CHAPTER VIII

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CHRIST AND THE EAST


For a first trip the Southwestern expedition under Fred Finch's tutelage had been something of an exploit. Finch's report to Peter McDougall was more than verified by the order sheets, and the observant Peter, keeping track of things during the succeeding weeks, noticed with quiet satisfaction that not a single order Was canceled.

To himself he said, "The lad's a find, I'm thinking. From Finch's talk I should say he has not only a natural knack of selling, but he sells for keeps. And that's the idea, Peter. Anybody can sell if the buyer means to call off the order by the next mail. This John Wesley boy may go far, and I'll have to tell Albert Drury the next time I see him that he's done the house of Cummings a real favor."

The months went by. J.W. kept his wits about him, and on the road he stuck to his salesman's faith that goods are better sold by those who know exactly how they may be used and that they are never sold until they are bought. So he found favor in the sight of Peter McDougall. The proof of that is easy. Peter gave him a week off before the end of his first year.

Delafield looked better to the homecoming salesman than it had to the boy coming back from college. And the town was glad to see him. He meant something to not a few of its people, altogether outside the interest of the Farwells—and Pastor Drury—and Jeannette!

Deep Creek was his first port of call, after his first half-day at home. He had been welcomed with deep, quiet gladness by the home folks, and he had talked a little over the telephone with the preacher. Then time was a laggard until he could head the Farwell car toward Deep Creek and the old farm.

Jeannette's welcome was all that even he could ask, though, of course, just precisely what it was is none of our business. In the car, and by the fireplace in the Shenk living room, and around the farm, they considered many things, some of them not so personal as others. J.W. told the story of his life in Saint Louis and on the road; Jeannette listening like another Desdemona to the recital. And once again it was not the adventure which supplied the thrill, but the adventurer.

And Jeannette told him the news of Delafield. How Joe Carbrook and Marcia Dayne's wedding had been the most wonderful wedding ever seen in Delafield, with the town as proud of its one-time scapegrace as it was of the beautiful bride. How brother Marty had been finding many excuses of late for driving up from his circuit, and how he managed to see Alma Wetherell a good deal. How Alma was now head bookkeeper and cashier of the Emporium, the town's biggest store, and how she was such a dear girl. How Pastor Drury and Marty had become great friends. How the minister was not so well as usual, and people were getting to be a little worried about him. How the Delafield church had taken up tithing, and was not only doing a lot better financially, but in every other way. How Deep Creek was going to have a new minister, a friend whom Marty had met at the summer school for rural ministers, who would try to help the Deep Creek people get an up-to-date church building and learn to use it. How the Everyday Doctrines of Delafield had been first boosted and then forgotten, and now again several of them were being practiced in some quarters. And much more, though never to the wearing out of J.W.'s interest. Certainly not, the news being just what he wanted to know, and the reporter thereof being just the person he wanted to tell it to him.

One bit of news Jeannette did not tell, for the sufficient reason that she did not know it. Pastor Drury and Brother Marty _had_ become great friends, but what Jeannette could not tell was the special bond of interest which was back of the fact. Marty had long been aware that for some reason the Delafield pastor was peculiarly concerned about J.W. Never did he guess Walter Drury's secret, but he knew well enough there was one.

These two, the town preacher and the young circuit rider, read to each other J.W.'s letters, and talked much about him and his experiences, and made J.W. in general the theme of many discussions.

"It has been good for the boy that he has had that border trip," said the pastor to Marty a few days before J.W. got back. "Don't you think so?"

Marty was, as ever, J.W.'s ardent and self-effacing chum. "I certainly do," he said. "He's growing, is J.W., and growing the right way. We need business men of just the quality that's showing in him."

The pastor hesitated a moment. Then he spoke: "Marty, when J.W. comes home I hope something will set him thinking about the outer world that has no word of our Christ. He hasn't seen it yet, not clearly; and you know that there isn't any hope for that world to get out of the depths until it gets the news of a Helper. I'm counting on you to help me with J.W. if the chance comes. Just between ourselves, you know."

"I'll do all I can, Mr. Drury; you may be sure of that," said Marty. And he did.

J.W.'s holiday brought several young people together who had not met for a long time. Marty came up again, and spent the day with J.W., all over town, from the store to the house and back again. In the evening Mrs. Farwell made a feast, to which, besides Marty, Jeannette and Alma and Pastor Drury were bidden. Mrs. Farwell was much more to Delafield than the best cook and the most remarkable housekeeper in the place, but her son insisted that she was these to begin with. Certainly, she had not been experimenting on the two J.W.'s all these years for nothing.

After dinner—talk. No need of any other game in that company at such a time. There was plenty to talk about, and all had their reasons for enjoying it. Naturally, J.W. must tell about himself. Letters are all very well, but they are no more than makeshifts, after all. He was modest enough about it, not having any special exploits to parade before their wondering eyes, but quite willing. His Western experiences being called for, he was soon telling, not of desert and cactus and irrigation, but of the people who had so taken his attention, the Mexicans.

"I believe," said he, "that we can do something really big down there. And it's our business. Nobody except American Christians will do it; nobody else can. Besides, the Mexicans are Christians in name, now. What they need is the reality. They are not impossible—just uncertain. All I heard and what little I saw made me believe they are suffering from bad leadership and ignorance more than from anything hopelessly wrong. They seem easy to get along with. The women are the most patient workers I ever heard of. And the poor Mexicans, the 'peons,' do want an end to fighting and banditry."

"Well, J.W.," Marty asked, "what's the first thing we ought to think about for Mexico?"

"I told you I don't know anything about Mexico, except at second-hand. But, I should say, schools. Schools are good for any land, don't you think, Mr. Drury? And in Mexico they are such great disturbers of the old slouching indifference. They will make the right kind of discontent. Schools bring other things; new ideas of health and sanitation, home improvement, social outlook, and all that. Then, with the schools, I guess, the straight gospel. The Mexicans won't get converted all at once, and they won't become like us, ever. But I'm about ready to say that whether missions are needed anywhere else or not, they surely are needed in Mexico. And Mexico is the first stepping-stone to South America; which is next on my list of the places that ought to have the whole scheme of Christian teaching and life."

"Yes," said Alma, "and you know, I suppose, that the beginning of our Panama Mission was an Epworth League Institute enterprise? Well, it was. California young people assumed the support of the first missionary sent there, and later he went on down to South America, with the same young people determined to take him on as their representative, just as they did in Panama."

"Where did you get that story?" J.W. wanted to know.

"Oh, I forgot," Alma answered him, laughing. "You haven't had time to read The Epworth Herald in Saint Louis."

"Yes, I have, young lady," J.W. retorted, "but I missed that. Anyway, it's on the right track. I think we've got to change the thinking of all Latin America about Christianity, if we can. Most of the men, they say, are atheists, made so very largely by their loss of faith in the church; and many of the women substitute an almost fierce devotion to the same church for what we think of as being genuine religion."

The minister spoke up just here. "I should think it would be pretty difficult to treat our United States Mexicans in one way, and those across the Rio Grande in another. We must evangelize on both sides of the river, but only on this side can we even attempt to Americanize."

"That's right," J.W. affirmed. "And even on this side we can't do what we may do in Delafield. The language is a big question, and it has two sides. But no matter what the difficulties, I'm for a great advance of missions and education, starting with Mexico and going all the way to Cape Horn."

"That's all very fine," interposed Marty, "but what about the rest of the world, J.W.? What about the world that has not even the beginning of Christian knowledge?" Marty had put the question on the urge of the moment, and not until it was out did he remember that Mr. Drury had asked him to help raise this very issue.

"Well," J.W. answered, slowly, "maybe that part of the world is worse, though I don't know. But we can't tackle everything. Latin America is an immense job by itself, and we have some real responsibility there; a sort of Christian Monroe Doctrine. Ought we to scatter our forces? The non-Christian world has its own religions, and has had them for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. What's the hurry just now? If we could do everything, we Protestant Christians, I mean, in this country and Britain, it might be different, but we can't. Why not concentrate?"

"Yes," Marty came back, "but not because Latin America is so nearly Christian. What about this atheism and superstition and ignorance; isn't it just a non-Christian civilization with Christian labels on some parts of it?"

"One thing I've heard," put in Jeannette, not that she wanted to argue, but she felt she ought to say something on J.W.'s side if she could, "that the religions of the Orient, at least, are really great religions, more suited to the minds of the people than any other. 'East is East, and West is West,' you know. But, of course, the people don't live up to the high levels of their beliefs. Americans don't, either."

Mr. Drury shot an amused yet admiring glance at Jeannette. What a loyal soul she was! Then said he: "The religions of the East _are_ great religions, Jeannette. They represent the best that men can do. The Orient has a genius for religion, and it has produced far better systems than the West could have done. Some of the truth that we Western people get only in Christianity the thinkers of Asia worked out for themselves. But God was back of it all."

That suited J.W.'s present mood. "All right, then; let's clean up as we go—Delafield, Saint Louis, the Southwest, Mexico, Latin America; that's the logical order. Then the rest of the world."

Marty put in a protest here: "That won't do, old man. Your logic's lame. You want us to go into Mexico now, with all we've got. Your letters have said so, and you've said it again to-night. But we're not 'cleaning up as we go.' Look at Delafield; the town you've moved away from. Look at Saint Louis; the town where you make your living. Are they Christianized? Cleaned up? Yet you are ready for Mexico. No; you're all wrong, J.W. I don't believe the world's going to be saved the way you break up prairie sod, a field at a time, and let the rest alone. We've got to do our missionary work the way they feed famine sufferers. They don't give any applicant all he can eat, but they try to make the supply go 'round, giving each one a little. Remember, J.W., the rest of the world is as human as our western hemisphere."

"I know," admitted J.W. "And I don't say I've got the right of it. I'd have to see the Orient before I made up my mind. But those countries have waited a long while. A few more years wouldn't be any great matter."

Alma Wetherell now joined the opposition. It looked as though J.W. and Jeannette must stand alone, for the old people said nothing, though they listened with eager ears. Said Alma, "I think it would matter a lot. The more we do for one people, while ignoring all the others, the less we should care to drop a developing work to begin at the bottom somewhere else."

"There's something in that," J.W. conceded. "I'm not meaning to be stubborn. But I've had just a glimpse of the size of the missionary job in one little corner of the world. Even that is too big for us. We could put our whole missionary investment into Mexico without being able to do what is needed."

"The missionary job, as you call it, is too big, certainly, for our present resources," said the pastor. "Everybody knows that."

"Yes," said Marty, who wondered if Mr. Drury had forgotten their compact about J.W., "but why limit ourselves to our present resources? They are not all we could get, if the church came to believe in the bigness of her privilege. I'd like to see for myself, as J.W. says, but I can't. Why don't you get a real traveling job, and go about the world looking things over for us, old man?"

"Me?" J. W. said, sarcastically; "yes, that's a likely prospect. Just as I'm getting over being scared by a sample case. I'll do well to hold the job I've got."

Alma didn't know what Marty's game was, but she played up to his suggestion. "Why shouldn't you go?" she asked. "You've told us that Cummings hardware and tools are sold all over the world. Doesn't that mean salesmen? And aren't you a salesman? They have to send somebody; why shouldn't they pick on you some time?"

J. W. rose to the lure, for the moment all salesman. "Nothing in it, Alma; no chance at all. But I would like to show the world the civilizing values of good tools, and I'd go if I got the chance."

Jeannette's reaction was quicker than thinking; "Would you go half way around the world just for that?" she asked, with a hint of alarm.

"Why, yes, I would," said J.W., "that is, if you were willing."

Whereupon everybody laughed but Jeannette, whose pale cheeks flamed into sudden rosiness.

The minister came to her rescue. "It would be a good thing every way, if more laymen would see the realities of Oriental life and bring back an impartial report. Suppose you should be right, J.W., and we found that the Orient could wait until the western hemisphere had been thoroughly Christianized. Think how many thousands—perhaps millions—of dollars could be directed into more productive channels. I can see what a great influence such reports would have if they came from Christian laymen. We have learned to expect stories of complete failure when the ordinary traveler comes back; and maybe the missionaries have their bias too. But business men with Christian ideals—that would be different."

Now, all this was far from unpleasant to J.W. He detested posing, but why wouldn't it be worth something to have laymen report on missionary work? Of course, though, if the time ever came when the firm was willing to trust him abroad, he wouldn't have much chance to study missions. Business would have to come first. It was no less a dream for being an agreeable one.

"There's no danger of my going," he told them. "The Cummings people are not sending cub salesmen to promote their big Asiatic trade. What could they make by it?"

Then the talk drifted to the Carbrooks. Marty said, "Well, we've spoiled your scheme a little, J.W., right here in Delafield. Joe Carbrook and Marcia are in China by now, and I'd like to see both of 'em as they get down to work. You can't keep all our interest on this side of the Pacific so long as those two are on the other."

"No," said J.W., warmly, "and I don't want to. I'll help to back up those two missionaries wherever they go." And his thoughts went back to camp fire night at Cartwright Institute, when he had said to Joe Carbrook without suspecting the consequences, "Say, Joe; if you think you could be a doctor, why not a missionary doctor?"

Then he asked the company, "Just where have these missionary infants been sent?"

Nobody knew, exactly. They had the name of the town and the province, but the geography of China is not as yet familiar even to those who support the missions and missionaries of that vast, mysterious land.

The pastor thought it was two or three hundred miles inland from Foochow. "Anyhow," said he, "it is a good-sized town, of about one hundred thousand people or more, and Joe's hospital is the only one in the whole district. The man whose place he takes is home on furlough, and I've looked up his work in the Annual Report of the Foreign Missions Board. Six or eight years ago the hospital was a building of sun-dried brick, with a mud floor and accommodations for about seventy-five patients. He was running it on something like five dollars a day. But it is better now, costs more too. And there's a school attached, where Marcia has already begun to make herself necessary, or I'm much mistaken."

So the talk ran on, until the evening was far spent, and everybody wished there could be half a dozen such evenings before J. W. must go back to Saint Louis and the road.

No other opportunity offered, however, and all too soon for some people J. W. was gone again from Delafield.

Walter Drury, seeing his chance, set himself to follow up the talk of that one evening. It had given him a lead as to the next phase of the Experiment, and he wanted to try out the idea before anything else might happen.

So he wrote to his brother Albert in Saint Louis. "I know I'm a bother to you," the letter ran, "but you have always been generous, being your own unselfish self. It's about young Farwell, 'John Wesley, Jr.,' you know. I judge he's a boy with a fine business future, and I've found out from his father some of the reasons why he is making good. Now, I don't know much about business, but it seems to me that the very qualities which make J. W. a good salesman for a beginner would be profitable to his company if they sent him to their Oriental trade. He's young enough to learn something over there. My own interest is not on that side of the affair, but I know it would be out of the question to suggest his going unless the Cummings people could see a business advantage in it. If you think it is not asking too much, I wish you would talk to Mr. McDougall about it. Tell him what I have written, and what I told you long ago about J.W."

Albert Drury had unbounded confidence in his brother's sincerity and sense, so he lost no time in getting an interview with his friend McDougall.

"See here, Peter," said he, "I'll be frank with you; I know you think I'd better be if I'm to get anywhere."

"That's very true," said McDougall, with assumed severity.

"Well, then, read my brother's letter; and then tell me if he's wanting the impossible."

Peter McDougall read the letter twice. "No," he said, when he handed it back, "he's not wanting the impossible. He's given me an idea. I owe you something already, for finding this young fellow, and I'll tell you what I'm thinking of. Of course the boy isn't seasoned enough yet, but he's getting there fast. A couple of long trips, a few months under my own eye here in the office, and he'll be ready. Now, your brother has hinted at exactly what young Farwell is good for. That boy sells goods by getting over onto the buyer's side. And he knows tools—knew 'em before we hired him. Well, then, here's the idea; one big need of our foreign trade is to show our agencies what can really be done with American hardware and tools. It takes more than a salesman; and Farwell has the knack. So there you are. Tell your brother the boy shall have his chance."

A few months later McDougall sent for J.W. and put the whole proposal before him.

"But I'm not an expert, Mr. McDougall," J.W. protested. "I haven't the experience, and I might fall down completely in a new field like that."

"We're not looking for an expert," said McDougall, shortly. "You know what every user of our stuff ought to know; you can put yourself in his place; and you'll be a sort of missionary. How about it?"

At the word J.W.'s memory awoke, and he heard again what had been said in the living room at Delafield when he was last at home. A missionary! And here was the very chance they had all talked about.

"Of course I should like to go, if you think I'll do," he said.

Peter looked at him more kindly than was his wont. "My boy," he said, "I know something about you outside of business, though not much. And I think you'll do. Mind you, your missionary work will be tools and hardware, not the Methodist Church. You will have to show people who have their own ideas about tools how much more convenient our goods are; handier, lighter, more adaptable. What they need over there is modern stuff. It will help them to raise more crops and do better work and earn a better income. You've nothing to do with selling policies, finance, credits, and all that. Just be a tool and hardware missionary."

"Where had you thought of sending me?" asked J.W., still somewhat dazed.

"Oh, wherever we have agencies that you can use as bases: China, the Philippines, Malaysia, India. You will have to figure on a year or nearly that. And you mustn't stick to the ports or the big cities. Get hold of people who'll show you the country; the places where our goods are most needed and least known. Study the people and their tools. Work out better ways of doing things. Don't try to hustle the East, but remember that the East is doing a little hustling on its own account these days. And talk turkey to our agencies—when you're sure you have something to talk about."

The rest is detail. The trip determined on, preparations were hastened. A month before the date of starting J.W. had time for no more than a hurried visit to Delafield, to say good-by to the home folk and to the preacher whom he had come to think of as Timothy might have thought of Paul. Then he had something else to say to Jeannette. His prospects were becoming so promising that he could ask her a very definite question, and he dared to hope for a definite answer.

Jeannette, troubled at the thought of his long absence in strange lands, consoled herself by her promise, which was his promise also. As soon as he came home again they would be married. Brother Drury should officiate, assisted by "the Rev. Martin Luther Shenk, brother of the charming bride," as J.W. put it.

Walter Drury was not his usual alert self, J.W. thought, and it hurt him to see his much-loved friend touched even a little by the years. But the pastor brightened up, and grew visibly better as J.W. told him all his plans.

"Just think, Mr. Drury," he said with animation, "I'm to be a missionary, after all. Once long ago I remember you suggested I might go to China and see for myself the difference between their religion and ours; and now I'm going to China. Who knows, maybe I'll see Joe Carbrook at his work. And then I'm to go all over the East, to preach the gospel of better tools." Then he became thoughtful. "Don't you think that's almost as good as the gospel of better bodies—Joe's gospel?"

"Surely, I do," said the pastor, "if you and Joe preach in the same spirit, knowing that China won't be saved even by hospitals and modern hardware. They help. But remember our understanding; you have your chance now to see the religions of the East. Going right among the people, as you will, you can find out more in a week than the average tourist ever discovers. I'll give you the names of some people who will gladly help you. And we shall want a full report when you come back. God bless you, J.W."

It was a tired preacher who went to bed that night. This new adventure of his boy's; what would it mean to the Experiment? He had done his best to keep that long-ago pledge to himself. Not always had the project been easy; he could not control all its circumstances, but in the main it had gone well.

And now J.W. was in the last stage of the Experiment Walter Drury had contrived to shape its larger conditions, with the help of many friendly but unsuspecting conspirators. This tour in the interest of better tools was due mainly to his initiative. But he could do nothing more. The event was now out of his hands. The relaxed tension made him realize that his nerves were shaky, and he had a sense of great depression. But before he went to bed he pulled himself together long enough to write to five missionaries, including Joe Carbrook, whose fields were on or near the route J.W. would travel. He had told J.W. that he would let these men know of his coming, but he did more. To each one he said a word of appeal. "Don't argue much with this boy of mine; I want him to see it without too many second-hand opinions. Explain all you please, and let him get as near as he can to the people you are dealing with. If, as I hope, he gets a glimpse of the work's inner meaning, I shall be satisfied."




The first day which J.W. spent in Shanghai was a big day for him. Even amid the strangeness of the scene he felt almost at home. The people who had the Cummings agency had received their instructions, and were prepared to help him every way. He could begin an up-country trip at once if he wished. Then he met the first of the men to whom Pastor Drury had written, Mark Rutledge, and at once he saw that this well-groomed, alert young missionary, who used modern speech in deliberate but direct fashion, would be of immense service to him.

Rutledge received J. W.'s gospel of tools with almost boyish enthusiasm. "I've always said," he exclaimed, "that if the other business men of America had as much sense as the tobacco folks they would hasten the Christianizing of China by many a year. Not that tobacco is helping; far from it. But it's the idea of fitting their product to this particular market. And your house has evidently caught that idea. You must have a real sales manager in Saint Louis! Of course I'll help you all I can."

Some of the help which Mark Rutledge gave him was of a sort that J. W. could not rightly estimate at the time, but he knew it was good. As long as he stayed in Shanghai, and as often he came back to the city as a base, he and Rutledge were pretty frequently together. The missionary kept his own counsel as to the Drury letter, merely dropping a hint now and then, or a suggestion which fitted both the Cummings agency's program and the pastor's desire.

The inland trips for business purposes kept J. W. busy for weeks; he found himself in so utterly novel a situation that he saw he could not work out anything without careful study and expert Chinese cooperation. As he came and went he saw, under Rutledge's guidance, much of the inside of mission work. In Shanghai he found a Methodist publishing house, sending out literature all over China, as well as two monthly papers, one in Chinese and one in English. Many missionary boards had headquarters here. From Shanghai as a business center every form of missionary work was being promoted, reaching as far as the foothills of the Thibetan plateau. Hospital equipment was distributed, and school equipment, and supplies of every variety. He saw that it was the financial center too, and mission finance is a special science. Shanghai seemed to J. W. to be one of the great capitals of the missionary world.

Rutledge's own work, many sided as J. W. saw it was, had two aspects of special significance. Rutledge was sending back to America all the information he could gather from the whole field. With the skill of a trained reporter he showed the missionaries how to write so as to make a genuine story seem convincing, and how to subordinate the details to the importance of making a clear and single impression.

The other work of Rutledge's which caught J. W.'s eye was his activity in behalf of the young people of China. Until lately nothing at all had been done comparable to the specialized development of young people's work in America, but now the Epworth League was beginning to be utilized and adapted to Chinese ways. Funds were available—not much, but a beginning. Leaders were being trained. A larger measure of local, Chinese help was being employed.

J. W. asked Mark Rutledge about all this one day. "Isn't it going to make a difference with the work by and by, if you get so many natives into places of responsibility? Are they ready for it?"

"No," said Rutledge, "they're not. But we must make them ready. You haven't begun to see China yet, but already you can see that the country could never be 'evangelized,' even in the narrowest use of that word, by foreign missionaries. And it ought not to be."

"You mean that we Americans ought to consider our work in China as temporary?" J.W. asked.

Rutledge answered, "Frankly, I do, if you let me put my own meaning into 'temporary,' We must start things. And much that must be done in the long run has not yet been started. We must stay here beyond my life expectation or yours. But China will be Christianized by the Chinese, not by foreigners. As far ahead as we can see the work will have help from outside, but I honestly want the time to come when we missionaries will be looked upon as the foreign helpers of the Chinese Church; not, as now, controlling the work ourselves and enlisting the services of 'native helpers.'"

"Then tell me another thing," J.W. persisted. "Is our Christianity, as the Chinese get it, any advance on their own religion? Or is their religion all right, if they would work it as we hope they may work the Christian program?"

"That's two questions," said Rutledge, dryly, "but, after all, it is only one. Our Christianity as the Chinese get it is far ahead of the best they have, in ideals, in human values, everything, even if they were more consistent in responding to its claims than Christians are. The old religions—and China has several—are helpless. We are not killing off the old faiths. If we should get out to-morrow these would none the less die out in time, but then China would be left without any religion at all. Instead, she's going to have the Christian faith in a form that will accord with the genius of the Chinese mind. That's my sure confidence, or I wouldn't be here."

It was necessary that J.W. should run down the coast to Foochow, the base for his next operations in the hardware adventure. "I know I'm green," he said to Rutledge, "and I may be thinking of impossibilities, but do you suppose there'll be any chance for me to get up to Dr. Carbrook's place from Foochow? I've told you about him and his wife, and I'd rather see those two than anybody else in all the East."

"It's not impossible at all," Rutledge assured him. "Carbrook's post is not so very far from Foochow, as distances go in China, and Ralph Bellew at the college will help you."

"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 Cummings 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 Cummings 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."

Dr. Joe Carbrook Does Such Work As This in China

"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 gratitude, 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 bump 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 nobody 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 tither, 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 Cummings 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 fashion.

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 Institute, 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 illustrated in gorgeousness of color and costume and accessories the history of the college. Besides all this pomp and circumstance 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 Cummings 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 Cummings 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 Cummings 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 spaces 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 shipboard he had encountered the usual assortment of missionary critics; the unobservant, 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 massed humanity too great for any but the merest guesses at its numbers. This "Mela," feast, religious pilgrimage, whatever it might mean to these endless multitudes, 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.

With the others J.W. set out for an advantageous observation point, on the wall of the fort which stands on the tongue of land between the two streams. On the way J.W. assured himself that if Calcutta seemed without religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances. In the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side. And yonder another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning close about him. The seeker after he knew not what who made his search while lying on a bed of spikes was here. And once a procession passed, two hundred men, all holy after the fashion of Hindu holiness, all utterly naked, with camels and elephants moving in their train. As if to show how these were counted men of special sanctity, the people fell on their faces to the ground beside them as they passed, and kissed their shadows on the sand.

The point of vantage reached, J.W.'s bewildered eyes could scarce make his brain believe what they saw. He was standing on a broad wall, thirty feet above the water, and perhaps a hundred feet back from it. Up and down the stream was an endless solid mass of heads. J.W. looked for some break in the crowd, some thinning out of its packed bodies, but as far as he could see there was no break, no end. Government officials had estimated the number of pilgrims at two millions!

A signal must have been given, or an hour had come—J. W. could not tell which—but somehow the people knew that now was the opportunity to enter the water and gain cleansing from all sin. A mighty, resistless movement carried the human stream to meet the river. Inevitably the weaker individuals were swept along helpless, and those who fell arose no more. Horrified, J. W. stood looking down on the slow, irresistible movement of the writhing bodies, and he saw a woman drop. A British police officer, standing in an angle of the wall beneath, ordered a native policeman to get the woman out But the native, seeing the crush and unwilling to risk himself for so slight a cause, waited until his superior turned away to another point of peril, and then, snatching the red-banded police turban from his head, was lost in the general mass.

The woman? Trampled to death, and twenty other men and women with her, in sight of the stunned watchers on the wall, who were compelled to see these lives crushed out, powerless to help by so much as a finger's weight.

What was it all for? J. W. asked his companions on the wall. And they said that the word went out at certain times and the people flocked to this Mela. They came to wash in the sacred waters at the propitious moment. Nothing else mattered; not the inescapable pollution of the rivers, not the weariness and hunger and many distresses of the way. It was a chance, so the wise ones declared, to be rid of sin. Certainly it might not avail, but who would not venture if mayhap there might be cleansing of soul in the waters of Mother Ganges?

On another day J. W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple. Here was a family which had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this temple. They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water from the river to a third. No one might know what inner urge had driven them here. The priest, slow to heed them, at length deigned to dip his finger in a little paint and with it he smeared the caste mark on the foreheads of the worshipers. It was heartless, empty formality.

J. W. watched the woman particularly. Her face was an unrelieved sadness; she had fulfilled the prescribed rites, in the appointed place, but there was no surcease from the endless round of dull misery which she knew was her ordained lot. Thought J. W.: "I suppose this is a sort of joining the church, an initiation or something of that sort. Not much like what happened when I joined the church in Delafield. Everybody was glad there; here nobody is glad, not even the priest."

At Cawnpore J. W. was able to combine business with his missionary inquiries. Here he found great woollen and cotton mills, not unlike those of America, except that in these mills women and children were working long hours, seven days a week, for a miserable wage. It was heathenism plus commercialism; that is to say, a double heathenism. For when business is not tempered by the Christian spirit, it is as pagan as any cow temple.

In these mills was a possible market for certain sorts of Cummings goods, as J.W. learned in the business quarter of the city. He wanted more opportunity to see how the goods he dealt in could be used, and, having by now learned the path of least resistance, he appealed to a missionary. It was specially fortunate that he did, for the missionary introduced him to the secretary of the largest mills in the city, an Indian Christian with a history.

Now, this is a hint at the story of—well, let us call him Abraham. His own is another Bible name, of more humble associations, but he deserves to be called Abraham. Thirty years ago a missionary first evangelized and then baptized some two hundred villagers—outcasts, untouchables, social lepers. Being newly become Christians, they deposed their old village god. The landlord beat them and berated them, but they were done with the idol. Now, that was no easy adventure of faith, and those who thus adventured could not hope for material gain. They were more despised than ever.

Yet inevitably they began to rise in the human scale. The missionary found one of them a young man of parts. Him he took and taught to read, to write, to know the Scriptures. He began to be an exhorter; then a local preacher; and at last he joined the Conference as a Methodist itinerant at six dollars a month. Now this boy was the father of Abraham.

As a preacher he opened village schools, and taught the children their letters, his own boy among them. Abraham learned quickly. A place was found for him in a mission boarding school. Thence he moved on and up to Lucknow Christian College. It was this man who escorted J.W. through the great mills of which he was an executive. He had a salary of two hundred dollars a month. If his father had been an American village preacher at twelve hundred dollars a year, Abraham's salary, relatively, would need to be twenty or thirty thousand dollars.

Abraham was the superintendent of a Sunday school in Cawnpore. He was giving himself to all sorts of betterment work which would lessen the misery of the poor. He had a seat in the city council. A hostel for boys was one of his enterprises. Here was a man doing his utmost to Christianize the industry in which thousands of his country men spent their lives; a second-generation Christian, and a man who must be reckoned with, no longer spurned and despised as a casteless nobody.

J.W. followed Abraham about the mills with growing admiration. Inside the walls, light, orderly paths, flowers, cleanliness. Outside the gate, to step across the road was to walk a thousand years into the past, among the smells and the ageless noises of the bazaar, with its chaffering and cheating, its primitive crudities, and its changeless wares. Certainly, a Cawnpore mill is not the ideal industrial commonwealth, but without men like Abraham to alleviate its grimness the coming of larger opportunities through work like this might well lay a heavier burden on men's lives than the primitive and costly toil which it has displaced.

There was just time for a visit to Lucknow, a city which to the British is the historic place of mutiny and siege; to American Methodists a place both of history and of present-day advance. J. W. worshiped in the great Hindustani Methodist church, the busy home of many activities. In the congregation were many students, girls from Isabella Thoburn College, and boys from Lucknow Christian College. Lifelong Methodist as he was, J. W. quickly recognized, even amid these new surroundings, the familiar aspects of a Methodist church on its busy day. The crowding congregations were enough to stir one's blood. A noble organ sounded out the call to worship and led the choir and people in the service of praise. There was a Sunday school in full operation, and an Epworth League Chapter, completely organized and active. His guide confided to J. W. that this church had yet another point of resemblance to the great churches at home; it was quite accustomed to sending a committee to Conference, to tell the bishop whom it wanted for preacher next year!

J. W. was not quite satisfied. The days of his wanderings must soon be over, but before he left India he wanted to see the missionary in actual contact with the immemorial paganism of the villages, for he had discovered that the village is India. How was the Christian message meeting all the dreary emptinesses and limitations of village life?

Once more he appealed to his missionary guide; this latest one, the last of the five men to whom Pastor Drury had written before J.W. had set out on his travels. Could he show his visitor a little of missionary work in village environment?

"Surely. Nothing easier," the district superintendent said. "We'll jump into my Ford—great thing for India, the Ford; and still greater for us missionaries—and we'll go a-villaging."

The village of their quest once reached, the Ford drew up before a neat brick house built around three sides of a courtyard, with verandas on the court side. This was no usual mud hut, but a house, and a parsonage withal. Here lived the Indian village preacher and his family. The preacher's wife was neatly dressed and capable; the children clean and well-mannered. The room had its table, and on the table books. That meant nothing to J.W., but the superintendent gave him to understand that a table with books in an Indian village house was comparable in its rarity to a small-town American home with a pipe organ and a butler!

The lunch of native food seemed delicious, if it was "hot," to J.W.'s healthy appetite, and if he had not seen over how tiny a fire it had been prepared he would have credited the smiling housewife with a lavishly equipped kitchen.

People began to drop in. It was somewhat disconcerting to the visitor, to see these callers squatting on their heels, talking one to another, but watching him continually out of the corners of their eyes. One of them, the chaudrie, headman of the village, being introduced to J. W., told him, the superintendent acting as interpreter, how the boys' school flourished, and how he and other Christians had gone yesterday on an evangelizing visit to another village, not yet Christian, but sure to ask for a teacher soon.

The preacher, in a rather precise, clipped English, asked J. W. if he cared to walk about the village. "We could go to the _mohulla_ [ward], where most of our Christians live. They will be most glad to welcome you."

The way led through dirty, narrow streets, or, rather, let us say, through the spaces between dwellings, to the low-caste quarter. Here were people of the bottom stratum of Indian life, yet it was a Christian community in the making. The little school was in session—a group of fifteen or twenty boys and girls with their teacher. It was all very crude, but the children read their lessons for the visitor, and did sums on the board, and sang a hymn which the pastor had composed, and recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third psalm.

"These," said the pastor, "are the children of a people which for a thousand years has not known how to read or write. Yet see how they learn."

"Yes," the superintendent agreed, "but that isn't the best of it, as you know. They are untouchables now, but even caste, which is stronger than death, yields to education. Once these boys and girls have an education they cannot be ignored or kept down. They will find a place in the social order."

"I can see that," J.W. said, thinking of Abraham. "But education is not a missionary monopoly, is it? If these children were educated by Hindus, would not the resulting rise in their condition come just the same?"

"It would, perhaps," the missionary answered, "but your 'if' is too big. For the low caste and the out-caste people there is no education unless it is Christian education. We have a monopoly, though not of our choosing. The educated Hindu will not do this work under any circumstances. It has been tried, with all the prestige of the government, which is no small matter in India, and nothing comes of it. Not long ago the government proposed a wonderful scheme for the education of the 'depressed classes.' The money was provided, and the equipment as well. There were plenty of Hindus, that is, non-Christians, who were indebted to the government for their education. They were invited to take positions in the new schools. But no; not for any money or any other inducement would these teachers go near. And there you are. I know of no way out for the great masses of India except as the gospel opens the door."

"Is there no attempt of any sort on the part of Indians who are not Christians? Surely, some of them are enlightened enough to see the need, and to rise above caste." J. W. suspected he was asking a question which had but one answer.

"Yes, there is such an effort occasionally," the superintendent admitted. "The Arya Samaj movement makes an attempt once in a while, but it always fails. If a few are bold enough to disregard caste, they are never enough to do anything that counts. The effort is scarcely more than a gesture, and even so it would not have been made but for the activities of the missionaries."




And so ended J. W.'s Indian studies. Before many days he was retracing his way—Calcutta, Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, Yokohama. And then on a day he found himself aboard a liner whose prow turned eastward from Japan's great port, and his heart was flying a homeward-bound pennant the like of which never trailed from any masthead.




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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