a?t?? ?e? s?ed??e? ???? ?stata? ?? ?fe??? ?e
?e?? f???? t?? s?? ?e??a ?a??sa ?a?e??.[35]
DAMAGETUS.

THOSE who visited Mrs. Ward at Stocks during the later years of the War were wont to fasten upon any younger members of the family who happened to be there, to declare that Mrs. Ward was working herself to death and to plead that something must be done to stop her. And even as they said it they knew that their words were vain, for besides the perennial need to make a living, was not her country at war and were not the young men dying every day? Mrs. Ward was not of the temperament that forgot such things; hence her desire to throw her very best work into her “War books”—which owing to their low price and the special terms on which she allowed the Government to use them could never bring her anything like the same return as her novels.[36] She regarded them therefore almost as an extra on her ordinary work, so that the pressure on her time was increased rather than diminished as the War years went on and her own age advanced. And the last of the series, Fields of Victory, was to make on her time and strength the greatest demands of all.

But the lighter side of her War labours was the intense and meticulous interest she took in the “War economies” devised by herself and Dorothy at Stocks. How they schemed and planned about the cutting of timber, the growing of potatoes, the making of jam and the sharing of the garden fruit with the village! Labour in the garden was reduced to a minimum, so that all the family must take their turn at planting out violas and verbenas, if the poor things were to be saved for use at all, while Mr. Wilkin, the well-beloved butler who had been with us for twenty years, mowed the lawn and split wood and performed many other unorthodox tasks until he too was called up, at 47, in the summer of 1918. Mrs. Ward could not plant verbenas, but she armed herself with a spud and might often be seen of an afternoon valiantly attacking the weeds in the rose-beds and paths. The links between her and the little estate seemed to grow ever stronger as she came to depend more and more directly on the produce of the soil, and when, in 1918, she established a cow on what had once been the cricket-ground her joy and pride in the productiveness of her new creature were a delight to all beholders. Her daughter Dorothy was at this time deep in the organisation of “Women on the Land”—a movement of considerable importance in Hertfordshire—, so that Mrs. Ward could study it at first hand and had many an absorbing conversation with one of the “gang-leaders,” Mrs. Bentwich, who made Stocks her headquarters for a time and delighted her hostess by her many-sided ability and by the picturesqueness of her attire. All this gave her many ideas for her four War novels—Missing, The War and Elizabeth, Cousin Philip and Harvest, the last of which was to close the long list of her books. Missing had a considerable popular success, for it sold 21,000 in America in the first two months of its appearance, but Elizabeth and Cousin Philip were, I think, felt to be the most interesting of this series, owing to the admirable studies they presented of the type of young woman thrown up and moulded by the War. Mrs. Ward was by no means ashamed of her hard work as a novelist in these days.

But, side by side with this immense output of writing, Mrs. Ward never allowed the springs of thought to grow dry for lack of reading. The one advantage that she gained from her short nights—for her hours of sleep were rarely more and often less than six—was that the long hours of wakefulness in the early morning gave her time for the reading of many books and of poetry. “There is nothing like it for keeping the streams of life fresh,” she wrote to one of us. “At least that is my feeling now that I am beginning to grow old. All things pass, but thought and feeling! And to grow cold to poetry is to let that which is most vital in our being decay. I seem to trace in the men and women I see whether they keep their ideals and whether they still turn to imagination, whether through art or poetry. And I believe for thousands it is the difference between being happy and unhappy—between being ‘dans l’ordre’ or at variance with the world.”

In addition to her novels and her two first War books, Mrs. Ward had been writing at intervals, ever since the summer of 1916, her Recollections, and brought them out at length in October 1918. They covered the period of her life down to the year 1900, giving a picture of things seen and heard, of friends loved and enjoyed and lost, of long-past Oxford days, of London, Rome, and the Alban Hills, such as only a woman of her manifold experience could offer to a tired generation. The reception given to the book touched her profoundly, for it showed her, beyond the possibility of doubt, that her long life’s work had earned her not only the admiration but the love of her fellow-countrymen. As an old friend, Mrs. Halsey, wrote to Dorothy, “I remember Mlle Souvestre saying more than thirty years ago, ‘Ah! the books I admire—but it’s the woman Mary Ward that I love.’” “Mrs. Ward’s Recollections are of priceless value,” said the Contemporary Review; “all the famous names are here, but that is nothing; the people themselves are here moving about and veritably alive—great men and women of whom posterity will long to hear.” And another reviewer dwelt on a different aspect: “She has lived to see the first social studies and efforts of her Oxford days grow into the Passmore Edwards Settlement, the Schools for the Physically Defective, the Play Centres and a great deal else in which she has reaped a harvest for the England of to-day or sown a seed for the England of to-morrow.” The reviews generally ended on a note of hope for a second volume, to complete the story—, but the story remained, and will always remain, uncompleted.

Perhaps part of the affectionate admiration with which her Recollections were received was due to the wider knowledge which the public at last possessed of all that she had been able to accomplish, through twenty years of toil, for the children of England. For it so happened that during the two years that preceded the appearance of her Recollections—years of war and difficulty of all kinds as they were—Mrs. Ward had seen her labours for the play-time of London’s children crowned by that State recognition towards which she had always worked, and her hopes for the extension of Special Schools for crippled children to the provinces as well as London very largely realised. After an immensely up-hill struggle to maintain the funds for her Play Centres during the first two years of the War, it was at length the War conditions themselves that convinced the authorities that all was not well with the child-population of our big cities and that such efforts as Mrs. Ward’s must be encouraged and assisted in the fullest possible way. “Juvenile crime”—that comprehensive phrase that covers everything from pilfering at street corners to the formation of “Black-Hand-Gangs” under some adventurous spirit of ten or eleven, gloriously devoted to terrorising the back streets after dark—was the portent that convinced Whitehall, that set the Home Office complaining to the Board of Education and the Board of Education consulting Mrs. Ward. The result of these consultations, carried on in the winter of 1916-17 between Mrs. Ward, Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge (the Permanent Secretary), Mr. Pease the outgoing and Mr. Fisher the incoming President of the Board, was that on Jan. 26, 1917, an official announcement appeared in The Times to the effect that “Grants from the Board of Education will shortly be available in aid of the cost of carrying on Play Centres.... Hitherto Centres have been established only by voluntary bodies, mostly in London, where the Local Education Authority has granted the free use of school buildings. It is hoped that the powers which education authorities already possess of establishing and aiding such centres will be more freely exercised in future.”

To which The Times added the following note:—“The announcement that the Treasury has approved the principle of play centres and will signify its approval in the usual manner, forms a fitting and characteristic climax to twenty years of voluntary effort on the part of Mrs. Humphry Ward and a devoted circle of workers.”

There was general rejoicing among the higher officials of the Board, who had watched Mrs. Ward’s work for so long, when the Treasury at length announced its consent to the Grant. Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge wrote to her in the following terms:

As a matter of fact, the Board’s regulations were largely drawn up by Mrs. Ward herself, and her relations with both officials and President continued close and cordial—nay, almost affectionate!—down to the last day of her life. Nor was the London County Council left long behindhand. The Treasury Grant amounted to 50 per cent. of the “approved expenditure” of any voluntary committee or Education Authority which carried on Play Centres according to the Board’s regulations, so that it was not long before some fifty great towns all over England were opening Play Centres of their own, under the Act of 1907, and London was in danger of being left behind. In the summer of 1919, however, Mrs. Ward’s edifice was crowned by the Council’s deciding to take over another quarter of the cost of her Centres, so that she was left with only one quarter to raise in voluntary funds. The whole of the organisation, however—which had long been perfected by the contriving brain of Miss Churcher—was left in Mrs. Ward’s hands, subject only to inspection by the Council, for the Education Committee knew better than to disturb the result of so many years of specialised care and study. The additional funds available made it possible for Mrs. Ward, in the last three years of her life, to add ten new Centres in London to the twenty-two that she was maintaining before the advent of the Grant. It may be imagined what joy this gave to her, and how, in the winter of 1917-18, in spite of the cruelly-darkened streets and the danger of air-raids, she managed to make her way to many of these new Centres, lingering there in complete content to watch her singing children. The last phase of the Play Centre movement, as far as Mrs. Ward was concerned, was the publication by her daughter, in February 1920, of a little book describing their origin and growth,[37] with a preface written by Mrs. Ward herself. This she sent to Mr. Fisher, and received from him, a month before her death, a letter which deserves to be quoted here as a fitting epitaph on her work. Mr. Fisher and she had recently visited Oxford together, to speak at the opening of the “Arlosh Hall” at Manchester College.

In the same way Mrs. Ward succeeded, in the spring of 1918, in persuading the House of Commons to add a clause to Mr. Fisher’s great Education Bill, making it compulsory for Education Authorities throughout the country to “make arrangements” for the education of their physically defective children. She used for this purpose the machinery of the “Joint Parliamentary Advisory Council” which she had founded in 1913,[38] but the bulk of the work—involving as it did the sending out of circular letters to ninety-five Education Authorities, the sifting and printing of the replies and the forwarding of these to every Member of Parliament—was carried out from Stocks, causing a heavy strain—long remembered!—on the secretarial resources of the house. It may be noted too, that all this took place during those agonising weeks when the British Armies were being hurled back in France and Flanders, and when Mrs. Ward, of all people, realised only too clearly the peril we were in. But the task was accomplished and the clause added to the Bill, so that a new charter was thus provided for the 30,000 or so of crippled and invalid children who still remained throughout the country uneducated and uncared for.[39] A little later, the movement initiated by Sir Robert Jones and the Central Committee for the Care of Cripples, for converting some of the War Hospitals into Homes for the scientific treatment of crippled children received Mrs. Ward’s warm support, her special contribution to the movement being a successful campaign for the provision of educational facilities for the children lying for many months within the hospital walls. The beautiful War-hospital at Calgarth on Lake Windermere (the Ethel Hedley Hospital) was converted to this use in the spring of 1920, and one of the last pleasures which Mrs. Ward enjoyed was her correspondence with the Governors of the hospital, who described to her their plan for the conversion and invoked her blessing upon it. Mrs. Ward was never able to visit Calgarth, but the love she bore to the fells and waters of the North which surrounded it have linked her memory very specially with this delightful place, where children who, even ten years before, would have been deemed hopeless cases, recover straightness and strength. Her connection with this enterprise made a gentle ending to her long labour for these waifs of our educational system.

Who that lived through the year 1918 will ever lose the memory of its gigantic vicissitudes? Mrs. Ward, with her actual knowledge of so much of the ground over which the battles of March and April raged, was certainly not among those who could shut their eyes to the national danger they involved. She tried to maintain her characteristic optimism throughout the blackest times, and was in the end justified. But I remember one afternoon at Grosvenor Place when a friend who thought that he was much “in the know” informed us confidentially that we were “out of Ypres—been out for the last two days, but they don’t want to tell us,” and hope sank very low. When the battle rolled up to the foot of her own Scherpenberg Hill she longed, I believe, to be there with a pike, but victory was ours that day and she felt a special lifting of the heart at the news. As the terrible pageant of the year unrolled itself, her heart went out to France in her losing struggle north of the Marne; to Italy in those anxious days of June, when after a first recoil she swept the Austrians permanently back over the Piave; to France again in the first great return towards Soissons and the Aisne. Was it the real turn of the tide? Hardly could we dare to believe it, but in the light of later events it became evident that the Italian stand on the Piave had indeed marked the turn for the whole Allied front. Mrs. Ward always thought of this with peculiar satisfaction, for she was kept in constant touch with the situation out there by her son-in-law, George Trevelyan, who was in command of a British Red Cross Unit on the Italian front, and the disaster of Caporetto had very sadly affected her. Now all was well once more and Mrs. Ward, who had been no fair-weather friend to Italy, rejoiced with all her heart. There was much talk during the summer of a possible visit of hers, that autumn, to the Italian front, but events were destined to move too fast, and Mrs. Ward never again beheld the Lombard Plain.

But when the incredible hope had at last become solid fact—when the British Armies had stormed the Hindenburg Line and how much else beside, when the Americans had won through the forest of the Argonne and the French had pressed on to their ancient frontier; when Stocks had been illuminated on Armistice Night and we had all settled down to speculation, more or less sober, on the remaking of the world, Mrs. Ward began to enquire from the authorities as to the possibility of a third and final journey to France. For she wished with almost passionate eagerness to write a third and final book on the last phase of “England’s Effort.” She was met once more with the greatest cordiality. Sir Douglas Haig expressed a desire to see her; General Horne promised to send her over the battlefield of Vimy; Lille, Lens and Cambrai were to reveal to her the tale of their four years of servitude. And, on their part, the French promised to convey her to Metz and Strasburg and to show her Verdun and Rheims on her return, while Paris was to be made easy for her by the hospitality of a delightful young couple, her cousins, Arnold Whitridge and his wife, who had the good fortune to possess a house there amid the rush and pressure of all the nations of the world.

So everything was planned and settled during the month of December 1918, but before she left England on her last mission Mrs. Ward was able to enjoy that strange Peace Christmas which, in spite of its superficial note of thanksgiving, seemed to ring for so many the final knell of joy. Just two months before, Mrs. Ward had lost, from the influenza scourge, yet another soldier-nephew, the youngest Selwyn boy, while sorrow had come to the house itself in the death at a training camp of her butler’s only son—a lad of 17 who had been the playmate of her grandchildren on many a golden afternoon in the days gone by. But if the elders could not forget these things, the children at least could be made an excuse for rejoicing! And so her two grandchildren, Mary and Humphry, came once more to Stocks as they had come for every Christmas since they entered this world; they mounted the big bed as of old and played the egg-game with solemn attention to detail, and then on the last day of the year Stocks opened its doors to the children from far and near, coming in fancy dress to dance out the Year of Miracles. Mrs. Ward, who had that very morning finished the writing of a novel, moved among the groups with a face the pallor of which, though we did not know it, was already a premonition of the end. She drank in the beauty of the scene in deep draughts of refreshment. That little boy attired as feathered Mercury—that slender Rosalind with the glorious bush of hair—they caught at her heart! From certain fragments of talk that she let fall during the evening one gathered that the sight had meant more to her than a mere joyous spectacle. To these would be the new world: let the elders leave it them in faith. “Green earth forgets.”

Mrs. Ward’s third journey to France was of longer duration (it lasted over three weeks, Jan. 7-30) than either of the others, and save that the conditions of danger created by the actual fighting were eliminated it was of a still more arduous nature, while it afforded her even greater opportunities than the others had done of realising and summing up the proportionate achievements of the three great armies—French, American and British. For the object of this final pilgrimage was no less than to bring out, by a careful analysis of all the available facts, the overwhelming part played by the British Armies in France in the last year of the War, and so to do her part in silencing the extraordinary misconceptions that were still current, especially in America, as to the share that the British Armies had had in the final breaking of the German resistance. A Canadian girl working at an American Y.M.C.A. in France had written to her in the previous August, imploring her to bring England’s Effort up to date and to distribute it by the thousand among the American troops.

This first-hand evidence has recently received a very striking corroboration in Mr. Walter Page’s Letters, and was amply borne out at the time by our Ministry of Information at home. Moreover, since August, Great Britain had indeed added another chapter to her previous record! So Mrs. Ward was received by Sir Douglas Haig, at his little chÂteau near Montreuil, on January 8, 1919, and there had a most illuminating talk with him, illustrated by his wonderful series of charts and maps; she went through the desolation of Ypres, and Lens, and Arras; she visited General Birdwood at Lille and General Horne at Valenciennes, renewing her friendship with the latter and making the aquaintance of his Chief of Staff, General Hastings Anderson, “a delightful, witty person, full of fun,” who told her many things. She climbed the Vimy Ridge, “scrambling up over trenches and barbed wire and other dÉbris to the top,” assisted by Dorothy and Lieut. Farrer, their guide; she crossed the Hindenburg Line in both directions, the second time at the Canal du Nord, where she got out in the January twilight to study the marvellous German trench system and the tracks of two tanks that had led the attack of the First Army on September 27; she saw the area of open fighting beyond Cambrai, and, returning by the Cambrai-Bapaume road to Amiens, passed through a heap of shapeless ruins “where only a signboard told us that this had once been Bapaume.” From Amiens she passed on to Paris, and thence to Metz and Strasburg, realising something, at Metz, of the difficulty confronting the French Government in the large German population, and at Strasburg passing a wholly delightful evening with General Gouraud—hero both of Gallipoli and of Champagne. Armed with General Gouraud’s maps and passes she then returned via Nancy to Verdun and spent an unforgettable afternoon, first in inspecting the subterranean labyrinth under the old fortress which had given sleep to so many weary soldiers during the siege, and then in motoring slowly through the battlefield itself. It may be imagined how such names as Vaux, Douaumont, the Mort Homme, the Mont des Corbeils and the rest made her heart leap, how they stirred the vivid historic imagination in her which always enabled her to visualise, beyond her fellows, the actual movement of events and of the men who played their part in them. The sight of Verdun certainly affected her more deeply than anything, I think, save the Salient with its hundred thousand British graves. Then, sleeping at ChÂlons, she moved on to Rheims, arriving in the Place before what had once been the Cathedral in time to see the Prime Minister of England—a Sunday visitor from the Conference—standing before the battered faÇade in animated talk with Cardinal LuÇon. Mrs. Ward stood aside to let them pass, watching the retreating figure of Mr. Lloyd George “with what thoughts.” This was Rheims; what remedy for it would the Conference find?

Nor did Mrs. Ward neglect the American battle-fields, for on her way to Verdun she had passed through the St. Mihiel salient and studied the ground there; she had seen the ForÊt de l’Argonne in the winter dusk after leaving Verdun, and now on her way to Paris she spent a cheerful hour at ChÂteau Thierry, mingling with the American boys on the scene of their first and perhaps most memorable triumph. For actually to have helped by hard fighting, man to man, to keep the Boche from Paris, that was something for which to have crossed the Atlantic! St. Mihiel and the Argonne were all part of the great plan, but this, this was history! So at least Mrs. Ward felt as she crossed the sacred ground from Dormans to ChÂteau Thierry where the Germans had made their formidable push for Montmirail and Paris, and where an American regiment of marines had said them nay.

After her long pilgrimage Mrs. Ward spent a week in Paris, much absorbed in the pursuit of accurate information for the book that she had still to write. But there was also time for the seeing of many of those famous figures who, with the best intentions, filled the French stage for half a year and, at the end, gave us the world in which, tant bien que mal, we live. She went to consult with our ambassador, Lord Derby, on certain aspects of her work; she revived her old friendship with M. Jusserand; she saw General Pershing and Mr. Hoover, and, on the very day when the League of Nations resolution had been passed, President Wilson himself. Of this she has left a lively account in the first chapter of Fields of Victory.

Mrs. Ward should, by all the rules, have returned straight home from Paris, for she had already begun to suffer from bronchial catarrh and the weather had turned colder. But she was bent on seeing certain British officers at Amiens who had prepared some special information for her and therefore broke her journey there and also at the little “Visitors’ ChÂteau” at Agincourt. Here, struggling against the intense cold and her own increasing illness, she exhausted herself in long conversations, though all that she heard was of deep interest to her task. But she was obliged to give up a visit to the battle-field of August 8 which her hosts had planned for her, and to return instead, while she still might, to England. When at last she reached home she was pronounced to have tonsilitis and to be within an inch of bronchitis too, and was kept in bed for many days. But it was many weeks before the bronchial catarrh left her, nor did she ever, during this last year of her life, regain the level of health at which she had started for France in the first week of the year. Yet none the less must her articles be written, for time pressed if she was to catch the right moment for the book’s appearance. She was ably and generously helped by various officers, especially by General Sir John Davidson, who brought with him to Grosvenor Place one day a reduced-scale version of the great chart at which she had gazed fascinated at Montreuil, and which she afterwards obtained leave to reproduce in her book. “It was amusing,” wrote Dorothy that night, “to see Mother and Lady Selborne and Sir John Davidson all on the floor, poring over his wonderful chart of the War.”

But in spite of the willingness to help of the authorities, the labour of studying and digesting the mass of material placed at her disposal—stiff and intractable stuff as it was—and of forming from it a harmonious and artistic whole was something far harder than she had expected. It required real historical method, and carried her back in memory to the days of the West Goths and the Dictionary of Christian Biography. But she would not be beaten, either by the difficulty of the task or by the necessity of getting it done within a certain time. One day in April, just after she had returned from Grosvenor Place to Stocks, it became necessary to send one of her articles, type-written, up to London in time to catch the Foreign Office bag for New York; the necessary train left Tring Station at 12.37. Mrs. Ward finished writing the article at 12.22; Miss Churcher, who had followed page by page with the type-writer, finished the last page at 12.30; Dorothy flew to the station with it and caught the train.

Besides the initial difficulty of the work, however, the necessity of submitting what she had written to two or three different authorities caused inevitable delays, while a printers’ strike in Glasgow at the critical moment again deferred the book’s publication. When, therefore, Fields of Victory at length appeared, the psychological moment had passed by, the world was far more concerned with the future than with the past, and only a moderate number of the book were sold. Mrs. Ward was of course somewhat disappointed, but there was much consolation to be had in the note of astonishment, combined with admiration, which the book called forth among those for whose opinion she really cared, whether in England, France or America. This feeling was summed up in a letter written by General Hastings Anderson—then holding a high appointment on the Staff of the Army—to Miss Ward, after her mother’s death.

Mrs. Ward’s health improved to a certain extent during the summer of this year (1919), so that she was able to enjoy on Peace Day (July 19) the great procession of Victory, watching it from the enclosure outside Buckingham Palace. “Foch saluting was a sight not to be forgotten,” she wrote. “A paladin on horseback, saluting with a certain melancholy dignity—a figure of romance.” But she was mainly at Stocks during all this summer, basking in the golden weather of that year, delighting in a few Sunday gatherings of friends and in the weekly visits of her grandchildren, who were now domiciled at Berkhamsted, five miles away, and whom nothing could keep away, on Sundays, from Stocks, with its tennis-court, its strawberries—and “Gunny”!

Much talk was heard on the lawn, as the summer passed on, about the peace terms and the prospects of any recovery in Europe, and it is recorded that although Mrs. Ward approved on the whole of the terms she thought it the height of unwisdom to have allowed the Germans no voice in discussing them before the signature. In Russia her heart was passionately with the various rebels who arose to dispute the tyranny of the Soviets, and as each hope faded she felt the horrors of that tragic land more acutely. But most of all did she feel the tragedy of the children of Austria and Central Europe, so that one of her last speeches was devoted to pleading, at Berkhamsted, the cause of the Save the Children Fund.[40] It was noticed that day how white and frail was her look, but all the more for that did her appeal find its way to the hearts of her audience. The children of Germany must be fed as well as the rest, she said; “we have no war with children,” and she recalled the lovely lines of Blake which describe the angels moving through the night:

“There are hundreds of thousands of children at this moment who on these beautiful October nights ‘are weeping that should have been sleeping’—It is for this country, it is for you and me, to play the part of angels of succour to these poor little ones wherever they may be, to feed and clothe and cherish them in the name of our common humanity and our common faith.”

In the meantime the unrelenting pressure of war taxation on her own income had made it imperative, at last, to give up the house in Grosvenor Place which had been her London home for nearly thirty years. Mrs. Ward slept there for the last time on August 29, 1919, and wrote of her parting from it the next day to J. P. T.

Then, in September, Mrs. Ward went for the last time to the Lake District, motoring there via Stratford-on-Avon in her “little car”—a cheap post-war purchase which spent most of its time in the repairing shop, but which, for this occasion, put forth a supreme effort and actually brought Mrs. Ward safely home through the midst of the railway strike. She made her headquarters at Grasmere, for which she had developed a special affection during two recent summers when she had taken “Kelbarrow” and had watched from its lawn every passing mood of the little lake. She visited Fox How and “Aunt Fan” almost every day; she renewed her friendship with Canon and Mrs. Rawnsley and her life-long intimacy with Gordon Wordsworth. And, on the Langdale side of the fell, she visited a little grave to which her heart always yearned afresh.

Mrs. Ward was deeply interested, during these last months of her life, in the attempts made by the Liberal element in the Church to modify or retard the “Enabling Bill,” or as it is now known, the Church Assembly Act. All her fighting spirit was aroused by the claim made by the Bill to lay down tests and distinctions between member and member of the National Church, especially by the imposition of the test of Holy Communion on all candidates for the new Church bodies. She feared, in the words of the Bishop of Carlisle (who saw eye to eye with her in this matter) “that the declaration required as a condition of membership of the Church of England will go a long way towards de-nationalising the Church and reducing it to the status of a sect.” She organised, early in December, a letter to The Times which was signed by all the most prominent names in Liberal Churchmanship, protesting against the scanty opportunities for debate which, owing to a ruling of the Speaker’s, the measure was to have in the House of Commons. But, when it became law quand mÊme, she turned her thoughts and her remaining energies to a constructive movement which might rally the scattered Liberal forces of the Church and assert for them the right, after due notice given of their opinions, to participate without dishonesty in the rite of Holy Communion. In a leaflet issued from Stocks to various private sympathisers in January 1920, Mrs. Ward pointed out that the difficulty which had confronted the Church sixty years before with regard to the Thirty-nine Articles had now passed on to the Creeds, and that to many who were convinced believers in the God within us, the following of Christ and the practical realisation of the Kingdom, the Nicene Creed was yet, “to quote a recent phrase, ‘no more than the majority opinion of a Committee held 1,600 years ago.’” She therefore appealed for the formation of a “Faith and Freedom Association,” the members of which might claim to take their part in the new Councils and Assemblies while openly stating their dissent from, or their right to re-interpret the Creeds; only so could the Church continue to include that Modernist element which was essential to its healthy development.

Mrs. Ward received a good deal of sympathy and encouragement from those to whom she sent her leaflet, and dreamt, in her indomitable way, of summoning a meeting later on if the response were sufficient. But she knew in her heart that her own strength would no longer suffice to lead such a crusade, and she appealed with a certain wistfulness to the young “to pour into it their life, their courage and their love.” It troubled her that no young person or group arose to take the burden from her shoulders. But in truth she was still the youngest in heart of all her generation, or the next, and if it were not that the poor body was outworn she might yet have exerted the influence she longed for on the religious life of her country.

But it was too late. Mrs. Ward’s health definitely gave way about Christmas-time, 1919, the breakdown taking the form of a violent attack of neuritis in the shoulders and arms. Although she would not yet acknowledge it, but tried to continue the old round of work, increasing weakness made it plain to her, at length, that she must not, for the present at least, go crusading. But how she hoped and strove for better times! Her devoted doctor-brother, Frank Arnold, to whom she turned again and again with pathetic trust, knowing his ingenuity in the devising of remedies, tended her with a skill born of a life-long knowledge of her; but the malady was too deep-seated. At the end of January she moved to London in order to try a certain course of treatment, taking up her abode in a little house in Connaught Square which her husband and Dorothy had found for her. She liked the little place, especially on the days when flowers from Stocks arrived to make a bower of it, and there, in the midst of a fruitless round of “treatments” which did nothing but sap her remaining strength, she passed the last weeks of her life. Old friends came once more to visit her; her son and her daughters took turns in reading to her the poets that she loved; Miss Churcher brought for her delight the latest stories from the Play Centres. She still went downstairs and even, sometimes, out of doors, but those who came to the house to sit with her left it, usually, with aching hearts. Then, on March 11, another blow fell. Mr. Ward became dangerously ill, and an immediate operation was found to be necessary. The doctors carried him off to a nursing home not far away and performed it, successfully, that night, while Mrs. Ward sat below in the waiting-room in an agony of anxiety. The next day, and the next, she was still able to go to him, the porters carrying her upstairs to his room, but on Sunday, March 14, signs of bronchitis showed themselves, together with a grave condition of the heart. The doctors would not hear, after this, of her leaving the house.

So for ten days she lay in the little London bedroom, looking out over London trees, her heart pining for the day—the spring day which would surely come—when she and he would return to Stocks together and their ills would be forgotten. “Ah,” she wrote to him in his nursing home on March 18, “it is too trying this imprisonment—but it ought only to be a few days more!”

And indeed, her release was nearer than she knew. Did she not know it? In mortal illness there are secrets of the inner consciousness which those who tend, however lovingly, can never wholly penetrate, but as her mind advanced ever nearer to the verge, one felt that it was swept, ever and anon, by far-off gusts of poetry, finding expression in words and fragments long possessed and intimately loved. Such were the “Last Lines” of Emily BrontË, of which, two days before the end, she repeated the great second verse to Dorothy, saying with the old passionate gesture of the hands, “That’s what I am thinking of!”

Then, early on the morning of the 24th, there came an hour of crisis, when life fought with death for victory; but, before the end, “she opened her dear eyes wide, her dear brown eyes, like the eyes of a young woman, and looked out into the unknown with a most wonderful look on her face. I think that at that moment her soul crossed the bar.” So wrote Dorothy, the only witness of that look; she will carry the memory of it in her heart to the end.

————

We buried her in the quiet churchyard at Aldbury, within sight of the long sweep of hill and the beechwoods that she had loved so well. Her old friend the Rector, Canon Wood, laid her to rest, while another friend for whom she had had a deep regard, Dean Inge, spoke of her in simple and moving words, naming her before us all as “perhaps the greatest Englishwoman of our time.”

There were not wanting, indeed, signs that many in England so regarded her. It was as though she had lived through the period, some ten years before, when the public had tired somewhat of her books and younger writers had to a large extent supplanted her, until, towards the end, she found herself taken to the heart of her countrymen in a manner that had hardly been her lot in the years of her greatest literary fame. They loved her not only for all that she had done, but for what she was, divining in her, besides her intellectual gifts, besides even the tenderness and sympathy of her character, that indomitable courage that carried her through to the end, over difficulties and obstacles at which they only dimly guessed. They loved her for wearing herself out, at sixty-seven, in visits to the battle-fields of France, that she might bear her witness to her country’s deeds; they loved her for all the joy that she had given to little children. Two months before her death the Lord Chancellor, making himself the mouthpiece of this feeling, had asked her to act as one of the first seven women magistrates of England, and later still, when she was already nearing the end, the University of Edinburgh invited her to receive the Honorary Degree of LL.D. These acts of recognition gave her a passing pleasure, and when she herself was beyond the reach of pleasure, or of pain, it stirred the hearts of those who went with her, for the last time, to the little village graveyard to see awaiting her, at the drive gate, a file of stalwart police, claiming their right to escort the coffin of a Justice of the Peace.

Many indeed were the tributes paid to her memory, whether in the letters received after her death or in the words uttered by Lord Milner and other old friends at the unveiling of her medallion in the Hall of the Passmore Edwards Settlement[41] (July 1922). Of these one only shall be quoted here, from a letter written to Mr. Ward by her dear and intimate friend of so many years’ standing, AndrÉ Chevrillon:

On her tombstone we inscribed the lines of Clough, which she herself had written on the last page of Robert Elsmere: