Missionary compound—Prayer—Reputed dangers of the way—The German girl—Midwife—The Bible as a guide—“My yoke is easy, My burden is light”—A harem—Helping the sick and afflicted—A case of hysteria—Drastic remedies—Ensuring a livelihood—“Strike, strike”—Barbaric war-song—The Chinese soldier—The martyrdom of the Roman Catholic priest.
And with my entrance into that missionary compound I entered a world as strange to me as the Eastern world I had come across two continents to see.
The compound is right in the heart of the town, and was originally a Chinese inn, built, in spite of the rigour of the climate, Chinese fashion, so that to go from one room to the other it was necessary to go out of doors. The walls looking on to the street were blank, except in the room I occupied, where was a small window, so high up I could not see out of it. How it must be to pass from one room to the other when the bitter winter of Northern China holds the mountains in its grip, I do not know.
I walked in out of the unknown and there came forward to meet me that sad-looking woman with the soft brown eyes and bright red lips. Take me in, yes, indeed she would take me in. I was dusty, I was torn, and I think I was more weary than I 253have ever been in my life, and she made me welcome, made me lie down in a long chair, and had tea brought in. A tall buxom German girl entered, and then to my surprise, and not a little to my discomfort, my hostess bowed her head, and thanked God openly that I had come through the dangers of the way, and been brought safely to their compound! For a moment it took my breath away, and so self-conscious was I, that I did not know which way to look. My father was a pillar of the Church of England, Chancellor of the Diocese in which we lived, and I had been brought up straitly in the fold, among a people who, possibly, felt deeply on occasion, but who never, never would have dreamt of applying religion personally and openly to each other. Frankly I felt very uncomfortable after I had been prayed over, and it seemed a sort of bathos to go on calmly drinking tea and eating bread and jam. The German girl had just arrived, and they heard that the day after she had left Peking, the German Consul had sent round to the mission station, where she had been staying, to cancel her passport, and to say that on no account must she go to Jehol as the country was too disturbed. However she and her escort, one of the missionaries, had come through quite safely, and the Tartar General in charge here had said she might stay so long as she did not go outside the boundaries of the town. But naturally, they were much surprised to see me, a woman and alone.
I looked round the room, the general sitting-room, a bare stone-floored room, with a mat or two upon it, a little cane furniture, a photograph or two, and some texts upon the walls, a harmonium, a 254couple of tables, and a book-case containing some very old-fashioned books, mostly of a religious tendency, and some stories by A.L.O.E. There was a time when I thought A.L.O.E\'s stories wonderful, and so I read one or two of them while I was here, and wondered what it was that had charmed me when I was eleven.
The only other woman in that compound, beside my hostess, was the German girl who had come out to help.
“I gave myself to the Lord for China,” she said, and she spoke simply and quietly, as if she were saying the most natural thing in the world, as if there could be no doubt of the value of the gift—truly it was her all, she could not give more. And the Chinese did need her, I think—that is only my opinion—but not exactly in the way she counted most important. She had taken the precaution to become a midwife, and indeed she must be a godsend, for Chinese practices are crude and cruel in the extreme. It is the child that counts, the mother, even in her hour of travail, must literally make no moan. A woman once told me how she went to see her amah, who was expecting a baby, and she was asked to wait. She waited about an hour, for she was anxious about the woman, and the room was very still, there was no sound till the silence was broken by the first cry of the new-born infant. The child had been born behind the screen while she waited, and an hour later, to her horror, the white-faced young mother was up and preparing to cook the family evening meal. The woman would not have cried out for the world. No Chinese woman would. If poor human flesh is weak, and a 255sigh of pain escape her, her mother-in-law will cover her mouth with her hand, but mostly the woman will gag herself with her long black hair, she will not disgrace herself by a cry as long as her senses are with her. It is all very well to say the Chinese do not suffer as white women suffer. They are not like the sturdy negro women who have lived a primitive, open-air life, walk like queens, and have exercised every muscle. They are the crippled products of an effete civilisation, who spend long hours on the k\'ang, and go as little as possible from their own compound. To those women that German girl will be a blessing untold. I think of their bodies while she labours for their souls. Anyway she is surely sent by God.
There were two men here to make up the complement, one was my missionary\'s husband, a man who takes the Bible for his guide in everything, the Bible as it is translated into the English tongue. He does not read primarily for the beauty of the language, for the rhythm, for the poetry, for the Eastern glamour that is over all. He reads it, he would tell you himself, for the truth. It is to him the most important thing in the world; he quotes it, he lives by it, it is never out of his thoughts, he might be a Covenanter of old Puritan days. And the fourth missionary is a man of the world. I don\'t think he realises it himself, but he is. He had lived there many years, had married a wife and brought up children there, and now had sent them home to be educated, and he himself talked, not of the Bible, though I doubt not he is just as keen as the other, but of the people, and their manner of life, and their customs, of the country, and of the strangers he had 256met, the changes he had seen, and, when I questioned him, of the escape of himself and his family from the Boxers.
For the souls and bodies of these wretched, miserable, uncomprehending Chinese, who very likely, at the bottom of their hearts, pity the strangers because they were not born in the Flowery Land, these devoted people work—work and pray—day and night. The result is not great.
“They will not hear the truth. Their eyes are blind. They worship idols,” they told me of the majority. But they give kindliness, and in all probability, for it is seldom that faithful, honest kindliness fails in its purpose, they make a greater impression than they or I realise.
True they believe firmly in the old Hebrew idea of a “jealous God,” but they themselves are more tender than the God they preach. For all of them, it seemed to me, life is hard, unless they have greater joy in the service than I, “a Greek” could understand, but for the older woman it must be hardest of all.
“My yoke is easy, My burden is light,” said the Master she followed, but the burden of this woman, away up in the mountains of Northern China, is by no means light. The community is so small, they do not belong to the China Inland Mission but call themselves “The Brethren,” the nearest white man is two days away hard travelling across the mountains, so that perforce the life is lonely. Day in and day out they must live here for seven years among an alien people; a people who come to them for aid and yet despise them. And because they would put no more stumbling-blocks in the way of 257bringing the Chinese to listen to the message they bring, these missionaries conform, as much as they can, to Chinese custom. Very seldom does this woman walk abroad with her husband—it would not be the thing—women and men do not walk together in China. If she goes outside the missionary compound she must be accompanied by another woman, and she puts on some loose coat, because the Chinese would be shocked at any suggestion of the outline of a figure. Also she looks neither to the right nor the left, and does not appear to notice anything, because a well-behaved woman in China never looks about her. She considers, too, very carefully her goings, she would not walk through the town at the hour when the men are going about their business, the hour that I found the most interesting, and invariably chose, no boy may bring her tea to her bedroom—it would not be right—and she has none of the arrogance of the higher race who think what they do must be right and expect the natives of the land to fall into line. No, she conforms, always conforms to the uncomfortable customs of the Chinese, and when any man above the rank of the poorest comes to call upon her husband, she and the girl are hustled out of the way and are as invisible as if he kept a harem. It often occurred to me that the Chinese thought he did. Even in the church the women are screened off from the men, and if a man adheres to the customs of the country so closely in everything they can see, it is natural to suppose they will give him credit for adhering to them in all things. But they must think, at least, he has selected his womenkind with a view to their welfare, for the older woman has had 258a little medical training, and simple cases of sickness she can deal with, while the German girl, as I have said, is a certified midwife. The other man too, though not a doctor, has some little knowledge of the more simple eye diseases.
And they are grateful, the poor Chinese, for the sympathy they get from these kindly missionaries, who openly say they tend their poor bodies because they feel that so only can they get at their souls. They come to the little dispensary in crowds, come twenty miles over the mountains, and they bring there the diseases of a slum people, coughs and colds, pleurisy and pneumonia, internal complaints and the diseases of filth—here in the clean mountains—itch and the like. Many have bad eyes, many granulated lids, and there is many a case of hideous goitre. While I was there a man, old and poor, tramped one hundred miles across the mountains; he was blind, with frightfully granulated lids, and he had heard of the skill of the missionaries. There are also well-to-do people here, who sometimes seek aid from them, though as a rule, it is the lower class they come in contact with.
But the ailments of the rich are different, I remember my missionary woman was called in to see a girl about twenty, the daughter of a high-class Manchu. The girl had hiccough. It came on regularly about four o\'clock every afternoon, and continued, if I remember rightly, three or four hours. She was well and strong, she had everything the heart of a Chinese woman could desire, she was never required to do one stroke of work, but she was not married. The Manchus have fallen on evil times and find some difficulty in marrying their 259daughters. So this girl, the daughter of well-to-do people, was necessary to no one, not even to herself, and the missionary, finding she spent the greater part of her time lying idly upon the k\'ang, diagnosed hysteria, and prescribed a good brisk walk every day. The proud Manchu, who was her mother, looked at the woman she had called in to help her, scornfully.
“My daughter,” she said drawing herself up to her full height, and the Manchus are tall women, “cannot walk in the street. It would not be seemly.”
The missionary looked at her a little troubled.
“At least,” she said, “she can walk in the courtyard and play with her brother\'s children.”
But the girl looked at her with weary eyes. There was no excitement in playing with her brother\'s, children, and she could not see the good to be got out of walking aimlessly round the courtyard. Poor Manchu maid! What had she expected?
“If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it?”
“I could do no good,” said the missionary sorrowfully, “and they would not listen to my message.”
The Chinese have their own remedies for many diseases, and some of them the missionaries told me were good, but many were too drastic, and many were wickedly dangerous. When an eye is red and bloodshot for instance, they will break a piece of crockery and pierce the eye with it, and in all probability the unfortunate loses his sight. No wonder they come miles and miles, however rough the way, to submit themselves to gentler treatment. I have known even women with bound feet toil twenty miles 260to see them about some ailment. Of course their feet are not as badly bound as some, for there are many women in China who cannot walk at all. I talked with a man once who told me he had just been called upon to congratulate a man because he had married a wife who could not get across the room by herself. She, naturally, was a lady with slaves to wait upon her. These Chinese women of the mountains of the poorer classes—the Manchus do not bind their feet—must be able to move about a little, for there is a certain amount of work they must do.
“A hundred thousand medical missionaries,” said this man, “are wanted in China, for the teeming population suffers from its ignorance, it suffers because it is packed so tightly together; the women suffer from the custom that presses so heavily, and it suffers from its own dirt.”
Up here at Jehol the suffering is apparently as bad as anywhere, and the dispensary is full with all the minor ailments that come within the range of the missionaries\' simple skill, and all the cruel diseases that are quite beyond them, that they cannot touch, and they do their best in all pity and love, and yet think that they are doing a greater thing than binding up a man\'s wounds when they can induce him to come to their prayer-meetings, which go along, side by side, with the dispensary.
I, a heathen and a “Greek,” question whether the Chinese ever receives Christianity. A Chinese gentleman, a graduate of Cambridge, once told me he did not think he ever did.
“But the Chinaman,” said he, he actually used the contemned word, “is a practical man, he receives all faiths. Some may be right, and when he thinks 261he is dying, he will send for a priest of every faith he knows of to help him across the dark river. Who knows, some of them may chance to be right,” and he laughed. He himself was of the faith so many of us of this modern world have attained to, seeing the good in so many faiths, seeing the beauty and the pity of them and standing aside and crying: “Why all this? Whither are we bound? What can it matter whether this poor coolie believes in Christ, or Buddha, or the cold ethics of Confucius?” I said this to my missionary woman one day and she looked at me with horror in her eyes.
“There will be a reaping some day,” she said. “Where will you be then?”
“Surely I cannot be blamed for using the reasoning powers God has given.” But I am sure she thought my reasoning powers came from the devil, and if I hadn\'t been getting used to it I should have been made uncomfortable by being prayed for as one in outer darkness.
It is the worship of the ancestors that holds the Chinese, the man who gives up that, gives up all family ties and becomes practically an outcast. There may be a few genuine Christians, but in proportion to the money spent upon their conversion, their number must be very small. I saw the colporteur come into the compound one day, and they told me he was an earnest Christian. He might be, but again that doubt arose in my mind. If the receiving of Christianity ensures a livelihood, could you expect one of a nation, who will be made a eunuch for the same reason, to reject it.
The missionaries had a hard time when first they came here. The place is inhabited by Manchus, 262full of the pride of race, and they do not want the outsider. They use them, as they have effected a settlement, but they do not approve of their being there.
As I and my saintly missionary walked down the street, she carefully avoiding a glance either to th............