The Nun's Story by Kathryn Hulme

Author:Kathryn Hulme
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General, Religious, Nuns, Fiction
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1958-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

XI

The changing colours of the altar cloths from the violet of Advent, through the whites and golds of Christmas and on to the purples of Lent, told of the passing year.

Or, there were the four letters she was permitted to write annually to her family, of four pages each and not a sentence more except with special permission which she seldom sought; instead, she shrunk her bold square handwriting down to the spidery lace that gave more lines to the page and saw herself finally writing just like all the other missionary sisters.

There was the continuous drop on Father André’s leg for three months after his accident and then bi-monthly X-rays of slowly mending tissues which always gave her a struggle with pride. And, every so often, Mother Mathilde reported that she had written to the mother house for the nursing reinforcement that never came.

Afterwards, when Sister Luke looked back on her first Congo year, she saw but one really important experience in it. It was nothing she could report to her family as a major impression. You had to be a nun to see it that way. God caught up with her and gave her one more chance to recite her vows without reservation. Then, when she was safely in His pocket, He let her see with shattering clarity how little humility she had. She repeated her vows on what she hoped and prayed was her deathbed, struck down with a dysentery that left no desire to live or even the memory of what it had been like to be alive without the agonizing pain that tore the will to shreds.

When she discovered her condition, she hid it as long as she could. It was a humiliation, a loss of a working hand in the community, a waste of God’s time through her own carelessness, she believed. She traced her malady to tropical fruits which had possibly been stung by the fruit fly.

Twice weekly when she went to the native hospital to take lumbar punctures, a serving boy showed his ardour by waiting for her at the clinic door with a bowl of iced fruit, usually mangos he had traded in the native market. It was his way of saying, I like you. The chilly golden flesh of the mangos was delicious to eat in the humid forenoons when you had a dozen lumbar punctures lined up and the sensitive tests of spinal fluids to make afterwards, in quest of the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness.

The dysentery was the fulminant type, quick and acute. The day she collapsed in surgery seemed to be her last. The doctor raged at her as he put her on a stretcher.

“You should have told sooner, you proud little fool.” His face hung close. “How many stools in the past twenty-four hours?”

“More than thirty,” she whispered and saw his sallow face go grey.

They carried her to the convent infirmary. In a haze of pain and exhaustion she swallowed what the doctor ordered and felt the needle-prick of his opium injections.

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