“Didn’t you get up?” our elder missionary demanded.
Astonishment broke upon the fat placid face of the schoolmaster. “What — I?” he retorted. “I am a scholar, and naturally I have no crude courage. I told my wife to get up, but by the time she had put on her outer garments the robbers were gone.”
No one in our town blamed him, for physical courage was not admired and certainly not expected of learned men. “Of the thirty-six ways of escape,” a Chinese proverb preaches, “the best is to run away.” It has been part of the revolution in China to repudiate this proverb and to lift up the soldier from the traditional position in society given him by Confucius and make him into something more nearly resembling the Western soldier, who is given the honor and glory that make easy heroes of our military men. Which conception is right? I can only say that in old Asia where the soldier was given no honor and war was without glory, there arose a culture which emphasized learning and wisdom and which produced no great and soul-racking world wars.
When my mind returns to the years I lived in that small northern town, I see people not in masses but individual and beloved. Madame Chang remains as one of the greatest women I have ever known. She lived just down our street, the matriarch of a large family, a tall and ample figure, dressed in a full skirt and a knee-length coat, as old-fashioned as a family portrait, her hair drawn tightly back from her round kind face. She was a Christian, at least she was a church member and a sincere one, but even the elder missionary took no credit for this. She had been a leader among the Buddhists before she became a Christian, and she was still a Buddhist. She joined the Christian church, she once told me, as a kindness to the foreigners, who were strangers in the town and whom she wished to encourage when she perceived that their works were good. Madame Chang was a widow, and like so many strong good women, she had been married to a weak and lazy man. He died when she was still young and the Buddhist priests in the temple told her that he had not gone to heaven but had been detained in purgatory. It was her duty, they told her, to release him by prayers and gifts to the temple, and for some years she had spent herself on the project of getting the poor man out of his misery. Bit by bit, the priests assured her, he was being freed, until he was held only by his left foot. Christianity then came to her aid to the extent of convincing her that the priests were hoaxing her, and wherever her husband was she let him remain thereafter. Strangely enough, this story of purgatory, common enough to dishonest Buddhist priests, I later heard in Ireland from a Catholic priest as a joke.
Madame Chang was a jolly kind-hearted soul, and every good work in the town had her support. Whenever something new was begun, the universal demand was “Does Madame Chang approve it?” If so, then the people got solidly behind it. There were no barriers between her and other human beings, and sometimes when my own heart ached for reasons I could not reveal, it did me good just to lay my head down upon her broad soft shoulder and be still for a bit. Never did she ask me what was the matter, but in her wisdom I felt she knew.
My neighbor to the left, Madame Wu, was entirely different. She was a thin beautiful woman, past middle age but still beautiful, and she ruled her big household with an absolute authority. Gossip told me that she had driven to suicide her eldest daughter-in-law and this out of sheer jealousy because her eldest son, her favorite, had fallen in love with his wife after marriage. This enraged her, for she had purposely married him to a girl not beautiful so that her own hold over him would not be threatened, and she had made the young wife so miserable that the poor creature hung herself from a rafter one day in her husband’s absence. The young husband had not spoken to his mother since except in the barest necessity of filial speech. If Madame Wu felt this, she gave no sign of it. She was as proud as ever and she chose another wife for her son. Yet she was a friend to me, and from her I learned much about the ancient and time-honored ways of a family such as hers. She had exquisite clothes, garments of hand-woven satins and silks and many kinds of furs from the North. She even had a coat lined with fine Russian sable, which had belonged to her grandmother. She taught me a great deal, giving me instruction in correct local manners among other things, and from her I learned much Chinese poetry. She too could not read, but she had been a precocious child, an only daughter, and her father had taught her poetry.
We had many beggars in our town, professional beggars usually, and they lived not so much on charity as on the Buddhists who for the sake of their souls would perform deeds of merit, among which was to give money to the poor. I was annoyed especially by the number of idle young men among these beggars, and one day upon my entering a side street to visit the house of a friend, a particularly impudent and bumptious beggar boy of about seventeen demanded alms. I stopped and looked at him hard.
“Why are you a beggar?” I asked.
He was taken aback by this and hung his head and mumbled that he had to eat.
“Why don’t you work?” I asked next.
“Who would give me work?” he retorted.
“I will,” I said firmly. “Follow me into our gate and I will give you a hoe and you can hoe out the weeds in my garden.”
This I did, amused to observe his sad face and reluctant hands as he took the hoe.
“How long am I to work before I am paid?” he asked.
“Work until noon and I will give you money enough to buy yourself two bowls of noodles for your dinner,” I told him. “Work until the end of the day and I will give you a day’s wage. Come back tomorrow and I will give you another day’s wage at nightfall.”
I left him and returned at noon to find a meager effort the result of his morning’s work. Nevertheless I gave him the coins for his noodles and bade him come back when he had eaten.
He did not come back. I never saw him again until about six months later, when I happened to meet him in another street on the opposite side of the town where I seldom went. He put out his hand to beg, and when he saw who I was horror spread over his brown face. Without one word he darted away and after this time I truly never saw him again.
One Christmas Eve I heard a childish voice at our back door, and opening it, I found there on the doorstep a little boy of perhaps eight, thin and starved, and clad only in a cotton shirt. He was a pretty boy, unusually so, and he looked at me with huge dark eyes.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“They told me it was your feast day and I thought you might have some scraps for me to eat,” he said plaintively.
“Where are you parents?” I asked.
“I have none,” he said.
“You must have a family,” I remonstrated.
“I have no one,” he said in his pathetic voice. “My father and mother and I were walking south to escape the northern famine and they fell ill and died and so I am alone.” It was true that there was a famine in the North that year and the boy looked honest. At any rate, my heart was soft with Christmas sentiment, and so I brought him in and bathed him and put warm clothes on him and fed him. Then I made up a cot in the small study and put him to bed. Nothing was hidden in our life, and of course the two servants we employed soon spread the news about the orphan and the next morning my first visitor was Madame Chang. She heard the story and then she inspected the small boy. He looked back at her in apparent innocence, answering her questions while she stared at him thoughtfully. After a while she sent him to the kitchen and she cogitated and then spoke.