And one by one, secretly and unknown to each other, the free people came to her and thanked her gratefully for the state of safety she was bringing about, and charged her to keep a stout heart and to go forward and do away with all the old fashions, the end of which was always death.
XV. THE SWEET AND THE STRONG
Meanwhile the Mission House had evolved into what was in her eyes a thing of beauty. She could at any rate boast that it was the finest dwelling in Okoyong, and it was a happy day when she removed "upstairs." Nor was the house all that was accomplished during these troublous times. Mr. Goldie had made her a gift of a canoe; but without a boathouse it was exposed to rain and ants and thieves, and she planned a shelter at the beach that would do both for it and for herself. Ma Eme brought her people to the spot, the men cut down trees and erected the framework, and the women dug the mud and filled in the walls, and Mr. Ovens made a door and provided a padlock.
Thus, in the course of a short time, she had built a hut; a good house with accommodation for children, servants, and visitors; a dispensary; a church; and a double-roomed boathouse. All the native labour had been given cheerfully and without idea of money, but from time to time she distributed amongst the workers a few gifts from the Mission boxes, or a goat or a bag of rice. In addition to her house at Ekenge she had a room in several of the villages, where she put up on her journeys; and it was characteristic of her that she secured these not for her own convenience but for the sake of the people, in order that they might feel that they were being looked after.
It was, indeed, for the people she lived. Mr. Ovens states that she was at their beck and call day and night; she taught in the schools, preached in the church, and, as he puts it, "washed the wee bairnies herself," and dressed the most loathsome diseases, all with tenderness and gay humour. "I never saw a frown on her face," he says. She was always ready for anything and equal to any emergency. "One morning," he recalls, "she came to me. 'Twins,' she said, 'and we have to go.' When we arrived at the spot we found that the bairns had been murdered by the grandmother, and the mother was lying on the bare ground in a hut some distance away. Miss Slessor sent her a bed and pillow, and told her husband to be kind to her. The man took her back into the house— such a thing had never been known before."
It was at this time that the plump and pretty infant referred to by Miss Kingsley in her Travels in West Africa was saved. The mother died a few days after the birth, and as there was a quarrel between her family and that of the father the child was thrown into the bush by the side of the road leading to the market, and lay there for five days and six nights.
This particular market is held every ninth day, and on the succeeding market-day, some women from the village by the side of Miss Slessor's house happened to pass along the path and heard the child feebly crying: they came into Miss Slessor's yard in the evening, and sat chatting over the day's shopping, and casually mentioned in the way of conversation that they had heard the child crying, and that it was rather remarkable that it should be still alive. Needless to say Miss Slessor was off, and had that waif home. It was truly in an awful state, but just alive. In a marvellous way it had been left by leopards and snakes, with which this bit of forest abounds, and, more marvellous still, the driver ants had not scented it. Other ants had considerably eaten into it one way and another; nose, eyes, etc., were swarming with them and flies; the cartilage of the nose and part of the upper lip had been absolutely eaten into, but in spite of this she is now one of the prettiest black children I have ever seen, which is saying a good deal, for negro children are very pretty with their round faces, their large mouths not yet coarsened by heavy lips, their beautifully-shaped flat little ears, and their immense melancholy deer-like eyes, and above these charms they possess that of being fairly quiet. This child is not an object of terror, like the twin children; it was just thrown away because no one would be bothered to rear it—but when Miss Slessor had had all the trouble of it the natives had no objection to pet and play with it, calling it "the child of wonder," because of its survival. This child was named Mary after the house mother, and completed the number of those who for long constituted the inner circle of the family. The others were Janie, Alice—a rescued twin of "royal" blood, and Annie—the child of the woman who took a native oath to prove that she did not help her husband to eat a stolen dog. These four were to grow up and become a comfort to their white "Mother," and will reappear from time to time in the course of the story. Another helper in the house at this time was Mana, a faithful girl, who had been caught by two men when going home from a spring, and brought to Okoyong and sold to Ma Erne. Other children there were, all with more or less tragic histories, and all were looked after and trained and loved.
But Mary could be as stern and strong as her native granite when combating evil. Mr. Ovens saw her repeatedly thrust brawny negroes away from the drink, taking them round the neck, and throwing them back to the ground. An intoxicated man, carrying a loaded gun, once came to see her. She ordered him to put the weapon in a corner of the verandah. He declined. She went up, wrested the gun from him, placed it in a corner, and defied him to touch it. He went away, and came back every day for a week before she gave it up. Another man came to her for medicine, and after he had described his symptoms she brought a bottle of castor oil and told him to open his mouth. Fearful that it might be some sort of witchcraft, he demurred. "Ma" simply gave him a smart box on the ear and repeated the order, whereupon he meekly took the stuff and went ruefully away. About this time, also, she went and prevented two tribes from fighting: although her heart was beating wildly she stood between them and made each pile their guns on opposite sides of her, until the heaps were five feet high. On another occasion she stopped and impounded a canoe-load of machetes that were going up-river to be used in a war.
Mr. Ovens was struck by her mental power and wide outlook. Despite her incessant preoccupation with matters about her she never ceased the cultivation of intellectual interests. She was a loving student of the Bible, a wide and discriminating reader, and she followed with a brooding mind the development of world affairs throughout the world.
Before his work was finished Mr. Ovens began to suffer from the exposure, and she nursed him day and night through a serious illness. When he returned to Duke Town she missed his cheery company; her isolation and loneliness seemed intensified, and she was only sustained by her faith in the efficacy of prayer and by her communion with the Father, "My one great consolation and rest," she wrote, "is in prayer." So invariably was she comforted: so invariably was she preserved from harm and hurt, that her reliance upon a higher strength became an instinctive habit. It conquered her natural nervousness and apprehension. She had frequently to take journeys through the forest with the leopards swarming around her. "I did not use to believe the story of Daniel in the lions dens" she often said, "until I had to take some of these awful marches, and then I knew it was true, and that it was written for my comfort. Many a time I walked along praying, 'O God of Daniel shut their mouths,' and He did." If she happened to be travelling with bearers or paddlers, she would make them sing and keep them singing; "And, Etubom" (Sir, Chief, or White Man), she would say, when telling her experiences, "ye ken what like their singing is— it would frighten any decent respectable leopard." And yet in some things she was as timid as a child. When travelling in the Mission steam-launch she would bury her head in her hands and cry out in fear if the engine gave a screech or if the vessel bumped on a sandbank. She was in terror all the time she was on board.