“Repeat, please,” said he as usual, and then rode forward and came baek saying, “I do not know the word.”
“What word?”
“What is a lot of people and a dead man?”
“Ah!” said I, jumping to conclusions unwarrantably, “that is a funeral.”
“A funeral!” said he triumphantly. “I have learned a new word.”
Mr. Wang was always learning a new word and rejoicing over it, but, as I had hired him as a finished product, I hardly think it was unreasonable of me to be aggrieved, and to feel that I was paying him a salary for the pleasure of teaching him English. However, on this occasion his triumph was short-lived. .
“Would you like to see the funeral?” he said.
I intimated that I would. My stalwart master of transport lifted me down and the crowded people made a lane for me to pass through, and half of them turned their attention to me, for though there were missionaries in the big towns, a foreigner was a sight to these country people, and, Mr. Wang going first, we arrived at a man with his head cut off! Mercifully he was mixed up with a good deal of matting and planks, but still there was no mistaking the poor dead feet in their worn Chinese shoes turned up to the sky.
Considering we are mortal, it is extraordinary how seldom the ordinary person looks upon death. Always it comes with a shock. At least it did. I suppose this war has accustomed some of us to the sight, so that we take the result of the meeting of mortal man with his last friend on earth more as a matter of eourse, as indeed it should be taken. Of course I know this is one of the results of the war.
My sister's son, staying with me after six months in hospital, consequent upon a wound at Gallipoli, came home from a stroll one day and reported that he had seen nothing, and then at dinner that night mentioned in a casual manner that he had seen two dead men being carried out of a large building and put in a motor ear.
I said in astonishment:
“They couldn't have been dead!”
“Of course they were. Do you think I don't know dead men when I see them? I've seen plenty.”
So many that the sight of a couple in the streets of a quiet little country town seemed not even an occasion for remark.
But I was not even accustomed to thinking of dead men and I turned upon Mr. Wang angrily:
“But that isn't a funeral. That's a corpse,” and once more to my irritation he rejoiced over a new word.
“Who killed him?” I asked.
“They think an enemy has done this thing,” said he sententiously and unnecessarily, as, ignorant as I am of tilings Chinese, I should hardly think even they could have called it a friendly action. The body had been found the day before, and the people were much troubled about it. An official from Ping Yow—a coroner, I suppose we should call him—was coming out to inquire about it, and because the sun was already hot the people had raised a little screen of matting with a table and chairs where he could sit to hold inquiry.
And here was the thing the missionaries had warned me against. Trouble, said they, always begins by the finding of dead bodies that cannot be accounted for, and this body was on the Great South Road. It might be only a case of common murder such as one might perchance meet in Piccadilly, possibly it was due to the bands of soldiers that were pouring into the country—to defend the crossings of the Yellow River, some people said—but it was to me an emphatic reminder that the warnings of Mr. and Mrs. Falls had not been given lightly, and I meditated upon it all the way to Ping Yow.
All day long the soldiers had been pouring through Ki Hsien, all night long they poured through the suburbs of Ping Yow. Not through the town itself—the townspeople were not going to allow that if they could help themselves; and as it was evidently a forced march and the regiments were travelling by night, they could help themselves, for every city gate is shut at sundown. The China Inland Mission had a station at an old camel inn in the eastern suburb, and there the missionary's young wife was alone with five young children, babies all of them, and there I found her. I think she was very glad to see me, anyhow I was someone to discuss things with, and we two women talked and talked over our evening meal. She was a tall, pretty young woman—not even the ugly Chinese dress and her hair drawn back, not a hair out of place, Chinese fashion, could disguise her pathetic beauty. And she was a countrywoman of mine, born and brought up in the same state, Victoria, and her native town was Ararat, green and fresh among the hills. And how she talked Australia! What a beautiful land it was! And the people! The free, independent people! The women who walked easily and feared no man! To thoroughly appreciate a democratic country you should dwell in effete China. But she feared too, this woman, feared for herself and her five tiny children. It would be no easy job to get away. I told her of the dead man I had seen—how should I not tell her?—and she trembled.
“Very likely it is the soldiers,” she said. “I am afraid of the Chinese soldiers.” And so am I in bulk, though taken singly they seem sueh harmless little chaps.
“When the willow is green and the apricot yellow in the fifth moon,” said a metrical inscription on a stone dug up at Nankin in that year—the fatal year 1914—“terrible things will happen in the land of Han.” Terrible things, it seems to me, always happen in the land of Han; but if it spoke for the great world beyond, truly the stone spoke truth, though we did not know it then.
In the evening back from the country where he had been preaching for the last day or two came my Australian's husband, and there also came in to see the stranger two missionaries from the other side of the town. They sat there, these men and women of British race, dressed in the outlandish costume of the people around them—a foolish fashion, it seems to me, for a European in unadulterated Chinese dress looks as ugly and out of place as a Chinese in a stiff collar and a bowler hat. And all the evening we discussed the soldiers and the dead man I had seen, and opinions differed as to the portent.
It is true, said one of them who had been in the country many years, and was a missionary pure and simple, with eyes for nothing but the work he had in hand—which is probably the way to work for success—that a dead body, particularly a dead body by the highroad, is often a sign of unrest, but again, quite as often it means no more than a dead body in any other place. If he had turned back for every dead body he had seen——
Well, I thought I would not turn back either. Not yet, at least.
Never was I sorrier for missionaries, I who have always written against missionaries, than I was for this young countrywoman of mine who never thought of being sorry for herself. It was a big ugly mission compound, the rooms, opening one into another, were plain and undecorated, and the little children as a great treat watered the flowers that struggled up among the stones of the dusty courtyard, and the very watering-can was made with Chinese ingenuity from an old kerosene tin. It seemed to me those little children would have had such a much better chance growing up in their mother's land, or in their father's land—he was a Canadian—among the free peoples of the earth. But who am I, to judge? No one in the world, it seems to me, wants help so much as the poorer Chinese, whose life is one long battle with disease and poverty; and perhaps these poorer missionaries help a little, a very little; but the poorer the mission the poorer the class they reach, and the sacrifice, as I saw it here, is so great.
Next morning we arose early, and I breakfasted with my host and hostess and their five children. The children's grace rings in my ears yet, always I think it will ring there, the childish voices sung it with such fervour and such faith:
“Every day, every day, we bless Thee, we bless Thee,
We praise Thy Name, we praise Thy Name,
For ever and for ever!”
There in the heart of China these little children, who had, it seemed to me, so very little to be grateful for, thanked their God with