A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

There came a smile into her bright young eyes. “Oh, I don't know. Some of them may. They are so very well-educated, and the Chinese admire education, and in a Chinese household, where there are so many people to do the work, a blind wife would not be so useless. Only the other day we heard of the marriage of one of our girls.”

And I looked at them again with other eyes, and hoped there were many households that would like a wife for their son who knew geography.

We went from the outer to the inner courtyard, a rock garden where, in true Chinese fashion, are set out plants and rockeries, a little winding river with a stone bridge across it, a miniature lake—there is no water in it now—and many creeping plants hiding the stones. It is a charming spot, but naturally the blind are not allowed to go there by themselves. It is too dangerous. However, on one occasion, one curious little boy objected to these restrictions, and went on an exploring expedition on his own account. Groping about in the darkness, he fell into the river, which has steep cement sides, and out of that he could not get. You would think that he would have yelled lustily to call attention to his predicament, but that is not the Chinese way. He had disobeyed, Fate was against him, and he must suffer, and there he lay the livelong day without a murmur, and not till they called the roll in the evening, was his absence discovered, and a search for him instituted. Even that lesson was not sufficient, for once again he was missing, and once again he was discovered fallen into one of the many traps of the rock garden. It was unexplored country to him, and he was willing to risk much to see what it was like.

In the parts of the house with which they are familiar they can all run about, up and down steps, and in and out of courtyards and down passages as easily as people with sight. The boys came out of their class-rooms where they learn to read, and write, and sing, and play the harmonium, and raced about much as other boys in other lands would do.

They have two meals a day—one in the morning and one at four o'clock in the afternoon, and as much tea and bread at other times as they care to have. Mrs Murray apologised for the dampness of the stones of the dining-room floor. It is a Chinese house, and stone floors are not a sign of poverty. These stones are damp because at twelve o'clock the boys come and pour themselves out cups of tea, and naturally they make a mess. The cook is busy, he cannot be with them always. For this charity is run on very simple lines, and the people who see are very few. There is the cook and the house-coolie, a woman for the girls, a doorkeeper, frail and old, he may be seen standing just outside the door in the picture of the hu t'ung, and a couple of men who attend to the making of the Braille books, for their making and binding requires the attention of someone with sight. But with these exceptions, the blind have it all to themselves; they learn, and they play, and they eat by themselves.

In one of the pictures I have taken, the boys have come out of school and are playing cat and mouse. All join hands in a circle, and one boy creeping in and out softly is chased by another. How they manage it in their darkness I don't know, but they chattered, and laughed, and shouted happily though what they said of course I did not know. They are all, boys and girls alike, dressed in the ordinary blue cotton of the country; the boys had their hair cut short, for nowadays the queue, that most curious of fashions in the dressing of hair, is going out. The girls were also dressed like the peasants, with their trousers neatly drawn in at the ankles and their smooth, straight hair drawn back and plaited in a tail down the back, much like an English schoolgirl; the little ones though, have their heads shaven in front, very ugly, but in conformation with Chinese custom, which always shaves part at least of the little one's head.

In the courtyard where the boys were playing, was a rocking-horse, a dilapidated and battered toy without either tail, or mane, or eyes. And this toy is pathetic, when you know its history. It was bought with the pennies saved by Mr Hill Murray's children. They, too, out of their small store, wanted to do something for the blind; and the blind children, immediately it came into their possession, took out its eyes. They were not going to have the rocking-horse spying on them when they could not see themselves.

They all wisely live in native fashion. Their food is the food of the well-to-do lower classes, plenty of bread, steamed instead of being baked, and plenty of vegetables and soup, with just a little meat in it; the food to which they have been accustomed, and which they like best. Their beds, I have tried to depict one, are just the ordinary k'ang, a stone platform to hold three in summer, and five in winter. Under it is a small fireplace where a fire can be built to warm it, above, it is covered with matting, and each boy spreads his own bed of quilted cotton, which is rolled up in the daytime.

I would have thought that the Mission to the Blind was so good and great a thing that it could rouse no bitter feelings in any breast. It has for its object the succouring of those whom the Chinese themselves treat with great respect, yet so fanatical was the Boxer outbreak, that in the hu t'ung outside the Mission, forty of the pupils and their teachers, helpless in their affliction, were done to death by those who would have none of the Westerner and his works, even though those works were works of mercy.

More often, perhaps, in China than anywhere in the world where I have been, am I reminded of the passage in Holy Writ that tells how as the Man of Pity came nigh unto Jericho a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. And, hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant, and they told him, “Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.” We may not give sight to the blind nowadays, but if we walk in the streets of Peking, and then turn in to the Mission to the Blind with its kindly care for the helpless, and its brightening of darkened lives, we know that that man who stood on the Beggars' Bridge pitied, as his Master had pitied before him. All that he could do he has done, and those who have come after him have followed faithfully in his footsteps, can any man do more? I think not. Truly I think not.