The Naulahka | Page 4

not the
heart to tell him the ways she had found to make them do her good. To
her mother she confided all her plan; to her father she only said that she
wished to learn to be a trained nurse. Her mother grieved in secret with
the grim, philosophic, almost cheerful hopelessness of women whose
lives have taught them always to expect the worst. It was a sore trial to
Kate to disappoint her mother; and it cut her to the heart to know that

she could not do what both her father and mother expected of her.
Indefinite as the expectation was--it was simply that she should come
home and live, and be a young lady, like the rest of the world--she felt
its justice and reason, and she did not weep the less for them, because
for herself she believed, modestly, that it was ordered otherwise.
This was her first trouble. The dissonance between those holy moments
in the garden and the hard prose which was to give them reality and
effect, grew deeper as she went on. It was daunting, and sometimes it
was heart-sickening; but she went forward--not always strong, not
every moment brave, and only a very little wise, but always forward.
The life at the training-school was a cruel disillusion. She had not
expected the path she had set before her to bloom with ease; but at the
end of her first month she could have laughed bitterly at the difference
between her consecrating dreams and the fact. The dreams looked to
her vocation; the fact took no account of it. She had hoped to befriend
misery, to bring help and healing to pain from the first days of her
apprenticeship. What she was actually set to do was to scald babies'
milk-cans.
Her further duties in these early days were no more nearly related to the
functions of a nurse, and looking about her among the other girls to see
how they kept their ideals alight in the midst of work so little connected
with their future calling, she perceived that they got on for the most
part by not having any. As she advanced, and was trusted first with
babies themselves, and later with the actual work of nursing, she was
made to feel how her own purpose isolated her. The others were here
for business. With one or two exceptions they had apparently taken up
nursing as they might have taken up dressmaking. They were here to
learn how to make twenty dollars a week, and the sense of this
dispirited her even more than the work she was given to do as a
preparation for her high calling. The talk of the Arkansas girl, who sat
on a table and swung her legs while she discussed her flirtations with
the young doctors at the clinics, seemed in itself sometimes a final
discouragement. Through all ran the bad food, the scanty sleep, the
insufficient hours for recreation, the cruelly long hours assigned for

work, the nervous strain of supporting the life from the merely physical
point of view.
In addition to the work which she shared with the others, she was
taking regular lessons in Hindustani; and she was constantly grateful
for the earlier days which had given her robust health and a sound body.
Without them she must often have broken down; and soon it began to
be a duty not to break down, because it had become possible to help
suffering a little. It was this which reconciled her finally to the low and
sordid conditions under which the whole affair of her preparation went
on.
The repulsive aspects of the nursing itself she did not mind. On the
contrary, she found herself liking them as she got into the swing of her
work; and when, at the end of her first year, she was placed in charge of
a ward at the women's hospital, under another nurse, she began to feel
herself drawing in sight of her purpose, and kindled with an interest
which made even the surgical operations seem good to her because they
helped, and because they allowed her to help a little.
From this time she went on working strongly and efficiently toward her
end. Above all, she wanted to be competent--to be wise and thorough.
When the time came when those helpless, walled-up women should
have no knowledge and no comfort to lean on but hers, she meant that
they should lean on the strength of solid intelligence. Her trials were
many, but it was her consolation in the midst of them all that her
women loved her, and lived upon her comings and goings. Her
devotion to her purpose carried her forward. She was presently in full
charge, and in that long, bare ward