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 damned Chinks again, trying to escape the Devil!"
"What's the matter, Pop?" some one asked the captain.
"That sampan full of Chinks 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 passengers 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.
[Illustration: CONFUCIUS' TOMB AT CHUFU, CHINA.]
[Illustration: RUIN OF THE MING TOMBS.
The turtle, the symbol of long life, is almost as common in China as the
dragon.]
[Illustration: GRINDING RICE IN CHINA.]
[Illustration: 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 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.
The constant fear of this River God 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
sanctity of sleep. An intricate system of circumnavigating
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 brass 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?"
"In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the organs of the body, and
one in the heart of a man who came to me because he couldn't breathe
very well."
"No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I don't think I could myself if
I had a needle in my blood-pump!" I said with a smile.
"These fancy needles that the old Korean doctors thought a good deal of
they put a handle on," he continued.
"What was that for?"
"So they wouldn't lose their needles in a body. The other, or common
needles, they just stuck into the body wherever the wound or sore place
was and left them there."
"And what, may I ask, was the idea of this playful Korean surgery! Was
it something like our 'button, button, whose got the button?'"
"No, the idea was that there were devils in the wound. If it was a
swelling there was a devil in that swelling. If it was typhoid fever,
and there was pain in the bowels, there was a devil in the inward parts
affected, and so, after carefully sterilizing the needle by running it
through his long, black, greasy hair, the native doctor would run it
into the affected part of the body to kill the devil or let it escape
from the body."
"The old idea of a fear religion, a fear social life, a fear family life
and a fear surgery prevails in Korea as it does in China?" I said by way
of a question.
"It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me it is the most awful thing
about working out here. The awful sense of constant fear that is on the
people always and everywhere."
Pounded-up claws of a tiger; the red horn of a deer; pulverized fish
bones; roots of trees, pigs' eyes; and a thousand poisons and
fear-remedies make up the medical history of the Oriental doctor.
"Why do they kill girl babies?"
"Fear!"
"Fear of what?"
"Fear of devils! The devils will be displeased if a girl baby is born.
Therefore kill the baby.
"Throw the babies out on the ground in the graveyards. Let the dogs eat
the babies."
I heard the dogs howling in a cemetery one night about two o'clock in
the morning as I was coming through the thousands of little conical
mounds, with here and there an unburied coffin.
"The dogs are having a baby feast to-night," said an old missionary.
"Why?"
"To appease the devils."
"My God man; you don't mean that they let the dogs eat their babies
because they are afraid of the devil?" I cried.
"I mean just that," replied the missionary.
"Fear! Fear! Fear! Everywhere. Fear by night and fear by day. They never
escape it. It is fear that makes them worship their ancestors. It is
fear that makes them worship idols. It is fear that makes them kill
their girl babies. It is fear that makes them build their little narrow
winding streets, which after a while must become so filthy; fear that if
they do not, the devils will find them; and if they do build their
streets narrow and winding the devils will get lost searching for them.
Oh, God, fear, fear, everywhere! The Orient is full of a terrible and a
constant fear!"
I looked at my friend astonished. He seldom went into such emotional
outbursts. He was judicial, calm, poised; some said, cold. But this
constant sense of fear that was upon the people had finally broken down
his reserve of poise.
"The chimneys are beautiful. See that beautiful upward dip in the
architecture. They are like the roofs," I said.
"But that beautiful, symmetrical development did not come out of a sense
of beauty. It came to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs.
The devils will glide off into space and will never be able to get down
the chimneys." It is so in other Oriental countries.
* * * * *
The same is true in the Philippine Islands. The whole fabric of human
life is permeated with the black thread of fear.
It is true of China and Korea; it is true of Borneo to a marked degree;
and it is true of that great mass of conglomerate humanity that we think
of as India.
These and other flash-lights of fear remain, and shall remain forever in
my mind. But of a fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of millions of
human beings; pictures of fear stand out, blurred here and there; but
clear enough in outline so that I can still see the human faces against
a background of midnight darkness.
Three pictures are clearer than the others. Perhaps it was because the
flash that focused them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Perhaps it
was, that the plate of my soul was more sensitive the days these
impressions were focused. But they stand out; three flash-lights of fear
above all:
One was told me by Zela Wiltsie Worley, a college girl, now a
missionary's wife, who has known what it means to lie on the floor of
her home an entire morning with machine gun bullets crashing through
her home, between the fire of two revolutionary armies.
"I was talking with my Amah--she is the girl who cares for our
children," said Mrs. Worley.
I nodded that I understood that.
"We were bathing the baby--our first wee kiddie--and the Amah seemed to
have an unusual inclination to talk. I had been joking with her and
asked her if she did not want to buy Clara Gene. In fun we started the
characteristic Chinese haggling over price, she trying to 'jew' me up
and I trying to 'jew' her down.
"'Oh!' she said, 'girl babies are very expensive the last two or three
years. Now you have to pay over ten dollars to get a nice fat one!
Before that, if you did not drown them, you had an awfully hard time to
get rid of them. There was a man in our town to whom we took the
babies--the girl babies I mean. He would go up and down the streets with
them and sell them to any one who would give him a chicken and a bowl of
rice in return.'
"'But do they drown the girl babies now?' I asked the Amah.
"'Oh, yes, of course, if you already have one or two boys. You know, in
my village I am the only Christian. My own family and the rest of the
village worship idols. They are afraid of their gods. They do not know
any better. Why my sister almost drowned my second little boy by
mistake. He had just arrived and she thought that he was a girl, and had
already stuck his head down in a pail of water when I rescued him.'
"'But who usually kills the girl babies?' I asked. 'Surely not the
mother?'
"'Yes, she does. She is so afraid when she finds it is only a girl,
afraid that the gods will be angry because she has brought another girl
into the world, that she kills it!'
"'Do they bury it then?'
"'Sometimes they wrap it up, and throw it under a pile of rubbish. You
know, we do not have coffins made for any of our babies who die before
they have had their first teeth! I have seen so many babies drowned,
Mrs. Worley. I never did like it. They cry so!'
"Then I inquired of our Chinese teacher's wife if she knew of girl baby
killing still going on in China.
"'Just last week,' this teacher's wife said in answer to my inquiry,
'the woman next door went back to her village two miles from here and
she saw her own sister drown a baby while she was there.'
"I asked an English missionary if she knew that this fearful custom was
still prevalent over most of China with its more than four hundred
million souls.
"She told me that it was the custom in Ning-daik for the women just to
throw the girl babies under their beds, and they would 'be gone in a day
or two.'
"And it is all because of their awful fear that the gods will be
displeased if they give birth to a girl baby!"
The second outstanding flash-light of fear comes from Java.
In the chapter on Physical Flash-lights I have described the old volcano
of Bromo. It is a terrible thing to look into. Great fissures in the
earth, belch thunder, sulphur, fire, and lava. Great rocks as large as
wagons shoot into the air to the rim of the two hundred-foot crater, and
then drop back with a crash.
For centuries, and even in these days, clandestinely; I am told by men
whom I trust; the most beautiful maiden of a certain tribe among the
Javanese; and some of the most beautiful women I saw in the Orient were
those soft-skinned, soft-voiced, easy-moving, graceful-limbed,
swaying-bodied; brown skinned women of Java; she, the fairest of the
tribe is taken; and with her the strongest limbed youth; he of the
fibered muscles; he of the iron biceps; he of the clean skin; and the
two of them are tossed into the belching fiery crater of old Bromo.
"Why?" I asked.
"They think that in that way, they may propitiate the gods of the
volcano. Their hearts are constantly filled with fear lest the gods of
the volcano become angry and destroy them," said the missionary.
Then he told me of a trip that they made a year before to the top of one
of the most inaccessible volcanoes which was then in constant eruption.
"We had a hard time getting native guides. Finally we succeeded. We had
to travel fifty miles before we reached the mountain. Then we climbed
five miles up its steep side, cutting our own trail as we made our way
through the tropical jungle. At last we reached the timber. But before
we entered the forest one of the guides came to me and, with the most
pitiable and trembling fear in his voice and face, begged us white
people not to say anything disrespectful of the mountain; not to joke
and laugh, and not to sing; for that would make the mountain angry, and
we would all be killed.
"I saw that he was in deadly earnest, and, while I wanted to laugh I
looked as solemn as I could, for there was such terror in his face, I
knew that if I laughed he would turn and run back to civilization.
"An hour later we reached the timber line. Before we entered it the
first boy fell flat on his face and prayed to the god of the mountain
asking that god not to hurt them. Then the next boy did likewise; then
the third and the fourth and the fifth!
"Their faces were almost white with fear when we missionaries did not
pray. It filled them with terror!"
* * * * *
And the last Flash-light of Fear is that of the baby in Medan. The
Priest lived across the way in a temple.
The baby was sick with whooping-cough. It was the usual, simple case of
baby sickness that American babies all have, and which is not taken
seriously here by either doctor or mother.
The mother took the baby to the priest.
The priest took a red hot iron; laid the baby on the church altar and
ran the iron across its neck, and then across its breast and then across
its little stomach. Then he laid it on the front steps of the temple.
The baby died after a few hours spent in terrible pain.
Hate the Priest?
No!
Despise the mother?
No!
Pity them!
The priest was honest and the mother was honest. They were doing the
best thing for the baby that either of them knew. They knew that the
baby had a devil in its little body and they were merely trying to drive
that devil out of its body.
Fear! Fear! Fear! Fear of devils in the home, lurking in the shadows of
night and in the light of day; lurking in the bodies of babies; devils
everywhere--always.
These are the Flash-lights of Fear!
And like unto them are the pictures of Frightfulness which I have set
down in the next chapter.