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Title: Flash-lights from the Seven Seas
Author: Stidger, William L. (William Le Roy), 1885-1949
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Flash-lights from the Seven Seas" ***
FLASH-LIGHTS
FROM THE SEVEN SEAS
WILLIAM L. STIDGER
[Illustration: MT. TAISHAN, CHINA, SAID TO BE THE OLDEST WORSHIPPING
PLACE ON EARTH.]
FLASH-LIGHTS
FROM THE SEVEN SEAS
BY
WILLIAM L. STIDGER
AUTHOR OF "STANDING ROOM ONLY," "STAR
DUST FROM THE DUGOUTS," "OUTDOOR
MEN AND MINDS," ETC.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL
ILLUSTRATED
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY
THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
DEDICATED TO
MARY I. SCOTT
A WOMAN FRIEND
WHO PUSHED BACK THE HORIZONS OF
THE WORLD AND LED ME TO THE
BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL THAT
HAS NO END: THE TRAIL OF
DREAMS AND TRAVEL
INTRODUCTION
BY BISHOP FRANCIS J. McCONNELL
The Rev. William L. Stidger is one of the most thoroughly alive men in
the ministry today. He sees quickly, reacts instantaneously, and knows
how to bring others to a like alertness of mental and spiritual seizure.
If it be said of him that he is impressionistic it must be remembered
that the impressions are made on a mind of sound purpose and
communicated to others for the sake of the truth behind the impression.
His narratives of travel do not belong in the guide-book category or in
that of the scientific geography. But if you wish to know what it would
be like to visit yourself the countries described, the reading of Mr.
Stidger's sketches will help you. If it be said that what one after all
is getting is the Stidger view, it must not be forgotten that the
Stidger view is marvellously vital and enkindling. The Stidger vitality
is bracing and health-giving. It is a tonic for all of us who are
getting a little old and sluggish. The contagion of youth and energy are
in this book: it will reach and stir all who read.
FRANCIS J. MCCONNELL
_Pittsburgh, Pa._
FOREWORD
That vast stretch of opal islands; jade continents; sapphire seas of
strange sunsets; mysterious masses of brown-skinned humanity;
brown-eyed, full-breasted, full-lipped and full-hipped women; which we
call the Orient, can only be caught by the photographer's art in
flash-light pictures.
It is like a photograph taken in the night. It cannot be clear cut. It
cannot have clean outlines. It can only be a blurred mass of humanity
with burdens on their shoulders; humanity bent to the ground; creaking
carts; weary-eyed children and women; moving, moving, moving; like
phantom shadow-shapes; in and out; one great maze through the majestic
ages; one confused history of the ancient past; emerging; but not yet
out into the sunlight!
Such masses of humanity; such dim, uncertain origins of unfathered
races; these can only be caught and seen as through a glass darkly.
Paul Hutchinson, my friend, in "The Atlantic Monthly" says of China what
is true of the whole Orient:
"In this vast stretch of country, with its poor communications,
we can only know in part. When one sets out to generalize he
does so at his own peril. The only consolation is that it is
almost impossible to disprove any statement; for, however
fantastical, it is probably in accord with the facts in some
part of the land."
The facts, fancies, and fallacies of this book are gleaned from the
rovings and ramblings of a solid year of over fifty-five thousand miles
of travel; through ten separate countries: Japan, Korea, China, the
Philippine Islands, French Indo-China, the Malay States, Borneo, Java,
Sumatra and the Hawaiian Islands; across seven seas: the Pacific Ocean,
the Sea of Japan, the North China Sea, the Yellow Sea, the South China
Sea, the Malacca Straits, and the Sea of Java; after visiting five wild
and primitive tribes: the Ainu Indians of Japan, the Igorrotes of the
Philippines, the Negritos of the same islands; the Dyaks of Borneo, and
the Battaks of Sumatra; face to face by night and day with new races,
new faces, new problems, new aspirations, new ways of doing things, new
ways of living, new evils, new sins, new cruelties, new fears, new
degradations; new hopes, new days, new ways, new nations arising; new
gods, and a new God!
When one comes back from such a trip, having fortified himself with the
reading of many books written about these far lands, in addition to his
travel, one still has the profound conviction that, after all is said,
done, and thought out, the only honest way to picture these vast
stretches of land and humanity is to confess that all is in motion; like
a great mass of bees in a hive, one on top of the other, busy at
buzzing, buying, selling, living, dying, climbing, achieving; groping in
the dark; moving upward by an unerring instinct toward the light.
At nights I cannot sleep for thinking about that weird, dim, misty
panorama of fleeting, flashing pictures; those thousands of Javanese
that I saw down in Sourabaya, who have never known what it means to have
a home; who sleep in doorways by night, and along the river banks; where
mothers give birth to children, who in turn live and die out under the
open sky. Nor can I forget that animal-like beggar in Canton who dug
into a gutter for his food; or those hideous beggars, by winter along
the railway in Shantung; or the naked one-year-old child covered with
sores which a beggar woman in the Chinese section of Shanghai held to
her own naked breast. Those pictures and a thousand others abide.
One has the feeling that if he could go back, again, and again, and
again to these far shores, and live with these peoples and die with
them, then he would begin faintly to understand what it all means and
where it is all headed.
And this author, for one, is honest in saying that, in spite of careful
investigation, in spite of extensive travel and a sympathetic heart, he
sees but dimly. The very glory of it all, the age of it all, the wonder
of it all, the mysterious beauty and thrill of it all; the thrill of
these masses of humanity, their infinite possibilities for future
greatness; like a great blinding flash of glory, dims one's eyes for a
time.
But, now, that he has, through quiet meditation and perspective, had a
chance to develop the films of thought, he finds that he has brought
back home pictures that one ought not to keep to one's self; especially
in this day, when, what happens to Asia is so largely to determine what
happens to America.
So, out of the dark room, where they have been developing for a year,
and out of the dim shadows of that mysterious land whence they came,
they are printed and at the bottom of each picture shall be written the
humble words:
"Flash-Lights from the Seven Seas"
WILLIAM L. STIDGER.
_Detroit, Michigan._
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY BISHOP FRANCIS J. MCCONNELL vii
FOREWORD ix
CHAPTER
I FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME 19
II FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL 33
III FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH 49
IV FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR 63
V FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS 79
VI FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS 101
VII FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN 123
VIII FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM 145
IX FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE 165
X FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP 189
ILLUSTRATIONS
MT. TAISHAN, THE OLDEST WORSHIPPING PLACE
ON EARTH _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE WALLED CITY OF MANILA 48
BEAUTIFUL FILIPINO GIRLS 48
KOREAN GIRLS WITH AMERICAN IDEALS AND TRAINING 49
STEPPING ASIDE IN KOREA 49
CONFUCIUS TOMB AT CHUFU, CHINA 64
RUIN OF THE MING TOMBS 64
GRINDING RICE IN CHINA 65
A CAMEL TRAIN ENTERING PEKING 65
THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN, PEKING 112
A BEAUTIFUL THIRTEEN-STORY PAGODA NEAR PEKING 112
A WAYSIDE TEMPLE AND SHRINE 113
A SUNRISE SILHOUETTE, JAVA 113
OLD BROMO VOLCANO, JAVA 128
A SIDE VIEW OF BEAUTIFUL BOROBOEDOER, JAVA 128
NAKED AND OTHERWISE 129
A DOG MARKET 129
FLASH-LIGHTS FROM THE SEVEN SEAS
CHAPTER I
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FLAME
Fire! Fire! Fire everywhere!
Fire in the sky, fire on the sea, fire on the ships, fire in the
flowers, fire in the trees of the forest; fire in the Poinsetta bushes
which flash their red flames from every yard and jungle.
In the tropical lands flowers do not burst into blossom; they burst into
flame. Great bushes of flaming Poinsetta, as large as American lilac
bushes, burst into flame over night in Manila.
That great tree, as large as an Oak, which they call "The Flame of the
Forest," looks like a tree on fire with flowers. One will roam the world
over and see nothing more beautiful than this great tree which looks
like a massive umbrella of solid flame.
Every flower in the Orient seems to be a crimson flower. The tropical
heat of the Philippines, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay States and
India's far reaches; with beautiful Ceylon, and Burma; seems to give
birth to crimson child-flowers.
The sunsets burst into bloom, as well as the flowers. There is no region
on earth where sunsets flare into birth and die in a flash-light of
glory and beauty like they do in the regions of the South China Sea. For
months at a stretch, every night, without a break, the most wildly
gorgeous, flaming, flaring, flashing crimson sunsets crown the glory of
the days.
I have been interested in catching pictures of sunsets all over the
world. I have caught hundreds of sunsets with the Graflex; and other
hundreds have I captured with a Corona, just as they occurred; and I
have never seen a spot on earth where the sunsets were such glorious
outbursts of crimson and golden beauty as across the circling shores of
Manila Bay.
Night after night I have sat in that ancient city and watched these
tumultuous, tumbling, Turner-like flashes of color.
One night the sky was flame from sea to zenith across Manila Bay. It was
like a great Flame of the Forest tree in full bloom. Against this sky of
flaming sunset-clouds, hundreds of ships, anchored in the bay, lit their
lesser crimson lights; while, now and then, a battleship which was
signaling to another ship, flashed its message of light against the
fading glow of glory in the crimson sunset.
"It is light talking unto light; flash unto flash; crimson unto
crimson!" said a friend who sat with me looking out across that
beautiful bay.
The picture of that flaming sunset, with the great vessels silhouetted
against it; with the little lights on the ships, running in parallel
rows; and the flashing lights of signals from the masts of the
battleship will never die in one's memory.
It was a quiet, peaceful scene.
But suddenly, like a mighty volcano a burst of flame swept into the air
at the mouth of the Pasig River. It leapt into the sky and lighted up
the entire harbor in a great conflagration. The little ships stood out,
silhouetted against that great flaming oil tanker.
"It's a ship on fire!" Otto exclaimed.
"Let's go and see it!" I added.
Then we were off for the mouth of the Pasig which was not far away.
There we saw the most spectacular fire I have ever seen. A great oil
tanker full of Cocoanut-oil had burst into flame, trapping thirty men in
its awful furnace. Its gaunt masts stood out like toppling tree
skeletons from a forest fire against the now deepening might; made vivid
and livid by the bursting flames that leapt higher and higher with each
successive explosion from a tank of gasoline or oil.
I got out my Graflex and caught several pictures of this flash-light of
flame, but none that will be as vivid, as lurid, or as lasting as the
flash-light that was etched into the film of my memory.
The next flash-light of flame came bursting out of midnight darkness on
the island of Java.
We were bound for old Bromo, that giant volcano of Java. We had started
at midnight and it would take us until daylight to reach the
crater-brink of this majestic mountain of fire.
White flashes of light, leapt from Bromo at frequent intervals all night
long as we traveled on ponies through the tropical jungle trail, upward,
and onward to the brink of that pit of hell.
White flashes of light leapt from Bromo at the narrow rail. They called
them "Night-Blooming Lilies," and sure enough they blanketed the rugged
pathway that night like so many tiny white Fairies. Indeed there was
something beautifully weird in their white wonder against the night.
They looked like frail, earth-angels playing in the star-light, sending
out a sweet odor which mingled strangely with the odor of sulphur from
the volcano.
And back of all this was the background of that awful, thundering,
rumbling and grumbling volcano as somber as suicide. Strangely weird
flashes lighted the mountains for miles around.
"It looks like heat lightning back at home," said an American.
"Only the flashes are more vivid!" said another member of the party.
Those flashes of light from the inner fires of the earth, bursting from
the fissures of restless volcano Bromo shall ever remain, like some
strange glimpse of a new Inferno.
Volcanic Merapi, another belching furnace of Java, gave me a picture of
a flash-light of flame.
The night that we stayed up on the old temple of Boroboedoer, Merapi was
unusually active; and now and then its flashes of flame lighted up the
whole beautiful valley between the temple and the mountain.
At each flash of fire, the tall Bamboo and Cocoanut trees loomed like
graceful Javanese women in the midst of far-reaching, green, rice
paddies; while two rivers that met below us, wound under that light like
two silver threads in the night.
Once, when an unusually heavy flash came from Merapi, we saw below us a
beautiful Javanese girl clasped in the arms of her brown lover. Each
seemed to be stark naked as they stood under a Cocoanut tree like Rodin
bronzes.
It was this beautiful girl's voice that we later heard singing to her
lover a Javanese love song in the tropical night.
This, I take it, was the Flame of Love; a flame which lights up the
world forever; everywhere her devotees, clothed or naked, are the same;
forever and a day; be it on the streets of Broadway; along the lanes of
the Berkshire Hills of New England; up the rugged trails of the Sierras;
or along the quiet, tree-lined streets of an American village. It is a
flame; this business of love; a flame which, flashing by day and night,
lights the world to a new glory.
* * * * *
One night the missionaries in Korea saw flames bursting out against the
hills.
"What is it?" they cried, filled with fear.
"The Japanese are burning the Korean villages!" said one who knew.
All night long the villages burned and all night long the people were
murdered. Runners brought news to the hillsides of Seoul where anxious,
broken-hearted American missionaries waited.
"One, two, three, four, five; ten, fifteen, twenty; thirty, forty,
fifty; a hundred, two hundred, three hundred; villages are burning," so
came the messages.
The entire peninsula was lighted as with a great holocaust.
It is said that the light could be seen from Fusan itself, a hundred
miles away.
"From our village it looked like a light over a great American
steel-mill city," said a missionary to me.
And when the morning came, the flames were still leaping high against
the crimson sky of dawn.
For days this burning of villages continued. Belgium never saw more
ruthless flame and fire; set by sterner souls; or harder hearts!
That was two years ago.
The villages are charred ruins now. Some of them have never been
rebuilt. The murdered people of these villages have gone back to dust.
The Japanese think that the fires are out. They thought, when the flames
of those burning villages ceased leaping into the skies; and at last
were but smouldering embers; that the flames had died. But the Japanese
were wrong, for on that very day, the Flames of Freedom began to burn in
Korean hearts and souls! And from that day to this; those flames have
been rising higher and higher. These are Flash-Lights of Flame that, as
the years go by; mount, like beacon lights of hope on Korean hills, to
light the marching dawn of Korean Independence.
* * * * *
A beautiful Korean custom that used to be; flashes a flame of fire
across the screen of history.
In the old days the Korean Emperor used to have signals of fire flashed
from hill to hill running clear from the Chinese border to Seoul, the
Korean capital. This signal indicated that all was well along the
borders and that there was no danger of a Chinese invasion from the
north.
Korea has always been a bone of contention between China, Russia and
Japan. Consequently this little peninsula has always walked on uneasy
paths, which is ever the fate of a buffer state.
Never did a Korean Emperor go to sleep in peace until he looked out and
saw that the signal fires burned on the beautiful mountain peaks
surrounding the city of Seoul; fires indicating that the borders were
safe that night and that inmates of the palace might rest in peace and
security.
"It must have been a beautiful sight to have seen the light flashing on
the mountain peak there to the north," I said to an eighty-year old
Korean patriarch.
"It meant peace for the night," he answered. "It was beautiful. I often
long to see those fires of old burning again on yonder mountain."
He said this with a dramatic wave of his stately white robed arm.
"The sunsets still flame from that western mountain peak, overlooking
your city beautiful!" I said with a smile.
"Yes, the sunsets still flame behind that peak," he responded with a
far-away look in his aged eyes.
"Perhaps the good Christian God is lighting the fires for you?" I
suggested.
"Yes, He, the good Christian God; is still lighting the fires for us;
but they are fires of freedom, fires of hope, and fires of Democracy!"
the old man said with a new light in his own flashing eyes.
"And fires of peace," I added.
"Yes, fires of Peace when freedom comes!" he responded.
But whatever the political implications are; it is historically true
that this old custom had existed for years until the Japanese took
possession of Korea and stopped this beautiful tradition.
But behind that same mountain from which the bonfires used to flash in
the olden days; indicating that the frontiers were safe for the night;
that no enemy hosts were invading the peninsula; behind that mountain
the fires of sunset still flame, flash, flare, and die away in the
somber purple shadows of night.
* * * * *
Nor shall one forget an evening at Wanju; a hundred miles from Seoul;
sitting in the Mission House looking down into that village of a hundred
thousand souls; watching the fires of evening lighted; watching a
blanket of gray-blue smoke slowly lift over that little village;
watching the great round moon slowly rise above a jutting peak beyond
the village to smile down on that quiet, peaceful scene in mid-December.
Koreans never light their fires until evening comes and then they light
a fire at one end of the house, under the floor and the smoke and heat
travel the entire length of the house warming the rooms. It is a poor
heat maker but it is a picturesque custom.
Thousands of flames lighted up the sky that night. The little thatch
houses, and the children in their quaint garbs moving against the flames
composed a strange Oriental Rembrandt picture.
* * * * *
Streets! Streets! Streets!
Lights! Lights! Lights!
Somehow streets and lights go together.
We think of our great Broadway. We smile at our superior ingenuity when
we think of the "Great White Way."
But for sheer beauty; fascinating, captivating, alluring, beauty; give
me the Ginza in Tokyo on a summer evening; with its millions of
twinkling little lights above the thousands of Oriental shops; with the
sound of bells, the whistle of salesmen, the laughter of beautiful
Japanese girls; the clacking of dainty feet in wooden shoes; and the
indefinable essence of romance that hovers over a street of this
Oriental type at night. I'll stake the romance, and beauty of the Ginza
in Tokyo, against any street in the world. He who has looked upon the
Ginza by night, has a Flash-Light of Flame; of tiny, myriad little
flaming lights; burned into his memory; to live until he sees at last
the lighted streets of Paradise itself.
* * * * *
Nor are the clothes of the Orient without their flaming colors.
The beautiful kimonos of the Geisha girls of Japan; the crimson, gold,
and rose glory of the Sing Song Girls of China; the flashing reds of the
brown-skinned Spanish belles of the Philippines, as they glide, like
wind-blown Bamboo trees through the streets; and the lurid, livid, robes
which men and women alike wear in Borneo and Java. In fact all of the
clothes of the Orient, are flame-clothes. There are no quiet colors
woven into the gown of the Oriental. The Oriental does not know what
soft browns are. Crimson is the favorite color for man or woman. They
even make their sails red, blue, green and yellow. The beautiful colors
of the sailboats in the harbor of Yokohama is one of the first flashing
touches of the Orient that a traveler gets. From Japanese Obies, which
clasp the waists of Japanese girls, to Javanese Sarongs, the flame and
flash of crimson predominates in the gowns of both men and women. Where
an American man would blush to be caught in any sort of a gown with
crimson predominating save a necktie, the Japanese gentlemen, the
Filipino, the Malay, and the Javanese all wear high colors most of the
time. And the women are like splendid flaming bushes of fire all the
time.
A Javanese bride is all flame as far as her dress is concerned. Her face
is powdered; her eyebrows are pencilled a coal black; her arms and
shoulders daubed with a yellow grease. As to her dress, the sarong is a
flaming robe that covers her body to the breasts; red being the dominant
color; with a crown of metal which looks like a beehive on her head.
Brass bracelets and ornaments on her graceful arms complete her costume.
* * * * *
Even the Pagodas and Temples of the Oriental lands are flame.
The most beautiful Temples of Japan are the Nikko Temples.
"See Nikko and you have seen Japan" is the saying that is well said.
But when one has spent weeks or a week, days or a day at Nikko; he
comes away with an impression of beautiful, tall, terraced,
red-lacquered Pagodas; beautiful, graceful red-gowned women; beautiful,
architectural masterpieces of Oriental Temples; all finished in
wonderful red lacquer; beautiful red-cheeked women in the village
stores; beautiful red Kimonos for sale in the Curio shops; red berries
burning against the wonderful green grass; and all set off, against and
under, and crowned by wonderful green rows of great Cryptomaria trees.
These red Temples and these Red Pagodas--red with a red that is flaming
splendor of the last word in the lacquer artist's skill; are like
beautiful crimson jewels set in a setting of emerald.
And back of all these Flash-Lights of Flame one remembers the path of a
single star on the smooth surface of Manila Bay at night; and the
phosphorescent beauty of Manila Bay where great ships cleave this lake
of fire when the phosphorus is heavy of a Summer night; and every ripple
is a ripple of flame. One remembers the continuous flash of heat
lightning down in Borneo and on Equatorial Seas; and one remembers the
Southern Cross; and the flash-lights of fire in a half-breed woman's
eyes.
CHAPTER II
FLASH-LIGHTS PHYSICAL
The red dawn of tropical Java was near. The shadows of night were still
playing from millions of graceful Palm trees which swung gently in the
winds before the dawn.
Three ancient volcanos, still rumbling in blatant activity, loomed like
gigantic monsters of the underworld, bulging their black shoulders above
the earth. Before us lay a valley of green rice paddies.
We had roved over ancient Boroboedoer all night, exploring its haunted
crannies and corners, listening to its weird noises; dreaming through
its centuries of age; climbing its seven terraces. But in the
approaching dawn, the one outstanding thrill of the night was that of a
half-naked Javanese girl, who stood for an hour, poised in her brown
beauty on the top of one of the Bells of Buddha, with some weird
Javanese musical instrument, singing to the dawn.
Then it came.
"What? Her lover?"
No! The dawn! The dawn was her lover! Or, perhaps her lover was old
Merapi.
For, there, as we too, climbed to her strategic pinnacle of glory on top
of the Buddha Bell to watch the dawn that she had called up with her
weird music and her subtle brown beauty; before us, stretched thousands
of acres of green rice paddies, spread out like the Emerald lawn of an
Emerald Springtime in Heaven. Below us two silver streams of water met
and wedded, to go on as one.
As we stood there that morning on the top of Boroboedoer's highest bell,
lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay swung into my soul:
"All I could see from where I stood
Was three tall mountains and a wood."
Only in this instance all I could see were three volcanos. And the one
in the center, old Merapi was belching out a trail of black smoke. These
three volcanos, take turns through the centuries. When one is working
the other two rest. When one ceases its activity, one of the others
takes up the thundering anthem and carries it on for a few years or
centuries and then lapses into silence, having done its part. While we
were there it was Merapi's turn to thunder and on this particular
morning Merapi was busy before daylight.
For fifty miles along the horizon, a trail of black smoke swept like the
trail of black smoke which a train leaves in its wake on a still day.
There was not another cloud in the eastern skies. Nothing but that trail
of black smoke as we stood on the top of Boroboedoer at dawn and
watched.
Then something happened. It was, as if some magician had waved a magic
wand back of the mountain. The rising sun was the magician. We saw its
heralds spreading out, like great golden fan-ribs with the cone of the
volcano, its direct center of convergence. Then before our astonished,
our utterly bewildered, and our fascinated eyes, that old volcanic cone
was changed to a cone of gold. Then the golden cone commenced to belch
forth golden smoke. And finally the trail of smoke for fifty miles along
the horizon became a trail of golden smoke.
This was a Flash-Light that literally burned its way into our memories
to remain forever.
There is another Flash-Light Physical which has to do with another
volcano which I mentioned in the preceding chapter. Bromo is its name.
It is still there, down on the extreme eastern end of Java, unless in
the meantime the old rascal has taken it into his demoniacal head to
blow himself to pieces as he threatened to do the day we lay on our
stomachs, holding on to the earth, with the sides trembling beneath us.
Old Bromo was well named. It reminds one of Bromo-Seltzer. I had heard
of him long before I reached Java. I had heard of the Sand Plains down
into the midst of whose silver whiteness he was set, like a great
conical gem of dark purple by day and fire by night.
Travelers said "You must see Bromo! You must see Bromo! If you miss
everything else see Bromo! It's the most completely satisfactory volcano
in the world."
It was two o'clock in the morning when we started on little rugged
Javanese ponies up Bromo's steep slopes.
At daybreak we reached the mile high cliff which looks down into the
world-famous Sand Sea. It was a sea of white fog. I have seen the same
thing at the Grand Canyon and in Yosemite looking down from the rims. I
thought of these great American canyons as I looked down into the Bromo
Sand Sea. By noon this was a great ten-mile long valley of silver sand
which glittered in the sunlight like a great silver carpeted ballroom
floor. Tourists from all over the world have thrilled to its strange
beauty. Like the gown of some great and ancient queen this silver cloth
lies there; or like some great silver rug of Oriental weaving it
carpeted that valley floor at noon.
But at daybreak it was a sea of mist into which it looked as if one
might plunge, naked to the skin and wash his soul clean of its tropical
sweat and dirt; a fit swimming pool for the gods of Java, of whom there
are so many.
Then something happened as we stood looking down into that smooth sea of
white fog, rolling in great billows below us. There was a sudden roar as
if an entire Hindenburg line had let loose with its "Heavies." There was
a sudden and terrific trembling of the earth under our feet which made
us jump back from that precipice in terror.
Then slowly, as if it were on a great mechanical stage, the perfect cone
of old rumbling Bromo, from which curled a thin wisp of black smoke,
bulged its way out of the center of that sea of white fog, rising
gradually higher and higher as though the stage of the morning had been
set, the play had begun, and unseen stage hands behind the curtain of
fog, with some mighty derrick and tremendous power were lifting a huge
volcano as a stage piece.
Then came the quick, burning tropical sun, shooting above the eastern
horizon as suddenly as the volcanic cone had been lifted above the fog.
This hot sun burned away the mists in a few minutes and there,
stretching below us, in all its oriental beauty was the sinewy,
voluptuous form of the silver sand sea--Bromo's subtle mistress.
* * * * *
There is another Physical Flash-light that will never die.
Coming out of the Singapore Straits one evening at sunset, bound for the
island of Borneo across the South China Sea, I was sitting on the upper
deck of a small Dutch ship. The canvas flapped in the winds. A cool,
tropical breeze fanned our faces. Back of us in our direct wake a
splashing, tumbling, tumultuous tropical sunset flared across the sky.
It was crimson glory. In the direct path of the crimson sun a lighthouse
flashed its blinking eyes like a musical director with his baton beating
time.
I watched this flashing, lesser, light against the crimson sunset and
was becoming fascinated by it.
Then great black clouds began to roll down over that crimson background
as if they were huge curtains, rolled down from above, to change the
setting of the western stage for another act.
But as they rolled they formed strange and beautiful Doric columns
against the crimson skies and before I knew it, I was looking at the
ruins of an old Greek temple in the sky. Then the black clouds formed a
perfect hour-glass reaching from the sea to the sky, with its background
of crimson glory, and the little lighthouse seemed to be flashing off
the minutes in the arteries of that hour-glass.
And then it was night a deep, dense, tropical night; heavy with
darkness; rich with perfume; weird with mystery. But the sunset of
crimson; the Doric temple in ruins; the hour-glass; and the flashing
lighthouse still remained.
* * * * *
And who shall ever forget the sunsets of gold across Manila Bay night
after night; with great warships and majestic steamers, sleek and
slender cutters, white sails, long reaching docks, and graceful Filipino
women, silhouetted against the gold? And who shall forget the domes,
towers, and pinnacles of the Cathedrals; and the old fort within the
city walls as they too were silhouetted against the gold of the evening?
* * * * *
Mt. Taishan, the oldest worshiping place on earth, not far from the
birthplace of Confucius; in Shantung; is one of the most sacred shrines
of the Orient. There, countless millions, for hundreds of centuries,
have climbed over six thousand granite steps, up its mile high slope to
pay their vows; to catch a view of the blue sea from its imminence; to
feel the sweep, wonder and glory of its sublime height, knowing that
Confucius himself gloried in this climb. The exaltation of that glorious
view; shall live, side by side, with the view from the top of the Black
Diamond range in Korea one winter's night as we caught the full sweep
of the Japan Sea by sunset. In fact these all shall live as great
mountain top Physical Flash-Lights etched with the acid of a burning
wonder into one's soul!
Nor shall one ever forget a month's communion with Fujiyama, that
solitary, great and worshiped mountain of Japan; sacred as a shrine;
beautiful with snow; graceful as a Japanese woman's curving cheek;
bronzed by summer; belted with crimson clouds by sunset like a Japanese
woman's Obie. It, too, presented its unforgettable Physical
Flash-Lights.
The first glimpse was one of untold spun-gold glory. There it stood.
"There it is! There it is! Look!" a fellow traveler cried.
"There is what?" I called. We were on top of a great American College
building in Tokyo.
"It's Fuji!"
I had given up hope. We had been there two weeks and Fujiyama was not to
be seen. The mists, fogs, and clouds of winter had kept it hidden from
our wistful, wondering, waiting eyes.
But there it stood, like a naked man, unashamed; proud of its white
form; without a single cloud; burning in the white sunlight. Its huge
shoulders were thrown back as with suppressed strength. Its white chest,
a Walt Whitman hairy with age; gray-breasted with snow; bulged out like
some mighty wrestler, challenging the world. No wonder they worship it!
I had gloried in Fujiyama from many a varied viewpoint. I had caught
this great shrine of Japanese devotion in many of its numberless moods.
I had seen it outlined against a clear-cut morning sunlight, bathed in
the glory of a broadside of light fired from the open muzzle of the sun.
I had seen it shrouded in white clouds; and also with black clouds
breeding a storm, at even-time. I had seen it with a crown of white upon
its brow, and I had seen it with a necklace of white cloud pearls about
its neck.
Once I saw this great mountain looking like some ominous volcano through
a misty gray winter evening. And one mid-afternoon I saw it almost
circled by a misty rainbow, a sight never to be forgotten on earth or in
heaven by one whose soul considers a banquet of beauty more worth
shouting over than an invitation to feast with a King.
But the last sight I caught of Fuji was the last night that I was in
Tokyo, as I rode up from the Ginza on New Year's eve out toward Aoyama
Gakuin, straight into a sunset, unsung, unseen by mortal eye.
Before me loomed the great mountain like a monstrous mass of mighty
ebony carved by some delicate and yet gigantic artist's hand.
I soon discovered where the artist got the ebony from which to carve
this pointed mountain of ebony with its flat top; for far above this
black silhouetted mountain was a mass of ebony clouds that seemed to
spread from the western horizon clear to the rim of the eastern horizon
and beyond into the unseen Sea of Japan in the back yard of the island.
It was from this mass of coal-black midnight-black clouds that the giant
artist carved his ebony Fuji that night.
But not all was black. Perhaps the giant forged that mountain rather
than carved it, for there was a blazing furnace behind Fuji. And this
furnace was belching fire. It was not crimson. It was not gold. It was
not red. It was fire.
It was furnace fire. It was a Pittsburgh blast-furnace ten thousand
times as big as all of Pittsburgh itself, belching fire and flames of
sparks. These sparks were flung against the evening skies. Some folks, I
fancy, on that memorable night called them stars; but I know better.
They were giant sparks flung from that blast-furnace which was booming
and roaring behind Fuji. I could not hear it roar; that is true; but I
could feel it roar. I could not hear it because even so great a sound as
that furnace must have been making will not travel sixty miles, even
though it was as still up there in the old theological tower as a
country cemetery by winter down in Rhode Island when the snow covers the
graves.
Then suddenly a flare of fire shot up directly behind the cone of Fuji,
flaming into the coal-bank of clouds above the mountain, as if the old
shaggy seer had forgotten his age and was dreaming of youth again when
the earth was young and he was a volcano.
Above that streak of fire and mingled with it, black smoke seemed to
pour until it formed a flat cloud of black smoke directly above the
cone, and spread out like a fan across the sky to give the giant artist
further ebony to shape his mountain monument.
Then Fuji suddenly belched its volcano of color and lava; of rose and
gold, amber, salmon, primrose, sapphire, marigold; and in a stream these
poured over Fuji's sides and down along the ridge-line of the lesser
hills until they too were covered with a layer of molten glory a mile
thick.
The clouds above Fuji forgot to be black. In fact, their mood of
sullenness departed as by magic, and a smile swept over their massive
mood of moroseness, and glory swept the skies. It was as if that furnace
behind Fuji had suddenly burst, throwing its molten fire over the hills,
the mountains, the sky, the world.
And "mine eyes" had "seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." And that
was enough for any man for one lifetime.
* * * * *
Then there is beautiful Boroboedoer down in Java. It is a Physical
Flash-Light that looms with its huge and mysterious historical
architectural beauty like some remnant of the age when the gods of
Greece roamed the earth. A sunrise from its pinnacled height I have
already described, but the temple itself is unforgettable. There is
nothing like it on the earth.
Boroboedoer is one of the wonders of the world, although little known.
It is in the general shape of the pyramid of Egypt, but more beautiful.
One writer says, "Boroboedoer represents more human labor and artistic
skill than the great pyramids." Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace says: "The
human labor and skill expended on Boroboedoer is so great that the labor
expended on the great pyramid sinks into significance beside it."
Boroboedoer was built in the seventh century A.D., by the Javanese under
Hindu culture. Then came the Mohammedan invasion, destroying all such
works of art in its pathway.
It is said that the priests so loved this beautiful Buddha temple that
they covered it over with earth and then planted trees and tropical
vegetation on it. In six months it was so overgrown that it looked like
a hill. This is one explanation of why it lay for a thousand years
unknown.
The volcanic ashes undoubtedly helped in this secretion, for old Merapi
even now belches its ashes, rocks and dust out over the beautiful valley
down upon which Merapi looks.
From Djodjakarta you go to the temples.
This great temple has, instead of the plain surfaces of the great
pyramid, one mile of beautifully carved decorations, with 2141 separate
panels depicting the life of Buddha from the time he descended from the
skies until he arrived at Nirvana, or perfect isolation from the world.
A history of more than a thousand years is told in its stone tablets by
the sculptor's chisel, told beautifully, told enduringly, told
magnificently.
One writer says: "This temple is the work of a master-builder whose
illuminated brain conceived the idea of this temple wherein he writes in
sculpture the history of a religion."
And again one says architecturally speaking of it:
"It is a polygonous pyramid of dark trachyte, with gray cupulas on
jutting walls and projecting cornices, a forest of pinnacles."
There are four ledges to this hill temple and above each ledge or stone
path are rows of Buddhas hidden in great 5-foot stone bells, and at the
top crowning the temple a great 50-foot bell in which Buddha is
completely hidden from the world, symbol of the desired Nirvana that all
Buddhists seek.
Mysterious with weird echoes of a past age it stands, silhouetted
against a flaming sky to-night as I see it for the first time. It is
late evening and all day long we have been climbing the ancient ruins of
that magnificent age of Hindu culture on the island of Java. This temple
of Boroboedoer was to be the climax of the day, and surely it is all of
that.
The fire dies out of the sky. The seven terraces of the stone temple
begin to blur into one great and beautiful pyramid. Only the innumerable
stone bells stand out against the starlit night; stone bells with the
little peepholes in them, through which the stolid countenances and the
stone eyes of many Buddhas, in calm repose, look out upon the four
points of the compass.
Night has fallen. We have seen the great Temple by crimson sunset and
now we shall see it by night.
The shadows seem to wrap its two thousand exquisite carvings, and its
Bells of Buddha in loving and warm tropical embrace. But no warmer, is
the embrace of the shadows about the Temple than the naked embrace of a
score of Javanese boys who hold to their hearts naked Javanese beauties
who sit along the terraces looking into the skies of night utterly
oblivious to the passing of time or of the presence of curious American
strangers.
Love is such a natural thing to these Javanese equatorial brown brawn
and beauties that unabashed they lie, on Buddha's silent bells, breast
to breast, cheek to cheek, and limb to limb; as if they have swooned
away in the warmth of the tropical night.
The Southern Cross looks down upon lover and tourist as we all
foregather on the topmost terrace of that gigantic shadow-pyramid of
granite.
The sound of the innumerable naked footsteps of all past ages seems to
patter along the stone terraces. Now and then the twang of the Javanese
angklong and the beautiful notes of a flute sweep sweetly into the
shadowed air.
Then comes the dancing of a half dozen Javanese dancing girls, naked to
the waist, their crimson and yellow sarongs flying in the winds of
night, as, in slow, graceful movements, facing one of the Bells of
Buddha they pay their vows and offer their bodies and their souls to
Buddha; and evidently, also to the Javanese youths who accompany them in
their dances.
The sound of the voices of these Javanese girls--who in the shadows look
for all the world like figures that Rodin might have dreamed--mingling
their laughter with the weird music; shall linger long in one's memory
of beautiful things.
Their very nakedness seemed to fit in with the spirit of the night; a
spirit of complete abandonment to beauty and worship. In their attitudes
there seemed to be a mingling of religion and earthly passion; but it
was so touched with reverence that we felt no shock to our American
sensibilities.
All night long we wandered about the terraces of the old Temple.
We wondered how long the Javanese girls would remain.
At dawn when we arose to see Boroboedoer by daylight they were still
there as fresh as the dawn itself in their brown beauty, the dew of
night glistening in their black hair and wetting their full breasts.
And across, from Boroboedoer the sun, in its dawning splendor, was
transforming belching and rumbling old volcanic Merapi into a cone of
gold.
[Illustration: LOOKING OVER THE WALLED CITY OF MANILA, AMERICAN SOLDIERS
SCALED THIS WALL A FEW YEARS AGO TO STAY.]
[Illustration: BEAUTIFUL FILIPINO GIRLS ALL OF WHOM SPEAK ENGLISH.]
[Illustration: KOREAN GIRLS WITH AMERICAN IDEALS AND TRAINING.]
[Illustration: STEPPING ASIDE IN KOREA TO LET THE AMERICAN DEVIL WAGON
GO BY.]
CHAPTER III
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH
He was an old man; gray-haired, gray-bearded; gray-gowned; and he knew
that the Japanese Gendarmes would just as soon take his life as light a
cigarette. They do each with inhumane impunity. One means as much to
them as the other.
He was under arrest for conspiracy in the Independence Movement.
"Do you know about the Independence Movement?" he was asked.
"Yes, I know all about it," was his fearless reply; though he knew that
that reply in itself might mean his death; even without trial or further
evidence. Just the fact that he had admitted that he knew anything at
all about the movement was enough to throw him into prison. He was like
an old Prophet in his demeanor. Something about the very dignity and
sublime Faith of the man awed the souls of these crude barbarians from
the Island Empire.
"Since when was it begun?" asked the Gendarmes.
"Since ten years ago when you Japanese first came to Korea," was the
dignified reply.
"From whence did it spring?" he was asked next.
"From the hearts of twenty million people!"
"Did twenty millions of people all get together then, and plan?"
"Not together in body but in spirit!"
"But there must have been some men to start it?" the Japanese Gendarme
said.
"They all started it!" was the old man's reply.
"Is there no one who had charge of this movement from the beginning?"
"Yes, there is one!"
"Do you know him?"
"I know him well!"
"What is his name?"
"His name is God!" said this seventy-year old, fearless Christian Korean
Patriot.
Such faith as I have indicated in the paragraphs above is a common thing
in Korea. Never in the history of the world have Christian people been
subjected to the same tortures, the same cruelties, the same terrors,
for their Faith as the early Christian martyrs; save these; the Koreans.
We had thought that the world had gotten past that day when men would be
tortured, crushed, persecuted, and killed because they were Christians
but that day is not yet past as almost any American Missionary in Korea
will testify.
The Japanese officials will say that there is no persecution because of
Christianity; but missionaries in Korea know better. They will point to
countless incidents when men, women and children have been hounded, and
persecuted for no other reason than that they were Christians.
"And when Jesus heard it, He marveled greatly and said to them that
followed, Verily I say unto you I have not found so great faith, no, not
in Israel!" might well be said of the Korean Christians every hour,
every minute, every second. They know what it means to die for their
Faith.
The story of Pak Suk Han is one of the most thrilling illustrations of
Faith that I have ever heard in Oriental lands. He had been a Christian
since he was seven years of age. He was a brilliant speaker and the
Assistant Pastor of the First Methodist Church at Pyeng Yang, where,
even the non-Christians loved him. He was arrested on Independence Day
and sent to prison where a barbarous Japanese officer, whom the natives
called "The Brute" kicked him in the side because he would not give up
his Christ. From that kick and further inhuman treatment running over a
period of six months; a disease developed which a most reliable
missionary doctor told me ended Pak Suk Han's life.
When he knew that he was about to die he said, "I have been a Christian
and have served the church since I was seven years old. I have given my
life to Christ, all but the last six months in prison which I have given
to my country. I have no regrets. I might have lived had I been willing
to deny my nation's rights and give up my Christ. I am going home to my
Father's house. Good-by!" No Christian martyrs in the early centuries of
the persecutions by Rome ever died with greater glory in their souls; or
with deeper Faith!
* * * * *
The temperature was zero.
The cold had swept down over night from the Siberian and Manchurian
plains across the city of Seoul. The capital city of Korea was shivering
with cold. But it was vibrant with something else. It was vibrant with a
great sense of something impending.
There were those who said that the restlessness in the souls of the
Koreans had died down with the terrible days of the March Independence
Movement; but I knew that the faith of the people was deeper than that.
I knew that the flame of faith was just smouldering.
I sensed this from the conversation of old-time missionaries who had
been in Korea from the very beginning. I sensed it in the conversation
of young Koreans who had graduated from American schools. It was there;
a vibrant, living, pulsing, faith in God and in the justice of their
hopes: the Independence of Korea.
The whole thing was summed up for me in a flash. It was a flash of the
light of a tremendous faith that blinded mine eyes for a day; but my
soul it lighted as with a great eternal light.
A Korean boy stepped into the home of a missionary friend of mine, whose
name I dare not use. If I did he would likely be sent home by the
Japanese. Men have been sent home for less.
The snow crunched under his feet as he walked up across the yard and the
porch. He knocked at the door.
"Come in," said the missionary, kindly.
The boy stepped in. The missionary had never seen him before. The boy
was moved deeply as with a great emotion. He seemed to have carried into
that quiet missionary home with him some of the tenseness of the outside
air and some of the tenseness of the political situation.
"What do you want?" asked the missionary.
"I want to talk with you about something very important," he replied in
Korean.
"All right! Go ahead! Do not be afraid. I am your friend!"
"So I know. All missionaries are our friends."
"Then you need not be afraid to talk."
"No!" said the boy. But he did not talk. His agitation was growing more
marked.
"Go on, my boy! Tell me what you came for."
The Korean boy looked at the half open door which led into the kitchen.
The missionary, without a word, stepped over and closed that door,
because he understood.
The boy himself closed a door which led into the missionary's study. For
in Korea in these days no home; not even a missionary's home, is free
from spies.
The boy started to talk hurriedly. The missionary soon saw that he was
not talking about the thing that he had come for.
"Come to the point! Come to the point! You did not come to me, in such
secrecy, to talk commonplace things like that!" said the missionary a
bit sharply.
Then the boy suddenly dropped to his knees behind the missionary's desk
and whipped out a big knife. Then he took from his white gown a long
piece of white cloth. This he laid out on the floor. Then he opened his
sharp knife with a quick motion and before the missionary knew it, he
had ripped the index finger of his right hand, from, the tip to the
palm, clear to the bone, until the blood spurted all over the floor.
"What are you doing, my boy?" cried the missionary.
The boy smiled a sublime smile and then knelt on his knees over the
white cloth and before the missionary's tear-misty eyes wrote across the
immaculate cloth in his own blood the words: "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!
Korean Independence Forever! Self-determination!"
Then underneath these words in a few swift strokes in his own blood he
drew a picture of the Korean flag. And as he drew, now and then the
blood would not flow fast enough; and he took his knife, as one primes a
fountain pen; and cut a bit deeper to open new veins in order that the
flag of his country and the declaration of his faith might be written in
the deepest colors that his own veins could furnish.
Finally, after what seemed hours he jumped to his feet and handed the
missionary that flag; crying as he did so: "That is our faith! That is
the way we Koreans feel! You are going back to America! We want America
to know that our faith in the Independence of Korea has not died! The
fire burns higher to-day than ever. The Japanese cruelties are worse!
The need is greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our determination
is deeper than ever before! I have come here this day, knowing that you
are going back to America; I came to write these words in my own blood
that you may know; and that America may know; that our faith is a flame
which burns out like the beacon lights on the Korean hills, never to
die!"
* * * * *
The most scintillating Flash-light of Faith that I saw in the Orient was
in the Philippine Islands. We were traveling the jungle trail to visit a
tribe of naked Negritos. These are diminutive people who look like
American negroes only they are much smaller; much more underfed, and who
live in trees very much like the Orangutans of Borneo. They eat roots
and nuts. They hunt with bows and arrows.
They are the lowest tribe in mentality on the Islands.
It was a terribly hot, tropical day and I had a sunstroke on the way up
the mountainside to this Negrito village.
I did not expect to get back alive.
For three solid hours under a killing tropical sun, without the proper
cork helmet and protection, a pile driver kept hammering down on my
head. I felt it at every step I took. Finally I dropped unconscious on
the trail. After several hours I was able to proceed to the top of the
mountain, where the Negritos were camped.
We got there about two o'clock and had lunch. As we ate about fifty
Negritos swarmed about us.
They were a horrible looking crowd; stark naked, filthy with dirt;
starved to skin and bones; and animal-like in every look and move.
I was so sick that I was not able to eat the lunch which had been
provided in baskets. I lay on my back trying to get back my strength.
As the rest of the expedition ate, the Negritos with hungry eyes,
crowded closer.
One hideous old man was in the forefront of the natives. He was so
hideous looking that he was sickeningly repulsive to me as I looked at
him crouched as he was like an animal with a streak of sunlight playing
on his face.
This streak of sunlight, with ruthless severity, made the ugly scabs of
dirt stand out on his old wrinkled face. That face had not felt the
touch of water in years. His whole body was covered with dirt and sores.
Wherever the sunlight struck on that black body it revealed scales like
those on a mangy dog. His body was also covered with gray hairs matted
into the dirt.
"That old codger represents the nearest thing to an animal that the
human being can reach," said McLaughlin, one of the oldest missionaries
on the island.
"You're right!" I said. "He looks as much like a Borneo Orangutan as any
human being I ever saw."
"And he lives like one, too; up in a tree in a nest of matted limbs and
grass," said another.
"I've traveled among the wild tribes of the world all my life and I have
seen the lowest human beings on earth; in Africa, South America,
Malaysia, Borneo, Java--Australia--everywhere," said a widely traveled
man in the crowd, "and I never saw a type as low in the scale as that
old fellow!"
So we discussed him as the lunch proceeded. He did not know, of course,
that we had consigned him to the lowest rung on the ladder of humanity,
so he just sat looking at us with his animal-like eyes as we ate; and at
me as I lay under a tree trying to recover my strength for the trip
back.
"He is not a human being!" added a philosopher in the crowd. "He is
lower than that stage. He doesn't seem to have a single spark of
humanity left in him!"
Then the meal over; the missionaries started to hand out what was left
of the food to these starving Negritos. The old man whom we had decided
was the lowest type of a human being on earth seemed, after all, to be
the leader of the tribe; no doubt because of his age; perhaps because of
something else which we were later to discover.
McLaughlin handed out a sandwich to the old man.
"Did he eat it himself?"
"He did not! He handed it to a child near by."
McLaughlin handed out another sandwich which was left.
"Did the old man, whom we had decided was more of an animal than a human
being, eat that one?"
"He did not. He took it over behind a tree where another old man was
timidly hiding and gave it to him."
McLaughlin handed out another sandwich.
"Did the old man eat that one?"
"He did not. He took it over and gave it to an old woman near by."
And so it continued, until every last piece of food was disposed of.
That old man; whom we had decided was an animal; saw to it, that every
man, woman, and child in that crowd was fed before he took a single bite
himself.
Then he suddenly disappeared. In half an hour he came back with an
armful of great, broad, palm leaves. He spread these out on the ground
in the shade of a tree; did this old man; this hideous looking monster;
and then motioned for me to lie down on the bed he had made for me. He
saw that I was sick.
Then he disappeared once again, and when he returned he was carrying a
long Bamboo-tube full of clear, cool water which he had gotten from a
mountain spring. He brought it to where I was lying on the bed he had
made for me and with this water he cooled my fevered, burning head; and
from this water he gave me to drink; he whom we had decided was the
lowest type of a human being on earth.
And I am writing here to say; that I have never seen a "cup of cold
water given in His name" that was given with a higher, or a deeper sense
of the Divine spark of God in humanity than I saw that tropical summer
afternoon, and this water was given by the naked Negrito whom we had
decided was the lowest human being on the earth. Yet even in this
animal-man; even in this naked savage; there was a spark of the Divine
that made us forever have a deeper and a more abiding faith that God
never did and never shall make a man to live on this old earth that He
did not have some purpose in making him.
A few days before I took this trip up into the jungles of Luzon to visit
this Negrito tribe I had received a copy of a slender volume of poems by
Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the cool beauty of the tropical evening
preceding this trip I had read the last lines of its introductory poem
called "Interim"; and these lines came flashing into my mind, even as I
lay on the hot earth on that Luzon hillside. I can still remember the
honey dripping like rain from the Cocoanut trees, and I can still hear
the ceaseless and maddening cry of millions of Locusts that hot day; but
suddenly came this beautiful outpouring of faith from, the cool depths
of a woman's woodland soul:
"Not Truth but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive! If, all at once
Faith were to slacken,--that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing--birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!"
That day bred new faith into my soul!
I have told this story of the naked Negrito a hundred times since that
eventful day and it kindles new flames of faith in human hearts every
time it is repeated! Mr. Edmund Vance Cooke, the poet, heard it in
Cleveland where I spoke in a Chautauqua programme and he said to me
several months later in my home at Detroit, Michigan, "That was the most
thrilling story of the Divine spark in a savage soul that I have ever
heard! It gave me new faith in God and in humanity!"
These, and a thousand other Flashlights of Faith come flashing out of
that Far Eastern background; the sublime faith of thousands of college
men and women who are giving their lives because they believe that
savages and barbarians, such as I have described in this Negrito; Do
have that spark of the Divine in their souls; faith that Christian
civilization, and Christian education; and a Christian God, may awaken
that spark.
And, indeed many a proof do they have of this miracle! Only the other
day from an American School, a girl from darkest Africa graduated as a
Phi Beta Kappa honor scholar. Bishop William A. Taylor picked up this
girl as a naked child in the jungles of Africa less than a quarter of a
century ago!
CHAPTER IV
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR
Quick, short, sharp signals shot down the speaking tube from the bridge.
The Chief Engineer of the _Santa Cruz_ yelled across the boiler room.
The bell rang for reverse and the entire ship shivered.
A woman on deck screamed, and there was a rush to the railings, for the
old boat had been slowly making its way up the winding, treacherous
Saigon River out of the China Sea into French Indo-China.
"Those damned Chinks again, trying to escape the Devil!"
"What's the matter, Pop?" some one asked the captain.
"That sampan full of Chinks was trying to get away from the River Devil,
so they shot across our bow to fool him and we nearly ran them down."
"Do they often indulge in that little friendly game with the Devil?" I
asked him, smiling at his seriousness.
"Every time we enter one of these rivers they do it. I killed six of
them going up the river at Shanghai a year ago. It gives me the creeps
every time I see them shoot across our bow. A ship like this will cut
'em in two like a knife!"
We looked over the green railing of the _Santa Cruz_. The big ship had
almost come to a stop for the engines were still in reverse and the
shallow river mud was churned up until the otherwise clear water looked
like a muddy pond. The little sampan, full of grinning, naked Chinese
coolies was fifty feet away from us, and our American sailors were
swearing at them in every language they knew and shaking big, brawny,
brown fists in their grinning direction.
It was considered a joke by the passengers but it was a very real thing
to these poor ignorant Chinese. One sees this happen everywhere in the
Orient. For the Chinaman starts out every morning in his sampan with the
worst kind of a River Devil after him. He must rid himself of that
Devil. So, when a big ship comes into sight, he waits until its bow is
very close and then darts in front of its pathway. The idea is, that
when a sampan full of Chinamen shoots in front of a big ship the Devil
is supposed to follow the ship all that day, and let the Chinese junk or
sampan alone.
[Illustration: CONFUCIUS' TOMB AT CHUFU, CHINA.]
[Illustration: RUIN OF THE MING TOMBS.
The turtle, the symbol of long life, is almost as common in China as the
dragon.]
[Illustration: GRINDING RICE IN CHINA.]
[Illustration: A CAMEL TRAIN FROM THE PLAINS OF MONGOLIA ENTERS PEKING
ON A WINTER'S DAY.]
It is the pest of an American seaman's life, for even a seaman hates to
see a human being drowned.
To an American mind this seems ridiculous. It even seems humorous. I
shall never forget how the passengers laughed when the captain told them
why he had had to reverse his engines to keep from crushing the frail
Chinese sampan. But suddenly the thought came to one of the passengers;
that to the poor Chinaman the fear which made him do that foolish thing
and the fear which made him take that awful risk was very real.
"Under God, the poor Devils must have an awful life if they have such a
fear as that in their souls day and night!" said an Englishman.
"They never start out for a day's work that they are not haunted every
minute of that day by a thousand devils, ill-omens, and bad spirits
which are constantly hovering about to leap on them and kill them!" said
a missionary. "The whole Orient is full of the thought of fear!"
This missionary was right. Paul Hutchinson, Editor of the _Chinese
Christian Advocate_ and one of the real literary men of the Americans
who are permanent residents of Shanghai, told me of a Chinese boy who
was graduating from a Christian College in Nanking. The boy had been for
four years under the influence of Americans. He could speak good
English. He was about ready to go to America to school when he had
completed his work at Nanking.
He, with a younger brother, was at home for the Christmas vacation. On
the way back to college the younger brother fell overboard into the
river. The older brother was not a coward. Everybody will testify to
that. In fact he was unusually courageous. But in spite of the fact that
his puny brother was able to swim to the side of the small boat, and in
spite of the fact that he begged his older and stronger brother to pull
him back into the boat, that older brother refused to do so.
"Why?"
Mr. Hutchinson says that the English teacher heard the tale in terror,
but that the brother took it as a matter of course, explaining that the
River Devil would most certainly have caught and dragged into the water,
any person who should have dared to attempt a rescue of his brother.
It is an established thing in China; that if a native falls into the
river, he never gets out unless he pulls himself out. Nobody will help
him, for if they do, that will incur the wrath of the River God and the
rescuer also will be dragged down to his death.
It is assumed that if a person falls into the river that is the River
God pulling him in.
The constant fear of this River God is so deeply intrenched in these
poor souls that they take no pleasure on the water and they carry their
sense of fear to such an extent that they will not even attempt a rescue
of their own babies or loved ones if these happen to fall into the
water.
Mr. Hutchinson calls attention to Dr. E. D. Soper's book "The Faiths of
Mankind" in which there is an entire chapter called "Where Fear Holds
Sway."
"Where is it that fear holds sway?" the reader asks.
The answer is, "In the Orient"!
Yes, the whole Orient is one great gallery of dim, uncertain, weird,
mysterious Flash-lights of Fear.
Paul Hutchinson says:
"It is impossible for the Westerner to conceive such an
atmosphere until he has lived in it. In fact he may live in it
for years and never realize the hold which it has upon his
native neighbors. But it is no exaggeration to say that, to the
average Chinese, the air is peopled with countless spirits,
most of them malignant, all attempting to do him harm. Even a
catalogue of the devils, such as have been named by the
scholarly Jesuit, Father Dore, is too long for the limits of
this article. But there they are, millions of them. They hover
around every motion of every waking hour, and they enter the
sanctity of sleep. An intricate system of circumnavigating
them, that makes the streets twist in a fashion to daze
Boston's legendary cow and puts walls in front of doors to
belie the hospitality within, runs through the social order."
This fear is even expressed in Chinese architecture.
"Why is that strange wall built in front of every household door and
even before the Temples?" I asked a friend in China.
"It is put there to fool the devils. They will see that wall and think
that there is no door and then will go away and not bother that house
any more," I was told.
The very architecture of the Chinese home is to keep the devils out. The
strange curves with the graceful upward sweep that makes the roofs so
beautiful to American eyes is for the purpose of throwing devils of the
air off the track. They will come down from the skies and start down the
curve of the roofs but will be turned back into the skies again by the
upward slant of the twisted roofs.
It was this same terrible sense of fear which developed the old surgical
system that the Koreans and Chinese used before the arrival of the
missionaries.
"Do you see these needles?" an American surgeon in Korea asked me one
day, as he pointed to about a hundred of the most horrible looking
copper and brass needles lying on a stand.
"Yes," I admitted, mystified.
"I have taken every one of them out of the bodies of human beings on
whom I have operated here in the hospital."
"Where did you find them?"
"In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the organs of the body, and
one in the heart of a man who came to me because he couldn't breathe
very well."
"No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I don't think I could myself if
I had a needle in my blood-pump!" I said with a smile.
"These fancy needles that the old Korean doctors thought a good deal of
they put a handle on," he continued.
"What was that for?"
"So they wouldn't lose their needles in a body. The other, or common
needles, they just stuck into the body wherever the wound or sore place
was and left them there."
"And what, may I ask, was the idea of this playful Korean surgery! Was
it something like our 'button, button, whose got the button?'"
"No, the idea was that there were devils in the wound. If it was a
swelling there was a devil in that swelling. If it was typhoid fever,
and there was pain in the bowels, there was a devil in the inward parts
affected, and so, after carefully sterilizing the needle by running it
through his long, black, greasy hair, the native doctor would run it
into the affected part of the body to kill the devil or let it escape
from the body."
"The old idea of a fear religion, a fear social life, a fear family life
and a fear surgery prevails in Korea as it does in China?" I said by way
of a question.
"It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me it is the most awful thing
about working out here. The awful sense of constant fear that is on the
people always and everywhere."
Pounded-up claws of a tiger; the red horn of a deer; pulverized fish
bones; roots of trees, pigs' eyes; and a thousand poisons and
fear-remedies make up the medical history of the Oriental doctor.
"Why do they kill girl babies?"
"Fear!"
"Fear of what?"
"Fear of devils! The devils will be displeased if a girl baby is born.
Therefore kill the baby.
"Throw the babies out on the ground in the graveyards. Let the dogs eat
the babies."
I heard the dogs howling in a cemetery one night about two o'clock in
the morning as I was coming through the thousands of little conical
mounds, with here and there an unburied coffin.
"The dogs are having a baby feast to-night," said an old missionary.
"Why?"
"To appease the devils."
"My God man; you don't mean that they let the dogs eat their babies
because they are afraid of the devil?" I cried.
"I mean just that," replied the missionary.
"Fear! Fear! Fear! Everywhere. Fear by night and fear by day. They never
escape it. It is fear that makes them worship their ancestors. It is
fear that makes them worship idols. It is fear that makes them kill
their girl babies. It is fear that makes them build their little narrow
winding streets, which after a while must become so filthy; fear that if
they do not, the devils will find them; and if they do build their
streets narrow and winding the devils will get lost searching for them.
Oh, God, fear, fear, everywhere! The Orient is full of a terrible and a
constant fear!"
I looked at my friend astonished. He seldom went into such emotional
outbursts. He was judicial, calm, poised; some said, cold. But this
constant sense of fear that was upon the people had finally broken down
his reserve of poise.
"The chimneys are beautiful. See that beautiful upward dip in the
architecture. They are like the roofs," I said.
"But that beautiful, symmetrical development did not come out of a sense
of beauty. It came to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs.
The devils will glide off into space and will never be able to get down
the chimneys." It is so in other Oriental countries.
* * * * *
The same is true in the Philippine Islands. The whole fabric of human
life is permeated with the black thread of fear.
It is true of China and Korea; it is true of Borneo to a marked degree;
and it is true of that great mass of conglomerate humanity that we think
of as India.
These and other flash-lights of fear remain, and shall remain forever in
my mind. But of a fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of millions of
human beings; pictures of fear stand out, blurred here and there; but
clear enough in outline so that I can still see the human faces against
a background of midnight darkness.
Three pictures are clearer than the others. Perhaps it was because the
flash that focused them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Perhaps it
was, that the plate of my soul was more sensitive the days these
impressions were focused. But they stand out; three flash-lights of fear
above all:
One was told me by Zela Wiltsie Worley, a college girl, now a
missionary's wife, who has known what it means to lie on the floor of
her home an entire morning with machine gun bullets crashing through
her home, between the fire of two revolutionary armies.
"I was talking with my Amah--she is the girl who cares for our
children," said Mrs. Worley.
I nodded that I understood that.
"We were bathing the baby--our first wee kiddie--and the Amah seemed to
have an unusual inclination to talk. I had been joking with her and
asked her if she did not want to buy Clara Gene. In fun we started the
characteristic Chinese haggling over price, she trying to 'jew' me up
and I trying to 'jew' her down.
"'Oh!' she said, 'girl babies are very expensive the last two or three
years. Now you have to pay over ten dollars to get a nice fat one!
Before that, if you did not drown them, you had an awfully hard time to
get rid of them. There was a man in our town to whom we took the
babies--the girl babies I mean. He would go up and down the streets with
them and sell them to any one who would give him a chicken and a bowl of
rice in return.'
"'But do they drown the girl babies now?' I asked the Amah.
"'Oh, yes, of course, if you already have one or two boys. You know, in
my village I am the only Christian. My own family and the rest of the
village worship idols. They are afraid of their gods. They do not know
any better. Why my sister almost drowned my second little boy by
mistake. He had just arrived and she thought that he was a girl, and had
already stuck his head down in a pail of water when I rescued him.'
"'But who usually kills the girl babies?' I asked. 'Surely not the
mother?'
"'Yes, she does. She is so afraid when she finds it is only a girl,
afraid that the gods will be angry because she has brought another girl
into the world, that she kills it!'
"'Do they bury it then?'
"'Sometimes they wrap it up, and throw it under a pile of rubbish. You
know, we do not have coffins made for any of our babies who die before
they have had their first teeth! I have seen so many babies drowned,
Mrs. Worley. I never did like it. They cry so!'
"Then I inquired of our Chinese teacher's wife if she knew of girl baby
killing still going on in China.
"'Just last week,' this teacher's wife said in answer to my inquiry,
'the woman next door went back to her village two miles from here and
she saw her own sister drown a baby while she was there.'
"I asked an English missionary if she knew that this fearful custom was
still prevalent over most of China with its more than four hundred
million souls.
"She told me that it was the custom in Ning-daik for the women just to
throw the girl babies under their beds, and they would 'be gone in a day
or two.'
"And it is all because of their awful fear that the gods will be
displeased if they give birth to a girl baby!"
The second outstanding flash-light of fear comes from Java.
In the chapter on Physical Flash-lights I have described the old volcano
of Bromo. It is a terrible thing to look into. Great fissures in the
earth, belch thunder, sulphur, fire, and lava. Great rocks as large as
wagons shoot into the air to the rim of the two hundred-foot crater, and
then drop back with a crash.
For centuries, and even in these days, clandestinely; I am told by men
whom I trust; the most beautiful maiden of a certain tribe among the
Javanese; and some of the most beautiful women I saw in the Orient were
those soft-skinned, soft-voiced, easy-moving, graceful-limbed,
swaying-bodied; brown skinned women of Java; she, the fairest of the
tribe is taken; and with her the strongest limbed youth; he of the
fibered muscles; he of the iron biceps; he of the clean skin; and the
two of them are tossed into the belching fiery crater of old Bromo.
"Why?" I asked.
"They think that in that way, they may propitiate the gods of the
volcano. Their hearts are constantly filled with fear lest the gods of
the volcano become angry and destroy them," said the missionary.
Then he told me of a trip that they made a year before to the top of one
of the most inaccessible volcanoes which was then in constant eruption.
"We had a hard time getting native guides. Finally we succeeded. We had
to travel fifty miles before we reached the mountain. Then we climbed
five miles up its steep side, cutting our own trail as we made our way
through the tropical jungle. At last we reached the timber. But before
we entered the forest one of the guides came to me and, with the most
pitiable and trembling fear in his voice and face, begged us white
people not to say anything disrespectful of the mountain; not to joke
and laugh, and not to sing; for that would make the mountain angry, and
we would all be killed.
"I saw that he was in deadly earnest, and, while I wanted to laugh I
looked as solemn as I could, for there was such terror in his face, I
knew that if I laughed he would turn and run back to civilization.
"An hour later we reached the timber line. Before we entered it the
first boy fell flat on his face and prayed to the god of the mountain
asking that god not to hurt them. Then the next boy did likewise; then
the third and the fourth and the fifth!
"Their faces were almost white with fear when we missionaries did not
pray. It filled them with terror!"
* * * * *
And the last Flash-light of Fear is that of the baby in Medan. The
Priest lived across the way in a temple.
The baby was sick with whooping-cough. It was the usual, simple case of
baby sickness that American babies all have, and which is not taken
seriously here by either doctor or mother.
The mother took the baby to the priest.
The priest took a red hot iron; laid the baby on the church altar and
ran the iron across its neck, and then across its breast and then across
its little stomach. Then he laid it on the front steps of the temple.
The baby died after a few hours spent in terrible pain.
Hate the Priest?
No!
Despise the mother?
No!
Pity them!
The priest was honest and the mother was honest. They were doing the
best thing for the baby that either of them knew. They knew that the
baby had a devil in its little body and they were merely trying to drive
that devil out of its body.
Fear! Fear! Fear! Fear of devils in the home, lurking in the shadows of
night and in the light of day; lurking in the bodies of babies; devils
everywhere--always.
These are the Flash-lights of Fear!
And like unto them are the pictures of Frightfulness which I have set
down in the next chapter.
CHAPTER V
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIGHTFULNESS
"The Jap is the slant-eyed Hun of the Orient. He has a slant-eyed
ethics, a slant-eyed morality, a slant-eyed honesty, a slant-eyed social
consciousness; a slant-eyed ambition, a slant-eyed military system; and
a slant-eyed mind!" said Peter Clarke Macfarlane, the well-known author
and lecturer, one day when I was interviewing him on the Japanese
question.
"That's pretty strong, Mr. Macfarlane, in the light of your usual
conservatism," I commented.
"I say it carefully and after much thought. It is said to stay said so
far, as I am concerned," he added with finality.
This was also my own opinion, after spending three months in Japan and
Korea, another month in China; and another month or two in Manila;
catching the angle of Japanese leadership from every slant.
And after due consideration, and after a year to think it over
carefully, I am here to say, that I never saw, or heard of anything
worse happening in Belgium under German rule than that which I saw and
heard of happening under Japanese rule in Korea, Siberia and Formosa,
while I was in the Orient.
Suffice it is to say, at this point, that the Japanese is hated by the
whole Orient. I do not believe that the German Hun in his worst day was
ever hated more unanimously for his inhuman practices than is the Jap
Hun hated by the whole Orient to-day.
"Is it getting better or worse?" I am asked constantly.
"Worse!" I reply, and this reply is backed up by interviews I have had
with returned Korean missionaries.
I found the Japanese scorned and hated from one end of the Orient to the
other. As far south as Java, as far east as the Suez; as far north as
the uttermost reaches of Manchuria and Siberia; as far this direction as
Hawaii.
For instance, after I had been away from Korea for six months and had
come back to America I met a most conservative missionary in the Romona
Hotel in San Francisco. The last time previous to that meeting that I
had seen him was in Korea itself.
I said to him "Are things better or worse in Korea?"
His reply was, "Worse than they have ever been; generally speaking!" I
have no intention and no desire to further augment ill feeling between
America and Japan. In fact I do not fear anything like war in that
direction; but I do have an intense feeling of responsibility about
telling my readers the plain and simple truth that the whole Far Eastern
world hates Japan.
If that thought itself can get into the mind of America, this country
will understand, at least, that there is some fault that lies back in
the Japanese military policy and character itself. It hardly seems
possible, with ten races and five different countries hating Japan; that
Japan herself is not mostly to blame. When a matter of hatred is so
unanimous among all races in that part of the world, it is likely that
the fault lies with the race and nation which has the hatred of so many
types of people focused on its actions.
While I was in Java some high dignitaries in the Japanese Navy arrived
in Batavia. The Chinese Coolies who live in Batavia absolutely refused
to carry any Japanese officers or sailors in their Rickshas. It was a
striking indictment of the Japanese nation.
In Singapore the distrust and hatred of the Japanese is unanimous. In
the Philippines it is the same. In Hongkong you see few Japanese. They
are not wanted and they are not trusted. In Shanghai, and Peking it is
the same. The Student Movement, one of the most powerful weapons that
has ever arisen in any nation in the world, has focused the Chinese
sentiment against selfish Japanese aggression in China.
The Japanese officials laughed at the Student Boycott of Japanese goods
when it first started. But in a year they were trembling in the face of
that boycott. I was in Tientsin, and Peking during the days of the
Student Street Demonstrations. They were like American demonstrations.
Keen, alert, intelligent Chinese boys addressed the crowds admonishing
them not to buy Japanese goods in Chinese shops. The pressure became so
strong that all Chinese merchants from the lowest shopkeeper up to the
owner of the great chain stores, like our Woolworth institutions, put
away Japanese-made goods and refused to sell them.
I took dinner in Shanghai with one of the foremost merchant princes of
China and said, "Are you selling any Japanese-made goods?"
"I certainly am not. I am not powerful enough with all my millions of
money and all of my chain of stores to take such a chance as that. I
have put all of my Japanese goods in the cellar."
The Boycott against Japanese goods in China became so powerful that in
Tientsin, while I was there, the Japanese Consul complained bitterly to
the Governor of the Province and the Governor who was said to be under
the influence of Japanese money, arrested a lot of students. There was
one of the most determined and terrible riots that I have ever seen. It
was war. It was not like any mild American riot. It was war to the
death. Several students were killed and finally the pressure was so
strong that even this Japanese Agent was compelled to release the
imprisoned students. I shall quote from an editorial that I was asked to
write for the Peking _Leader_ during my stay in China:
The weapon which most worries the Japanese I should say, is the
boycott that the Students Movement has inaugurated. The
Japanese Government never had anything that quite worried it so
much. It is a weapon that is worth a thousand battleships, or
fifty divisions of soldiers. It is a weapon that will, if
continuously, and consistently and faithfully used, bring a
money-loving nation, like Japan to her knees, and send her
finally, scurrying like a whipped cur, with her tail between
her legs back home where she belongs.
I talked with a ragged Chinese boy through an interpreter just to find
what his reactions to the Japanese were. He was a beggar. He said, "The
Japanese has a heart like a dog and a liver like a wolf."
I quote again from the editorial in the Peking _Leader_:
All day I have been on the streets of Peking listening to
groups of students discussing the all absorbing-question of
the Boycott. I have not understood the characters printed on
their banners, but I have understood the light in Young China's
eyes. I can understand that language and that light, for it is
the language and the light of freedom, justice, liberty! I am
an American. I understand that light when I see it; and I know
also; that it is a light that can never be snuffed out. It is a
light that prison walls cannot hide and that the brute hand of
the invader cannot dim.
"And what are they protesting against?" is the question asked.
Primarily against the Japanese control of Shantung. Secondarily,
against a type of civilization which Japan represents; a civilization
that uses the weapons of frightfulness to accomplish its ends; a
civilization that steals a nation like Korea, compelling the abdication
of a weak Emperor at the point of the bayonet; and then using the avowed
method of extermination to deplete a subjected nation. The whole Orient
knows Japan and knows the methods that Japan has used and is using in
conquered territory. It is a continuous and continual policy of
extermination, frightfulness, and assimilation. This is the underlying
cause of the hatred of the whole Orient and the Far and Near East
against Japan; and this is the fundamental reason for the Students'
Boycott of Japanese goods in China.
One might devote an entire book to narrations of frightful cruelties
perpetrated by Japanese on Koreans, Siberians and Formosans; but that
would not be so strong as the setting forth of the underlying ethical
reasons for this universal hatred in which Japan is held.
However it might be quite honest and fair for this writer to set down
here several acts of frightfulness that came under his own personal
observation merely as casual illustrations of that which is going on all
the time.
One day I was walking with a missionary's wife through the streets of
Seoul. There was an excavation being made and a little railroad track
was being run along this excavation. A Korean boy had been set to guard
this track to keep folks from getting hurt when the dump car came down
its steep grade. He had been ordered by his Japanese employers to stop
all passage when the signal was given.
We were walking along when this Korean stopped an ordinary Japanese
civilian. He was of the low-browed type; mentally deficient I should
say; but quite the average type that is used by Japan to settle these
conquered countries.
The Korean held up his hands in warning.
The Japanese stooped over, picked up a stone as large as a cabbage head
and, with only a space of two feet between himself and the Korean,
threw it with all his force against the cheek of the Korean and smashed
his jaw in, tearing his ear off, breaking his jaw bone, and lacerating
his face fearfully. It was one of the most inhuman things that I have
ever seen done.
The missionary woman said to the Korean when the Jap ran; "Why do you
not report this to the Japanese police?"
"It would do no good. They would give no justice to me, and I would be
hounded to my death for reporting it."
One evening with a friend I had been speaking in Pyeng Yang. It was
midnight one Sunday and we were waiting for a train down to Seoul. As we
stood on the platform waiting; a north-bound train came in. It stopped.
As it stopped several Japanese train boys got off of the train. An old
white-haired Korean gentleman, about seventy-five years of age, stood on
the platform waiting for the train. He was intelligent looking; poised;
and well-dressed in the usual immaculately white robes.
A fifteen-year old Japanese train boy, seeing him standing there,
deliberately ran out of his way, lowered his shoulders like a football
charger and ran squarely into the old man, knocking him down to the
platform and ran on with a laugh and some muttered Japanese words.
The dignified Korean gentleman got up, brushed the dirt from his
clothes; did not even deign to glance at the offending boy; and walked
on as if nothing had happened.
This scene illustrates two things: First, the superiority of the Korean
mind and character to that of the Japanese. This is one of the causes of
the extreme frightfulness pursued by the Japanese. They instinctively
feel the superiority of their captives. It is not the first time in
history that a lesser nation has conquered a superior people.
This superiority in soul-stuff that the Korean has over that of the
Japanese is recognized immediately by all Europeans and Americans who
become, even in the least bit, familiar with the two peoples. The
sympathy of Christian civilizations is with the Koreans immediately.
The other thing that this simple scene illustrates, is the spirit of
ruthless cruelty and frightfulness that is bred in the very soul of the
youth of Japan toward the Koreans. Even the train boys can do a thing
like that without fear of punishment.
The first day that we were in Seoul, the capital city of Korea, Pat
McConnell and myself were walking down the main street of this
interesting city toward the depot. Parallel with us marched a squad of
Japanese soldiers. In front of them, going the same direction, was a
poor Korean workman pushing a small cart that looked like our American
wheelbarrow.
The Japanese soldiers were in formation and marching in the middle of a
wide street. But deliberately; evidently with orders from their officer
in charge; they edged over to that side of the street where the Korean
was walking and pushed him into the curb stone, kicking his barrow as
they passed, although this meant a useless swerving of, at least,
fifteen feet out of their course to do so. It was a case of deliberate
brutality.
"Korea is a land of trails and terraces," said a prominent missionary in
that fair spot to me one day as we were riding from Fusan to Seoul.
"And terror," added another traveler from America. "It is a land of
trails, terraces, and terror!"
One day a friend of mine was begging Baron Saito, the present
Governor-General of Korea, to stop the cruelties of the Japanese
gendarmes in villages in northern Korea. The Baron asked for the names
of those who had given the missionary his information about the
cruelties and he refused to give them.
"Why should you not give them?" asked Baron Saito.
"Because they would be killed for complaining," said the missionary.
Then he told Governor-General Saito how he had once complained to the
police department when a father and son were cruelly beaten in prison.
"Give me their names," said the gendarme.
"I will if you will give me a promise that they will be protected."
"No! I cannot do that! The gendarmes are very revengeful!"
I know personally of a Korean preacher who has done no greater crime
than to attend a meeting at a dinner given for released Korean
prisoners. He was arrested and kept in jail for three days, just for
attending that dinner.
Another preacher with whom I talked was suspected of collecting money
eight months after the March Independence Movement. When he heard that
the Japanese police were coming for him he fled. This angered the
police. They appeared the next morning at three o'clock at his home.
There were only the mother and a twelve-year-old daughter left. First
the gendarmes burst in the frail doors with the butts of their rifles,
and then from three o'clock in the morning until daylight, they beat and
tortured those two helpless Christian Korean women; kicking them all
over the house until they were unconscious. These two Korean women were
in bed for two weeks because of that night's experience and were not
able to walk for a much longer period than that.
And these women were educated, cultured women. They had committed no
crime. It was simply because they did not know where the father was.
Later the father and son were arrested. They were beaten cruelly in the
process of arrest although they offered no resistance. The son later
said to me, "I could stand it to be beaten myself and even to see my
father beaten but the unbearably cruel thing was to know that they had
beaten my innocent mother and sister when no man was there to protect
them."
I cite this instance because it happened eight months after the
Independence Movement, and three months after the so-called reform
Government of Baron Saito had been in effect and after the Japanese
Press had said to the world that all cruelties had ceased.
A case of frightfulness that was called to my attention; which seemed to
me to be the very essence of cruelty was that of the moral terrorizing
of an educated Korean Pastor, whom the police merely suspected of having
had something to do with the Independence Movement. They had no direct
evidence but submitted him to months of moral terrorizing which was the
worst I have ever heard of.
For months at a stretch they would suddenly appear outside of his home
and thrust their bayonets through his doors. Then they would go away
without saying a word. He had absolutely no redress. If he had
complained, he would have been thrown into prison.
One of the most reliable missionaries that I met in Korea told me of how
one morning the policemen came to a church in northern Korea during the
hour of service. They broke eighty windows, arrested fourteen men,
smashed the little organ with their gun butts, smashed a beautiful lamp,
tore up the mat seats from the floors, and burned them in front of the
church.
At the funeral service of another young Korean preacher, Pak Suk Han in
Pyeng Yang, hundreds of Japanese soldiers appeared with drawn bayonets
just to terrorize the people. The church was full of Japanese officers
with drawn swords.
"What would have happened if somebody in a fit of patriotism had shouted
'Mansei'?" I asked.
"We would have been killed instantly!" said the missionary soberly. "I
was afraid of that!"
A prominent, educated and English-speaking Korean official, told me that
in a conversation with a high Japanese official that that particular
Japanese had said "Our plan will be to assimilate the Korean people!"
"But that will be impossible. There are twenty million of us. You will
find that a hard thing to do!" said this Korean.
The Japanese official smiled and said significantly, "We know the way!"
The Korean knew what that meant. It meant extermination; extermination
in every way possible. It meant extermination by introducing
prostitution in Korea. This has been done. Korea never had any legalized
prostitution. Korea never knew what the Red Light Section meant. Japan's
first move was to introduce that. She sent her diseased women to Korea.
She made prostitution ridiculously cheap; fifty sen; which is
twenty-five cents in American money.
"Why?"
It is one of her ways of assimilation which means extermination and she
has already shot venereal disease rates up to an alarming state in
Korea.
Her next step in frightfulness was to introduce opium. Japanese Agents
raise thousands of acres of Opium in Korea and sell it. This is another
one of her steps in the process of assimilation or extermination.
Japan has stolen from poor Koreans their rice lands and their coal beds.
The process is for a Japanese company to buy the water sources of the
rice paddies below and then refuse to let the Koreans have water for his
rice fields. This is another step in frightfulness that will finally
exterminate the Korean if it keeps up long enough.
The recent massacre of Koreans in Manchuria by Japanese soldiers
illustrate the Japanese spirit.
This same policy of frightfulness is carried on in Formosa and in
Siberia and wherever the Japanese army and gendarme system has
authority. It is worse than anything that the Germans ever did in France
or Belgium. It has its only parallel in the dark ages.
I told Baron Saito, Governor-General of Korea this in an interview. He
wanted to know what America thought of Japan's rule in Korea. I said:
"America and the whole civilized world is stirred with indignation at
the Japanese rule in Korea. There has been nothing like it since the
dark ages." Then I read him a quotation from an editorial in _Zion's
Herald_, a church paper published in Boston with virtually those words
in it.
* * * * *
My friend, whom I met first in France, when he came back from. France
was sent to Siberia as a Captain in the American Army.
I met him in Manila just after he had returned from Siberia. He, in
common with all Americans who had seen the Japanese methods of
frightfulness in Siberia, was filled with hatred.
"One night," he said, "a company of Japanese soldiers entered the
little village six hundred miles north of Vladivostok where we were
located. They announced that they were hunting for Bolsheviks.
"They did not find any in the little village, although they ruthlessly
broke down every door of every home in that village. Then they went out
to a sawmill about three miles from town and brought in five boys
between the ages of twelve and eighteen.
"After torturing these boys in an old box car for two days, hanging them
up by the thumbs with their arms behind their backs until they were
unconscious; and then forcing salt water, hot water, cold water, and
water with pepper in it down their nostrils, alternately; and other
added cruelties; they announced to the village that they would release
them that night on the public square."
"Did they do it?" I asked anxiously, for I was stirred to my soul's
depths with his narration of cruelties in Siberia.
"Yes, they released them; in this way:
"They called all the friends and families of the prisoners together on
the public square. Then they dug five graves. Then five Japanese
officers came stalking across the public square, whisking at the
thistle-tops with swords as they came; and then walked up to these
innocent Russian boys, and whacked off their heads.
"Had they been tried?" I asked indignantly.
"They had been given no trial. They were mere boys, who, probably,
didn't even know what the word Bolshevik meant. It was the worst
illustration of frightfulness that I ever saw, although it was a common
thing for the Japanese troops to go through the country upsetting the
barrels of honey that the poor peasants were saving up for the long
winters; rooting up their young potatoes; cutting the throats of their
colts and cattle, and ravishing the land."
"How could you stand it?"
"We couldn't stand it. I had to fight to keep my company of Americans
from sailing into them with fists and bayonets. It would have meant war.
So I sent word back to headquarters that we were out of provisions and
we were called back to Vladivostok."
Can this scene be duplicated in Formosa and Korea, where the Japanese
hold sway?
It can.
During the Independence Movement in Korea this thing happened: All of
the Korean Christians had been asked to assemble in a church for a
meeting. When they were all in the church, the Japanese gendarme set
fire to the church and then fired into it, killing every man.
A woman, big with child, came running toward the church having heard the
shooting and knowing that her husband was within.
A big, burly Japanese pushed her back.
"What do you want?" he cried in Korean.
"I want to go in there. My husband is there," she cried in terror.
"But you will be killed if you go in there!"
"I don't care! I want to die if he is to die!"
"All right! You shall have your wish!" said the Japanese, and pulling
out his sword, cut off her head, killing her instantly. She fell at his
feet with her unborn child; and he laughed aloud at the spectacle.
This is Japanese frightfulness and it can be duplicated by many
missionaries in Korea if they dared to speak.
But the minute they speak and tell the truth that minute they are sent
home from their life work. They realize that this leaves the Koreans to
the utter and awful cruelties of the barbarous Japanese, and because of
this, in spite of their indignation they hold their tongues for the
larger good. But they eagerly give the facts to those of us who are
coming back to America so that America in turn may know what is going on
in Korea. That is the only hope; that the indignation of a righteous
world, without war, may bring pressure to bear on Japan to stop these
terrible cruelties and tortures; this unutterable frightfulness. This
is the hope of the missionaries; this is the only hope of the Koreans!
* * * * *
I don't know whether or not it was because I had been listening for so
long to the most brutal stories of Japanese treatment of Korean men,
women and children; with murder, rapine, burning of homes, especially
Christian homes; beating of a mother and her twelve-year-old girl from
three in the morning until eight to make them reveal the hiding-place of
their preacher daddy, that the crimson, blood-red sunset I witnessed on
my last night in Korea seemed to me like a "sunset of crimson wounds."
All I know is that it happened in Korea while I was there, and that my
soul had been, for a solid month, stirred to the depths of its righteous
wrath over the things that I had heard first-hand from human lips.
But there it was. The sky was blood-red. At first it was black, a somber
black. Not a coal-black but a slate black. Then suddenly just at the
edge of the horizon a crack began to appear. It was a slit of blood. It
looked more like a wound than anything else I ever saw. The slit of
blood grew larger and larger in the slate-black clouds.
Then suddenly all over the horizon these wounds began to break through
the mass of black clouds. Some of these slits were horizontal slits,
and some of them ran in graceful curves. Some of them looked as if a
bayonet had been lunged into the body of that somber cloud and a great
crimson gash was made with ragged edges as big as a house. Then it
looked as if some ruthless Japanese gendarme had taken his sword and
slashed a rip in the abdomen of that sky; and from side to side like a
crescent moon appeared this great crimson wound.
I had never seen a sunset just like it. But there it was. It seemed that
there was back of that great black cloud a blood-red planet, pouring its
crimson tides like a great waterfall down back of that slate-black mass
until finally the curtain of black began to tear, and the blood poured
through to run along the horizon, and splash against the clouds, and
slit its way like wounds through the clouds of night.
And I thought of something else. I thought how a Man once was crucified.
I thought how dark the skies were on that afternoon. I thought how
slate-colored and somber all life seemed, especially to that little
group of disciples. I thought of the wounds in His hands and feet and
side. I thought of the wounds the thorns in His crown made, and of the
blood that ran over His face. I could see Him there back of that cloud
in Korea. I could see His Christian people being crucified again
because of their religion. I could see Japanese bayonets thrust into His
side and Japanese nails through His feet and His hands. I could see a
Japanese crown of thorns on His head because He said, "Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it
unto me." And I could see the blood of his wounds breaking through that
nation's clouds on that wonder evening of the "sunset of wounds" back of
the Korean mountains in December.
CHAPTER VI
FEMININE FLASH-LIGHTS
"Oriental women are fascinating to Occidental men," said a newspaper
reporter in a Shanghai hotel lobby, a year ago.
"All women are fascinating to Occidental men. Take the French girls and
the way they captured our American soldiers; of course, these
brown-eyed, brown-skinned, graceful, mysterious----"
"It's just as I said," replied the first speaker interrupting the second
speaker, "Oriental girls are more fascinating to Occidental men than
white girls."
"Yes--I guess you are right, when we get down to the honest to goodness
truth of the thing," said an American oil man. "Take that Javanese girl
who knocked at the door of my room; or take that half-breed Malay girl
we met on the ship between Singapore and Batavia; or that little
red-cheeked Japanese girl in Tokyo; or that Spanish brunette in Manila;
or--Oh, Boy! Do you remember that Chinese half-breed, with English blood
in her veins and an English education in her brain and Paris clothes on
her back, and American pep in her eyes, and Japanese silk stockings on
her----"
"Come on! Come on! We didn't call on you for a lecture on Oriental girls
whom you have met," said the first speaker.
Then a bell boy paged me and I lost the rest of the conversation.
But this dialogue set me to thinking on the various types of fascinating
Oriental women; the standing they have in the world; and the status of
their living.
There were the Japanese women; beautiful, graceful, red-cheeked, small
of stature, wistful-eyed, colorfully dressed; always smiling slaves to
their men.
The well-trained Geisha girl has, for centuries, because of her superior
education, received the confidences of Japanese men; while a Japanese
man would scorn to talk things over with his wife.
There was the banquet we attended at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Mr.
Uchida, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and many of the high officials
of Japan were present with their wives. Several members of the House of
Parliament were present as well as the Secretary to Mr. Hara, the Prime
Minister. Each of these great leaders of Japan had his wife by his side
at the banquet table.
It was a small group.
One of the speakers of the evening said: "Perhaps you Americans do not
realize that this banquet is an unusual occasion in Japan. I think that
it is the first time that I have ever attended a banquet in all my life,
when so many Japanese gentlemen had their own wives with them at that
banquet. It is a very unusual thing to do, but I hope that, in time, it
will become more common in Japan, as it is in America."
This speech was met with amused laughter on the part of the Japanese
gentlemen present; but laughter that was kindly; and it was met with
applause on the part of the Americans present.
It was typical of the attitude of even the educated Japanese man toward
the matter of appearing in public with his wife at his side.
Up in Sapporo, on the island of Hokkaido, we were entertained by a
beautiful Japanese woman. We had been away from America for several
months and were tired of eating Japanese food, so when we were invited
to this Japanese home for a dinner we groaned.
But much to our delight, when we sat down we had as fine an American
dinner as any of us had ever eaten.
I turned to our hostess, a most beautiful Japanese woman; the wife of
the Dean of the College at Sapporo; and said: "Do you have servants who
know how to cook American food?"
"No, I cooked it all myself!" she said much to my surprise with a bow
and a smile.
And there she sat, cool and poised after having cooked food enough for
fifteen people that morning; and arranging for it to be served in the
finest style; with place cards, salted almonds, Turkey, pudding,
vegetables and everything that makes an American dinner good; including
a fine salad. There she sat; as cool, calm and collected as if servants
had done all of the work that morning instead of she herself.
And never in all of my life have I seen a more gracious hostess. She
watched the wants of every guest. She noted which guests liked a special
food, and saw to it that they had plenty of that particular food; and,
in addition to this she kept a fascinating line of conversation going
constantly during the meal.
"Do you live in American fashion or Japanese fashion?" I asked her,
knowing that she had been educated in America.
"Both!" was her reply. "We have Japanese rooms for our Japanese guests
and American rooms for our European and American guests."
"But how do you live yourselves; how are you training your children?" I
asked her.
"We are training our daughters to live in American style; on a common
ground with the men. That is the better way. That is the fairer way!
That is the way out of our feminine darkness!"
She said it quietly, with poise, and with a fine assurance which was
thrilling. It sounded like a call to battle, like a trumpet note in the
new freedom for women.
A missionary friend told me at the conclusion of that meal that this
beautiful young Japanese hostess whispered to her Mother-in-law during
the dinner a phrase that sounded strangely like American slang, when she
noted that her mother-in-law was not carrying on much of a conversation
with the man beside her, "Start something! He can speak Japanese as well
as English!"
At that, dear Mrs. Mother-in-law started an animated conversation in
Japanese with her silent guest on her left. This was illustrative of the
care with which our hostess was watching that we be kept happy at her
table. It was a Feminine Flash-light that I do not care to forget; an
illustration of the possible efficiency, poise, grace, beauty and
sweetness of the Japanese woman of the future when she shall have won
her rights of freedom from the slavery of an inferior position to man in
the social scale.
To an American, the position of woman in regard to prostitution in Japan
is a terrible thing, but when we consider the light in which the
Ethical thought of Japan sees it, we do not blame the women any more
than Jesus blamed the woman taken in adultery in his day.
The system of prostitution is run by the Government and the largest
income that the Government has, comes from the sale of Sake, the
national drink, and its houses of prostitution.
A woman who becomes a Prostitute is looked upon as a heroine. This is
for the simple reason that she is given a matter of several hundred yen,
it depending upon her form, beauty and qualifications for her position;
and that money goes to her poor parents. When she leaves her little
village to give a certain number of the years of her life to the
Yoshiwara in order to free her parents from debt she is lauded and fêted
by the people of her village and sent off as one who goes on a crusade
of service.
Prostitution is so much a part of the acknowledged life of Japan that
Temples for prostitutes exist where they may go and pray. In one Temple
we saw large numbers of photographs put up by certain girls of the
Yoshiwara to advertise their wares.
Consequently there is no fine tradition of ethical values established in
Japan and the poor girl herself is not to blame. Nor is she blamed; for
it is not at all an uncommon thing for a Japanese girl to marry out of
a house of prostitution into a fine family.
One of the terrible Feminine Flash-lights that every careful traveler
discovers in the Orient is the presence of Japanese girls in the
segregated sections of Shanghai, Seoul, Peking, Nanking; and even so far
away as Singapore. I understand however that a recent order from the
Emperor has called all these girls back to Japan, which is an upward
step not only for Japan as a nation; but for the womankind of Japan.
* * * * *
It was in a Japanese Hotel in northern China that Pat McConnell and I
had our experience with the strange ways and customs of Japan. Pat was
taking the pictures and I was writing the stories.
We thought it would be an unusual experience to stay all night at a
regular Japanese Inn. We stayed.
That night, much to the amusement, of the missionaries who stayed with
us, three beautiful Japanese girls came gracefully into the cold room
where we had started to take our clothes off.
They bowed several times as they came with cups of hot tea.
They seemed to pay particular attention to me.
All three of them bowed to me first and then each proceeded to select an
individual man to whom they served tea.
I took it for granted that they had paid this particular attention to me
because of some special characteristic of masculine beauty or
intellectual appearance; or atmosphere of greatness that must have
hovered about me in some unknown fashion.
I made the mistake of swelling up with pride and bragging about this
attention that I had received.
"Ah, that's because of your bald head. They think that you are the old
man of the party. They have great respect for old age!" the missionary
said with a roar of laughter.
The truth of the matter was that I was the youngest of the party, but
those girls had selected me as the venerable member of the group of
Americans.
But the climax came when these young ladies decided to stay with us "To
the bitter end" as Pat called it.
After filling us with tea they still remained; bowing and smiling; even
though they could not understand a word we were saying nor we a word
that they were saying.
"It's one o'clock now! I'd like to get to bed," said Pat.
"How long will they stay with us?" I asked.
The missionaries only grinned in reply.
"By George, I'm going to take my shirt off and see if they won't go!"
said Pat.
He took it off. The young girl who was serving him took his shirt and
after neatly folding it, laid it carefully away.
"So that's what they're waiting for; to undress us?" queried Pat and the
missionaries laughed again, waiting to see what would happen.
"They can go as far as they like. If they can stand it, I can!" said
Pat.
Then he took off his shoes.
A young lady took the shoes, carefully brushed them off, and put them
away. Then he took off socks, followed by his trousers.
It looked as they would stay until Pat got into his Pajamas. He was in a
corner.
"It seems as if this young lady wants to put me to bed right!" said Pat,
with a grin.
"That's exactly what she is here for. It's a hotel custom in Japanese
hotels and we get so that we don't think anything of it. They bathe in
the same pool; men and women alike; and think nothing of it. After all,
modesty is not entirely a matter of clothes, as the Japanese prove."
"Anyhow, that's what I call service!" said Pat with a grin.
* * * * *
It was a cold winter night in Seoul, Korea. I had been invited to dinner
at a Korean home; the home of a former Governor under the Korean
regime; and now, a respected official under the Japanese rule.
I had looked forward to this dinner with unusual interest.
We took Rickshas to get there and nearly froze on the way.
We took both our shoes and our coats off on the back porch and left them
to the tender mercies of the zero weather which prevailed on that night.
We were ushered into this beautiful home.
A room was full of men; stately sons of the family; the gray-bearded,
dignified father; but no women, not a single woman. I wondered about
this, for I knew that this household was noted for its beautiful
daughters and a wonderful mother. The missionaries had told me that.
I wondered why no women came to welcome me.
Finally we sat down to one of those interminable Oriental dinners, with
thirty or forty courses; squatted on our haunches, on the cold floor;
half-frozen, cramped and uncomfortable.
Then in came a beautiful girl. She was beautiful in every sense of the
word; physically and spiritually. There was a touch of refinement about
her which made me know that she had received an English education.
But she was not there for any part of the dinner. Not at all. She was
there merely to serve.
I found that she could speak English and every time she came to serve
me, I took the opportunity of talking with her; taking a chance on
whether it was diplomatic for me to do so or not. I was after
information.
"You speak good English?" I said. "Why do you not sit down and eat with
us?"
She laughed aloud.
"My father would drop over dead if I did. It is not the custom in Korea
for the women of the family to dine with the men on an occasion like
this. We eat alone in the kitchen."
"Have you a mother?"
"Yes, but she is in the kitchen."
"Will I not get to meet her before I go?"
"Perhaps? Perhaps not. If you meet her at all it will be just at the
close, of the evening, providing my father thinks to call her. It is not
important; so our Korean men think."
"But you; you know better? You have been in an American School?" I said,
as she came in for the fifteenth course and paused a moment to talk with
me.
"Yes, I know better! I know the American way of treating women is the
Christian way," she said sadly.
"And what do you think of that way? Do you not like that way better
than the Korean way?" I asked.
"The American way is much better." Then she paused and much to my
delight used a typical American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch
of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in her brown cheeks, "Why,
I just love the American way!" she said and then fled, blushing with
shame, as if she had said something immodest.
I did not see her again that evening. Nor did I see any of the other
women of that household. Nor did I see the mother of the home at all.
* * * * *
It was in a Shanghai hospital. I was sitting beside an American
newspaper friend who was at the head of the Chinese Information Bureau.
He was a world-vagabond. Beside his bed sat a beautiful Chinese girl,
who had been educated in England and whose mother was a Scotch woman.
Her father was a full-blooded Chinese.
"I love her but she won't marry me!" said my friend suddenly looking up
toward the Chinese girl.
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN, PEKING.
Long before a single cathedral had been built in Europe this beautiful
structure was erected.]
[Illustration: A BEAUTIFUL THIRTEEN STORY PAGODA NEAR PEKING.]
[Illustration: MILLIONS OF WAYSIDE TEMPLES AND SHRINES ADORN THE FIELDS
AND HIGHWAYS EVERYWHERE IN JAPAN, KOREA, AND CHINA. THIS IS ONE OF THEM.
A SHRINE AND A TEMPLE.]
[Illustration: A SUNRISE SILHOUETTE PHOTOGRAPH OF SOME OF THE HUNDREDS
OF BELLS OF BUDDHA ON BOROBOEDOER, JAVA.]
She was a beautiful girl and could play a piano as few American women I
have met. She would have graced any social room in America with her dark
beauty, her brown eyes, and her Oriental fire. She was rich. Her father
was worth several millions; being one of many shrewd Chinese business
men. She was dressed like a Parisian model, in the latest European
styles. She was in China for the first time in her life. Her father had
brought her back to marry a Chinese boy. She did not love him. She did
love my American friend.
"Why will you not marry James?" I asked her.
"My father would kill me," she said quietly.
"Does he say so?"
"He does. He went to America a week ago; and the last thing he said was,
'If you marry anything but a Chinese I will kill you!'"
"Did he really mean it?" I asked her, astonished.
"He meant it more than anything he ever meant in his life. It would be
considered a disgrace to my entire family if I married anybody but a
Chinese boy."
"Even though your father married a Scotch woman?" I said.
"For that very reason it is imperative that I marry my own blood," she
said.
"That is terrible!" I replied catching my first glimpse of the strange
and terrible social position in which a girl of mixed blood is placed in
China.
"You see," she said in a quiet, refined voice, with a marked English
accent, "I have an English education but I have Chinese blood. I can
never be happy marrying a Chinese after I have been educated in
England. I can never be happy with Chinese clothes, Chinese customs, and
Chinese people. And yet if I marry the man I love, it will break my
father's heart. He would kill me to be sure; for if he says he will,
that means that he will keep his word. But that would not be the worst
of it. To die would be easy."
"What would be the worst of it?" I asked, my heart stirred with a
strangely deep sympathy at this beautiful Chinese girl's dilemma.
"The worst thing would be that it would break my father's heart!"
Then she wept.
That was my first glimpse of the life of tragedy through which a
half-breed woman of the Orient has to go.
I met them in the Philippines, with Spanish and American blood running
in their veins; I met Malay girls whose fathers had been German or
English; I met Dyak girls whose fathers had been Dutch; and Javanese
girls whose fathers had been either American, English or Dutch.
I stayed with such a woman in a home in Borneo. She had been a Dyak
girl. Yet she did not look it. She had a beautiful home with beautiful
English speaking children. I met her in the interior of Borneo a hundred
miles from a single white woman. And yet in this far interior; living
with her English husband who was the head of a mining project; she was
keeping intact the English education of her children. There was a piano
and the children played beautifully while the mother, in a rich
contralto voice sang.
She was graceful, accomplished, beautiful, poised and sweet.
One night as we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened
his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks
to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be
surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took
her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and took her to England."
"That's a lie!" I exclaimed.
"It is the truth!" he added.
Somehow his statement angered me. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the
unusual heat of the tropics. We were directly on the Equator. I would
have fought him for that statement.
But it was true.
"And the hell of it was that when I took her to England she was not
happy and my people would not receive her. So we have had to come back
to Borneo and live our lives in this fashion, far from civilization."
He was silent for a few minutes.
"That is the fate of mixing bloods in these tropical lands," he said
with a shudder. "And the woman always suffers more than the man!"
I met another Malay-English girl on the ship going from Singapore to
Batavia, Java.
She too was an educated, English-speaking girl of a strange beauty and
fascination. She started to talk with me as I sat alone on the Dutch
ship. We were the only English-speaking people on board and we felt a
certain comradeship. We sat an entire evening talking about the problem
of a girl of mixed blood in the Malay States.
"White men always assume that we are bad girls. They come into the
offices where we work as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint
of mixed blood. We have the longings and the ideals of the best blood
that is in our veins; but the skin and the color and the passions of the
worst. We try to be good; some of us; but everything is against us. We
can never marry white men; though we frequently fall in love with them
for we work side by side with them in the offices. But when it comes to
marrying us they fear the social ban. It is a terrible thing. There is
no way out! It is a thing that has been imposed upon us from the
generations that have gone. We pay!"
I shall never forget her brown eyes, her brown skin, her heaving breast,
as the great Dutch ship cut the waves of the South China Sea bound for
Java.
"Why are you leaving a good position and going to Java?" I asked her.
"They say things are better for us girls in Java; that the Dutch are not
so particular. I shall no doubt be homesick for Singapore but I am going
to try Java for a while. My sister is there!"
* * * * *
A Feminine-Flash light that has its humorous side was one that I
experienced in Borneo.
We had gone out to a Dyak village to take pictures.
It was a miserably hot morning. That night I stayed in Pontianak which
is bisected by the Equator. It was so cold in the middle of the night
that I had to get up and put on a night shirt!
The next day we tramped ten miles through the Jungle to a Head-hunting
Dyak village.
I had been taking pictures for an hour in this Kampong when six of the
most beautiful Dyak girls came in, with great Bamboo water tubes flung
over their gracefully strong shoulders. Their skin looked like that of a
red banana from toe to chin. They were stark naked save for a girdle
about their loins. They had been five miles away for water.
Their skin was flushed with exercise. There they stood, mystified at
seeing white men in the village Kampong.
In fact they were terrified.
Their big brown eyes bulged out.
Their breasts heaved with fear.
I said to the missionary, "Dyak Madonnas! What a painting they would
make?"
"Yes, there are no more beautiful women anywhere. They look like bronze
statues. A Rodin, or a St. Gaudens would go wild over their limbs and
bodies."
I asked the missionary to tell them that I wanted to take a picture of
them just as they were, standing with their water vessels poised on
their shoulders; in their naked splendor and beauty.
He told them.
They squealed for all the world like American girls and ran for dear
life, disappearing in the flash of an eye.
He tried to coax them to come out to get a picture taken. The Missionary
could speak their language but they would only peek through the doors
with grinning faces.
Finally they agreed that we could take their pictures if I would let
them put dresses on.
I didn't want to do this; for I wanted them just as they were; but saw
that they were adamant in their souls even if their brown bodies did
look as soft as ripening mangos; and as beautiful and brown.
I pictured all sorts of ugly dresses; discarded by the white folks and
given to them. But much to my surprise, when they appeared all dressed
up for the picture, every last one of them had on a white woman's
discarded night gown.
I wanted to laugh. It destroyed their picturesqueness but those gowns
could not destroy their symmetrical beauty of limb and body.
"That's a quick way to dress up!" I said to my missionary friend.
We smiled but I got the picture.
And back of these Flash-lights Feminine; is the black page of the
history of womankind in all the Far East; with footbinding still rampant
over nine-tenths of China; baby-killing, baby-selling, and baby-slavery
which I saw with my own eyes time and time again; with slavery of
womankind, from Japan down to Ceylon the regular thing. But there is
still hope in the woman-heart of the Far East; and the hope is the
American woman and her religion. That and that alone will break down
prejudices, break off shackles, and tear to bits the traditions of the
past.
* * * * *
"The women suffer! Yes, the women always suffer!" said a big fellow to
me up in the northern part of Luzon in the Philippines one evening.
"What do you mean?" I asked him, scenting a story.
Then the man told me of a cholera epidemic that he had passed through;
of how he had tried to care for the sick, even though he was not a
physician; told me of their poor superstitious methods of driving away
the "evil spirits."
He told of how he had gone into homes where he found seven inmates dead
and four dying; of how he tried to care for them with nothing medicinal
at hand.
Then he told me of how the poor people went down to a dirty inland river
and had killed a hog, taken its heart; killed a dog, taken its heart;
and then after putting them on a little raft, floated them off down the
river to drive the cholera away. Then he told me of how the natives had,
in their desperation, tied tight bands about their ankles to keep the
evil spirits from coming up out of the earth into their bodies.
"But what do you yourself do about a doctor. You say that you are 400
miles from a doctor, even here. What about your children, when they take
sick?" I asked him, and then was sorry that I had asked the question
because of a terribly hurt and unutterably sorrowful look in his eyes.
"Mother and I don't like to talk about that or to think about it!" he
said simply, and I knew that I had torn open an old wound which was just
over his heart.
His voice broke as he spoke, and he looked at the woman who was his
brave helpmate and said again: "Mother and I don't like to think about
that!" The tears ran down over his cheeks and "Mother's" too, and mine
also.
"I am sorry! I am sorry if I have opened an old wound!" I said, quite
helpless to remedy the damage I had done. I felt as one who had
unwittingly trodden on a flower bed and crushed some violets. They
bleed, even though you see no blood. I saw that their hearts were
bleeding. But he spoke.
"We were 400 miles from a doctor. Baby took sick. If we could have had a
doctor she would have been saved."
"Now Daddy, we do not know for certain about that," said the
ever-conservative woman in her.
"There was not a Filipino doctor. She died in mother's arms!"
It was oppressively silent in that far-off mission home for a few
minutes. I thought some one would sob aloud. It might have been any one
of us, the way we all felt. I took hold of my cane chair with a grip
that numbed my hands for a half hour afterwards.
CHAPTER VII
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FUN
All the "Peck's Bad Boys" of the world are not confined to American
soil.
I found them all over the Far East; especially in China.
I was annexed by one of them who became a sort of a guide de luxe when
we were going through the ruined Palaces of the romantic regions of
Peking.
He annexed himself to us in somewhat the same fashion as a thistle or a
burr annexes itself to you as you walk through the field where thistles
are thick.
He was an acquired asset of questionable value. With him were a lot of
followers but it was plain to be seen that he was the leader of the
gang; which was, for all the world, like a typical street gang in an
American city.
Who could pass up that group of a dozen little rascals who followed us
through the ruins of the old Summer Palace? Who could resist their
imitations of everything one did? I sneezed and the little rascals
sneezed also. I counted one, two, three, four, as I adjusted my Graflex
for a picture and I heard a chorus of laughing "One, two, three, fours."
I yelled ahead to an American member of the party and said "Wait!" and a
dozen boys yelled "Wait!"
We fell in love with the dirty-faced rascals. They looked to be a
nuisance when we started and I wanted them driven back, but before we
were through they had become the most interesting part of the whole
trip. Sure enough we emptied our purses of pennies and some white money.
The little fellow who was in his bare feet and who said, with a real
touch of seven year old Chinese humor, "These are leather shoes that I
have on and they will last all my life," won our hearts. That was humor
with a vengeance.
This lad was happy. No wonder then that when one of the party passed him
an extra penny early in the morning he winked knowingly as one who had
been taken into the inner councils of affection.
And no wonder that he followed the man who gave him that penny to the
end of the morning, and no wonder when we told him through the
interpreter that we liked the boys because they were good boys; he said
in return, "Some boys would have followed you around, pulling your coats
and being rude and yelling at you."
The nonchalant way in which they admitted that they were good boys won
our hearts and we came back penniless.
Then who can forget the little rascals who smiled and winked back in the
midst of the dignified Lama ceremonies over at the Lama Temple, proving
that they were, after all, real human boys with a laugh and the spirit
of fun in their little souls in spite of their having to take part in
this dignified chanting service.
It was fun when the service was over to see them tumble out of the
Temple so fast that one boy fell and about six fell on top of him just
as American boys do pouring out of school. I even saw one lad whack
another one on the back of his little bald head and a scuffle ensued.
They laughed, fought, tumbled pell-mell, got up again grinning, winked
and laughed back at the good natured Americans for all the world like
American boys.
The Chinese have a distinct sense of humor and it is very much like that
which is found in our own America. Indeed the Chinese are like us in
many respects.
The Filipino enjoys a good joke but his humor is more cruel than is
American humor.
The Dyak of Borneo has a sense of play and fun that would not exactly
appeal to an American mind; although there are those who claim that
American football is a near kin to the delightful game of Head-hunting
indulged in by the Dyaks of Borneo.
The Dyaks have for centuries been known as the head-hunters of the Far
East. They, in common with the Igorotes of the Philippines, have had the
playful custom of going out when the mood took them and bringing in a
few heads just as our Indians used to get scalps. When a Dyak youth
wanted to marry a nice young Dyak girl to whom he had taken a fancy (and
I can assure the reader that some of them are as beautiful as Rodin's
bronze statues), he didn't even dare mention his desire for that young
bronze beauty until he had brought in five or six heads. After that he
had some standing in the lady's sight. Without the heads he had no more
chance of winning either the girl herself or her pa or ma or any of the
Dyak family than the proverbial snowball has of getting through Borneo
without melting. It just simply couldn't be done according to Dyak
etiquette.
Head-hunting was a game between tribes also. When two tribes of Dyaks
felt a playful mood coming on, they would challenge each other to a
head-hunting game. The game would last for a week or so and the tribe
that took the most heads won. It was nothing like "Tag you're it." If
so, some of the skulls that I have seen at Dyak Compounds would not be
grinning so hideously these days as they ornament the poles of certain
vain and proud Dyak hunters.
The Battaks of Sumatra also have a playful custom of getting rid of
their old men. When a man gets so old that they think it is about time
for him to tell his last tale, they put him up a Cocoanut tree. Then all
of the young bucks of the village get together and try to shake him
down. If he is too feeble to hold on, and comes down, that is a sign of
heaven that his days are through and they cook him and eat him.
* * * * *
The Japanese claim to have a great sense of humor. Japanese students
speaking in America, insist that this is true. But travelers in Japan do
not find it so. Indeed if Japan had a sense of humor, it would keep her
out of many an international tangle. She does not know how to laugh. Her
sense of dignity is so exaggerated that she does not know the fine art
of smiling and laughing at herself.
"What does Japan most need to learn?" a student asked me.
"To laugh," I replied.
"I think that you are right! Your Lincoln knew how to laugh!" was his
response as he went off thoughtfully.
I was advertised to speak in a northern college in Japan. The Dean of
the school wanted to advertise me so that the students would all come
out to hear me. This is the way he did it:
"Dr. Stidger is a college student who played with the foot-ball
in America. He is a man with the bigness of the head! He
reaches the six feet tall; the four feet around; has an arm
like an ox and a head like a board!"
I was not certain as to just what he meant by many of those references,
but I was assured that they were intended to be highly complimentary to
me. I am not yet sure of that but I had a good laugh just the same.
The story is told of a ruthless American humorist Hotel-keeper in
Singapore who was entertaining a group of Japanese Officers from the
Japanese Navy. This American had no love for Japan. He also knew of
their lack of humor; so when the Japanese Captain arrived at the hotel
the American Manager made quite an extended speech of welcome, as his
American friends listened, greatly amused.
He said in part: "The hotel is yours! During your stay the entire force
of servants is at your disposal. If there is anything that you want that
you do not see, please ask for it."
[Illustration: OLD BROMO VOLCANO, JAVA.
"The way it effervesces Bromo is a fitting name," said the author when
he saw it in action.]
[Illustration: A SIDE VIEW OF BEAUTIFUL BOROBOEDOER IN JAVA.
Said by travelers to make the Pyramids look like child's play as a
tremendous piece of construction; and as a work of art to have no rival
in the whole world.]
[Illustration: NAKED AND OTHERWISE.
This curious conglomeration of Mongrel children watching the
photographer in Borneo where Dyaks, Chinese, Malay and others mix
indiscriminately.]
[Illustration: A DOG MARKET AMONG THE IGGOROTEES OF THE PHILIPPINES.]
The Japanese Captain bowed continuously and smiled; sucking in his
breath with a characteristic national custom; the same sound they made
as they eat fried eggs in a Japanese dining car; a sound similar to the
old-fashioned but now obsolete method of drinking coffee from a saucer.
"There is just one request however that we will have to make of you,
while you are here with us in the hotel," continued the American hotel
manager.
"And what is that may I ask?" inquired the Japanese Captain, still
bowing and sucking in air through his teeth.
"That you do not climb around in the trees!"
The Japanese officers did not see the joke and did not even smile but
the Americans in the Far East have laughed over it for years.
Which reminds one of the night on the Sambas River when a hundred little
monkeys were silhouetted against a crimson sunset.
Red, brown, yellow, golden, blue orchids flashed in the sunlight; and
flowers of every hue under God's blue skies made brilliant the river
banks. At times the ship went so close that I could reach out and grab a
limb of a tree, much to the indignation of the monkeys who chattered at
me as if I had stolen something. Now and then a big lazy alligator slid
into the water from the muddy banks as the wave-wash from our propeller
frightened him.
Coming back down the Sambas River, along its winding, beautiful way we
sat one evening and watched a crimson sunset from the deck of the ship.
At one point in the river there was a row of dead, bare trees. There
were no leaves on the branches--only monkeys: big red monkeys, which
they call "Beroks," and little gray fellows, which they call "Wahwahs."
These monkeys were strikingly silhouetted against the crimson sunset in
strange tropical fashion. From the tips of those dead trees down to the
lowest branches dozens of monkeys stood like sentinels, or romped like
children, or chattered like magpies. Their long curling tails
silhouetted below the branches against the light of evening.
* * * * *
Most Americans who go in and out of Japan get disgusted with the
regulations that policemen impose upon them.
This is especially true of those Americans living in China who are
compelled, for business reasons, to go in and out of Japan, for at every
trip they are required to answer the same list of questions. I traveled
from Korea into Japan with the Military Attaché of the Spanish Legation.
When we landed a Japanese officer who had known him for many years
insisted upon his answering the usual questions.
"I've been in this country for ten years and yet I never go out or in
that they do not compel me to go through the same foolish police
regulations which they have copied from Germany and haven't sense
enough to give up!" he said indignantly.
I also traveled with a party in which there was a Methodist Bishop's
wife. This Bishop's wife absolutely refused to give the Japanese
policeman her age. Not that she had any reason to be ashamed of her age.
In fact she could easily have passed for twenty years younger than she
probably was, but she just had the average American woman's spunk and
refused to give it.
For a few minutes it looked as if diplomatic relations between Japan and
America might be seriously cracked, if not broken; for the Japanese
officer had no sense of humor. That is one of the chief defects of the
Japanese police and military system. It has no sense of humor. It takes
itself too seriously. It does not know how to laugh.
To the eight or ten Americans in the party the whole matter was a huge
joke and we admired the spunk of the Bishop's wife, but the poor
Japanese police officer was facing what he thought was an international
problem.
Need it be said that the whole matter was finally settled to the entire
satisfaction; not of the Japanese officer, but to the entire
satisfaction of the Bishop's wife.
* * * * *
A friend of mine who happens to be in business in the Orient got so
tried of being interviewed, trailed, and made to answer innumerable
questions about his mother, grandmother, etc., that one day on landing
in Yokohama, in a spirit of fun, he answered the officer's questions in
this manner:
"How old are you?"
"Thirty-six."
"Have you a family?"
"Yes."
"How many children?"
"Three."
"How old are they?"
"One is thirty-eight, one forty, and one forty-five."
"What is your occupation?"
"Commander-in-Chief of the Greenland Navy."
"What are you doing in Japan?"
"Getting a cargo of ice to take back to Greenland."
After satisfying his appetite for information, the Japanese police
officer departed to make his reports, while the young American went to
his hotel with a grin all over his face.
While he was eating his dinner that evening suddenly the Japanese
officer appeared in the dining room with a big smile on his face and
walked over to where the American sat with a group of friends.
As he approached the American's table he said with a grin, "You
American! I know! You American!"
"How did you guess it, my friend?"
"You make me one tam fool!" he said holding out the report.
* * * * *
Some of the most laughable things that one sees in the Orient are the
Japanese signs translated into English by some Japanese merchant who has
picked up a dash of English here and there.
One such sign which caused a lot of amusement was that of a tailor who
was trying to cater to American Tourist trade. He had, evidently, also
had some contact with the spiritual phraseology of the missionaries. He
had painted on a big sign:
"BUY OUR PANCE!
THEY FIT YOU BETTER AND
THEY WARM YOUR LEGS LIKE THE
LOVE OF GOD!"
Perhaps the most exhilaratingly humorous thing that the Japanese have
perpetrated on the Koreans was a list of advices printed and posted all
over Korea by the Police Department as to the regulation of Fords:
RULES!
1. At the rise of hand of policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass
him by or otherwise disrespect him.
2. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle the horn
trumpet to him melodiously at first. If he still obstacles your
passage, tootle him with vigor and express by word of the mouth
the warning, "hi, hi."
3. Beware of the wandering horse that he shall not take fright
as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go
soothingly by, or stop by the roadside till he gently pass
away.
4. Give big space to the festive dog that make sport in the
roadway. Avoid entanglement of dog with your wheel spokes.
5. Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the
skid-demon. Press the brake of the foot as you roll around the
corners to save the collapse and tie-up.
6. Number of people you put in the Ford: You put two in the
front house and three in the back house.
There were other rules but this list will be sufficient as a Flash-light
of Fun to give some idea of the ridiculous way in which the average
Japanese twists the ideas and phraseology of English in the
translations.
I saw one great sign which brought a smile. It was up on the island of
Hokkaido. It had printed in large English letters:
"GET YOUR MOTHER'S MILK HERE!"
Below that sentence there was a picture of a cow which looked as much
like a combination of an Elephant and a Camel as anything I know. The
artist must have been a wonder. Attached to each of the cow's udders
were long lines of hose that ran for about ten feet across a big
bill-board. At the end of each line of hose was a nipple, like our
American baby-nipples. At the end of each nipple there was a man-sized
baby pulling away at the nipple. It was one of the funniest advertising
signs I ever saw. I watched several Americans look up at it and every
one of them laughed aloud. And the funny thing about it was that it was
intended to be a serious advertising sign.
* * * * *
At a banquet given in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo one of the most
side-splitting incidents happened unintentionally that ever happened at
any banquet anywhere.
One of the sons of a great Japanese business man was speaking. The
banquet was in honor of a well-known College President from America who
had come to take up work in the Orient. This banquet was to welcome him
officially to Japan.
One of the speakers, sitting beside Mr. Uchida, the Foreign Minister,
had been a student in America where this man was formerly the college
president and he was trying to make the crowd see how happy he was to
welcome the president to Japan. He did it in the following language as
nearly as I can remember it:
"I feel like a cartoon I see in your peculiar paper--what you call
him--_Puck_? _Judge_? No--he bin in that peculiar paper, _Life_? That
was he.
"This picture; he shows two dogs talking to each other.
"One dog he a great, what you call him--Coolie? Pug? Yes, he was a
Scottish Coolie. The other was a little wee dog; a Pugnacious Dog, I
think you call him.
"The little dog he have his tail all done up in the bandages.
"The big dog say, 'Little dog, for why you have your tail all bandaged
up like that? You have an accident?'
"'No,' say the little dog, 'but my master, he just come home from
France, and I am so glad to see him I bin wagging my tail all day long
until it get broke and I have to have him wrapped up like this.'"
Then the speaker turned dramatically--with the deepest sense of
seriousness; without a trace of a smile on his face, without a glimmer
of consciousness of the fact that the Americans at that banquet were
biting their teeth to keep from bursting into laughter; and with a grand
flourish, pointed to the American dignitary and said, "I feel just like
that little dog. I so glad to see Dr. ---- come to Japan that I have
been wagging my tail all day long."
But he got no further. The American crowd; full-dressed, and full of
dignity as it was; exploded. That speech was too much, even for the sake
of international courtesy, to expect such a crowd to hold in.
Fortunately most of the educated Japanese there saw the joke and joined
in the laugh.
* * * * *
We had a funny experience in a dining car on a Japanese train coming
from northern Japan down to Tokyo one evening.
A well-dressed Japanese in a rich Kimono sat drinking heavily at a table
a few feet from us.
Suddenly he looked up and yelled "Silence!" looking directly at us.
It was so sudden and so funny that I laughed. This made the Japanese
gentleman angry.
Then he let forth a more extended English sentence. Later we figured
that it was the only sentence in English that he knew, and that he had
learned that sentence by sitting at the feet of some stern, English
teacher who had occasion to reiterate that sentence frequently.
This drunken Japanese looked at me sternly for laughing and said,
"Silence! All gentlemen must be silent!"
This was too much for my sense of humor and I laughed again.
"Silence! All gentlemen must be silent!" he yelled a third time.
"We must get away from him; or we'll get into trouble. I can't keep from
laughing when he repeats that," I said to Dr. Goucher.
We all moved back to another table, but Dr. Goucher sat by himself at a
little table. This moving, insulted the drunken Japanese and he came
back to where Dr. Goucher sat and leered into his face yelling once
again, "All gentlemen must be silent!"
At this one of the party jumped to the side of Dr. Goucher and took the
Japanese by the shoulder and turned him around and said, "Go! Sit down,
fool!"
The train was whirling through the night. There were mutterings and
imprecations among the Japanese and we thought that they were directed
toward us; but a missionary who could understand the language, said that
the whole crowd of Japanese was severely reprimanding the drunken
Japanese for insulting foreigners. They told him in Japanese phrases
that he ought to be ashamed of insulting foreigners in his own country.
About five minutes after this he suddenly left his seat, came staggering
down the aisle of the car with a plate full of big red apples and
offered an apple to each one of us as a peace offering.
We got to calling him, in our party "Old Mr. 'All gentlemen must be
silent!'" and he came to be a real character in our fun.
But one morning a month later as we were all boarding a train in Fusan,
Korea, bound for Seoul, who should be sitting in the car but "Old Mr.
'All gentlemen must be silent.'"
This time he was in American clothes. We had a Japanese friend with us.
We told this friend about the incident on the train in northern Japan
and asked him who the man was.
"Why that is a member of the House of Lords and he is going up to Korea
representing the Diet to make a report on the Korean outrages," we were
told.
Another month passed and I was coming back from Seoul, Korea, to Tokio,
Japan, when I suddenly ran into our old friend "All gentlemen must be
silent!" This time he was drunk again, and sitting in a Japanese dining
car with the same Kimono on that he had worn the first time we saw him.
He saw me enter the car.
I tried to avoid him, but he was not to let this opportunity for
international courtesy go by unnoticed and unimproved. So, much to my
delight and surprise, he arose, and made a low bow.
I bowed back. He made another bow until his nose almost touched the car.
I made a return bow. He made a third one. I followed suit. He made a
fourth. I made a fourth, although I was beginning to feel dizzy and my
insides were beginning to complain.
I wondered when the thing would stop. I thought of a hundred fat men I
had seen on a Gymnasium floor trying to do the same thing and touch the
floor with their hands. I knew that there was a limit to my endurance in
a test of this kind. He bowed five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times,
and I bowed back. I could see things whirling around me.
"Blame it, why doesn't he stop some time!" I said to myself.
I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at him and he looked at me and
he said, with great dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent!" and sat
down, with his friends and his wines.
I don't know whether he realized how funny it was or not. I don't know
whether he even knew what he was saying in his drunken condition, but I
do know that when I got out of that car into the vestibule I had the
laugh of my life. A Japanese woman came by, smiled at me and I am sure
said to herself:
"Ah, these Americans they are all crazy!"
* * * * *
The last Flash-light of Fun is a picture from the Philippines.
I have spoken in the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" of the trip to
the Negrito tribe, but in that chapter I did not speak of the desperate
adventure of the trip back down the jungle trail to civilization after
the experience with the old man.
For the second time on that memorable day I dropped in my tracks with a
sunstroke. My legs refused to move. My muscles were congested with waste
matter and evidently my brain was also. When I returned to consciousness
I saw lying beside me Mr. Huddleston, an old missionary who had been in
the Philippines for many years. Across from, him was a naked Negrito who
was acting as our guide.
I looked up in a tree above us and saw what I thought was a group of
monkeys.
"Look at the monkeys!" I said to the missionary.
"There are no monkeys in that tree!" he said.
That made me angry. My mind was affected by the sun to such an extent
that I had an insane desire to grab the Bolo of the Negrito guide out of
his belt and run it through the missionary. I made a determined mental
effort to do so, but my arm would not work. I strove as one strives in a
dream when he is trying to run away from some imagined danger and his
feet are tied down. If I could have gotten my hands on that bolo I
would have run it through the missionary without a minute's hesitation.
But my mind was detracted from this thought by two large elephants which
I suddenly saw running down the path on which we were lying. I yelled
aloud!
"The elephants! They will trample us man! Look! There they come!" I
cried pointing up the trail on which we were lying.
"Why you're plumb crazy man! You've missed too many boats! That sun's
got you! There are no elephants on this trail!"
"But I know elephants when I see them!" I cried and tried to roll out of
the trail but again found it impossible to make my brain and my muscles
coordinate. It was a terrible moment to me.
"My God man! Are you crazy! I know elephants when I see them. They're
right on us now! Help me out of here! I can't move!"
"I tell you there are no elephants and there are no monkeys in these
islands. I've been here twenty years or more!"
"But I know elephants when I see them!"
But just at that moment a much greater danger confronted us, for I saw
three tigers leap out of the jungle and start after the two elephants;
right down the trail toward us. Then I knew that we were as good as
dead.
I yelled: "Tigers! Tigers! They are running after the elephants! They
are on top of us!"
The fool of a missionary laughed aloud, as he lay on the trail and said,
"Plumb crazy! Plumb crazy! Sun's got him! Sun's got him!"
"Sun's got who, fool? The elephants and tigers will kill us in about a
minute!"
But just then something happened which upset my calculations and made me
have a feeling that--after all--perhaps the old missionary was
right--for suddenly those two elephants; being too closely pursued by
the tigers; nonchalantly flew into the air like two great birds, and
lighted in the tree over our heads where I thought the monkeys were. If
those elephants hadn't started to fly; I should still be arguing with
the missionary; but as it turned out; I shut my fool mouth and decided
that the missionary was right and that I had "Missed too many boats."
CHAPTER VIII
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FREEDOM
"SELF-DETERMINATION!" That phrase has set the whole world on fire!
"Independence!" That word somehow has awakened the Oriental world;
awakened that mass of humanity as it has never been awakened before.
Korea perhaps has thrilled to this awakening as no other section of the
Orient or the Near and Far East. India's millions are restless; the
Filipino is hungry for Independence although he is loyal to the United
States; but Korea has the matter set in its heart like adamant. This
determination will never be broken; Korea will never be conquered by
Japan!
This dream of complete and full independence is buried in the souls of
the children, as well as in the souls of the brave women, and of the old
men of Korea.
"It is one of the most thrilling things I have ever seen in the Orient!"
said a man on the Editorial staff of _Millard's Weekly_. "It is the most
significant outcome of the war; Korea's passion for independence, and
the Student Movement in China!"
I said to a business man of California who had traveled all over the
Orient and who had been sent as part of the Commission that prepared the
way for the abandonment of the Picture Bride custom, "What is the most
significant thing you have seen in the Orient?"
"The determination of the Koreans for Self-determination!" was his quick
reply.
"Will they get it?"
"It is inevitable in time!" he responded, and then he added: "Why the
little rascals; the children, I mean; paint the Korean flags on their
brown bellies, because the Japanese gendarmes will not allow them to
display the Korean flag in public!" and he laughed aloud at the memory.
"Have you seen Korean kiddies with flags painted on their stomachs?"
"Dozens of them. They like to show them to Americans," he said.
A week later I was walking with a Korean missionary and asked him if
what the business man from California had told me about the children was
true and he said, "Wait until we find a group of them."
We waited for only a few minutes when we ran into a crowd coming home
from school. A friendly smile and a low-voiced "Mansei" got attention.
Then we pointed to our own stomachs.
In a flash they caught on to what we wanted and, looking around
cautiously, each little rascal untied his robe and there, sure enough
was the flag of his country painted on his stomach.
"That is one of the most thrilling sights I have seen in the Orient!" I
said with tears in my eyes. "If the children of the land feel that way,
Korea will never be conquered!"
"The American understands! The American understands!" one of the little
bright-eyed boys said to the missionary in Korean.
* * * * *
A missionary was teaching a class of Koreans about Heaven.
A little hand shot up.
The missionary nodded that the child could speak.
"Will there be any Japs in Heaven?"
This was a baffling question; for diplomatic destinies were at stake.
But missionaries are usually honest, so she said, "Yes, if they are good
Japs!"
"Then I don't want to go!" said the little eight-year-old Korean with
emphasis.
Another teacher was telling a class in Geography to draw a map of the
Orient.
One Korean child said, "Do we have to put in that little group of
islands east of the coast of China?"
I met one Korean whom I had known in America. He was educated in the
American universities. He was in every sense of the word a gentleman and
an intellectual.
He told me that the older children of his family had taught the
nine-months-old baby to raise its hands in the air above its head
whenever the word "Mansei" was spoken.
I got an electrical shock of patriotism the day I saw that tiny child
lift its little arms above its head when that sacred word was spoken. It
was like a benediction of freedom!
"This posture of the child is more significant," said Mr. ----, "when
you know that the most cruel method of torture that the Japanese use is
that of stretching a man, woman or child up by the thumbs to the ceiling
with his toes just touching the floor."
In that same posture of torture Koreans rise to their toes when they
give their national cry of "Mansei" for all the world like an American
student giving his college yell.
"It means life and death to give that cry as you know," said this
intelligent Korean.
"Then what will your children do when they grow a bit older and go out
on the streets and yell this cry?" I asked this intelligent father.
"Be killed, no doubt, by some ignorant, ruthless Japanese gendarme!" he
said with finality.
"Then you should not allow them to teach its tiny lips that word!" I
said.
"I would rather my child were dead than to have it forget that cry!"
In this same family one Sunday afternoon a two-year-old child was
sleeping on a mat. The father and mother were reading some American
papers sent them by their old college friends in the United States.
Suddenly that little two-year-old sat straight up in its mat bed, lifted
its arms in the air and shouted "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!" three times
and then dropped back to sleep as if nothing had happened.
"How did you feel?" I asked my Korean friend.
"It made me cry. I said to my wife 'As long as Korea has babies with
that in their little souls before they are two years of age, Korea will
never be assimilated by Japan!'"
The children of Korea look up at the ceiling when a Japanese teacher
enters a room. They are compelled to have Japanese teachers; even in the
mission schools. The children refuse to do anything for a Japanese
teacher.
One day a Japanese teacher thought that he would break that mood by
telling a funny story. He told it with skill.
But not a child laughed, although one of them said to her father that
night, "It was hard not to laugh for it was a very funny story!"
"Who tells you to do these things; you students? Who teaches you to
treat your Japanese teachers in that manner?" my Korean friend asked his
six-year-old child.
"Nobody tells us; we just do it ourselves! All the children hate the
Japanese!" he replied with the wisdom of a grown man.
All over Korea we saw Korean flags cut in walls, carved on stones, and
against excavations where the sand was impressionable to little fingers
and sticks. I took many photographs of these unconventional flags.
There is one instance where Korean children went on a strike just at
Commencement time. It meant that they would not get their diplomas but
that was just the reason they did it: to show their contempt for
Japanese diplomas.
Japanese authorities begged them to return to school.
Finally on Commencement Day they decided to return.
Something had happened.
It was a day of rejoicing among the Japanese so they invited a lot of
Japanese officers to the Commencement exercises.
The diplomas were given, to each boy; the Japanese teachers bowing, and
smiling in their peculiar way.
Then a thirteen-year-old Korean boy stepped to the front to make the
address of thanks. He made a beautiful speech of thanks. The Japanese
teachers were bowing with delight.
But the boy's speech was not finished. He paused toward the end, threw
back his blouse, lifted his proud head and said, "I have only this one
thing further to add."
He knew the seriousness of what he was about to do. He knew that it
would possibly mean death to him and his relatives.
"We want but one thing of you Japanese. You have given us education, and
you have given us these diplomas. The teachers have been good to us."
Then he reached in his blouse and pulled out a Korean flag. To have one
in one's possession is a crime in Korea in the judgment of the Japanese.
Waving it above his little head he cried, "Give us back our country! May
Korea live a thousand years! Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!"
At that signal every boy in that school jumped to his feet, whipped out
a Korean flag and frantically waved it in the air, weeping and yelling
in wild abandonment to the faith and courage of freedom in their
hearts!
Then they tore their diplomas up before the horrified and angered
Japanese teachers.
The result was a great student demonstration for freedom; which was
broken up by a force of Japanese gendarmes with drawn swords; but not
before the shooting of many boys and girls; and not before over four
hundred girls and boys were thrown into prison; some of them never to
emerge.
In the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" I told the story of the
seventy-five-year-old Korean who unflinchingly faced the Japanese
gendarmes and admitted that he knew the source from which the
Independence Movement had come; and knew the signers of the Declaration
personally; every one of them. This spirit burns in the heart of, not
only the babies of Korea but also in the souls of the white haired
stately patriarchs.
One old man who was dumb had his own way of expressing his patriotism
when "Mansei" was yelled. He always lifted his arms above his head. He
could not speak but he could yell with his arms!
This placed the Japanese authorities in the ridiculous position of
arresting a dumb man for yelling "Mansei!"
They tortured him for months. He was told that he would be released if
he would promise never to lift his hands above his head again.
He could not speak in answer to their demands. They waited.
Suddenly he caught their meaning. They were trying to frighten him from
giving vent to his only method of showing his patriotism.
His eyes flashed fire. He leapt to his feet with a contemptuous look at
his Japanese captors.
Then like flashing piston rods of steel his arms shot into the air above
his head three times, shouting in their mute patriotism, "Mansei!
Mansei! Mansei!"
Nor are the women void of this determination for freedom. It beats in
their brave hearts. It is a great flame in their souls as well as in the
hearts of the children and men of the peninsula.
"The soul's armor is never set well to heart unless a woman's hand has
braced it, and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of
manhood fails!" says Robert McKenna in "The Adventure of Life."
If that is a true definition of the strength of honor and the desire for
freedom then the armor of the Korean men is well set.
Sauci, a young Korean girl was under arrest. She was just a school girl
and very beautiful; with dark brown eyes; skin the color of a walnut;
and a form, bred of the grace of her much walking race. She had walked
the innumerable trails of her native land from babyhood and the rhythmic
swing of her supple body would have made any race, save that of her
conquerors, reverent with admiration.
Sauci was too much for her Japanese captors.
The Japanese guard struck her across the mouth with a whip.
"That doesn't hurt me. That is the grace of God. I don't hate you for
that blow!" said Sauci.
This angered the Jap and he struck her again. This stroke left a streak
of blood across her face.
Sauci said again, "That doesn't hurt me. That is the grace of God. I do
not hate you for striking me!"
The gendarme was furious. His anger was like that of a beast. He flew at
her blindly, and struck, struck, struck her woman's body until he was
exhausted.
A few days later when she was recovering from that brutal beating, a
high official of the Japanese gendarme force came to see her.
"Sauci," said he to her, recognizing her for an intelligent Korean girl,
"why do not the Koreans like us?"
She replied, "I had a dream last night here in the cell. That will tell
you why. In my dream a visitor came to our home and stayed for dinner.
Then instead of going home, the visitor stayed all night. Then the
visitor stayed two or three days. Then two or three months. Then two or
three years. We were surprised but were too polite to say anything.
"But finally the visitor got to telling us how to run our house."
"How?" asked the Japanese official, "Did the visitor tell you how to run
your house?"
"The visitor," replied Sauci, "told us that he didn't like our wall
paper. 'I think you had better get new paper!' he said. 'I do not like
your clothes and your schools. Wear clothes like mine, and have schools
like mine. I do not like your way of talking. Learn my language!'
"So finally we got tired of our visitor and said, 'Please go home! WE do
not like you! We do not want you! Please go home!'"
"But what has that to do with us?" said the Japanese official.
"Why in a few days the visitor in my dream went home!" said Sauci
simply. "And in a few years the Japanese will go back home also!" Such
is the courageous spirit of the Korean women.
* * * * *
One day an American friend of mine had gone to the Police Station with a
young Korean girl who had been summoned to appear on what was called a
"rearrest charge."
For the Japanese feel perfectly free to rearrest a person even after
that person has been proven innocent of a charge. A Korean may be
rearrested any time. He can never feel free.
This young, educated girl had been subjected to such indignities on her
previous arrest as I would not be able to describe in this book; so she
begged the woman friend to go with her.
As she entered the station a rough, ignorant Japanese officer snarled at
her as she passed, "Hello! Are you here again? I thought you were still
in prison!"
When he had gone from the room the Korean girl said to the American
woman, "That man beat me for ten hours one day the last time I was in
prison!"
"Why did he beat you?" asked the missionary.
"He was trying to compel me to give him the names of those girls who
belonged to the 'Woman's League'."
"And you would not tell him their names?"
"I would rather have been beaten to death than give him their names!"
"Thank God for your courage!" said the missionary, for she had seen the
girl's body when she had gotten out of prison; the burns of cigarette
stumps all over her beautiful skin; the scars, the whip marks; the
desecrations.
When I was told this story, amid the tears of the narrator, an American
college woman, she concluded with fire in her soul: "I have never seen
such courage on the part of women in all my life! Even mere girls and
children have it. Most of those who are arrested come out of our
American Missionary schools. There isn't a one of them who doesn't have
in her soul the spirit of Joan of Arc. If France had one Joan of Arc,
Korea has ten thousand!"
One young girl of whom I heard was kept in prison under constant torture
for six months. And a cruel imprisonment it is. I visited this prison
myself one winter day when I was in Korea. The thermometer was at zero;
the snow covered the ground, and there wasn't a fire in a single room in
that prison save where the Japanese guards were staying, and they were
huddled around a roaring coal stove.
And this is the show prison of the whole Peninsula. The Japanese take
visitors through it. But to an American even it is fit only for the
darkness of the Middle Ages.
In its limited quarters I saw ten and fifteen young girls, sweet faced,
cultured, educated school girls, huddled together in narrow rooms,
without a single chair, so closely packed that they were seated on the
floor like bees in a hive.
After six months of this awful life the girl of whom I speak was about
to be released.
The guard questioned her. "Now what are you going to do?"
Her answer came, quick as a shot, although she knew that it would send
her back to the hell from which she was about to be released.
"It is either liberty for Korea or we die!" she said.
And in three minutes, beaten, and dragged on the ground by the hair she
was thrown into the cell from which she had been taken; to rot and die
as far as the Japanese were concerned.
Another girl who had been kept in jail 135 days without even a charge
having been preferred against her was released. Her old mother came to
meet her and while in Seoul the mother attended an Independence Meeting
for women. The whole crowd of women then went to the Police Station and
shouted "Mansei"!
The mother was arrested and cruelly beaten in spite of her seventy-five
years of age.
When they were through beating her they said, "Now will you refrain from
yelling, 'Mansei!'"
"Never!" said this old woman.
Then they took a bar of iron and beat her over the legs until she
dropped.
"Now will you refrain from yelling 'Mansei?'"
The old woman was weak, but in a low, painful whisper said, "The next
time the women come to yell, if I am able to walk I will be with them!"
Another old woman was brought to prison for yelling "Mansei!" When they
asked her why she yelled "Mansei" she answered in a sentence that sums
up the entire spirit that is in the woman-heart of Korea.
"I have only one word in my head and that is 'Mansei!'"
I personally, one day in Korea, saw the Japanese gendarmes come for a
Korean girl. She was one of the most popular girls in the American
Methodist Missionary School.
It was the common custom for Japanese officials to come and take Korean
girls out of these schools, without warning, without warrants, without
words, and carry them off to prison.
Often the girl was not even permitted to say good-by to her American
teachers or to write a word to her parents.
"They are not even permitted to supply themselves with toilet articles,"
said the matron to me that day.
On this day, six big, brutal, ugly faced, animal-like Japanese officers
came for this beautiful girl.
The missionary women wept as the girl was dragged away. The girl waved
good-by.
It was a sight never to be forgotten; one of those Flash-lights of
Freedom, which burned its way into my soul with the hot acid of
indignation. This injustice and indecency in the treatment of a pure
girl made my blood run hot in my veins.
The look on her face I shall never forget. It was such a look as the
martyrs of old must have had when they died for their faith.
"Good-by! Good-by! Give my love to Mary and Elizabeth!" she cried to the
missionary woman standing by, helpless to assist her. These two names
were children of the missionary home; children whom this Korean girl had
learned to love as she lived in this American home.
"And the awful thing about it all, is," said the missionary to me as
they took the girl away, "that, as pure as that girl is, as pure as a
flower, she will be taken to a prison fifty miles from Seoul, kept there
under torture for six months, and she will not be allowed to see her
friends. They will not even allow us to visit her. She may be undressed
and spat upon by men who are lower than animals. She may suffer even
worse than that----"
Then the American missionary woman fainted.
That flash-light may be duplicated a hundred times in Korea.
"The woman of Korea suffers as much as the man. But thank God they do
not flinch!" said an American missionary.
The Japanese Gendarmes have forbidden the singing of several of the
great church hymns in mission churches because they insist that these
are hymns of Freedom; that they foment what the Japanese call "Dangerous
Ideas." Japanese spies have reported certain Seoul Methodist churches
for singing hymns that, to their way of thinking, were directed against
the Japanese Government. This particular illustration of the peculiar
workings of the Japanese mind might have been included in the chapter on
Flash-lights of Fun; were it not for the fact that the Japanese officers
themselves call these old church hymns "Hymns of Freedom."
The Japanese are just as much afraid of these "Dangerous Thoughts" in
Japan as they are in Korea. A good illustration of this fear is the fact
that a certain picture corporation of America called "The Liberty Film
Company" sent several films to Japan. The Government would not allow
these pictures to be shown until that word "Liberty" was cut from the
film.
Certain Japanese spies reported a Mission church in Seoul for singing
"Rock of Ages."
"But why may we not sing 'Rock of Ages'?" asked the American preacher in
charge.
"Because it starts off with 'Mansei!'" replied the officer.
He interpreted the thought of "Rock of Ages" to be a direct imputation
that the Japanese Government was not able to take care of the Koreans
and that they were flying to some other protecting power.
"It would be funny if it were not so serious!" said a missionary to me
one day in Seoul.
Later they stopped the churches from singing "Nearer My God to Thee,"
because there seemed to be an implication in that, that those who sang
that hymn, were swearing allegiance to a higher power than that of
Japan.
"Ridiculous! Absolutely ridiculous!" I said in disgust.
"Yes, ridiculous, but serious," replied the missionary, "when you have
to live with it year in and year out."
"Crown Him Lord of All," insisted the Japanese spies, when they
seriously reported a certain church for singing that old hymn was
"Dangerous Thought." It seemed to this ignorant spy that "Crowning Him"
was putting some other power before that of the Japanese Government.
"All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name" has been put under the ban and when
a certain missionary woman was asked to sing at the Korean Y.M.C.A. and
announced that she was going to sing "Oh, Rest in the Lord" she was
advised not to sing it because it was considered by the gendarmes to be
"Dangerous Thought" and to suggest "Liberty," "Freedom" and such
dangerous words and ideas.
When one Protestant preacher prayed about "Casting Out Devils" he was
reported by Japanese spies, who insisted that he was talking about
Japanese in Korea and meant that these should be cast out of the land.
"'It is to laugh!' as the French say!" I responded to this story.
"No! It is to weep!" said the American missionary.
When Dr. Frank W. Schoefield spoke against Prostitution the Japanese
papers declared that he had made a virulent attack on the Government.
One Korean preacher who preached on a theme from Luke 4:18, which reads
"Setting the captives free," was arrested and kept in jail for four
days.
"It is very foolish to yell 'Mansei' when you know you will be killed,"
I said to a Korean preacher. I wanted to see how he would take that
suggestion.
"We Koreans would rather be under the ground than on top of it if we do
not get our liberty!" he said with a thrill in his quiet voice.
One day a Korean preacher was arrested for preaching on the theme, "Seek
ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto
you," because that was, without doubt, disloyal to Japan and meant
rebellion.
Another day a speaker in the Y.M.C.A. said, "Arise and let us build for
the new age!" He was asked to report to Police Headquarters just what he
meant by that kind of "Dangerous" talk about Freedom.
CHAPTER IX
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAILURE
Three great Flash-lights of Failure stand out in the Far East and the
Oriental world to-day; one being the failure of a race to survive,
another being the failure of the world to understand that Shantung is
the Holy Land and not the appendix of China; this sacred shrine of the
Chinese which has so carelessly and listlessly been given over to Japan;
and the third being Japan's failure to understand that methods of
barbarism from the Dark Ages will not work in a modern civilization.
"Why are they making all this fuss over Shantung?" an acquaintance of
mine said to me just before I left America. "Isn't it just a sort of an
appendix of China, after all? If I were the Chinese, I'd forget Shantung
and go on to centralize and develop what I had."
That was glibly said, but the fact which the statement leaves out of
reckoning is that Shantung is the very heart and soul of China instead
of being the appendix.
The average American has so often thought of China just as China; a
great, big, indefinite, far-off nation of four hundred million people,
always stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't mean much to us.
Yes, but it means much to China.
It means about the same as if some nation should come along and take New
England from us; New England, the seat of all our most sacred history,
the beginning of our national life, the oldest of our traditions, the
burial-place of our early founders, the seat of our religious genesis. I
don't believe that many folks in New England would desire to be called
an appendix of the United States.
So one of the things that I was determined to do when I went to China
was to go from one end of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies,
officials, old men and young men, students, and those who can neither
read nor write; missionaries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to
see just what importance Shantung is to China as a whole.
The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people
living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population
of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's
appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields
of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human beings, and
every last one of them, as busy as ants.
I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling
with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and
wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had been passing through land
that was absolutely level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been
saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's exactly like our Middle
West Country."
Then much to my astonishment this Kansas man turned to me, and said,
"Did it ever occur to you that these fields of Shantung look just like
Kansas?"
"Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I responded.
Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have been shutting my eyes and
trying to imagine that I was in Kansas, it's so much like home."
"And say, man, but a tractor on those fields would work wonders," added
a portion of William Allen White's reading constituency.
And that is exactly how Shantung strikes an American when he has ridden
all day through its great stretches of level fields. He can easily
imagine himself riding through Kansas for a day.
My first visit to Shantung was at Tsingtao, the headquarters of the
German concession and now of the Japanese concession. I spent a day
there, and took photographs of the wharves and town. On the wharves
were still standing hundreds of boxes marked with German names and the
inevitable phrase "Made in Germany." Those boxes were mute reminders of
the evacuation of one nation from a foreign soil. But standing side by
side with these boxes were also other hundreds, already being shot into
Shantung in a steady stream; and these boxes have a new trademark
printed in every case in English and Japanese, "Made in Japan."
I spent several days in Tsinanfu and Tientsin, two great inland cities,
and more than a week in cruising about through Shantung's little towns,
its villages and its sacred spots.
I heard of its mines and of its physical wealth. But the world already
knows of that. The world already knows that this physical wealth of
mines and raw material was what made it look good to Germany and Japan.
But the thing that impressed me was its spiritual wealth.
The thing that makes Shantung attractive to the Japanese, of course, is
not the spiritual wealth, as the world well knows. Perhaps the Japanese
have never considered the latter any more than the Germans did; but the
one thing that makes it most sacred to the Chinese, who are, after all,
a race of idealists, is its treasuries of spiritual memories and
shrines.
In the first place, many Chinese will tell you that it is the "cradle of
the Chinese race." I am not sure that histories will confirm this
statement. And I am also not sure that that makes any difference as long
as the idea is buried in the heart of the Chinese people. A tradition
often means as much to a race as a fact. And the tradition certainly is
well established that Shantung is the birthplace of all Chinese history.
So that is one of the deeply rooted spiritual facts that makes Shantung
sacred to the Chinese.
The second spiritual gold mine is that one of its cities, Chufu, is the
birthplace and the last resting-place of the sage Confucius. And China
is literally impregnated with Confusian philosophy and Confucian
sayings.
I took a trip to this shrine in order to catch some of the spiritual
atmosphere of the Shantung loss. The trip made it necessary to tramp
about fifteen miles coming and going through as dusty a desert as I ever
saw, but that was a trifle compared with the thrill that I had as I
stood at last before the little mound about as high as a California
bungalow; the mound that held the dust of this great Chinese sage.
During the war I stood before the grave of Napoleon in France. Before I
went to France I visited Grant's tomb. I have also stood many times
beside a little mound in West Virginia, the resting-place of my mother,
and I think that I know something of the sacredness of such experiences
to a human heart, but somehow the thrill that came to me on that January
morning, warm with sunlight, spicy with winter cold, produced a feeling
too deep for mere printed words to convey.
"If we feel as we do standing here on this sacred spot, think of how the
Chinese feel toward their own sage!" said an old missionary of the
party.
"Yes," added another, "and remember that the Chinese revere their
ancestors and their sages and their shrines more than we ever dream of
doing. Any grave is a sacred spot to them, so much so that railroads
have to run their trunk lines for miles in a detour to avoid graves.
These Chinese are idealists of the first water. They live in the past,
and they dream of the future."
"When you get these facts into your American heads," added a third
member of the party, not without some bitterness, "then you will begin
to know that the Chinese do not estimate the loss of Shantung in terms
of mineral wealth."
At Chufu, the resting-place of Confucius, there is also the spot of his
birth, and this too is most sacred to the Chinese nation. We visited
both places. I think that I never before quite realized just what the
loss of Shantung meant to these Chinese until that day, unless it was
the next day, when we climbed the sacred mountain Taishan, which is
also in Shantung.
"It is the oldest worshiping-place in the world," said the historian of
the party. "There is no other spot on earth where continuous worship has
gone on so long. Here for more than twenty centuries before Christ was
born men and women were worshiping. Emperors from the oldest history of
China down to the present time have all visited this mountain to
worship. Confucius himself climbed the more than six thousand steps to
worship here."
"Yes," said another missionary historian, "and this mountain is referred
to twelve separate times in the Chinese classics, and great pilgrimages
were made here as long ago as two centuries before Christ."
That day we climbed the mountain up more than six thousand stone steps,
which are in perfect condition and which were engineered thousands of
years ago by early worshipers.
The only climb with which I can compare that of Mt. Taishan is that of
Mt. Tamalpais overlooking San Francisco. The climb is about equal to
that. The mountain itself is about a mile in height, and the climb is a
hard one to those who are unaccustomed to mountain-climbing, and yet
thousands upon thousands climb it every year after pilgrimages from all
over China.
We climbed to the top of Taishan, and saw the "No-Character Stone"
erected by Emperor Chin, he who tried to drive learning out of China
hundreds of years ago. We saw the spot on which Confucius stood, and
glimpsed the Pacific Ocean, ninety miles away, on a clear day. It was a
hard climb; but, when one stood on the top of this, the most sacred
mountain of all China, he began to understand the spiritual loss that is
China's when her worshiping-place is in the hands of aliens.
"And don't forget that Mencius, the first disciple of Confucius, was
born and died in Shantung, too, when you are taking census of the
spiritual values of Shantung to the Chinese," was a word of caution from
the old missionary who was checking up on my facts for me. He had been
laboring in China for a quarter of a century.
"And don't forget that the Boxer uprising originated in Shantung, and
don't forget that it is called, and has been for centuries, 'the Sacred
Province' by the Chinese. It is their 'Holy Land.' And don't forget
that, from Shantung, coolies went to South Africa in the early part of
this century and that the Chinese from Shantung were the first to get in
touch with the western world. And don't forget that nine-tenths of the
coolies who went to help in the war in France were from Shantung!" he
added with emphasis. This was a thing that I well knew, for I had, only
a few weeks before this, seen two thousand coolies unloaded from the
_Empress of Asia_ at Tsingtao.
No, Shantung is not an appendix of China, as many Americans suppose; but
it is the very heart and soul of China. It is China's "Holy Land." It is
the "Cradle of China." It is the "Sacred Province of China." It is the
shrine of her greatest sage. It is the home of "the oldest
worshiping-place on earth." It is because of its spiritual values that
China is unhappy about the loss of Shantung, and not because of its
wealth of material things.
The failure of the world to understand what Shantung means to China and
the failure of Japan to understand that they cannot for many years stand
out against the indignation of the entire world in continuing to keep
Shantung is one of the great spiritual failures of the Far East in our
century.
The second great failure is the tragic failure of an entire race of
people; that of the Ainu Indians of Japan.
It is a pathetic thing to see a human race dying out; coming to "The End
of the Trail." But I was determined to see them, in spite of the fact
that people told me I would have to travel from one end of Japan to the
other; and then cross four hours of sea before I got to Hokkaido, the
most northern island of Japan, where lived the tattered remnants of
this once noble race.
The name of this dying race is pronounced as if it were spelled I-new
with a long I.
These are the people who inhabited Japan before the present Japanese
entered the land from Korea and drove them, inch by inch, back and north
and west across Japan. It was a stubborn fight, and it has lasted many
centuries; but to-day they have been driven up on the island of
Hokkaido, that northern frontier of Japan where the overflow of Japan is
pouring at the rate of four thousand a year, making two million to date
and only about fifty thousand of them Ainus.
"Are they like our American Indians in looks, since their history is so
much like them?" I asked my missionary friend.
"Wait until you see them, and decide for yourself. I know very little
about American Indians."
So one morning at three o'clock, after traveling for two days and nights
from one end of Japan to the other, and then crossing a strait between
the Japan Sea and the Pacific Ocean to the island, we climbed from our
train, and landed in a little country railroad station.
It was blowing a blizzard, and the snow crashed into our faces with
stinging, whip-like snaps.
I was appointed stoker for the small stove in the station while the
rest of the party tried to sleep on the benches arranged in a circle,
huddled as close as they could get to the stove.
We were the first party of foreigners of this size that had ever honored
the village with a visit. And in addition to that we had come at an
unearthly hour.
Who but a group of insane foreigners would drop into a town at three
o'clock in the morning with a blizzard blowing? Either we were insane,
or we had some sinister motives. Perhaps we were making maps of the
seacoast.
And before daylight half of the town was peeking in through the windows
at us. Then the policemen came. They were Japanese policemen, and did
not take any chances on us. Even after our interpreter had told them
that we were a group of scientists who had come to visit the Ainus they
still followed us around most of the morning, keeping polite track of
our movements.
About five o'clock that morning, as I was trying to catch a cat-nap, the
newsboys of the village came to get the morning papers which had come in
on the train on which we had arrived. They unbundled the papers in the
cold station; their breath forming clouds of vapor; laughing and joking
as they unrolled, folded and counted the papers; and arranged their
routes for morning delivery.
It took me back to boyhood days down in West Virginia. I did the same
thing as these Japanese boys were doing. I, too, arose before daylight,
climbed out of bed, and went whistling through the dark streets to the
station where the early morning trains dumped off the papers from the
city. I, too, along with several other American boys of a winter
morning, breathed clouds of vapor into the air, stamped my feet to keep
them warm, and whipped my hands against my sides. I, too, unwrapped the
big bundles of papers, and did it in the same way in which these
Japanese boys did, by smashing the tightly bound wrappers on the floor
until they burst. I, too, counted, folded, put in inserts, arranged my
paper-route and darted out into the frosty air with the snow crunching
under my feet. How universal some things are. The only difference was
that these boys were dressed in a sort of buccaneer uniform. They had on
high leather boots, and belts around their coats that made them look as
if they had stepped out of a Richard Harding Davis novel. But otherwise
they went through the same processes as an American boy in a small town.
When the vanguard of villagers had come to inspect us, they at first
tried to talk Russian to us. They had never seen any other kind of
foreigners. They had never seen Americans in this far-off island.
When daylight came, we started out on a long tramp to the Ainu villages.
They were a mile or two away on the ocean. These people always build
near the sea if they can. Fishing is one of their main sources of food.
We spent the day in their huts. They live like animals. A big, square
hut covered with rice straw and thatch, with a fence of the same kind of
straw running around the house, forms the residence. The only fire is in
the middle of the only room, and this consists of a pile of wood burning
on a flat stone or piece of metal in the center. There is no chimney in
the roof, and not even an opening such as the American Indians had in
the tops of their tepees. I do not know how they live. The smoke finds
its way gradually through cracks in the walls and roofs. One can hardly
find a single Ainu whose eyes are not ruined. The smoke has done this
damage.
The only opening in their houses besides the door is one north window,
and it is never closed. In fact, there is no window. It is only an
opening.
"Why is that? I'd think they would freeze on a day like this," I said to
the guide.
"They keep it that way all winter, and it gets a good deal below zero
here," he said.
"But why do they do it?" old Shylock demanded.
"It is part of their religion. They believe that the god comes in that
window. They want it open, so that he can come in whenever he wishes. It
offends them greatly when you stick your head through that window."
Pat tried it just to see what would happen, just like a man who looks
into the barrel of a gun, or a man who takes a watch apart, or wants to
hit a "dud" with a hammer just to see whether it is a dud. The result
was bad. There was a sudden series of outlandish yells from the
household. I think that every man, woman and child, including the dogs,
of which there were many, started at once. I wonder now how Pat escaped
alive, and only under the assumption that "the good die young" can I
explain his escape.
I wanted some arrows to take to America as souvenirs; and, when an old
Indian pulled out a lot of metal arrows on long bows with which he had
killed more than a hundred bears, I was not satisfied. They were not the
kind of arrows I wanted.
"What kind are you looking for?" I was asked.
"Flint arrow-heads," I responded.
"Why, man, these Indians have known the use of metals for five hundred
years. The stone age with them is half a thousand years in the past."
"Have they a history?" I wanted to know.
My interpreter, who has much knowledge of these things, having worked
among them for years, said, "All of the Japanese mythology is centered
about the battles that took place when these Indians were driven out of
Japan proper step by step."
I was surprised to find that they were white people compared with the
Japanese who were their conquerors. There are other marked differences.
The Ainus are broad between the eyes instead of narrow as are the
Japanese. They are rather square-headed like Americans as compared with
the oval of the Japanese face. They do not have markedly slant eyes, and
they are white-skinned. They might feel at home in any place in America.
I have seen many old men at home who look like them, old men with
beards. This came as a distinct surprise to me.
At each house, just in front of the ever-open window of which I have
spoken, there is a little crude shrine. It is more like a small fence
than anything that I know, a most crude affair made of broken bamboo
poles. Flowers and vines are planted here to beautify this shrine, and
every pole has a bear-skull on it. The more bear-skulls you have, the
safer you are and the more religious you have become.
Pat was sacrilegious enough to steal a skull in order to get the teeth,
which he wanted as souvenirs. I was chagrined and shocked at Pat's lack
of religious propriety. However, I was enticed into accepting one of the
teeth after Pat had knocked them out and stolen them.
"How do they worship bears and kill them at the same time?" I queried
the guide.
"That's a part of the worship. They kill the bear, slowly singing and
chanting as they kill him. They think that the spirit of every bear that
they kill comes into their own souls. That's why they kill so many. That
seventy-year-old rascal over there has killed a hundred. He is a great
man in his tribe."
"If I was a bear," commented Pat, "I'd rather they wouldn't worship me.
That's a funny way to show reverence to a god. I'd rather be their devil
and live than be their god and die." Pat is sometimes loquacious. "They
dance about the poor old bear as they kill him. One fellow will hurl an
arrow into his side, and then cry out, 'O spirit of the great bear-god,
come enter into me, and make me strong and brave like you! Come, take up
thine abode in my house! Come, be a part of me! Let thy strength and thy
courage be my strength and my courage!'"
"Then," said the interpreter, "he hurls another arrow into him."
"And what is Mr. Bear doing all that time?"
"Mr. Bear is helpless. He is captured first in a trap, and then kept and
fattened for the killing. He is tied to a tree during the killing
ceremony."
"All I gotta say is that they're darned poor sports," said Flintlock
with indignation. "They're poor sports not to give Mr. Bear a fighting
chance."
And old Flintlock has voiced the sentiments of the entire party.
Everybody that was at the Panama Pacific International Exposition will
remember the magnificent statue of an Indian there. This Indian was
riding a horse, and both were worn out and drooping. A spear which
dragged on the ground in front of the pony was further evidence of the
weariness of the horse and rider. The title of this Fraser bronze was
"The End of the Trail," and it was intended to tell the story of a
vanishing race, the American Indians. But even more could that picture
tell the story of the Ainus of Japan.
"They will be entirely extinct in a quarter of a century," our guide
said. "They are going fast. They used to be vigorous and militant, as
Japanese mythology shows. They were a fighting race. They built their
houses by the sea. They used to go out for miles to fish, but now they
are so petered out that they go only to the mouths of the rivers to
fish. They used to hunt in the mountains, but they do not take
hunting-trips any more. Venereal diseases and rum (saki) have depleted
them year by year, just as in the case of our American Indians. They are
largely sterile now. They used to build their own boats, but they build
no more. It is a biological old age. Their day is through."
"It is a sad thing to see a race dying out," said Pat.
"Especially a white race, as these Ainus seem to be," said another
member of the party.
And back to the village we went silently, plodding through a driving
blizzard that bore in upon us with terrific force. As we fought our way
through this blizzard, I could not help feeling a great sense of
depression. It is a fearful thing to see anything die, especially a race
of human beings. That is a great epic tragedy worthy of a Shakespeare.
That is enough to wring the soul of the gods. That a race has played the
game, has been powerful and conquering and triumphant, and then step by
step has petered out and become weak and senile until biological decay
has set in--that is fearful.
Another illustration of the ignominious failure of a lower type of mind
to understand a higher type of mind is set forth in the following
letter which was written at my request by a missionary whom I met in San
Francisco just as the final chapters of this book were being written.
The first time I met this missionary was in Seoul, Korea.
I have been told so many times that the cruelties in Korea have been
stopped. Certain men said that they had been stopped immediately after
the Independence Movement, but they were not stopped. At frequent
intervals the American press is flooded with statements which come from
Japanese press sources that the outrages in Korea have ceased.
I said to this missionary, who had just arrived from Korea, "Is it true
that the cruelties have stopped in Korea?"
"No! They have not stopped! They have not even diminished! They are
getting worse, rather than better!"
"Would you be willing to write out, in your own handwriting, a few
things that you know yourself which have occurred since I was in Korea
so that the book which I am writing may be accurate and up to date in
its facts?"
"I will be glad to do that for you! We who are missionaries dare not
speak the truth!"
"Why?"
"If we did the Japanese Government would never let us get back to our
people!"
"Then you may talk through me, if you are willing to do it. I want the
truth to get to the American people!"
"I am not only willing but I am eager to talk!" said this missionary and
wrote out the following story of cruelty against an educated and
cultured Korean, who was the Religious and Educational Director in the
Seoul Y.M.C.A. This story of the latest Japanese barbarisms I pass on to
the reader in this chapter to illustrate another ignominious Hun failure
to understand that the practices of the Dark Ages will not work in this
century:
"On May 26th, 1920, just as Mr. Choi was coming out of his
class room he was met by two detectives, one Korean and one
Japanese, who informed him that he was wanted at the Central
Police Station. Here he was turned over to the Chief of Police
and thrown into a room and kept all day. Mr. Brockman and Cynn
both made several attempts to find out why he was arrested.
Each time they were given an evasive answer. Finally Mr. Cynn
insisted that they tell him the cause of the arrest. It was
finally discovered that he was wanted in Pyengyang on certain
charges. He was to leave Seoul that evening on the 11 p.m.
train. Anxious to see how Mr. Choi was being treated, Mr. Cynn
and several of the Y.M.C.A. men went down to the station. Mr.
Choi with the other six students were standing on the platform.
Apparently Mr. Choi was not bound as is the usual custom.
Closer observation, however, revealed the fact that his hands
were bound with cords, but in his case the ropes were placed on
the inside instead of the outside, of the clothes. He arrived
in Pyengyang the next day, May 27, at 5 p.m. Instead of taking
Mr. Choi first they called in one of the students whose name is
Chai Pony Am. After the usual preliminary questions these
inquisitors of the Dark Ages said, 'We know all about you
everything you have done. There is no use for you to deny
anything. You make a clean confession of everything.' Mr. Choi
replied, 'I have done nothing. If I knew what you wanted, I
would tell you.' More pressure was urged in the way of
bombastic speech. Finally the police said, 'If you won't tell
of your own free will we will make you tell!' Then the
tortures, which the Government published broadcast had been
done away with, began. They brought out a round stool with four
legs and laid it down on its side with the sharp legs up and
made him strip naked. Then they took the silken bands (about 2
in. wide) and placing his hands behind his back until the
shoulder blades touched begun bending the arm from the wrist
very tight. This completed, they made him kneel upon the sharp
edge of the legs of the stool with his shins. Then they took
the bamboo paddle (this is made of two strips of bamboo about 2
in. wide and 2 ft. long wound with cord) and begun beating him
on the head, face, back, feet and thighs. Every time they
struck him his body would move and the movement cause the shins
to rub on the sharp edges of the stool. To further increase the
pain they took lighted cigarettes and burnt his flesh. This was
continued until the student fainted and fell off. They then
would restore the patient by artificial respiration and when he
refused to confess, continued the torture. This process was
continued for 45 minutes and then the student was put into a
dark cell and kept for three days. Upon the third day he was
again brought before these _just_ policemen and asked if he
were ready to confess. Said they, 'If you do not tell us this
time we will kill you. You see how the waters of the Tai Pong
(the river at Pyengyang) wear smooth these stones. That is what
we do with those who come in here. Many have been killed in
here. Your life is not worth as much as a fly.' He was
tortured in the same manner as before and then put back into
the cell for another three days. This process was continued
every three days for two weeks.
"When Mr. Choi, the educational director of the Y.M.C.A. was
called in the police said, 'You are an educated gentleman and
we propose to give you the gentleman's treatment. We do not
want to treat you like ordinary men. Now we want you to tell us
what your thoughts have been and are. Make a confession of
anything you have done since March 1st, 1919.' Mr. Choi said,
'What do you want me to confess? If you will give me a little
time I will write you out something.' This they refused to do
and said, 'Since you refuse to tell us we will make you tell.
We will treat you like all other dogs.' Then they forcibly took
off his clothes, and proceeded to bind him in the same manner
as the previous student. After being bound he was placed on the
stool and beaten. He did not lose his consciousness but fell
off the stool, and then was placed back and the same process
continued. When Mr. Choi fell off the stool the bands on his
arms were loosened and they proceeded to unloosen and rewind
his arms. This time they wound them tighter than before. At the
ends of these bands are brass rings which are placed next to
the flesh and made to press upon the nerves. This time Mr. Choi
said as they wound his right arm he felt a sharp pain and at
once noticed that he had lost the use of his arm. It was
paralyzed. Mr. Choi was tortured five times in all--one every
three days. The first torture lasted one hour and the
succeeding ones were less severe than the first. At the end of
two weeks, June 10th, Mr. Choi and the six students with him
were called before a police captain who said to the students,
'There is nothing against you. Some bad Korean has testified
falsely against you. We are sorry you have suffered but you can
now go free.' However to Mr. Choi he said, 'You must remain
here a week yet. You are still under police supervision. Go to
---- hotel and stay.' On June 16th the police came to the hotel
where he was staying and said, 'You may go down to Seoul
tonight.' Mr. Choi arrived in Seoul on the 17th and gave this
testimony. His arm is still paralyzed."
And so it is that these great failures stand out: the failure of a race
of people to survive; the failure of the American people to estimate the
loss of Shantung at its proper valuation spiritually, and the failure of
Japan to understand that Korea is still and ever shall be _Korea the
Unconquered_; this Korea which I call "The Wild Boar at Bay."
CHAPTER X
FLASH-LIGHTS OF FRIENDSHIP
We were running down the Samabs River in a small Dutch ship, the
_Merkeus_. This river, running almost parallel to the Equator, and not
more than fifty miles away from that well-known institution, cuts the
western end of Borneo in two, and lends phenomenal fertility to its
soil.
Shooting around a bend in the river, suddenly there loomed on the
western shores, so close that we could throw a stone and hit it, a tree
that was leafless, dead as a volcanic dump; but its dead branches
literally swarmed with monkeys. The light in the west had so far gone
that they appeared as silent silhouettes against the sunset Their tails,
which seemed to be about three feet long, and were curled at the ends,
hung below the dead branches. One big fellow had perched himself on the
tiptop of the tree, and in the dim light he looked like a human sentinel
as his black outline appeared against the evening light.
Then came Missionary Worthington's story about Kin Thung, the boy who,
with characteristic Oriental spirit, had quick murder in his heart:
"It was while I was the head of the Boys' School down in Batavia, Java,
that it happened. One has experiences out here in dealing with youth
that he does not get at home, for it is inflammable material, explosive
to the highest degree."
I waited for his story to continue as the Dutch ship glided swiftly down
the river toward the South China Sea, and night settled over us as we
sat there on the upper deck, watching the crimson glory change into
sudden purple.
"I heard a noise and I knew there was a fight on in the dormitory. I had
seen the aftermath of such Malay and Chinese feuds in our schools
before, and I knew that it was no trivial matter, as it often is with
boy fights at home, so I hurried up.
"When I got there I saw Kin Thung wiping his knife, and the boy he had
been fighting lying on the floor, bleeding from a long wound."
"What had happened?"
"Kin Thung was a quick-tempered boy. In addition to that, he was of a
sullen make-up, with, what I call, a criminal tendency in him. That,
added to his already volatile spirit, made him a real problem in the
school. For instance, he was the kind of a boy who, if a teacher called
on him without warning to recite, he would get uncontrollably angry,
turn sullen and refuse to answer."
"Why didn't you fire him?" I said.
"That would have been the easy thing to do. I preferred to win him
rather than to fire him!"
I felt ashamed of myself for my suggestion, and looked out into the
night skies where the beautiful form of the southern cross loomed in the
zenith.
"No, I didn't fire him."
"What did you do?"
"As I was dressing the boy's wound Kin Thung stood looking on, utterly
expressionless and unrepentant, even sullen.
"I didn't say anything to Kin that night, save to ask him to come to the
office the next day.
"The other boys were calling out to him as he entered, and I could hear
them through the window, 'I wonder how many strokes of the rattan he
will get?' for that is one of our forms of punishment.
"He was no doubt wondering himself when he entered, still sullen.
"I said to him, 'Kin, I could give you as punishment a hundred strokes
of the rattan. I could put you on rice and water for a month, or I could
put you to a room for a week in solitary confinement. But I am not
going to do either or any of them. I am going to pray for you!"
"'I don't want you to, sir!' he cried in alarm.
"'Kneel down!' I said to him.
"'I don't want to.'
"'Kneel down, I say!'
"'I won't!'
"'But this is your punishment. You would submit to the rattan if I
imposed that. You must submit to this!' I said.
"'I hate prayer!'
"'Kneel down, boy!'
"He knelt. I prayed. He wept."
This was the cryptic way the missionary came to the climax of his story.
Again the Southern Cross shot into view as we turned a curve in the
river.
"The fountain broke. A boy's heart was won! I didn't have to fire him. I
won him!"
"That lad came to me two years later as he started out from our school
in Batavia, and said, 'Mr. Worthington, that moment when you called me
into your office was the crucial moment of my life. If you had been
unkind to me then; if you had punished me, even as much as I deserved
it; if you had not been Christ-like, I should have killed you. I had my
knife ready. There was a demon in me! Your kindness, your praying for
me, broke something inside of me. I guess it was my heart. I cried. I
prayed. That morning saved my soul!'"
"That was a marvelous experience, Mr. Missionary! It was a marvelous way
to meet the situation," I said in a low tone, looking up at the white
outline of the Southern Cross, and remembering two thieves.
"It was Christ's way!" said the missionary.
But perhaps the outstanding Flash-light of national Friendship is that
of America for the Philippines. I shall never forget the day we started
southward from winter-bound China for sun-warmed Manila.
As the great ship swung about in the muddy waters of the Yangsti and
turned southward, the bitter winds of winter were blowing across her
deserted decks. But in two days one felt not only a breath of warm
tropical winds on his face but he also felt a breath of warmer
friendship blowing into his soul as he thought of the Philippines and
America.
The first breath of warm winds from southern tropical seas gently kissed
one's cheeks that afternoon. It was a soothing breath of romance,
freighted with the scent of tropical trees. It was much of a contrast
with the bitter winter winds that had blown the day before at Shanghai.
There the snow was flying, and woolen suits were greatly needed.
But to-night men and women alike walk the decks of this Manila-bound
ship. They are all in white. One stands at the bow of the ship, glad to
catch the salt spray on tanned cheeks, glad to feel the sea-touched
winds playing with his hair, glad to see fair women of the Orient tanned
with summer suns; for it is summer in the Philippines, while winter
reigns in China and the rest of the Oriental lands further north.
Last night we passed the narrow straits leading out of Shanghai harbor
directly south. Two lighthouses blinked through the dusk of evening, the
one to the north in short sharp notes, like a musician of the sea
singing coasts, rapidly beating time. The light to the south seemed to
count four in blinks and then hold its last count like a note of music.
In between the two lighthouses vague, dim, mist-belted mountains of the
China coast loomed through the dusk.
This morning and all day long we have been sailing past the huge
outlines of mountainous Formosa, that rich island off the coast of
China, between Shanghai and Manila. It looks like some fairly island
with its coves and caves, into which pours the purple sea, visible
through the faint mists of morning and noontime. Its precipitous sides
shoot down to the sea in great bare cliffs, save where, here and there,
a beautiful bay runs in from the southern sea to kiss the green lips of
the land.
But now the sun is setting. I am watching it from my stateroom window.
* * * * *
And now it is the rainy season in the Philippines.
It doesn't rain in Luzon; it opens up clouds, and oceans suddenly drop
to the land. Lakes and rivers form overnight. Bridges wash out, fields
are inundated, houses by thousands are swept away, and railroad tracks
twisted and played with, as if they were grappled by gigantic fists.
Men will tell you of the great Typhoon that suddenly dropped out of the
mountains at Baguio, sliced off a few sections of the mountains, rushed
down through the great gorge, and left in its trail the iron ruins of
eight or ten bridges, put in by American engineers, founded on solid
granite; but swept away like playthings of wood, in an hour.
One night we were driving from Baguio to Manila.
A storm dropped suddenly out of the nowhere. We had no side curtains on,
and in just three minutes we were soaked to the skin, and dripping
streams of water. The artesian wells along the way were but dribbling
springs compared with us.
The storm came out of a clear, star-lit sky. Storms come that way in the
Philippines. Only a few minutes before I had been looking up at the
Southern Cross admiring its beauty. I looked again and there was no
Southern Cross. A few great drops of rain fell and then came the deluge.
Candle lights flickered in innumerable thatched houses where brown and
naked women fluttered about dodging the rain, looking strangely like
great paintings in the night. At the edge of each side porch a Bamboo
ladder reached up from the ground. A fire burned against the rain. This
fire leapt up for two feet.
One could easily imagine on this stormy night, with every road a river,
every field a flood, and every vacant space a sea, that the thatched
houses raised on Bamboo poles were boats, afloat in a great ocean. The
fires on the back porches looked for all the world like the fires that I
have seen flaring against the night from Japanese fishing boats.
We had been warm, personal friends since college days, this driver and
I. He had chosen the harder way of the mission fields to spend his life.
"After all," said he, "that was a dream worth dreaming!"
"What do you mean?" I asked him, a bit startled.
"Why the American occupation of these islands; the dream that McKinley
had, of teaching them to govern themselves; and then giving them their
independence; an Imperial Dream such as the world never heard of before;
a dream that, if it has done nothing else, has won for America the
undying friendship of the intelligent Filipino."
"Right you are, man! But why such a thought at this ungodly hour? I
should think rather that you would be sending out an S. O. S."
"Dunno! Just flashed over me that that was a dream worth dreaming; and,
by gad, boy, we're seeing it come to pass. Look at those contented
people living in peace and security; their home fires lighted; their
children in school; plenty to eat; not afraid that to-morrow morning
some Friar will sell their home from under them. No wonder they have
given their undying friendship to America!"
He continued as we sped through the rain.
"England and Germany sneered at America's dream. Such a dream of
friendship through serving its colony had never been born in any other
national soul from the Genesis of colonization up to this day, save in
the soul of America in the Philippines. We have set the ideals of the
world in many ways but never in a more marked way than this.
"The Phoenicians were the first colonizers and they swept the
Mediterranean with a policy of exploitation and slavery which was
selfish and sordid. Then came Greece which had some such ideal of
colonization as America. Her ideal was, that colonies, like fruit from a
tree, when ripe, should fall off of the mother tree. Or the ideal of
Greece was that colonizing should come about like the swarming of bees."
I nodded my head. He went on as we slashed through the muddy ways, "Rome
with her Imperial dream, her army to back it up, failed as have failed
both Germany and Japan; three nations with kindred ideals as to
colonization.
"Venice was cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on
the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black
blotch on the world's pages.
"Modern colonization began with Spain in South America, Mexico and the
Philippines. Spain has nothing over which to boast in that record. The
Dutch in Java, the record of Belgium in the Congo; that of the
Portuguese in the Far East; the French in Africa; the English in India;
Germany in China and Africa, and Japan in Korea, have not been entirely
for the service of the subjected people, for all of these Governments
have gone on the fundamental theory that the colony exists for the
Mother States."
He paused a moment as we made a cautious way around a big caribou. "Then
came the great dream of America that the Mother State exists for the
benefit of the colony.
"Elihu Root said, 'We have declared a trust for the benefit of the
people of the Philippine Islands!'
"President William McKinley said: The government is designed not for
exploitation nor for our own satisfaction, or for the expression of our
theoretical views, but for the happiness, peace and prosperity of the
people of the Philippine Islands.'
"Ex-President Taft said when he was Governor-General of the Islands: The
chief difference between the English policy and treatment of tropical
peoples and ours, arises from the fact that we are seeking to prepare
them under our guidance for popular self-government. We are attempting
to do this, first by primary and secondary education offered freely to
the Filipino people.'
"This spirit has won the undying friendship of the Filipino people. True
enough, they will finally want their independence. That is natural, but
there is a deep love for America buried in their hearts because America
has been square with them; has fulfilled her promises; has not
exploited them, but has served them. That is why I call the colonization
policy of America here in the Philippines a dream worth dreaming." My
friend was right.
"We love America, because America is our friend!" said a humble
fisherman to me one day on the banks of the Pasig.
"Yes, the United States; it is our own! You are our brothers!" said a
Filipino boy who had been educated in a Mission school.
"We are no longer our own. We belong to America. You have bought us with
a price! It cost the blood of American soldiers to buy us!" said an old
Filipino, gray with years, but high in the councils of the Government.
* * * * *
One night on the Lunetta the Filipino Band was playing. It was a
beautiful evening with a sunset that lifted one into the very skies with
its bewildering glory and ecstasy. I had been sitting there, drinking in
the beautiful music made by the world-famous Constabulary Band, and
watching the quicksilver-like changing colors of the sunset. Then the
band started to play "The Star Spangled Banner." I was so lost in the
sunset and the music that I did not notice.
I heard a sudden stirring. Brown bodies, half-naked Filipinos all about
me, had leapt to their feet at the playing of our national hymn.
Beautiful Filipino women in their dainty and delicately winged gowns,
bare brown shoulders heaving with pride and friendship, stood
reverently. Filipino soldiers all over the Lunetta stood at attention
facing the flag, the Stars and Stripes waving in the winds from the old
walled city. Side by side with American soldiers who had just returned
from Siberia stood Filipino Constabulary soldiers. Side by side with
well-dressed American children stood half-naked Filipino children at
reverent attention, paying a wholesome respect to the Stars and Stripes
as the old hymn swept across the Lunetta.
"That is a thrilling thing to see!" I said to a friend.
"It could not have happened ten years ago! M he replied.
"Why?"
"They did not trust us, and they did not love us. They had seen too much
of the selfish colonization policies of Spain. They expected the same
things from America. It did not come. They have been won to us!"
This warm-hearted friendship is not true either of England's colonies
anywhere in the Orient or of Japan's in Formosa or Korea. It is true
alone in the Philippines.
* * * * *
While I was in the Philippines, down in San Fernando, a statue was
erected to a well-known rebel. He was a man who had refused to take the
oath of allegiance to America when we captured the islands. He escaped
and carried on a propaganda against us. But when he died and a request
was made that a statue be erected to his memory, the United States
granted this permission.
At the dedication of this statue the Governor of this Province said that
he doubted if any nation on the face of the earth, save the United
States, would have permitted the erection of such a statue to a rebel
against that government. "That act will bind our hearts closer to the
heart of the United States!" he said in closing his address. The
thrilling thing about it all was, that his address was met with
prolonged cheering on the part of the thousands of Filipinos who had
gathered for the dedication.
Another evidence of this beautiful friendship for America is the
painting which adorns the walls of one of the Government buildings in
Manila. It is called "The Welcome to America." It was purchased, paid
for and erected by Filipinos; erected in good will, with laughter in
their souls, and joy in their hearts.
It was painted by Hidalgo in Paris in 1904.
High colors; reds, browns, yellows, golds, blues, purples; tell its
story. It adorns the panel at the end of the Senate Chamber of the
Filipino Government.
It has spirit in it and a great, deep sincerity.
The central figure is a beautiful woman, symbolic of America. She comes
across the Pacific carrying the gifts of peace, prosperity, security and
love to her colony, the Philippines.
She carries in one hand the American flag. At her side is Youth bearing
a Harp, symbol of the music that America brings into the souls of the
people whom she comes to serve. Singing angels hover about the scene.
Above the central figure of America, on angel wings, is a Youth carrying
a lighted torch. To the left is a beautiful brown-skinned Filipino woman
with eyes uplifted to this torch. She bears within her ample bosom the
children of the islands. The torch is symbol of the fact that we are
handing on the light of our Christian civilization to the children of
our colonies.
I visited this painting many times, but I never visited it that I did
not see many Filipinos, both young and old, standing before it, with
reverent eyes.
I said to a high official of the Government, "Does that painting
represent the way you Filipinos feel to-day?"
"Hidalgo has spoken for us. He has voiced our feelings well!" was the
reply.
* * * * *
This friendship for the United States is a thrilling thing found all
over the Far East. One finds it in Korea, as well as in the Philippines,
like a burning light of glory. Korea says, "America is our only hope! We
have always trusted and loved America!"
One finds it like a silver stream running through the life of China. Dr.
Sun Yat Sen said to me in Shanghai: "America has always been China's
staunch friend! America we trust! America we love! America is our hope!
America is our model!"
Mr. Tang Shao-yi said, "America's hands and those of America alone are
clean in her relations with China. This cannot be said of the other
nations."
Then he told me a thrilling story of the Boxer Rebellion. He, with two
thousand Chinese, who were Government officials, were barricaded in a
compound behind the usual Chinese walls. The Boxers were firing on them
every day. They had run out of food. In fact, they were starving.
But one morning a bright-faced American boy appeared at the gates of the
wall. He was admitted because he was an American. He asked to be taken
to Mr. Tang Shao-yi.
"What do you most need?" this young American asked the rich Chinese
merchant.
"We most need food," was the reply.
"All right, I'll get enough for you to-day!" said the young American.
"That night," said Mr. Tang Shao-yi, "that American boy returned with
five hundred hams which the Boxers had thrown away, in addition to a
thousand sacks of flour which he had gotten from the English legation."
"Wonderful!" I exclaimed.
"And that boyish American was----"
"Who?" I asked with tense interest, for the old man was smiling with a
suggestive Oriental smile, as if he had a climax up his commodious
sleeves.
"That man was Herbert Hoover!"
And from that interview henceforth and forever no human being need tell
me that the Chinese have no sense of the dramatic.
"That's why we love and trust America," said this great Chinese
statesman. "It is because America has always been our friend in time of
need!"
I found this friendship for the United States true all over the Oriental
world. It was to me a great miracle of national friendship. The peoples
of the Orient trust us. They are not suspicious of our intentions in
spite of what jingo papers say. We have won their hearts. We have
claimed their friendship.
The name "America," which stands in the Oriental mind for the United
States, is a sacred passport and password. It is a magical word. It
opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the world; it tears down
barriers, century-old, that have been barricading certain places for
ages past. That simple word opens hearts that would open with none
other.
The eyes of the brown men of the Far East open wide at that word, and a
new light appears in them. This is particularly true in Korea, in China,
in the Malacca Straits, and in the Philippines.
It is enough to bring a flood of tears to the heart of an American,
lonely for a sight of his own flag, homesick for his native shores, to
see and feel and hear and know the pulse of this friendship for our
country among millions of brown men.
"It is because we are like you, we Chinese," said Tang Shao-yi. "It is
because we are both Democrats at heart!"
"It is because you have been our true friends!" said Dr. Sun Yat Sen.
"It is because your ideals are our ideals; your dreams our dreams and
your friends our friends," said Wu Ting-fang, one of China's greatest
leaders, to me.
"It is because so many of our young men have been trained in your
American schools, and because so many of us feel that the United States
is our second home. It is because you have sent so many good men and
women to China to help us; to teach us; to live with us; to love us; to
serve us! It is because your missionaries from America have shown the
real heart of the United States to us!" said Mr. Walter Busch, a Chinese
American student who is now editor of the Peking _Leader_.
But whatever the cause, the glorious fact is enough to:
"Send a thrill of rapture through the framework of the heart
And warm the inner bein' till the tear drops want to start!"
But perhaps the highest and holiest Flash-lights of Friendship that one
finds in the Far East is that of the friendship formed by the American
missionaries for the people among whom they are working, and the
friendship that these people give in return. These are holy things.
The average missionary comes home on his furlough, but before he is home
three months he is homesick to go back to his people. So they come and
go across the seas of the world through the years, weaving like a great
Shuttle of Service the fabric of friendship for themselves and for the
United States.
This shuttle of service is being woven night and day across the Atlantic
and across the Pacific by great ships bearing missionaries going and
coming; furlough following furlough, after six years of service; term
after term; leaving native land, children, memories; time after time
until death ends that particular thread, crimson, gold, brown or white.
The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friendship across the
seas as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and homebound
missionaries to foreign fields.
I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I write this sketch sitting
in a room overlooking the great harbor of Yokohama where three Japanese
warship lie anchored and two great Pacific liners, one on its way to San
Francisco and another bound for Vancouver. They come and go, these great
ships. A few days ago the _Empress of Asia_ made its twenty-eighth trip
across and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip back to
Vancouver again. Some of the ships out of San Francisco have made more
than a hundred trips. So they weave the shuttle back and forward across
this great sea. And never a ship sails this sea that it does not carry
its passenger list of missionaries. Our list was more than half a
hundred.
As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appreciative article that he has
written for the _Ladies' Home Journal_, says, the common phrase on a
Pacific liner is, "There are two hundred and fifty passengers and
forty-five missionaries on board." Every Pacific passenger list
immediately divides itself into two groups, the missionaries and the
other passengers.
Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shallow, narrow-minded, often
ignorant and uneducated tourists and business men who dare to speak of
this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. Forman has no particular
interest in missions and he has no particular interest in the Church,
but he started out to investigate this derogatory phrase, "and
forty-five missionaries."
Mr. Forman starts his article with these striking paragraphs
"If ever you cross the Pacific you will find the passengers on
the steamer quietly and automatically dividing themselves into
two groups.
"'How many passengers have we on board?' you may lightly ask
your neighbor.
"And your neighbor, traveled man no doubt (his twelfth
crossing, he will mention), will smartly reply, with a suave,
man-of-the-world smile: 'A hundred and two passengers and
forty-five missionaries.'
"After that you will be initiated and you will be mentioning
with an easy grace to some one else that there are on board so
many passengers and so many missionaries. It becomes a part of
the jargon of Pacific crossing."
But Mr. Forman sees working that Shuttle of Service of which I am
speaking. He sees, as any thinking man sees, as Roosevelt saw, as
Bryan saw, and as Taft saw, that the greatest single influence for
good in the Orient is the missionary. Mr. Forman was incensed at
this careless phrase on the Pacific liners, and he investigated the
work of our missionaries when he was in the Orient, and he came to
the decision that they are worth more to America, even from that
selfish standpoint, than all the ambassadors that we have sent
over, because they are, in their crossing and recrossing, weaving a
Fabric of Friendship between the Orient and the Occident; between
the nations of the East and those of the West; between the white
peoples and the brown peoples; in spite of the diplomatic
differences and yellow newspapers in the United States and Japan.
Mr. Forman says about his conclusions:
"I concluded that any one of the large missions in those
Oriental countries accomplished, so far as concerns American
standing and prestige, more than all our diplomatic
representation there put together. I do not believe it to be an
exaggeration to say that for the Orient the missionaries are
perhaps the only useful form of what is called diplomatic
representation."
And again in the same article he says:
"One good missionary in the right place, it seemed to me, can
accomplish more than quite a number of ambassadors."
And again he wonderfully sums up that mission of love in a paragraph
which I think ought to be passed on:
"But when a missionary establishes a clinic or a hospital,
healing sores and diseases that their own medicine men have
abandoned as hopeless; when he educates boys and girls that
otherwise would have remained in darkness; when, with a
whole-souled enthusiasm, he gives them counsel, aid and service
and he asks nothing in return then the stolid and passive
Chinese or Korean is genuinely impressed. Then America really
becomes in his mind the synonym for kindness and service, and
from mouth to mouth goes abroad the fame of the land that is
aiming to do him good, without any menacing background of
exploitation."
I talked with one bright-faced, twinkling-eyed, red-blooded, big-framed
missionary who was crossing with his family of a wife and four children.
He had spent fifteen years in the Orient as a missionary, and then
because of illness he had been compelled to go to America. There he had
taken a church and had preached for five years. His health came back,
and as he told me, "The lure of the East got me and I had to come back.
I never was so happy in my life as I am on this trip and the whole
family feels the same way. We are going back to _our people_!" And the
way he pronounced those _italicised_ words made me know that he, too,
was weaving a thread in the Fabric of Friendship.
We met a woman who was traveling back to China with her three darling
little tots. I made love to all three of them, and it wasn't long before
I asked one where her Daddy was. I assumed, of course, that they had
been home on a furlough and that Daddy was back there in China waiting
anxiously for them to return to him. I pictured that meeting, for I have
seen many such during war days, both on this side and in France.
"My Daddy is dead," the child said simply with a quiver of her little
lips.
"All right, dear baby, we won't talk about it then," for I was afraid
that those little trembling lips couldn't hold in much longer. But she
wanted to tell me about it. I soon saw that. She liked to talk about her
"dear dead Daddy."
"He went to France," she said simply.
"Ah, he was a soldier?" I questioned.
"No, he was better than a soldier, my Mamma says. He did not go to kill;
he went to help." And back of that sentiment and that statement I saw a
world of struggle and ideals in a missionary home where the man felt
called across the seas to be "in it" with his country and at last the
refuge of the man who could go "not to kill but to help."
"He went to work with the coolies and he got the influenza and died last
winter. We won't have any Daddy any more," and her little blue eyes were
misty with tears. And so were mine, more misty than I dared let her see.
And they are misty now as I write about it. And yours will be misty if
you read about it, as they should be. That is something fine in you
being called out.
Later I met the mother. She told me over again the story that little
Doris had told me of the big Daddy who had felt the call to go to France
in the Y.M.C.A. to help the poor "coolies," several hundred of whom
were, by strange coincidence, going back to China on the same boat with
us, and with that brave mother and those dear children. These "coolies"
were going back alive, but he who went to serve them died. "Others he
saved; Himself he could not save," echoed in my soul as that mother and
I talked.
"I am going back to the Chinese to spend the rest of my life finishing
Will's work. It is better so. I shall be happier."
"But the association there--everything--every turn you make--every place
you go--will remind you of him," I protested.
"It would be what Will would want most of all, that I go on with his
work. I go gladly. It will be the best balm for my sorrow."
And far above national friendships there loom these snow-white peaks of
the sacrificial friendship the missionaries bear in their hearts for the
people with whom they live, and serve, and die.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Inconsistencies in hyphenation of words preserved. (flash-lights,
flashlights; foot-ball, football; star-lit, starlit; to-day, today;
to-night, tonight)
Inconsistencies in the spelling and transliteration of non-English words
preserved. (Pyeng Yang, Pyengyang)
Pg. 25, "bacon" changed to "beacon". (like beacon lights of hope)
Pg. 26, inserted missing comma. (there to the north," I said)
Pgs. 79, 101, 145, inserted opening double quote mark to start of direct
speech at top of chapter.
Pg. 153, "flashng" changed to "flashing" (like flashing piston rods of
steel)
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Flash-lights from the Seven Seas" ***
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