Читать книгу China Hand - John Paton Davies Jr. - Страница 8

Caleb Davies came to the United States from Wales, at the age of 23, in the 1870s. He was a merchant clerk intent on improving his lot in life, which he proceeded to do. Through diligence and frugality he became a shopkeeper— drygoods—in Chicago, until burned out by The Fire. Thereupon he moved to Cleveland, began over again, and married Rebecca French, a devout and sober Quakeress. The rugged little Welshman and the lean, gentle Ohioan, conscious of her 1776 ancestral connections, were bonded together by three consuming interests: “the store” which was their livelihood, their religious beliefs and practices, and their family, eventually embracing five children. The middle of these was John Paton Davies, my father.

Caleb and Rebecca brought up their children in fear-and-love of God, with prayers and scripture readings at the beginning and end of each day. Although Rebecca had joined her husband’s fundamentalist church, the Disciples of Christ, she retained Quaker characteristics. She addressed me as thee. But more, she listened for the still small voice and waited for the spirit to move her. No temporal power had for her an authority equal to that of her conscience: and the same was true of Caleb.

By 1920 Caleb Davies was well established as a prosperous and respected merchant. Six years later, writing to congratulate me on graduating from high school, he said, “I am moved as I note a clan bearing my father’s good name. I am filled with gratitude and humility for the satisfying way his grandchildren wear it and observing that the great grandchildren thus far give every assurance of keeping the Davies name unsullied . . . The goal worth striving for is just simple goodness without the remotest personal reference. To say of one ‘He is a good man’ or ‘She is a good woman’ is the greatest and best that can be said of any person . . . I wish you much happiness and many friends selected with not too great haste.”

These two positive personalities, Caleb and Rebecca, were a dominant, loving force in the lives of their children. My father was particularly receptive to the Bible study and worship in which he was nurtured. So it was not surprising that, after finishing Oberlin College, he went on to the theological seminary and to a Bible institute in New York. His calling was made clear to him. It was, quite simply, to go overseas where there was the greatest concentration of heathen and save their souls.

In New York, he met Helen MacNeill, a comely, mettlesome young woman from Manitoba. She had left the farm on the Canadian prairies, near Treherne, where her father, Ephraim, toiled against the elements for barely enough to sustain his family. Possessed by an ambition to become an opera star, she traveled by day coach to New York. But her naturally full and vibrant mezzo-soprano was scarcely trained. Postponing, therefore, her debut at the Met, she obtained engagements as a soloist in church choirs. Then, in touring Georgia as one of a revival troupe and released from the formality of conventional church music, she discovered that her singing of gospel hymns could rouse sinners to repent and give themselves to the Lord. She herself underwent what she later described as a religious experience in which she emerged from shallow faith to find Christ.

John Davies, the idealistic yet matter-of-fact young preacher, committed above all else to his evangelical mission, married this emotional, aspiring frontierswoman. The American Baptists sent them as missionaries to China. In 1906 they crossed the Pacific by steamship and then proceeded up the Yangtze, halfway by river steamer, the remainder on a series of junks towed by trackers. It was some 1700 miles from Shanghai to Kiating, their destination, and the journey took about two months. Upon arrival, both of the young missionaries plunged into studying the Chinese language. John also began long hours of church work, guided by a colleague who had been in Kiating several years. John felt fulfilled, for this was what he had dedicated himself to do. Helen was miserable. She found the poverty, filth and disease of this essentially medieval town loathsome; and she felt neglected by her husband.

Two years after their arrival in China I was born. And then a year later my mother was stricken with typhoid, from which she nearly died. In 1911 she bore my brother, Donald. Five days after his birth we boarded a houseboat to flee the revolution that overthrew imperial rule and resulted in the creation of a nominal republic in China.

After a year in the United States, we returned to China and moved to the provincial capital, Chengtu. There my father was in charge of the Baptist evangelical and educational work. We lived some distance from other missionaries, and as travel by sedan chair was slow, we tended to spend most of our time at home among ourselves and with Chinese. Our occasional contacts with other foreigners were for the most part with Canadians, for the Canadian Methodist mission was much the biggest Protestant group in Chengtu. Playing with the Canadian children heightened my nascent nationalism, growing out of a natural feeling of separateness from the Chinese. The small Canadians and I traded puerile boasts over whose country was bigger and better. Being greatly outnumbered, I worked harder than they at these undiplomatic exchanges and became quite a chauvinist.

We also got together at times with an American family. Robert Service was in charge of YMCA activities, and his son, Jack, was my contemporary and good friend. My parents regarded YMCA people as a little “worldly.” They were not, of course, “wicked” like Catholic missionaries, especially the nuns in a nearby convent, who were not only Catholic but also French and therefore probably immoral in addition to being idolatrous. Anyway, we all liked and enjoyed the Services, however deficient they might have been in sanctity.

Mrs. Service taught Jack and his brothers with correspondence courses sent out by the Calvert School in Baltimore. My mother was impressed by the curriculum and subscribed to a Calvert education for Don and me. This, at the age of nine or ten, was my first formal schooling. The arrival of the textbooks, after months in transit, was a great event. After the limp Chinese books that I knew, how elegant the American ones looked in their crisp, hardback covers, how thick and sleek the paper, and how exciting the pictures and maps.

Secular education, however, was not in my parents’ eyes as important as Donald’s and my religious education. This took the form of selected reading and interpretation of the Bible and memorizing certain Psalms and passages from the New Testament. But such indoctrination was not as compelling for me as it had been for my father. I did not then rebel against it intellectually; I was only uninterested and unmoved. When I reached 12 and we were at Oberlin, Ohio on furlough, my parents made it clear that, having attained the age of reason and therefore being competent to make a conscious, rational choice, I should declare my decision to be a Christian and be baptized. Because they were Baptists my parents considered sprinkling of infants, practiced by such as Episcopalians, to be at best an evasion of Jesus’ injunction on baptism. For me it was to be total immersion, and before the whole congregation of the church.

Although I felt no elation over the decision confronting me, it was unthinkable that I should decline to go through with what was so earnestly expected of me. Yet I had no sense of original or even more recent sin needing to be washed away. I also cringed at the prospect of appearing so conspicuously before a host of strangers, proclaiming a belief in saving grace, descending into the baptistery to be submerged backwards by the preacher and then, with all eyes focused on me, sloshing off with my drenched white shirt and pants clinging to me and water from my matted hair dribbling down my face. I went through with the ritual and it was about as I had feared. But it made my parents happy.

Henry L. Mencken and The American Mercury came into my life three or four years after my baptism. We had moved to Shanghai where I was enrolled in the American high school there. Among the periodicals in the library was The American Mercury. The subject matter of the magazine and Mr. Mencken’s use of the English language were quite a departure from what I was accustomed to. Much taken by the debunking, satire, and Mencken’s lambasting prose, I made no attempt to conceal my newly found enthusiasm from my parents. Rather than being angered by my irreverence, they were troubled and hurt. My father, who was fundamentally more a man of reason than of temperament, tried to be open-minded and understand the Menckenian outlook. It strained his Christian charity; clearly he could not approve of it.

The Experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, which I attended in 1927–29, widened my intellectual interests. It was created and presided over by Alexander Meiklejohn as a two-year school, the first year of which was devoted to the study of classic Athenian civilization, and the second to nineteenth-century United States. Meiklejohn was one of those rare human beings—Père Teilhard de Chardin was another—who radiated warmth, composure and wisdom. His approach was Socratic: we students had to come up with our own answers. And we were encouraged to explore and discover ideas without fear of ridicule or censure.

My fellow students were disparate personalities, many of them new kinds of people to me. Victor Wolfson from New York, bursting with creative talent and enthusiasm, produced Electra in the Agricultural School’s cattle-show pavilion, a production in which I unpersuasively acted the role of Orestes. Then there was Carroll Blair, a gnarled and bitter little native of Wisconsin who later became a Communist Party functionary. Sidney Hertzberg from New York was a Norman Thomas socialist, deliberate, orderly and temperate. There was also the fellow from one of the more prestigious military academies for boys who had done everything by bugle, could not adjust to the independent study and therefore spent most of his time looking for bridge and poker partners.

What I got out of the two years at the Experimental College was, I suppose, the development of a fairly open and, at the same time, skeptical outlook. Unlike some of my schoolmates, I did not, unhappily, store up a fund of knowledge. But the philosophical and aesthetic values to which I was exposed did make an impression on me. They did not, however, bring me closer to the theological beliefs of my parents.

While at college I wrote to my father suggesting that he read a magazine article extolling the cultivation of beauty as a substitute for religion. He replied:

I suppose it is true that the present student generation does not ascribe as much authority to the Bible and the Church as mine did . . . they are at best but means for bringing us to God. Some people are more loyal to them than to God himself. What is needed is devotion to the Heavenly Father— through the Bible and the Church if possible—but through aesthetics rather than not at all. If you were spurning all thought of God I should feel grieved because it would seem that we were parting company in the most meaningful sphere of life. But as long as you are making an honest earnest search for God, I feel that we are all the more drawn together for that is what I have been doing. Personally, I am convinced that we have revealed to us through Christ and the Bible a definite Plan of Salvation. It is confessedly a straight and narrow way, and the only way . . . I must obey the light I have, and not only walk in this way but also try to induce others to do the same . . . I have a hunch that God will somehow accept many who are not on my particular road. But hunches are not proper criteria, so I must hew to the line, and also remember than I am not to judge others but to bear my testimony by words and by life.

My father was right in assuming that I had not spurned all thought of God. I was open to persuasion, but I did not find his theology persuasive. I did, however, respect his fidelity to belief and conscience.

One morning in June 1928, Alexander Meiklejohn read to us a passage that moved me more than anything else I heard or read at Madison. It was from Epictetus.

This Priscus Helvidius, too saw, and acted accordingly. For when Vespasian had sent to forbid his going to the senate, he answered: “It is in your power to prevent my remaining a senator, but as long as I am one, I must go.”

“Well then, at least be silent there,” said the Emperor.

“Do not ask my opinion,” he replied, “and I will be silent.”

“But I must ask it.”

“And I must speak what appears to me to be right.”

“But if you do, I will put you to death.”

“Did I ever tell you that I was immortal? You will do your part, and I mine. It is yours to kill, and mine to die intrepid; yours to banish, mine to depart untroubled.”

What good then did Priscus do, who was but a single person? Why, what good does the purple do to the garment. What else but to be beautiful in itself, and to give example of beauty to others.