Dr. Elsie Inglis. Lady Frances Balfour
when he came to us at Naini Tal. What a remembrance there is of early walks and early breakfasts with him and the three of us. The table was spread in the verandah between six and seven. Father made three cups of cocoa, one for each of us, and then the glorious walk! Three ponies followed behind, each with their attendant grooms, and two or three red-coated chaprasis, father stopping all along the road to talk to every native who wished to speak to him, while we three ran about, laughing and interested in everything. Then, at night, the shouting for him after we were in bed and father’s step bounding up the stair in Calcutta, or coming along the matted floor of our hill home. All order and quietness flung to the winds while he said good night to us.
‘It was always understood that Elsie and he were special chums, but that never made any jealousy. Father was always just! The three cups of cocoa were exactly the same in quality and quantity. We got equal shares of his right and his left hand in our walks, but Elsie and he were comrades, inseparables from the day of her birth.
‘In the background of our lives there was always the quiet strong mother, whose eyes and smile live on through the years. Every morning before the breakfast and walk, there were five minutes when we sat in front of her in a row on little chairs in her room and read the scripture verses in turn, and then knelt in a straight, quiet row and repeated the prayers after her. Only once can I remember father being angry with any of us, and that was when one of us ventured to hesitate in instant obedience to some wish of hers. I still see the room in which it happened, and the thunder in his voice is with me still.’
Both Mr. and Mrs. Inglis belonged to the Anglican Church, though they never hesitated to go to any denomination where they found the best spiritual life. In later life in Edinburgh, they were connected with the Free Church of Scotland. To again quote from his daughter: ‘His religious outlook was magnificently broad and beautiful, and his belief in God simple and profound. His devotion to our mother is a thing impossible to speak about, but we all feel that in some intangible way it influenced and beautified our childhood.’
In 1870 Mrs. Inglis writes of the lessons of Elsie and her sister Eva. ‘The governess, Mrs. Marwood, is successful as a teacher; it comes easy enough to Elsie to learn, and she delights in stories being told her. Every morning after their early morning walk, and while their baths are being got ready, their mother says they come to her to say their prayers and learn their Bible lesson.’ There are two letters more or less composed by Elsie and written by her father. In as far as they were dictated by herself, they take stock of independent ways, and the spirit of the Pharisee is early developed in the courts of the Lord’s House, as she manages not to fall asleep all the time, while the weaker little sister slumbers and sleeps.
Eva, the sleepy sister, has some further reminiscences of these nursery days: —
‘We had forty dolls! Elsie decreed once that they should all have measles – so days were spent by us three painting little red dots all over the forty faces and the forty pairs of arms and legs. She was the doctor and prescribed gruesome drugs which we had to administer. Then it was decreed that they should slowly recover, so each day so many spots were washed off until the epidemic was wiped out!
‘Another time one of the forty dolls was lost! Maria was small and ugly, but much loved, and the search for her was tremendous, but unsuccessful. The younger sister gave it up. After all there were plenty other dolls – never mind Maria! But Elsie stuck to it. Maria must be found. Father would find her when he came home from Kutcherry in the evening, if nobody else could. So father was told with many tears of Maria’s disappearance. He agreed – Maria must be found. The next day all the enormous staff of Indian servants, numbering all told about thirty or so, were had up in a row and told that unless Maria was found sixpence would be cut from each servant’s pay for interminable months! What a search ensued! and Maria came to light within half an hour – in the pocket of one of the dresses of her little mistress found by one of the ayahs! Her mistress declared at the time, and always maintained with undiminished certainty, that she had first been put there, and then found by the ayah in question during that half-hour’s search!’
These reminiscences have more of interest than just the picture of the little child who was to carry on the early manifestations of a keen interest in life. A smile, surely one of the clouds of glory she trailed from heaven, and carried back untarnished by the tragedies of a stricken earth; they are chiefly valuable in the signs of a steadfast, independent will. The interest of all Elsie’s early development lay in the comradeship with a father whose wide benevolence and understanding love was to be the guide and helper in his daughter’s career. Not for the first time in the history of outstanding lives, the daughter has been the friend, and not the subjugated child of a selfish and dominant parent.
The date of Elsie’s birth was in the dawn of the movement which believed it possible that women could have a mind and a brain of their own, and that the freedom of the one and the cultivation of the other was not a menace to the possessive rights of the family, or the ruin of society at large. Thousands of women born at the same date were instructed that the aim of their lives must be to see to the creature comforts of their male parent, and when he was taken from them, to believe it right that he had neither educated them, nor made provision for the certain old age and spinsterdom which lay before the majority.
There have been many parents who gave their daughters no reason to call them blessed, when they were left alone unprovided with gear or education. In all periods of family history, such instances as Mr. Inglis’ outlook for his daughters is uncommon. He desired for them equal opportunities, and the best and highest education. He gave them the best of his mind, not its dregs, and a comradeship which made a rare and happy entrance for them into life’s daily toil and struggle. The father asked for nothing but their love, and he had his own unselfish devotion returned to him a hundredfold.
It must have been a great joy to him to watch the unfolding of talent and great gifts in this daughter who was always ‘his comrade.’ He could not live to see the end of a career so blessed, so rich in womanly grace and sustaining service, but he knew he had spared no good thing he could bring into her life, and when her mission was fulfilled, then, those who read and inwardly digest these pages will feel that she first learnt the secret of service to mankind in the home of her father.
CHAPTER III
THE LADDER OF LEARNING
1876–1885
‘Hast thou come with the heart of thy childhood back:
The free, the pure, the kind?
So murmured the trees in my homeward track,
As they played to the mountain wind.
‘Hath thy soul been true to its early love?
Whispered my native streams.
Hath the spirit nurs’d amid hill and grove,
Still revered its first high dream?’
After Mr. Inglis had been Chief Commissioner of Oude, he decided to retire from his long and arduous service. Had he been given the Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-West, as was expected by some in the service, he would probably have accepted it and remained longer in India. He was not in sympathy with Lord Lytton’s Afghan policy, and that would naturally alter his desire for further employment.
As with his father before him, his work was highly appreciated by those he served. Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, in a letter to Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, writes, February 1876: —
‘During the short period of my own official tenure I have met with much valuable assistance from Mr. Inglis, both as a member of my Legislative Council, and also as officiating Commissioner in Oudh, more especially as regards the amalgamation of Oudh with the N.W. Provinces. Of his character and abilities I have formed so high an opinion that had there been an available vacancy I should have been glad to secure to my government his continued services.’
Two of Mr. Inglis’ sons had settled in Tasmania, and it was decided to go there before bringing home the younger members of his family. The eldest daughter, Mrs. Simson, was now married and settled in Edinburgh, and the Inglis determined to make their home in that city.
Two years were