The call, p.15
The Call, page 15
Not waiting for a new answer from Emily, he writes to her again.
* * *
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ON AUGUST 17 he went by train to Albany, where he visited the capitol and the Association building. Two days later he arrived at the Hotel Grammatan in Bronxville for a meeting with members of the International Committee. There: “Received letter from Emily. Not very encouraging. Dark day.”
And the following day: “Rainy, so cannot go out in the hills. Full sessions of reports. I am handicapped in having this problem just now. The time is so short….”
The time had clearly come to talk to Emily face to face. On the twenty-second David went to New York, where he stayed for two days with a young volunteer, a candidate for Canton or Hong Kong, named George Field, at Columbia. Now there comes an explosive entry:
24 Went to Madison, N.J., in P.M. to try to settle the problem which has been long and, in the end, hard. She is the one! Her opening to me was too sacred to write about! God is good to me!
This is all we learn, but it is enough. David is whirled back into a series of indoctrination meetings. “Took train to Northfield, where the foreign comm. met. Todd, Grimes, and Horris lectured. Happy!” Two days later: “They are working us hard, giving us last directions. My trunk has been lost several days. HAPPY!” He returned to New York, where he stayed with Robert Service, who was destined for interior China (and to be father of John Service, one of the State Department China hands hounded from office, many years later, by Senator Joseph McCarthy). David notes with some relief that peace has been settled between Japan and Russia. There are more meetings at the Association offices.
Then in three terse entries the story is brought to its swift conclusion:
SEPT. 2 Returned to Madison just as Emily received an unfavorable letter from her mother. How I love this woman and how she loves me. Happy!
3 Went to service with my dear. Our love deepens hourly. Telegraphed to Mother Kean to come. We are becoming one in spirit in two bodies.
4 Mother Kean came early this morning. She is splendid and says Emily can go with me. Placed the Psi U pin where it belongs. This winning is the greatest feat of my life.
* * *
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BUT THE WINNING was subject to ratification. This “other worker for China” had to be found acceptable to the Association authorities.
David returned to New York for a series of conferences with Blackton, Tinker, Poe, Henry, Irons, Johnson, and a man who was to be one of his colleagues in Tientsin and who was now in the United States on furlough, Thomas Gridley. Ten years older than Treadup, Gridley was a graduate of Princeton, where he had been a football star; people still called him Center Rush Gridley. As big as Treadup, he was jovial, breezy, warm, and bumptious, “with a heart proportional to his build.”
David spent two days seeing these men and haunting the New York Central freight offices, trying to trace his trunk. “Things are looking favorable for me to marry before going.” He returned to Madison on a Thursday. While Emily taught school on Friday, he read in the public library. “Life is bright even on a rainy day.”
On Saturday, David took Emily to New York, where the couple was put through a hideous ordeal. Emily was examined alone by a forbidding panel of male judges, Todd, Blackton, Gridley, and several members of the International Committee; and then from head to foot by a male doctor. David and Emily were kept waiting for an hour while the elders conferred. They were summoned and Blackton delivered the verdict: Miss Kean was acceptable, but it was decided that Mr. Treadup should proceed at once to China, and Miss Kean should devote a year or eighteen months to helping her parents and then follow overseas.
A new and bitter struggle for Christian acceptance which both of them might have had was eased by their being so besotted by love that obstacles seemed like opportunities. Three days later: “After careful consideration we have decided the comm. decision is best. Our love grows.”
On September 18, after a last round of conferences, and having found his trunk, David took the Empire State Limited to Syracuse and then went home to Salt Branch. Tersely: “My people are pleased that I am engaged to Emily.” He repacked his trunk and crated some belongings, including his large iron bedstead, and with a trusting heart sent everything off ahead to that so far imaginary place, Tientsin, China. On the thirtieth he went to Herkimer, met Emily at the station, and rode with her to her home, a mile and a half outside the village of Newport. The diary:
OCT. 1 Her father is Supervisor and game protector. This is a superb valley and the color of the trees dazzling. The sun never shone brighter. Her people open themselves to me. Kitty has light and nervous temperament, Jane more like Emily, slower to get close. Mr. Kean a bluff Scotsman. Mrs. Kean feels my taking Emily away very sharply. She gives vent to her feelings.
A week later David took Emily to Salt Branch. “It seems like a dream to have her in my home. She has a rare spirit.” For five days Emily helped David “getting things systematized.” She made a scrap album of his past. “These are happy days when we can love and confide. Emily likes the dear ones and they her.”
On October 18 David took Emily home to Newport, and the diary notes choke in their tautness in dealing with finalities:
Tore away. Brave sweet woman. She never broke down. Applied for policy with N.Y. Life. Went to S.B. in P.M…. Last night at home. Packing all done…. Cut home ties with awful wrench. All wept at prayer. I went through it all with dry eyes…. Took train at 3 P.M. for Chicago. Changed in Buffalo. I am going to miss Emily oh so much. God bless and keep all my loved ones and give me strength for everything that comes…. Bowels off. Wrote to Todd, loved ones, and Emily…. Spent morning at Mont. Ward and Co., buying outfit. Wrote E…. Awoke aboard Provinces Limited close to the Miss. River and half an hour out of St. Paul. Breakfasted and got shave in barbershop at Minneap. Took Soo Line for Portal…. Great wheat fields of the north. Threshing, burning straw…. Awoke at Portal two hours late. Two Chinamen were detained. Saw the Customs inspectors go through some trunks. Great expanse of prairies. Men risk everything out here for money. Land away from the Ry. $10 per 640 acres. Wrote E…. Entered the Rockies. Train climbs along the ranges, follows crooked streams, shoots through tunnels. Stopped at Glacier…. Showed Emily’s picture to Mrs. Tower in seat in front. Arrived at Vancouver at one P.M. Am to have stateroom with Dr. Elting older man who goes back out with a mission in West China…. Wrote to Grow, Paul, Mrs. Kupfer, Father, Emily, Emily. Went aboard the ‘Empress of Japan’ and saw staterooms…. There will be nine at least in our party. Wrote last letters. Aboard at noon. Many down to see us off. At 3:30 P.M. the gangplank was drawn up, and I was cut off from the continent and from my boyhood and from my dearest dearest Emily. And from changing my mind. The instant when the block and tackle lifted the gangplank’s wheels off the dock! Inch of thin air between the wheels and the dock! The rest of my life in that inch.
*1 In Syracuse admissions policy up to that time, the phrase “a Hebrew” had been more accurate than Chancellor Day evidently wanted it to sound; nor had there been much more “facility” for the Catholic. A few years before David’s matriculation, the Syracuse Annual interviewed 132 students and found that of those who declared religious connections, 61 were Methodists, 8 Presbyterians, 8 Congregationalists, 6 Baptists, 5 Episcopalians, 5 Seventh-day Adventists, and 2 Lutherans; and one each of Universalist, Unitarian, Evangelical Lutheran, Jew, and Roman Catholic.
*2 See Index of Chinese Names, this page.
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.
* * *
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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.
* * *
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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.
* * *
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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.
* * *
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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.
* * *
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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.
