Part 10 (1/2)
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.