It is the pest of an American seaman's life, for even a seaman hates to see a human being drowned.
To an American mind this seems ridiculous. It even seems humorous. I shall never forget how the passengers laughed when the captain told them why he had had to reverse his engines to keep from crushing the frail Chinese sampan. But suddenly the thought came to one of the passengers; that to the poor Chinaman the fear which made him do that foolish thing and the fear which made him take that awful risk was very real.
"Under God, the poor Devils must have an awful life if they have such a fear as that in their souls day and night!" said an Englishman.
"They never start out for a day's work that they are not haunted every minute of that day by a thousand devils, ill-omens, and bad spirits which are constantly hovering about to leap on them and kill them!" said a missionary. "The whole Orient is full of the thought of fear!"
This missionary was right. Paul Hutchinson, Editor of the Chinese Christian Advocate and one of the real literary men of the Americans who are permanent residents of Shanghai, told me of a Chinese boy who was graduating from a Christian College in Nanking. The boy had been for four years under the influence of Americans. He could speak good English. He was about ready to go to America to school when he had completed his work at Nanking.
He, with a younger brother, was at home for the Christmas vacation. On the way back to college the younger brother fell overboard into the river. The older brother was not a coward. Everybody will testify to that. In fact he was unusually courageous. But in spite of the fact that his puny brother was able to swim to the side of the small boat, and in spite of the fact that he begged his older and stronger brother to pull him back into the boat, that older brother refused to do so.
"Why?"
Mr. Hutchinson says that the English teacher heard the tale in terror, but that the brother took it as a matter of course, explaining that the River Devil would most certainly have caught and dragged into the water, any person who should have dared to attempt a rescue of his brother.
It is an established thing in China; that if a native falls into the river, he never gets out unless he pulls himself out. Nobody will help him, for if they do, that will incur the wrath of the River God and the rescuer also will be dragged down to his death.
It is assumed that if a person falls into the river that is the River God pulling him in.