The call, p.14
The Call, page 14
Miss Rook’s cheeks were now bright red. Her unrelentingly detailed picture of Christian women’s breasts being cut off with swords by the Boxers, of castrations of males, of disembowelments and beheadings, not to mention pillage, arson, and desecrations, by the heathens; and her unashamedly gleeful accounts of the revenge taken by zealous defenders of the faith—she particularly praised a Reverend V. R. Prior and a Reverend D. F. Larksbury—who, having persuaded American officers to allow them to lead a squad of cavalry into the countryside near Peking to hunt Boxers, and having found that villagers had fled at their approach and emptied their settlements, thereupon set every house on fire “with a certain conviction in their minds that Boxers had surely been hiding there”—all these things Miss Rook told, David wrote, “with eyes like burning sulphur.”
His diary for the next few days was peppered with evidences of pumped-up courage: “ ‘Though they slay me yet will I trust in him.’ ” “ ‘He who would save his life shall lose it, but he who would lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.’ ”
It was at this time that David, as if he were a soldier about to go into battle writing (in case he did not return alive) a last letter home, sketched out “The Events of My Life.”
* * *
—
ON APRIL 4, Hurte came to Treadup with astonishing news: He had had a letter from Todd saying that the Treadup candidacy had come too late; the ten men for China had already been named. Blackton’s apparently official bid had, it seemed, meant nothing. David’s diary on the fifth: “Many who know of Dr. Todd’s attitude are extremely unsatisfied.”
Now came a terrible struggle. Was this God’s will? Must he bow his head to it? He felt hanging over him an unspoken obligation to be a good Christian and accept this painful outcome.
Like a hurt child, he ran to his other mother of that period, Mrs. Kupfer, in puzzlement and for comfort.
Christian or not, she had reacted in rage, he learned, and had written the great James B. Todd a stinging letter.
* * *
—
THE LETTER must indeed have been full of peppercorns, for less than a week later, on April 11, we find a cryptic note in Treadup’s diary: “Hurte tells me there is to be a new development on the China question.”
The very next night Treadup was in an upper berth on the Empire State Limited, riding to New York, where he arrived at ten o’clock on the morning of the thirteenth. He put up, as Hurte had told him to do, at a cheap hotel, the Breslin, and hurried to the offices of the International Y.M.C.A. at 124 East 28th Street.
There he learned that he was to be seen not by Todd but by Blackton. The latter was over in New Jersey that afternoon, interviewing some other young man. So David, his big body prickling with frustrated curiosity, took a ferry to Bedloe’s Island and
climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty—practically ran up. I looked out through the windows of the diadem—I who want with all my heart to be an ‘emigrant,’ going overseas to “your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.”
Blackton received Treadup early the next morning and said that “Dr. Todd is considering me for Syracuse representative in China.” No mention of Mrs. Kupfer’s letter. Treadup rather boldly reminded Blackton that Blackton himself, surely with Todd’s knowledge, had three months earlier given him a formal bid to go to China for the Association. What was behind the change in signals? Then it came out:
Mix-up based on their reluctance to send a bachelor. Once you are out there for life, chance of finding wife slim. I said I would do my best to remedy the situation. Mr. Blackton asked me if I had definite prospects. I hope I was not carried away by my eagerness, I said, “Not definite but I am hopeful.”
Blackton disappeared, presumably to consult with the remote Dr. Todd. He came back after a while with a doctor, who told David to strip to his B.V.D.’s. “He hummed the whole time he examined me.” Small wonder; this Gulliver was indecently healthy.
Blackton led Treadup into Todd’s office.
His first words were, “Ah, yes, I remember this handsome fellow. I think we could find this Lochinvar a bride, don’t you, Blackie?” I thanked him and said I would do it for myself. “Well, then, if you will undertake that I think we’re ready to announce it, Treadup.” The breeze of that man refreshed the most solemn moment of my life. Will probably sail in October.
* * *
—
BACK AT SYRACUSE on Sunday, the sixteenth, David had the pleasure of hearing the chancellor announce in chapel the International Committee’s decision. “Many congratulate me. This development ought to greatly stimulate and arouse the missionary interest here.” The next day the city paper, the Standard, and the university paper, the Herald, both carried long stories about Treadup the missionary-elect. “I believe I am called to a mighty work. The Syracuse constituency greatly pleased.”
David got permission to go home to confirm his family’s permission.
I took train for home via Weedsport. Father and Mother do not object. It will be hard for them however. Brot home several books on China. My time of prep for this work is short. The Salt Branch ‘Clarion’ picked up announcement from Syracuse paper, so everyone knows about my going. The different questions are interesting and in some cases amusing. Is it true that the Chinese eat rats? Will I wear a pigtail? Bad question, oft repeated: Am I to go alone? My answers to that are awkward.
The rest of the term sped away. We have already seen how frantic the wife hunt had become. Studies gave him trouble when spring fever struck. He was rowing—and it was at the Long Branch boathouse, in May, that David suffered a sudden outburst of the old “badness.”
Coach Ten Eyck had rebuked him for a halfhearted effort in practice, and after the shell had been carried into the boat shed David took his oar outside, whirled it in circles three times over his head, and with a lunge smashed the blade against the trunk of an oak tree.
Ten Eyck threatened to dismiss Treadup from the Navy, but beating Cornell was evidently more important in the end than teaching a lesson about property to the most powerful hulk in his eight; and the penalty was reduced to payment for the oar.
As in the past, a downswing of David’s spirits followed the outburst. Notes suggest that he was hard hit by the irrevocability of his commitment—to a lifetime of exile. His wild search for a partner was getting nowhere. And suddenly the sadness and, so far as the hunt was concerned, the finality of graduation was upon him.
Last frat chapter meeting. Farewell speeches. Many regrets. Baccalaureate sermon by Chancellor. We (’05) marched in caps and gowns. I had to preside at Class Day and made a mediocre speech. At Fraternity Alum dinner I responded for chapter. Commencement oration by Dr. Buckley was very good. Obstructive, Destructive, and Constructive Men. Received the sheepskin. Chancellor’s reception, I took Miss Miller. It dawns with great force that it is all over. These good-byes are painful. My problem remains unsolved, and I am now to be removed from female company.
THE COURTING
DAVID was by now a huntsman verging on panic. He had heard from Hurte of two cases of desperate bachelor volunteers for overseas, for whom the SVM and the designated missions had simply gone out and found deserving brides. He distinctly did not want an arranged marriage. What if James B. Todd, with that Godworthy smile of confidence in what is best for us all, saddled him, “till death do us part,” with someone like poor Miss Jenkins at Syracuse: fine Christian woman, not particularly strong face—David’s euphemism (“and the greatest of these is charity”) for ugly?
* * *
—
AFTER graduation David was able to steal a couple of days from crew practice to go home. “This is like the olden days, to have the family all together. How we children have changed and separated!” “Paul and I went fishing at night. I speared four. I made some good shoots so have not forgotten how.”
The Poughkeepsie race was something of an anticlimax. David did not feel, as he had the year before, the abandoned, ecstatic burst of power of the man possessed by a sport—as if, for a third of an hour, the sport were expressing itself through him rather than the other way around. “I was logy.” Syracuse came in second, nineteen lengths behind Cornell. And that was the untriumphant end of being a college man.
* * *
—
DAVID was summoned to a ten-day conference, for the volunteers who were about to go out in the field, at Silver Bay. There they would undergo concentrated instruction for their various missions.
With a fortnight to kill, David decided to hike from Salt Branch across New York State to Lake George, and during those days, easing along the valley of the Mohawk River, stopping now and then to catch a fish on a collapsible rod and to fry it on the banks on a tiny skillet over a fire of sticks, sleeping under the stars, waiting out a day of rain in an old inn in Little Falls, then moving on and on, he was “filled with a piercing melancholy. I strive to make a picture in my mind of a woman by my side in Cathay, but I cannot see her clearly.” He was carrying in his pack a copy of a recently published book, The Lore of Cathay, by W. A. P. Martin, the president of the Chinese Imperial University in Peking; he would stop in the afternoons and read for an hour “under these beloved maples and chestnuts and oaks I may never see again, turning the pages and dreaming about a mysterious future shared with a mysterious someone.”
When he reached the foot of Lake George, he rented a rowboat and, blissfully at a pair of oars again for his own solitary pleasure in gliding on water, he took three days to row forty miles to the head of the lake and then back to Silver Bay, halfway down the western shore, sleeping nights on fragrant pine needles under conifers. “What will life bring? What will life bring?”
* * *
—
THE PROGRAM at Silver Bay was something like that of the much larger Northfield Conference the previous summer: lectures, discussion groups, prayer meetings, and plenty of time for swimming, tennis, rowing, walking, singing—and thinking: “time to be alone with my master.” All too alone. His lack hung over him. Ten of the thirteen men who were headed for China were married, and their wives—some of them attractive (“Ginser made a good choice,” “Mrs. Saxe is cheery”)—were there in the flesh, in wind-blown bloomers on the tennis court, in knee- and elbow-length woolen swim togs in the cool lake. David was joylessly paired with one of the bachelors. “Adams and I climbed Sunrise Mountain.” “Rowed with Adams to Gull Bay, ten miles.”
* * *
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ONE IMPORTANT QUESTION was soon settled. “Todd spoke at 10:30 on the cost of leadership. He was at his best. His addresses always inspire me. Interview with him at 2 P.M. My field is to be Tientsin with Gridley and Harmon.” So he knew he was to be in North China, in a city near Peking. At the end of the interview
Dr. Todd frightened me. He asked me how my matrimonial plans were progressing. His expression was severe. I had visions of having the post he had just named snatched back from me. Without lying, I made the best of my situation. I said I had given a solemn promise that I would solve that problem, and that I had a habit of keeping my promises. “I knew we could count on you, Treadup,” he said. I came away wretched.
Wretched all day, he doggedly made notes on readings assigned by the convention programmers. One edifying entry, on the heathen Chinese:
“This moral mummy [the Chinaman—DT] is embalmed and wrapped in superstition four thousand years old, and more than ten thousand layers deep. These superstitions touch every act of life, and every word, and every secret thought. They are victims of luck, fortune-tellers, and necromancy. They live in a world packed to the very stars with powerful spirits, which must not be offended. All ranks and classes, from the emperor down to the poorest coolie, are steeped and boiled and parboiled in superstition. By these superstitions the university men and the priests govern and rob and torment all classes.”
Another entry, on the Chinese woman:
“She is not desired at birth, is subject to father, husband, and son, and is denied the privileges of education. To destroy baby girls at birth was formerly exceedingly common, and not regarded as a crime by the majority. Often no name, simply a number, is given to the baby girl, and a father in counting his family members mentions only sons. Girls are simply sold as bondmaids to relieve poverty; and a wife may be legally sold or rented by her husband to another man for a fixed period. The binding of feet is but an outward and visible sign of the crippled lives and energies of one-half of_________”
* * *
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IN HIS DIARY for that day, in words obviously written in slapdash haste and agitation, we discover why the note on women was suddenly broken off:
While copying in commonplace notebook just now I was suddenly struck right in the solar plexus by a momentous thought! Why has it held itself back from me all this time? I must write to Emily Kean! [In his excitement he uses her first name, for the first time we have ever seen it in his hand.] Who can tell how things went with Mr. Zeedon, ’00? Perhaps the fact that she did not teach after all, as planned, at Chittenango, near to the city of Syracuse and Mr. Z, can be taken as encouraging. I remember the evening after the Park Church service when I opened my heart to her and it seemed to me she reciprocated. She did like me. I cannot understand why this idea has hidden itself from me!
It took David two days to get up the courage to shoot his arrow into the sky. “I wrote Emily Kean and am praying for the outcome.”
David’s letter has not survived. It is likely that if David dared in it to ask Emily Kean whether her hand and heart were after all free, he would also appeal to that side of her which had won her the presidency of the college Y.W.C.A. He would suggest to her the obvious possibilities of “a partnership in service” in the mission field. He might have working for him, besides, though he would never have written it down, the thought that there must be something amiss with an attractive woman not yet married, or perhaps not even engaged, a full year after college. His diary hints that this was one time when David broke the promise he had made himself at Syracuse never to utter self-serving prayers.
* * *
—
AFTER SILVER BAY—no answer had come from Miss Kean—he went to New Bedford, to visit the Framptons, and to see friends from his years there. For the first time in his life he experienced something like a vacation. “Resting. Moonlight sail…. Rode to Marion in carriages…. To Woods Hole by steamer…. To Newport on the trolley. We were exceedingly fortunate in being able to get on the Missouri and to see eight of the boats of the north Atlantic gunboat squadron.”
“The Russian difficulty darkens,” he wrote right after the Newport jaunt, for the sight of the warships must have made vivid in his mind the news of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which had by then reached the stage of naval revolts. The earlier strikes, riots, and assassinations, and public outrage at the government, had been intensified by the destruction of the Russian Pacific fleet at Tsushima by Admiral Togo in May. The war in Manchuria and North Korea seemed (from such a distance) all too close to his Tientsin.
On July 15 he received a letter in New Bedford from Mr. Blackton (David must have given correspondents the address there), telling him to attend a gathering of Y.M.C.A. overseas candidates in Bronxville in August, and to go to New York and then Northfield for further interviews and instructions. The letter enclosed money for the trips.
* * *
—
TWO DAYS later he wrote a tightly controlled entry in the diary: “Received a nice letter from Emily Kean.”
No more. No exclamation point. But what a head of steam in that careful word, “nice”! Emily had not, at the very least, closed the door in David’s face. Perhaps she had cared for him at Syracuse more than he had realized. At once:
Wrote again to Emily Kean. I love her! I believe that the greater the sacrifice for Jesus Christ, the greater the peace and satisfaction of life. I spend much time alone with him.
* * *
—
ON JULY 28 he returned to Salt Branch, and there the laconic diary takes up the story. David’s second letter must have pressed a bit too hard, for now Emily’s fear of the unknown seems to have been rearoused. She has found an impediment.
JULY 29 Received letter from Emily Kean. She has a duty which calls her to work here at home. Her father has had reverses which made it impossible for him to do for her two younger sisters as he has done for her. Emily must help.
But David nevertheless floats in a nimbus of daydreams. “I am going to do all I can to remove Emily’s difficulties,” he writes. Two days later: “Wrote letters. One to Emily. Walked in the fields, watched the clouds, and prayed to God.” All around him are matings: “Carl Becker has his sweetheart out from New York.” “Brother Will came down to stay overnight. He is engaged to Frances Mindorff. I am praying for another worker for China.”
His hopes seem to have stirred up delicious fantasies, which must be curbed. “It is a fight for me to stay pure. Fight the good fight with all thy might, Christ is thy strength and Christ thy right.” And temptation: “Called on Cassie Berns. She is hurt with me.” He is trying to break with the past: is burning papers and selling off belongings, all in a lover’s daze. “A most delightful day. Clear and cool. I am feasting on nature, the clouds and sunsets are splendid.”
