John Wesley, Jr. Part 22

"Yes, my pastor at home told me to be sure and call on him," said J.W., and took his leave of a man he would long remember.

The call of Professor Bellew was not delayed long after J.W. had found his bearings in Foochow, and the Professor's welcome was even more cordial than that of the c.u.mmings agency, though these gentlemen were, of course, the soul of courtesy. If they were not so sure as Peter McDougall that J.W. or any other American could teach them anything about selling the c.u.mmings line in China, at least they would not put anything in his way.

One important interior town, Yenping, they had hoped J.W. might visit, but unfortunately there was no one connected with the agency who could be sent with him. They understood that some of his missionary friends were ready to help him in the general enterprise, and perhaps they might be able to suggest something.

When the difficulty was stated to Professor Bellew he said: "Why, that's one of our stations. It is a little out of the way to go up to Dr.

Carbrook's place on the way to Yenping, but we'll see that you get to both towns."

"That's certainly good of you, Professor," said J.W., gratefully. "I've told you about Joe Carbrook, and I can hardly wait until I get to him."

As a matter of fact, he had told everybody about Joe Carbrook.

Professor Bellew was sympathetic. "I know," he said, "and I understand.

When you come back, if we can manage the dates, you may find something here which you ought to see."

The Carbrook Hospital--it has another name in the annual reports, but this will identify it sufficiently for our purposes--spread itself all over the compound and beyond in its welcome to J.W. Joe and Marcia were first, and joyfullest. The school turned out to the last scholar, and even the hospital's "walking cases" insisted on having a share in the welcome to the foreign doctor's friend.

"Tell us what you are up to," said the Carbrooks, when they were back in the house after a sketchy inspection of the whole establishment; hospital, dispensary, school, chapel, and so forth. And, "Tell me what you are doing with it, now that you have the hospital you have been dreaming about so long," said J.W.

But J.W. told his story first, just to get it out of the way, as he said. Then he turned to Marcia and said, "How about it, 'Mrs.

Carbrook'?"

"Well, J.W.," said Marcia, "that name is not so strange as it was. I'm feeling as if I had been married a long time, judging by the responsibilities, that are dumped on me just because I am the doctor's wife. And this doctor man of mine hardly knows whether to be happy or miserable. He's happy, because he has found the very place he wanted.

And he's miserable because he ought to be learning the language and can't get away from the work that crowds in on him."

"And you yourself, Marcia," J.W. asked, "are you happy or miserable, or both?"

"She's as mixed up as I am, old man," Joe answered for her. "Talk about the language! I don't hanker after learning it, but I've got to, some time. If they would just let me be a sort of deaf-mute doctor I'd be much obliged. The work is fairly maddening. You know, it was a question of closing up this hospital or putting me in as a green hand. Of course there are the nurses, and a couple of students. But I'm glad they put me in; only, look at the job! Never a day without new patients. A steady stream at the out-clinic. Why, J.W., I've done operations alone here that at home they'd hardly let me hold sponges for. Had to do 'em."

"Well," J.W. commented, "isn't that what you came for?"

"It is," Marcia answered--these two had a queer way of speaking for each other--"and it would be a good plenty if the hospital were all. But we are putting up a new building to take the place of an adobe horror, and Joe has to buy bricks and deal with workmen and give advice and dispense medicine and do operations, all with the help of a none too sure interpreter. He's the busiest man, I do believe, between here and Foochow."

J.W. wanted to draw Dr. Joe out about the work in general. What of the evangelistic work, and the educational work, and all the rest.

But Dr. Joe would not rise to it. "I'll tell you honestly, J.W., I just don't know. Haven't had time to find out. When I got here I found people standing three deep around the hospital doors, some wanting help for themselves, and some anxious to bring relatives or friends. I was at work before anything was unpacked except my instruments. And I've been at it ever since. Everything else could wait, but all this human misery couldn't. And I don't know much of what the evangelistic value of it all will be. We have a Bible woman and a teacher in the school who are very devoted. They read and pray every day with the patients, and as for grat.i.tude, I never expected to be thanked for what I did as I have been thanked here. I'll tell you one thing; I didn't dream a man could be so content in the midst of such a hurricane of work. I'm done to a standstill every day; I b.u.mp into difficulties and tackle responsibilities that I hadn't even heard of in medical school, though I haven't killed anybody yet. And all the time I remember how I used to wish I might be the only doctor between Siam and sunrise. I'm plenty near enough to that, in all conscience. The only doctor in this town of one hundred thousand, and a district around us so big that I'm afraid to measure it. On one side the next doctor is a good hundred miles away.

Now, do you know how I feel? Oh, yes; insufficient until it hurts like the toothache, yet somehow as though I were carrying on here, not in place of the man who has gone home on furlough, but in place of Jesus Christ himself. You know I'm not irreverent; I might have been, but this has taken all of the temptation out of me. It is his work, not mine."

J.W. turned to Marcia again. "I thought you said this Joe of yours was miserable, I've seen him when he was enjoying himself pretty well, but I never saw him like this."

"I know," Marcia admitted, "and I didn't mean he was really unhappy. But it is a big strain, and there's no sign of its letting up until the regular doctor gets back."

The next day J.W. watched his old friend amid the press of duties which crowded the hours, and he marveled as much as the wretchedness of the patients as he did at the steady resourcefulness of the man whom he had known when he was Delafield's adventurous and spendthrift idler.

As he looked on, J.W. could understand something which had been a closed book to him before. No one could stand by and see this abjectness of need, this helplessness, this pathetic faith which was almost fatalistic in the foreign doctor's miraculous powers--it recalled that beseeching cry in the New Testament story, "Lord, if thou _wilt_ thou _canst_"--without being deeply, poignantly glad that there were such men as Joe Carbrook. It was all very well to talk at long range about letting China and other places wait. But on the spot n.o.body could talk that way.

The visit might have lasted two weeks, instead of two days, and then the Carbrooks would have hung on and besought him to stay a little longer.

Torture would not have drawn any admission from them, but back of all the joy in the work was a something that left them without words as J.W.

and his little group from Foochow set out for the next stopping place.

Just before the last silent hand-grips, J.W. told his friends about Jeannette and himself, and promised Joe a wedding present. "You see," he said, "I never sent you one when you were married, and I'd like to send you a double one now, for yourselves and for us. You send me word what it is you most need for the hospital, an X-ray outfit, or a sterilizer, or a thingamajig for making cultures, microscope included, and Jeannette and I will see that you get it. I'm a t.i.ther, you know, and my salary's been raised, and I want to do something to show what a fool I was before I knew what sort of a business you were really in out here. So don't be modest; you can't hurt my feelings!"

Back at Foochow in the course of the slow days which Chinese travel gives to those who go aside from the beaten path, Professor Bellew welcomed J.W. with eager warmth. "You're back just in time, if you can stay a few days; the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the college begins to-morrow."

J.W. had at least a week's business with the c.u.mmings agents. He had found some conditions on his inland journey which called for much discussion. So he had time for sharing in a good deal of the celebration. It was something to marvel at, that a Christian college had been at work in this great city for forty years.

The president of the college and his wife started the proceedings with a formal reception, at which a Chinese orchestra furnished music outside the house, and Western musicians rendered more familiar selections in the parlors. Alumni flocked to the reception, men of every variety of occupation, but all one in their devotion to their Alma Mater. The next afternoon was given over to athletics, and the evening to a lecture, quite in the American fas.h.i.+on.

The third day being Sunday, J.W. listened to an American missionary in the morning, who spoke boldly of the prime need for a college like this if the youth of China were to be trained for the highest service to their country. At night he sat through nearly three hours of the most amazing testimony meeting he had ever seen. It was led by a Chinese who had been graduated from the college thirty years before. The eagerness, almost impatience, to confess what Jesus Christ and Christian education had meant to these Chinese leaders--for it was evident they _were_ leaders--was a thing to stir the most sluggish Christian pulse. J.W.'s mind took him back to a memorable love feast at Cartwright Inst.i.tute, when Joe Carbrook had made his first confession of and surrender to Jesus Christ, and it seemed to him that the likeness between these two so different gatherings was far more real than all their contrasts.

On Monday the anniversary banquet brought the American consul, a representative of the provincial governor, and many other dignitaries.

And on Tuesday the students put on a pageant which ill.u.s.trated in gorgeousness of color and costume and accessories the history of the college. Besides all this pomp and circ.u.mstance there was a wonderful industrial exhibit. The president of China sent a scroll, as did also the prime minister. Former students in the cities of China, from Peking to Amoy, sent subscriptions amounting to twenty-five thousand dollars for new buildings, and other old students in the Philippines sent a second twenty-five thousand dollars.

All of which stirred J.W. to the very soul. Here was a Christian college older than many in America. Its results could not be measured by any visible standards, yet he had seen graduates of the school and students who did not stay long enough to graduate, men of light and leading, men of wealth and station, officials, men in whom the spirit of the new China burned, Christian workers; and all these bore convincing testimony that this college had been the one great mastering influence of their lives. A Christian college--in China!

J.W. thought of it all and said to himself: "I wonder if I am the same individual as he who not so many months ago was talking about the good sense of letting China wait indefinitely for Christ? Anyhow, somebody has had better sense than that every day of the last forty years!"

The "tour of the tools" was teaching J.W. more than he could teach the merchants of Asia. And yet he was doing no little missionary work, as evidenced both in his own reports to Peter McDougall, and still more in the reports which went to that observant gentleman after J.W. had moved on from any given place. The c.u.mmings Hardware Corporation may be without a soul, as corporations are known to be, but it has many eyes.

These eyes followed J.W.'s progress from Shanghai to Foochow, to Hong Kong, to Manila. They observed how he studied artisans and their ways with tools, and the ways of builders with house fittings, and the various devices with which in field and garden the toilers set themselves to their endless labor. As the eyes of the c.u.mmings organization saw these things, the word went back across the water to Saint Louis, and Peter McDougall took credit to himself for a commendable shrewdness.

But the ever-watchful eyes had no instructions to report on the tool missionary's other activities, and therefore no report was made. None the less they saw, and wondered, and thought that there was something back of it all. There was more back of it than they could have guessed.

For J.W. had come to a new zest for both of his quests. The business which had brought him into the East was daily becoming more fascinating in its possibilities and promise. In even greater measure the interests which belong especially to this chronicle were taking on a new importance. Everywhere he went he sought out the missions and the missionaries. He plied the workers with question on question until they told him all the hopes and fears and needs and longings which often they hesitated to put into their official letters to the Boards.

In Manila he saw, after a little more than two decades of far from complete missionary occupation, the signs that a Christian civilization was rising. The schools and churches and hospitals and other organization work established in Manila were proof that all through the islands the everyday humdrum of missionary service was going forward, perhaps without haste, but surely without rest.

When he came to Singapore, that traffic corner to which all the sea roads of the East converge, he heard the story of a miracle, and then he saw the miracle itself, the Anglo-Chinese College.

They told him what it meant, not the missionaries only, but the Chinese merchants who controlled the c.u.mmings line for all the archipelago, and Sumatra planters, and British officials, and business men from Malaysian trade centers whose names he had never before heard.

The teacher who put himself at J.W.'s service was one of the men to whom Pastor Drury had written his word of appeal on J.W.'s behalf. He respected it altogether, and the more because he well knew that here was no need for mere talk. A visitor with eyes and ears could come to his own conclusions. If the college were not its own strongest argument, no words could strengthen it.

The college had been started by intrepid men who had no capital but faith and an overmastering sense of duty. That was a short generation ago. Now J.W. saw crowded halls and students with purposeful faces, and he heard how, at first by the hundreds and now by thousands, the product of this school was spreading a sense of Christian life-values through all the vast island and ocean s.p.a.ces from Rangoon to New Guinea, and from Batavia to Sulu.

But it may as well be told that, even more than China, India made the deepest impress on the mind and heart of our tool-traveler. From the moment when he landed in Calcutta to the moment when he watched the low coasts of the Ganges delta merge into the horizon far astern, India would not let him alone. He saw poverty such as could scarcely be described, and religious rites the very telling of which might sear the tongue. If China's poor had a certain apathy which seemed like poise, even in their wretchedness, not so India's, but, rather, a slow-moving misery, a dull progress toward nothing better, with only nothingness and its empty peace at last.

Once in Calcutta, and his business plans set going, he started out to find some of the city's Christian forces. They were not easy to find. As in every Oriental city, missionary work is relatively small. Indeed, J.

W. began to think that this third city of Asia had little religion of any sort.

He had been prepared in part for the first meager showing of mission work. On s.h.i.+pboard he had encountered the usual a.s.sortment of missionary critics; the un.o.bservant, the profane, the superior, the loose-living, and all that tribe. The first of them he had met on the second day out from San Francisco, and every boat which sailed the Eastern seas appeared to carry its complement of self-appointed and all-knowing enemies of the whole missionary enterprise. While steaming up the Bay of Bengal, the anti-mission chorus appeared at its critical best. J.W. was told as they neared Calcutta that the Indian Christian was servile, and slick and totally untrustworthy. Never had these expert observers seen a genuine convert, but only hypocrites, liars, petty thieves, and grafters.

In spite of it all, at last he found the Methodist Mission, and it was not so small, when once you saw the whole of it. By great good fortune his instructions from home ordered him up country as far as Cawnpore.

And to his delight he met a Methodist bishop, one of the new ones, who was setting out with a party for the Northwest. So, on the bishop's most cordial invitation, he joined himself to the company, and learned in a day or two from experts how to make the best of India's rather trying travel conditions.

Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Lucknow--J.W. came to these cities with a queer feeling of having been there before. Long ago, in his early Sunday school days, the names of these places and the wonders of them had been the theme of almost the only missionary book he had at that age cared to read.

At Allahabad, said his companions of the way, an All-India Epworth League convention was to be held, and J.W. made up his mind that a League convention in India would be doubly worth attending. He did attend it too, but it left no such memory as another gathering in the same city; a memory which he knows will last after every other picture of the East has faded from his recollection.

The party had reached Allahabad at the time of the Khumb Mela, a vast outpouring of ma.s.sed humanity too great for any but the merest guesses at its numbers. This "Mela," feast, religious pilgrimage, whatever it might mean to these endless mult.i.tudes, is held here at stated times because the two sacred rivers, the Jumna and the Ganges, come together at Allahabad, and tradition has it that a third river flows beneath the surface to meet the others. So the place is trebly sacred, its waters potent for purification, no matter how great one's sin.