The call, p.72
The Call, page 72
As intended, the emetine made Treadup vomit violently for three days in succession. He felt as if he were crossing an ocean.
* * *
—
WHEN the rough voyage of purgation was over, Treadup assumed that he must have reached a new continent of health. The assumption was itself therapeutic, and in somewhat improved spirits Treadup took a train to Tientsin, to see Lin Fu-chen at Peikai. He wanted to ask his old friend’s advice about the possibility of his finding a Chinese, rather than a foreign-missions, financial base for his work in the villages.
He was shocked by Mr. Lin’s appearance. Remembering that Mr. Lin was only a couple of years his senior, David saw a suddenly aged man, with a hundred hairs of a long white beard of wisdom on his chin, sipping tea in his presidential office. He asked Mr. Lin if he might be able to suggest some “wealthy gentleman of the old school” before whom Treadup could kowtow and make his appeal, someone like Yen Han-lin, the scholar-official who had so long ago opened the way for Treadup to begin his lecture program.
“My dear Treadup,” Mr. Lin bitterly said, “where have you been? Don’t you know that all those old literati are now corrupt officials of the Salt Gabelle? Or Japanese errand boys? Yen Han-lin died years ago. His oldest son is a free-lance bandit—he has an enclave down near Tsinan. He’s very rich, but I would guess that teaching peasants to read is the last thing he is interested in. Now, if you could teach the farmers to pay taxes promptly to the local bandit-warlord, you’d get backing for that!”
* * *
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TREADUP traveled to Nanking. He wanted to look into the chance of fitting himself into Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement.
The Generalissimo had succeeded in driving the Communists out of their base in Kiangsi Province. In the previous February, in the Kiangsi city of Nanchang, he had made a speech calling for “a movement to achieve a new life.” He told his audience that Germany (where, he needn’t remind anyone, Hitler had come to power) and Japan (where the military had taken over) were strong because they had adopted a proper style of life. China must “militarize the life of the people of the entire country.” He called for a new struggle for order, cleanliness, physical fitness, destruction of pests, punctuality, and abstention from alcohol, opium, and tobacco. The four Confucian ideals—li, i, lien, ch’ih; correct behavior, justice, integrity, and honor—must now again be observed. The G-mo promised that New Life would rid the country of poverty, crime, corruption, and dishonesty. The four virtues, after all, had been the secret of success of the ancient kingdoms of Ch’i and Ch’u—as they also were of the strong modern nations. Fascist Italy and militarist Turkey had joined those models in Chiang’s harangues; he had added a Blue Shirt Movement as an army adjunct of the New Life Movement.
Treadup’s diary:
G-mo, I’m told, has been seeking advice of some missionaries. I hope to make impression on two grounds: (a) principal emphasis has been on urban reforms, and I may be able to sell the idea of an exemplary rural experiment; and (b) the Movement’s attack on economic ills (“get rid of beggary”) is entirely on basis of molding minds through a reformation of personal habits—e.g., not spitting on the floor will somehow relieve poverty—and perhaps I can sell a deeper exploration along the lines of my present work.
Most encouraging for Treadup was the fact that the Christian G-mo had chosen as the first General Secretary of the New Life Movement a young man named Peter T. P. Jen, who had been a Y.M.C.A. secretary in Mukden before the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. “I ought to be barking up the right tree.” In high hopes Treadup called on Peter Jen at an office which David found “as austere as a poem by Milton—looks as if living down to the bone is going to be the cry.” The interview brought a sharp letdown.
Too late. It seems that Edward Robbins, the chap from Shaowu whose excitement about Johnny Wu’s work at the Second Menghsien Institute so impressed me—he’s the one who called the work “Christian Communism”—has got in on the ground floor with just the sort of thing I was going to propose. Robbins’s big advantage is that Shaowu is in Kiangsi, which, since the G-mo snatched it back from the un-Christian Communists, he wants to make into a showplace of the New Life.
* * *
—
HIS ARM hurting again—he hadn’t brought his dumbbells south with him—Treadup went on to Shanghai. He had no success there, either. But he did have one consolation.
Hank Burrell says I’m well out of the New Life outfit. Says: “Look here, Treads, there’s nothing new about the New Life Movement. They want to revive virtues handed down from China’s immemorial past. There’s a very strong smell of the fascism of Italy, where they’re trying to modernize society partly by reviving the ancient spirit of Rome. You mustn’t take the Puritanism in New Life for Christian zeal; it’s backward looking. You know, in the past we’ve been the liberalizers: the Y supplied a good deal of the yeast for the present ferment here in China. But—don’t quote me when you write Todd—it’s the Communists who are putting out the yeast now. If the G-mo’s Christianity is any measure, the Christians are falling behind. Very bad. Just my opinion.”
Burrell was able to tell Treadup what had been happening to the other Y.M.C.A. men who had been demobilized. Several had gone back to the United States, some to continue working with American branches of the Association, quite a few, oddly enough, to go into the insurance business. Dr. Charles, with whom Treadup had gone so long ago to Soochow to fight the cholera epidemic, and who had later joined the Lecture Bureau, had been demobilized the previous year, and he was now working as a missionary doctor in the Navaho Reservation near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Of those who had chosen to stay in China, one was working for the International Famine Relief Committee, one had taken a position with the salt-tax office, one had joined the Irish Presbyterian Mission, and several were teaching, one at the Shanghai American School, two at Yenching University, two at the College of Chinese Studies in Peiping. “Not one thing that would appeal to me,” Treadup wrote.
* * *
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HE RETURNED to Paoting deeply discouraged. As had happened before, Emily’s spirits rose as his declined. He needed a mantle of cheerfulness, and she threw it over him. Her letters now were quite sunny. From one to sister Jane:
On Monday I went into the city and did some shopping. I bought a pair of shoes that would set you laughing if you could see them. Black velvet, lined with felt, with snaps on the sides—they look like the kind of “comfort” slippers that one sees on ancient and infirm grandmothers. However, they are quite stylish, and warm now that cold weather is coming. I also got material for a new dress. I am cutting and sewing it doubling the cloth—also for weather that will soon shiver our bones. My dress will be very snappy, too (I mean it will be fastened by snaps), and when I wear it with the shoes, I hope I will be the only one laughing inside at how funny I look!
I am taking David out for long walks, to buck up his health. (Mine is fine.) I have some favorite objectives. One is a tree, which, according to common belief, was alive before the city was founded, and since the city is 2,000 years old, you can see that the tree is venerable. Of course it’s dead, and it’s surrounded by a little walled shrine, where people go to worship because they believe a god lives in the tree. They say a foolish man took a branch for firewood, but the pot he cooked in over it melted right away to nothing. Then there’s a tomb, said to be of an emperor, to which we walk—a plain mound of dirt, about twenty feet high—you can climb up one side and down the other by a little path. Another sight we like is a “snow-wave” stone. This has been placed on a sort of pedestal in a little pavilion. It gets its name from the fine white wavy lines that run through the stone, which is rather a blackish hue. It is not specially beautiful, no American would look at it twice, but odd rocks are much prized by the Chinese.
* * *
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TREADUP’S salary had stopped. He and Emily both seemed on dead center; they did not seem to know what to do next. They still paid the servants their wages; the cook bought food; David bought gasoline for his trips to his villages on his Indian. How? Out from her underwear drawer had come the black silk bag bulging with the Mex dollars that Emily had secretly begun to squirrel away just after Nancy’s death. The drawer had been like a safe; neither servants nor thieves had ever found the bag.
“She was counting the last few of them out yesterday,” Treadup wrote in his diary, “when God looked down and saw two of his sparrows about to fall and decided to do something about us.” He and Emily could only think that what happened now had come about through divine intervention. The rescue, Treadup acknowledged much later, had been more mundane. A messenger came from Peiping, saying that Madame Shen, the woman who had been Johnny Wu’s first patroness—and who had wept at the first graduation of a literacy class at Chefoo, saying she had never before seen barefoot scholars—urgently invited T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng to wait upon her in Peiping.
Treadup went back on the train with the courier. The old lady received him in one of the formal rooms of her mansion. Seated in a large square ebony chair at the far end of the room, in a court robe embroidered with dragons and storks, she looked a little as Treadup imagined the Empress Dowager must once have looked. She said she had heard of the brilliant work T’ao Tu Hsien-sheng had been doing in the countryside near Paoting. Her friend Wu at Menghsien had told her that T’ao Tu had, as she put it, “reached an honorable parting with his American patrons.” She would like to offer her unworthy support, so that the work T’ao Tu had begun could be continued.
Suddenly all circumlocution ended; she hurled a very direct question at Treadup. How much had he been paid per annum?
Two thousand four hundred gold dollars.
Madame Shen cleared her throat. That was more than her miserable little treasury could support, she said. Long pause. But she would be glad to provide the black market equivalent of two thousand dollars gold each year for part of T’ao Tu’s support. Would this unworthy sum be of help?
Treadup then did something which, he later wrote, “I couldn’t help.” He kneeled on the floor and kowtowed thrice to the old lady. Then he stood up and turned two cartwheels—“there was plenty of space”—across the room in front of her.
Madame Shen did not even raise her eyebrows at this performance. She clapped her hands—not applause, it turned out; she was summoning a manservant. One appeared. Soon she had her bailiff, all dressed in black, counting out the whole of Treadup’s first year’s allowance in Mex dollars. She sent six men with Treadup to Paoting, to make sure bandits on the train would not steal the money.
There was no bank in Paoting that the Treadups could trust, so the entire year’s dollars went into the black silk bag, and it went back into the underwear drawer.
* * *
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THIS PROVIDENTIAL EVENT seemed almost literally to stun the Treadups. Their relief was immense, but it left them logy, dull, and drowsy. Treadup wondered in his diary how Johnny Wu could have heard of his demobilization—for David had been too proud to go begging at Menghsien. He worked it out that Lin Fu-chen in Tientsin must have sent word to Johnny. This meant that at least two Chinese friends really loved him; here was a cause for rejoicing almost as great as Madame Shen’s munificence, yet Treadup did not pull himself together to go to Menghsien to thank Wu for nearly three months; and there is no way of knowing whether he ever thanked Mr. Lin.
Through the remainder of 1935, and well into the spring of 1936, Treadup—as he later put it in “Search”—“twiddled my thumbs.” The villagers had set up their Mass Education Council, and they had replaced Shen Mo-ju with an older man, a Christian who had been converted by the Paoting Congregationalists; the work went along moderately well. Treadup let himself be caught up in a series of minor projects which he called “garnishing around the edges of the platter.”
• Since the Chinese were so fond of tales, sayings, and fables, he decided he would translate and introduce into the literacy syllabus some of the parables of Jesus. He chose The New Patch and the Old Garment, The Hidden Treasure, The Valuable Pearl, The Soils, The Tares, The Pharisee and the Publican, The Good Samaritan, The Laborers, The Lost Sheep, The Lost Coin, The Prodigal Son, The Elder Brother, The Wise and Foolish Builders, The Rash King, The Uncompleted Tower. “Yes! My whole work—an unfinished tower.”
• He organized a mass wedding. An elaborate wedding was the greatest source of pride to a Chinese family, and even the poorest peasants would put themselves in debt for years to stage a grand show. Fancy clothing, a chair and bearers for the bride, instrumentalists, a feast—weddings could cost more than a decade’s savings, and moneylenders grew fat on wedding loans. Treadup passed the word throughout the district that all couples who wanted a grand wedding could have one in April for only four dollars Mex each—if they didn’t mind being married in a herd. The occasion turned out to be a huge success, a holiday for the whole district; twenty-three couples were married on a sunny afternoon. The music, the red-bedecked sedan chairs, the feast of many dishes—every bride blushed, every groom was satisfied.
• Music came back into his life. Not only did he get out his old cornet to work up expressive lips by playing hymns accompanied by Emily on the piano; he formed a choir of thirty of the best singers from all the villages. From the Department of Music at Yenching he got hold of sheet music of hymns translated into Chinese and set to old Chinese folk songs and lute tunes. The chorus, all male, sang falsetto in the style of Chinese operas, but its members also sang in harmony, in the style of American church choirs. They sang, Treadup wrote, “like meadowlarks.” Their favorite hymn was Chen Mei Ke, “Lord for Thy Revealing Gifts,” set to an ancient lute tune:
WHILE the Treadups were caught in their backwater eddy—in a strange state, it seemed, of dimmed consciousness—China’s larger fate was being speeded up. In October 1934 the Communists under Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and Chu Teh had broken out of Kiangsi and had begun the astonishing trek that came to be known as the Long March; by July 1935 the force had reached Szechuan Province, in West China, where they were joined by other Communist troops that had been driven by Chiang from Soviet areas north of the Yangtze. The whole force moved on and had adventures worthy of legends. Mao’s followers crossed the deep gorge of the Tatu River, in remote West China, crawling over on a bridge of chains anchored at the tops of the rock cliffs on either side of the river’s abyss. After a year of forced marches Mao led the wanderers into a barren region of loess land blown down through the centuries from the Gobi Desert.
Chiang Kai-shek, meanwhile, was putting more effort into fighting the Communists than into repelling the Japanese, who were gradually consolidating their de facto control of much of North China. Through an American journalist, Edgar Snow, Mao offered the KMT an end to the civil war and a united front against the Japanese, and Mao wrote two works that were to become basic texts of guerrilla warfare for revolutionary movements for the rest of the century: On the Tactics of Fighting Japanese Imperialism and Strategic Problems in China’s Revolutionary War. Increasingly Chiang’s allied forces—particularly the so-called Northeast Army of “Young Marshal” Chang Hsueh-liang, son of the late warlord Chang Tso-lin—urged the Generalissimo to join forces with the Communists to drive out the foreign enemy. Chiang, however, continued to press the fight against the Communists.
* * *
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IN NOVEMBER, Treadup finally got himself in hand and went to Menghsien to thank Johnny Wu for having persuaded Madame Shen to come to his rescue. “What a lift I always get when I come here!” In a depressed and frightened countryside Treadup found Wu ebullient and optimistic, talking of “a new stage” in the Menghsien work. The experiment had now been going on for seven years; so successful had it proved to be that the central government had taken the idea up, and Wu claimed that there were now some eight hundred rural reconstruction centers scattered through the KMT areas—none so far very effective, Wu said, because they were inadequately staffed and funded. Wu was now excited about the idea of expanding his experiment, which had been focused on a single hsien, into a province-wide program, and in spite of the increasing encroachments of the Japanese in Hopei Province, he had begun to make plans with any provincial officials who would listen to him.
* * *
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WHATEVER stimulus Treadup got from the Menghsien visit seemed to have spent itself pretty quickly. “Getting the habit of napping after lunch,” the diary announced. “Setting up a work bench in the back room on the ground floor. Thought I’d build some models for the fun of it—Peking cart, wedding sedan chair, sampan, ect. ect.” “Arm not too comfortable.” “Believe my stabbing myself with that screwdriver was a case of my old-time ‘badness.’ ” And:
Em and I been to several American movies in the city, movie house set up by a White Russian fur trader. Some say he’s a front for the Japs—softening up the populace. I say, why not enjoy? ‘Pasteur’ not bad. Last Saturday saw ‘White Angel.’ Have also managed to see ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ ‘House of Rothschild,’ and a southern mountain feud picture—the first color photography to be shown in these parts. Also a Shirley Temple one, and Anna Karenina.’
