A Woman In China

by Mary Gaunt

But the girl looked at her with weary eyes. There was no excitement in playing with her brother's, children, and she could not see the good to be got out of walking aimlessly round the courtyard. Poor Manchu maid! What had she expected?

“If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldst thou not have done it?”

“I could do no good,” said the missionary sorrowfully, “and they would not listen to my message.”

The Chinese have their own remedies for many diseases, and some of them the missionaries told me were good, but many were too drastic, and many were wickedly dangerous. When an eye is red and bloodshot for instance, they will break a piece of crockery and pierce the eye with it, and in all probability the unfortunate loses his sight. No wonder they come miles and miles, however rough the way, to submit themselves to gentler treatment. I have known even women with bound feet toil twenty miles to see them about some ailment. Of course their feet are not as badly bound as some, for there are many women in China who cannot walk at all. I talked with a man once who told me he had just been called upon to congratulate a man because he had married a wife who could not get across the room by herself. She, naturally, was a lady with slaves to wait upon her. These Chinese women of the mountains of the poorer classes—the Manchus do not bind their feet—must be able to move about a little, for there is a certain amount of work they must do.

“A hundred thousand medical missionaries,” said this man, “are wanted in China, for the teeming population suffers from its ignorance, it suffers because it is packed so tightly together; the women suffer from the custom that presses so heavily, and it suffers from its own dirt.”

Up here at Jehol the suffering is apparently as bad as anywhere, and the dispensary is full with all the minor ailments that come within the range of the missionaries' simple skill, and all the cruel diseases that are quite beyond them, that they cannot touch, and they do their best in all pity and love, and yet think that they are doing a greater thing than binding up a man's wounds when they can induce him to come to their prayer-meetings, which go along, side by side, with the dispensary.

I, a heathen and a “Greek,” question whether the Chinese ever receives Christianity. A Chinese gentleman, a graduate of Cambridge, once told me he did not think he ever did.

“But the Chinaman,” said he, he actually used the contemned word, “is a practical man, he receives all faiths. Some may be right, and when he thinks he is dying, he will send for a priest of every faith he knows of to help him across the dark river. Who knows, some of them may chance to be right,” and he laughed. He himself was of the faith so many of us of this modern world have attained to, seeing the good in so many faiths, seeing the beauty and the pity of them and standing aside and crying: “Why all this? Whither are we bound? What can it matter whether this poor coolie believes in Christ, or Buddha, or the cold ethics of Confucius?” I said this to my missionary woman one day and she looked at me with horror in her eyes.

“There will be a reaping some day,” she said. “Where will you be then?”

“Surely I cannot be blamed for using the reasoning powers God has given.” But I am sure she thought my reasoning powers came from the devil, and if I hadn't been getting used to it I should have been made uncomfortable by being prayed for as one in outer darkness.