Mrs. Drummond's vocation

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By

II

There was a friture for supper that evening in the little room behind the cafe of the Blue Parrot, — delicate fish like baby soles; there was a ragout of beef, stewed until it was a delicious parody of game; there was a salad whose bowl had indisputably been rubbed with garlic; there were little square cheeses, condensed cream that melted in the mouth; there was a sweet omelette soaked, alas ! in rum ; a meal such as Samuel Drummond had never before partaken of.

And there was Lily in her best white frock of coarse nun's veiling trimmed with lumpy bows of cheap ribbon — a garment fit for Venus herself, Drummond would have thought, had the Improper Goddess been a fit inmate for his chaste imagination.

Madame Louvrier, fired with the excitement of the great idea suggested to her by 12 something in Drummond’s face, had assumed a demeanour of the greatest dignity, verging on stiffness. The Anglais was angular and plain and awkward, eh bien oui, mon Dieu, but he was, it was plain to see, amoureux fou of the little one; and something about his clothes, his boots, his hideous silver watch chain gave the old woman a comforting confidence that he was well-to-do.

For the first time Lily was allowed to laugh and chatter in the presence of a man. The laugh that so terrified her austere grandmother was, plainly, a powerful attraction to the Anglais. Therefore, let the child laugh !

Madame Louvrier wore in honour of the occasion a lace collar and a long gold chain from which hung a little gold cross, worn thin with age. This horrible symbol caught the nonconformist’s eye as he was eating his second delicately fried fish.

“You are a papist?” he asked, faintly, but with the severity he judged obligatory on him.

He pointed at the cross as he might have pointed, shrinkingly, at a leper. “Catholic?”

Madame Louvrier reflected for a moment, and then she understood.

“Ah! qa, oui. Ah, yes, I am Catholique, naturally. And you, Monsieur?”

He tried to explain to her what he was, but his voice faltered. His duty was to go at once, and never return.

“Vous n’aimez done pas la sainte Eglise? You like not ze Church?”

“It is the Scarlet Woman of Babylon,” he returned doggedly, his eyes half closing, “the mother of all evil. I — I had not thought of that.”

Lily was giving bits of bread to the obliging Folichon, who sat up like a gentleman beside her. The conversation plainly bored her. At her Drummond gave one glance. He would go as soon as common politeness would allow him.

But Madame Louvrier, her sharp black eyes half hidden under their wrinkled lids, like those of an ancient crocodile, spoke softly.

“Ah, oui, I understand," she said; “you are of the new religion — vous etes Calviniste. My daughter's poor 'usband, Mistaire Crane, — he too was of that religion. Very sombre I call it, — sans gaite, not gay like ours, but what will you? He was born to it. And when Lily came, he insist, oh, but furiously, that she too should be Calviniste. It was triste, vous comprenez, for my poor Paul and me, but" — with a shrug — “she was 3 is child, Crane's, and — que voulez vous ?"

Of this skilfully delivered speech Drummond gathered only the main fact. Lily was a Calvinist. The saving grace of this truth purged from his attentive mind any realisation of the horror of the old woman's attitude towards a lack of gaiety in his religion.

“Oh, then she" — he stammered, in his relief draining his glass, hitherto untouched, of red wine.

“But yes. She is of your religion, poor IS cherished one. Lily, Monsieur interests himself,” she went on in French, “for your soul.”

Lily wiped her fingers, just half swallowed by the poodle, and smiled her dazzling smile across the table.

“Ah, yes?” she asked Drummond, “it interests you, souls?”

The strong wine had warmed the missionary’s imagination. “Your soul interests me,” he declared, “more than anything else in the world.” ✓

For a moment her honey-coloured eyes glowed at him; then they dropped and were hidden.

It was what her grandmother had long called her naughtiest trick. Half unconscious still, it yet, even in her youngest maidenhood, savoured of coquetry. Often had Madame Louvrier hesitated whether to respect the innocent half or chastise the coquettish half of the little by-play, but she had always put off her decision.

And now, as she ate her smoking ragout, 16 she rejoiced in her heart. For Drummond actually blushed under the glance Lily gave him.

Madame Louvrier was a thoroughly good woman and a devout Catholic. But she was afraid of and for her granddaughter, and if Heaven and the Blessed Virgin had sent a heretic husband to the girl, it was indeed a blessing that they had sent him before her possibly innate characteristics had had time to develope.

At the back of the house there was a small square of moth-eaten-looking grass in which grew a bony and nearly leafless tree. There was also a tonnelle on which crept a depressed creeper adorned with half-a-dozen pale mauve flowers. Under this little bower the small party drank its coffee. Drummond, on the understanding that it was strictly a temperance drink, took a small glass of some fiery brown fluid that had the immediate effect of reducing any obstacle suggested to his bliss by his brain, to filmy nonsense to be laughed away.

There was a moon, a remarkably large moon of a deep orange hue. Drummond had never before been in such sympathy with moonlight.

Presently Madame Louvrier rose and went to her place in the cafe.

“Grand’mere lives in the cafe,” observed Lily, dipping bits of sugar into her coffee and transferring them, dripping wet, to her mouth. “She love it.”

“And you?”

“Me? No. It is dull, very dull; I can’t do with it.” There was a decided cockney inflection to her pretty, broken English ; she said “cawn’t.”

“And what do you like?”

“Me? Oh, I like to go to the marche where there are many people, and to Mass on Sundays — ”

“To Mass? But you are a Protestant!” At the horror in his voice she looked up.

“Protestant! Yes, my father was, and so am I. But, — I go to Mass always with 18 grand'mere. Que voulez-vous? It is gay and I like the incense."

“But you are a Protestant," he insisted, gazing at her. And she laughed softly. It sounded like rippling water to him, and her eyes held light as golden as that of the moon.

Ill

They were married three days later by a minister from near Leeds, whom Drummond had met on the beach and accosted as a brother.

Mr. Billings, a worn old man with a large wen on his glossy brow, lived as it were in a cloud of the aroma of peppermint, a remedy supposed to be efficacious against the dyspepsia that for many years had held him in its clutches. He had come abroad for his holiday, but the horrors of France had proved to him such that his courage had failed him here at her very edge, and he was installed in a small hotel on the quai, where he clung pathetically to a waiter who spoke English, and where the beefsteak was really red inside.

He told his story to Drummond and together they sat on the sands whereon French 20 ladies, frisky though fat, skipped seawards in short skirts, and dallied with the fringe of the Channel with little shrieks of amused fear.

“I wish I had gone to Hoylake,” Mr. Billings declared, “but I have always wished to come abroad, and when my dear wife died, last November, my health broke down, and the doctor said a complete change would do me good. It is a rich connection, ours, and they got up a subscription to give me this ’oliday. I don’t know,” he concluded with deep gloom, “that they’ll like my tarrying here , but I reely ’aven’t the courage to go on.”

“The air is good here,” suggested Drummond, consolingly; “it ought to help you.”

“The little girls’ skirts are so short,” pursued Mr. Billings, dusting a peppermint lozenge which had accumulated a coating of fluff in his pocket ; “they seem all legs. And the only difference one can perceive between them and the very little boys, is that the girls 21 have lace edgings to their drawers. One doesn’t quite see why.”

Drummond did not laugh, because he was not in the least amused. The old minister appeared to him to be as worthy as he, in spite of his peculiarities, undoubtedly was, and the younger man was sorry for him.

“It’ll cheer you up to have something to do,” he suggested ; “you didn’t expect a wedding here, did you?”

“No, no, I can’t say I did. It’s a strange thing to do, to marry a French girl.” When he sucked his lozenge he, or it, made a loud noise.

“She isn’t French. Her father was an Englishman — name of Crane — she is a Calvinist.”

And thus it was arranged.

Lily, one bright morning, became Mrs. Samuel Drummond, and a breakfast was partaken of in the garden behind the cafe.

By means of laths laid over the seven-foot garden walls, and freshly cut Virginian creepers spread over the laths, a certain 22 amount of shade was ensured to the company. The breakfast was excellent, and old Mr. Billings at one period was moved to tears by emotions of various sorts.

Madame Louvrier, looking rather handsome in a russet-coloured silk, nodded approvingly when Drummond refused wine.

“You have reason, my friend," she said. “Lily too has never tasted it. We others — we French — it is different, but she is Engleesh and it is better she should drink nothing but water."

Lily's father, Drummond knew, had looked too frequently on spirits when they were golden, and he had already written to his parents at Clapham that his bride was a teetotaller.

Under her filmy veil, Lily's beauty was remarkable. And her shrewd old grandmother saw with satisfaction that the child's eyes were often fixed on Drummond's face.

“He will mould her," Madame Louvrier thought, draining her glass; “thanks to the Blessed Virgin that he has got her while she 23 is so young. He is a fine young man, too, with his great nose and his big shoulders. Me, I like a man with a nose.”

“Messieurs et Dames,” — the uncle Scipion had risen and struck his glass against a bottle to call the company to order. “Messieurs et Dames.”

The uncle Scipion, a brother of the late M. Louvrier, was a small man with a remarkably large, black moustache that lay across his little wizened face like the fire-end of a poker. He was a wine-dealer in the champagne, and, it was rumoured, rich.

He had given Lily five hundred francs for her trousseau, and felt in return entitled to a few words.

The few words lasted twenty-two minutes. Lily yawned, her little pink tongue curling up like a puppy’s; Madame Louvrier, her eyes with much politeness fixed on the uncle Scipion’s face, mentally reviewed her purchase of the trousseau and rather regretted after all that she had changed her mind about the dark blue travelling dress. “The 24 red and gold galloon was very chic/’ she reflected.

A fly objected to the orator’s oratory and buzzed rudely round his moist bald head. Henri, the waiter, smartened up for the occasion, shoo’d at the fly with his napkin, and nearly put the uncle Scipion’s eye out. Uncle Scipion broke off in his discourse on the perfect joy of married life to call Henri a camel, and the bride’s bubbling peal of laughter caused her uncle to do what he, none other, called “cutting his discourse short.”

The other toasts were brief and few.

Then Lily was taken away by her grandmother to change her frock, and to say good-bye to her Aunt Voilet, a paralysed sister of her father who had lived in the house ever since she could remember, and her constant intercourse with whom explained the girl’s fluent English.

Drummond, a few minutes later, joined his wife — O word of wonder! — by Cousin Voilet’s sofa, where the invalid, a sharp- 25 featured woman with blue-white false teeth that snapped when she talked, lay with plates of food and glasses of wine all about her.

“Good-bye, Miss Crane,” Drummond said, gently, wondering how she could live with no air; “I will send you the postal cards.”

“Thank you, Mr. Drummond. Kiss me good-bye, Lily.”

Lily bent over the sofa. “Have you had enough to eat, Cousin Voilet?”

“I’ve done very nicely, thank you, my dear.”

They kissed and Lily cried a little, which lovely act confirmed Drummond for the hundredth time in his opinion that her character, like her complexion, was flawless.

At the door of the cafe, — crowded with curious customers, — Madame Louvrier and her granddaughter embraced and parted, while Folichon, appropriately decorated with a white ribbon, begged from table to table and made a beast of himself on bits of sugar dipped into various glasses. This, old Mr. 26

Billings considered a degrading spectacle.

The carriage, drawn up in splendour in the shade before Madame Coutreau’s shop, bore the travellers down the street, and their hands, a little damp, were clasped tenderly.

They took the three o’clock express for Paris, and, spending exactly twenty hours in that perilous capital, made their way southwards and took the boat for China where the miserable heathen were waiting for enlightenment.

IV

On the north coast of China, not very far from Shantung, is situated the Bledsoe Mission.

There is a chapel, beautiful with the beauties of corrugated iron, and half-a-dozen bungalows, each in its little compound. Close to the sea runs the long and filthy street that composes the European city, in which live most of the redeemed brethren.

Higher up the gently sloping hill to the left, lies, a huddle of picturesque wooden and tiled roofs, the Chinese city, wherein no foreign power has jurisdiction, and whither flee all Chinese refugees from the British and German settlements within a hundred miles. Old, old is the Chinese city. Its temple was filled with worshippers long before a certain Man was born at Nazareth; its present-day habits are those described by the earliest 28

Jesuit missionaries and that cheery old rolling-stone, Marco Polo. Centuries leave here as few marks as do years in European cities ; the busy, inscrutable crowds gathered together to barter and sell in the market booths, are dressed precisely as were their ancestors when Harry the Eighth ruled in the little Island considered by some people so important.

Serene, immutable, conservative to the nth power, the inhabitants of the Chinese city live their lives, worship their queer gods, squeeze their women’s feet, paint their crude pictures, eat their indescribable messes, and die their unemotional deaths, regarding the absurdities of their little band of white neighbours with a scorn too deep for words, probably even with a grim amusement.

And it is these people to help in the conversion of whom Samuel Drummond brought his child-wife that day thirteen years ago.

His bungalow, a small grey cottage with a deep, green-pillared verandah, was furnished according to the taste of its late inhabitants.

There were cane-seated chairs, cheap shiny tables, two looking-glasses, both to be extolled as a remedy for budding vanity, coarse crockery, iron bedsteads, and sheets made of a slippery stuff, the name of which Lily never learned.

“Very nice," declared Samuel the evening of their arrival, as he stood before the green-grey mirror in their bedroom, shaving. “And the sitting-room, especially, is really genteel."

“Yes," assented Lily from the next room where she sat, her knees under her chin in the barrel-like stone bath tub; “the pictures are beautiful."

She was immensely pleased at having a home of her own, and her ignorance of all matters of taste stood her in good stead.

She admired the crude magenta wash on the walls, and the yellow antimacassars that adorned those of the chairs whose backs were not chiefly hole. There was one plush 30 seated and backed rocking-chair whose splendours were protected by a piece of embroidery representing Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. This work of art the Drummonds thoroughly admired.

It was now early in October, and the greatest heat of the summer was over, but they ate their strange little supper to the accompaniment of a buzzing electric fan, and found it none too cool. Their servant, Ah Fee, inherited, like the house, from their predecessors, and a noted convert of the strongest nonconformist convictions, slipped noiselessly in and out through the split bamboo curtains, his beady unwinking eyes fixed on his master.

“I hear very good things about you, Ah Fee,” Drummond observed kindly, at length.

“Yessir, me welly good Chlistian. Me love Djlesus-Chlist welly much.”

“That’s right. I shall expect you to give me your help in bringing other — other Chinese people into the fold.”

“Yessir, me help bling — Chinese peoples welly ignolant — poor lost sheep.”

Lily watched her husband admiringly. He was so good, so wise, she thought. Unconsciously he had taught her to think this. He was so gentle with her, so kind, so immeasurably devot !

Madame Louvrier was right. He had caught the girl young and her mind had already begun to take the stamp of his.

After supper the newcomers, sedately dressed in their best, went out to explore the field of their labours and to pay their respect to the Bradys, — the minister and his wife.

The sea was very quiet, meeting the land, apparently, without a break or a seam, and lying nearly as motionless in the pale afterglow left by the sun behind the low mountains at the horizon.

“It smells very bad, doesn’t it?” commented Lily, as they passed a chow-house under the verandah of which squatted halfa-dozen great broad-shouldered coolies, 32 stripped to the waist, eating their mess of rice with a great noise of chopsticks.

These gentry and others, gazed unmoved at the Europeans ; the sight was ridiculous to them, but they were used to it. Lily’s fair hair, caught by the light of a lantern, shone in a way offensive to their taste, but they made no remarks. Supper was important, and fantan to come, and the opium pipe. These things were perennial, eternal, but the coming and going of absurd foreigners made no real mark whatever on their great country.

Lily paused to look into the windows of the pawnbroker’s shop, and again at the fishmonger’s, where by the light of torches, housewives laid in their supplies.

Down by the little pier where once a month one of the smaller boats from Shanghai stopped for water, solemn merchants walked gravely, listening to each other’s remarks with that politeness which puts our curt civility to shame.

A woman in a bright magenta jacket and as bright blue trowsers, dragged along by one arm a deliciously fat baby in a loose garment that displayed most of his smooth body, toasted by the sun to a turn.

“Look, Lily, what a fine boy !” said Drummond. But Lily was busy looking at the mother’s blue enamel earrings.

“See her earrings — oh, yes, the baby. I don’t like babies,” she answered absently.

Drummond stopped short. “Not like babies! Why, Lily!”

She gazed up at him. “Ah, — I have shock you? I am sorry. But, no, I do not like them at all,” she insisted gently.

Drummond drew her to him and leaned against a sampan that stood just above the high tide line.

“But, darling,” he said, very gently, his stern face softening, “you mustn’t say that. Suppose the Lord — sent us one?”

Her vivacious answer was in French, and he asked her to repeat it in English. After a pause she gave him what was obviously a Bowdlerized translation. “I said I hoped 34 the Lord will not , Samuel. That was all.”

He was silent, and after a minute they went their way back through the village and up the hill. He was very much in love and wished above all things that his moulding of her might be a painless process. Mould her, of course, he must. That was his first duty, but she was seventeen and he was thirty-two; and he was big and strong and she was little and delicate, — he must not frighten her.

After a bit he asked her if she had as yet made any* plans for her garden, and they returned no more to the subject of the hypothetical baby.

The minister and his lady they found at home and frankly awaiting their call.

“I knew you’d come, dear Brother Drummond,” Mr. Brady said, by way of greeting.

He was a small, thin man, middle-aged and kind-looking, with missionary stamped all over him.

His wife, who, physically, would have made three of him, had a moist-looking, pink 35 face and a kind, wavering smile. She had on a loose, grey gown trimmed with black, for which she apologised, explaining that with ’er size, by the time evening came it was absolutely necessary to get into something comfortable.

The minister, impeccably black, but for his linen, from head to foot, wore straw Chinese slippers and kept one foot on the rung of a neighbouring chair, as ’is corns were that troublesome of late.

Kind, conscientious, self-sacrificing, vulgar people, whose limited vision and lack of imagination allowed them to survey their efforts to Christianize China with comforting optimism.

Mrs. Brady, while the gentlemen discussed the conditions of the community, gave her young friend much good advice. Wing Fook was the man to go to when one’s clothes were worn out and needed copying; the man who brought fish on Wednesdays was pretty well to be trusted, but Lily was to beware of him of Fridays.

“And you must get a topee at once, my dear. It’s very hot still in the middle of the day, and we can’t ’ave you laid up with sunstroke. Whitelow’s is the place. You can get everything at Whitelow’s, from hats to soap. They ’ave Monkey Brand now, I am glad to say,” continued the good lady, “and fairly good bacon. Eggs are the greatest difficulty.”

To these domestic details Lily listened with the placidity of the born Housekeeping Failure. It interested her far more to overhear the information Mr. Brady was now giving her husband about the other missionaries.

“The Blands you will like; Brother Bland is a most earnest worker in the vineyard, — and Sister Bland is as earnest. Then the Smiths, yes, yes, tlie Smiths are earnest too, but they are younger,” went on the Minister indulgently, “and I fear Sister Smith is not quite so serious-minded as she might be. They have four little ones, — the youngest just four days old.”

“I have a letter to Mr. Penguin — ”

Mrs. Brady fanned herself vigorously. “Oh, yes, the Penguins. Miss Penguin is an invalid, unfortunately, and will be obliged to go home. ' E is a good man, a very good man. Ah, yes, one of our most earnest workers.”

Lily said that she would be very glad to meet the excellent Penguins.

When the Drummonds left, Mr. and Mrs. Brady went with them to the gate of the compound.

“Now, my dear,” Mrs. Brady said to Lily, kissing her kindly, “remember, we are all friends here, and whenever you want any ’elp of any kind, or the loan of anything, I'm always ready!”

Through the starlit darkness, the new labourers in the vineyard went home, armin-arm.

B8

Days at the Mission were much alike; each was like its predecessor; the months, looked back upon, melted together like the sleepers of a railway track seen from a moving train.

When the fourth anniversary of their arrival came round, Lily Drummond could hardly believe it was really the fourth.

“Are you sure it isn't three years, dear?” she asked her husband; and Drummond assured her gravely that he was sure.

“The first anniversary was our little dinner party, don't you remember? And the second, Mrs. Brady was so ill, — you were with her all day.”

“Oh, yes, — last year, of course, was the riot. I remember now. But it hardly seems possible.”

The little missionary lady sat in her verandah, sewing. She was making a frock for one of the Rescued Orphans, a dull grey garment warranted to last through the stormy infancy of several Orphans.

The years had changed Lily Drummond. She had been, when she came to the Mission, so young, so unformed, that, as was natural, Drummond, himself a strong, patient nature, had impressed her mind as much unconsciously as consciously, with the stamp of his. Too wise in his narrow way to frighten her at first with the work that was very nearly his whole life, he let her gradually accustom herself to the strange mental tone of the little community, and then, little by little she had come to do her share in the great work. She read aloud, at first, to the long-suffering Celestials at the Mission School; then she was promoted to giving a few regular lessons to the half-grown boys who learned so readily all that she told them; and a little later, when Drummond felt that her ignorance in religious matters would no longer put him to shame, her occupation became 40 that of “telling the story of Jesus to the poor heathen.”

To this story the poor heathen listened with an exquisite courtesy that delighted the workers who had hitherto met only with the vulgar rudeness, or at least the vulgar good intent, of the London poor. The poor heathen said little, as is their way, and that little was soothing to the missionaries, some of whom wrote home to the periodicals of their sect, describing in flowery language the beautiful behaviour of the more enlightened of the denizens of the Flowery Kingdom.

It is, of course, as impossible to state what the converted Chinese of the Bledsoe Mission really thought, as it is to declare what the idols in their great temples think, or what the Omnipotent Power overhead thinks of the missionaries’ labours and their results. The Omnipotent Power, however, being Justice Personified, some theologians to the contrary notwithstanding, must at least, in judging the men and women of the Bledsoe 4i

Mission, count to their credit their indomitable courage, their sincerity, and their kindness to each other as well as to those to succour whom they had left the millions of suffering poor at home.

The Smiths, the Penguins, the Blackers and the rest indeed laboured in season and out, and labouring out of season on the north coast of China is no joke.

The blazing summer days, hotter than the stay-at-home European can conceive, are trying to the temper as well as to the health. Then there are the rains, when for weeks the earth is a great sponge, and sickness abounds. In the winter the cold is intense; and snow lies round about, crisp and cold and even, like the snow in Good King Wenceslaus. Then for months no steamer comes, the post is brought once a month by a runner (who, judging by the time he takes, does anything but run) from Shantung or Wei-Hai; the little community is as much cut off from the outer world as if it were located on a desert island.

And through these vicissitudes the community went its way, patient and kind, ignorant and vain, a very epitome of the world in miniature, but for a marked lack of enmity and greed that characterized it.

When poor Miss Penguin died, in midwinter, Samuel Drummond, the strongest and most muscular of the missionaries, himself dug her grave, cleaving through three feet of snow and gouging up the frozen earth with a pickaxe until a hole had been made sufficiently large to secure the poor, painted coffin from the wolves. And he and Brother Blacker it was who carried the coffin to its grave on their shoulders.

Mrs. Blacker’s baby, on the other hand, was born in July, two years after the arrival of the Drummonds, a humid, hot day when things stuck to one’s hands and the Australian butter floated precisely like oil, in its tins.

Mrs. Blacker was desperately ill, and the Mission doctor, himself at death’s door with dysentery, could not go to her.

Then, in the hour of need, it was Penguin, long, thin, lath-like in build, given to overprofuse perspiration and constant dyspepsia, who came to the rescue. Mrs. Blacker never forgot the wonderful things he was, by God's grace, enabled to do for her, and the rather gruesome details were considered appropriate subject matter for confidential talks over teacups, until the poor lady died, six years later, from the bite of one of the rare little adders found under the stones of the brook near the gates of the Chinese city.

There are other stories that might be told of the brotherly and sisterly love of these voluntary exiles, stories that redound, all of them, to the eternal credit of their kind.

And the Mission flourished. Year by year the number of converts increased and was duly quoted in the home-sent Reports. The number of backsliders was not recorded, and even among themselves, once one of these sinners was found to have slid beyond recall, he was not often mentioned.