The call, p.32
The Call, page 32
There are dangers. The demonstrations are so remarkable that many tend to regard them as magical. This must be dealt with frankly and vigorously, so that the audience becomes secure in its reverence for truth.
Also, I must bring the audience to recognize that science in its present definitions and limitations is quite inadequate to the task of improving our lives. It is only part and on the whole secondary. Intellectually stated, science gives us materials, forces, powers, and principles—tools—but it carries the limitation of indifference to moral issues. It is a limitation that scientific men wisely put on science. Science can be used for good and for evil, and it is entirely indifferent to how it is used. The bigger issue is: ‘How shall these tools be used?’
I never preach. I try to let the beautiful laws of nature and my own enthusiasm and courtesy give the message. The audience knows I come to them from the Young Men’s Christian Association. If I measure up, that is enough. I do have a great yearning that each member of the audience shall become a “more God-like man.” By this I mean he shall acquire some of the characteristics which we formerly ascribed to God alone. I seek for each individual an elevation of ideals; an increase of powers and capacities; an enhancement of personality; a control over self, nature, and destiny; and the attaining of a new poise and peace. That is the direction of the “God-like man.”
* * *
—
HE DEPRECATES the magic but uses it. With a wave of a hand the magician bids his assistant come forward with the next innocent device. See! There is no false bottom in this hat! Only here it is not a hat but a wheel, another familiar bicycle wheel. One can say quite openly: See! It is more heavily weighted at the rim than the gyroscope wheel! In place of a tire there is soft lead pipe bound in with spring brass wire. What a clumsy, useless object! And here is the wooden shell we use to cover it with—cleverly carved by a Chinese artisan to look, when assembled over the bicycle wheel, quite like the tire and solid hub of the wheel of an automobile. We hide nothing! The weighted bicycle wheel can turn on its ball-bearing axle within the shell.
The magician waves his hand again. The assistant dashes forward, assembles the shell over the wheel, and with the obligatory flourishes of a magician’s assistant’s arms, rolls it forward to the magician. The latter balances the wheel upright and says: Look! I can push it over with my little finger! And he does so, with the little finger of his right hand. The ungainly object falls to the floor.
“Admiral Li! Please come up on the stage. I want the audience to be quite satisfied that there was no trick to my pushing the wheel over in that way.”
With mincing steps the pudgy Admiral climbs to the stage. The assistant lifts the wheel from the floor and balances it. The magician bids the Admiral push it over with his little finger. With a despairing look at the audience, the Admiral bends over and applies a fat pinky to the wheel. It falls over! The audience shouts its approval and claps delightedly in the Western style. The magician nods, permitting the Admiral to return to his seat.
Now the magician waves once more. The assistant attaches the wheel to a strut from the derrick, raises it off the floor, cranks up the protruding hub of the bicycle wheel within until it is revolving at a very high speed, lowers it to the floor, and detaches it from the strut. Now the wheel stands alone, at a queer, slight list to one side; it turns very slowly on its tilted axis.
“Admiral Li, please tell me, who is the strongest man in the audience?”
Admiral Li stands up, turns, surveys the audience. From various quarters there are shouts of candidacies—men nominating their friends, men proposing themselves. Near the back a giant is standing, waving his arms. Admiral Li appoints him strongest. The magician invites him to the stage. The magician bows to the strong man, then shakes his hand in the Western fashion but holds on to the hand. He announces to the audience that he is examining the strong man’s little finger, to see if it is truly powerful. It is! Please! Push the wheel over with your little finger!
The strong man steps confidently forward, applies the certified little finger, meets resistance, the finger bends, the face is puzzled.
The magician bids the strong man use his whole hand. He does so. Far from falling over, the wheel restively pushes back at the pushing hand.
The magician waves. The assistant runs forward with a stout bamboo pole about five feet long, one end of which is padded with a solid rubber ball. The magician hands the pole to the strong man. Push it over! Get your body behind it!
The strong man places the padded end of the pole against the wheel and leans his body into his effort to push it over. The wheel, momentarily very slightly tilted, reacts as if in anger and resumes its former position, forcing the strong man to retreat.
“Admiral Li! We need another strong man.”
Two men push together, but within the shell the bicycle wheel is revolving with the tremendous energy of a flywheel, and the strange laws of a gyroscope’s stability and precession govern, so that any attack on it above the hub develops a powerful and instantaneous counterreaction.
But the vigor of the wheel’s reaction is nothing to the vigor of the reaction of the audience. Throughout the wrestling of the strong men with the gyroscope, there has been absolute silence in the hall, broken only by the strong men’s baffled grunts. But when they give up, dismay on their faces, there is an explosive outcry which, David is later to write, gives him “the joy of a small boy whooping at the marvelousness of life as he leaps into the hay from a high beam of the barn.” The roar and the buzz go on and on. Amazement, puzzlement, delight in the sheer drama of enigmatic powers the magician has unfolded, a sense of wonder at forces that must always have been there, all through eternity, but have never been seen or even imagined before, wild pleasure at the discomfiture of boastful strong men, a response to the strange look of both yearning and exultation in the eyes of the magician, a more open sympathy with the look of pride on the face of the Chinese assistant, a vague thought of the possible taming of these mysteries, an inkling perhaps of future power, Chinese power, an incipient sense of victory even in the moment of defeat of strong Chinese men, a sense above all that this entire lecture has given of potentiality—there is so much to applaud!
* * *
—
OCCASIONALLY pausing to write characters for certain technical terms on the blackboard, Mr. Treadup explicated the simple, pure, God-made laws of the gyroscope which had governed all the marvels those in the hall had just seen. This took only a few minutes. It gave the audience the great relief of understanding. Then it was over.
THE SLUMBER OF SUCCESS
THE STIR in the hall afterward was Treadup’s reward.
Within half an hour arrangements were made for ten subsequent lectures in Canton—which were given on the following days, sometimes three in one day, to gatherings of Chinese Christians, businessmen, teachers, officials; and to student bodies of several Chinese and mission schools and colleges.
In Hong Kong the audiences were even larger and more varied; they included the student bodies of the Chinese Engineering Institute and the Seamen’s Engineering Institute. His Excellency Governor General Lugard presided at one lecture. After another an immensely wealthy Chinese man named Ho K’ai, who had never before been persuaded to attend any Y.M.C.A. affair, pledged a contribution to the Association’s campaign for the purchase of a building site.
In Foochow, an ebulliently immodest Treadup later reported, “the lectures were a key factor in one of the most striking victories of our movement in China—the raising of $48,000 (Mexican) for the Association building campaign under what person after person assured us were impossible conditions.
“In Shanghai,” he wrote, “the Martyrs’ Memorial Hall was filled day after day with audiences of whatever class we chose.”
“Treadup’s lectures,” Blackton wrote New York,
are more than meeting with our highest expectations. He has traveled with only one so far, namely on the gyroscope. It is opening doors and winning friends for us. Here in Shanghai he is being invited right into government institutions where the prejudice against anything foreign, not to speak of Christian, has been very great. We must lay ourselves out for him.
And so David Treadup moved, as the months passed, from strength to greater strength.
* * *
—
NOW MUCH PRAISED, and confident of a long-range success, Treadup worked in his Shanghai laboratory in the spring of 1911 with an athlete’s striving energy. He was wonderfully inventive. He was sure of the steps he took; the list of his good qualities was prominently posted in his mind. Not that he had grown vain, or conceited—though he might well have, for he had become, almost overnight, the sensation of the missionary enterprise in the China field; so many people, both Chinese and foreign, had begun trooping in to see his laboratory that he had recently had to establish strict visitors’ days. No, Treadup knew his strength, but there seemed to be a total blank in his makeup in that place where, in normal people, a trait of egotism is implanted. He seemed unaware that the people trooping through his shop were watching him, or that in the bright light of his notoriety he appeared to others to be hopelessly obsessed by his science lectures. He was locked so tightly into their preparation that he evidently did not hear some signals that the real world seemed to be trying to send him.
* * *
—
ONE DAY, as he was supervising the construction of a model airplane by A Ch’u and one of the carpenters, at the crucial moment of bonding in a delicate gluing of frame members, Wei, the family’s “boy,” came running into the laboratory and cried out breathlessly, in the pidgin English that the Treadups’ servants used because David’s Shanghai dialect was still flawed, “Missy wantchee Mastuh walkee homeside chop chop.”
David waited until the glued joint was fast and then took a ricksha to Yates Road. Suddenly in a hurry, he urged the ricksha boy to run for his money. He found Emily well advanced in labor. She had sent for the doctor some time since. She damped her pain with her usual serenity. She had begun to dilate. The doctor did not come. David ordered a hot charcoal brazier on a tripod brought to the bedroom, with a kettle of water to boil, and a basin besides of hot water to wash his hands in. He sterilized a knife. The crown of the infant was visible. David, with clean hands, received the little head, pulled gently at the shoulders and chest, and took the child into the world. He cut the cord and tied it. He held the body up by the heels and spanked it, and Emily, hearing the first squalls of a new life, weakly smiled. Her lips moved. She was trying to say something. David leaned down to make out her whisper.
“Don’t leave me alone.”
For answer he put his hand on her shoulder. Apparently reassured by that touch, she closed her eyes. He bathed her child.
One by one the four servants appeared, to offer their condolences, for they had learned that the mistress had, worst luck, produced a daughter.
Was David impatient to get back to his model airplane? He recorded Emily’s whisper in his diary that evening, but we will have reason to wonder whether he had the slightest inkling what she had really meant.
* * *
—
A CH’U was a bird fancier. Each day he would bring to the laboratory a different pet bird. The cages were marvelously varied works of art, and David, missing entirely at first the tenderness of A Ch’u’s relationship with each living pet, rebuked in his diary the impractical patience of a Chinese workmanship that could devote so much care to a useless artifact like a birdcage. But gradually David began to understand that there was another kind of patience here, for A Ch’u, using a teaching method exclusively of rewards, was training each bird to do stunts. It might take years to produce a single trick: on command, a siskin turns a somersault.
Then one day A Ch’u began to tell David about the way the flesh of birds was used in Chinese medicine. He said the meat of the crested mynah—that chatty creature—was given to cure stuttering. Oriole meat was fed to women to cure jealousy, because of the obvious domestic felicity of pairs of orioles. The breast of the restless cuckoo was a remedy for drowsiness. The charred and powdered flesh of woodpeckers was applied to dental cavities. A tincture made from the head of the hawklike kite, which soars at great heights, was given as a cure for vertigo.
David wrote these prescriptions down as amusing. But the very next day there are two significant notes in his diary. The first served his obsession:
We need a series of lectures on medicine. There are reports of pneumonic plague in Manchuria and North China. Heretofore plague has always threatened us from the south—the bubonic—but now three very dear friends in the north Doctors Menzies, Seto, and Wu have succumbed as they were directing the fight against the epidemic. And TB! When I returned to Shanghai from Europe I found three of our Association secretaries (nearly one-fourth of the force) in initial stages of tuberculosis—and my neck gland that had to be removed may have been tubercular—made me realize the fearfulness of this scourge in China.
The second note bespoke David’s sense that a lecturer on science must try to become a scientist through and through; but it inaugurated a new activity which, like his rowing, his study of Chinese, his constant rehearsals of lectures out loud in the parlor at home, was solitary, exclusive—left Emily alone:
Have set up feeding stations within the walled yard at Szechuan Road. One in mulberry tree; one in bamboo; one in umbrella tree. Intend to record Shanghai birds according to seasons.
In a separate notebook:
MAY: lark (bedraggled), bunting, shrike, pipit, wagtail, ousel, crake, stint.
JUNE: Java sparrow, bulbul, cuckoo, swallow, blackbird, dove.
JULY: crow, magpie, turtle dove, mynah, oriole, hawfinch, water-hen….
* * *
—
IN THE HOTTEST part of the summer, David and A Ch’u took a river steamer up the Yangtze to Hankow. On the way David developed dysentery. In Hankow he delivered five gyroscope lectures, his head buzzing and his gut cramped; yet the demonstrations were the most successful he had given. All the gear was taken down and put in its boxes, and the two men went with a flotilla of little bumboats across the way to Wuchang. David by now had a high fever and was seriously dehydrated. But news of the lectures had traveled ahead, halls had been reserved, expectations were high; he was unwilling to disappoint his audiences. Too weak to stand, he arranged to have himself carried onto the stage on a litter, and he gave the first of three horizontal lectures. These were nothing short of sensational in their effect. At the end of the third, an army officer in the audience stepped up on the stage, introduced himself as Colonel Li (“The armed forces of China seem to be entirely populated by men named Li,” David wrote in his diary, evidently thinking of his friend the Admiral in Canton), and made a graceful speech of thanks. David, oblivious to everything but his mission, had no feel for the powerful influences that were stirring at that very moment in Wuchang and Hankow, and that would very shortly make this Colonel Li the first vice-president of the Republic of China.
* * *
—
IT IS true that David records in his diary the currency of “rumors that something is going to happen soon.” But he seems to have no curiosity about this “something.” Terrible floods in the Yangtze Valley had just recently subsided; in Hankow itself, water had stood two to three feet deep in the streets, and on the river steamer on the way up, the crew had said the Yangtze had in places on the plain lately been fifty miles wide. Would the “something” be merely the pestilence and famine and unrest that always followed Chinese floods? David does not even ask this question.
* * *
—
EVEN STRANGER were the complacency and lack of curiosity with which David watched a bizarre—and, to any other eye, obviously significant—event in Shanghai, not long after his return from the Yangtze trip.
In September we find in the diary: “A Ch’u told me today he is thinking of having his queue cut off. I told him it would improve his looks.”
What an inadequate response! The declaration must have meant a great deal to A Ch’u. For more than two and a half centuries the alien Manchus of the Ch’ing Dynasty had enforced their decree that non-Manchus—the real Chinese—must wear the plait of hair foreigners called the pigtail, as a sign of their submission to their Manchu rulers. In the single-mindedness of his lecturing mission, David had apparently not even noticed that there had been a growing campaign, backed by young men of the upper class, and especially by students who had returned from abroad, to get rid of this humiliating imposition by the Manchus; and it is obvious that it had not dawned on David that getting rid of the queue was a metaphor for getting rid of the Manchus themselves. In this sense, queue-cutting was a revolutionary act, and one that took courage. Older Chinese were largely against it, for with the passing generations the wearing of the queue had become a custom and, as with all customs in China, a thing to be cherished. But the young upper-class radicals were now stressing the shame, the inconvenience, the discomfort, the dirtiness of the queue, and were clamoring for its extermination. It was indeed quite remarkable that a working-class man like A Ch’u would dare to follow the lead of the elite radicals; his association with David Treadup must have been exposing him to the influence of some of the returned students who worked with the Association. We must imagine the pounding of A Ch’u’s heart as he made his quiet announcement to T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng. But the great lecturer said only, “Good. It will improve your looks.”
