumatic headaches," adding that she was "nervous, fanciful and unstable," but that he could find "no physical disease." She did not improve, and in August, 1852 he arranged to have her for some weeks under observation at his house in Scotland, Birk Hall, near Ballater.
Miss Nightingale managed to get "permission for absence" from Fanny and went with Dr. and Mrs. Fowler, who in 1845 had been concerned in her attempt to enter Salisbury Infirmary, to Dublin, where she intended to use Manning's introduction and enter the hospital of the Sisters of Mercy.
But she was disappointed. "The hospital has got a whole holiday and is being repaired so there's nothing to be seen," wrote Hilary Bonham Carter to Clarkey. Nevertheless, while in Dublin she had, in some hospital, an experience of great importance. She speaks in a "Memorandum of 1852" of a "terrible lesson learned in Dublin," and her inclination toward Roman Catholicism vanished.
She was called from Dublin by Sir James Clark. Parthe had had a mental breakdown. There were "delusions," "some degree of chronic delirium," and "extreme irritability." Sir James, a friend of the Bunsens and the Herberts, admired Miss Nightingale, and he told her that she. must separate herself from her sister. Parthe's only chance of regaining normal health and balance was to learn to live without her; for Parthe's sake she must, at any rate for a time, leave home.
Ten years later Miss Nightingale wrote: "A very successful and justly successful physician once seriously told a sister who was being Devoured that she must leave home in order that the Devouree might recover health and balance which had been lost in the process of devouring. This person was myself." In a private note she described Sir James Clark's talk to her as "a terrible lesson which tore open my eyes as nothing less could have done. My fife has been decided thereby." On September 20 Sir James wrote W. E. N. a letter of grave warning.
Parthe showed "alarming indications" of "extreme irritability, total absorption in self, some degree of chronic delirium . . . nervous feelings have been, I venture to say, fostered by overindulgence." He recommended that Parthe should be separated from her family and placed in the care of "some judicious kind relative in the family connection with whom she could reside for some time."
Fanny's reply was to declare that Sir James was making a fuss about nothing. On October 12 Hilary Bonham Carter wrote to Clarkey from Embley: "Aunt Fanny does not like Parthe's illness made much of. She says 'One need not talk much about a little bilious attack."' None of Sir James's recommendations were followed, and Hilary wrote that Embley was filled with "an immense amount of company!"
After Miss Nightingale had brought Parthe back from Scotland, she stayed only a few days at Embley. The burden of her responsibility for Parthe had been removed, the last chain which held her had been broken, and she began quietly to separate herself from home. By the end of October she had obtained an authorization from the Council of the Sisters of Charity in Paris allowing her to work in their hospitals and institutions.
Manning wrote to his friend the Abbé des Genettes in Paris announcing her arrival; Miss Nightingale, who was in London staying with the Herberts, began to pack her trunks.
At this stage Fanny suddenly spoke as if the visit to Paris was an entirely new idea. "Flo is thinking of some new expedition perhaps to Paris," she wrote to Aunt Mai. "I cannot make up my mind to it." One evening W. E. N. unexpectedly appeared in the Herberts' drawing-room. He was distraught, saying that life at Embley was unendurable. Parthe was ill and in hysterics and Fanny at her wits' end. A large party of visitors was expected---how could Fanny manage all alone? Florence must leave London and come home.
Before Miss Nightingale could make a decision, Great Aunt Evans was taken ill. The journey to Paris was canceled and she went to Cromford Bridge House to nurse Great Aunt Evans through her last illness. On New Year's Eve she was back at Embley writing her "Memorandum for 1852 ... .. I am so glad this year is over; nevertheless it has not been wasted I trust. . . . I have re-modelled my whole religious belief . . . . I have re-cast my social belief. . . . I have learnt to know Manning .... Have been disappointed in my Dublin Hospital plan. Formed my Paris one.... Lastly all my admirers are married ... and I stand with all the world before me.... It has been a baptism of fire this year."
She determined to go to Paris in February. But Fanny and Parthe were not yet defeated; Fanny discovered she could not bear the idea that Florence was going abroad and suggested a new scheme. Florence had once said she wanted to found a sisterhood. Very well, let her found a sisterhood now, in Aunt Evans's empty house at Cromford Bridge. Everything should be provided---money, furniture, equipment. She declined. Parthe then suggested Forest Lodge, a vacant house on the Embley estate, which Miss Nightingale described as the only place on earth more unsuitable for the purpose than Cromford Bridge House. She declined again.
She had now been at home for some weeks, and Fanny must have seen for herself how her presence exasperated Parthe. She gave way---partially. Florence might go to Paris for a short time on a visit to Clarkey, but the horrid name of the Sisters of Charity was not to be mentioned. Fanny spoke of dressmakers and wrote to Clarkey enjoining her to make sure that while Florence was in Paris she bought clothes for the coming season. Parthe was furious, possessiveness and jealousy consuming her with a twin flame. On January 29, 1853, she wrote angrily to Clarkey: "Truth is a good thing and the history of the last year (the others much like it) is one month with the Fowlers in Ireland, three . . . in London, three . . . at Harrogate and Cromford Bridge, three at the water cure and Grandmamma's . . . so that I hope she has passed a very pleasant year, but meantime these eternal poor have been left to the mercies of Mamma and me, both very unwell and whose talkey talkey broth and pudding she holds in very great contempt. . . . I believe she has little or none of what is called charity or philanthropy, she is ambitious---very and would like well enough to regenerate the world with a grand coup de main or some fine institution, which is a very different thing. Here she has a circle of admirers who cry up everything she does or says as gospel and I think it will do her much good to be with you, who, though you love and admire her, do not believe in the wisdom of an she says because SHE says it. I wish she could be brought to see it is the intellectual part which interests her, not the manual. She has no esprit de conduite in the practical sense. When she nursed me everything which intellect and kind intention could do was done but she was a shocking nurse. Whereas her influence on people's minds and her curiosity in getting into varieties of minds is insatiable. After she has got inside they generally cease to have any interest for her."
Yes there was, in spite of the gentleness, the sympathy, the charming intelligence, something about Florence which chilled. Impossible to move her, or to influence her by a personal appeal. She did not know what personal feelings were; in a private note she wrote that never in her life did she recollect being swayed by a personal consideration. She lived on a different plane, out of reach, frighteningly, but also infuriatingly, remote.
On February 4 Miss Nightingale arrived at 120 rue du Bac. She was like a child out of school. Anna von Mohl, a young niece of M. Mohl, described her as being "so thankful to drop being ladylike." She would not take cabs but went everywhere in omnibuses. Anna, fascinated, wrote she was "on the point of falling in love with Florence." Her plan was to stay for a month with Clarkey and make a survey of all the hospitals in Paris. She then intended, thanks to Manning, to enter the Maison de la Providence, the hospital of the Sisters of Charity in the rue Oudinot, as a postulante to undergo a training in nursing. She was to wear the convent dress, "the dress of a nun," and "render all necessary service to the sick" under the direction of the sisters, but she was to eat and sleep in a separate cell and not enter the dormitories or the refectory of the sisters.
The day of her entry into the Maison de la Providence approached and final arrangements were made. She presented herself to the Reverend Mother, was approved, and an hour was fixed for her admission. She had almost come to her last day in the rue du Bac---when Fate struck again. Her grandmother was taken ill, and she was recalled to England. Once more the arrangements with the Sisters of Charity were canceled, and she hurried to Tapton, arriving in time to nurse her grandmother through her last days. "I can never be thankful enough that I came," she wrote to Hilary Bonham Carter on March 26. "I was able to make her be moved and changed and to do other little things which perhaps soothed the awful passage and which perhaps would not have been done as well without me."
After Tapton she went alone to Lea Hurst. She intended the separation from her family to be final, and before she went to Paris she had decided to take a post when her training was completed. Early in April, 1853 Liz Herbert wrote that through Lady Canning she had heard of what might prove a suitable opening. The Institution for the care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances had got itself into difficulties. It was to be reorganized and moved from its present premises. The committee, of which Lady Canning was chairman, were looking for a Superintendent to undertake the reorganization. Liz Herbert suggested Florence, and Lady Canning, after consulting her committee, wrote describing the post and its requirements. On April 8 Miss Nightingale wrote to Clarkey: ". . . It is no use my telling you the history of the negotiations which are enough to make a comedy in 50 acts. . . . I am afraid I must live at the place. If I don't, it will be a half and half measure which will satisfy no one. . . . I can give you no particulars, dearest friend, because I don't know any. I can only say that, unless I am left a free agent and am to organise the thing myself, and not they, I will have nothing to do with it. . . . But there are no Surgeon Students or Improper Patients there at all, which is, of course, a great recommendation in the eyes of the Proper."
Clarkey advised her to be sure to "trample on the Committee and ride the Fashionable Asses rough shod round Grosvenor Square."
On April 18 there was an interview, and Lady Canning wrote the same day to Mrs. Herbert: "I write a line in great haste to say that I was delighted with Miss N's quiet sensible manner. In one short acquaintance I am sure she must be a most remarkable person. It is true that Miss Nightingale looks very young but that need not matter and I hope the old matron or housekeeper will in point of outward appearance supply the young Miss N's deficiencies in years." Miss Nightingale had suggested she should bring, as her personal attendant, a "superior elderly respectable person" at her own expense.
When the news was broken to Fanny and Parthe, sickeningly familiar scenes took place. Parthe wept, raged, worked herself into frenzy, collapsed, and had to be put to bed. Fanny stormed, lamented, and had to be given sal volatile. Meals were sent away untouched. Ordinary life was at an end. W. E. N. took refuge in the Athenaeum Club. Among the Verney Nightingale papers are two sheets of Athenaeum Club notepaper scribbled back and front in W. E. N.'s strange difficult hand---he always used a quill and abhorred "great Iron Spikes":
Memorandum April 20th
I have this day reached the conclusion that Parthe can no more control or moderate the intensity of her interest in Flo's doings than she can change her physical form, and that her life will be sacrificed to the activity of her thoughts, unless she removes herself from the scene immediately---the only question being where to go . . .
Having come to the resolution that it is entirely beyond your mental strength to give up interference in your sister's affairs and being equally sure that your health cannot stand the strain we advise you to retire from London and take to your books and country occupations till her proceedings are settled.
23rd April
I doubt my own thoughts.
24th April
Retirement might do more harm than good---what then?
Reconsidered.
Matters might be worse if I were alone in mediation. Query then, is the case hopeless?
He did nothing. Parthe was not sent to the country but remained in London, passing from fit to fit of hysterics, while Miss Nightingale conducted her negotiations with the committee. W. E. N. did, however, take one vital step---he decided to allow Miss Nightingale £ 500 a year. Fanny was extremely angry and insisted that since Florence was independent she should pay her share of the bill at the Burlington. She paid and subsequently discovered that Fanny had charged her more than her fair share.
Negotiations with the committee, "those Fashionable Asses with their 'offs' and 'ons' poor fools! " were trying. Their hesitations centered upon her social position. She was a young lady in society---was it not peculiar for a young lady to wish for such a post; could a lady take orders, even from a committee of other ladies; should a lady, even in these days of strange mingling of ranks, nurse one who was not a lady; was it nice for a lady to be present at medical examinations and, worse still, at operations?
The deciding factor in the situation was a family quarrel. The Nicholsons disapproved of Florence. "Very unkind things" were now said. She was described as "going into service"; her conduct "could not be looked on in a charitable light." It happened that one of the committee knew Marianne, and asked her if Miss Nightingale's parents approved the step she proposed to take. Marianne drew a dramatic picture of Florence in opposition to her family: Parthe prostrated, Fanny in tears. The Committee, horrified, decided to have nothing more to do with Miss Nightingale and a letter was written informing her that negotiations were broken off.
However, Fanny and Parthe now completely changed front. Though they might disapprove, they were not going to have Florence attacked by Marianne, and Parthe rushed to her defense. She said unpleasant things about Marianne. Some of them were repeated to her brother Lothian Nicholson, who lost his temper, wrote angrily to Parthe, and finally wrote to Miss Nightingale suggesting with some justice that Fanny and Parthe had provoked gossip by their own conduct, but because poor Marianne had the reputation of talking, everything was laid at her door.
Miss Nightingale replied with a masterpiece of tact. "Dear friend," she began, and apologized for an "overwhelming quantity of work" which prevented her from replying sooner. She praised Lothian's attachment to his sister; he was quite right to defend her; but she preferred "not to go into the matter with you. I hope you will come and see me 'in service' when you have a day to spare in London. Finally, dear Lothian, one word, our old---and I hope real---friendship encourages me to say it. Do not engage in any paper wars. You will convince nobody and arrive at no satisfaction yourself." They remained friends and fifteen years later were still meeting.
Despite everything, by the end of April she had successfully completed her negotiations. She was to receive no remuneration, and she was to bear all the expenses of the Matron she brought with her to compensate for her youthful appearance, but she was to be in complete control not only of the management of the Institution but of its finances. Her duties were to begin as soon as new premises could be found. In the interval she proposed to go back to Paris and at last accomplish her training with the Sisters of Charity.
There was an explosion from Fanny and Parthe. What, when Florence was preparing to leave home, would she not devote the few weeks that were left to her mother and sister? She would not, and she went to Paris on May 30th.
For the third time she attempted to train at the Maison de la Providence, and for the third time she was defeated, for after a fortnight in the convent she developed measles, "une rougeole intense." "And, of all my adventures of which I have had many and queer, as will be (never) recorded in the Book of my Wanderings, the dirtiest and queerest I have ever had has been a measles in the cell of a Soeur de la Charité," she wrote to Clarkey on June 28. "It is like the Mariage de Mademoiselle; who could have foreseen it? . . . For me to come to Paris, to have the measles a second time, is like going to the Grand Desert to die of getting one's feet wet . . . "
Clarkey was in England, but as soon as Miss Nightingale was convalescent M. Mohl, "in his kind paternity," brought her to the rue du Bac and put her to bed in the back drawing-room, the same room in which she had seen M. Mohl. and Fauriel boil the kettle for tea on a January afternoon sixteen years ago. Her convalescence was spent in conversation with him. "Her gentle manner," he wrote to W. E. N., "covers such a depth and strength of mind and thought." Before she came home, she went to the dressmakers and was fitted for a "great panjandrum of black velvet." On July 13 she reached London, but she would not join Fanny and Parthe. She took rooms in Pall Mall.
These rooms caused fresh lamentations. Even Clarkey, who was staying at Embley, was moved to suggest that she might spend her free time at least with her family. "I have not taken this step Clarkey dear," wrote Miss Nightingale in August, 1853, "without years of anxious consideration. I mean the step of leaving them. I do not wish to talk about it---and this is the last time I shall ever do so. . . . I have talked matters over ('made a clean breast' as you express it) with Parthe, not once but thousands of time. Years and years have been spent in doing so. It has been, therefore, with the deepest consideration and with the fullest advice that I have taken the step of leaving home, and it is a fait accompli. . . . So farewell, Clarkey dear, don't let us talk any more about this. It is, as I said before, a fait accompli."
From July 13 to August 12 she was in London with Aunt Mai supervising the alterations to the new premises chosen for the Institution. Fanny refused to give her blessing---"'it would be useless upon what I consider as being an impossible undertaking." On August 12, 1853, she went into residence in the new premises, number 1 Harley Street.
"I AM LIVING IN AN ideal world of lifts, gas, baths and double and single wards," wrote Miss Nightingale to Hilary Bonham Carter in the summer of 1853. She was moving in. her natural element. From Paris, first from her cell at the Maison de la Providence, then from her convalescent couch at 120 rue du Bac, she had kept a firm hand on her committee, issuing precise instructions to them in long, enormously detailed letters.
Her requirements were not merely exacting; they were revolutionary. She had a scheme for saving work by having hot water "piped up to every floor." She wanted a "windlass installation," a lift to bring up the patients' food. On June 5, 1853, she wrote to Lady Canning: ". . . The nurse should never be obliged to quit her floor, except for her own dinner and supper, and her patients' dinner and supper (and even the latter might be avoided by the windlass we have talked about). Without a system of this kind, the nurse is converted into a pair of legs. Secondly, that the bells of the patients should all ring in the passage outside the nurse's door on that story and should have a valve which flies open when its bell rings, and remains open in order that the nurse may see who has rung."
Her committee became dazed. Forced to answer the innumerable questions raised in her letters, sent out on expeditions to unknown parts of London to view "windlass installations," and new systems of bells with valves, they had the sensation of having unknowingly released a genie from a bottle. They were, she said, "children in administration." In fact, they had never been called on to administer anything before. The Institution had been managed by two committees, a Ladies' Committee and a Gentlemen's Committee. The Gentlemen had transacted all the business and paid the bills. Miss Nightingale returned from Paris to find nothing had been accomplished. On August 20 she wrote to Clarkey: "I have had to prepare this immense house for patients in ten days---without a bit of help but only hindrance from my committee. I have been 'in service' ten days and have had to furnish an entirely empty house in that time. We take in patients this Monday and have not got our workmen out yet. From Committees, Charity and Schism, from the Church of England, from philanthropy and all deceits of the devil, Good Lord deliver us."
The accounts of the Institution were in confusion. "I am seriously uneasy about our funds," she had written to Hilary Bonham Carter on July 24. ". . . The Committee are wholly regardless of money. £ 1200 we had in the funds they have taken out for the alteration and furniture of this house, and spent every penny of it." The administration of the Institution was also in confusion. The two committees quarreled with each other, and, among themselves, the doctors did the same. "There is as much jealousy in the Committees of one another and among the medical men of one another as ever what's his name had of Marlborough," she wrote to W. E. N. on December 3, 1853.
During the first week of her appointment Miss Nightingale and her committee had a serious difference. She was determined the Institution should be non-sectarian; the committee was determined it should be Church of England. On August 20 she wrote to Clarkey: "My Committee refused me to take in Catholic patients, whereupon I wished them good morning, unless I might take in Jews and their Rabbis to attend them. So now it is settled, and in print that we are to take in all denominations whatever, and allow them to be visited by their respective priests and Muftis, provided I will receive (in any case whatsoever that is not of the Church of England) the obnoxious animal at the door, take him upstairs myself, remain while he is conferring with his patient, make myself responsible that he does not speak to, or look at, anyone else, and bring him downstairs again in a noose, and out into the street. And to this I have agreed! And this is in print! Amen."
She gained her point, but there was disapproval. Some members of the committee were shocked, and an opposition formed against her. In October Liz wrote offering to come up from Wilton for a committee meeting: "I thought some wicked cats might be there who would set up their backs and if so I would like to set mine up too."
Miss Nightingale was not what her committee had expected. Her genius was of an unromantic character. She perceived that unorganized devotion, unorganized self-sacrifice were useless. To bring about the installation of a row of bells "with valves that flew open" when the patient called was more effectual than to turn oneself into a devoted nurse, toiling endlessly up and down stairs because no such bells existed. To put in the best possible kitchen stove, to descend into the coal cellar and rake over the coal to ensure the coal merchant had not delivered an undue proportion of dust, to check stores and linen and provide patients with clean beds and good food were more effectual than to sit through the watches of the night cheering the dying moments of the patient expiring from scurvy and bed sores. But it was not so picturesque.
She gave devotion generously, and she did an immense amount of practical nursing in the Institution herself, but she was always aware that its success was impossible without a balanced expenditure and a proper system of keeping accounts.
She set herself to manage the committee. By December she had learned how to get her own way. "When I entered 'into service' here," she wrote to W. E. N., "I determined that, happen what would, I NEVER would intrigue among the Committee. Now I perceive that I do all my business by intrigue. I propose, in private, to A, B, or C, the resolution I think A, B, or C most capable of carrying in Committee, and then leave it to them, and I always win."
She went down into the kitchen and herself turned out cupboards and store-rooms, finding, she wrote to Clarkey in August, 1853, that while there were no brooms, brushes, or dusters, jam at is. a pot had been ordered in "£2 worth at a time." She had 52 pots of jam made in the kitchen of the Institution at a cost of 3 1/2 d. a pound. The grocer's boy had been calling "two or three times a day and bringing everything by the ounce." She gave out contracts to the best firms---one of her contracts was with Fortnum and Mason---and secured wholesale prices.
The bed linen and furniture of the Institution, she told Clarkey, were "dirty and neglected. Table linen and kitchen linen ragged and filthy. . . . Chairs with covers, not washable, but put on with nails and soaked with dirt. . . . Saucepans deficient." As the committee had already spent more money than the Institution possessed, she had to make the best of what was at her disposal. She enlisted Fanny's help and "had odd pieces of linen washed at home and patched together pieced out carpets, contrived bed covers out of old curtains."
The original staff from Chandos Street did not long survive. The housekeeper left after a single interview; the house surgeon resigned after a month. She secured a successor who "dispensed the medicines in the house, saving our bill at the druggist's of £ 150 per annum."
She was in tremendous spirits. On October 20 she wrote Fanny a letter, which was bursting with gaiety, asking for a pair of comfortable old boots---she was spending all day and most of the night on her feet:
"Oh my boots! Where are ye, my boots. I never shall see your pretty faces more. My dear I must have them boots. . . . More flowers, more game, more grapes."
Within six months opposition had collapsed. On December 3 she wrote to W. E. N.: "I am now in the heyday of my power. . . . Lady ----- who was my greatest enemy is now, I understand, trumpeting my fame through London."
It was not an easy life. She had disappointments. She had to struggle with suspicion and inefficiency. "The chemists," she had told W. E. N. in December, 1853, "sent me a bottle of ether labelled Spirits of Nitre, which, if I had not smelt it, I should certainly have administered, and should have an inquiry into poisoning." The builders did not carry out her orders properly. "The whole flue of a new gas stove came down the second time of using it, which, if I had not caught in my arms would certainly have killed a patient." Medically there were heartbreaking failures. "We have had an awful disappointment," she wrote to W. E. N. in the spring of 1854, "in a couching for a cataract, which has failed. The eye is lost . . . and I am left, after a most anxious watching, with a poor blind woman on my hands, whom we have blinded, and a prospect of insanity. I had rather ten times have killed her."
Fanny and Parthe continued to disapprove, though Fanny with ineradicable generosity sent regular weekly hampers of flowers, vegetables, game, and fruit from Embley for the patients. Miss Nightingale had her own sitting-room at Harley Street where she gave her friends tea out of special blue cups. Parthe was persuaded to accept an invitation but collapsed in hysterics as she crossed the threshold of the Institution. She nevertheless could write in a private note of January I, 1854: "I have never repented nor looked back, not for one moment. And I begin the New Year with more true feeling of a happy New Year than I ever had in my life."
Yet she found time to go to parties, and in the season of 1854 received invitations from Lady Beresford, Lady Canning, Lady Cranworth, Lady Palmerston. Gay little notes went round by hand to Harley Street from frivolous friends. "Lock up your young ladies, leave someone else to stir the gruel and cab round to me." "Dearest do come to an evening party, it will be rather a squeeze." "Don't get too radical, sceptical and querical my Flo." With the Herberts she was on a footing of closest intimacy. "Dearest," "My dearest," "Dearest old Flo," Liz Herbert wrote.
Her patients worshiped her, writing innumerable adoring letters: "My dearest kind Miss Nightingale. I send you a few lines of love." "I felt so lonely when I saw you going away from me." "All your affectionate kindness to me comes before me now and causes me many tears." "I am your affectionate, attached and grateful." "Thank you, thank you darling Miss Nightingale." "You are our sunshine . . . were you to give up all would soon fade away and the whole thing would cease to be."
Her sympathy with impoverished struggling women penetrated into every detail of their lives. She understood their loneliness, their perpetual financial difficulties, the burden of other relatives even poorer than they. She sent a poor governess to Eastbourne at her own expense and arranged that she should be visited and taken for drives. "I know not how to thank you my dear dear Miss Nightingale. I cannot even express how much indebted I am to you," wrote the patient. Often she sent financial help. "How gratefully I accept your offer of defraying my poor aunt's expenses. My mother has unfortunately no means of settling it herself." She saved women whose resources had been exhausted from going straight from a bed of sickness to a new post. Again and again a letter runs: "I cannot thank you enough for this extra rest." At Harley Street her correspondence was very large. The patients wrote; their relatives wrote; poor friendless women who were complete strangers were "emboldened by your very great kindness to my afflicted friend" to confide their fears of dreaded secret ailments.
In December, 1853 Richard Monckton Milnes, after staying at Embley, wrote to his wife: "They talk quite easily about Florence, but her position does not seem to be very suitable." She had enjoyed the period of reorganization, but as soon as the Institution was running smoothly she became restless. By January, 1854 she was speaking of "this little mole hill."
In the spring of that year she began to visit hospitals and collect facts to establish a case for reforming conditions for hospital nurses. On May 29 Liz Herbert wrote: "Sidney has begged me to write and ask you whether you can give him any facts in writing as to abuses which exist in --- Hospital. Sidney says if he could get some authentic information on the subject of the nurses, their bad pay and worse lodging he could get the evil more or less remedied and public attention at any rate turned that way."
Soon letters were passing almost daily, Miss Nightingale submitting reports and Sidney Herbert asking for "additional information . . . as soon as possible." Reform was difficult. Within the hospitals there was jobbery. Hospital appointments were often held as the result of bribery or nepotism, and the official who supported reform found his appointment in danger. Outside the hospitals there was indifference; their conditions were accepted as a necessary horror. The number of the enlightened who, like the Herberts, pressed for improved conditions and a better type of nurse was very small. Most people agreed with Lady Palmerston. "Lady Pain thinks . . . the nurses are very good now; perhaps they do drink a little, but . . . poor people it must be so tiresome sitting up all night," wrote Lord Granville.
In any case, where was a better type of nurse to come from? Superior nurses did not exist. In June, 1854, a doctor who had met Miss Nightingale in Paris wrote asking her to recommend two reliable skillful nurses to act as matrons in colonial hospitals. She had to reply that she knew none: "Alas I have no fish of that kind." It was absurd to create a demand which could not be supplied. Before any scheme of nursing reform was embarked upon, a training school capable of producing a supply of respectable, reliable, qualified nurses must be brought into existence. Her first task must be to produce a new type of nurse.
She confided in Dr. Bowman, one of the best-known surgeons of his day, surgeon to the Institution, and her devoted admirer. King's College Hospital, where he held a senior appointment, was being reorganized and rebuilt, and his influence would be sufficient to obtain her the post of Superintendent of Nurses, where she would have scope for training a new type of nurse. Rumors reached Embley, and Fanny and Parthe broke into lamentations: the suggestion of a hospital post struck them with horror as fresh as if it had been a new idea.
But Miss Nightingale was not at home to be reproached in person; she would not go home, she remained in Harley Street. The eager, susceptible, over-affectionate girl had become the elegant, composed, independent woman of genius. It was now beyond anyone to stop Miss Nightingale in her course. She continued her negotiations with Dr. Bowman, and, down at Embley, Fanny's reproaches and Parthe's hysterics sank to ineffectual flutterings. They wrote her letters imploring her to nurse babies, to found a penitentiary; she ignored them, and their voices trailed into silence and were heard no more.
In the summer of 1854, cholera broke out in London, particularly in the miserable, undrained slums round St. Giles, to the west of Drury Lane. The hospitals were overcrowded; many nurses died; many, afraid of infection, ran away. In August Miss Nightingale went as a volunteer to the Middlesex Hospital to "superintend the nursing of cholera patients." From the Middlesex Hospital she went to Lea Hurst, where Mrs. Gaskell was staying. In a long letter to Emily Winkworth Mrs. Gaskell repeated Miss Nightingale's account of the epidemic. The authorities at the Middlesex Hospital were "obliged to send out their usual patients in order to take in the patients brought in every half hour from the Soho district, Broad Street, etc., . . . chiefly fallen women of the district. . . . The prostitutes came in perpetually---poor creatures staggering off their beat! It took worse hold of them than of any." Miss Nightingale was "up day and night, undressing them . . . putting on turpentine stupes, etc., herself to as many as she could manage." The women were filthy and drunken, crazed with terror and pain, and the rate of mortality was very high. All through the night wretched shrieking creatures were being carried in. From Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon she was never off her feet.
Mr. Sam. Gaskell, a relative of Mrs. Gaskell's, had been prejudiced by what he had heard of Miss Nightingale; he had spoken very contemptuously of her and called her "your enthusiastic young friend," but when they did meet he was "carried off his feet" And Mrs. Gaskell herself continued in a letter to Catherine Winkworth dated October 20th: "Oh Katie! I wish you could see her.... She is tall; very slight and willowy in figure; thick shortish rich brown hair; very delicate coloring; grey eyes which are generally pensive and drooping, but which when they choose can be the merriest eyes I ever saw; and perfect teeth, making her smile the sweetest I ever saw. Put a long piece of soft net, say 1 1/4 yards long and half a yard wide, and tie it round this beautifully shaped head, so as to form a soft white framework for the full oval of her face (for she had the toothache and so wore this little piece of drapery) and dress her up in black silk high up to the long white round throat, and a black shawl on and you may get NEAR an idea of her perfect grace and lovely appearance.... She has a great deal of fun and is carried along by that I think. She mimics most capitally, mimics for instance the way of talking of some of the poor Governesses in the Establishment, with their delight at having a man servant, and at having LADY Canning and LADY Mounteagle to do this and that for them."
And yet a week later Mrs. Gaskell was chilled. She too had discovered that Florence was intimidating. Beneath the fascination, the sense of fun, the gentle hesitating manner, the demure wit, there was the hard coldness of steel. On October 27 Mrs. Gaskell wrote: "She has no friend ---and she wants none. She stands perfectly alone, half-way between God and his creatures. She used to go a great deal among the villagers here, who dote upon her. One poor woman lost a boy seven years ago of white swelling in his knee, and F. N. went twice a day to dress it.... The mother speaks of F. N.---did so to me only yesterday---as of a heavenly angel. Yet the father of this dead child---the husband of this poor woman---died last 5th of September and I was witness to the extreme difficulty with which Parthe induced Florence to go and see this childless widow ONCE whilst she was here; and, though this woman entreated her to come again, she never did. She will not go among the villagers now because her heart and soul are absorbed by her hospital plans, and, as she says, she can only attend to one thing at once. She is so excessively gentle in voice, manner, and movement, that one never feels the unbendableness of her character when one is near her. Her powers are astonishing. . . . She and I had a grand quarrel one day . . . she said if she had influence enough not a mother should bring up a child herself; there should be creches for the rich as well as the poor. If she had twenty children she would send them all to a creche, seeing, of course, that it was a well managed creche. That exactly tells of what seems to me THE want---but then this want of love for individuals becomes a gift and a very rare one, if one takes it in conjunction with her intense love for the RACE; her utter unselfishness in serving and ministering . . . but she is really so extraordinary a creature that anything like a judgment of her must be presumptuous."
One day Fanny and Mrs. Gaskell were alone. Fanny spoke of Florence "with tears in her eyes," telling Mrs. Gaskell, "We are ducks who have hatched a wild swan." But it was not a swan they had hatched: in the famous phrase of Lytton Strachey's essay---it was an eagle.
The summer of 1854 marked the end of a chapter. The long agonizing apprenticeship was over, and the instrument uniquely fitted for its purpose was forged. In the world outside Harley Street a catastrophe was taking shape. In March, 1854 England and France had declared war on Russia. In September the Allied armies landed in the Crimea. Harley Street, with its unreasonable committee, its "deficient" saucepans, its ragged linen, had been a dress rehearsal. Now the curtain was about to go up on the play.