GABRIELLE
My sister Gabrielle was singularly circumstanced in temperament, as she had been too curiously abused in treatment. I left her a young man of twenty-one—she was two years older than I—and only knew of her changing experiences from letters sent to me at San Antonio, Texas. Mother and father were always a trifle worried over Gabrielle's retired and shrinking ways, her abnormal shyness before people, a physical timidity almost that kept her face averted, her rich, deep, large eyes half closed as if in dreams, and controlled her speech, impeding and denying it.
Her languid action and the frequent recurrent fits of a semi-stupor passing off into reveries, when the loosened current of her thought found an unexpected vent in rambling half-lucid, oftentimes poetic apostrophes and ascriptions, wrought in them a transparent terror that embarrassed the grieving girl.
Something of the sort had disturbed me before I left home, because I loved Gabrielle dearly, and remembered so many intimacies between us. In our walks around fair Briois we—both perhaps prematurely serious and inquisitive—talked of things invisible and beautiful, as angels and fairies, and in an old graveyard back of a church beyond the village and on the edge of a wood where the birds nested and sung, wondered over the dead. We amused our fancies with inventions of their work and play, now their bodies were so securely anchored in the earth. Because of all this, yes, and because Gabrielle was very pretty too, I tried to break the mystery of her modesty and lonely habits.
But really there was no mystery, and her modesty was a lovely maidenly reserve. Gabrielle was nervously over-strung, and her susceptibilities were extremely tender and responsive, and then there was growing in her that inexplicable power which forms the raison d'être of all this marvellous experience which—as everyone knows now—put an end to the awful WAR.
Well, before I left home, before I found myself hung, as it were, over the bottomless Atlantic in a big sea-worthy American ship, booked for Galveston, Texas, mother and father decided to send Gabrielle to Paris to a training school of nurses. It had occurred to them that my sister with her gentleness, and a real skill in the use of her fingers, would do well, while the contact with doctors and surgeons—rather direct, imperious, and active men—would wear away her apparent mistrust and nervousness.
But here was their mistake. The analysis was correct, the procedure hopelessly wrong. Gabrielle, always obedient and gravely mute about her own wishes, assented, and entered a training school for nurses and almost at once encountered the terrors of the operating room. Her sensitive and refined sense shuddered at the sight of suffering and disease, her pity for it—willing and self-sacrificing as was her desire to help—caused her involuntary agony of mind. The vulgarities of treatment, the raw necessities of the exposure, mutilations, and the repulsion she felt for blood, and the naked sightlessness of wounds, amputations, incisions—all the obtrusive physical facts of the hospital offended her. Too delicate in feeling, too aesthetic in temperament, too limpid in her affinities, as of a spirit discarnate, soaring, and apprehensive, she underwent mental tortures—hard to realize to others differently conditioned—in this enforced service.