The call, p.88
The Call, page 88
Nothing, here, about the consequences of the experience, devastating though they were to be for him. He does not speculate—he never will—whether he imagined those presences with him in the room, or was suffering some sort of psychic accident. Several days pass before he can write:
I am calm. I am out of touch with God. It may be that I realized that night—that I now think—that there is no God. On that point I am not sure. I still feel capable of amazement; I walked out this morning and was dazzled by the shimmering line of dew, touched by the new sun, along the upper edge of the wall that holds me imprisoned. I feel as if my hands and feet had been tied for a long time, and that the knots have suddenly been undone. This has been an eerie experience. I don’t think I am going to be quite so afraid any more. If there is a God, I must be a disappointment to him.
THE INNER FRAME
HE FELT no raptures, but he began to notice some spring in his legs. The colors of the day had gained intensity. He ate his food slowly, savoring the tastes. He was not so tired at work as he had been. He was still susceptible to fear, but now the fear, when it came, responded to real dangers, real concerns, and it was edged with the old familiar expectation of surprise, which he had first experienced as a boy, watching the dog Tub give birth to her pups. Fear was no longer dominant. He was open to minor pleasures. Memories of major ones, long asleep in him, rushed forward.
* * *
—
IN “SEARCH,” a few weeks later, as his loss of the bulk of his faith hardened in him, he wrote:
What was happening now was altogether different from the period after my conversion at Syracuse. This was a much calmer aftermath, though colder. I felt, all along, this time, a deep sense of loss—a loss of years of habits of thought, a loss of God’s wings over me in the nest, a loss indeed of some kind of narrowness, tightness, which had made life easy for me, without my even knowing it. Yet the gain was palpable, too: Now, right away, I had access to a range of feelings that seemed to me greater than what I had known before. Nonsense and folly, my own and others’, were more visible than before. I still wanted to be good in the eyes of others, but the whole idea of sin had found its proportions. Living at close quarters with Miller, the bullying ex-sergeant, and Irrenius Cashman, the supposedly sainted missionary, each with his astonishing contradictions folded into him; and with Sister Catherine, and with the shabby Corbuc and rodent Drubbins, and with Flanders the Tientsin Club steward, “too good to be true,” and Phinny, and Ramsdel the pompous Kailan Mining executive—stripped down, all of them, to their most primitive conditions of value—living so intimately together, in such raw states of hunger and need—it seemed to me I was seeing some human constants at work which made the idea of being cleansed of sin by Jesus Christ illusory. One could believe in illusion and take strength from it, and I suppose I had, for all those years, but the moment illusion is seen for what it is—whoosh! its beauty and support are gone. The outcome was bleak for me. It would take a new order of courage to live without this support. Yet the possibility of courage had itself taken on a new meaning, somewhat painful, but challenging, because there was no hand but mine, now, on the tiller.
* * *
—
TREADUP was on his way back to his room after the noon shift of pot washing. The day was so brilliant that he felt himself embedded in a universal sapphire. The compound was livable. Cleanup squads had got rid of all the rubble and debris that had made the camp so unsightly at first, and the English gardening mania had begun to tell a cheery story in a large plot alongside the hospital.
As Treadup walked past one of the two water-boiling sheds that had been set up to provide water both for drinking and for showers—this one was called “Waterloo” and the other was “Dew Drop Inn”—he found Flanders, the club steward, manning the pump which raised water to the holding tank for the boilers. This pump, and others like it around the camp for various water uses, had to be serviced all day long by turns of strong men. “Chief” Flanders, forever tidy in the eye of his club clientele, was in his immaculate black jacket and striped pants. Flanders had always been slightly condescending to Treadup, who had not been “clubable” when he had lived in Tientsin, but now, when Treadup, in the good mood of this bright day, called out a greeting, Flanders stopped pumping, straightened himself, responded with the slight bow of respect he usually reserved for clubmen, and then with an involuntary groan stretched his arms over his head.
“Your back’s sore,” Treadup said.
“The pump handle’s frightfully awkward,” Flanders said.
“I see that,” Treadup said. “The fulcrum is much too low.”
Treadup, “finding myself excited by the problem,” examined the pump, then went straight to the plumbing shed of the Committee on Engineering and Repairs. He knew the man on duty, an engineer from the Tientsin Municipal Council, and he persuaded him to let him have the parts and the tools necessary to see if he could heighten the hand pump Flanders was working on.
Hacksaw, threader, wrench, and muscle—two hours. Flanders had left. Treadup pumped hard to make up for the lost time. He could work standing up straight.
* * *
—
THE DIARY:
When I wrote the other day about a new, wider range of feeling, I did not take note of something at which I marvel: I mourn the great loss I have suffered, it is bitter and impoverishing, there is a huge hollow place, yet at the same time I am joyous and feel free. I am waking up from a sleep. Phinny kept at me all that time about “entering the twentieth century.” Perhaps I have begun to do so. That thought gives me some strength. Part of my joy, I think, comes from my sense that in spite of this void in my spirit, I can look back on my mission in the China field without shame or guilt. It was not all error and mummery. I really think I gave what I could give with a whole heart. And this: Old Todd was onto something, after all, with what I thought was his so offensive charge of “humanism.” This experience I have gone through here must have been brewing in me for a long time.
* * *
—
IT WAS May, and the weather was fine. The food preparers worked outdoors, at a long table outside the kitchen. One afternoon Treadup, taking a breather from washing pots, stepped out into the soft air. The workers there were chatting. Treadup heard a familiar, somewhat metallic voice. Mrs. Evenrude! The seventy-odd-year-old woman, who had not done a stroke of domestic work for three-fourths of her life, was peeling turnips. He watched her, without stepping forward, for a long time. She was chatting away like a catbird. Her face was strong and clear. She was doing this menial work with great dignity and amazing deftness and rapidity. When Treadup finally intruded, she threw down her knife and the turnip she was working on and flung her arms around his neck. Treadup had a sudden vivid memory of another unexpected embrace, from long ago, when old Dr. Elting, on the porch of the Astor House in Tientsin, had taken raw young Treadup to his breast, and astonishing tears had come to David’s eyes. Now, rather, David’s impulse—equally astonishing to him—was to laugh. Stiffening, perhaps sensing this, Mrs. Evenrude drew back and presented Treadup to her co-workers, formally, as if she were serving high tea on Davenport Road.
* * *
—
HE TALKED one evening with Sister Catherine, and, for the first time, looking in her eyes, he saw the deep pools of her loneliness. He touched her with something he perhaps carelessly said, and she suddenly opened out to him with a shocking candor. She was frightened. She had stopped menstruating. She said she had endured all sorts of troubles in China; others had always praised her calmness, her equanimity. But here, in this crowded camp, she was cut off, alone, and now, as she so strangely put it, considering her vows, “barren.”
Sister Catherine’s loneliness reached like a pickpocket into his. Soon she was in full possession of his starved love for Emily. She drew from him many pictures of Em: the maiden with nut-brown hair in the Y.W. canteen at Syracuse; the seasick bride riding up the China Sea; the pale being beyond the terrible wall she had built around herself, after the loss of Nancy; the cynosure of four thousand men on His Majesty’s Transport Tyndareus. On and on. The nun, having with her disciplined charity put aside her own distress, listened to his, saying nothing.
Emily! As he tried to tell Sister Catherine about Emily’s serenity, he suddenly found it hard to describe; it had subtly changed, it baffled him, it became an enigma. He was faced with wondering what Em would think of him now. Would he seem a stranger to her? Would she accept him as he now was? Was he, puzzling over something he had seen so often in her, at a distance from her that was not just geographic? “I was disturbed by these thoughts, and they made me dishonest,” he wrote. “I did not tell Sister Catherine a word about my apostasy.” And then, a perplexing line: “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
* * *
—
EUSTACE HOCKING, former chief engineer for Kailan Mining and now head of the camp Committee on Engineering and Repairs, asked Treadup if he could find spare time to raise the level of the handles of all the other water pumps around the compound. The committee assigned Treadup a helper. He called their undertaking the Great Yin Hsien Civilian Assembly Center Rainmakers’ Spine-Straightening Company Limited. He pieced the work out, between pots and pans, over a two-week span.
Then on a Monday morning Phinny Cunningham asked David if he had seen that day’s posting of the week’s assignments by the camp Employment Committee. Treadup went right to the notice board and found that he had been transferred from kitchen work to Engineering and Repairs.
Now came a burst of energy which was—on a somewhat lower scale of grandeur—like the one he had had after his first lecture tour in the spring of 1911. He felt, in fact, easily three decades younger than he had a month before. His arm was all healed. He ran three times around the perimeter before breakfast each morning. His mission now was modest. Its slogan: Modernize the Yin Hsien Camp in This Generation!
His ingenuity opened out like a morning glory. First of all, he rearranged the carpenters’ and fitters’ shop to make it more efficient; he trained the men to think of their tools as precious extensions of themselves, to be cared for as tenderly as their own limbs and extremities. (He even pointed out, as a measurement of value, the sense Sergeant Miller gave to the word “tool.” “I could never have uttered such a thing a month ago, and even now I felt a little thrill of shame. My fellows encouraged me by laughing.”) Cannibalizing materials already in the compound, he designed and supervised the refashioning of the camp’s hot-water boilers. Phinny importuned him to rebuild some of the hospital’s facilities. He headed a team that did over the Tsingtao kitchen while it was being used. Every day brought a score of breakdowns, collapses, accidents.
In June he succeeded Eustace Hocking as chief of the Committee on Engineering and Repairs. Dr. Cunningham said he had “engineered” the replacement. Hocking was in fact happy to step down into an easier job. The diary:
I must confess I wanted it. Hocking is a friendly fellow, but he is muddled in his thinking and cannot take things in sequence. I’m going to make things hum.
* * *
—
TREADUP played third base for Tientsin. In the fine weather there was a softball game every evening. There were kitchen teams, city teams, corporate teams—B.A.T., Kailan, Standard Oil.
I hit one over the wall for a four-bagger last night. I don’t think I’ve had so much fun since those games at the summer conference at Silver Bay, when I was how old?—fourteen? We have an arrangement with the Jonathans for one of their guards to shag for us when somebody knocks one “out of the park”—obviously we can’t chase balls outside the compound. It’s a long peg from third to first, and I manage to get the ball over there. I’ve booted a few, but so has everybody else. The big surprise is the Catholic team. Their left fielder is a bishop. The best player in the whole camp is their pitcher, we call him Father Windy. He talks constantly while he is pitching—to himself, to the batter, to the umpire, to the crowd in the stands. Which, by the way, is always a big one. Half the camp turns out to root for a team. Even the British come out to be amused by the chaps playing rounders. The nuns and priests all come to watch. Two young nuns act as cheerleaders. “Rome! Rome! Rome! Rickety-rah!”
* * *
—
TREADUP wrote: “My ‘I’ has moved into my eye.” By that he apparently meant: Now he was aware of the world. He wrote in another note that he realized how “shut in” he had been for so long.
One use of his eye (and ear): He began going—as he had not done at first—to the entertainments that were put on in the church building each week. The Pekingers were particularly active in staging these evenings. A young pianist and conductor from the capital, Peter Plumb, gave some recitals on a grand piano which the Japanese had, after much importuning by the internees, shipped to the camp from Peking. Plumb organized, rehearsed, and presented an orchestra and chorus in performances of Stainer’s Crucifixion and The Daughter of Jairus, Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer, and parts of Handel’s Messiah and a Bach oratorio.
After hearing the Bach, Treadup wrote:
What a superb sense of order, struggling against almost uncontrollable inventiveness! The composer must have thought he had a special relationship with his God, who said to him, “Tame your wild imagination so that ordinary human beings can hear what you’re saying!” How I envy that, in my spiritual deprivation. If I were a genius, perhaps I would need a God so much that I would still have one.
The Tientsin entertainments tended to be more popular “and frankly,” Treadup wrote, “more fun.” A company put on The Pirates of Penzance. Treadup played his cornet in the orchestra. (“I started tooting again about three weeks ago. Corbuc the Rumanian runs howling from the room when I practice. My poor fat lip could manage Sullivan; never could have done the Bach.”) Groups got up satirical skits. A squad of hearty British men, dressed up as chorus girls, staged an all-male Folies Bergères. And, finally and inevitably, David Treadup went to work in the engineering shop, and in early July, to full houses on two successive evenings, “trotted out Good Old Gyro.” The lecture was a great hit. He had trained Miller, the ex-sergeant, to be his assistant, and Miller turned out to be very funny. “Is there a clown hiding in every retired sergeant?—there’s a certain kind of humor, after all, which has cruelty at its core.” Treadup himself “felt on the wing up there. Of course it was that dear old spiel—automatic, by now.” He was obliged to realize that he was becoming a Camp Personality.
* * *
—
THE DIARY:
Em, I am at home here in a community, with as much sense of belonging as I have ever had—more, even, I think, than in Salt Branch—far more than in Ma Ch’iao (alas that that should be so). The citizens here have, through a remarkable effort of cooperation, mastered all the basic services that we need, using no labor but our very own. We even have some refinements, now: a laundry, a sewing room, a shoe repair shop, a watch-repairing service. We have a library—the heart of its collection, it goes without saying, being the load of books from Phinny’s Tientsin house that he and I lugged here. The Peking American School and the Tientsin Grammar School are going strong, and there are evening courses for adults, with language study predominating—the preference being for Chinese—but with about 25 other courses, too: Greek classical drama, a history of the industrial revolution, ect. A resourceful lady has started something called the White Elephant Exchange, where people can trade things that are useless to themselves for things that are useless to others. Theatricals, concerts, puppet shows, shadow pictures, skits, and sports contests keep us busy. The church is full all day Sunday—three or four early Catholic masses, which I have visited out of curiosity, the music is splendid, especially for the pontifical masses; then an Anglican service at eleven; the “free” Protestant denominations in a Union Service in the afternoon; and hymn sings in the evenings—the last not nearly as popular as an outdoor Sunday-twilight show put on by a Dutch priest, which consists of skits, jokes, and community singing, all to a great deal of laughter. It would be a full life if you were here.
