WE SAT DOWN four to breakfast: Mr. and Mrs. Panter, young Mr. Titherton, and myself. They were American missionaries.
Mr. Panter was a very tall, very doleful man. His voice was the voice of Doom, slow and terrible; it seemed to come from a very long way away. He never smiled. He had an aloof and absent-minded manner. For thirty years he had struggled in a remote place to convert heathens to Christianity and (harder still) to make the converts Christians in something more than name; you had the feeling that this had bred in him a bitterness of soul which once it had been difficult to suppress. Now he had the mastery of it; but the inner superadded to the outer conflicts had left him worn out. He had no longer any interest or energy left for anything outside the duties which he so indomitably carried out. He was more nearly a ghost than anyone I have ever met.
His wife had, and needed to have, both feet on the earth. Her manner was not nearly so sepulchral as Mr. Panter’s. Though almost ostentatiously narrow in her sympathies, she was a person of great kindliness. She was accessible. She reflected her husband’s austerity and his controlled fanaticism, but she remained nevertheless an ordinary human being, capable of laughter and willing to admit vulnerability.
Young Mr. Titherton was the most interesting of the three. He was out there, I gathered, on probation; he was a kind of apprentice missionary. Although he had lived with the Panters for a year, and although for hundreds of miles round there were not more than half a dozen other white people, he was still addressed as ‘Mr. Titherton’. He was not, I think, entirely approved of. He was about twenty-five. His bland, slightly unctuous face became, when he was amused, all of a sudden facetious in a curiously disreputable way; you would almost have said that he leered. He quite often was amused. He had a natural leaning towards controversy, and at meal times would gratuitously stir up trouble for himself by defending the use of the word ‘damn’ in moments of ungovernable annoyance, or by putting in a word for Confucianism, or by partially condoning the less respectable aspects of Chinese life. Mr. Panter, reproving him with a vehemence which he clearly found it difficult to curb, would become for a moment almost human.
However sternly reproved, Mr. Titherton was irrepressible. A supremely tactless man, he would both make and withdraw his heretical statements in such a way as to give the maximum of offence. ‘Well, well,’ he would chirp, when enfiladed by a withering fire of orthodoxy from either end of the table, ‘I dare say you know best. Let’s say no more about it.’ Then he would wink at me in a very sophisticated way. This put me in a false and embarrassing position.
Breakfast was at 7.30. We sat down, and then Mr. Panter said a grace. But he never said it quite soon enough for me. Try as I would, I could not remember about that grace. The opening words always caught me with a spoon or a sugar-bowl poised guiltily over my porridge, while the others all had their hands folded devoutly on their laps. This made me appear both greedy and irreligious.
After breakfast, prayers.
Mr. Titherton distributes little red books entitled, ‘Redemption Songs: for Choir, Solo, or The Home’. Mrs. Panter seats herself at an instrument distantly related to the harmonium and strikes a wheezy chord.
‘No. 275!’ announces Mr. Panter in an awful voice.
Mrs. Panter rolls up the sleeves of her dress We are off …
The Redemption Songs do not seem to me very good songs. Their composer often expresses himself in so turgid and involved a style as to be practically incomprehensible. His syntax is occasionally weak, and even at its strongest is over-richly encrusted with allusions and invocations (‘Oh Tsidkenu!’ is a favourite one) which mean nothing to me. Nor is Mrs. Panter, at the harmonium, particularly adept at glossing over his frequent metrical inconsistencies; her lively but straightforward attack is based on the assumption – too often unjustifiable – that both lines in a couplet will contain roughly the same number of syllables.
However, save for some daring experiments in the third verse, this morning’s Song is fairly plain sailing. Each verse ends with the lilting refrain ‘Wonderful Man of Cal-varee-ee!’ and we usually manage that bit rather well.
On the whole, though, the singing is ragged. Mr. Panter’s voice, though not lacking in vigour, ploughs a lonely furrow just where we most needed co-operation. Mr. Titherton flutes away modestly and, as far as I can judge, in tune; but he stands no chance against Mr. Panter, who produces a consistently formidable volume of sound and makes a point of shouting all the holier words at the top of his voice. In all this uproar I myself am a mere cipher, for I well know that I cannot sing and it is better that I should not try. I go nevertheless through the motions, opening and shutting my mouth with a rapt air, and occasionally emitting a little sort of mew.
At last the Song is over.
A passage from the Bible is now read aloud, either by Mr. Panter or Mr. Titherton, and afterwards extracts from a commentary upon it. This is an extraordinary compilation, thunderously phrased but somewhat bigoted in conception. Yesterday the commentator launched a furious attack upon witches. It was ridiculous, he warned us, to assert that these creatures were either harmless or nonexistent. On the contrary, they represented a very real peril to Church and State alike, and when encountered should be severely dealt with.
To-day he is in milder mood. Sternly, but in temperate terms, he animadverts on the folly of attaching undue importance to some popular prejudice or superstition.
He must have been a remarkable man.
After that we pray for fellow-missionaries belonging to the Panters’ denomination. A little pamphlet is produced – the Army List, as it were, of the Church Militant – and all the names and addresses on one page are read out as being those to which on this day we especially wish to call Divine attention. Yesterday they were all in Spain, and Mr. Panter, who is not too good at foreign words and when reading the commentary gets terribly tied up over Latin phrases like vox populi, vox dei, had considerable difficulty with the Spanish place-names.
But to-day it is Mr. Titherton’s turn, and Mr. Titherton is much more nimble-tongued. Also he has the pleasing custom of annotating the list, wherever possible, from personal knowledge of the people whose names are on it. His manner towards the Deity is friendly and informal. He reads out something like this:
‘ADDIS ABABA – Reverend Macintyre. … MEDINA – Miss Tackle, Miss P. Flint (I know those two ladies, Our Father. Please look on them to-day. They’re two of the very best, I can tell you). … ALEPPO – Reverend and Mrs. Gow. … MOSUL – Miss Gondering, Miss J. Gondering. (Now that printing press they’ve rigged up, Our Father! That’s a splendid bit of work. I do hope you’ll help them to make a success of it, Our Father.) … DAMASCUS – Reverend Pretty, Reverend Polkinghorne, Miss O’Brien …’ and so on, ending up with a swift and delightful transition from the Near Eastern deserts to ‘ICELAND – Reverend Gook.’
Now we kneel down, and either Mr. Panter or Mr. Titherton embarks on a long impromptu prayer. Here again I prefer Mr. Titherton’s technique. Mr. Panter is apt to be stilted and ponderous; he thanks God for ‘the bright weather which obtains’. Mr. Titherton is very different. Nothing stilted about him. He has a straight talk to God. He is confidential, almost racy. ‘Stop me if you’ve heard this one, Our Father’, you expect to hear him say at any moment.
I much admire his ingenuity – far greater than Mr. Panter’s – in finding things to give thanks for. Mr. Panter has to rack his brains to recall a blessing; his struggles are indeed a sad comment on human felicity. But Mr. Titherton is never at a loss. It rained yesterday. Mr. Panter would have thanked God for the rain and left it at that. But Mr. Titherton examines every aspect of the shower. Its timeliness: its cooling propensities: its value to both the flora and fauna of the district: the damage it inflicted on the graceless poppy-fields: and last of all, just when it seemed that Mr. Titherton must have exhausted all the potential cues for thanksgiving, its effectiveness, in falling on good and evil alike, as a reminder of God’s impartiality, Mr. Titherton’s pious courtesy is Oriental in more than its setting.
After this there are more prayers, of a general nature: at the end of which I am suddenly shaken out of a stupor by the discovery that I myself am being prayed for. The experience, however salutary, is embarrassing. The prayee – his mind flashing back to the ritual of after-dinner toasts – has an uncomfortable feeling that he ought to stand up, or at any rate adopt some posture other than the kneeling. There is also the haunting fear that he may have to – and certainly ought to – reply.
Mr. Titherton’s position, however, is almost equally awkward. Aware, like the rest of that tiny congregation, that my prime desire is to leave Jehol with the minimum of delay, he leads off with a request for Divine intervention to accelerate my departure. Then something – perhaps a cough from Mrs. Panter – tells him that this was not the happiest of beginnings, and in the end the difficulty of reconciling the purpose of his prayer with the laws of hospitality is overcome only by a great deal of circumlocution, qualification, and parenthesis. His voice becomes halting and apologetic. For the first time uncertainty has reared its ugly head in that comical but gallant little community.
In several ways, Prayers were rather a strain.