The third party that set out from that suburb consisted of the Rev. Donald Smith, his wife, and some schoolgirls they were escorting back to their homes, as he considered, in these troublous times, they would be safer with their own people than in the mission school. They went due east, and had not gone three miles when they were set upon. The girls fled in all directions, but the attackers only molested the foreigner and his wife. He endeavoured to defend her, but they beat him so severely that both his arms were broken, and they were both left for dead by the wayside. Here they were found by some friendly, kindly villagers—the average Chinaman is kindly—who, when the roughs were gone, came to their rescue, and took them back to the eastern suburb, where the other missionaries had spent a terrible two hours, momentarily expecting the mob to rush in and kill them.
But the Chinese are a cautious people, curious in their respect for precedent. What was to be done with these foreigners. Sometimes the foreigners had been slain, but then again, quite as often, they had been guarded and kept safely. There was no getting into the city. The gates were fast locked and were kept shut for days, but someone—very probably a well-wisher to the missionaries—went to the wall and shouted up to know what was the order about foreigners? Were they to kill them or were they to protect them? Back came the response, the order was, the foreigners were to be protected, and when word of this was brought back to the mission station, they were not only released, but the property of which they had been robbed was returned to them. For those who had looted kept it intact till they saw which way the wind blew.
And by the time the city gates were opened and order was restored, it was understood, by the proclamation of the New Republic, that all foreigners were to be protected.
But the case of the missionaries in Hsi An Fu graphically illustrates the dangers every foreigner, missionary, or the missionary's bête noire, the ubiquitous cigarette-selling British American Tobacco man, runs in China, where the civilisation, the long-established civilisation is that of Nineveh or Babylon, or ancient Egypt. Not that the foreigner runs any greater risk than the native of the country, sometimes he runs less, because, even into the far interior, a glimmering of the vengeance the Christian nations take for their martyred brothers has penetrated; but life in China is, as it was in Nineveh or Babylon, not nearly as sacred as it is in the West. The life of a poor man, one of the luckless proletariat, is of small account to anyone. A disbanded and unpaid soldiery are for ever a menace, and the difference between the disciplined soldier and the unlicensed bandit is very, very small. One week a regiment of soldiers clamouring for their pay, the next a band of robbers hiding in the hills, their methods ruthless, for their hand is against every man's and every man's hand is against them. They live by the sword, as they perish by the sword, and when the tide of lawlessness reaches a certain height, white man and yellow alike suffer, but we take count only of the sufferings of our own people. Sitting in the missionary compound up at Jehol in the evening, I thought of these things and looked into the eyes that looked into mine, the kind, brown eyes, and I wondered did she remember, did she think of them, too. I looked again, and I knew she remembered, that ever with her was the thought how cut off they were from the rest of the world, and I read there, though she never murmured, fear. For Jehol has its traditions of sacrifice and martyrdom too. Only six miles away at a village on the Lanho, in the year of the Boxer trouble, they had slowly buried the Catholic priest alive. All the long hot summer's day they had kept him tied to a post, slowly, to prolong his agony, heaping up the earth around him. The day was hot, and he begged for water as the long, weary, hopeless hours dragged themselves away. And some of them had loved him.
“You might,” said a man looking on, “give him a drink, even if you do kill him.”
And they turned on him even as men might have done in the days of the Inquisition:
“If you say any more, we will bury you beside him.”
And so he died a cruel death, a martyr, for there was none to help, and when the Western nations exacted retribution, they made the people put up a cross, the symbol of his faith, over the grave. And then, because they had been forced to do it, every villager who passed that monument to show his contempt for the foreigner and all his works cast a stone, till now shape and inscription have both gone, and the passer-by cannot tell what is that rough rock, jagged and unshapely.
Yet here among these selfsame people, four and a half days' hard journey from Peking, far beyond all hope of help from the foreign soldiery, dwell these Christian missionaries. “To the Greeks, foolishness.” But could they better demonstrate the strength of their faith?