A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  In November, when Isabella was at Tobermory and Bishop was ‘alone’ in Edinburgh, he was struck down with the painful skin disease erysipelas after performing an operation on a sailor with it. From this infection, apparently much more serious in those days, he never fully recovered, and its effects, allied to Isabella’s troubles, blighted the remainder of their married life. She was ill next, with ‘carbuncles on the spine’ and ‘nervous prostration’ as the limitations of a conventional home and marriage began to chafe. When she was able, she took ‘elderly rides’ on a side-saddle in her husband’s company and felt a ‘crippled fool’ the while. But though she may have burned in secret fury at the convention imposed upon her sex, she never once defied it by putting on her ‘Hawaiian riding dress’ and revelling in the therapy of a ‘good gallop’. Instead she decided to satisfy her yearning for speed with a tricycle and corresponded with her publisher as to whether she should buy a ‘National’ or a ‘Salvo’ – eventually concluding that the latter was too slow for her ‘somewhat fast notions of locomotion’. Whether she actually possessed a tricycle when in Edinburgh is not on record – it is, in any case, the sort of eccentric detail that Anna Stoddart would have refrained from mentioning. Years later, however, when Isabella was back in London, John Murray apparently presented her with one, and the story goes that she learned to ride it in Albemarle Street.

  During her second year of married life Isabella, who was still restless and melancholy, continued work on her book about Malaya, but she wrote listlessly, for now that the inspiration of her sister had gone, she cared ‘nothing for fame or money’. By this time in her life, she probably had no need to worry about the latter. She had undoubtedly inherited money as sole survivor of her close family, her husband earned quite enough to support her, and in addition her books were beginning to make a considerable profit. Her book about the Sandwich Isles, of which only a thousand copies were printed, had done little more than cover costs, but there was a continuing steady demand for her book of Rocky Mountain adventures. In fact, its sales, combined with those of Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, which was also very popular, brought her a cheque for £1,447 from John Murray. ‘I, at all events, have no cause to complain of my publishers’, she told him warmly. However, this represented something of a high point in the profits she made from her writing; from her next book, The Golden Chersonese, for instance, published in 1883 and dedicated to Henrietta, she reaped an eventual reward of only £370. Critically the latter book was well received, though one or two reviewers did comment on a certain waspishness of tone, a lack of sympathy for those less tough than she – such as the limp young Misses Shaw.

  But there was no sinew of toughness now, as poor Isabella and John simply staggered from one illness to the next. They went south in search of health, where Bishop completely collapsed and pernicious anæmia, probably linked to the erysipelas infection, was diagnosed by London specialists. ‘He has become a skeleton with transparent white hands and his face is nothing but a beard and beautiful eyes’, Isabella wrote. ‘He is always happy, everything, however distressing, is “all right”. He says that these weeks have been the happiest time of his life. His mind is very clear and bright; he is full of fun, interest and thought for others.’ That was written in September 1884, and for the next eighteen months Isabella devoted herself unstintingly to the welfare of this saintly, luckless, brave man she had married. There were dreary rounds of medical consultations; dismal and unsuccessful convalescences during which Dr Bishop was wheeled in a bath-chair along various sea-fronts to get the benefit of the fresh sea air; there was a brief hopeful return to Tobermory where John managed to stroll to the village with the aid of a stick, and then the desperate flight to the Riviera away from the brutal Scottish winter.

  All this time, Anna says, Isabella ‘never recorded a word about herself or her ailments … Her diary is filled with entries concerning him – his doctors, nurses, movements, daily condition.’ For the poignant truth was that now, during John’s last lingering illness, she found herself truly and dependently in love with him – a love awakened by the noble qualities she admired and his courageous battle against affliction. Following medical advice, they went to Cannes, Geneva, Glion (whence Isabella had to return to London briefly for an operation on her back!), to St Vissoie, St Luc, to Cannes again … a painful procession of cheerless spa hotels, foreign nurses and menservants, friends coming and going, sleepless nights and lack-lustre days of sickroom waiting. At Cannes, Sir Joseph Lister, under whom Bishop had once worked, came over to carry out a transfusion of blood, taken from ‘a sturdy young Italian peasant who was willing to risk it for a large sum of money’. This, not surprisingly, was of no avail, and Bishop wasted slowly day by day. ‘Oh my idol, my treasure, my noble and spotless love’, Isabella wrote to Ella in anguish. ‘His dark eyes look out strangely from the small face which, for the last week, has worn the serene contented look of one who has entered into rest. When those eyes see me they brighten and the whole face lightens into rapture, and the weak voice utters words of wildest love and worship!’ A few days later, on 6 March 1886, two days before their fifth wedding anniversary, Bishop died. ‘So happy my own bride’, were his last direct words to her, Isabella recorded. At first she was stunned: ‘His extraordinary patience, self-control and cheerfulness and intellectual activity blinded all who were about him for the last sixteen months to the extent of his deprivations and sufferings. He was always so happy, so interested in every one and everything, so enthusiastic, so grateful and loving that it did not seem as if he could die.’

  When the impact of her new loss struck her, it was ‘simply awful … John’s long and weary illness had made him the object of all my thoughts, plans, hopes, fears, interests…. Was it not strange’, she asked Ella, ‘that so late in life and so unwillingly on my part the unequalled unselfish devotion and increasing beauty of his character should win my whole heart and that then he should leave me?’ Her morbid obsession with Hennie’s death had blighted the first year of their marriage; it had been mitigated only by the onset of her husband’s fatal illness; during his endurance of that illness, he had truly won her heart; now she had lost him – and that loss too was tinged with guilt because she had not responded earlier to his love, had never rested long in its shelter. It is a touching, melancholy story of patience, ill-starred devotion, suffering and sheer misfortune.

  III

  Back in Tobermory, Isabella wore the sad garb of mourning again, again tended ‘Henrietta’s poor’, again sorted through heart-rending memorabilia of the beloved beset by ‘rushes of desolation’, and then, painfully, turned her thoughts forward. She had, she told John Murray, ‘ample’ financial means and was ‘absolutely without any ties so that I can, if any measure of strength returns, shape the remainder of my life as I please’. (And she, who so dearly loved freedom, must have felt some small stir of pleasure in her newly unencumbered state.) ‘But I am no longer young and shall never be as strong as I was and shall never have the same spirit. As to travelling, that is a subject which I hope to consult you about…. After a time it may seem desirable, but I should not be inclined, as my last great journey before settling quietly in my own country, to do anything that is not very well worth doing, and which would not enable me to bring back a rich cargo of knowledge. When I have thought of travelling and when my husband and I talked it over, it has always been of Asia that I have thought and of that country which lies between China and N. India.’ Later she again pursues the theme, proposing a tour of medical missions, ‘with the object of taking and sending home private notes of the working of each with the variation in the mode of working … The scheme commends itself to me from my beloved husband’s and my own very deep interest in medical missions, and from my desire to erect a memorial to him in the shape of a medical hospital.’

  And so she began to erect the elaborate façade of reasonable and virtuous motives for the wild escape she planned: she was going for a last journey, she would secure ‘a cargo of know
ledge’, she was going to inspect missions, to build memorials. She was going because it was her only chance of health and happiness, but that she did not dare admit, because it was such an ignobly selfish reason, compared with the consistently selfless deeds of the beloved dead. In practical preparation, she took a three-month course of nursing training at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and she reactivated her journalistic talents with some on-the-spot reports for Murray’s Magazine on the latest bout of Irish troubles. On her return, she confessed to Mr Murray, ‘my health improved very much in Ireland. I became more vigorous and enterprising daily … It is rather a sad fact – but rough knocking about, open-air life in combination with sufficient interest is the one in which my health and spirits are best.’

  Even so, her long siege of grief and anxiety had left her bruised, cantankerous, uncertain of her physical and mental capabilities, and she procrastinated, fearing the outcome. Acting on impulse, she bought a house in Maida Vale, London, which she purposed to use partly ‘as an invalid home’. A Derbyshire farmer was her ‘first patient’; a ‘person from the East End’ her second. Isabella was a poor judge of her own psychology; she never accepted that she was truly not cut out to be an angel of mercy, or that, though she could cope admirably in a log-cabin with a couple of buckets, a pinewood fire and a hunk of venison, she was quite incapable of establishing smooth and viable domestic arrangements for herself in such a place as Maida Vale. The house brought only disappointment, melancholy, ‘carking cares’, and she sold it within a year. ‘I surrounded myself with my relics, thinking that I might find a sort of ghostly companionship in them and that I might make my house useful in entertaining guests who could not “recompense” me’, she explained. ‘Both these plans have failed – the relics mock me and the guests are too great a fatigue … The cottage at Tobermory will then be home, if any place can be home to one so frightfully bereft.’

  For a few months she again teetered on the verge of total emotional collapse. ‘In truth unrest had seized her’, Anna Stoddart surmised, ‘and she mistook its fever for the misery of solitude.’ In this precarious state, Isabella even quarrelled with the abiding shelter of the established Church, deploring its ‘reactionary tendency … The church of my fathers has cast me out by means of inanities, puerilities, music and squabbles’, she whined petulantly. So she turned to the nonconformists and underwent what Miss Stoddart terms ‘the ceremony of immersion without joining the Baptist body’. It was a special arrangement apparently, and Isabella makes no further mention of any particular attachment to the sect. Added to her spiritual turmoil was the continued plague of ill-health. Doctors diagnosed rheumatic gout, ‘threatened rheumatic fever’, said her heart ‘was much affected’ and that she would never regain much strength. Nevertheless, she told Murray in the summer of 1888, ‘I hope in a few months I shall gain enough to embolden me to carry out a scheme of travel which has been simmering in my mind ever since I was left alone.’

  Back again at Tobermory, where the salt winds tossed the rows of sweet peas and pinks in Hennie’s gentle bower, she was sewing a ‘complete outfit’ of Jaeger flannel, reading books about the ‘country which lies between China and N. India’ – and giving lectures to the local young women on ‘Dress’, ‘Thrift’ and ‘Courtesy’. When, late that autumn, she bolted the door and shuttered the windows of the cottage shrine, she resolutely pushed grief away from her at last. ‘When I leave the dear ones here I shall feel as if the bitterness of death was past’, she wrote in January 1889, just before she sailed. ‘The voyage will be a strange time, a silent interval between the familiar life which lies behind … and the strange unknown life which lies before. I wish you could see my outfit, packed in four small boxes, 20" long, 12" high, 12" wide, and a brown waterproof bag containing a canvas stretcher bed, a cork mattress, blankets, woollen sheets and a saddle!’

  Part Three

  A LADY’S LIFE ON THE BACK OF YAK, PONY, MULE AND STALLION; ON JUNK, WUPAN, STEAMER, SAMPAN; IN TENT, STABLE, HUT, CARAVANSERAI; ACROSS THE DESERTS, AND OVER THE PLAINS AND UP THE MOUNTAINS

  CHAPTER VII

  Kashmir and Tibet

  MRS ISABELLA BISHOP, in bleak and empty mood, was bound for one of the bleakest, emptiest lands in the world – Tibet. She had no one especially to preserve herself for any longer; she was footloose to a new, alarming, depressing degree. Now Hennie was dead, there was no one with whom her travels could be truly shared. ‘I feel most keenly the difference between this and former journey’, she told her publisher in a letter from Tibet. ‘My sister seems to die afresh with everything I see and the enjoyment, though not the interest of travel has died out.’ She was prone to emotional over-dramatisation, and in fact quite a few rays of pure, forgetful, exultant pleasure still shine from her books, but there was a significant change of emphasis. Her later letters are not so spontaneous, uninhibited or personal as those written to Hennie; never again had she to concentrate every faculty in the effort of conveying each immediate nuance of her experience in order to send it home to her sister fresh, intact, with the bloom still on it. She was keeping a sort of diary for six friends, she told Murray, but no friends, however dear, could command such emotional allegiance; they were not ‘with her in spirit’ as she went. And, for her last two major works, she reluctantly relinquished the ‘letter’ form altogether.

  So, from now on, it was principally interest that sustained her, a highly developed and trained interest that continued to broaden and invigorate her intellect as she grew older; but which did not quite compensate for the loss of that outgoing and candid joy. Compared with her earlier writings, the three full-length books that Isabella wrote after her sister’s death are heavier to pick up and harder to appreciate. They are increasingly authoritative and contain considerable insight into the moral, political and social structures that frame people’s lives, but there is less detail about her relationships with individual personalities. They are not however dull, for Isabella’s interest illuminates them, that lucid, careful, responsive attention to every detail of the immediate environment which never failed her and made her one of the great travel-writers of her day.

  During the spring of 1889 which she spent in Kashmir, Mrs Bishop’s interest was focused on the founding of a mission hospital at Srinagar. It was to be called the John Bishop Memorial Hospital – a fitting tribute to the man. During her later years, and partly from the proceeds of her books, she financed the establishment of several other hospitals and orphanages in various parts of the East, most of them staffed by qualified medical missionaries and under the trusteeship of the Church Missionary Society. Her personal tastes were simple, and these institutions were her single extravagance – if the term is appropriate to describe these acts of generous and disinterested private benevolence. Present day opinion looks askance at the evangelical stratagem of the medical mission, where, it has been said, ‘the heathen sick were bribed with the promise of Christian health’. But it should be remembered that during the nineteenth century there were certainly few other places where the poor of the East could hope to receive skilled, sophisticated medical attention. Mission staff were invariably tireless workers, they soothed diseased eyes, prodded tumours out of diseased flesh, strengthened rickety limbs, cleansed festered sores. Even if the patients were surrounded by texts from the New Testament and did have to recite a short prayer before receiving their medicine, it was a small price to pay – and usually the only one, for benefactors such as Isabella footed the bills.

  Once the construction of the hospital was under way, there was little to detain Isabella in Srinagar and much to send her away. By mid-June Kashmir was ‘in season’: ‘There is an English hubbub most monstrous and the wretched coolies are beaten and cheated and lawn tennis, polo and horse racing, which have been played out below, invade the most secluded valleys, and the country is over-run by tourists and sportsmen from the plains’, she complained bitterly – and if there was one thing Isabella never could stand it was the bray of the upper-middle-
class English on selfish pleasure bent. So she planned escape. She hired a Punjabi interpreter, a willing Kashmiri lad called Mando, and three mules and drivers for a shilling a day each, to carry camping equipment, folding chair and bedding. She was provided, perforce, with an ‘escort’ made up of one Afghan soldier from the local Maharajah’s troop of irregular mercenaries. ‘This man, Usman Shah, was a stage ruffian in appearance. He wore a turban of prodigious height ornamented with poppies or birds’ feathers, loved fantastic colours and ceaseless change of raiment, walked in front of me carrying a big sword over his shoulder, plundered and beat the people, terrified the women and was eventually recognised at Leh as a murderer and as great a ruffian in reality as he was in appearance.’ She concluded drily, ‘An attendant of this kind is a mistake.’

  Remedy and crown among her new acquisitions was Gyalpo, a buoyant, silver-grey Arab steed ‘as light as a greyhound and as strong as a cart-horse. He was higher in the scale of intellect than any horse of my acquaintance. His cleverness at times suggested reasoning power, and his mischievousness a sense of humour. He walked five miles an hour, jumped like a deer, climbed like a yak, was strong and steady in perilous fords, tireless, hardy, hungry, frolicked along ledges of precipices and over crevassed glaciers, was absolutely fearless, and his slender legs and the use he made of them were the marvel of all. He was quite untameable, rejected all dainties with indignation, swung his heels into people’s faces when they went near him, ran at them with his teeth, seized unwary passers-by by their kamar bands and shook them as a dog shakes a rat, would let no one go near him but Mando, for whom he formed at first sight a most singular attachment, but kicked and struck with his forefeet, his eyes all the time dancing with fun, so that one could never decide whether his ceaseless pranks were play or vice … I was never weary of watching him, the curves of his form were so exquisite, his movements so lithe and rapid, his small head and restless little ears so full of life and expression, the variations in his manner so frequent, one moment savagely attacking some unwary stranger with a scream of rage, the next laying his lovely head against Mando’s cheek with a soft cooing sound and a childlike gentleness … His wild eyes were like those of a seagull. He had no kinship with humanity.’ ‘He was not exactly an old woman’s horse’, she added in a letter, ‘but I contrive to get on with him.’