THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH--_MARCELLA_ AND _SIR GEORGE TRESSADY_--THE
BUILDING OF THE PASSMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT
1892-1897
The acquisition of Stocks in the summer of 1892 was a landmark in Mrs.
Ward's life for more reasons than one, for it coincided with the advent
of a mysterious ailment, or disability, from which she was never to be
wholly free for the rest of her life. She had hardly been in the new
house a fortnight before she succumbed to a violent attack of internal
pain, showing symptoms of gastric catarrh, but also affecting the nerves
of the right leg. It crippled her for many weeks and exercised the minds
of both the local and the London doctors. Some believed that the cause
of it must be a "floating kidney," others that the pain was merely
neuralgic, while Mrs. Ward herself, with that keen interest in the human
organism and that instinct for self-doctoring which made her so
embarrassing a patient, watched the effect of each remedy and suggested
others with pathetic ingenuity. She had her better days, when she was
able to go down to the old walled kitchen-garden--about 300 yards from
the house--in a bath-chair, but whenever she tried to walk, even a
little, the pain returned in aggravated form. Only those who watched her
through those two summer months knew what heroic efforts she made to
master it and to throw herself into the writing of her new book,
_Marcella_, or how her "spirit grew" as the days of comparative relief
were followed ever and again by days of collapse. While she was still in
the thick of the struggle she received a visit from her American friend,
Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, whose impressions of the day were written
immediately to Mrs. Whitman, in Boston, and give a vivid picture of
Mrs. Ward as she appeared at that time to so shrewd and sympathetic an
observer.[17] (Aug. 20, 1892).
"Yesterday we spent the day with Mrs. Humphry Ward, who has been
ill for a while and is just getting better. Somehow, she seemed so
much younger and more girlish than I expected. I long to have you
know Mrs. Ward. She is very clear and shining in her young mind,
brilliant and full of charm, and with a lovely simplicity and
sincerity of manner. I think of her with warmest affection, and a
sacred expectation of what she is sure to do if she keeps strong,
and sorrow does not break her eager young heart too soon. Her life
burns with a very fierce flame, and she has not in the least done
all that she can do, but just now it seems to me that her vigour is
a good deal spent."
The "spent vigour" was only another word for bodily illness, but some
weeks after Miss Jewett's visit the first signs of relief appeared. Her
London doctor introduced her to a new drug, phenacetin, which worked
wonders with the sore side and leg. Phenacetin and all its kindred
"tabloids" came into common use at Stocks from that time onwards, in
spite of the mockery of her friends. Mrs. Ward developed an
extraordinary skill in the use of these "little drugs," and would often
baffle her doctors by her theories of their effects. At any rate, they
bore a remarkable part in the complicated struggle between her work and
her health, which was to occupy the next few years, and Mrs. Ward always
staunchly believed in them.
The improvement continued steadily, so that she was able, that autumn,
to undertake a speaking-tour in Lancashire and Yorkshire on behalf of
University Hall, finding wherever she went the most astonishing welcome.
At Manchester she went, after her own meetings were over, to a great
Unitarian gathering in the Free Trade Hall, stipulating that she was not
to speak; but at the end she was entrapped, nevertheless. Her husband
received the following account of it.
"Then at the very end, to my sorrow, the chairman announced that
Mrs. Humphry Ward was present, and had been asked to speak, but
was not well enough to do so! Whereupon there were such groans from
the audience, and I felt it so absurd to be sitting there pleading
illness that I could only move up to the desk, wondering whether I
could possibly make myself heard in such a place. Then they all
rose, and such applause as you never heard! It was a good thing
that a certain number of people had left to catch early trains, or
it would have been still more overwhelming to me. I just managed to
say half a dozen words, and I think I said them with sufficient
ease, but whether they carried to the back of the hall I don't
know. It certainly must be very exciting to be able to speak easily
to such a responsive multitude."
At Leeds the same kind of experience awaited her, though on a smaller
scale. "I should not have been mortal if I had not been deeply touched
by their feeling towards me and towards the books," she wrote. "And what
a strong independent world of its own all this north-country
Nonconformity is! I feel as though these experiences were invaluable to
me as a novelist. One never dreamt of all this at Oxford."
The improvement in health, which had enabled her to face the strain of
this tour, was not of long duration. Many letters in the winter complain
of the "dragging pain" in the right leg, which prevents her from walking
more than fifty yards without being "brought up sharp till the pain and
stiffness have gone off again--which they do with resting." By the
following June (1893) she was as ill as ever she had been in the
preceding summer. The London doctor adopted the theory of the "shifting
kidney," but encouraged her to allow herself to be carried up and
downstairs at Stocks, so as to lie in the summer garden. "I am afraid
this tendency may mean times of pain for me in the future," she writes,
"but it is not dangerous, and need not prevent my working just as usual.
I _am_ so enjoying the sight of the flowers again, and this afternoon I
shall somehow get to the lime on the lawn. It had given me quite a pang
at my heart to think the lime-blossom would go and I not see it! One has
fewer years to waste now."
She was hard at work on the writing of _Marcella_ throughout this year,
but the fact that she could not sit up at a table without bringing on a
"wild fit of pain," as she described it once, meant that she had to
cultivate the art of writing in bed or in her garden chair, a proceeding
which was very apt to produce attacks of writer's cramp. Elaborate
erections of writing-boards had to be built up around her, so as to
enable as many as possible of Dr. Wolff's precepts to be carried out,
but it was a weary business, and often the hand would drop lame for a
while, in spite of the author's longing to be "at" her characters. This
joy of creation was, however, her principal stay during these months of
pain and weakness.
_To Mr. George Murray Smith_.
_September 8, 1893._
"I, alas! cannot get well, though I am no doubt somewhat better
than when you were here. The horrid ailment, whatever it is, will
not go away, and work is rather a struggle. Still it is also my
great stand-by and consolation,--by the help of it I manage to
avoid the depression which otherwise this long _malaise_ and
weakness must have brought with it. A walk to the kitchen-garden
and back yesterday gave me a bad night and fresh pain to-day, and I
cannot travel with any comfort. But I can get along, and soon we
shall be in London and I must try some fresh doctoring. Meanwhile I
have written nearly a volume since we came down, which is not so
bad."
All through the autumn of this year she grew more and more absorbed in
her story, while her health improved slightly, though walking was still
an unattainable joy. The life of the little village of Aldbury, half a
mile from the house, which she wove into so many scenes of _Marcella_,
had an immense fascination for her. She would drive down in her
pony-carriage, whenever she could find time, to spend an hour with old
Mrs. Swabey or Mrs. Bradsell, or with Johnny Dolt, the postmaster,
gleaning from their old-world gossip the elemental life-story of the
country-side, or hearing the echoes of the bloody tragedy which had
convulsed the village just before we came to it, in December, 1891. For
while the old lady of Stocks (Mrs. Bright) lay dying, a murderous affray
had occurred in the wood, not a mile from the house, between the
gamekeeper and his lad on the one side, and a band of poachers on the
other. The keeper was shot dead, and the lad, who fled for his life into
the open, down towards a spreading beech in the hollow below, was
followed and beaten to death with the butt-end of a gun. No wonder that
Mrs. Ward took the tale and made it the dominating theme of her story,
weaving into it new threads that the sordid tragedy itself did not
possess--of the poacher Hurd, the dying child, the piteous little wife.
The village itself was somewhat agape, we used to think, over the
proceedings of the new mistress of Stocks, who would have "grand folks"
down from London to spend their Sundays with her, but who had also taken
a cottage on purpose for the reception of tired people from the back
streets, and who was constantly having parties down from "some place in
London" to enjoy the garden and the shady trees. The place in question
was Marchmont Hall, for whose cricket team we children preserved a
private but invincible contempt; but the elderly Associates became real
friends, and soon learnt to know Stocks and its environs with more than
a passing knowledge. Sometimes they would come down just for a day's
outing, but more often they, or the club-girls, or some ailing mother
and baby would stay for a fortnight at the Convalescent Cottage under
the care of the loquacious Mrs. Dell, whose memory must still be green
in many London hearts. A natural philosopher, reared on the Bible and
her own shrewd observation of life, Mrs. Dell was the ideal matron for
the London folk who were sent down to her; she took them all in under
her large embrace, though her opinion of their "draggled" faces when
they arrived was anything but complimentary. She was wont to express
herself, in fact, with considerable freedom about London life. Once one
of her guests--a working-man--had gone back to town for the week-end,
feeling bored in the country. "And pray what can 'e do in London?" she
asked with magnificent scorn. "Nothin' but titter-totter on the paves!"
And besides the Convalescent Cottage, there stood on the same steep
slope of hill, just under the hanging wood, with its mixture of beech,
ash and wild cherry, another little house, known simply as Stocks
Cottage, which Mr. Ward acquired to round off the miniature estate early
in 1895. It became a source of unmixed joy to Mrs. Ward, for she could
lend or let it to many different friends, from Graham Wallas and Bernard
Shaw, who came to it during one of her absences abroad, and thence
roamed the downs with the daughter she had left behind, preaching
collectivism and Jaeger clothes--to the Neville Lytteltons, who spent
seven consecutive summers in the little place, from 1895 to 1901. The
Cottage, indeed, became a very intimate part of Mrs. Ward's life at
Stocks, and its mistress, Mrs. Lyttelton, one of her closest friends.
* * * * *
_Marcella_ was finished, after a long struggle against sleeplessness,
headache and a bad bout of writer's cramp, on January 31, 1894. A
characteristic passage occurred between the author and her publisher
immediately afterwards. Mr. Smith had sent her, according to promise, a
considerable sum in advance of royalty, setting forth at the same time,
with his habitual candour, the exact sum which his firm expected to make
from the same number of copies. Mrs. Ward thought it not enough, and
wrote at once to propose a decrease of royalty on the first 2,000
copies. "I hardly know what to say," replied Mr. Smith. "It is not often
that a publisher receives such a letter from an author." But after
mutual bargainings--all of an inverted character--they arrived at a
satisfactory agreement.
Mrs. Ward fled to Italy with husband and daughter to escape the
appearance of the book, and saw herself flaunted on the posters of the
English papers in the Piazza di Spagna early in April. It was indeed an
exhilarating time for her, for there were few harsh voices among the
reviewers on this occasion, while the many letters from her friends were
as kind as ever. A typical opinion was that of Sir Francis Jeune: "I was
charmed with sentence after sentence of perfect finish and point, such
as no other writer of fiction in the present day ever attempts and
certainly could not sustain. They are a delight in themselves, and the
care bestowed on them is the highest compliment to a reader. May I add
that I think the dramatic force of some scenes--I single out the morning
of Hurd's execution, and the death of Hallin, but there are several
more--is greatly in advance of anything even you have done, and touches
a very high point in comparison with any scenes in English fiction. I
think George Eliot never surpassed them." In her _Recollections_ Mrs.
Ward describes the coming out of _Marcella_ as "perhaps the happiest
date in my literary life," for it not only gave her unalloyed joy in
itself, but it coincided also with a comparative return to
health--though always with ups and downs. Yet the immense publicity
which the success of the book brought her was also a grievous burden,
and she gives vent to this feeling in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, written
in reply to his own words of thanks for the gift of the book:
25, GROSVENOR PLACE.
_May 6, 1894._
MY DEAR MR. GLADSTONE,--
It was charming of you to write to me,--one of those kindnesses
which, apart from all your greatness, win to you the hearts of so
many. I am so glad that the eyes are better for a time, and that
you have shaken off your influenza.
We have just come back from a delightful seven weeks in Italy, at
Rome, Siena and Florence, and I am much rested, though still, I am
vexed to say, very lame and something of an invalid. The success of
_Marcella_, however, has been a most pleasant tonic, though I
always find the first few weeks after the appearance of a book an
agitating and trying time, however smoothly things go! The great
publicity which our modern conditions involve seems to wear one's
nerves; and I suppose it is inevitable that women should feel such
things more than men, who so often, through the training of school
and college and public life, get used to them from their childhood.
Your phrase about "prospective work" gave me real delight. I have
been enjoying and pondering over the translations of Horace in the
_Nineteenth Century_. Horace is the one Latin poet whom I know
fairly well, and often read, though this year, in Italy, I think I
realized the spell of Virgil more than ever before. Will you go on,
I wonder, from the love-poems to a gathering from the others? I
wanted to claim of you three or four in particular, but as I turn
over the pages I see in two or three minutes at least twenty that
jostle each other to be named, so it is no good!
Believe me,
Yours most sincerely,
MARY A. WARD.
_Marcella_, like her two predecessors, first appeared in three-volume
form, but Mrs. Ward's quarrel with the big libraries for starving their
subscribers, which had been simmering ever since _David Grieve_, became
far more acute over the new book. She reported to George Smith on May 24
that "Sir Henry Cunningham told us last night that he had made a
tremendous protest to Mudie's against their behaviour in the matter of
_Marcella_--which he seems to have told them he regarded as a fraud on
the public, or rather on their subscribers, whom they were _bound_ to
supply with new books!" This feud, together with the desire of the
American _Century Magazine_ to publish her next novel in serial form,
provided it were only half the length of _Marcella_, induced her to
consider seriously the question of writing shorter books. "It would be
difficult for me, with my tendency to interminableness," she admitted to
George Smith, "to promise to keep within such limits. However, it might
be good for me!" Soon afterwards the decision was made, and with it the
knell of the three-volume novel sounded, for other novelists soon
followed Mrs. Ward's example. The resulting brevity of modern novels
(always excepting Mr. William de Morgan and Mr. Conrad) is thus largely
due to the flaming up of an old quarrel between librarians on the one
side and publishers and authors on the other, as it occurred in the case
of Mrs. Ward's _Marcella_.
The summer of 1894 was a period of comparative physical ease, during
which Mrs. Ward found that although she was still unable to walk more
than a very little, she could ride an old pony we possessed with much
profit and pleasure, of course at a foot pace. Thus she was enabled to
explore some of the woods and hill-sides around Stocks which she had
never yet visited, a pastime which gave her exquisite delight. But by
the following winter both her persistent plagues had reappeared in
aggravated form. "My hand is extremely troublesome, alas!" she wrote to
her father, "and the internal worry has been worse again lately. It is
so trying week after week never to feel well, or like other people! One
lives one's life, but it makes it all more of a struggle. And as there
is this organic cause for it, one can only look forward to being
sometimes better and less conscious of it than at others, but never to
being quite well. However, one needn't grumble, for I manage to enjoy my
life greatly in spite of it, and to fill the days pretty full." And to
her husband, who was away on a lecturing-tour in America, she wrote in
February, 1895: "Alas! for my hand. It is more seriously disabled than
it has been for months and months, and I really ought to give it a
month's complete rest. If it were not for the _Century_ I would!"
This unusual disablement was due no doubt to the extraordinary
concentration of effort which she had just put forth in the writing of
her village tale of _Bessie Costrell_--a tale based on an actual
occurrence in the village of Aldbury, the tragic details of which
absorbed her so much as to amount almost to possession. She finished it
in fifteen days, and gave it to George Smith, who always cherished a
special affection for this "grimy little tale," as Mrs. Ward called it.
When he had brought it out, the world devoured it with enthusiasm--so
much so that her true friend and mentor, Henry James, whose opinion she
valued more highly than any other, thought fit to address a friendly
admonition to her:
"May 8, 1895. I think the tale very straight-forward and
powerful--very direct and vivid, full of the real and the _juste_.
I like your unalembicated rustics--they are a tremendous rest after
Hardy's--and the infallibility of your feeling for village life.
Likewise I heartily hope you will labour in this field and farm
again. _But_ I won't pretend to agree with one or two declarations
that have been wafted to me to the effect that this little tale is
"the best thing you've done." It has even been murmured to me that
_you_ think so. This I don't believe, and at any rate I find, for
myself, your best in your dealings with _data_ less simple, on a
plan less simple. This means, however, mainly, that I hope you
won't abandon _anything_ that you have shewn you can do, but only
go on with this _and_ that--and the other--especially the other!
Yours, dear Mrs. Ward,
most truly,
HENRY JAMES."
Meanwhile, in spite of the drawback of her continued ill-health, she
derived throughout these years an ever-increasing pleasure from the
friendships with which she was surrounded. Both in the London house,
which they had acquired early in 1891 (25 Grosvenor Place), and at
Stocks, she loved to gather many friends about her, though the effort of
entertaining them was often a sore tax upon her slender strength. Her
Sunday parties at Stocks brought together men and women from many
different worlds--political, literary and philanthropic--with whom the
talk ranged over all the questions and persons of the day from breakfast
till lunch, from lunch till tea, and from tea till dinner; but after
dinner, in sheer exhaustion, the party would usually take refuge in what
were known, derisively, as "intellectual games." Mrs. Ward herself was
not particularly good at these diversions, but she loved to watch the
efforts of others, and they did give a rest, after all, from the endless
talk! On one such occasion the game selected was the variety known as
"riddle game," in which a name and a thing are written down at random by
different players, and the next tries to give a reason why the person
should be like the thing. Lord Acton, who had that day devoured ten
books of Biblical criticism that Mrs. Ward had placed in his room, and
would infinitely have preferred to go on talking about them, found
himself confronted by the question: "Why is Lord Rothschild like a
poker?" For a long time he sat contemplating the paper, then scribbled
down in desperation: "Because he is upright," and retired impenetrably
behind an eleventh book. But Mr. Asquith made up for all deficiencies by
his ingenuity in this form of nonsense. "Why is Irving like a
wheelbarrow?" demanded one of the little papers that came round to him,
and while the rest of us floundered in heavy jokes Mr. Asquith found the
exact answer: "Because he serves to fill up the pit and carry away the
boxes."
Politics were of absorbing interest to Mrs. Ward, and though her own
views remained decidedly Unionist on the Irish question, in home affairs
they were sufficiently mixed to make free discussion not only possible,
but delightful to her. She still retained her old friendship for Mr.
Morley, and probably the majority of her Parliamentary friends at this
time were of the Liberal persuasion. 1895 was the year of the "cordite
division" and the fall of Lord Rosebery's Government, involving many of
these friends in the catastrophe. Mr. Morley was defeated at Newcastle
and went to recover his serenity in the Highlands, whither Mrs. Ward
sent him a copy of _Bessie Costrell_, provoking the following letter
from her old friend and master:
_August 6, 1895._
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,--
It was most pleasant to me to receive the little volume, in its
pretty dress, and with the friendly dedication. It will take its
place among my personal treasures, and I am truly grateful to you
for thinking of me.
The story is full of interest to me, and in the vein of a true
realism, humanising instead of brutalising. The "severity" of the
poor dead woman's look, and the whole of that page, redeems with a
note of just pity all the sordid elements.... We are quartered in
one of the most glorious of highland glens, five and twenty miles
from a railway, and nearly as many hours from London. Now and then
my thoughts wander to Westminster, passing round by way of
Newcastle, but I quickly cast Satan behind me--and try to cultivate
a steady-eyed equanimity, which shall not be a stupid insensibility
to either one's personal catastrophe or to the detriment which the
commonwealth has just suffered. If life were not so short--I
sometimes think it is far too long--I should see some compensations
in the deluge that has come upon the Liberal party. It will do them
good to be sent to adjust their compasses. The steering had been
very blind in these latter days. Perhaps some will tell you that my
own bit of steering was the very blindest of all. I know that you
are disposed to agree with such folk, and I know that Irish
character (for which English government, by the way, is wholly
responsible), is difficult stuff to work with. But the policy was
right, and I beg you not to think--as I once told the H. of
C.--that the Irish sphinx is going to gather up her rags, and
depart from your gates in meekness.
During these months another Liberal friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, was
taking infinite pains to pilot Mrs. Ward through the intricacies of the
Parliamentary situation required for the book she was now writing, _Sir
George Tressady_--drawing her a coloured plan of the House and the
division-lobbies for the scene of Tressady's "ratting," and generally
supervising the details of Marcella Maxwell's Factory Bill. "I am sure
it is owing to you," wrote Mrs. Ward to him afterwards, "that the
political framework has not at any rate stood in the way of the book's
success, as I feared at one time it might." She herself had regularly
put herself to school to learn every detail of the system of sweated
homework prevalent in the East End of London at that time; wading
through piles of Blue-books, visiting the actual scenes under the care
of a Factory Inspector, or of Lord Rothschild's Jewish secretary;
learning much from her Fabian friends, Mrs. Sidney Webb and Mr. Graham
Wallas.
"As to Maxwell's Bill itself," she wrote to Mr. Buxton, "after my
talk with you and Mr. Gerald Balfour, I took the final idea of it
from some evidence of Sidney Webb's before the Royal Commission.
There he says that he can perfectly well imagine, and would like to
see tried, a special Factory Act for East London, and I find the
same thing foreshadowed in various other things on Factory Law I
have been reading. And some weeks ago I talked over the idea with
Mr. Haldane, who thought it quite conceivable, and added that
'London would bear quietly what would make Nottingham or Leeds
revolt.' If such a Bill is possible or plausible, that I think is
all a novelist wants. For of course one cannot describe _the real_,
and yet one wants something which is not merely fanciful, but might
be, under certain circumstances. The whole situation lies as it
were some ten years ahead, and I have made use of a remark of
Gerald Balfour's to me on the Terrace, when we had been talking
over the new Factory Bill. 'There is not much difference between
Parties,' he said, agreeing with you--'but I should not wonder if,
within the next few years, we saw some reaction in these matters,'
by which I suppose he meant if the Home Office power were
over-driven, or the Acts administered too vexatiously.
"Do you see that they have lately been repealing some Factory
legislation concerning women's labour in France? We are not France,
but we might conceivably, don't you think, have a period of
discontent?"
When the book at length appeared, in September, 1896, Mrs. Ward was
afraid that it would hardly float under the weight of its politics, but
this was not so, for it sold 15,000 copies within a week, and never,
perhaps, were the reviews more cordial. The relation between the two
women, Letty and Marcella, was universally felt to be one of the best
things she had ever attempted, while the greater compression of the book
was accepted with a sigh of relief.
* * * * *
"Mrs. Ward is wisely content," said the _Leeds Mercury_, "to take more
for granted, and with true artistic instinct to leave room for the play
of her readers' imagination; we are saved, consequently, tedious
details, and that over-elaboration of incident, if not of plot, which
was one of the most conspicuous blemishes in her previous works. She is
beginning also to believe that brevity is the soul of art, as well as of
wit, and therefore, without any sacrifice of the essential points in her
narrative, she has found it possible--by discarding padding--to state
all that she has to tell about 'Sir George Tressady' in considerably
less than six hundred pages, instead of making her old, unconscionable
demand for at least a thousand. It would not be true to say that Mrs.
Ward has lost all her literary mannerisms, or even affectations, but
they are falling rapidly into the background--one proof amongst many,
that she is mastering at length the secret of that blended strength and
simplicity of style which all writers envy, but to which few attain."
* * * * *
Two opinions, expressed by such opposite critics as Mrs. Sidney Webb and
Mr. Rudyard Kipling, may be of interest to this day:
"The story is very touching," wrote Mrs. Webb, "and you have an
indescribable power of making your readers sympathize with all your
characters, even with Letty and her unlovely mother-in-law. Of
course, as a strict utilitarian, I am inclined to estimate the
book more in its character of treatise than as a novel. From this
point of view it is the most useful bit of work that has been done
for many a long day. You have managed to give the arguments for and
against factory legislation and a fixed standard of life with
admirable lucidity and picturesqueness--in a way that will make
them comprehensible to the ordinary person without any technical
knowledge. I especially admire your real intellectual impartiality
and capacity to give the best arguments on both sides, though
naturally I am glad to see that your sympathy is on the whole with
us on those questions.
"Pray accept my thanks from a public as well as a personal point of
view for the gift of the book to the world and to myself."
And Mr. Kipling wrote:
"DEAR MRS. WARD,--
I am delighted to have _Sir George Tressady_ from your hand. I have
followed him from month to month with the liveliest wonder as to
how the inevitable smash in his affairs was to fall, and now that I
have read the tale as a whole I see that of course there was but
one way. Like all human books it has the unpleasant power of making
you think and bother as one only bothers over real folk: but how
splendidly you have done the lighter relief-work! 'Fifteen out of a
possible twelve' has already been adopted as a household word by
us, who have two babies.
"It will always be one of the darkest mysteries to me that any
human being can make a beginning, end _and_ middle to a really
truly long story. I can think them by scores, but I have not the
hand to work out the full frieze. It is just the difference between
the deep-sea steamer with twelve hundred people aboard, besides the
poor beggars sweating and scorching in the stoke-hold, and the
coastwise boat with a mixed cargo of 'notions.' And so, when the
liner sees fit to salute the coaster in passing, that small boat is
mightily encouraged."
But the writing of _Sir George Tressady_ had been carried out against
greater handicaps of physical suffering and nervous strain than perhaps
any of Mrs. Ward's previous books. She had agreed to let the _Century
Magazine_ publish it serially from November 1, 1895, and had fully
intended to have it finished, at any rate in provisional form, by that
date. But ill-health and her absorption in the affairs of University
Hall retarded its progress, so that when November came there were still
eight or nine chapters to write, and those the most difficult and
critical of the book. The _Century_ cabled for more copy, but at the
same time Mrs. Ward fell a victim to "a new ailment," as she wrote to
her father, "and what with that and the perpetual struggle with the
hand, which will not let me write lying down, I hardly know how to get
through sometimes." She was advised to have what the surgeons assured
her would be a "slight" operation, but put it off until after a
Christmas month at Stocks, during which she devoted herself, crippled as
she was, to the writing of _Tressady_. Hardly would she have "got
through" these weeks at all--for by now the demands on her time, the
letters and requests to speak were endless--had she not discovered
during this winter a secretary, Miss Bessie Churcher, whose wonderful
qualities made her not only Mrs. Ward's closest helper and friend during
the whole remainder of her life, but have impressed themselves for good,
through many years' devotion, on the public work of London.
When Mrs. Ward at last found time to put herself in the surgeons' hands,
the operation which ensued was clumsily performed, and left her with yet
another burden to carry through all her later life. After it she lay for
days in such pain as the doctors had neither foreseen nor prophesied,
while the nervous shock of the operation itself was aggravated, one
night, by the antics of a drunken nurse, who came into her room with a
lighted lamp in her hand and deposited it, swaying and lurching, upon
the floor. Fortunately help was at hand and the nurse removed, but the
terror of the moment did not forward Mrs. Ward's recovery. It was many
weeks before sleep came back to her, many weeks before she could sit up
with any comfort or move with ease. But the book must be finished, in
spite of aches and pains, and finished it was within ten weeks of the
operation (March 22, 1896). George Tressady's death in the dark
galleries of the mine "possessed" her as she had only been possessed by
the tale of Bessie Costrell, and helped her no doubt to master the host
of her physical ills. But when the strain was over she was fit for
nothing but to be taken out to Italy, there to recover, if she could,
under the stimulus of that magic light and air which appealed--so at
least we used to imagine--to something in her own far-off southern
blood. At Cadenabbia, on Lake Como, health began to return to her; at
Padua she was "doing more walking than she had dreamed of for four
years," and with the revival of her strength she wrote home in sheer joy
of spirit, "All Italy to me is enchanted ground!" But alas, it was too
early to rejoice. She came again to the Lake of Como to have a
fortnight's complete rest before returning home--staying at the Villa
Serbelloni, above Bellagio--and there unduly overtaxed her new-found
powers. She must make her way to the ruined tower of San Giovanni that
looks at you from its hill-top beyond the little town, and since the
path was _non-carrozzabile_ she would make the ascent on foot. The
adventure was pure joy to her, the views of the lake all the more
intoxicating for having been won by her own strength of limb. But the
next day a violent attack of her old and still unexplained trouble
declared itself. The journey homewards, via Lucerne, was performed under
conditions of crisis which still leave a haunting memory, and though a
clever Swiss doctor at Lucerne appeared to diagnose the disease more
surely than any previous medicine-man, he could suggest no practicable
remedy. Mrs. Ward continued to suffer from her obscure ailment to a
greater or less degree for the rest of her life, as well as from the
results of the operation; but on the whole the attacks became less
frequent, or less severe, as the years went on. She developed an
extraordinary skill in fighting them, by the aid of the thousand and one
little drugs before-mentioned, and often derived a keen pleasure from
the sense of having met and routed an old enemy. But the enemy was
always there, lying in wait for her if she walked more, say, than half a
mile at a time. It is well to remember that her life from 1892 onwards
was conducted under that constant handicap.
* * * * *
Yet it was during the years in which her illness was most acute that she
carried to a successful conclusion her labours for the foundation of the
Passmore Edwards Settlement.
When Mr. Edwards, in May, 1894, offered to provide £4,000 towards the
Building Fund of University Hall,[18] it was only the beginning of a
long struggle towards the accomplishment of this design. The next step
was to interest the Duke of Bedford--as the ground-landlord of that part
of London--in the scheme. This Mrs. Ward succeeded in doing during the
summer of 1894, thus laying the foundation of a co-operation that was to
ripen into a strong mutual regard. The Duke took a keen personal
interest in the finding of a suitable site for the new building, and
when such a site became available in Tavistock Place, offered it to the
Committee at less than its market value, and contributed £800 towards
the building fund. Oddly enough, however, this site--for which the
contract was actually signed in February, 1895--was not that on which
the Settlement stands to-day, but lay on the opposite side of the
street; the disadvantage to it being that there would have been a delay
of two years in obtaining possession, owing to existing tenants' rights.
When, therefore, an equally good site actually fell vacant in the same
street a few months later, the Duke willingly released the Committee
from their contract and made over to them the ground on which the
Settlement now stands on a 999 years' lease. In the meantime Mr.
Passmore Edwards had raised his original offer from £4,000 to £7,000,
and then to £10,000; the total fund stood at over £12,000, and Mr.
Norman Shaw agreed to preside over an architects' competition and to
judge between the various designs submitted. All connected with
University Hall rejoiced greatly when the award fell to two young
residents of the Hall, Messrs. Dunbar Smith and Cecil Brewer, whose
simple yet beautiful design far surpassed those of the other
competitors. But according to the instructions of the Committee itself
the building was to cost up to £12,000, while the price of the site was
£5,000, and a further sum would be required for furnishing. Mrs. Ward
set herself to the task of raising further funds with her accustomed
energy, but her illness during the winter of 1895-6 greatly hampered
her, and the fund rose all too slowly for her eager spirit. Meanwhile
the builders' tenders soared in the opposite direction. When she
returned from Italy and Lucerne in May, 1896, she found the situation
critical; either fresh plans of a far less ambitious nature must be
asked for, or a further sum of £3,500 must be raised at once. Mr. R. G.
Tatton, already one of the most active members of the Council, and soon
to be appointed Warden, believed that the only hope lay in Mr. Passmore
Edwards, but told Mrs. Ward plainly that the benefactor had said he
could do no more unless others showed a corresponding interest. Mr.
Tatton boldly asked Mrs. Ward herself to lay down £1,000. This she did;
a fortunate legacy of £500 came in at the same moment, and Mr. Edwards
gave an additional £2,000 with the best grace in the world. Yet once
more, on the night of the formal opening, nearly two years later, did he
come forward with a similar donation, making £14,000 in all. He showed
throughout a steadfast faith in the working ideals of the Settlement
that triumphed over all minor difficulties; Mrs. Ward described him once
as possessed by "the very passion of giving." No wonder that the
Committee decided, long before the new building was completed, to call
it by his name.
Thus Mrs. Ward could have the happiness, during the years 1896 and 1897,
of seeing the beautiful building for which she had toiled so hard rise
and take bodily shape before her eyes. She became fast friends with the
two young architects, who had so decisively won the competition, and who
now devoted themselves indefatigably to the supervision of the work. She
formed, early in 1897, a General Committee for the new Settlement, the
wide and representative character of which showed how warm was the
sympathy entertained for the new venture not only in London, but also in
Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester. And she devoted herself to the
formation of a Lectureship Committee, named after Benjamin Jowett, which
was to carry on, within the new organization, the religious ideals of
University Hall. The Settlement itself rested on a purely secular basis,
but the Council fully agreed to the inclusion of the following clause as
one of the "Objects" in the Memorandum of Association: "To promote the
study of the Bible and of the history of religion in the light of the
best available results of criticism and research." The Jowett
Lectureship Committee was established in order to carry out this clause,
and a sum of £100 per annum was placed at its disposal from the general
revenue of the Settlement--a small result, it may be argued, of all the
missionary effort put forth in the founding of University Hall seven
years before. But the Settlement itself stood there as the result of
that effort, and as Mrs. Ward looked down, on October 10, 1897, on the
packed audience that assembled in the new hall to hear her opening
address, she might well feel that her dreams had come to a more solid
fruition than she could ever have dared to hope. But even then she did
not know the whole. There sat the mothers and the fathers, with faces
eager and expectant, ready to throw themselves into this big experiment
that was opening out before them. Mrs. Ward welcomed them with her whole
heart; yet this was not all: the children were at the gates.