Reverend Henry B. Withery, on a morning in late March, came, by springless cart, out of Kansu into T'ainan. A drab little man, with patient fervor in his eyes and a limp (this latter the work of Boxers in 1900). He was bound, on leave, for Shanghai, San Francisco and home; but a night at T'ainan with Griggsby Doane meant, even in the light of hourly nearing America, much. For they had shared rooms at the seminary. They had entered the yielding yet resisting East side by side. Meeting but once or twice a year, even less often, they had felt each other deeply across the purple mountains.
They sat through tiffin with the intent preoccupied workers in the dining-room of the brick house; and Mr Withery's gentle eyes took in rather shrewdly the curious household. It interested him. There were elements that puzzled him; a suggestion of staleness in this face, of nervous overstrain in that; a tension.
The several native workers smiled and talked less, he thought, than on his former visits.
Little Mr. Boatwright—slender, dustily blond, always hitherto burning with the tire of consecration—was continually fumbling with a spoon, or slowly twisting his tumbler, the while moodily studying the table-cloth. And his larger wife seemed heavier in mind as in body.
Mr. Withery found the atmosphere even a little oppressive. He looked up about the comfortable, high ceiled room. Mounted and placed on the walls were a number of interesting specimens of wild fowl. Elmer Boatwright, though no devotee of slaughter or even of sport, had shot and mounted these himself.
Withery asked him now if he had found any interesting birds lately. The reply was little more than monosyllabic; it was almost the reply of a middle-aged man who has lost and forgotten the enthusiasm of youth.
There was talk, of course; the casual surface chatter of folk who are deeply united in work. A new schoolroom was under construction. Jen Ling Pu, a native preacher, was doing well at So T'ung. The new tennis court wasn't, after all, long enough.
During all this, Withery pondered. Griggsby was driving too hard, of course. The strongly ascetic nature of the man seemed to be telling on him; or perhaps it was running out, the fire of it, leaving only the force of will. That happened, of course, now and then, in the case of men gifted with great natural vitality.
Then too, come to reflect on it, the fight had been hard, here in Hansi. Since 1900. Harder, perhaps, than anywhere else except Shantung and Chihli. Harder even than in those more easterly provinces, for they were nearer things. There were human contacts, freshening influences... . The Boxers had dealt heavily with the whites in Hansi. More than a hundred had been slain by fire or sword. Young women—girls like these two or three about the dinner table—had been tortured. Griggsby and his wife and the little girl had missed destruction only through the accident of a journey, in the spring, to Shanghai. And he had returned, dangerously early, to a smoldering ruin and plunged with all the vigor in his unusual body and mind at the task of reconstruction. The work in the province was shorthanded, of course, even yet. It would be so. But Griggsby was building it up. He even had the little so-called college, down the river at Hung Chan, going again, after a fashion. Money was needed, of course. And teachers. And equipment. All that had been discussed during tiffin. It was a rather heroic record. And it had not passed unobserved. At the Missionary Conference, at Shanghai, in 1906, Griggsby's report—carefully phrased, understated throughout, almost colorless—had drawn out unusual applause.
Mrs. Doane's death occurred during the first year of that painful reconstruction. Griggsby's course, after that, from the day of the funeral, in fact, as you looked back over it, recalling this and that apparently trivial incident, was characteristic. The daughter was sent back to the States, for schooling. Griggsby furnished for himself, up in what was little more, really, than the attic of the new mission residence, a bare, severe little suite of bedroom and study. The newly married Boatwrights he installed, as something near master and mistress, on the second floor. The other white workers and teachers filled all but the two guest rooms, and, at times, even these. And then, his little institution organized on a wholly new footing, he had loaded himself sternly with work.