This suggestion also was in part adopted. An excellent dissecting-room was built, provided with numerous instruments, microscopes and other apparatus.[138]
And so this woman of ideas went on, week by week, month by month, pouring in requisitions, hints, plans, to the Government at home; sometimes getting things done as she wanted, at others making suggestions which, had they been adopted, would still more have conduced to efficiency. Something of that calm and clear sagacity, which impressed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert when they made her personal acquaintance,[139] was reflected in her appearance and demeanour as observed by eye-witnesses at Scutari. "In appearance," wrote Mr. Osborne, "Miss Nightingale is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self-possession, and giving, when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still, I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work as its head. As such she knows well how much success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order."[140]
[139] See the words cited at the head of this chapter, and below, pp. 324, 325.
[140] _Scutari and its Hospitals_, p. 25.
It was soon perceived at Scutari that Miss Nightingale was a power. She mentioned incidentally at a later period a curious fact, which shows the way in which officers appealed to her as a kind of emergency-man. In 1862 she was pressing the War Office to separate the function of Banker from that of Purveyor, and she illustrated the confusion caused by the amalgamation from her own experience. Among the instances was this: "I had at Scutari thousands of sovereigns at a time in my bedroom, entrusted to me by officers who preferred making me their banker because of the perpetual discord. 'Offend the Commissary or Purveyor, and you won't be able to get your money.'"[141] It was soon perceived also that Miss Nightingale was the person who, if any one, could get things done, and any official who had an idea took it to her. In the letters to Sidney Herbert she sometimes bids him know that what she says does not merely come from "poor me," but represents the views "of all the best men here." But she, I think, was the best man of them all.[142] Such was the opinion, at any rate, of a man among men, the redoubtable Sydney Godolphin Osborne. "Every day," he wrote in describing his experience at Scutari, "brought some new complication of misery to be somehow unravelled. Every day had its peculiar trial to one who had taken such a load of responsibility, in an untried field, and with a staff of her own sex, all new to it. Hers was a post requiring the courage of a Cardigan, the tact and diplomacy of a Palmerston, the endurance of a Howard, the cheerful philanthropy of a Mrs. Fry. Miss Nightingale fills that post; and, in my opinion, is the one individual who in this whole unhappy war has shown more than any other what real energy guided by good sense can do to meet the calls of sudden emergency."[143] And hence it was, too, that any official who felt the urgency of some particular need in his own department carried his case to the Lady-in-Chief. Did a surgeon want some point represented with special urgency to the authorities at home? He went to Miss Nightingale. Did a purveyor want some special authority from the military to facilitate his task? He went to Miss Nightingale. The centre of initiative at Scutari was in the Sisters' Tower; and going to Miss Nightingale had something of the magic that in earlier days was found in "going to Mr. Pitt."[144]