BOOK TWO
USE GRAVITY!
TO CHINA
AT DAWN America was out of sight astern. The farm boy vibrated with the largeness of being a world traveler on this white floating city called the Empress of Japan. The oval of the carefully varnished rail under his hands had flakes of sea salt on it. All the metal wore an uneven thick skin of white paint. The rolling city creaked, and down in the cabin one heard a constant thumping which Dr. Elting said came from the helical blades of the propeller biting at the miles of the ocean.
Servants in white jackets were always cheerful at your elbow, and they gave one a sinking feeling. Were they Chinese or Japanese? How could one tell? Could a ship called the Empress of Japan be manned by Chinamen? Here, in one who had pledged his whole life to the service of the Chinese people, was an ignorance so profound that he dared not ask anyone for the answer.
The puzzle made him dizzy. Or was it the rising and dipping of the horizon? Dr. Elting reserved two deck chairs. The deck steward tucked David into his with a blanket that had an odor of a dampness seven miles deep. Dr. Elting strode round and round the deck, his jaw working as he walked, as if he too were masticating miles. His beard blew like an ample white scarf over his shoulder. David heard roared snatches of the veteran warrior’s conversation with fellow pacers as they approached his deck chair on their rounds: “…that great Eleventh of Hebrews with its inspired and inspiring record of Old Testament men and women of faith, and of what God wrought through them…”
That day David saw fish that could fly. He saw porpoises in the joy of their breaching and arching. In midafternoon there were shouts on deck, and out on the sea he saw fountains. Whale spouts! Jonah was on David’s mind, a man in a dark room in a kind of submarine that was alive—until Dr. Elting shouted in his merciless praying voice, “Thar she blows! Thar she blows!” and then playfully started pacing with one leg stiff as if he were clumping along on a peg of whalebone.
THE WIND rose. The waves bared their white teeth. David suddenly felt that he, become Jonah, had swallowed a whale. He threw back the musty blanket and fled on knees of sponge to the cabin, where he disgorged his viscera, his young pluck, and all his hopes of life to come.
He was seasick for three days. Dr. Elting, healthy as a horse in a hay meadow, sloshed and spewed as he shampooed his beard in the morning, and dressing bellowed a hymn that rang in David’s perfidious inner ears all day:
Jesus, Savior, pilot me
Over life’s tempestuous sea;
Unknown waves before me roll,
Hiding rock and treacherous shoal;
Chart and compass come from Thee:
Jesus, Savior, pilot me!
“Stay on deck!” Dr. Elting shouted. “Fresh air!”
David, in the cocoon of his steamer rug, was able to sip the consommé and nibble on the crisp water biscuits the tactful deck steward offered him; only to have to stagger below again to empty out his emptiness.
Part of his seasickness must have been the effect of a rough voyage of the mind into the unknown. He was a twenty-seven-year-old landsman out on a vast alien tossing sheet of mystery, driven by the unconscious national impulse of westing toward a heathen shore. He heaved his heart out into an enamel basin because he was lovesick and homesick. This was not like the voyages dreamed in the Ecarg on the ice pond in Salt Branch. Was the world flat, and would the Empress of Japan fall off the edge in the night? He had promised away a whole lifetime. Now he expected the span to be very short. He would die on the crest of the next wave.
BUT HE DOES not die. Instead he rings for the room steward and asks him to fetch the ship’s doctor. “Get doctor!” he shouts. “Me want doctor!” In his letter to Emily describing this scene, he tells of his intense shame at falling into childish red-Indian talk in his effort to make himself understood by the Chinese or Japanese servant. The steward nods and grins and goes away. After a while he returns with the assistant purser, a young Englishman. David sheepishly says he was wondering if the ship’s doctor could give him something for his stomach. The young Englishman looks at David from the lofty height of a race with sturdy sea legs—this is David’s first encounter with the British stare that will burn his eyes for years in China—and says he will see what he can do, sir.
A hundred waves later the doctor comes in. He is English and drunk. He is gallant and jocose. “Mal de mer,” he says, “is seated here.” He aims a finger like a pistol at his own head. Then he begins to fumble in his black bag. In his condition the motion of the ship throws him about like a rag doll. David, who knows what to think of drinking, does not want to be given the wrong medicine by this sinner, and he is on the point of telling the doctor that he suddenly feels better when the door flies open and Dr. Elting enters singing. The long beard wags for a few moments as the doctor of divinity diagnoses the ailment of the doctor of medicine. Then there is fire in Dr. Elting’s eye, and while David wrestles on the bunk with his gorge there is a brief but active exercise of Dr. Elting’s gift for the rescue of souls. The physician, who has obviously encountered missionaries before on this run to the Orient, snaps his bag shut with exaggerated dignity, the little finger of the hand at the catch genteelly elevated as if to hold a teacup, and exits with his head high, apparently forgetting that he has not treated his patient.
THE AFFAIR of the drunken doctor seemed to tap a deep well of outrage in Dr. Elting. This worthy elder was on his way back to a remote station of the Presbyterians after his first furlough in thirty years. He had told David on the first day that he was a believer in itinerating: the lonely task of wandering in the hinterland with a few Bibles and tracts on one’s cart, preaching in the streets of small towns, saving the poor heathen Chinese one by one, “drinking every day,” he said, “the sweet nectar of soul-winning.” This was the evangelistic romance David had so often heard about and dreamed of. Dr. Elting’s wife had died of a quinsy; he had lost a son to a fever as the family fled across the country in rags, disguised as Chinese peasants, during the Boxer time. He prayed angrily to an angry God, and now, dizzied, it seemed, by the fragrance of spirituous liquors hanging on the air of the stateroom after the doctor’s door slam, he turned his improving eye on poor David. Seasick David did not need this.
Dr. Elting chose this moment to ask David how much he knew about Confucius.
“Precious little,” said a weak voice from the berth.
“He looked at me,” David wrote Emily,
as if I were a toad. “Another ignoramus!” he shouted. “Another ignoramus for the field!” Then he began to lecture me about “the deceptively attractive ideas concerning ethics which you will find among the Confucianists. You must steel yourself, young man, against this most seductive of the heathen systems that you will encounter. It is almost the case that with respect to morals a Christian may look in the mirror and see—with but little distortion—a Confucianist. A looking glass—danger, my son!—vanity! You will be putting up the true word as it is in Jesus Christ against a very close semblance of the truth, and you will find that the native Confucianist is not eager to purchase the wares you offer him. He stands on the obverse of the reflection, and he sees no great advantage on your side. I advise you in your untutored condition to stay away from the literati. Your harvest will be among stupid people like yourself. Even they will argue. Even there, you will need to be armed. I wish we could tuck into the kitbag of every young recruit like you a concise little tract with just the nub of the case against all these claims of the Buddhists and the atheists and the Taoists and the Confucianists and so forth. You should not go out there with blinders on. Bone up. Get the main lines of the thing. Don’t go out there an ignoramus!” And with that, Emily, he departed from the stateroom with his head at almost exactly the same angle as the doctor’s when he had left a few minutes before, and he slammed the door in exactly the same way.
TO DAVID’S astonishment, Dr. Elting’s wrath acted as a tonic. Instead of feeling chagrined, he felt much better. He got up and about. The sea was no flatter than it had been, but David’s mind turned to the stability of the little gyroscope in Absolom Carter’s demonstrations at Enderbury Institute. He paced the decks and scanned the bulletin boards. He played pickup games of shuffleboard and deck tennis and Ping-Pong, and he noted in his diary: “About seventy passengers. Businessmen, army officers, pleasure seekers, sixteen missionaries. Making 350 miles/p/d.”
In the library off the main saloon, two days later, he wrote letters on ship’s stationery. To Dr. Todd in New York:
In a day of sports on shipboard, I was fortunate enough to uphold the reputation of the Association by winning two events. When they learned that I was an Association Secretary, the officials did not offer me the prepared prizes—boxes of cigars—but quietly exchanged them for boxes of candy, thus giving a nice testimonial to the Association.
DURING the night of November 5, the Empress crossed the 180th meridian, the International Date Line, and something happened that quite frightened David. A day was lost from his life. The ship crossed an invisible line in the ocean, and having retired on Sunday evening, he awoke on Tuesday morning. He felt a yawning gap in his immediate past. What might he have experienced on that lost day? What might he have learned? Feeling a need to make up for the loss, and having heard that there were numerous Chinese passengers down in steerage on this ship—some of them turned back from America by the recent extension of the “yellow-peril” immigration restrictions, others going home discouraged by the hostility they had encountered during their stays—he descended, like Virgil into hell, into the bowels of the Empress. What he saw there seared his mind.
Back on the lifeboat deck in fresh air on his chair, he tried to stammer out to Dr. Elting the picture of that pathetic band huddled in unventilated caverns of the holds: students, coolies, businessmen, packed in without regard to person or station, in a miasma of vomitous odors, kept out of sight and mind of the seventy white saloon passengers above.
Dr. Elting, seated stiffly beside him, disdaining a blanket, was unmoved. “Did you preach?” he asked (as David wrote Emily).
“No,” David said. He wanted to add: I fled.
“You should have preached. You must realize that the Chinese people are dying without God at the rate of a million a month. Look into the hearts of those passengers down there, young man. There is nothing they need so badly as the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The nation they are going back to is rotten to the core. You will not find an honest man in China from the rickashaw puller to the lamentable boy who is called Son of Heaven. Eunuchs rule the roost. Chicanery, rapacity, cheating—there is greed and shame and moral corruption in every transaction. Men sell their daughters into sin. They quarrel and smoke opium. God is truant from their lives. Righteousness is absent from China. Ah, son, those of us who know God see a bleak future for that great empire. The Chinese talk about reform, they dabble in what they call reform, but they must look to their morals and turn them right around toward Jesus Christ, or China as we know it will wither away to oblivion.”
“He was putting me on my guard,” David wrote Emily, “against a tendency to idealize the conditions of the heathen and the heathen world. Still,” he added, “I wish he had gone down there to see for himself.”
DAVID was impressed by Dr. Elting. This Moses dressed in black serge was obviously one of the heroes of the penetration of China, and David was moved by things he said. Years later he recalled with embarrassment that one of the old man’s outbursts had thrilled him so much he had had gooseflesh all over his body. They were talking about the British officers on the ship. David felt intimidated by them; his way of putting this to Dr. Elting was: “These Brits are starchy, aren’t they?”
The big white head swiveled toward David, throwing its white chin-flag around. “Look here,” he said. “Mark you the providence of the Lord in opening the door of faith unto the Chinese Gentiles. First he sent the English branch of the Anglo-Saxon race and gave it a hold of the two wrists of the imperial power. God sent the gunboats and God sent the cannons, and God sent these men you call starchy. They planted their standard in Peking, they planted their standard in Tientsin. I am speaking of 1858, 1860. The English power grasped the hands and held them firmly, and then God gave to the other branch of the Anglo-Saxon race, to us, to the Americans, access to the brain and to the heart of the Chinese heathen. He let the English use main strength, to hold the heathen still so he would listen to us. He made us the prime evangelizers and educators of those people. God had a plan before we ever saw it.”
In a letter to brother Paul a decade later, recalling this episode, David tersely commented: “Everything considered, in my preparation for my missionary career there was perilous little left out, of exactly the sort of thing that would most unsuit me for my work.”
LACONIC notes from David’s diary:
| NOV. 14 | Awoke as the ‘Empress’ entered the bay before Yokohama. Saw Togo’s fleet. Saw Fujiyama at dawn. Rode about town in a jinrickisha. |
| 15 | Arrived Kobe about two today. Found Kobe a town touched everywhere with Western life. Made some small purchases. |
| 16 | On inland sea. The sides of the mountains terraced and cultivated. My vaccination is working lovely. |
| 17 | Arrived Nagasaki at 6 A.M. Nagasaki not as clean as other towns. Saw more of Jap life. Have decided the ship’s crew is Chinese. |
So much for Japan. David seemed to be withholding his real excitement for what was to come. The sea south of Japan was as quiet, he wrote Emily, “as a bay. As I near China I am concerned to know what is before me but thankful that I cannot see.” What a strange line! Was he savoring his last hours of naiveté and ignorance? Or had fierce old Dr. Elting frightened him? By the time he wrote “Search,” years later, he had come to believe that the days of harrowing seasickness on this voyage had marked a turning point in his life. He thought perhaps he had vomited out a great deal of his former priggishness, his self-concern. He was humble. He was ready to try to be kind.
He was out on deck at dawn on the nineteenth, and in the first light of day he saw a strange sea-change. At a definite line, the water turned from blue to yellowish brown. “Silt from Tibet!” Dr. Elting shouted. “That’s water from the Yangtze, my boy!”
THE FLEDGLING missionary went ashore at Shanghai at ten o’clock on the morning of November 19, 1905. Three Y.M.C.A. secretaries’ wives—Mesdames Keystone, Wolf, and Wood—were on the dock to meet him. As David walked down the gangplank his whole being seemed to be concentrated in the itch of his vaccination. Was this China? The river was massed with destroyers, gunboats, and merchant ships flying the flags of European nations. The ladies rode with David in a carriage across the Soochow Creek Bridge and along the Bund—an asphalted path by the river, a lovely strip of tended lawn, a busy thoroughfare. Mrs. Keystone was the tour guide. She waved a white-gloved hand toward the compound of the British consulate. Police Court. Then the first of what she called “the hongs”: vast stone office buildings, Fearon’s, Dent’s, Jardine Matheson. Had there been a terrible mistake? Had he crossed the Atlantic? Was this London? Out on the river—Mrs. Keystone’s lips were pursed—were four ugly opium hulks, where the drug, she said, was bonded. The Yuenfah, the Ariel, the Corea, the Wellington. “The Ariel,” she said, “was an American clipper that sailed out of here and was dismasted off the Saddles.” The Customs House and receiving shed; then two banks. Kelly and Walsh, a bookstore. The Telegraph Company. The China Merchants Company. David was nothing but a hot arm. He decided in his dismay he had smallpox. Where was the quaint Cathay of his heart’s yearning? In the wide-lawned public gardens he had seen a gazebo, a bandstand: a grand version of the one back in Salt Branch. Oh, no! The fever was homesickness! He should not have come. Emily! They tricked me! Todd and Blackton sold me a counterfeit country!
The Keystones were gentle, but David woke the next morning with the chills and aches of a cheated man. Mrs. Keystone took him downtown to order an overcoat against the North China winter, and a cutaway and striped trousers that the farm boy would need for formal occasions with Chinese officials. They rode in rickshas past the playgrounds of empire: the racecourse, the Swimming Bath, the Shanghai Cricket ground, the Golf Club. The scrupulously tended flower beds beside the pavilions of pleasure were asplash with ravishing chrysanthemums. David saw the November light from these flowers caught glistening in tiny globes of sweat rolling down the neck of his ricksha boy. He wanted to shout: “Stop! Let me down. I’m sorry.” The only Chinese he had been near so far were the Number One Boy and the coolie at the Keystones’, and this panting human pony. “I’m sorry,” he said out loud.
The tailor shop was on Shantung Road. Here in streets in back of the Bund were hints, at least, of a West-facing mercantile China: large Chinese characters on hanging signs over shopfronts adorned with carved dragons and red-tasseled octagonal lamps. Shops of silk, satin, embroideries, curios, purses, pottery, scrolls, cloth shoes, ear guards, tea-root figures, and even, if you had the need, coffins—and David felt he might. The tailor exclaimed in a wild flattery of pidgin English at David’s enormous size. The coat would be ready the next afternoon at two.
FARROW BLACKTON. General Secretary of the Y.M.C.A. for all China, was now in the Far East, but he was off in Korea on Association business, and David would have to wait for his return to know exactly what his assignments in Tientsin would be. The next ship north was to leave on the twenty-eighth.
In the meantime he made the acquaintance of the Shanghai secretaries. “Took tiffin with Wolfs.” “Dinner with Sinclairs.” Keystone took him to some evening classes. He helped measure an athletic field, tracing out racing lanes with lime, for a meet among Chinese athletes the Association was staging; and at the meet he was awed by the presence of six “stewards” who were of “high official rank next to governors,” in silks and conical hats with buttons and badges of their haughty grades. With Bulmer Wolf he called on Methodist Bishop James W. Bashford, to be, as it were, blessed out of his shock at this non-China he had reached after so many struggles of the heart. But even the episcopal nods over teacups failed to rescue David from his incredulity and letdown. Near tears, he shopped for some curios to send home to loved ones. He wore his new overcoat everywhere. It was lined with fur. It had cost eight American dollars.
“IT IS WAR”
ON NOVEMBER 28 David started downriver with his colleague F. Albert Wood on a coastwise steamer, the Hsin Tung. After the huge white surge of the Empress, this tinny black little tremblement of a cargo vessel with room for just six cabin passengers seemed to rock whenever a fish jumped near it in the river. Sure enough, when she reached the open sea, she bucked and rolled and felled poor David. He had recovered from his reaction to his vaccination but not from his reaction to the spurious China he had seen in Shanghai. The ship’s captain, a Scotchman named McKinnon, was a soft-spoken Christian, and he dropped by two or three times a day to assure David that the motion would stop as soon as they rounded the Shantung peninsula. That, however, took two and a half days. One of the cabin passengers was a silk-clad Chinese gentryman who had been the Emperor’s Minister to Madrid. At the one meal David was able to take at table, this splendid personage ate with chopsticks and made rude slurping sounds; Wood whispered on deck afterward that according to Chinese etiquette these noises praised the cook. David sighed at how much he had to learn.
In midmorning of December 1 the Hsin Tung arrived off the bar at Taku, at the mouth of the Pei Ho; a tender took the passengers over the bar and ashore at three, and they caught the Tientsin train an hour later. They rode sixty miles over a flat and dun terrain, every inch tilled but for scattered villages of mud huts, windmills, conical grave mounds, and temples with curved roofs in groves of trees.
Secretaries Henderson and Harmon were on the train platform to meet the new secretary. Behind the warmth of their greeting was a sincerity that came from their knowledge, which David did not yet share, that the neophyte was going to relieve them of horse work so they could do things they had long wanted to do.
It was a damp and foggy evening, and as they stood there David was assaulted by the stink of great China, which came in windborne waves: the smell of night soil spread on fields so that the excrement of the generations would grow food to produce excrement to grow food to produce excrement in the endless cycle of a precarious agronomy; of decomposing human and animal corpses in shallow graves and floating face down in rivers; of decaying vegetation and feces in canals; of burning garbage; of the rotting guts of beasts in shambles; of garlic and sweat and menses and bad teeth and mildewed quilted garments—the hideous compacted smells of the poor. David, standing on the platform of Tientsin East train station, raised his nose to the evening breeze and knew he had arrived at last in some kind of China.
THE HENDERSON family took him in. Happily they lived in a Chinese-style house in the Chinese city—a walled compound containing several buildings on three courtyards. The Chinese-city work of the Association was done in the compound, which was on an alleyway called Ch’ing-tzu Hutung, near where the East Gate of the city wall had been. The Hendersons had two small children. They were warmly hospitable. They gave him a room on the innermost courtyard looking out on an acacia tree. Miraculously some of David’s boxes shipped from Salt Branch had already arrived before him; one of the oddities he would soon learn about China was the astonishing combination of delays, false starts, postponements, corrupt deceptions, and lapses in execution, on the one hand, with dazzling efficiencies and expeditious deliveries and prompt and cheerful performances, on the other. Out of a kindness undoubtedly tinged with powerful curiosity, the Hendersons had opened all the boxes. One of them contained his bed frame, and Mrs. Henderson said: “We knew we were to have a grand big man, because the bedstead you’d shipped is seven feet long. I measured it. I said to Henny: ‘This new chap must be Og, King of Babylon, whose bedstead was of iron; nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the width of it.’ ”
Henderson broke some bad news to David that first evening: He knew that “Blackie” wanted David to start immediately teaching English-speaking Chinese students at the Peikai Middle School. This meant David would have to postpone his study of the Chinese language. Henderson had been teaching at the school. David saw at once that he was on the lowest rung of the North China ladder. There went the romantic visions of soul-winning—the young athlete braving famine and plague as a colporteur of tracts and a preacher to the heathen in fluent Mandarin: a great Elting in the making, except more sensitive, more humane. Instead he would grub along “doing” English comp and algebra and geog Monday and Wednesday evenings and Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons.
In his diary, three burdened words: “Prayed for courage.”
THE NEXT MORNING Henny Henderson took David on a ricksha ride through the foreign parts of the city. “Another Shanghai,” David dejectedly wrote that night. As they rode along, Henny explained how this strange, polyglot city had come into being. Though many miles upriver from the sea, he said, the Chinese had long used Tientsin as Peking’s port. Four times in the nineteenth century, he said, foreign powers had humiliated China: the British, in the Opium War, in 1840; the British and French, in two campaigns in North China, in 1858 and 1860; and the Japanese, in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Under the Peking Convention, after the 1860 war, Henderson said, the British and French extracted from the Chinese the right to trade in Tientsin and to lease parcels of land on the city’s riverfront. After the Japanese victory, the Germans and Japanese claimed similar concessions, and when the Boxer Rebellion was put down five years later, “the real grab game began,” Henderson said. The Russians, the Belgians, the Italians, and the Austrians all carved out miniature countries, a few score acres in area, in the city, and the earlier lessees all enlarged their enclaves.
“This was truly queer,” David wrote that night,
for we traversed Europe—and more—in our rickshas in less than an hour. Without crossing water, we could go through England, France, Germany, and even Japan; Russia and Austria are across the river. Each of the concessions has the national architecture, language, legal system, plumbing, business methods, and costumes and customs of its proprietor. On Victoria Road we saw Sikh policemen of the British force, with their turbans and beards; on Rue St. Louis we saw the Foreign Legion kepis of Senegalese policemen. Henny pointed out that one eats ‘Knackwurst’ in the German Concession, takes his shoes off at doors of inns and homes in the Japanese Concession, and plays cricket on the Recreation Ground in the British Concession. There’s good living here: parks and racecourse and bathing and boating and golf clubs. The only Chinese I saw were ricksha boys, street cleaners, municipal workmen, and house servants; though Henny told me that some rich Chinese—businessmen and generals and government officials who are out of favor at court and are afraid of having their heads cut off—rent some of the big foreign houses with high walls around them topped with broken glass set in the mortar. What a letdown! In my imagination, I had had such a different picture of the city of my mission.
First impressions in the Chinese city were, besides, depressing. “Human life cheap. Servants dirty. Beggars in streets. Horrible cripples. Saw a leper—nose totally rotted away.” He tried to make a home—bought some things: straw matting to cover the brick floor of his room; a screen with lotus blossoms painted on it; a washstand with its basin, pitcher, and slop jar (for there was no such thing here as running water).
IN GREAT TREPIDATION he faced his first class at the school. A bare, brick-walled room. Cold. Thirty students in rows on benches. Blank faces. David spoke slowly so the students would understand. Trying to use primer words, he gave a lecture, improvising as he went, on the republican form of government. The one-way dealings were hard. “Tough English and geog. Teaching going to take lots of time. The difficulties of the situation will call for much sacrifice.”
MORE THAN he knew when he wrote those words, for Blackton finally arrived in mid-December and firmly told David that besides teaching at Peikai, he was going to have to take charge of the Settlement Branch of the Y.M.C.A., relieving Harmon for other work. David could hardly believe his ears. He was to take the place of two men. And the Settlement Branch! Not even dealing with Chinese but only with the foreigners of the concessions. It had been decided in New York that he was not to marry until the next fall.
David tried hard to be angry. All he could write in his diary was: “I fear these men have put dark glasses on.” They could not see how things really stood.
Already, the next day, Christian passivity had set in. The rage David must have felt deep down lurks in his note on his meek acceptance of Blackton’s orders:
I knew I must expect hardship and great travail out here. I have given my life to this work. It is war, and I as a general must be ready to face even death. Why not live with a smile and a happy heart?
ON ONE of his first evenings at the Hendersons’ David heard a stirring story.
A visitor had come from Peking, an Association man David had met in New York during the trying time when Emily was being examined by the International Committee: “Center Rush” Gridley, the huge, jovial, bustling Princeton man with mustaches like a locomotive’s cowcatcher. As they lingered at table after dinner, Gridley said he had heard disturbing news in Peking from a friend at the American Legation.
On October 28—just three weeks before David stepped off the gangplank in Shanghai—the Presbyterian station at Lienchow had been sacked by a Chinese mob, and five more missionaries had been added to the roster of martyrs. Gridley explained to David that the Chinese had been reacting furiously in recent months against the American extension of the immigration exclusion act the year before—the “yellow peril” act, to keep cheap Chinese labor out of the United States.
“The fellow in charge down there at Lienchow,” the big man said, “was a daggoned fool. First he buys a temple and stores the idols in an outhouse. Then, when the villagers build a mat shed for something or other, and one end sticks over onto Presbo land, he calls them in and makes them promise never to trespass again. Of course they do, so he sends out his coolies to steal three ridiculous little cannon the village clan owns to scare off bandits. He gives ’em back when he cools off, but not all the people in the village know he’s returned ’em, so they bust into the hospital to look for ’em. While they’re rummaging around they find a fetus preserved in alcohol in a big beaker. Well! That’s enough! They parade it through the streets to show the people how missionaries murder babies and bottle ’em, so when they’re ready they can scoop out the eyes and livers to mix ’em with lead and mercury to make silver. You know all those old stories, Henny. That’s when the slaughter began.”
David asked what “all those old stories” were.
“Henny and Center Rush told me some of them,” David wrote Emily. “Their eyes,” he wrote,
became like glass buttons as they talked, and there were red spots on their cheeks; you’d have thought they had a high fever. There were terrible Chinese broadsides and pamphlets that accused missionaries of the most barbarous crimes. They claimed that after the missionaries cut the vital organs out of babies’ bodies they boiled the corpses and ate them, or laid them away in pickle barrels to eat in the winter. They said missionaries poisoned lice and spread them among the poor to kill them. And that they carved fetuses out of pregnant Chinese women and used them to make pills that rejuvenated Christians but crippled everyone else.
In this account David must have given Emily the impression that Henderson’s and Gridley’s feverish look came simply from their having lived so long with danger that it made them hot to tell of it, but from the diary we find another reason. In a hand so cramped and tiny as to be barely legible, David wrote some more things they told him—things he could not possibly have passed on to Emily. We can only imagine David’s own pinpoint irises and embered cheeks as he wrote such forbidden words:
Accusations of ‘these’ sins: That potions, made of “monthlies,” sperm, and virgins’ ovaries, when rubbed on ‘mons veneris’ of Chinese women, caused them to be beside themselves with lust for missionaries. That missionaries considered menstrual blood sacred and drank it, and this gave them the famous missionary stink. That Roman Catholic priests inserted tubes in the rectums of young boys to enlarge them for comfort in the doings of Sodom and Gomorrah. That Protestant ministers, who thank heavens even these Chinese haters did not believe went in for such monstrosities, but rather favored the fair sex, initiated each young Chinese bride in the church in holy instruction in coitus. That they baptized nubile girls naked in holy water as a preparation for what the polemicists called “the net of pleasure.”
Finally, as David did write Emily, the two older men told David of a massacre of foreigners
right here in Tientsin. It was thirty-five years ago, but they said it could happen today. The arrogance of some of the French had driven the city wild. Some French nuns, they were Lazarists, established an orphanage, and in their zeal to win souls for Christ they offered a cash premium for each child brought in to them—and worse than that, they paid to have sick and dying children carried in to them so they could baptize them ‘in articulo mortis.’ Rumors went around that after going through their mystic rites, the nuns took out the babies’ eyes and hearts for purposes of witchery. One day the French consul—very overbearing—touched things off with a temper tantrum, smashing teacups and other things in the office of the imperial commissioner and then firing a pistol into a crowd outside. He was immediately killed and literally torn to pieces by the mob, which went on to set the French cathedral on fire and burn down the French consulate. They brutally killed two French diplomats —two priests—ten nuns—some tourists who were riding along on horseback—thirty-odd Chinese Catholics. The mob stripped the sisters naked, one by one, and in full sight of the surviving nuns ripped their bodies open, cut their breasts off, gouged their eyes out, impaled them on long spears, hoisted them in the air, and threw them into the burning chapel of the orphanage.
The thrill of danger David must have felt that evening was apparently the first lift he had had since arriving in China. “Poor brave souls,” he wrote in his diary, and underlined the phrase three times. Yes, he was possibly in mortal danger. This thought obviously restored his sense of mission, in the face of all that had let him down. Less obvious to us, deeply hidden presumably from him, were his motives in writing as much of this as he did, in such shocking detail, to Emily.
BEGINNINGS
DAVID rides home from his afternoon classes at the Peikai School in a well-kept ricksha, with enameled mudguards decorated with golden dragons and with polished brass lanterns attached to the shafts. He is wearing his fur-lined overcoat and a new fur hat. His ricksha man has his feet bound in burlap against the cold and damp, but David is used to such things now; he no longer apologizes to a puller.
Raw China is in the streets of the native city. David’s ample nose cleaves through a fog of pungent smoke at a corner where a chestnut vendor is roasting his wares. Beggars in the most pitiful rags cluster at a gate; David throws them a few copper cash, and there is a hideous scramble in the gutter. Does he feel guilty at his patrician elevation above them? He must know that they, as he is, are professionals. A cluster of Lamaist priests floats along; they are dressed in yellow robes in many layers, so that they seem to bob and bounce like gaudy balloons full of water, and they have yellow hats piped in brown fur topped by crimson silk knobs. They pretend not to see the foreign religionist pass.
Arrived at the Hendersons’ house, David steps down and pays the puller the usual sum for the trip he has taken; the puller protests violently (a standard ritual performance); David gives him one more copper; the puller is profuse in his thanks and bows to David’s munificence.
The compound gate is open, but one cannot see in, because just inside the gate is the large baffle screen of the sort placed within every Chinese doorway to prevent fox spirits, which are thought to be able to go only in straight lines, from entering. David walks around it and makes his way to the second courtyard, where his room is. As soon as he enters he is greeted by his “boy” Lao San, who seems overjoyed to see him home again. A wood fire is blazing in a stove; David seats himself in front of it in a Morris chair, with its leg rest extended, and begins writing on a yellow pad.
My dear brother Paul:
To save the Hendersons bother, I have set up housekeeping. I eat with them occasionally, but for a week I have been buying pots and kettles, fuel and food, and still my “boy” says I haven’t enough. I never before took an interest in this department of the world’s industry. Now alas! I must buy brooms, wood, and coal, send the boy after chickens, which he brings home alive, tied together with a string and left to hop about until he wants them. I must put down in my book all these pennies which I so domestically spend. It is not romantic and you do not think of yourself in the light of a hero, when you are counting the sticks of wood which you bought at seven cash (¾ of a cent) per stick.
When my supper of curry and rice, cocoa, bread and butter, marmalade, prunes, and cake is finished tonight, I will come into this room where I live most of the time, and, stretching myself out in my Morris chair, read the ‘Outlook.’ Not such a picture of sacrifice and martyrdom, is it? Last night I went out to dinner and wore a cutaway; think of doing such an impious thing! A missionary having good clothes and having the immodesty to wear them out to a dinner, whereat he forgets the seriousness of life and puts away good food! I am afraid you will be ashamed of me. Don’t let this get into the printed columns of ‘Life and Light for Women,’ or that yellow journal, ‘The Dayspring,’ which we used to pore over Sunday afternoons. But I was about to say that I come home to my bachelor quarters and sit down before the warm stove, feeling very much like one of those young Englishmen you read about in books, Sir Peanut Brittle, R.A., or the Hon. Remington Typewriter, M.P. For my boy came in just now and pulled out my slippers and tried to look intelligent while I put them on, as he had nothing to do at the time, he just wanted to watch me. You should see us communicating! I draw pictures, and he laughs very hard with his hand politely in front of his mouth. And you would laugh to see me eat. I am taking my meals in a little room next to this, whither the boy brings all the food from the kitchen. He is very proud of his culinary skill and is very much delighted when I like the cuisine. But yesterday, the first day in this pilgrimage across the deserts of housekeeping, we had soup. It was a curiosity. There was milk in it, and tapioca, and what else I know not. This morning, after indulging in an orange, some oatmeal, part of the hen which I bored into and excavated a little yesterday, and some coffee, he pressed me to cap it off with some of his tapioca pudding, but although I come from a state where they are reported to have pie for breakfast, I gently but firmly refused. But the fellow is doing well and is working so hard that today he told me he had no time for his breakfast….
Yes, David, who was very poor by American standards, had a servant. This was most disconcerting. The farm boy was ready to be kind, but despite the apparent ease of his report to Paul, he was not ready for servility. The taste of the imperial made David feel just grand, but quite soon the grandeur began to give him touches of vertigo. The servant, though a grown man, was called “boy.” David had the greatest difficulty telling how old Chinese people were, for their skin at any age seemed to have the warm sheen of a most delicate varnish of youth; but he guessed that his boy was five or six years older than he. Henny said that his name, Lao San, meant Old Third—himself a farm boy, third son of a family doubtless so poor they had to send him off to the city to find a rice bowl. He had had some crude training in American missionary homes, and he devoted himself, with the most touching cheerfulness and alacrity, to David’s every comfort. David had no way yet of knowing that Lao San’s loving deference to him stemmed less from David’s own lovableness and superiority than from the deeply ingrained Chinese societal rules of obedience and respect and sweetness in the face of authority that Lao San had grown up with, even in a rural village hovel.
ON ONE of his first days, David set out from the Hendersons’ in a ricksha. “I confess,” he wrote Emily,
I was a little nervous starting out with a strange ricksha man through the crowded narrow streets of the native city of a million, where foreigners had been massacred, but Henny, who speaks Chinese well, assured me that the ricksha man was reliable, and that he had instructed him exactly where to go and that he knew the temple well. It was like diving into wild and unknown waters, but I plunged. The streets were only ten and twelve feet wide and were thronged with people, but I found they were good-natured, and at the cry, “ ‘Chieh kuang! Chieh kuang!’ ”—“lend light” = “open up”—they would always step aside and let us through. I discovered, in fact, that I was exhilarated by the hubbub of the crowds, and since then I have been nowhere so happy as walking in the milling streets.
He safely reached the temple that Henderson had described. A servant met him at its great gate and led him to a hall where Lin Fu-chen—the Chinese man who was to mean most in David’s early life in China—was waiting to receive him for the first time. Lin was the founder of the Peikai Middle School, where David was teaching. His temporary office was in a former Buddhist temple, the grounds of which the school had taken over.
What an impressive figure! You know, we have a wrong idea of the Chinese stature because the Chinese immigrants to the United States are almost all from the single open port of the early days, Canton, and the Cantonese are small. But many North Chinese have a noble frame—and Lin one of the noblest. Shoulders of an ox draped in the gray silk of a long gown with a shadowy pattern. A broad face shining with knowledge and humor. I was astonished to find that he was only about my own age. Oh, I thought, I am going to be a lucky man to be this man’s friend.
Mr. Lin greeted David by bowing with his fists pressed together and invited him to sit down on one side of a long table. Mr. Lin sat on the other side. David noticed a large rectangular hole in the brick floor near the table, going down some four feet into bare earth below. A second servant brought a pot of hot jasmine tea and Chinese cups with covers to keep the tea hot. To David’s relief Mr. Lin spoke beautiful English, with a slight British accent,
and Em, he dazzled me with his learning. He has mastered the classics; but he is one of the literati who looks to the West, and he put me to shame in my own culture. He quoted Milton and talked about the inventions of Leonardo. He knows the Bible. He has read Darwin. China must modernize, he says, and the key is the education of the young. Now that the examination system has been suspended, it will be schools like his, he said, and teachers like me, he said, who will give China new life.
The tablecloth, David noticed, was a heavy white foreign bedspread, with long tassels hanging down. The high ceiling was supported by handsome fourteen-inch polished wooden pillars, and leaning against one near him, with back to the pillar, was a grinning sitting Buddha, about three feet high. By now Mr. Lin had put his guest at ease, and David risked saying, “What are you going to do with the idols?”
Cupping his hand to the side of his mouth, Mr. Lin leaned over toward David and said very softly, “We’re making them part of the general understanding.”
Under where we would stand, he meant! He was pointing at the hole in the floor.
AFTER a few weeks of teaching, David was by no means sure it would be he who would give China new life. Unable to speak Chinese, using methods of Enderbury and Syracuse with students who had been brought up shouting rote learning, he became doubtful of his calling as a teacher. He yearned for the romance of evangelizing. Sometimes he thought nothing was getting through; sometimes he thought the students understood everything and liked to poke fun at this ta-pi-tzu, this foreign creature with a very big nose. “What am I to think, after fourteen days’ work,” he wrote in his diary, “when I’m told that the name of the Son of God is Satan?”
ON THE THEORY that the most direct access to an awakening China would be through its leaders, the Association secretaries were eager to make as many connections as possible with the literati. Lin Fu-chen generously arranged to have all the Tientsin secretaries invited to the home of the Salt Commissioner of Chihli Province. This was a big fish. Salt being a government monopoly, and graft having been intrinsic to the old system of advancement through examinations and favor at court, this Mr. Wang was very rich. The secretaries all put on their cutaways—their “sugar-scoop suits,” as Henny called them, because the coats were shaped like the tin scoops used in country stores back home to measure bulk sugar from open barrels. Again to Emily:
Henny had a slightly battered top hat, and as we started out from our East Gate compound, he was in the ricksha ahead of me, and I’ll never forget the sight of that hat bobbing and swaying up there, glistening in the light of the kerosene street lamps.
Mr. Lin was waiting for the secretaries at the great gate of Mr. Wang’s house. The Americans were not allowed to pay for the rickshas; Mr. Lin took care of them—Chinese social manners. He gathered the men around him and said, sotto voce, that as they were led across a courtyard porch they would see a big fat man in his undershirt, on the lawn below, cranking the handle of an ice-cream freezer. “Pay no attention to him. That is Mr. Wang himself. He is the only one in his household who knows how to make ice cream, and he is very proud of his new freezer, and he wants you Americans to have ice cream. But you must not look at him.”
They passed the big man grinding away. They did not look at him, and he did not look at them. They went into the receiving hall, where several Chinese guests were waiting. Ten minutes after “this sample of Chinese courtesy-play,” a magnificent gentleman appeared in the reception hall, dressed in a robe of sea otter fur over a purple silk gown, with two chains around his neck, one of amber beads, the other of coral, and with a Tartar hat topped by a crimson silk knob of his rank—“and I mustn’t forget the black satin boots”—a figure straight off a great coromandel screen. It was clearly understood that none of the guests had recently seen this grand person in his underwear—or ever seen him, for that matter.
It seems Mr. Wang was fond of foreign plate glass, for we saw many partitions and sliding doors of heavy plate as we went into the large dining room. On all of them were long strips of paper pasted, with characters that Henny told me afterward said, “Look out for the glass.” What a feast! Some of the things I remember we had were bird’s-nest soup, Peking duck, salted goose feet and duck gizzards, sea slugs and white fungus, yum!(?)—I don’t know what all—thirty dishes, ending with ice cream. The Chinese don’t have dessert at the end, as we do, but Mr. Wang served us vanilla ice cream. Very good, too.
After the meal the party went into a kind of parlor, with huge German overstuffed chairs, and everyone was in high spirits. Someone suggested singing. Henderson sang the Indiana song, Treadup did Syracuse, the Americans all knew Cornell’s “Cayuga’s Waters” and Yale’s “Boola-Boola.” Then they asked for some Chinese songs. Mr. Wang turned and spoke to a big, handsome young man, and finally,
after a cascade of protests, this fellow put his head back and out came the most remarkable and beautiful sounds—falsetto, high, high, like a woman’s voice. I could hear yearning and sadness. It gave me a stab of missing you.
But a secret, Em. I’ll whisper: Mr. Wang was a disappointment. Perhaps once a scholar, but a very narrow person. He looks to the West for plate glass. Mr. Lin is ten times the man. There’s an Old, and there’s a New, I begin to see.
DAVID’S work in the Settlement Branch of the Association, which he carried on at odd times when he was not teaching, had very little to do with China. He might as well have been at Syracuse—except for one thing: his sense of being a foreigner here among foreigners. Americans were distinctly in a minority in Tientsin. There was no American Concession in the city (though a regiment of American regular army troops was barracked there, to protect American business interests, such as they were). The Settlement Branch was in the French Concession, on Rue de Paris, and its clients were an odd mixture of devout Protestant clerks and minor functionaries, enlisted soldiers of several nationalities looking for something to do, and rather declassed businessmen who wanted a place they could think of as their club. The dominant numbers and style were British, and David struggled rather stubbornly against giving in to growing curled-up mustaches, saying “ripping” and “rahthuh” and “deah boy,” and addressing Chinese, whether servants or not, as if they were donkeys and dogs; and consequently he was rather brutally snubbed even by some of the rather shabby Britishers who patronized the Association.
ONE BRITISH MAN David took to at once was a spry sexagenarian from the London Missionary Society, the Reverend Dr. Rencher Rimmon, who used to drop in at the Branch from time to time to “do a spot of fishing,” as he put it—randomly recruiting apple-cheeked young British soldiers and policemen and clerks for Jesus. He was a small man who seemed to whirl about on a powerful engine that ran on a volatile fuel of pure optimism. His was an almost irresistible enthusiasm. He was out of touch with sadness. He never suffered even the slightest dips in mood. It was months later that it occurred to David that there was something pathological about Rev. Rimmon’s good cheer; it was as if he had once taken a blow on the head, followed by a permanent amnesia for all that had ever been serious on this earth.
“Treadup, where was tennis played in the Bible?”
“Tennis? I don’t know, sir.”
“When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.”
Wasn’t that excellent? Everything was excellent. Everything good was excellent, and everything bad was excellent.
One reason David was particularly taken with Rev. Rimmon was that he said he often went street preaching in the Chinese city, and he invited David to go along some day. He said he liked to take a party of young white Christians with him, so that the hymns would be loud. All must dress in Chinese clothes that day, he said—so David rather excitedly had a simple straight blue quilted gown made by a tailor Lao San brought to the house for him.
The day came, high-skyed and not too cold. The party assembled at the Branch. Dr. Rimmon had six bellowers besides David—four Cockney soldiers, who cackled and thumped each other when they put on the Chinese gowns Dr. Rimmon lent them; a silent Customs clerk; and a middle-aged L.M.S. colleague. David, who apparently caught that day a touch of Dr. Rimmon’s virus of joy, wrote in a report letter to his Syracuse backers:
We got down from our rickshas at the north gate and crowded our way through the streets to the biggest Taoist temple. Inside the temple courts, standing upon a heavy granite railing with grotesque lions crouching before us, we opened our hymn books and began to sing. “A Mighty Fortress” and “Lead, Kindly Light,” and—‘fortissimo’—“Onward Christian Soldiers.” This was last Sunday. In a balcony at one end of the main courtyard there was a native band beating and sawing the life out of brass and other howling instruments. As we sang, on every side hawkers, fakirs, and fortune-tellers plied their own causes, and beyond were long rows of small shops, where, within the sacred enclosure, buying and selling goes on from morn to night, but we were not past the second line of the first hymn before every eye was riveted upon us, and soon about 400 people were gathered around us in respectful, earnest attention. After the singing, our Dr. Rimmon announced that there would be no charge for listening, for in China if you listen to a public performance the hat is sure to be passed before the show is over. Then in what sounded to me like perfect Mandarin (he told the rest of us later exactly what he had said), he announced the purpose of holding the meeting, and stated that as this was the City Temple, and as they had canonized all the deities, sages, and divinities from East and West, North and South, it seemed perfectly proper that we should come to talk to them about the Great Heavenly Father. Then we sang some more. Then Rev. Rimmon scrambled up on the back of one of the lions and in simple reverent tones told the old story of the Great Father’s love. When the service was ended he dismissed the people by proposing to distribute a leaflet entitled “Happy News,” but there was such a surging of the crowd, and such a squabbling amongst the stronger men to get hold of the printed statement of the Truth that it was very hard to keep our foothold—and this in the very heart of the native city of Tientsin! I am happy to say that before the meeting broke up, a band of globe-trotters warmed up their cameras on this scene from a distant corner. I was glad of this, that skeptical tourists could catch on their cameras the true picture of the deserted booths of the fakirs, fortune-tellers, and seats of the idols, and of the crowd, almost entirely made up of men, listening attentively to the Gospel. They came to worship they knew not what, but they must have gone away with new ideas of What and Who is God.
David was so moved by the illusion of success in God’s work that had been achieved at the City Temple that day by Rencher Rimmon’s monkey climb onto the stone lion’s back, and by his dancing eyes and merry voice, that he, David, wanted to be able to do likewise. The evangelization of the world in this generation! This was what he had dreamed of back at Syracuse. On the Monday, thinking in somewhat magical terms, he wore his new quilted Chinese gown to his classes at the Peikai School. As he walked into the classroom, every student suddenly raised a hand to cover his mouth. Like the baffles at all compound gates, such shielding hands would stop anything evil—anything discourteous—in irrepressible laughter from reaching its target. David did not write home about this frightful loss of face, nor did he record it in his diary. We come on it only years later, in “Search.” By that time he had a different view of Dr. Rimmon’s saving of souls.
NOW, early in David’s missionary career, came two instances of rebuff by the home office which shocked him by their arbitrariness, by the sense they gave him of being a puppet on strings pulled in faraway New York. Back at Northfield, when James B. Todd had been recruiting him, David had told the great man that he was in debt to Syracuse by about two hundred dollars. With a grand wave of the hand—but not in writing, alas—Todd had given David the distinct impression that this was just a tiny button which the International Committee would tuck away in its big sewing kit. Now, in Tientsin, dutifully worried, David wrote Todd:
The problem of paying off my college debt is still unsolved. You will remember we discussed this question in Northfield. I have been thinking that perhaps if this year I did not present any bill for the cultivation of my constituency you would be willing to let the $25, which would be the allowance for this year, apply to my debt….
David’s constituency consisted of his Syracuse backers, who put up most of the money for his support, and they were faithful and needed no “cultivation.” Todd’s stiff answer:
I enter sympathetically into your debt problems but am nonplussed to know what to recommend in the way of relief. I had hoped that the improved financial arrangement which the Committee made last summer might make it possible for you gradually to wear out your debt. The Committee regret that they cannot conscientiously adopt your suggestion of allowing the $25 appropriated to your budget for cultivation purposes to be applied to the payment of your debt. I wish I could think of some way to be of practical help to you.
The other blow hurt much more. On a visit to Tientsin in December, Blackton told David that there would be a short conference of all Association secretaries in Shanghai in late April, and since that would be Treadup’s only chance to get to the port to which ships from America came, it would be a good time for his fiancée to arrive, and for the couple to be married. David sent a euphoric cablegram to Emily, telling her to be ready to leave no later than March 20; and he followed this with a long, careful letter of instructions—what kind of steamer trunk to buy, not to forget long johns for winter, bring a tennis racket.
Two weeks later a peremptory cablegram came from Todd. The agreement had been that the couple were to wait one year. The time for Miss Kean to join him would be at the start of his language study in the autumn. End of message.
BUSY DAILY LIFE wrapped itself closely around David, and even Todd’s chilling messages did not long keep his heart from being warm. On New Year’s Eve, “Henny and I had a discussion of human progress, provoked by Kidd’s Social Evolution.” One day David went with Mrs. Henderson, Mrs. Harmon, their children, and Wood for an outing on the solidly frozen river on p’ai-tzus—low, flat sleds with iron runners, on which the passengers, two by two, reclined under fur rugs, while on each sled a coolie, standing at the back, poled the contraption along amazingly fast by pumping an iron-pointed stick backward between his legs. “Smoked out with stove in morning, am getting a new Calorigen stove!” “Enjoy the Hendersons very much.” “Excitement! Thieves broke into the Harmons’ house [in the Settlement Branch compound]. Called police. Suspect Branch servants. All must go.” One day he lectured his students on the whale, and the next day he asked for essays on this creature. One of these themes he sent to sister Grace (commenting, “You may laugh, Ecarg, but I am proud—there’s progress here”).
The wale is the larger kind of fish and his power is so higher that all the fish live in water are controled by him. But he difference all the fish, for all fish cannot live on land to inspire the air. But the wale can be inspiring the air and drinking the water also for he have no gil but has a large mouse for it is hard when he turns in water and in few very minutes he can appears in the air that he might died. As for his spout can he spit the water almost thirty feet away thus wrecks the smaller vessels and the fishing smacks, the people of the river’s bank almost always distressed by him, a king of fish.
David managed, with touches now and then of Rencher Rimmon’s blind Panglossian optimism, to turn sad or threatening news into fine signs of the testing of his fiber. On Christmas day he wrote: “Troubles in the south. China for the Chinese becoming ever more assertive.” In late February: “Reports of more riots in the south. Six Caths and four Prots killed.” Ten days later: “The troubles in the south lead many to believe that the volcano is about to break forth. We are needed!” Word came that the infant child of the Robert Services had died of a fever while the Services were on their way up the Yangtze to a new Association post in inland Chengtu. And much closer at hand, Mrs. Henderson suffered a miscarriage. “How pure,” David wrote, “was the enduring heart of Job!”
ONE DAY in March the sky over Tientsin turned weirdly orange, and David felt grit in his teeth. It was a sandstorm—a great weather system of dust from the Gobi Desert lifted by west winds and carried hundreds of miles to China. The dark sky lasted three days. Dust eddied in little drifts under doorways; it settled on pillowcases; it blew into one’s eyes. It was a blizzard of Mongolian topsoil. On the second day a cart loomed through the ocher haze at the Ch’ing-tzu Hutung gate with six wooden boxes on which, when Lao San had whisked off the dust, could be seen black stenciled letters:
DAVID TREADUP
Y.M.C.A.
TIENTSIN, CHINA
Here again was a Chinese wonder: With no more address than this, these boxes had come all the way from the village of Newport, New York, U.S.A., to the right house on the right alleyway in the teeming city in China. They were things of Emily’s. David hovered over them. He did not know whether he should open them—what if there were “personal” things? That evening he wrote a thoughtful letter to brother Paul:
The boxes are over against the wall. I know that my Em will bring a woman’s touch to my residence, and I desire that grace in my life. Yet—I wonder often what my boy thinks of the luxuries of my life. I’ve joined Rotary, and I go to their lunches at the posh Tientsin Club. We are building a tennis court at the Presbyterian compound for the exclusive use of us Y secretaries. Worrying about our high style of living, I spoke about it to my English friend Rencher Rimmon the other day, but he said, “Fiddlesticks, my boy. We must impress these people. We have to keep a proper dignity, don’t you know. These Chinamen want us to have a certain refinement, don’t you know. Were we to lower ourselves to the level of the masses, it would blow our influence to smithereens—and expose us to innumerable petty annoyances. Oh, no, Treadup, things are first rate the way they are.” But I cannot help wondering. I want to be Lao San’s brother, as I am yours, Paul. Did Jesus care a fig for his social position? Or his “dignity”?
IN EARLY MAY David read in the North China Daily Star that Dr. Elijah Elting of the China Inland Mission—David’s cabinmate on the Empress—was to be in Tientsin for a few days for a meeting of a committee of translators of the Bible into common spoken Chinese. He was to be staying at the Astor House Hotel. David found that he yearned to see the frightening old man, his strongest link, besides Dr. Rimmon, with the nostalgic dream of evangelization that had been growing so dim in his urban routines of the Association. He waited two days, then went to call on Dr. Elting at the Astor House—at teatime, when the committee would be sure to be recessed.
The forbidding whitebeard greeted David with a fierce warmth, a fatherly hug, which to David’s astonishment brought tears to his own eyes. They sat on the broad veranda of the hotel in white wicker chairs. Dr. Elting asked about David’s work. He nodded and waved his immaculate beard. When they had talked awhile David screwed up his courage and asked the old prophet whether he would be doing any itinerating on the northern plains.
Dr. Elting’s white eyebrows shot upward and he barked out, “Aha!” Then he was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “I had not been planning…Aha! My boy! We’ll go on Friday next.” The old terror, whom David had thought so insensitive, had seemed with these sudden gasps to have realized the full force of David’s hunger.
“You know I can’t speak three words of Chinese,” David sheepishly said.
“I have tongue enough for two,” Dr. Elting said.
Dr. Elting told David he would meet him at the place where the Peking carts gathered at the edge of the farmers’ market in the Chinese city, at dawn on Friday. He should of course wear Chinese clothes.
WHEN THE CARTMEN saw the old white man with the white beard accompanied by the boyish white giant, they came in a storm of competition, shouting and haggling for the right to carry them. With unexpected agility, Dr. Elting arbitrarily heaved himself up on the hub of one of the huge wooden wheels, tossed his bedroll and knapsack onto the flat bed of the cart, and climbed aboard, announcing loudly to the cartman that he wanted to go “in the direction of Tsinan.” David followed. For some time Chinese travelers gave that cart a wide berth; then a boisterous farmer climbed up, laughing wildly at his own courage. Others then followed in a rush, as if passage on that cart were after all the highest privilege. About fifteen crowded aboard. The breaths of their hilarity were “blowtorch blasts of garlic that could singe one’s eyebrows off.” All had rolled-up sleeping mats and bundles of various shapes and sizes which they sat upon and among. “The cart on which we traveled,” David wrote Emily,
consisted of two wheels joined by a ponderous axle under a flat bed resting directly upon the hounds without a hint of springs between. The thills were two huge shafts joined at the rear by a heavy crossbeam. This was bound directly to the axle. The whole gearing was without spring or coupling to break the jar. Our company thumped and jounced, our knee joints and hip joints and shoulder joints rattled like a tossed bundle of jackstraws. We were hauled by the largest mule I have ever seen, and the whole cart bed tilted toward the rear.
We were soon out of the city, lurching along on a rutted dirt road so ancient that it had cut itself into a kind of huge gutter two and three feet below the level of the rest of the plain. Some miles into the country, Dr. Elting reached into his gown and fumbled around, as if he were scratching flea bites, and then out came his hand holding a pamphlet of the Acts of the Apostles, in the vulgar translation his committee was working upon. He began reading this, at first to himself, in a low mumble. Then suddenly he was belling it out in the high falsetto of a scholar reading the classics, in beautiful singing tones almost like those I had heard that night at Salt Commissioner Wang’s. You could not have detected from the passengers’ faces that this evangelical opera was being sung—tact?—or had they so often passed by the village school and heard such reading that it seemed an ordinary thing?—or heard their landlord, having put aside his abacus for an hour in favor of a beloved classical scroll? Dr. Elting chanted along, as we bounced on the hard wood. When he came to verse thirty-six of the ninth chapter, “Now there was at Joppa a certain disciple named Tabitha, which by interpretation is called Dorcas: this woman was full of good works and alms-deeds which she did,” he suddenly stopped hallooing and spoke in a straight voice as if chatting with a friend, talking off the edge of the cart to the open plains, saying that this Dorcas was a simple village woman like any man’s wife or mother. Then, as if unaware that anyone might have heard him, he was off with another aria from the holy Book. Then another explanation in normal tones. And so, back and forth, until you can believe me that all the passengers on that crowded cart were raptly following every word. Now for ten miles this white-haired elder, somehow metamorphosed by magic into a passionate minister of the Holy Word, held those common folk in the palm of his hand. To judge by their faces, that must have been a simple, deep, stabbing message of Christ’s love and forgiveness. It was a masterly performance! How I wish I had the gifts of that craggy old gentleman!
AT THE LUNCHEON of the Rotary, the following week, David was seated next to a man named Gilbert Olander, a businessman who worked for Standard Oil. In David’s diary:
Still excited abt. Dr. Elting’s preaching. Told Mr. O. His comment: “I know that old bird. He’s been skulking around China for centuries. What an ass. That man is a numskull, a busybody, and an utterly blind creature. He hasn’t the dimmest idea what the Chinks are all about.”
David wrote no more than that in his diary, but in later years we find numerous references to the Olander remarks, which clearly disturbed him in ways he could not, at the time, decipher. Some of these show up when he is writing home about his joint tours with James B. Todd; they point to growing doubts about the slim harvests and weak holding power in China of old-fashioned campground preaching.
There was one immediate reaction, a small and tentative move in itself but one that was ultimately to have immense consequences in his life. The very next day after the Rotary lunch he wrote to his mother in Salt Branch:
I have been somewhat discouraged in my efforts to bring the word of Jesus directly to the classroom. I have been thinking of giving the students some science demonstrations. Mother, would you please send me that little gyroscope of mine? It is in a maplewood box which I believe I put in the old trunk in the attic, in with the few boyhood and college relics I decided to hold onto. If I’m not mistaken, you will find it just under that Psi U wall plaque toward the back of the trunk.
IN APRIL David went by ship to Shanghai to the conference of Association secretaries. “The days are filled with work—the problems are great—their solutions are beyond us,” he wrote. David’s future was dictated there by the seniors on the force: He would work in Tientsin through the summer; would go to Paotingfu for language study in October, with time to get settled before his fiancée arrived; he would best be married in Shanghai, probably in November. He would then have two years to master the language.
MORE AND MORE, as the months passed and as his admiration for certain qualities of the Chinese grew and grew, he felt the deadness of his tongue. To get from day to day with Lao San he picked up a smattering of household Chinese, interspersed with pidgin English—a condescending form of communication, used by businessmen with their Chinese compradors, which hurt David’s throat. He wanted much more. He wanted to be able to understand these delightful people. His letters to baby sister Grace are full of sketches of little things he saw that enchanted him:
Group of boys of about twelve, I judge, on stilts in the street. Some were beating drums, others had gongs. They were jumping, running races, hopping on one stilt with the other one held straight up behind their backs…. I often see a fine gentleman in the street airing his thrush. This seems to be his idea of getting some exercise. He just stands there looking off into space and holding the bird, which he has trained to imitate a cat, a dog, a crow, an eagle. Very proud…. Street stall where they sell small paper figures, men with wheelbarrows, tiny carts, horsemen—all move around with great alacrity. All harnessed to big black beetles!…I love to watch the wonderful controlled agility of the workmen on a new house near here. They are amazingly strong, and they behave like acrobats, shouting and jumping as if before a huge audience. Like this: Man on the ground is mixing mortar. He lifts a spade full of it and in one flowing motion throws it, spade, mortar, and all, to a bricklayer on a high scaffolding. The spade flies up in perfect balance and the man above, having pivoted slowly like a dancer at the thrower’s cry, stretches out his hands in a pose and the spade handle settles exactly into his palms as if it were light as a feather. Beautiful!…
IN OCTOBER a new volunteer came into the field to relieve Treadup for his language study, a young man named Roscoe Hersey. David in his impatience has nothing to say in his diary about Hersey except
He doesn’t seem to see the importance of at once getting into the work…. At school in morning. Hersey did not connect…. Spent time with Hersey. He went with me to school for night class…. Took Hersey to school with me so he could get on to work. He is always behind…. Helping Hersey get on his feet and packing goods….
EARLY on the morning of October 18, 1906, David had his goods already heaped on the platform at the Tientsin station. In came the train—a tall-stacked engine belching black soft-coal smoke; some open freight cars; then third-class passenger cars, which were just like the freight cars, flat-bedded trucks open to the sky, with lower walls than the freight cars; then second-class coaches, with compartments with wooden benches, one containing the “first-class saloon,” which had crimson plush cushions and silk curtains at the windows. Having been advised by his elders on the safest way to travel, David had the platform coolies pile his goods onto one of the open third-class cars; then he carefully counted his boxes and suitcases and made sure his trunk was securely seated; and then he settled down himself there among his things. The car was soon thronged with poor Chinese and their bundles. In this way David could reach Paotingfu and know that none of his things would be stolen. Soot got in his eyes.
BOOK AND RING
HE SAT on a straight wooden chair at a bare deal table. Across from him hovered a round face—“like a paper moon,” David later wrote Paul. Very near the center of the great circle of immobile flesh was a tiny cluster of features. The little eyes blinked and the little mouth moved. When the little mouth stopped moving, it snapped into the fixed position of a smile. “I think that Wu Hsien-sheng is jolly,” David reported. Hsien-sheng meant Teacher. This was their first morning of work. Teacher Wu had bounced vastly into the room half an hour late. Though it was mid-October, he carried a flat straw fan, which fluttered to whoosh away the teacher’s loss of face whenever David made a mistake. They had started the session with a prayer, for Wu was a Christian. Their text was Mateer’s Primary Lessons.
“My messod,” Teacher Wu had announced at the beginning of the lesson (in David’s transcription to Paul), “is kwai-kwai-ti, man-man-ti. Means quick slow. Fust go fast, next go slow.”
Accordingly they had gone over the first lesson in the book quickly. David had a pad in front of him. He did not try to copy the characters as Wu pronounced them, but wrote out phonetic equivalents in English letters, and after each romanized word wrote a number to remind him of the proper tone. He repeated the sound of each character after Wu.
Now, nearly two hours later, they were working over the lesson more slowly. Wu asked David to read each character from the book. Then, after what seemed to David an interminable process—“part of the exceedingly man-man, the slowest of the slow ‘messod,’ I’d say”—of ceremoniously wetting his writing brush and ink stone, working up some moist ink on his ink block, transferring some of this to his ink stone, and rolling the tip of the brush and pointing it up with ink, with each motion shooting his wrist out of his long sleeve, poising his brush at the properly artful angle, hesitating, approaching, pulling back, describing little strokes of meaning in thin air—“for to be able to write beautifully in this country, brother Paul, is to feel oneself a prince in a kingdom of letters three thousand years old”—Wu finally wrote down on small slips of paper the characters of the lesson and asked David to recognize and pronounce them from memory.
There came a moment during this slow part of the lesson which the pupil would have reason to remember later on. David, having reached a stage of mental satiety and bewilderment, mispronounced a character for the third time, using a wrong tone. Suddenly the tiny eyes in the huge face were blazing. Wu’s voice came whistling out at a high pitch, in a kind of throttled scream. “When teacher say, pupil do.”
“I was exhausted that day,” David wrote weeks later when Wu first threatened to resign.
Our lessons were (and are) five and six hours long, and I had Emily’s arrival very much on my mind back then—and this language was presenting problems of cognition of a kind I had never met before. What I have come to realize is how much anger there is in jolly Teacher Wu. I have had to face it that he is a rice Christian. He accepted conversion because he thought it would mean it would make him an insider with foreigners, he would become a comprador and work the Tientsin Bund and make a fortune. But instead he has only managed to become a teacher to these shabby missionaries. Underneath all those layers of good humor and adipose tissue, he is not satisfied with the bargain made with Jesus Christ. I now find it a great strain to look at that tiny frozen smile in the middle of that great pudding of resentment. I have tried to make delicate moves to help him, but I am quickly given to understand that each such move shatters the ritual relationship between teacher and pupil, and is not allowed. His fierce exercise of his dominance over me, which derives from the Confucian teacher’s absolute authority over his student, is his revenge on a Jesus who is infuriating precisely because he forgives all
THE LONG-AWAITED language study marked a paradox—a simultaneous entrance into, and withdrawal from, the real China.
In spite of whatever tension David may have felt in working with Wu, he loved moving at last into the territory of clear meaning. He could leave the terrible imperial desert of pidgin English—that weird code of translated Chinese constructions which was based on the assumption that the whole subservient world had better damn well learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue. He remembered and used all the methods of mastery Absolom Carter had taught him, though the problems here were quite new. Even in Greek with its different alphabet, the learning had been basically phonetic. Chinese was ideographic—a character for every word. David had learned a few such signs in his own language: 9, %, &, $. But here every single meaning had a sign of its own. This made the learning task immensely more difficult. To cross the beautiful moon-bridge from illiteracy to literacy, one must learn at least three thousand of these signs. One could start with characters that were a little like pictures: The sun, originally ʘ, had become 日. A tree was 木 and a forest was two trees put together: 林. A man had two legs: 人. A horse galloped: 晔. The first three numbers were – 二三. A mouth was 口, and this sign also stood for mouthlike things: a hole, a harbor. But pictures never could have done all the work of language, and so most Chinese characters had become a marriage of two parts, one carrying a root meaning, and the others telling something about the sound. And so David was plunged into a wilderness of new linguistic technicalities—radicals, enclitics, auxiliaries. And on top of all that there were four tones in the Mandarin that David was studying, those delicate slidings of the voice that made spoken Chinese sound to Western ears a singsong language: a high sustained tone, a falling tone, a rising tone, and a dipping tone, falling then rising. With these he must be most careful, for a wrong tone gave a wrong meaning—and it was their widespread tone deafness that had made some imprudent missionaries a laughingstock among educated Chinese. But David found all these difficulties somehow exciting; overcoming them would give him access to China, as nothing else, not even the most one-sided treaties, could do.
AT THE SAME TIME his life in Paotingfu was a kind of escape from China. The city of Paotingfu had early been chosen by missionaries as a key center for their work. A hundred miles southwest from the capital of the empire, itself the capital of Chihli Province, it was a kind of gateway on the line of travel to more remote provinces, Shensi, Shansi, Shantung, Honan. Unlike Shanghai and Tientsin and other treaty cities, it had no foreign settlement, and the various missions had set themselves up in very large compounds some distance outside the walls of the city. Like other Association men before him, David had been sent to Paotingfu for his language study precisely because of the isolation and tranquillity of life in these compounds.
He had been assigned to the American Board Mission compound in the south suburb of the city. On two connecting plots of flat land of several acres, it was surrounded by high walls made of earthen bricks. Within, all was American in style—brick houses with pitched roofs, turrets, verandas; this might have been a corner of a small town in the Plains states. Brick pathways ran between lawns from home to home. A substantial brick chapel in its own enclosure had Gothic windows, a corrugated tin roof, and a little bell tower that rang out the calls to worship. “I have been here a little over a week,” he wrote his parents,
and I am pretty well settled. I have two rooms in one of the big houses at the east end of the residential compound. I say “I” have two rooms: These are the two rooms my dear Em and I will soon share as our first home. I have received word that she sails from Seattle on the twentieth—the day after tomorrow! I know Em will make these rooms homey, in the meantime I more or less camp out. My bedroom is on the ground floor and faces out under an arbor with a tangle of rosebushes which must be a corking sight in summertime. I have an iron bed which is short for me, I curl my feet around the ironwork of the footboard, oh well. I have a washstand, a screen, a large bureau, a coal stove, a table, and a rocking chair; my “study,” which is also my dining room when I eat alone, is quite bare: two wooden chairs and a plain table. There are mats on the floors. I have stocked the study closet with supplies from the States: cans of pineapple, gooseberry jam, apricot jam, pears, peaches, cherries, ect., salmon, cold tongue, coffee, condensed milk, butter, as well as bottles of pickles, papers of stove polish, cornstarch, soda, tins of baking powder, cocoanut, ect., bags of native meal of different kinds for porridge, sugar, crackers, ect. And of course I have popcorn and a popper.
You see I am in a seven-room house, of which the regular denizens are the Misses Selden and Demestrie. I am their guest, or the waif who has been deposited on their doorstep, depending how you want to look at it. They live upstairs.
David’s diary suggests the degree of his withdrawal from China in this period. Apart from brief notations of his work—“Studied 5½ hrs…. Studied 6½ hours….”—the notes center around a life that, like the Gothic windows and gooseberry jam, might just as well have been in Nebraska: “Went to the Ta-fang to play baseball. Five men went from this compound…. Played two sets of tennis with Mr. Swing…. Played cornet at service…. Took dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Cowley. They had a turkey roast….”
BUT PAOTINGFU also served as a special reminder of the nature of the missionary calling, for there, in the Presbyterian and American Board and China Inland Mission compounds, just five years earlier, fifteen Protestant foreigners had been martyred in the Boxer uprising. The missionaries had had ample warning that they might be killed, but they had chosen to stay in order to try to defend their native converts, who were also threatened. Very soon after David arrived, he heard the tales of “the crowning day”: of thirty-two-year-old May Simcox going out on the porch of her house to plead with the mob to spare the infant daughter in her arms—but in vain; the house set on fire with the Simcoxes and Hodges in it; the two older Simcox children rushing out of the burning house, caught, cut down, and thrown in the cistern. Horace Pitkin, thirty-one-year-old Yale graduate, who had sent telegrams in Latin asking for help from Peking, holding the Boxers at bay from the porch of his house, to defend the native converts inside it, armed with nothing but a pistol—beheaded after his few rounds of ammunition had been spent. Annie Gould, marched off with others toward the city, fainting, then, hands and feet tied, slung from a pole as the Chinese carry pigs—later beheaded, with others. David, writing to Paul about these stories:
Hearing all this, I have been forced to realize two things: how literally frenzying it must have been to the Chinese to have been so humiliated in the last fifty years by outlanders whom they consider inferior to themselves; and also that under the universal sweetness and good humor and natural grace of manner of the Chinese, there lurks, at least in some of them, a strain of unthinkable ferocity—imagine the savagery of a man who could run a spear through a little girl like Gladys Bagnall! How I honor the compassion in the face of death of Dr. Taylor, who showed the Boxers his pistol and said he disdained to take human lives and threw the pistol into the flames of the Lowrie house, in which flames he then died!
THOSE DAYS of work were days of waiting. His bride was coming. David had reason to be anxious. He had fallen in love with Emily Kean, to be sure, but he hardly knew her. It is virtually certain that apart from having held her hand a few times, and probably having stolen a few sweet kisses, he had no way of guessing at what marriage would bring in the privacy of nights at home. He had given signs of past guilt over urges and acts marked! and O. They were nothings. Here in the mission compound, cut off from the world by a high wall—“Isn’t it bracing,” a Mrs. Elliott said to him, “to be away from all the filth and dirt?”—he must have been cut off from fantasy, even. How could a pure man imagine the abandoned wrestling of naked bodies on this too-short iron bed, which creaked and clanked like a rolling metal drum full of rocks when he merely heaved a sigh in the night?
David did what he had done before. He encoded his sexual yearnings and ignorance and fears and offered them, in a sweetened form of dependency, to an older woman. This time it was to Miss Letitia Selden, the more dynamic of the two upstairs ladies. In this context we must approach the nickname of this strong-jawed woman somewhat warily. She was called by all her friends, without the least embarrassment, Miss Titty. This was understood by all as a purely phonetic diminutive of her first name. Letitia Selden was a native of Maine, and in her spare strong speech one heard the pounding of the sea on coastal rocks. She and the younger Miss Demestrie (“true yokefellows,” as everyone said) were in charge of a school for girls run by the mission. Miss Selden, who had served in the field since 1894, had been spared the Boxer horror because she had been in the United States during it, on furlough; Miss Demestrie had arrived after it, in 1903. Miss Titty pictured herself to David as an only child who had grown up in a playground of printed words. She had lived her entire childhood indoors, inhabiting the magazines then considered “instructive”—St. Nicholas, Our Young Folks, The Youth’s Companion—and she said she had practically memorized all the books in Godwin’s “Juvenile Library,” especially Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespear and Adventures of Ulysses. Stories of sorrows and suffering had always especially moved her; Enoch Arden had almost broken her heart. And so, just as under this lady’s whalebone-ribbed corset there was a warm and pulsing amplitude, so under the Down East shell of personality there was a boundless romantic softness. Perhaps to humble this dangerous flesh and even more dangerous sensibility, she drove herself without mercy. Miss Demestrie told David that Miss Titty had been valedictorian at Mt. Holyoke not because of any easy brilliance but because she had worked so hard that her eyes often gave out and she had to get her lessons by having someone read aloud to her.
“Miss Selden said to me today, ‘When a bachelor is about to be delivered up for the slaughter, he needs a mother near him to pat his cheek.’ ” The diary begins to punctuate this lady’s sympathies, which take the form of a voracious curiosity about Emily, with an abundance of exclamation points. “She says: ‘Tell me about her! Tell me! What color are her eyes?’ ‘Hazel.’ ‘Hazel! How sweet! I shall call her Hazy!’ ”…“She asks: ‘Is she slim? Tell me about her posture!’ ‘Well, what should I say? Straight and lithe.’ ‘Straight and—did you say lithe! How lovely she must be!’ ” The younger yokefellow was apparently slightly miffed by the mothering, or at least by this interrogatory form of it. “Miss Demestrie walks back and forth. She seems an unhappy person.”
ON THE SIXTH OF NOVEMBER David received a telegram from Wolf in Shanghai saying that the Doric with its precious cargo would arrive there on the fifteenth. “Miss Titty actually did pat me on the cheek when I read the telegram to her! She is very dear to me. She seems almost as excited to see Em as I am!” Hectic, David packed his cutaway and a few other things and took the ten fifty train the next morning for Tientsin. There he “engaged passage on the coastwise bucket Tung Tien,” which was to leave in two days. He stayed with the Hendersons—and found that in his excitement he had forgotten to pack his shaving brush, his straight razor, and his stropping strap. “Hate to buy new ones,” he wrote in his diary. The second evening he went to a meeting of a temperance society for foreign soldiers and sailors, then, feeling all too sober himself, he went aboard the “bucket” at midnight. It cast off from the Bund at two in the morning. The ship anchored outside the Taku bar to take its cargo from lighters. “Not many congenial passengers. Captain Jewar is a tough.” The voyage, except for one “dirty” night, was tolerably smooth. The Tung Tien tied up in Shanghai at one thirty on the twelfth. “Found everyone getting ready for the event.”
DAVID got up at five in morning on the fifteenth. His friends had secured him a place on a launch that would take him twelve miles downriver and across the bar into the shallows of the sea where the Doric would be anchored with other ships waiting for high tide before going up the Whangpoo to the city. Thus he would gain a few hours on the long wait to see Emily. We can guess he had swallowed hard when this plan had been proudly announced to him. What if it was rough out there? What if Emily’s first sight of him, at long last, should be of her stalwart fiancé decorating the carpet of Tibetan silt with his breakfast? But the launch turned out to be much larger than he had imagined it would be, and the sea was calm, and he climbed a gangway on the flank of the ship, and there she was. She stood in a crowd on the promenade deck, her face aglow with the light of her surprised pleasure. That night he wrote: “She is far more beautiful than I had remembered.”
They reached the Bund soon after noon. Several Association people were on hand to greet Emily. In the carriage on the way to the Wolfs’ house she frightened David with a sudden groan. She had seen, for the first time, a Chinese woman tottering on tiny bound feet.
It seemed as if there was not a minute to wait. They rehearsed the ceremony that afternoon, then went to Nanking Road to see the three pieces of furniture the Association secretaries were having made for their wedding gift. They had dinner with the Blacktons, where they met two unmarried young women who had just arrived in China, pale as a pair of White Leghorns, named Miss Paddock and Miss Coppock.
The next morning the wedding couple were kept apart. Just after twelve o’clock Emily Kean, luminous in her slightly yellowy lace wedding dress (which had been her grandmother’s and her mother’s), took sedate steps with little pauses, timed by Mendelssohn on a Victrola, into the Wolfs’ living room, where David stood waiting in his sugar-scoop suit. She had trustingly packed the dress in her steamer trunk back in Herkimer County, New York, before setting out on an incredibly brave voyage to the opposite side of the earth down there, where people walked around upside down. Here she was, in creamy lace, right side up. She stood like a willow by her groom. In the hush of the twenty guests during the first of the vows, the ring bearer, a golden-haired boy of five—David in his haze had no idea whose child it was—with a little satin pillow balanced like a tray in his hands, suddenly began to howl, and the ring slid off the pillow and rolled under a chair. Alarmed at the thought of an omen, David looked anxiously at Emily’s face behind her veil. She was laughing. David’s diary: “I knew then that my Em would be all right in China, and I with her.”
IT GOES without saying that no written record of the consummation survives—except by indirection. One reason there had been such a hurry to get the wedding over with, quite beyond the young couple’s having waited for it so long, was that the Koon Hsing, on which a cabin was being saved for a Mr. and Mrs. D. Treadup, was to sail for the north that very afternoon. “Our good friends came to the boat to start us off. Rice and red paper hearts were in evidence.” By suppertime the lovebirds were vomiting. The next day David was able to write only one line in his diary: “I was never this sick in my life.” And the next day: “We lay in our berths all day. Rather hard lines for a honeymoon.” On Sunday the ship made only four knots through mountainous seas. Captain Anderson said he had never seen such a gale. Early Tuesday morning the Koon Hsing dropped anchor off the Taku bar, and it was finally calm. While the cargo was offloaded onto lighters, all the passengers except the Treadups went ashore. And here came the cryptic announcement in the diary: “We greatly enjoyed the ship to ourselves.” At last the honeymooners were in luck: the next morning the ship tried to cross the bar and went aground. Again the other passengers went ashore. This time the author of the diary loses all reserve. “Sunshine after clouds, sweet after bitter.” On the crest of the tide the next morning the ship drove free and entered the river. David, too, had crossed over the bar that for so long had lurked under the surface of his mind. From here forward he floated free. Years later, in “Search,” he was able to express his gratitude to Emily for the “naturalness” she had shown him in those days at the rivermouth, for she had, as it were, taken him gently by the hand and led him away from the idea of one sort of sin.
OBJECTIVELY we now see a huge leap in his growth as a person. He has zest for his work. He begins to see Teacher Wu’s anger, and he devises ways of teaching himself. Each day he memorizes six verses from the translated Gospel of St. Mark. He carries his character cards everywhere. A tennis partner laughs at him one day for pulling the cards out of his pocket between points. He and Emily take long walks—along the railroad tracks, to the south suburb, into the countryside. He has begun to call her Hazy. Nothing daunts him. He visits the hospital to watch operations. Two weeks later a Miss Perkins falls under a moving train at the railroad station; both legs have to be amputated below the knee; David stands in as anesthetist, dripping ether onto a cone over the wrecked lady’s nose. Teacher Wu threatens to resign, then does. “I am relieved. He is not a man of strong character.” In the evenings David laughs loudly with Miss Titty, who adores Emily and fusses over her. Emily is strong; her accepting the fussing, as she might accept the buzzing of a fly around her head, is like a precious gift to Miss Selden. “Hazy has a quick ear for the language.” On the seventeenth of December a new teacher arrives. “He is off in pronunciation but may answer all right if I apply myself.” David and his friends play hundreds of sets of tennis, right through the winter. One day he notes: “Played four sets. Snow on the ground but court had been cleaned.” “Popped corn last night.” He and Emily read Arthur H. Smith’s Village Life in China aloud to each other. On Christmas day, “Hazy gave me many remembrances. Handsome cloisonné napkin rings.” “Emily is a jewel of a wife.” “We are very happy these days.”
He makes extraordinary progress in the language. His second teacher, whom David has called “not a learned man,” quits in late February. David does not consider that two personal teachers’ having resigned could be attributed to his being hard to get along with; he is inclined to be sorry for two limited men.
He thinks he will not ask to be assigned another teacher for now, for he has learned that he is to go soon to Shanghai. There he will first assist at some evangelistic meetings with harangues by the awesome James B. Todd, who is on a world tour; then he will attend a great conference, also in Shanghai, of most of the Protestant missionaries in China, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Protestant missionary work in China. After that, he is to stay in Shanghai a while longer and then spend the hot months studying the language at the missionaries’ summer resort of Kuling, in the mountains up the Yangtze.
So he will bide the time now with self-teaching. He is cocky. In late February he asks to be allowed to go to the college at T’ungchow to be examined “for a year’s work,” though he has studied only five months. Wolf in Shanghai is doubtful. Treadup presses. Wolf demurs. Treadup gets testimony on his progress from Cowley and Swing at Paotingfu. Wolf grudgingly gives permission.
T’ungchow, March 5, 1907.
Dear Brother Wolf:
I take pleasure in reporting to you that in accordance with your request I have examined Mr. D. Treadup in his study of the Chinese language. He has made amazing progress, the likes of which I have not previously met with. He has fully completed one year’s work in less than half that time. He was excellently prepared on sixty lessons in Mateer, twenty in ‘Kuan Hua Chih Nan,’ the Gospel of Mark, ten selected hymns, writing three hundred characters, free conversation, and memorizing ten Chinese proverbs and the Ten Commandments.
I was impressed by the thoroughness of Mr. Treadup’s work in these various lines of study. His pronunciation and tones were accurate, and his use of Chinese natural and easy. I usually have marked examinations on the basis of 100 for perfect work, but will not do so on this occasion because this man’s accomplishment throws the standards I have applied to others all out of kilter.
I congratulate you on having a younger associate following in your tracks who will overhaul you some of these days if you do not keep face to the front!
Very cordially yours,
(signed) E. Y. Sterling.
SEVENTY SHEAVES
DAVID sat in the back of the big room. It was already packed with an all-male audience an hour before the scheduled time of the meeting. David could hear an angry buzzing in the anteroom. Many who had been invited had come too late and were being turned away.
The largest available auditorium in Shanghai was the decidedly unfinished Martyrs’ Memorial Hall in the new Y.M.C.A. building. The hall was months away from completion; but the Todd meetings were deemed so important that the Association had taken down the plasterers’ scaffoldings from the interior walls, covered the empty windows with straw matting and flags, hidden the lathing of the walls with bamboo fronds, and rented chairs and lights and a speaker’s podium.
This was the third of three Todd meetings. To the first had come native pastors and leading Chinese Christian laymen, for a discussion of struggles of the native church; at the second Todd had talked to a hundred and fifty Christian leaders of the Association and native churches about efficient ways to attract and organize and manage their flocks. Tonight’s was to be the main event. Tickets had been issued to four hundred members of the Association and of its Bible classes; six hundred students in Christian schools and colleges; two hundred graduates of those institutions; and two hundred “inquirers” from the native churches—men who had heard a little about Christianity and wanted to know more.
David, with no sense whatsoever, apparently, of the cultural incongruities in what he was describing, wrote his Syracuse “constituency” the next day:
Special hymn books had been prepared so that every man could sing—and sing they did. Twelve hundred Chinese men singing might have been bedlam but not these men. The choir of one hundred fifty voices from the Christian schools was lost, not in a heathen howl but in the strains of “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” from the voices of twelve hundred men who in the mission schools and churches and the Association had learned to sing. It was more like the Silver Bay or Northfield conventions than anything I’ve heard on this side of the earth.
Then James B. Todd spoke, and David, forgetful of Todd’s faraway brutal rebuff of his request for help on his college debt, and of Todd’s faraway heartless insistence on the full year’s probation before David could be married, was now wholly carried away by the vibrating woodwind voice of the confident, handsome, straight-backed, blond-haired man. Of the artistry of Z. T. Tao, Todd’s interpreter, David could only grasp the amazing external translations—the gestures, the swoops of bassoon tones turned clarinetish, the sudden crescendos, the solemn pauses, the piercing stares from a face thrust forward, the great Todd rendered into a Chinese personality with a slightly skewed mimicry which to outside eyes might have looked both witty and wicked, but which seemed to mesmerize this audience.
David, so moved that the metaphors began to scramble in his mind like the squirrels in the treadmill in the cage back home in Salt Branch, wrote his Syracuse friends:
The blood of the martyrs, the memory of which is to be kept green by this hall, is doing its work, and it was fitting that this first meeting in the hall should have its harvest of seventy sheaves, of seventy men who had not previously declared themselves for Jesus. Among the Todd Seventy, who may yet be sent out “two and two into the villages and towns,” there was the silk merchant who was a charter member of the Association, the military director of the leading Government college of this port, seven students from one college and a dozen men who had been studying in our Association enquirers’ classes.
What we must note for the future about this experience of David’s is not simply that it stirred up once again his romantic daydreams of itinerations and street preaching, of playing his own dashing role in the evangelization of the world in his generation; but rather that his awe of James B. Todd was almost too much for him. He felt somewhat as he had as a freshman at the foot of the hill at Syracuse on the day of the salt rush—“really small.” He wrote in his diary: “He made me into a cipher sitting there at the back of the Martyrs’ Hall.” There was some deeply puzzling ingredient in the great Todd’s magnetism. We will see, a few years later, some unraveling of the puzzle when David goes on tour through China as a fellow lecturer with Todd and a remarkable shift takes place in the balance of power between these two vigorous creatures.
IN THE DAYS of waiting for the Centenary Conference to begin, David was given the task of following up with some of the “Todd Seventy” who were known to speak English. The very first man he called on, to enroll him in an Association Bible class, lived in a fine house deep in the Chinese city. A strange confession in David’s diary: “Even though I knew I was on a sacred mission, I must admit I felt like one of those house-to-house ‘canvassers’ Mother used to hate so much. Sellers of pans brooms mousetraps ect.” The young man was a student at St. John’s College.
He had a long face. “My family is nobody Christians,” says Chen, “I have no friends in Christian church. I want so much Jesus Christ, but my mother…” He stopped short there and wouldn’t say another word more, he had lost face, but it wasn’t hard to finish the sentence. I am praying hard for him.
In the agonizing of “Search” David recalls this Todd evening and his own rather discouraging follow-ups as having hung in his mind back then, contributing to a later skepticism about the old ways of evangelizing:
Only seventy declarers for the mighty Todd out of an audience of twelve hundred—a motheaten six tenths of one per cent! Motheaten because how many of them had parents who refused permission—or wriggled out for other “practical” reasons? I myself could not say I had confirmed for future cultivation a single declarer among the famous “Todd Seventy.”
THE TREADUPS were staying in a third-floor room in the Keystone house. On the ship down from Tientsin, Emily had developed a sore throat, and now, in damp March, as David had to go off for a few days at a time, first to Soochow for a get-together of Association secretaries, then north with the Todd party, she felt worse and worse. A Dr. Marshall came to see her during one of David’s absences, and he off-handedly said she had a quinsy. Her diary: “It was as if he had stabbed me with an icicle.” For David had told Emily about the travails of old Dr. Elting, about how, for one thing, his wife had died of a quinsy. Her fear—and perhaps her sense of dependency on powerful David, and her helplessness without him (though he might have said that he was already hopelessly dependent on her)—seemed to hone the pain. She refused food because she could not swallow without the most cutting anguish; and she began to imagine that she would starve to death. Finally one day Dr. Marshall lanced the abscess. The next day David was back in Shanghai, and she suddenly was able to sit up and to eat some custard. Within a week she was herself. This was the first of many, many times when the silently arching Milky-Way calm of Emily’s married life would be torn out of her sky by one of David’s sudden departures.
THE CENTENARY CONFERENCE
IN MID-APRIL the scattered herd began to assemble. One could see striding in the streets of Shanghai, their heels crashing on the pavements as if with strokes of the hammers of history, all the famous missionary stalwarts of the late nineteenth century. Arthur H. Smith, Timothy Richard, Joshua Bagnall, C. W. Mateer, W. A. P. Martin, Young J. Allen, the brothers Moule—legends were walking around. They had terrifying faces, these giants, ravaged by a fixated, unyielding love of humanity. The huge frosty bushes hanging from the chinbones of most of them proclaimed their fierce seniority. If the Christians had gone in for idolatry, these figures must surely have vied for the honor of modeling for the One and Only Godhead.
Under the watchful eyes of men like these, this conference to celebrate one hundred years of mission work in China had been well prepared. For a decade committees had been sitting to grind and sift the grist of resolutions on which there might be the astounding possibility that all the sects of Protestantism and all their eccentric devotees and mystics and down-to-earthers might agree. The Chinese church and ministry, methods of educational and evangelistic and medical work, women’s work, translation of the Bible and the preparation of tracts, the dream of comity and federation of the sects for united work in the field, and the difficult question of what part missionaries should play in public questions in China—these and other subjects had been endlessly thrashed over, and resolutions had been prepared to be presented to the conference for discussion and, it was hoped, passage.
HUGE DAVID TREADUP was an usher. He was wearing a stiff wing collar with a gray foulard tie, and a blue serge suit newly cut for him by the tailor on Nanking Road who had made his fur-lined coat. Emily (who was to sit in the balcony with most other wives) had said on the way to the hall that he was the handsomest creature on earth, but as he walked down the center aisle of the Municipal Council’s Town Hall on that first evening, April 26, now and then by the side of one of the fierce old male giants of the spirit, he felt shrunken, misfitted, and awkward. He realized he was lucky to be there at all. Here were to be assembled some seven hundred of the more prominent of the thirty-five hundred Protestant missionaries then in the China field. The conference would set the tone of life for missionaries in China for at least the next decade. But David felt raw, new. He knew only five hundred Chinese characters; he had experienced only enough of China so far to have recognized that the mission romance he had swallowed at Syracuse had been a delusion. He was, besides, distracted. He burned with something very much like lust for Emily. He was ambitious, and it cut him to have good Dr. Mateer look right through him as he directed the old man to a front-row seat. Perhaps hoping to be heard if not seen, he had offered to the arrangements committee to play the cornet at some meeting, but they had brushed him off. The point of David’s rather boyish discomfort and distraction was that he was in no position to take in the real meaning of what was going on around him from moment to moment. He just lolled by the door to the hall and listened to the words.
THE OPENING ADDRESS, that evening, was a review of the first century of Protestant China missions in China by the redoubtable Arthur H. Smith, author of quirky and opinionated but generally quite fair books, Village Life in China and Chinese Characteristics, among others. He had been in the field for almost half the century. Men like Dr. Smith had grown up listening to, and later delivering, sermons two hours long, and his speech this night did not stint the teeming past.
The brethren were gathered, Mr. Smith roared out in his pulpit voice, to celebrate the arrival in Canton, one hundred years ago, of the first Protestant missionary in the China field, a young Scot named Robert Morrison.
Why had he come to Canton? Ah, Mr. Smith could sniffingly tell that part, and with a somewhat malicious relish—for it had to do, as he saw it, with a blunder and failure on the part of “our esteemed Catholic friends.” The Ch’ing Dynasty of Manchus had come to power in the seventeenth century. Already by that early time Arabs, then Portuguese, then Dutch and British traders had been sailing to China to buy her famous silks; and in that century came an incursion of Jesuit missionaries, with their astrolabes and cross-staffs and spring-wound clocks. Mr. Smith could grant that the Chinese—particularly the so-called literati, the scholar-gentry class, who regarded their country, the Central Kingdom, as the hub of all civilization—tolerated Jesuits decked out in Chinese clothing and graced with Chinese manners. But they were contemptuous of the crude and uncultivated Western traders with their grayish skin and their body odor of sheep fat. How well the present brethren knew that the Chinese had come to call all pale-skinned interlopers, over the centuries, “foreign devils” (yang kwei-tzu), “hairy men” (mao-tzu), “big-noses” (ta-pi-tzu), and other worse names. But the too clever Jesuits let themselves be divided over the so-called Rites Controversy—the slippery issue of how far to accommodate to Christianity the Chinese practice of ancestor worship—and the Chinese court became increasingly hostile to the foreign religion and indeed to all foreigners, and in the eighteenth century imperial edicts forbade Christian worship and restricted foreign trade to the one southern port of Canton.
So that was where Morrison had come. He worked there for twenty-seven years and managed in that time to translate the Bible into Chinese (rather poorly) and to convert exactly ten Chinese. He was early joined by others, including one William Milne, whose study of the Chinese language led him to assert that mastering that tongue was a task for persons “with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of spring-steel, eyes of eagles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.” The first American Protestants to arrive, in 1830, were Elijah C. Bridgman and David Abeel of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who were followed by the first medical missionary to open a hospital in China, Dr. Peter Parker.
What prodigies of courage and prickliness, Mr. Smith said, some of those pioneers had been! There was Karl Friedrich Gutzlaff, a Pomeranian, who had “an intolerable assumption of omniscience,” and who got around the restriction to Canton by working as an interpreter on Jardine Matheson opium ships, toting his tracts and Bibles with him; he also invented the practice, much imitated later, of hiring Chinese to act as colporteurs to sell Bibles and preach where foreigners could not go. (Some of them, then and later, it was said, sold the Bibles for their paper, which was made into clothbound soles of Chinese shoes.) Another early hero was Dr. James Legge, who arrived in Canton in 1843 and who spent his life translating the Chinese classics into English, to the extent of sixty-six volumes, in order to “open the door to the mind of the Chinese.”
For the bearers of the Word, as for the bearers of mercantile goods, Smith said, Canton was not enough of a market. Guns opened up the rest of China to the message of the Prince of Peace. During the Tientsin negotiations after the British-French campaign of 1858, Rev. Samuel Wells Williams, author ten years earlier of The Middle Kingdom, an explanation of China to Westerners, remarked that “nothing short of the Society for the Diffusion of Cannon Balls” could be understood by the Chinese. “They are the most craven of people, cruel and selfish as heathenism can make men, so we must be backed by force if we wish them to listen to reason.” Williams managed insertion into the treaty of clauses on religious toleration. These were elaborated in the Treaty of Peking two years later, Article 29 of which provided that
the principles of the Christian religion as professed by the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are recognized as teaching men to do good and do to others as they would have others do to them. Hereafter, those who quietly teach and profess these doctrines shall not be harassed on account of their faith.
These provisions opened China’s interior to missionaries, as other provisions did to traders and diplomats. The treaties gave missionaries the shield of “extraterritoriality.” They were exempt from Chinese laws and taxes; they were subject to the legal jurisdictions of their own governments only. What was more, they now had a social status most of them had never dreamed of at home, for they were to enjoy most of the perquisites of Chinese officialdom; they were a protected elite, like the learned gentry.
As it turned out, foreign merchants managed their business adequately, by and large, in the coastal ports, and it was the missionaries, Mr. Smith said, who made the most of the right to penetrate to the very heart of China.
Mr. Smith’s lungs were tireless. The speech went on and on. Before long David’s restless mind ran off like a dog on its rounds in the dark.
BETWEEN SESSIONS he was with Emily, and there was much socializing—formal calls, tiffins, chafing-dish suppers. David enjoyed getting together with the younger men, who tended to be, unlike him, thinnish, with taut neck muscles and often with pince-nez spectacles. With them he could recapture some of the Northfield elation of being among the chosen. “Have met Goudy Beach of Wesleyan,” David noted, “Huntington of Yale, Nichols of Trinity, Clements of Chicago, Young of New York, Marshman—all Psi U.” But in the presence of the China veterans, who seemed like so many direful prophets, Elijahs, Amoses, Ezras, Isaiahs, the shrunken sense of callowness would hit him again. It came to him, during a morning session, that his state of confusion was a product of his ignorance. He desperately wanted to be clear about what was being transacted.
ACUTELY CONSCIOUS of Emily sitting above him in the balcony, David perked up on the day devoted to the topic of Woman’s Work. The speakers that morning were of two sorts, who looked interchangeable to David: elderly spinsters and wives of the giants. They had eyes of angels; their mouths could chew nails.
The first to speak was a Miss Benham of the London Missionary Society, who started out by pointedly saying, “We are met today on behalf of the women of China. For two short hours this conference”—which was to last two weeks—“will consider their special needs, and how to meet them.” Miss Benham presented some resolutions. Based on the aim of “the development of the whole woman, physical, mental, and spiritual,” they were largely devoted to the Chinese woman’s right to, and need for, education—an idea outlandish to the Confucians. Elsewhere in its documents, the conference would deplore the debased condition, indeed the utter worthlessness, of Chinese women in the eyes of traditional Confucians: “One man has, besides his wife, several concubines…. Husbands are wicked enough to sell their wives, and other people are wicked enough to buy them. Mothers drown their daughters or sell them to be slaves or prostitutes….”
During the debate, Mrs. Arthur H. Smith, speaking on the evangelization of women with a brevity her husband could well have aped, struck at ways in which missionaries had perpetuated that worthlessness: “Let us use our influence against building any more chapels which place [the Chinese woman] in a separate room, or behind a high screen. Try it yourself one Sunday and see how much less you get if sitting out of sight of the speaker. Make the most of these neglected mothers if you wish to make sure of the children….”
Later in the morning the delegates reached Resolution VI:
That the influence of Christian schools should be against the adoption of foreign dress and customs, and especially that a stand be taken against masculine dress and manners; that the ideal woman to be held before girls and young women in schools is the wife and mother in the home….
In the discussion that followed, the elderly ladies who had sponsored the resolution explained that the reason it was so conservative was that Chinese custom was so very much more conservative that any attempt to move faster would discredit all other efforts, especially those in education.
Up popped old Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who had been in China since 1849, had long been president of the Imperial University in Peking, and was the author of The Lore of Cathay, the book David had read stretched out on carpets of pine needles beside brooks during his hike across New York State to Silver Bay two years before. The venerable warrior moved that “the first part of the resolution, as to dress and customs,” should be struck out.
A MISS NEWTON Dr. Martin, the ladies know a little better than men the effect of foreign dress.
DR. MARTIN I leave the question of taste in dress to the ladies. The question of dress, however, is not of taste but a lesson of politics. I refer to the Dowager Empress of China adorning herself in a foreign dress from Paris, and when she asked her Chief Eunuch how she looked, he replied if she continued to wear such a “barbarous” costume, he would dash his brains out on the floor. Whereupon, Her Majesty discarded her Parisian robes. Are the ladies here to put themselves on a line with the eunuchs, and object to Chinese women wearing civilized dress?
Dr. Martin’s amendment was voted down by an overwhelming show of hands, and the whole of Resolution VI was adopted.
THAT EVENING David sought out Goudy Beach, who had had two years in Soochow and who had struck David as the brightest of the young men he had met. Could Beach help him to get all these resolutions straight in his mind?
“Don’t you see what’s going on, Treadup?” Beach said.
“Well, I hear the votes, but—”
“Ah, man, there’s been a struggle going on. Don’t you see, the elders—the fogies, I call ’em—they’ve always thought that the only proper work of God’s shepherds in the field is the saving of souls. Oh, for them, it’s urgent—the judgment day is near, and there’s so much to be done before it. It’s ironic, they’re a lot like the old Confucianist heathens, they put all their stress on morals. Right morals will make a right world. These old boys believe this. But there’s this new generation—the majority right here at the conference—you’ve seen them—their beards aren’t white yet—some of them shave their chins. They’re turning things around. Didn’t you read the Dennis book?”
“Dennis?”
“Look here, Treadup, Christian Missions and Social Progress. I’m surprised at you. Dennis?—a chap in Syria. It’s what the new people here have taken up. They’re fighting for a new idea—that missions can help bring about the social regeneration of the world. Western nations are superior because of Christianity. We don’t say the Christian nations are free from all evils, not yet, but at least we have a spirit of protest against all those things that degrade human personality. Among the heathen nations, corruption, thievery, licentiousness, cruelty to the weak—all taken for granted. Our Christian missions have a duty to instill in these nations a new conscience, that will rid them of both moral laxity and social injustice.”
In “Search,” David wrote:
Beach made me see some of the ways the new people in the missions had been making themselves felt. Since the Boxer Rebellion, he told me, the more forward-looking American missionaries had been much more sensitive to the Chinese than the United States government, much less inclined than their elders to view acts of imperialism as acts of God. They were embarrassed by bristling gunboats. They were opposed to the harsh Boxer indemnities. They had tried hard to get the United States government not to extend the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. And in the follow-up of the Lienchow massacre—which Gridley and Henderson made so vivid to me just after I arrived out here—these people argued against heavy reparations, for which the State Department had been pressing; they said that excessive claims created a painful impression in China and harmed the missionary cause.
THE CONVERSATION with Beach helped David to make sense of the two final documents that came out of the conference. The first, entitled “Letter to the Chinese Church,” struck him as a triumph of the white-beards. It spelled out for the missionaries’ Chinese colleagues how Christians should strive to live. The Christian message was not one of judgment and punishment, but rather a call for repentance of sins and a promise of salvation through righteous living—right morals. The catalog of sins in this letter was presented as if they were universal on earth, but in fact the list was cut to patterns of ills the missionaries saw as typically Chinese.
Men do not love God or love their neighbors. They quarrel and they cheat one another. They lie and are insolent to one another. They are passionate, and they fight as if they were dogs instead of men. They gamble and smoke opium. They get drunk and injure one another. The strong trample on the weak. They love money more than they love goodness, and are more anxious to see their children rich than to see them good. The customs of society are depraved. Men worship idols and not God; they burn incense, light candles, bow and prostrate themselves, but do not repent of sin…. Under the influence of temper, or out of revenge, men and women take their own lives….
The importance of this “Letter” for David’s future was that it provided a checklist of the Chinese social ills that missionaries were authorized, so to speak, to fight against. It set limits. Any missionary who took it upon himself to go farther or deeper would do so without the sanction of this impressive ecumenical body.
THE OTHER final paper, David could see, was at least a partial victory for the younger missionaries. It was called a “Memorial to the Chinese Government.” Its purpose was to present a petition to their Imperial Majesties the Empress Dowager and the Emperor, asking for complete religious liberty to all classes of Chinese Christians. One of the important arguments in favor of granting this, the Memorial said, was “the non-political character of Christianity.”
Some Christian countries have been absolute monarchies like Russia, some have been limited monarchies like Great Britain and Germany, some have been republics like America and France. Christ said nothing about forms of government. The Scriptures say, “The powers that be, are ordained of God.” We are bidden to pray for kings and all in authority. In all Chinese churches prayer is regularly offered for the Rulers of China. We ourselves constantly exhort Chinese Christians to be loyal subjects, to honor the Rulers of their land, to love their country and pay their taxes regularly. We entirely discourage among them all connexion with political and secret societies.
The very next passage, however, spoke subtly for the kind of social change missionaries could and would support—reform:
Our great desire for China is that it may prosper and take a leading part among the nations of the earth, and we believe that the slow, gradual, steady influence of our missions is in the direction of bringing in that national prosperity which is based not on military power, but on justice, mercy, and truth.
It would take David many years to begin to see how political “the non-political character of Christianity” really might be. In the meantime he would become more and more involved, if only by the indirection of his remarkable work, in the “slow, gradual, steady” politics of reform.
BEACH had opened David’s mind to some comprehension of the quiet revolution that had been taking place in the missionary movement, yet David felt himself still drawn to the elders. “I need advice,” he confided to Emily, “from one of these wise old heads.” As he watched and listened to the elders during the weeks, he found himself more and more attracted to Joshua Bagnall. Like the other old men, Bagnall was dour and cranky, but somehow everything that that old bird said resonated in some inner cavern of David’s sympathy—a place in him that had nothing to do with comprehension. Perhaps, David later thought, it was that Bagnall seemed more aware than most of the other elders did of the whereabouts of the center of gravity of the Chinese soul.
The talk wore on and on. “Tired of attending meetings,” David petulantly wrote in his diary. On May 8, at the last session of the conference, he received a medal “for ushering ect.” And that evening he entered a fascinating decision in his diary: “Think I’ll grow a mustache.” Were “the wise old heads” particularly hairy? He must by this time have heard the Chinese term of scorn, mao-tzu, hairy ones. Did he think there might be awe tucked in the scorn? We see a photograph of David at Kuling two months later. He is holding a tennis racket, and he is wearing a white pith helmet. His teeth, which glisten in the grin of a winner, are overhung with a glorious dark brown drapery. He looks like a cross between Center Rush Gridley and Teddy Roosevelt.
Just before the last session, David approached Joshua Bagnall, who was sitting in an aisle seat at the very front of the hall. “Put a mental squeeze on my liver, till I was full of gall, and asked him for a conference. He obliged. Curt nod. ‘Hotel Astor, teatime,’ he says. ‘Don’t be late, Mr. Treadup.’ Knew my name! How? How? Why, I walked back down that aisle on air!” So, casually, was arranged what turned out to be one of the most important conversations of David’s whole life.
A TALK WITH JOSHUA BAGNALL
DAVID TREADUP left a sheaf of notes in longhand, entitled “Minute of D. T.’s Conference with Rev. Dr. J. B., 8 May 07,” written on sheets of letter paper of the Astor Hotel, The Bund, Shanghai—suggesting that he must have sat down at a writing desk in the public rooms on the ground floor immediately after the conversation to write out his record of it while it was fresh in his mind. Attached to the memorandum are a number of pages of the same letter paper, covered with almost illegible scribbles; Joshua Bagnall must have allowed him to write bits down as they talked, reminders which became the basis of these more extended notes. David’s document does not set the scene, so we must imagine it:
A large high-ceilinged room. Wooden-bladed fans slowly stir the air. Potted bamboos and palms are interspersed with stone pillars around the sides of the room. There is a discreet murmur of conversation, punctuated by the tinkling of spoons. Chinese “boys” in starched white jackets and black trousers and shoes move silently among the tables serving tea and watercress sandwiches and Fortnum and Mason biscuits; they bow to a guest after each filling of a riceware cup from a silver teapot. Dr. Bagnall [as we can judge from photographs taken at the Centenary Conference] is rather small of stature, though stocky. He has a beard of a sort usually painted on a head of Moses holding the slates. He is pompous, but often his face fires up and is merry. Having come here straight from the Town Hall, he is wearing a frock coat of an elegant light material lined with figured black silk.
David’s document dispenses with preliminaries:
[Here, for the first and only time in the notes, David enters a comment:]
At this juncture Dr. B. stood up. I thought he was dismissing me, but he began to talk in a somewhat louder voice, and I confess I was much embarrassed, because people who were having tea in the salon turned their heads. It was suddenly as if he were preaching a sermon. As if he had said it before and would say it again. I was so abashed. The depth of his feeling shook me. He was an old man angry perhaps because of the very great difficulty of passing his power along to a young person. I must have stood there with my mouth open, looking no doubt very stupid. Here is what he said:
| J.B. | But there is one side of the literati you must not forget. They are rich. They are privileged. You are to remember that you have made a deliberate choice of using gravity so that what is learned flows downward. Downward to the people at large. The year of Jubilee is coming, Mr. Treadup, in this unhappy China, when the hereditary rights of the poor, as well as of the rich, will be restored, and when the accursed land laws, which permit the poor to be oppressed at will, shall be changed, and when the wicked monopoly granted to landowners in town and country shall be withdrawn, and the poor laborers who have largely made the cities prosper shall have their due share of the profits of their labor. The landlords only raise and raise and raise again the rents without limit and do nothing in return for rack rents, but on the contrary spend it on extravagant living. One orders a special railroad train for four hundred dollars to go a short distance to his grouse shooting. Another gives dinners which cost six hundred dollars per head. Countless numbers spend all their time in sport and gambling away fortunes, while numberless poor widows and orphans die of slow starvation in the same city. What wonder is it that people are driven to anarchy? God has provided a salvation for all. It is our duty to see that this is preached till the poor and needy get their year of Jubilee. Don’t ever forget that, Mr. Treadup. |