The call, p.59
The Call, page 59
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HERE IS the gatekeeper with a telegram. He has put it on a plate, to hand to the mu-shih in style. It is from Austin McDonald, the United States Consul in Peking.
NATIONALIST ADVANCE RAPID ALL U.S. CITIZENS ADVISED EVACUATE PAOTING SOONEST.
Treadup writes Liu in Shanghai:
There seems to be a consensus that the women and children should leave. Our wives don’t like to be hurried away in this fashion: it diminishes them. But Em is packing. Boats are hired to take the party downriver to Tientsin tomorrow. Since as you know we Treadups are overdue for a furlough, Emily is putting things in the trunks so she and the boys could go on ahead to the States if things get worse.
As for the foreign men, I think we agree that we ought to stay by our job. At least until our Chinese friends think we are more of a handicap than an asset. I don’t believe that time has come yet.
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WORD CAME BACK after a few days that Emily and the two boys had gone to Peitaiho. Absolom and Paul, oblivious of China’s upheavals, romped on the sand and galloped on donkeys, whipping their hats up and down like cowboys. Most of Emily’s letters to David in those next few weeks have been lost. Did David destroy them? There came a strain between them. David:
A telegram from you today, saying that you are engaging passage for Kobe Apr 26th. I am not quite sure from the wire whether I am included in the passage engaged, but you should know that I must stay on here. The Chinese in the villages all feel I should stay on, and I see no excuse for leaving.
Two days later:
I am not sure I would have been in quite such a hurry as you have been to engage passage, as I still believe this flurry will soon pass over. Make your own decision. I will plan to see you off if you go.
Be sure and leave out my clothes that you took, especially my best gray suit and the palm beach suits. And if you want anything else from here, let me know.
Another letter:
Why hurry away? Everything here is as peaceful as one could ask, and the opportunity for Christian work is certainly the best it has been in three years. Not a letter from Peking or Tientsin to explain what is the frightful spectacle that is driving us from our homes and work. I have just wired you as follows (with translation of code):
UNOOL Is return imperative? Consider with great care.
KUIPL Have concluded not to leave at present.
SNIRN Please cancel passage for
OATRP Mr. D. Treadup.
Again:
I am still in the dark as to what has caused this stampede. I think it’s Austin McDonald, the consul. He has been badgering me and everyone else to leave. He is advising Washington to use an iron fist and in preparation for that he wants all Americans out of the interior. Regarding your sailing, you will have to make the decision. I still feel that the family would be safe under the present conditions right here in Paoting. The Five Powers have handed in their note, and that relieves my mind somewhat. If Hoover is substituted for Kellogg, as the papers suggest may happen, we may expect a more enlightened foreign policy by the United States.
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FOR EMILY the summer was heavy. She missed her oldest and dearest, Philip—whose letters from Yale, though mostly cheerful, betrayed (she thought, as she wrote in her diary) a “sense of being an alien in his own country.” In late June Emily fell sick, with what was diagnosed as sprue. A letter from David to Liu in Shanghai reported that “she has been put on a diet of nothing but strawberries and buttermilk, and is making slow progress.”
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RUMORS flew around like pigeons with whistles attached to their tailfeathers. That Chiang had retired from public life. That he had married the petal-faced Christian graduate of Wellesley, Soong Mei-ling—daughter of the matron Emily had worked with in the antiopium campaign in Shanghai. New hope for the cause of the cross? But. There was always a but. That the retirement was a sham. That Chiang was back in the field. That he was behind the northward drive. That he was “beheading” the Communist Party. That he had reduced its strength to that number so beloved by the Chinese, for good and for ill: ten thousand. One-fifth of its former strength. So it was said.
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Out of sight and earshot:
Just before the Nanking incident, the young Hunanese leader Mao Tse-tung published a Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, in which he argued that the poor peasant was the main force of the revolution, and demanded confiscation of landlords’ land; but the thesis was rejected by the Russian-dominated Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. In Russia, Stalin won out over Trotsky, and not long afterward Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the co-founder of the Chinese party (who years before had advocated studying the life of Jesus), was accused of being a Trotskyist and was deposed as party secretary. Mao led an ill-considered peasant uprising in Hunan, was defeated, and fled to a mountain stronghold at Chingkangshan.
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IN EARLY AUGUST Treadup sent a cablegram in Y.M.C.A. code to Shanghai and New York:
GYXITRPVUV EHEETLYENK.
Translated, this meant: “Departure Mrs. Treadup and sons postponed indefinitely. Communicate this to home center by cable and letter.”
Treadup wrote—perhaps not quite candidly—to Liu, that “after prolonged and very careful consideration of all points involved,” he and his wife had decided together that the family should remain in China. It might not be possible for Emily and the boys to come to Paoting in September, when they left Peitaiho, but they could be housed in Peking or Tientsin. When the situation cleared up, they could return to their station. Meanwhile he would go on with his work and now and then visit his family. “It seemed that it was asking too much of Mrs. Treadup to make her take the two boys home and have the responsibility for all three alone for a year.” The political situation looked more promising. It might be that before many months they could be a united family in Paoting, returning to America then together when the Association was ready to let them have their furlough.
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BUT SHOCKS:
A Chinese saying: “When the lips are gone, the teeth feel the draft.” At Paoting the teeth of the north chattered.
The Nationalists surged northward, far faster than anyone had foreseen, in a two-pronged drive. Treadup’s old friend General Feng, now an opportunistic Nationalist, approached from Shantung to the southeast. (A bitter disappointment, Feng. Treadup learned that Z. T. Kao of the Association staff had interviewed him. Feng’s “religion,” if one could give that name to the constant of fanaticism in him, was now based on the “Three People’s Principles” of Dr. Sun Yat-sen. “I have dropped my active Christian evangelistic work in my army because I now have under my command large bodies of Mohammedan troops from Kansu.”) From the west and southwest, at the same time, came Wu P’ei-fu and Yen Hsi-shan, the warlord of the “model province,” Shansi—both now in Chiang’s camp.
In the November edition of The Shepherd, the lead story was:
WAR AGAIN, OR STILL
Fifteen thousand Northern soldiers in disorderly retreat toward Paoting, breaking into small bands, robbing and looting thru “our” villages as they flee from the advancing Nationalist army. Carts and animals taken by the hundreds from the farmers to move men, food, cannon, ammunition. Bridges blown up and repaired by armored trains. Bombs hurled from airplanes manned by Russians. Panic. Valuables hidden. Many fleeing.
What does it all mean? It means that the “blue-sky white sun” banner is closer to Peking than it has ever been. Does it also mean that literacy is of no use whatsoever? We are not yet prepared to jump to that conclusion. We are carrying on.
Not for long. Chang Tso-lin’s northern troops fell back on the environs of Paoting. Treadup was glad that Emily and the children had not yet come home. The local missionaries—all of whom by now had heard Treadup’s full account of the horrors of Nanking—decided that they would do well to gather together in, and try to defend, one compound. They settled on the high-walled Congregationalist compound in the south suburb. By cart and by ricksha Treadup carried there a few valuables: his L. C. Smith typewriter; the family silver, such as it was; “a bit of crockery”; his Mount of Olives Bible; a “few sentimental gewgaws.”
As it turned out, the pattern of Nanking was reversed: It took three days for the retreating northerners to loot the city, while the Nationalists, following on their heels, were restrained and orderly. The Congregationalist compound was never challenged by the looters. But Treadup’s little compound was.
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FROM A LETTER to Liu in Shanghai, with a mere carbon to Emily:
The house has been completely wrecked, doors, windows, floors, bathtub ect. ect. all having been torn out. At the same time, everything I had not carted away has been removed, to use a coarse word, stolen. Everything, that is, except my books. Every one of them is still there—all over the floor, of course. Even the gates of the compound have been carried away. I have had the gate bricked up, but people—civilians, now—are still climbing over the wall, looking for hidden treasure, of which of course there is none left. The future? My own feeling is that perhaps the best thing to do would be to pull down the remains of the house and build a cheap bungalow, putting in an Areola heating plant and the usual water fixtures, planning an occupation of, say, 15 years. I am inclined to think it would be the cheapest thing to do in view of the damage done. The longer I live, the more I am inclined to advocate a very small compact house for life in China.
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HE WAS on his hands and knees with a heavy heart. His papers, like his books, had been scattered all over the floor of his study. He was picking them up and randomly putting them into boxes. Suddenly he stood up, and out from the belly of his misery came a triumphant Onondagan war whoop. He had found the slip of paper with the name of Inventor Wang’s village, and the directions to get to it from Tientsin. He slipped it under the cover of his Mount of Olives Bible, to be sure he would not mislay it again.
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PEKING fell on June 3, 1928. Two months later the bungalow had been built. Emily and the children were back. Shanghai paid for the new house. New York sent one thousand dollars of U.S. money to cover the Treadups’ losses in the looting. Treadup wrote Todd:
First. The loss was fairly and squarely ours and not the Y.M.C.A.’s, and we do not feel that the Association was under obligation to assume any responsibility. We were the ones who went into the foreign field “to spend and be spent” in the service. Your gift takes away the satisfaction of our having given something to the Cause of the Master, and I am going to put the money into our work in the villages. I hope the missionary movement will never become so completely organized and institutionalized that it will no longer be possible for one to go out and follow Paul the Apostle in the matter of self-sacrifice.
Second. In my opinion the International Committee was on right lines when you decided to ask their secretaries, who were looted in Changsha, Nanking, here, and elsewhere, not to seek indemnity by appealing to the American government to secure redress. This is not a time in China when a policy of “an eye for an eye” can do anything but harm.
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SOMETHING deeper than the Pauline spirit of sacrifice was operating in David Treadup’s psyche. It was expressed in a self-consciously “written” letter he sent to his old counselor and friend, Farrow Blackton:
Do you ever get away from the feeling of despair, bewilderment, and hopelessness that has come to you as you have made your way down the crowded streets of a great city in China, like Soochow, or Hangchow, or the native city in Shanghai or Tientsin, or our Paoting, and you have felt the woes of that suffering and patient people settle down on your soul, a burden you are helpless to lift?
Can you ever shake off the sinking of heart that has come as you have suddenly turned aside from the beautiful countryside and paused before the hut of a villager, seeing through the open doorway the dire poverty of the hardworking peasant and his family who in return for their labor do not enjoy even a semblance of the comforts which we of America consider essential to animal life, to say nothing of human life?
The petition “Give us this day our daily bread” is, in the Lord’s Prayer, coordinate with “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” I am at this moment very very low in my mind. I had been so excited about teaching all China to read. I think I have to think more about bread. The bread and wine of the Holy Sacrament—flesh and blood. Bread above all. The everyday kingdom of flesh.
DANGEROUS GRAYS
ON A BITTER DRY DAY in January 1929, Treadup, wearing a quilted Chinese coat and a lambswool-lined hat with the earflaps down, boarded an open gondola railway car with his Indian motorcycle and a small bundle of spare underclothes and socks. At the Peking station outside the city wall, he changed trains and went on to Tientsin.
It was late in the day when he arrived there, but he did not pause. He putted right out of town on his motorcycle, southward, on the road toward Tsinan. Soon it was dark. His headlight sought, so that he could avoid, the worst ruts in the sunken dirt road. It was after midnight when he pulled off into a field, lifted his tent and bedroll from the sidecar of the Indian, pitched the canvas, and crawled in. “Night so still and cold I felt as if whole weight of the Cheops pyramid sat up there over me. Hence slept like a mummy.”
He was up at five. He boiled water for tea over a can of Sterno, packed, struck camp, and drove off before the local population had a chance to gather around and gawk.
The sun was not yet on the shoulder of the morning when he pulled into a medium-sized village where the first thing he noticed was a house surrounded by a whitewashed wall made not of mud but of real baked bricks, and crowned with jagged bits of broken glass. Assuming that this was the house of the village headman and main landlord, he knocked at its gate.
He asked the woman who answered whether this was the home of the village chieftain.
She said it was not. The headman lived in the third house down the village street—a relatively modest structure with a mud wall.
Treadup knew he must clear any errand in the village in advance with the headman. Though unpretentious outside, the chief’s house showed signs indoors of a fair degree of prosperity: a lacquered chest, brass bowls, new reed matting. The headman was spending this winter day playing a kind of chess with a friend. He greeted the foreigner cordially and told him that Wang the inventor lived in the “big house.” The foreigner had permission to visit him. He would not be the first foreigner to have done so.
Treadup went back and knocked at the gate in the white wall.
Wang was not gambling over a chessboard. He was out in his yard with a crew of men supervising the construction of a large wooden machine; Treadup remembered at once the little model of the tamping machine for road building that Wang had showed him in Shanghai. Wang recognized his caller, and with great good form invited him into the house, directed his wife—the lady who had answered at the gate earlier—to bring tea, and the pair sat down cross-legged on a spacious k’ang in a room well lit by the sun through paper-paned windows.
Wang was chubby. He was dressed in the long cotton gown of a man who had no need to work with his hands. Yes, he had prospered. He let out his machines, he said, on a system of rental in kind—in grain, mostly—to which no one objected, because he had helped many of the farmers in the vicinity to grow more crops than ever before. His biggest hit was a device which vastly simplified the drawing up of water from a well, for irrigation; but he had also put many other labor-saving machines to work throughout his entire hsien.
“I remembered,” Treadup later wrote,
the burning eyes of this obsessed man when he came to see me in Shanghai. He had wanted me then to help him to help China. And now I saw that he had instead helped himself Unmarred fingernails! He had three little chins—good eating. I despaired of persuading him to help me to help China.
But that was what Treadup had come to do, and he tried. He reminded Inventor Wang that he had been a coolie once, a down-and-out younger brother; and that he had got his start through the literacy program in France. Now in the region around Paoting, and in the whole district of Menghsien, programs of literacy were catching on. But a farmer had come to Treadup recently saying, “I can read and write all the characters in your books, but my stomach still growls just like my neighbor’s who cannot read at all.” It was time to broaden the teaching—to help the farmers to acquire better tools, to make better choice of crops, to learn about rotation of crops and better application of manure, to get better seed, and to learn how to control insects and plant and animal diseases. He wanted Inventor Wang to come to Paoting and help the farmers install labor-saving machines—and without charging for the service. It would be Wang’s gift to the new China.
