The call, p.66
The Call, page 66
One expected difficulty during the trip was the crossing of the Yangtze. In Pukow Treadup went to the consulate and arranged for the party to cross over on a Socony launch. No sooner were they on the train on the Nanking side than Treadup remembered he had left his arctic overshoes on the Peiping train.
In Shanghai, the nursing home was expecting Miss Demestrie. The first thing David Treadup did was to go to American Express to tell them about his arctics. Then he went to Thomas Cook and booked passage to the United States for three—the patient, Miss Selden, and Nurse Lassiter—on the President Wilson, leaving on January 11. He wrote Emily: “I feel responsible now, and I must stay till they sail. I’m sorry it’s so long. Miss Selden especially leans on me.”
The next day was Sunday. Treadup went to church with Henry Burrell of the Y, who had kindly put him up. In his letter to Emily:
It has been many, many a month since a church service has seemed to be so completely the thing I needed as I did this one. For the first time since we left Paoting I had the opportunity to think with myself. The import of our travels came over me with full force, and I felt like weeping. I almost did several times during the service. I did enjoy the hymns, but it got to me as I sang along and realized how familiar these words were to Helen Demestrie and how far from joyous singing she now was. I realized the tragedy of her state—worse than death in many ways.
After church a newspaper friend told Henry Burrell that the chief Chinese delegate at the League of Nations, Alfred Sze, and the foreign minister at Nanking, Wellington Koo, had both resigned. What these two facts might mean seemed to overcome me, and being just in a proper condition for pessimistic suggestions of mind, later at supper table I found my head going around in a whirl that truly made me dizzy.
Early Monday morning Treadup went to American Express and found his arctics waiting for him. In his diary: “Beautiful China! It is in extremis, yet with what delicacy it finds my overshoes for me!”
* * *
—
HENRY BURRELL begged David Treadup to spend as much time as he could at the Lecture Bureau workshop, helping to get things up to snuff. “Going back to old haunts may be a mistake,” Treadup wrote. “Things are never as good as they once were.”
* * *
—
TREADUP went to see Helen Demestrie every day. Her responses to him varied. She was having lucid periods, during which she held tight to his hand and looked piercingly into his eyes. (No mention of blushing.) Sometimes she was hostile; bridled; muttered in Greek. But Lysistrata seemed to be letting go of her. “Letitia Selden is the one who breaks my heart,” David wrote Emily. “It has taken all this to make me realize that Helen was Miss Titty’s anchor to windward; now the ‘stronger one’ is adrift.”
* * *
—
AN ENTRY in the diary: “Overnight trip to Nanking. Stirring.”
That is all he wrote at the time.
* * *
—
BACK IN SHANGHAI, Treadup resumed his daily visits to Miss Demestrie. One day he called on David Liu, who was at home, in bed, ill with heart trouble, high blood pressure, and some sort of kidney complication. Liu was impatient to be on his feet and back at work. He said he urgently needed to go to the States to fight for money. David protested that he must take time to get his strength back. Liu said, “All right, if you think I should take time, read this.” And he handed Treadup a cablegram he had received from Blackton in New York a few days earlier:
ESTIMATED YMCA DEFICIT OWING TO BUSINESS DEPRESSION GOLD TWOHUNDREDFIFTY THOUSAND INEVITABLE MUST RESORT IMMEDIATELY SALARY PERSONNEL AND APPROPRIATION REDUCTION STOP ADVISE YOU CONFER NATIONAL COMMITTEE DETERMINE REDUCTIONS AND LIST MINIMUM TWELVE SECRETARIES ORDER PRIORITY POSSIBLE RETURN HOME STOP SUGGEST ALSO FURLOUGH COST REDUCTION BY HOLDING SOME SECRETARIES HERE POSTPONE OTHERS STOP CABLE RECOMMENDATIONS SOONEST
To Emily: “My first thought was: Will I be one of the twelve? But then I thought: If that were a real possibility, he wouldn’t be showing me this message.”
* * *
—
TREADUP rode out on the lighter to the President Wilson with the three women. Helen Demestrie was all too lucid. She knew she would never see China again. She and Letitia Selden wept all the way. Nurse Lassiter, who had never relented toward David, stood apart. At the gangplank Miss Demestrie threw her arms around David and hugged “until I thought she would break my back.” In her old familiar gesture, Letitia Selden patted David’s cheek. “See you in Tipperary,” she said. The diary:
The trip back up the Whangpoo was a lonely one. I could not have survived my first years in China without Miss Titty’s help. It will be a long long way to wherever I see her again.
SAVING THE WORLD
IT WAS on the midnight express to Nanking that Treadup finally wrote an account of the “overnight” in the capital which he had previously failed to record. His handwriting, because he was writing on a moving train, is jagged and scrawly, and this gives the whole affair, as one reads it in the diary, an air of agitation, excitement, worry, and haste.
One afternoon in Shanghai, the shaky scrawl tells us, during the days of anxiety for Helen Demestrie, Hank Burrell called Treadup into his office. He said he had had a call from David Liu, from his bed at home, saying that President Chiang Kai-shek had just telephoned him long-distance from Nanking. The President and his wife wished to invite a group of missionaries from Shanghai and Nanking to confer with them about the present national crisis. Hank wanted Treadup to join the party.
David protested that he was not important enough in the missionary world: the bigwigs had wanted him withdrawn from the field! There were surely others who should take his place.
Burrell said, “David! David! You’re a giant! You taught us all how to teach the Chinese.” Besides, a missionary from the North should by all means be in the party.
The diary:
Hank kept at me—kept saying that I am one of the great men of the field—flattery which made me feel cranky and ornery. I don’t know how to teach the Chinese. A teacher has to understand his pupils. The more I learn about the Chinese, the less I know.
* * *
—
NINETEEN MISSIONARIES—American, British, and French, fifteen Protestants and four Catholics—took the midnight express to Nanking, in a special sleeping car provided by the President. Appleton Sills, the Nanking Y secretary, had assembled seven Nanking men to join them.
President and Madame Chiang received the guests in their private bungalow outside the city at five that afternoon.
Spidery words in the diary:
One had heard of her dazzling beauty. I was truthfully disconcerted by her graciousness, which had, if I can say it, an icy warmth. She made me feel that I was the most important nonperson she had ever met. I noticed a delicate tremor in her hands. He sat straight as a flagpole. Uniform of very good cloth, immaculately ironed. I was surprised by the smallness of his shaven head. He may have amassed all his great power entirely on the strength of his reserve, which is rather terrifying. It seemed that anyone with that much self-control could easily control a country.
At the request of the Chiangs, the group spent the first half hour in spiritual fellowship, led by Bishop Andrew Selant of the American Methodist Episcopal Church and by Father Pierre LeFeu, S.J. The service opened and closed with hymns, for which words were provided on mimeographed sheets in Chinese, English, and French. “Since we were going in for fellowship,” Treadup wrote, “I sang the first verse in English, the second in Chinese, and the third in French—my parley-vous being somewhat choppy.” The leaders gave “devotional” addresses, then “several men, but not I, heaven forbid, were moved to extemporaneous prayer, not always of the briefest sort.” Then the President rose to speak. Hank Burrell later typed up the “substance” of Chiang’s remarks:
I have asked you, as fellow Christians, to come to Nanking that I might have your counsel. I appreciate very much your coming.
Responsibility for saving the world rests on religion. It is the task of religion to keep alive the consciences of men and to save mankind from destruction.
This has become increasingly a matter of grave concern. As the world has gone forward by leaps and bounds in the progress of its material civilization, it has gone backward in moral and spiritual culture. Men are neglecting their spiritual lives. In the pathway of such neglect lie sin, violence, and destruction.
Japanese aggression in Manchuria is a manifestation of this sinfulness. This becomes more evident day by day as the scope of Japanese aggression increases.
Bolshevism, which set out to destroy all religion, has itself become a religion. It, however, is a religion not of love but of hate. In Christianity and bolshevism we have the two most powerful rival religions now at work in the world. If bolshevism wins, humanity will sink into hell. If Christianity prevails, the world can yet be saved.
Japan is wrong in supposing that taking over Manchuria is to her advantage. Imperialism is out of date. It also is opposed to religion. Some have charged Christianity with being a tool of imperialism. True Christianity stands for humanity so cannot be imperialist. Japan is hurting her own interests and is inviting into the Far East the religion of Karl Marx by her present course of aggression in Manchuria.
Various members of the party then spoke, assuring the President of the sympathy and prayers of Christians around the world for the heavy burdens and responsibilities on his shoulders; expressing hope that the Sino-Japanese crisis might be handled so as to secure justice and peace in the Far East, and also, as an Anglican missionary put it, that “the instrumentalities for the pacific handling of international conflicts may be strengthened throughout the world”; and asking how as individuals and as members of their missionary groups they could be most helpful to him and to China in this hour of trouble.
This brought President Chiang to his feet again. His response, David wrote, was “as vague as a river mist.” He hoped the League of Nations would be able to do something; on the other hand, the Japanese would not accept decisions of the League. As to what those present could do,
I hope you will help the Christians of China to study the Manchurian question and to understand what is required in maintaining the peace of the world. Christians must show that there is power in their religion which can be brought to bear upon actual problems and difficulties such as we now face.
Shortly after seven the party moved to the city home of President and Madame Chiang, where a banquet was served. At ten fifteen, “after five hours,” as Henry Burrell later wrote, “of genuine Christian fellowship and of conference,” the party broke up, and the Shanghai group caught the midnight express back.
* * *
—
TREADUP must have been up much of the night in the observation car writing all this, which had happened three weeks earlier, down in his diary. Even when he crawled into his berth he evidently got little sleep, for in a note to Emily the next day he wrote: “Tossed and turned in my lower, thinking about the pain of arranging the end of their calling of those poor distraught women.” He may have got a little sleep, however, because the train arrived three hours late.
Appleton Sills, the Nanking fraternal secretary, to whom Treadup had wired ahead, was at the station to meet him. “He was popping like a firecracker,” saying: Lucky the train was late. Tied up all morning at the Consulate. Radio messages. Japs attacked Shanghai at dawn. Yes, Treadup, you got out by the skin of your teeth. Bombed the Shanghai railway station. Shambles. Shelling Chapei district. Lucky man, Treadup! Lucky man!
* * *
—
THREE DAYS later David wrote Emily:
The inevitable state of panic. All trains from Shanghai are cut off. They say they may have some trains to the north in a day or two—to bring troops down for the defense of Nanking, which everyone expects to be attacked. I’ll try to get aboard the first train that leaves.
The news from Shanghai is appalling. The railway station and many of the factories along the river have been wrecked by artillery and airplane bombing and incendiary fires. The Japs didn’t dare attack the International Settlement and the French Concession. From there, at night, they say you could see the glare of burning buildings in the Chinese city. In the first two days motor cars, carriages, rickshas, and wheelbarrows brought three hundred thousand distraught people from the war area into the International Settlement, most of them with no belongings but the clothes they were wearing. The Y is overwhelmed with refugee work. A huge bazaar and market building being constructed by the Continental Bank, and nearly completed, has been turned over as a camp.
Nanking next? I hope I can get out of here and back to you, my Hazy. Sills has just had a phone call from the American consulate, saying that it would be well for women and children to leave, either by the American gunboat anchored in the Yangtze about five miles from Sills’s house or by a Butterfield & Swire freight steamer, which can take about forty deck passengers. Margaret Sills is now packing some clothing and bedding in case she and the boys have to leave.
The lights went out a few minutes ago. The Chinese newspapers had said that would be a signal for a Japanese air attack. But they have just gone on again.
* * *
—
DAVID thought a great deal about the session with President Chiang. “We take heart,” he wrote Emily, while he was waiting to get away from Nanking,
when we know that we have a man of that sort in command of the affairs of China. There is a great hue and cry from super-patriots for resistance “to the last drop of blood.” The fact that the League of Nations has not produced any results has given point to the demand for war. But some of us have hope. Henry Burrell was reminding me of the old Chinese tradition for settling quarrels by bringing them to the magistrate at the city gate and threshing them out there in the presence of one’s fellow townspeople. Having taken this contention to the city gate at Geneva, surely the neighbors can avoid a fistfight.
But a few days later Treadup was writing that every time he felt optimistic he heard old Cowley shouting, “What tommyrot! You have the mind of a six-year-old.” He told Emily that he had had a talk one day in Shanghai with the son of Z. T. Tao, the former treasurer of the Shanghai Y.M.C.A. This was the youth who, back in 1912, at the age of fourteen, had tried to rush off to give his life in China’s great revolution, only to be caught and brought back by his father. He was now a young man of thirty-three, and he was bitter and cynical. When Treadup told of the hours with Chiang Kai-shek, young Tao exploded.
“Do you know what this gentle Christian is doing to the Communists in Shanghai? It’s common knowledge. Do you know about the methods of torture and firing squad he is using? Christian!”
David reported to Emily what young Tao said then:
“The League has committed suicide. The Nine Power Pact and the Peace Pact—meaningless. The nations don’t love peace, they are just somewhat afraid of war. Japan now has all of Manchuria. Next she will take China proper, and then she will turn on the rest of the world. China has no choice but to fight. Of course we shall be defeated, but it is better to die fighting than to give up the struggle. Our fighting may start another world war, and that is what I should like to see. I know the cost would be awful, it might be the end of civilization, but then we would all be in it together. It’s the only way we could get help. This episode in Manchuria has convinced us that China has not a single friend in the world. We are doomed and we had better die fighting.”
* * *
—
IT WAS not yet Nanking’s turn, and on January 4, 1932, David Treadup started back north toward Paoting.
DENIAL OF A CHRIST-LIKE PRINCIPLE
DAVID had been away for more than a month. He wrote in his diary:
I remember that when you stand on the beach at Peitaiho, on the flat wet sand washed by the incoming waves, the water first rushes up the shallow slope, then drains down under the curl of the next wave, and as the spume of the withdrawal gathers around your ankles there is a very odd sensation: the footing is pulled out from under you. I have that feeling on dry land, here in Paoting, these days. The old underpinnings, which were only sand to begin with, are being sucked away. The threat of these uniformed Japanese is constant: one is tempted to think un-Christian thoughts about their short bow legs, their woodchuck teeth, their ridiculous pointed army hats. Because of their presence there has been a subtle change of atmosphere in the entire missionary enterprise. It pulls the sand out from under our feet. We are all tense. Em is dark again. She says: “What can one foreign woman do?—tend to a handful of tatting women—worry about a few hairnet makers—scrub up a party of starving orphans—ridiculous!—none of it makes the tiniest dent!” Old Cowley is grim as a sparrow hawk; Stanley wears a face ten miles long; young Shanks looks as if he would cry half the time. “My” villagers quarrel and whine. I am coming to a conclusion. Life should be less grim than this. The Chinese have a gift of laughter. It is being whimpered away by my coreligionists. I can’t remember a single occasion on which Jesus preached in favor of laughter. Am I going rotten at the core?
* * *
—
THE YOUNG VILLAGER David had chosen as his assistant, Shen Mo-ju, had done a remarkable job of keeping the literacy schools going during Treadup’s absence. The lad had gained so much confidence that the villagers, on the one hand, had begun to grumble that this youth was turning into “a new warlord,” and he, on the other hand, now showed some signs of resentment at the return and interference of his superior officer, Treadup. Besides, patriotic propaganda teams of middle-class, urban-bred students had gone through the villages, planting anger and anxiety in everyone’s fields.
