Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 6

That day bred new faith into my soul!

I have told this story of the naked Negrito a hundred times since that eventful day and it kindles new flames of faith in human hearts every time it is repeated! Mr. Edmund Vance Cooke, the poet, heard it in Cleveland where I spoke in a Chautauqua programme and he said to me several months later in my home at Detroit, Michigan, "That was the most thrilling story of the Divine spark in a savage soul that I have ever heard! It gave me new faith in G.o.d and in humanity!"

These, and a thousand other Flashlights of Faith come flashing out of that Far Eastern background; the sublime faith of thousands of college men and women who are giving their lives because they believe that savages and barbarians, such as I have described in this Negrito; Do have that spark of the Divine in their souls; faith that Christian civilization, and Christian education; and a Christian G.o.d, may awaken that spark.

And, indeed many a proof do they have of this miracle! Only the other day from an American School, a girl from darkest Africa graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa honor scholar. Bishop William A. Taylor picked up this girl as a naked child in the jungles of Africa less than a quarter of a century ago!

CHAPTER IV

FLASH-LIGHTS OF FEAR

Quick, short, sharp signals shot down the speaking tube from the bridge.

The Chief Engineer of the _Santa Cruz_ yelled across the boiler room.

The bell rang for reverse and the entire ship shivered.

A woman on deck screamed, and there was a rush to the railings, for the old boat had been slowly making its way up the winding, treacherous Saigon River out of the China Sea into French Indo-China.

"Those d.a.m.ned c.h.i.n.ks again, trying to escape the Devil!"

"What's the matter, Pop?" some one asked the captain.

"That sampan full of c.h.i.n.ks was trying to get away from the River Devil, so they shot across our bow to fool him and we nearly ran them down."

"Do they often indulge in that little friendly game with the Devil?" I asked him, smiling at his seriousness.

"Every time we enter one of these rivers they do it. I killed six of them going up the river at Shanghai a year ago. It gives me the creeps every time I see them shoot across our bow. A ship like this will cut 'em in two like a knife!"

We looked over the green railing of the _Santa Cruz_. The big ship had almost come to a stop for the engines were still in reverse and the shallow river mud was churned up until the otherwise clear water looked like a muddy pond. The little sampan, full of grinning, naked Chinese coolies was fifty feet away from us, and our American sailors were swearing at them in every language they knew and shaking big, brawny, brown fists in their grinning direction.

It was considered a joke by the pa.s.sengers but it was a very real thing to these poor ignorant Chinese. One sees this happen everywhere in the Orient. For the Chinaman starts out every morning in his sampan with the worst kind of a River Devil after him. He must rid himself of that Devil. So, when a big ship comes into sight, he waits until its bow is very close and then darts in front of its pathway. The idea is, that when a sampan full of Chinamen shoots in front of a big ship the Devil is supposed to follow the ship all that day, and let the Chinese junk or sampan alone.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CONFUCIUS' TOMB AT CHUFU, CHINA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: RUIN OF THE MING TOMBS.

The turtle, the symbol of long life, is almost as common in China as the dragon.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRINDING RICE IN CHINA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CAMEL TRAIN FROM THE PLAINS OF MONGOLIA ENTERS PEKING ON A WINTER'S DAY.]

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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers; 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 G.o.d, 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. n.o.body will help him, for if they do, that will incur the wrath of the River G.o.d and the rescuer also will be dragged down to his death.

It is a.s.sumed that if a person falls into the river that is the River G.o.d pulling him in.

The constant fear of this River G.o.d is so deeply intrenched in these poor souls that they take no pleasure on the water and they carry their sense of fear to such an extent that they will not even attempt a rescue of their own babies or loved ones if these happen to fall into the water.

Mr. Hutchinson calls attention to Dr. E. D. Soper's book "The Faiths of Mankind" in which there is an entire chapter called "Where Fear Holds Sway."

"Where is it that fear holds sway?" the reader asks.

The answer is, "In the Orient"!

Yes, the whole Orient is one great gallery of dim, uncertain, weird, mysterious Flash-lights of Fear.

Paul Hutchinson says:

"It is impossible for the Westerner to conceive such an atmosphere until he has lived in it. In fact he may live in it for years and never realize the hold which it has upon his native neighbors. But it is no exaggeration to say that, to the average Chinese, the air is peopled with countless spirits, most of them malignant, all attempting to do him harm. Even a catalogue of the devils, such as have been named by the scholarly Jesuit, Father Dore, is too long for the limits of this article. But there they are, millions of them. They hover around every motion of every waking hour, and they enter the sanct.i.ty of sleep. An intricate system of circ.u.mnavigating them, that makes the streets twist in a fashion to daze Boston's legendary cow and puts walls in front of doors to belie the hospitality within, runs through the social order."

This fear is even expressed in Chinese architecture.

"Why is that strange wall built in front of every household door and even before the Temples?" I asked a friend in China.

"It is put there to fool the devils. They will see that wall and think that there is no door and then will go away and not bother that house any more," I was told.

The very architecture of the Chinese home is to keep the devils out. The strange curves with the graceful upward sweep that makes the roofs so beautiful to American eyes is for the purpose of throwing devils of the air off the track. They will come down from the skies and start down the curve of the roofs but will be turned back into the skies again by the upward slant of the twisted roofs.

It was this same terrible sense of fear which developed the old surgical system that the Koreans and Chinese used before the arrival of the missionaries.

"Do you see these needles?" an American surgeon in Korea asked me one day, as he pointed to about a hundred of the most horrible looking copper and bra.s.s needles lying on a stand.

"Yes," I admitted, mystified.

"I have taken every one of them out of the bodies of human beings on whom I have operated here in the hospital."

"Where did you find them?"