V

SISTER KATHLEEN 

This morning I pay my respects to the nurse. We meet often, and I am surprised that it has not occurred to me to make her the theme of an earlier contribution. In the hospital ward and in the sick-room the nurse and the minister exchange frequent courtesies ; and if to the poor minister she sometimes seems a trifle imperious, he sets it down to her sense of the dignity and importance of her office, and secretly admires her all the more. 

I can forgive any man for falling in love with a nurse. To tell the truth, I once fell in love with a nurse myself. But there were difficulties. To begin with, she was a devout and whole-souled Catholic, whilst I was a convinced young Protestant. That was serious. And then, to make matters worse, there was the minor circumstance that I was only fourteen, whilst she was over forty. Thus it came to pass that love’s young dream was shattered ; but to my dying day I shall never forget the face that, in hours of anguish and delirium, seemed to me like the face of an angel. Night and day, through weary weeks, she watched tirelessly beside me ;  no vigil too long, and no trouble too great. I used to guess at what the doctors had said by closely scrutinizing her face. She would walk off with them when they left me. If she came back crooning to herself some jaunting little Irish melody, I knew that the doctors were satisfied. If she came back looking as though the weight of the world were on her shoulders, I knew that I was fighting an uphill battle ; and once, when things were very dark with me, I caught the glint of tears in her eyes. A few weeks later, when I was making headway rapidly, she would exchange meals with me. My bread-and- butter was cut and spread by machinery — each slice just like every other slice. Her bread was cut by hand ; the slices were irregular, and the butter was in neat little pats on the side of the plate. And each little delicacy that came her way she at once brought to me. We both cried when, the long, long struggle over at last, we said good-bye to each other. I have never since been able to look upon a nurse without blessing her; and whenever I have been tempted to a too vigorous criticism of Roman Catholicism, I have been confronted by the imperishable memory of Sister Kathleen. She would have thought it heaven to lay down her life for her Church — or for her patients. 

But, all such memories apart, he must have an adamantine soul who does not see something very attractive about a modern nurse. I say a modern nurse — for sufficient reasons. I am not praising Sarah Gamp. ‘She was a fat old woman, this Mrs. Gamp, with a husky voice and a moist eye, which she had a remarkable power of turning up, and only showing the white of it. Her face — the nose in particular — was somewhat red and swollen, and it was difficult to enjoy her society without becoming conscious of a smell of spirits.’ Her rusty black gown, rather the worse for snuff, and her huge umbrella have engaged the attention of ten thousand artists. She went to a lying-in or a laying-out with equal relish, being careful to adopt a beaming or lugubrious countenance according to the nature of the occasion. Mrs. Gamp has gone, and gone for good — in more senses than one. In her place we have a much more lovable figure. Never was transformation more complete. I was talking to a nurse half an hour ago. Her dainty costume, her immaculate apron and streamers, her faultless cuffs, collar, and cap are suggestive in themselves of that scrupulous cleanliness any violation of which is now regarded by science in the light of a crime. The cheerfulness of her face, the softness of her voice, the lightness of her tread, and the gentleness of her touch impart to the ward or the sick-room an atmosphere which would have been totally foreign to the ideas of Sarah Gamp. The musical jingle of the tiny implements that dangle from her waist, combined with her preternatural facility for laying her hand at a moment’s notice on all kinds of mysterious appliances, are in themselves subtle reminders to the patient of a careful training and of a varied experience which, by inspiring confidence and restfulness, possess a healing virtue of their own. One does not care to imagine the uses to which Mrs. Gamp would have put a clinical thermometer ; nor dare I speculate as to what her reply would have been if a curious patient had ventured to ask her views on the general subject of bacteriology. 

Nursing is neither a science nor an art ;  it is something deeper and higher than either. It is an instinct, and a primal instinct at that. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, implies that it is one of the highest of the primal instincts. I have sometimes wondered that the genial professor did not follow his great chapters on ‘The Evolution of a Father’ and ‘The Evolution of a Mother’ with a third on ‘The Evolution of a Nurse.’ For certainly the story of the coming of the modern nurse is one of the most romantic pieces of evolution that any thinker could record. Jack London, too, whose genius for portraying the inner side of animal life amounted almost to an intuition, commented repeatedly upon the marked propensity for nursing which some dogs exhibit. In The Call of the Wild he describes the misfortunes that overtook, and nearly killed, Buck, the great St. Bernard, on the long, exhausting trail. And he tells how Skeet, a little Irish setter, made friends with Buck, who, in a dying condition, was unable to resist her advances. ‘She possessed,’ the writer says, ‘that doctor trait which some dogs have ; and as a mother cat washes her kittens, so she washed and cleansed Buck’s wounds. Regularly, each morning, she performed her self-appointed task, till he came to look for her ministrations as much as he did for his master’s,’ Any one who casually glances through a collection of stories illustrative of the sagacity of animals will find ample evidence of the existence of this curious phenomenon. In one way, it is even loftier than the maternal instinct, since it stands quite independently of the claim of kinship or any natural tie. 

And so we climb these golden stairs. We follow the tortuous process of evolution up from the nest and the burrow and the lair. Tracing its upward course, we come at length upon Sarah Gamp. For we must be fair to Sarah Gamp. Let us admit that if, on the one hand, she has been put to shame by her gentler and more graceful successors, she was, on the other hand, herself an advance upon her remoter predecessors. Evolution moves upward and ever upward until we come to Florence Nightingale, to Sister Kathleen, and to the nurse whom I met at the hospital just now — the very incarnation of Longfellow’s Evangeline : 

With light in her looks she entered the chambers of sickness,
Noiselessly moved about the assiduous, careful attendants,
Moistening the feverish lip and the aching brow, and in silence 

Closing the sightless eyes of the dead, and concealing their faces,
Where on their pallets they lay, like drifts of snow by the road-side,
Many a languid head, upraised as Evangeline entered, 

Turned on its pillow of pain to gaze while she passed ; for her presence
Fell on their hearts tike a ray of the sun on the walls of a prison. 

Mark Rutherford used to say that the modern nurse is about the strongest argument we have to prove that the world is not governed by the devil. ‘Thank heaven,’ he exclaims, ‘that the modern hospital, with its sisters, gently nurtured, devoted to their duty with that pious earnestness which is a true religion, has supplied some evidences to prove that God rules His world !’ 

If this means anything, it means that the nurse represents in her own fair person one of the very finest triumphs of the Christian spirit in contact with mortal pain. She stands for one of the greatest strides in the whole history of human progress. 

I like to watch her beautiful hands,
Slender, flexible, strong as steel —
In the rubber gloves that fit like skin—
At pitiful tasks that hurt to heal. 

They move like Fate, those beautiful hands,
Firm, relentless — tender and kind.
Cleansing wounds at which others shrink,
Theirs is the strength that has love behind. 

Merciless, merciful, beautiful hands —
Whether they bring relief or pain,
Those who have felt their healing touch
Will long, in need, for those hands again. 

I am not surprised that in every city in Christendom efforts are being made to secure trained nurses for the poorest dwellers of the slums. Nor is it strange that in these vast Australias of ours, with their terrific solitudes, bush nursing schemes should be so popular. The world has few things of which it is entitled to be more proud than of the perfection to which the craft of nursing the sick has now been brought ; and it is both natural and creditable that so strong a desire should be felt to extend the usefulness of this beneficent sisterhood to the lowest strata of society and to the loneliest outposts of civilization. 

But deeper — let us go deeper ! For see, whilst the patient recovers, the nurse tires ! He gets stronger, but she grows weaker ! Can it be that she is Sister Kathleen literally pouring the tides of her rich young life into his exhausted frame? ‘That,’ says the Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, ‘ is what makes her look so pale : she keeps the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah ! ‘ he exclaims, ‘ illness is the real vampirism ; think of living a year or two after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at one’s bedside ! Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy duties ; one that goes in a nurse, may come out an angel. God bless all good women ! To their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last ! ‘ 

Two letters lie before me as I write. I do not need to search for the signature. I can tell by the handwriting that they come from the same person. Which things are an allegory, for, on a table near my desk, there stand a photograph of a nurse and a New Testament. I have not toilfully to trace the history of nursing on the one hand, nor to investigate the inspiration of the Scriptures on the other, in order to discover that the spirit of the nurse and the spirit of the New Testament were both breathed into them from the same divine source. In both I find the same sympathy with suffering, the same patience of pity, the same soft tenderness of touch. These, like the two letters, also reveal the same handwriting, and bear the same signature. As Charles P. Cleave so delicately sings : 

I lay my hand on your aching brow,
   Softly so I And the pain grows still —
The moisture clings to my soothing palm.
   And you sleep because I will.
You forget I am here ? ‘Tis the darkness hides,
   I am always here, and your needs I know,
I tide you over the long, long night
   To the shores of the morning glow. 

So God’s hand touches the aching soul,
   Softly so ! And the pain grows still,
All the grief and woe from the soul He draws,
   And we rest because He will.
We forget, and yet He is always here I
   He knows our needs and He heeds our sighs;
No night so long but He soothes and stills
   Till the daylight rims the skies. 

When one has drawn so awful, yet so apt, an analogy as this, there remains no more to be said. The case for the nurse is complete.