‘Her example has done a great deal in removing caste feelings among Christians. Batala was a place for feasts. In these feasts all Christians were invited. She generally sat with low-caste Converts, and ate with them....
‘Once for sending a girl to an orphanage she sent for a prospectus of the school. In it two warm dresses were put down in the list of clothes. ‘It is very unreasonable,’ she said, ‘to require two warm dresses.’ She had herself only one, and that she had been using for the last nine years. Her poem, “What a Missionary Miss Sahiba should be,” is an embodiment of what she was.’
One more short sentence from the same source is worthy of particular attention: ‘When ill, Miss Tucker did not like to inform her friends of it, lest her friends should leave their work and come to nurse her. She often expressed a wish that there were Mission Nurses, who could attend to the sick Missionaries. Without these, when one got ill, others were taken from their work to nurse her.’
In an earlier chapter it was suggested that some ladies, wishing to find a vocation, might offer themselves as Honorary helpers to the more regular Missionaries in certain lines, among which Nursing was included. Here it seems that the same thought had distinctly occurred to the mind of Charlotte Tucker. Why should not a little Band of Honorary Nurses for India be organised,—Nurses, trained and capable, holding themselves ready to go wherever their services may be required by any sick Missionary, so that the steady work of other Missionaries should not be unnecessarily interrupted by the illness of one of their number? The idea is at least worth consideration, since apparently it would have met with the approval of A. L. O. E.
CHAPTER XIV
A.D. 1885-1886
ON THE RIVER’S BRINK
Changes again were impending. Mr. and Mrs. Weitbrecht, after two years’ work in Batala, were to quit the place; and in their stead would come Mr. and Mrs. Corfield,—the former as new Principal of the High School. It is singular to note one Missionary after another thus coming and going, while Charlotte Tucker, with resolute perseverance, held to her post.
At last she too began to think of a change. Not of leaving Batala; not of going home, for even the shortest of furloughs! Such an idea perhaps never so much as occurred to her mind. She simply began to think of altering her residence in Batala. At Anarkalli she had lived with Miss Swainson, with Mr. and Mrs. Beutel, with Natives alone, with Mr. Baring, with Mr. Baring and his wife, with Mr. and Mrs. Weitbrecht; and now another ‘upheaval’ had become imminent.
The notion of a move was apparently at first her own, though others soon looked upon it as desirable. Two German ladies, Miss Hoernle and Miss Krapf, dwelt together in the cosy little Mission Bungalow, which they had named ‘Sonnenschein’ or ‘Sunshine.’ No room remained for a third inmate; but Miss Tucker formed a plan of building a small annexe to the west of ‘Sunshine,’ for her own use; and to this tiny annexe she resolved to give the name of ‘Gurub i Aftab,’ or ‘Sunset.’