by Pauline Fredericka Strong

For fifteen years I was a hospital nurse and attended more largely on the poor ward patients. It would be difficult for you to imagine one half the misery and pain that was pressed into my existence all through that most exceedingly unhappy time! Yet I was never happy unless I was doing something for some sufferer and so you see I could no more change my life or my vocation than I could create myself over again.

It naturally had fallen to my lot all the years almost of my life, to hear the woeful tales of sorrow from almost every mortal I came in contact with, and was almost driven to nursing from sheer sympathy. I soon found that my strong feelings of tenderness for those afflicted made me over-weak and unfit for duty! And so the years brought the discipline, courage and success, and lost me love, truth and purity! For as I witnessed such a multitude of suffering I began to grow more and more calloused to its call until I went at the call of duty only as a machine goes which is set in motion mechanically and at the will of its operator! Something was dying in me, not my good physical health, for I was most unusually robust! But something which used to speak to my inner consciousness, from my own inner self, that still small voice which men and women call the conscience for want of a better term, that thing was dying, even had died!

When I found my faith in human kind departing I was appalled, I grew awhile in terror of myself, until at last I settled down into the natural course of things, got down into a healthy material groove, reasoned from a materialistic standpoint, lived an infidel and was of the earth earthy! My associates did the same if they were successful, and if not they retired back into the places from where they came! Poor dear girls! The men I knew were a hard lot of unprincipled physicians who wielded power in finances and politics, and we nurses were trained in their school! I grew to be a good servant of Mammon, worshipping at the shrine of a God of frivolous pleasures, working and toiling only for material recompense in dollars and cents and not because there might be a higher and holier aspiration in my daily labor than this! At last I came only to judge my friends’ value for what prowess and power they held in the circles of the world’s people! Just for actually what money they possessed! And I grew to live so continually on this plane of life that my sympathies were rarely if ever awakened for the better influences in life!

One cheerless dreary damp day in December there came a tiny half shrunken little waif of a girl child into one of the beds of my south ward. The eyes were closed as they laid her on the bed, as if in death, and the tiny over-old, pinched features of her face told of a certain suffering that seemed to pierce into my breast and cut like a knife, and from the first moment I saw her, I felt a strange intangible desire gripping me to stay close by her side and never leave her! And how coldly I laughed and scorned my own thoughts and feelings and drove these vague impulses from me like some troubled dream! But I had just as soon tried to stay myself from her bedside as a piece of steel from a magnet, for she drew me, and I at last scarcely left her, only to go at a sterner command of duty calling, ever calling! At last this little starveling spoke and ate nourishing food, and was propped up on the pillows and told me that she was begging for food, when the great wheeled van struck her, and broke both her legs and she was brought to St. Mary’s. She told me that she had had nothing to eat for almost three days when she was hurt! At her words, a great swelling something rose up in me, and I feared for myself, for I was angry at the cruelty of starvation, and I then wanted to go out and feed all the hungry – but with a mighty effort I again laughed at my insane weakness and settled down into a hospital nurse again, stayed myself down into that same wordless, stony hearted, miserable creature that the people of the world call kind and noble but alas, they do not know!

Once I asked this little creature her name and age and she said, “Age is nuthin’ to me, I don’t know what age is, an’ my name is Happy, just plain Happy, least thet’s what they call me ever’where.” At last I knew that she had come out of the filth of the dirty streets where naught lives but treachery and wickedness and wrong! I was indeed a foolish woman to listen for a moment to any such a story! Once when I had gone out and left her sleeping, I heard a feeble cry and returning quickly I saw her with outstretched arms and half raised body muttering something, with her gaunt roaming eyes fixed, in rapt awe on the ceiling! Not understanding I asked her what she was doing. “Beggin’,” she answered, “When I’se hungry I does that to Him, an’ then I goes out an’ begs of them as I see in the streets, but now I ain’t hungry, but I’s beggin’ to be took away so’s I won’t be hungry no more!” And this was prayer – ah, so long, so long, my heart had forgotten!

I cannot tell you with what a new and rapt inspiration I began life after this little foundling had taught me once more just how to pray. When she was dying I stood close over her with all the old sophistries and cynicism gone forever, for now that I had entered a new existence I was rising constantly above the mean conventionalities of the mundane sphere and living in close communication with other forces that I, as yet, realized little of! When, as I tell you, the experience of this little waif dying in my care as she raised those great sad, roaming eyes upward, searching the walls and ceiling for some familiar thing. I watched her intently and asked her what it was she wished. She told me that she saw there the dazzling whiteness of many forms and faces of smiling peace and happiness and that they were calling her incessantly to come to them! Gazing, I wondered and looking into the perfect quietude of the concentration of death, I heard strange sweet whispers float over my waiting and astonished ear! They spoke of peace and eternal blessing, and like a flash of inner hearing I knew that I would live after death, for these were only disembodied spirits that spoke to me, and that were showing themselves so radiantly happy to little Happy of the streets!

A great joy swelled within my soul and as my little world sick soul on the bed, left the body and soared away, I looked long and intently, and to my absolute astonishment I saw her, her real self arisen and moving upward in the arms of some mighty one and carried out of my astounded sight! It is needless to say that I sent up a strong prayer of supplication, of pleading that I might be forgiven and deserve the happiness that possessed me. Daily I grew, but with another growth, a soul awakening, whereas I had been passing through a spiritual death! But little Happy, that strange, pathetic little bundle of rags, had given me a new birth and I began to feel the breathing of the soul growing into new thoughts, pure and wholesome and which drove away all the old materialistic and sordid desires. I soon began to see people’s souls as well as their outer covering and I was astonished at my power of second sight as I called it.

And now all the ties and obligations of the old life seemed mean and ignoble and when I saw once and for all that the greater portion of the so-called physicians were not attending on an high and holy mission of actual relief to the sick but that their daily lives and acts of medical practice were actuated almost alone on the principles of charlatanism, lying and trickery, I was really appalled.

You see I had begun to see with the eyes of the soul, to feel within the inner depths, and now I could no longer blindly go headlong into the future and aid in carrying out the plans of these most wily, unprincipled men, for indeed they were most falsely preying upon an innocent public, and have always; and are doing so today! God pity them when they enter the boundaries of this beautiful world, for those of whom they have shed innocent blood, through needless and misapplied surgery, will rise up before them in mighty armies and mock them unceasingly! Those of whom it has been said in your world, “Oh yes, the operation was very successful, but-well the patient was too weak to rally!” So it would seem that the life of the patient was held in but small esteem, but the operation was the most important thing to be considered, and if that was successfully accomplished, then the patient might die or live, a matter of little consequence in either case! So when I received my new sight, I went to the superintendent and told him my intention of giving up my position of nursing the sick and suffering at large, on my own account, and in the run of our conversation I told him why! Told him that I could no longer aid the nefarious work of the cruel men of that institution, and he informed me that I might go in two weeks hence!

Alas! could I have seen! I went to my room shortly after and retired for the night, but was awakened from my first sleep by two masculine voices, holding low converse close to the foot of my bed! Then I heard footsteps, and an unspeakable horror seized me! Before I could struggle or call out, strong arms lifted me and pinioned me tight, while deft fingers threw a white cloth saturated with some sickening, deadly drug over my face, and I could not choose but breathe the deathly poison into my lungs. And this was the last I remembered of mortal life, and I awoke at last as if from a deep sleep, and stood alive and with a new sense of life, gazing on the pale coldness of my corpse on the bed, in the light of the grey winter morning. And lo, as I stood there these two, my murderers, came creeping in, and taking a bottle of poison, stealthily placed it into the stiffening and nerveless fingers of my lifeless body. I recognized then immediately, one as the assistant hospital physician and the other as the head of the institution. “The dead do not tell tales,” they whispered as they stole out, “only that little vial in her hand will be accountable for the loss of Mrs. Strong.”

With the awful sorrow of one looking on a doomed soul did my spirit eyes follow those men as they left my room and went their way, nor did the walls between us hide them, for spirits can read the acts of men through the darkness and solidity of walls or other material obstructions! They turned my body and I witnessed the dreary service to the end, and then appeared in the papers the account of another unhappy woman, a hospital nurse, who committed suicide by swallowing poison. For a long, long period of time, possibly years of earthly reckoning I was bound to earth by the terrible cause of my passing! But gradually I tore myself away from those low vibrations and rose into realms ethereal with those of the happier and the eternally blessed! And now I come and give my blessing unto you.