The Nun on the Fire Escape
A delirious man, a locked bedroom, and a nun’s desperate climb up a high-rise fire escape to deliver medicine.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In a nameless city, a wealthy man lived alone in a luxurious fifth-floor flat. When a hot sickness touched him, he fell into delirium. His physician, believing religion was better for nursing than science, sent Sister Ursula. One Sunday afternoon, the invalid fell into a deep melancholy. When the doctor's boy arrived with medicine, the invalid was asleep. Sister Ursula stepped into the hall, and the door clicked shut, locking her out. Unable to find the caretaker, she went to the basement and found the caretaker's wife, who directed her to the outside fire escapes. Sister Ursula began the terrifying climb up the sheer wall. As she ascended, children in the street began to shout, drawing a crowd. She climbed past empty apartments, her hands raw from rust, determined to deliver the medicine to save the man's life. She eventually reached the window, climbed through, and successfully delivered the dose, saving the patient and sparking his will to live.
“Sister Ursula had gone down the basement steps through the cellar into the area, and with clenched teeth was looking up the monster sheer of red brick wall cut into long strips of the lessening perspective of perpendicular iron ladders.”
This story, written by Rudyard Kipling, captures the anxiety of urban isolation and the vertical divide of the city. While the 'high-rise' of 1893 was a luxury novelty, the story of seeking human connection across the cold, metallic barriers of a modern building remains a relevant trope in Seattle’s increasingly dense, vertical, and often lonely downtown landscape.
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