Notable Women of Modern China Part 10

When the Manchu governor of Nanchang was captured he was taken to Kiukiang, where, in chagrin at his imprisonment, he attempted suicide. Deserted by his servants and soldiers, he would have died alone and uncared for had it not been for Dr. Stone, for no one else dared to go near him. Dr. Stone and two of her nurses cared for him until the death which they could not prevent, but which they made far easier than it would otherwise have been.

It was this same governor who, but a few months before, had refused Dr.

Stone the rights of Chinese citizens.h.i.+p because, in purchasing land for a men's hospital at Kiukiang, she was buying property for foreigners.

When the leaders of the revolutionary party learned that their prisoner had committed suicide they were greatly disturbed. None of them dared to carry the news to General Ma, lest, in accordance with an old Oriental custom, he should punish the bearer of ill tidings. In their perplexity they went to Dr. Stone and asked her to take the news to the general.

Accordingly the little doctor, accompanied only by one of her nurses, went to the general's headquarters to break the news to him. It is significant, not only of the universal respect accorded the doctor, but also of the new position accorded woman in China, that these women, who ventured unattended into a soldiers' camp, were received with every courtesy. General Ma asked the doctor many questions about her work, and at the close of their interview exclaimed, "When things are settled once more, I intend to find support for such a work; the Chinese ought to help it."

Because of the disturbances caused by the Revolution, many students in the Kiukiang schools returned to their homes. The family of one young woman insisted that she make use of this enforced vacation to become married to the young Chinese to whom she had long been engaged. The marriage was unwelcome to her, for she was a Christian and the man was not, but as she was the only Christian in her family she received no sympathy from them, and the wedding was set for Christmas day. The parents, however, yielded to their daughter's earnest desire for a Christian ceremony, and her brother was dispatched to Kiukiang to seek Dr. Stone, who had been eminently successful in all kinds of operations and might surely be relied upon to tie a satisfactory marriage knot. Dr. Stone accordingly left all her Christmas engagements, and accompanied by a Chinese pastor and one of her nurses, set out, through a heavy snow storm, for the girl's home. When the wedding guests were all a.s.sembled, Dr. Stone said that she would like to say a few words before the ceremony took place, and for an hour and a half she told her hearers of the Christian good tidings. The result was that when the wedding was over the mother and father of the bride brought their idols to her, and allowed their daughter to apply the match to them, for both had determined to become Christians. The father said that he wished other people to hear the good things Dr. Stone had told them, and would give the land for a Christian school. The bridegroom volunteered to do the carpenter work which would be necessary before a school could be opened, and now the young wife is teaching a group of children who have entered this new Christian school, and in the new home husband and wife daily unite in morning prayers.

After the Revolution was practically over, but conditions were still so unsettled as to make it unwise to reopen the hospital, Dr. Stone and several of her nurses made a trip to a number of towns in the region around Kiukiang. In a recent letter Dr. Stone tells of being given a piece of land by the influential people in one of these towns, with the earnest entreaty that she leave a nurse there to carry on a permanent medical work. She could make them no definite promise, but is hoping that friends in America will make it financially possible to support a nurse and dispensary where they are so greatly needed.

Truly the Chinese women are blessed in having so perfect an embodiment of the ideal woman of the great new China in this una.s.suming physician, whom a friend who has known her from babyhood declares to have the most perfect Christian character of any one she knows. After his visit in Kiukiang, Dr.

Perkins exclaimed: "Such a wonderful woman as Dr. Mary Stone is! I do not know of any good quality she does not possess"; and one who has had an intimate acquaintance with the college women of America says: "What a marvel Dr. Stone is! To me she is unexcelled in charm, in singleness of purpose, and all-round efficiency, by any other woman I have ever known."

YU KULIANG

[Ill.u.s.tration: Yu Kuliang]

YU KULIANG

The same year that little Mary Stone first saw the light, on almost the same day, in another part of the same city, another little girl was born, a member of the same proud old family whose line runs back so many years into Chinese antiquity. Unlike Mary Stone, she was not born into a Christian home, but it was a home where the parents truly loved each other, and one in which she might have spent a very happy childhood, had not the young father died while she was still a baby.

The mother, broken-hearted over her husband's death, decided to become a Taoist nun and devote the remainder of her life to the search for truth.

With her baby she shut herself up in a little hut outside of the city, seeing no one, and giving her whole time to the care of the child and her efforts to find truth. The members of her family, which is one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic in Kiukiang, were greatly pleased with what they considered an eminently virtuous resolve for a young widow to make, and applied to the Emperor for his approval of the course she had decided to follow. This being heartily given, they built a very comfortable home for her on the outskirts of Kiukiang. The building was christened Purity Hall, and over its gateway were placed large placards announcing the imperial sanction of the life which the young widow had chosen for herself and her child.

Here the little girl grew to womanhood, knowing no companions.h.i.+p except that of her mother and her teachers. Her mother employed the best possible Chinese teachers for her, and she early learned to read the books of the three religions of China, that she might join her mother in her pursuit of truth. She seldom left the house, and no one but her teachers ever entered it, but day after day she pored over the books on Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism until she had read them all. She, too, became a Taoist nun, but continued in the wors.h.i.+p and study of Buddhism and Confucianism also, determined to find the _true_ religion.

She even surpa.s.sed her mother in the ardour of her search for truth, for she spent twelve entire years, in periods of three years each, in one room of the house, living in the most absolute seclusion, not seeing her mother, speaking to no one, and hearing no voice, for three years at a time. After such a vigil she came out into the rest of the house for a year, then went back for another three years of solitude. In one corner of this room were the shrine and the altar before which Yu Kuliang knelt hour after hour during the years of her long vigil, and the idols, large and small, of wood and stone, which were her only companions. She always kept three sticks of incense burning before the shrine, one for each religion, that she might be sure not to make a mistake. In the ardour of her devotion she even made offerings of pieces of her own flesh to the idols. Her whole body, even her face, was covered with the ugly round scars caused by this self-mutilation.

When Yu Kuliang was a woman of thirty-two she learned that the Stones were her cousins, and of her own accord went to call on them. Thereafter the doors of "Purity Hall," so long fast closed to all, were thrown open to the Stone family. Yu Kuliang and her cousin Dr. Mary Stone, born at almost the same time, living, and having always lived, lives as totally different as two lives could be, became fast friends. To Dr. Stone, Yu Kuliang frankly confessed that an entire life spent in seeking truth had not brought her success. She was very willing to listen to all that Dr. Stone had to tell her of the truth which she had found, and finally even succeeded in summoning up sufficient courage to attend the Sunday morning church service. Her years of seclusion had made her so timid, and so afraid of mingling among people, however, that the first time she came to the church she disguised herself in the garb of a Chinese man. Dr. Stone gave her a Bible and she began the study of it at once, with the same earnestness and determination to find truth that she had shown in her study of the books of the Chinese religion.

After she had once gained courage to attend the church service she came frequently, no longer in man's clothes, nor in the coa.r.s.e, grey cotton costume of the Taoist nun, which she discarded soon after knowing Dr.

Stone, but in the ordinary dress of the Chinese woman. She became a frequent visitor to the hospital, too, where she loved to follow Dr. Stone from ward to ward, or to sit beside her in the dispensary as she cared for the suffering women and children who flocked there daily.

Finally Dr. Stone invited her to come to her for a week's visit, hardly daring to hope that she would do so; for she had never, since entering "Purity Hall" as a baby, spent a night outside of it. But she consented, and gladly drank in all that Dr. Stone and the doctor's mother told her of the truth which she had so long sought. One day soon after she had gone home, when Dr. Stone was calling on her and her mother, the mother drew Dr.

Stone aside and said, "Since my daughter came back from your house she hasn't been upstairs to see the idols once." After years of ceaseless devotion to them, Yu Kuliang had forsaken her idols, and was turning toward the living G.o.d. Soon afterward, when it was necessary for Dr. Stone to go to America for an operation, and for Miss Hughes, who was in charge of the Bible Woman's Training School, to accompany her, Yu Kuliang came and asked that she might enter the school when Miss Hughes returned from America. But when Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes returned to China, they found Yu Kuliang suffering from tuberculosis. The long years of self-inflicted imprisonment had left her with no vitality to resist, and the disease was making rapid progress.

Soon after the doctor's return, Yu Kuliang's mother went away for a visit of some days. One afternoon during her absence, when Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes were calling on Yu Kuliang, she told them that she was studying the Bible, and trying to pray, and added: "I never go near the idols any more.

They are all upstairs in my old cell." Dr. Stone at once said: "If you no longer believe in the idols, get rid of them. Give them to us." Yu Kuliang a.s.sented immediately, saying, "Take them if you want to," and went upstairs with Dr. Stone to get them. They brought down a Buddha and a G.o.ddess of mercy, which, after a few moments of further talk and prayer, Dr. Stone and Miss Hughes took away with them, Yu Kuliang watching them without a murmur.

The next day Dr. Stone and her mother went to see Yu Kuliang again, and with her consent and approval chopped to pieces a huge wooden idol, which was too large to carry away. When they were wondering what they should do with the stump of the body, Yu Kuliang exclaimed, "Throw the horrid thing into the ditch!" Thus pa.s.sed out of her life the idols to which she had prayed for hours at a time, before which she had burned numberless sticks of incense, beside which she had lived and slept, and which she had made her most constant companions all the years of her life. The old temple bell, which had for years been used to call the G.o.ds from sleep, was given to Dr. Stone on the same day.

But when Yu Kuliang's mother returned she was furiously angry--not at the daughter to whom she was devoted, but at those who had turned her away from her idols. Dr. Stone took the old woman's hands in hers and pleaded with her: "You know your daughter does not believe in idols, you know the misery of her life, you know how she longs for peace; and as long as you harbour the idols in your home, Jesus cannot come into her heart and dwell there."

The old woman at once broke out, in the tones of one taking the part of an injured friend, "But if your G.o.d is such a mighty one, and has the tens of thousands of followers you tell us He has, why should He be jealous of our poor little idols and those who wors.h.i.+p them?"

Dr. Stone did not interrupt the tirade which was now poured forth, but picked up a piece of wood and a pebble from the floor, and when the old woman waited for her to answer, quietly replied to the pebble and bit of wood in her hand. Finally the woman said, "Why don't you answer me? You have come to see me, and perhaps I have been rude, but you are my relative and I want to be friends with you." Still Dr. Stone did not answer, but went on talking to the stone and wood, until the old woman lost patience and exclaimed, "What nonsense is this!"

Then Dr. Stone put her arm around her and answered, "If you think it is nonsense for me to talk to the stone and wood in your house, instead of giving you attention, how do you think the Heavenly Father feels,--the one who created you, the one who is your Father--when you satisfy yourself with images of wood and stone instead of giving that love and devotion to Him?"

Before Dr. Stone left the young women knelt in prayer, but the mother would not join them.

Later, with her mother's consent, Yu Kuliang went to the hospital, and there spent four of the ten last days of her life, in the companions.h.i.+p of her cousin. Dr. Stone gave her every minute that could be spared from her hospital duties, telling her of the glad new life which she was soon to enter, and praying with her. Many times Yu Kuliang tried to leave the bed to kneel with Dr. Stone, but the doctor explained to her that her prayers were just as acceptable where she was, and that she was too weak to kneel.

"Those four days in the hospital with cousin were the happiest in my life,"

she told her mother when she returned to her home.

When she knew that she could not get well she insisted, weak as she was, upon being dressed and having her photograph taken, for all the photographs which she had had before were in the dress of the Taoist nun, and she wanted to have one taken after she had become a Christian.

Just before her death she said to her mother, "Mother, there is nothing in this life of ours, nothing! We were all wrong. I'm so glad it is over and now I am not at all afraid, for I am going to that beautiful place." And then, her lifelong quest at length crowned with success, she went to behold the face of Him who is the Truth.

ANNA STONE

I. EAGER FOR EDUCATION

II. AMONG HER OWN PEOPLE

III. THE POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE

[Ill.u.s.tration: Anna Stone]

ANNA STONE

I

EAGER FOR EDUCATION

"G.o.d knew where to send girls; He knew who would be good to them," Mrs.

Stone a.s.sured the neighbours who had come to condole with her on the birth of a second daughter, and to remind her that "ten queenly daughters are not worth as much as one son with a limp." Years before, when the baby's father, one of the literati, had lost all his property in the Tai Ping Rebellion, he had adopted the profession of teaching Chinese to the missionaries, as the only dignified means by which one of his rank and learning could earn a living. While he taught them Chinese characters, they taught him about Christianity, and it was not long before he was in charge of a Christian chapel in Kiukiang. So when this little daughter was born, she was given the good old Bible name of Anna, and great plans were laid for her future. While she was still a tiny baby her mother carried her to the missionary in charge of the girls' boarding school, one of those to whom her father had taught the Chinese language years before, and said to her, "As soon as this baby is old enough, I want you to take her and train her for Christian work."

If she was to fulfil her mother's ambition for her Anna must of course receive an education, although a girl who could read or write even the simplest sentence was then almost unknown in China. But Mrs. Stone knew well that the more education Anna had, the more efficient a worker she would be. She herself had never been taught at all, and after she had become a Christian and was eager to tell other women of the good news which she had learned, she had found herself sadly hampered because she could not read the Bible. It was not so difficult when her husband was at home to read it for her; but while he was away on his preaching tours, she had lost many opportunities of teaching Christianity to the women who came to see her, because of her inability to read the Book which told of the great new truth she had learned. So, busy as she was with her babies and her household cares, she determined to learn to read, and asked her husband to teach her.

Pastor Stone, however, had still something to learn. He did not believe that it was possible for the feminine mind, especially that of a woman grown, to learn the difficult Chinese characters; and he told his wife that, in his opinion, it was not worth while for her to attempt it. If Mother Stone was discouraged she did not show it. Every night after the rest of the family were asleep she set a candle beside her bed and studied characters diligently. Whenever Pastor Stone woke up for a moment, or turned over in bed, he would receive a gentle nudge and Mother Stone would delightedly exclaim, "Oh, father, won't you please tell me what this character is?" He soon decided to teach her in orthodox fas.h.i.+on, and she proved to be such an apt pupil that it was not long before she was in charge of a little day school for girls.

Anna received much of her early education from her mother, and for a time she and her older sister Mary went to school with their brother. Girls at school were decidedly a novelty, and the visiting mandarin opened his eyes in amazement. "Can _girls_ learn anything?" he demanded of the teacher, who was forced to admit that they learned as fast as the boys, and sometimes a little faster. When a little older, Anna became a member of the Kiukiang Boarding School for girls, where she proved to be a diligent and quick pupil. During this time her sister Mary went to America to take her medical course, and down in her heart Anna cherished a secret hope that when she had completed her high school work she, too, might go to that wonderful Christian country from which her missionary teachers had come and in which her sister was receiving the training which would fit her for such large service among her countrywomen. She said very little about this hope to any one, but she and her friend I-lien Tang, who was also eager to go to America, determined to pray about it, and to study so faithfully that if the way should ever open for them to go, they would be ready. Accordingly they completed the high school course in Chinese, and studied English and Latin in addition.