CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXI.Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and her husband—No respecter of persons—From within four walls—South Africa and America.

Multifarious work and many honours—Jubilee Nurses—Nursing Association—Death of father and mother—Lady Verney and her husband—No respecter of persons—From within four walls—South Africa and America.

Her activities were so multitudinous that it is difficult even to name them all in such a brief sketch as this. Besides those at which we have already glanced, prison reform, help to Bosnian fugitives, Manchester Police Court Mission for Lads, Indian Famine Fund—merely glancing down two pages of her biography, I find all these mentioned. She was herself, of course, decorated with the Red Cross, but M. Henri Dunant’s magnificent Red Cross scheme for helping the wounded on the battlefield may be said to have been really the outcome of her own work and example. For it was the extension of her own activities, by means of the Red CrossSocieties, which throughout the European continent act in concert with their respective armies and governments.

She was the first woman to be decorated with the Order of Merit, which was bestowed on her in 1907, and in the following year she received, as the Baroness Burdett Coutts had done, the “Freedom of the City of London,” having already been awarded, among many like honours, the French Gold Medal of Secours aux blessés Militaires, and the German Order of the Cross of Merit. On May 10, 1910, she received the badge of honour of the Norwegian Red Cross Society. But there was another distinction, even more unique, which was already hers. For when £70,000 came into Queen Victoria’s hands as a gift from the women of her empire at the time of her Jubilee, so much had the Queen been impressed by the work of the Nursing Association and all that had been done for the sick poor, that the interest of this Women’s Jubilee Fund, £2,000 a year, was devoted to an Institution for Training and Maintaining Nurses for the Sick Poor; and the National Association for ProvidingTrained Nurses, which owed so much to Miss Nightingale, was affiliated with it, though it still keeps its old headquarters at 23 Bloomsbury Square, where for so many years would arrive at Christmas from her old home a consignment of beautiful holly and other evergreens for Christmas festivities. H.R.H. the Princess Christian is President of the Nursing Association, and Miss Nightingale’s old friend and fellow-worker, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, is the Secretary. The influence of Miss Florence Lees, described by Kinglake as “the gifted and radiant pupil of Florence Nightingale,” who afterwards became Mrs. Dacre Craven, and was the first Superintendent-General, has been a very vitalizing influence there, and the home owes much also to her husband, the Rev. Dacre Craven, of St. Andrew’s, Holborn. Miss Nightingale’s warm friendship for Miss Florence Lees brought her into peculiarly intimate relations with the home, and both the Association and the Queen’s Jubilee Institute are the fruit of Miss Nightingale’s teaching, and a noble double memorial of the national—nay, imperial—recognition of its value.

The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in which Queen Alexandra was so specially interested, helped to crown the fulfilment of Miss Nightingale’s early dream and long, steadfast life-work.

But equally important, though less striking, has been the growing harvest of her quiet, courteous efforts to help village mothers to understand the laws of health, her pioneer-work in regard to all the dangers of careless milk-farms, her insistence on the importance of pure air as well as pure water, though she had always been careful to treat the poor man’s rooftree as his castle and never to cross his doorstep except by permission or invitation.

After the death of her father at Embley in 1874—a very peaceful death, commemorated in the inscription on his tomb, “In Thy light we shall see light,” which suggests in him a nature at once devout and sincere—she was much with her mother, in the old homes at Embley and Lea Hurst, though Lea Hurst was the one she loved best, and the beech-wood walk in Lea Woods, with its radiant shower of golden leavesin the autumn, for which she would sometimes delay her leaving, is still specially associated with her memory: and her thoughtfulness for the poor still expressed itself in many different ways—in careful gifts, for instance, through one whom she trusted for knowledge and tact; in her arrangement that pure milk should be sent daily from the home dairy at Lea Hurst to those in need of it.

With faithful love she tended her mother to the time of her death in 1880, and there seems to be a joyous thanksgiving for that mother’s beauty of character in the words the two sisters inscribed to her memory: “God is love—Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”

After her mother’s death, when the property had passed into the hands of Mr. William Shore Nightingale, she still visited her kinsman there and kept up her interest in the people of the district.

Among the outward events of her life, after her return from the Crimea, one of the earliest had been the marriage of her sister Parthenope,who in 1858 became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney,[20]and her home at Claydon in Buckinghamshire was thenceforth a second home to Miss Nightingale. It need hardly be said that in Sir Harry Verney’s various generous schemes for the good of the neighbourhood, schemes in which his wife cordially co-operated, Miss Nightingale took a warm and sympathetic pleasure. His keen interest in army reform was, of course, a special ground of comradeship. Miss Nightingale divided her time chiefly between her own home in South Street, Park Lane, and visits to the rooms that were reserved for her at Claydon. One of her great interests while at Claydon, soon after her sister’s marriage, had been the building of the new Buckinghamshire Infirmary in 1861, of which her sister laid the foundation; and her bust still adorns the entrance hall.

Mrs. Tooley reminds us that not only was Lady Verney well known in literary and political circles, but also her books on social questionshad the distinction of being quoted in the House of Commons. She gives many interesting details with regard to the philanthropic and political work of Sir Harry Verney and his family, but it is hardly necessary to duplicate them here, since her book is still available. Lady Verney’s death in 1890, after a long and painful illness, following on that of her father and mother, bereaved Miss Nightingale of a lifelong companionship, and might have left her very lonely but for her absorbing work and her troops of friends.

How fruitful that work was we may dimly see when we remember that—to instance one branch of it only—in ten years the death-rate in the army in India, which her efforts so determinately strove to lessen, fell from sixty-nine per thousand to eighteen per thousand.[21]She strove—and not in vain—to improve the sanitary conditions of immense areas of undrained country, but she also endeavoured to bring home to the rank and file of the army individual teaching.

She gives in one of her pamphlets a delightful story of men who came to a district in Indiasupposed to be fatal to any new-comer, but, strong in their new hygienic knowledge, determinednotto have cholera. They lived carefully, they grew their own garden produce, they did not give way to fear, andall, without exception, escaped.

To return for a moment to Britain, since a separate chapter is reserved for India. She was before her day in contending that foul air was one of the great causes of consumption and other diseases. And her teaching was ever given with courtesy and consideration. How strongly she felt on this and kindred subjects, and how practical her help was, we see clearly in her letters and pamphlets. She delighted in making festivities for companies of nurses and of her other hard-working friends. And in St. Paul’s fine sense of the phrase, she was no “respecter of persons”: she reverenced personality, not accidental rank. She had no patience with those visiting ladies who think they may intrude at all hours of the day into the homes of the poor, and her quick sense of humour delighted in many of the odd speeches which would have shocked the prim and conventional. She thoughtthe highest compliment ever paid to her staff of nurses who visited in the homes of the poor was the speech of the grubby ragamuffin, who seemed to think they could wash off even the blackness of the Arch-fiend and, when being scrubbed, cried out, “You may bathe the divil.”

But with all her fun and relish of life, how sane, how practical, she was!

Do you remember how she laughed at the silly idea that nothing was needed to make a good nurse except what the “Early Victorian” used to call “a disappointment in love”?

Here are other of her shrewd sayings from herNursing Notes:—

“Another extraordinary fallacy is the dread of night air. What air can we breathe at night but night air? The choice is between pure night air from without and foul air from within. Most people prefer the latter.... Without cleanliness within and without your house, ventilation is comparatively useless.... And now, you think these things trifles, or at least exaggerated. But what you ‘think’ or what I‘think’ matters little. Let us see what God thinks of them. God always justifies His ways. While we are thinking, He has been teaching. I have known cases of hospital pyæmia quite as severe in handsome private houses as in any of the worst hospitals, and from the same cause—viz., foul air. Yet nobody learnt the lesson. Nobody learntanythingat all from it. They went onthinking—thinking that the sufferer had scratched his thumb, or that it was singular that ‘all the servants’ had ‘whitlows,’ or that something was ‘much about this year.’”

If there had been any hope at first that Miss Nightingale might grow strong enough to stand visibly among those who were being trained as nurses by the fund raised in her honour, that hope was now past, and when the great new wing of St. Thomas’s was built—the finest building for its purpose in Europe—the outward reins of government had to be delivered over into the hands of another, though hers was throughout the directing hand. And the results of her work are written in big type upon the page of history.

In India and America she is acclaimed as an adored benefactress, but what has she not done for our own country alone? To sum up even a few of the points on which I have touched: she initiated sick nursing among the poor, through her special appeal was built the Central Home for Nurses, she was the pioneer in the hygienic work of county councils, and, besides the great nursing school at St. Thomas’s, to her was largely due the reform of nursing in workhouses and infirmaries. And in 1890, with the £70,000 of the Women’s Jubilee Fund, the establishment of the Queen’s Nurses received its charter.

In affairs of military nursing it is no exaggeration to say that she was consulted throughout the world. America came to her in the Civil War; South Africa owed much to her; India infinitely more; and so vital have been the reforms introduced by Lord Herbert and herself that even as early as 1880, when General Gordon was waging war in China during the Taiping Rebellion, the death-rate as compared with the Crimea was reduced from sixty percent. to little more than three in every hundred yearly.[22]

We have seen that, though she was so much more seriously broken in health than any one at first realized, that did not prevent her incessant work, though it did in the end make her life more or less a hidden life, spent within four walls, and chiefly on her bed.

Yet from those four walls what electric messages of help and common sense were continuously flashing across the length and breadth of the world! She was regarded as an expert in her own subjects, and long before her Jubilee Fund enabled her to send forth the Queen’s Nurses, she was, as we have already seen, busy writing and working to improve not only nursing in general, but especially the nursing of the sick poor; and unceasingly she still laboured for the army.

Repeated mention has been made of General Evatt, to whose memory of Miss Nightingale I am much indebted.

General Evatt served in the last Afghancampaign, and what he there experienced determined him to seek an interview, as soon as he returned to England, with her whom he regarded as the great reformer of military hygiene—Florence Nightingale. In this way and on this subject there arose between them a delightful and enduring friendship. Many and many a time in that quiet room in South Street where she lay upon her bed—its dainty coverlet all strewn with the letters and papers that might have befitted the desk or office of a busy statesman, and surrounded by books and by the flowers that she loved so well—he had talked with her for four hours on end, admiring with a sort of wonder her great staying power and her big, untiring brain.

He did not, like another acquaintance of mine, say that he came away feeling like a sucked orange, with all hoarded knowledge on matters great and small gently, resistlessly drawn from him by his charming companion; but so voracious was the eager, sympathetic interest of Miss Nightingale in the men and women of that active world whose streets, at the time he learned toknow her, she no longer walked, that no conversation on human affairs ever seemed, he said, to tire her.

And her mind was ever working towards new measures for the health and uplifting of her fellow-creatures.

We have seen how eager she was to use for good every municipal opportunity, but she did not stop at the municipality, for she knew that there are many womanly duties also at the imperial hearth; and without entering on any controversy, it is necessary to state clearly that she very early declared herself in favour of household suffrage for women, and that “the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage is the proud possessor of her signature to an address to Mr. Disraeli, thanking him for his favourable vote in the House of Commons, and begging him to do his utmost to remove the injustice under which women householders suffered by being deprived of the parliamentary vote.”[23]

Florence Nightingale’s London House, 10 South Street, Park Lane (house with balcony), where she died, August 14, 1910.

Whatever could aid womanly service—as a voice in choosing our great domestic executive nowadays undoubtedly can—had her sympathy and interest; but what she emphasized most, I take it, at all times, was that when any door opened for service, woman should be not only willing, but also noblyefficient. She herself opened many such doors, and her lamp was always trimmed and filled and ready to give light and comfort in the darkest room.

It has been well said that in describing a friend in the following words, she unconsciously drew a picture of herself:—

“She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable, but so much overlooked, in our Saviour’s life. She had the absence of all ‘mortification’ for mortification’s sake, which characterized His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day. And how did she do all this?... She was always filled with the thought that she must be about her Father’s business.”

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