Part 12 (1/2)
For a time it seemed as if her desire were to be granted, for when autumn came she was able to open the Women's School at the usual time, and to teach in it each morning. By keeping the afternoons free for rest she gained so much that she could write: ”I feel very grateful for my health. I am up every day for my work. It is a busy life, but a very happy one.” Dr.
Stone had decided in the autumn that unless Anna gained a great deal within the next few weeks she would send her to the mountains for the winter, in the hope that the dry air would help her. But, as she said, ”Anna hates to hear us talk about it because she does not want to leave her pet work.” And Anna soon seemed so much stronger that the doctor did not insist on her going.
Anna wrote happily of the Christmas exercises in the school. ”The women for the first time attempted to have a public programme for the happy season.
They had a dialogue, three new songs, and acted out shepherds in the night watch and Herod in his trouble. Then they had a tree on which were little fancy trinkets which the women made for their friends. They had a joyous time because they worked for it.” She carried the work until the Chinese New Year vacation, which began about the middle of January, and then dismissed the school for the vacation period, full of hopes and plans for the new term, for which she felt that the month's rest would prepare her.
Special services were held in the church during the New Year vacation and Anna saved her strength that she might sing at the evening meetings. She herself led the closing service. One who was there says, ”The native church will not quickly forget her clear and beautiful testimonies.”
But her strength was not equal even to these tasks. Early in February she had a severe hemorrhage from her lungs, from which it seemed as if she could not rally. She felt this herself and said to Dr. Stone, with a brave smile, ”Sister, I am going. This is in answer to prayer, for I do not want to linger on and endanger all of your lives.” This attack was followed by pleurisy, and for ten days of severe suffering her life hung by a very slender thread. A fellow-worker wrote at this time: ”She is bright and happy, although fully expecting to go. She has been so enthusiastic in her work, and always so cheerful, that she has often gone beyond her strength.
I think that she has been failing more than we who daily watch her have realized. We feel that we cannot let her go, but it is not for us to say.
Since she would rather go to G.o.d than stay and not be able to carry on her work, we can only pray 'The will of G.o.d be done.'”
Once more, however, she showed the elasticity which had made it so hard for her friends to realize the true state of her health, and for a few weeks seemed to improve. As life returned she began to hope that she might again be able to take up her work, and for a time the eagerness to work was so strong that she dreaded the thought of death. As the days pa.s.sed and strength did not come, she was troubled to understand why, when the need was so great and the workers so few, she who so longed to work, should not be permitted to do so. She said to Dr. Stone one day: ”Sister, I have just prepared myself to work, so much has been spent on me that I want to live at least fifteen years to pa.s.s on some of my blessings to others. I am so young, and our home life has been just beautiful. I am not anxious to give it up so soon. I have great hopes of the Training School. I love the women. I want to take a whole cla.s.s through a course of training and then leave them with my work. I want to see them well established in their work, and a new school building put up well worthy of the name. Above all I want to see our native church thoroughly roused by the Holy Spirit, and a self-supporting church started.”
One of the missionaries wrote afterward: ”I wish you might have known what a comfort Dr. Stone was to her through all those dark hours, carrying her own burden constantly in her heart and yet bravely helping Anna to bear hers. And Anna on her side was just as brave, for she suffered intense pain through her illness, but constantly fought down every expression of it.”
Anna's lifelong love for the will of G.o.d was so strong that she could not fail to love it to the end, and the struggle was soon succeeded by complete victory and peace. Her sister wrote Mrs. Joyce after she had gone: ”She did not know why, when so much had been done for her and she was so willing to do any service unto the Lord, she should not be spared, and given a healthy body for the work that seemed to be so much in need of workers. But she said she was willing to go if it was the Lord's will, and she wanted people to know that she loved to obey G.o.d mare than she desired her own life....
She said she was perfectly willing to go, only she had wanted to work a little longer.”
Her brief struggle pa.s.sed, her thought was all for others. She often spoke of the women for whom she had been working, and begged her sister to look after them and keep them from going back to the old ways; and in delirium she pleaded with one and another of them. She sent messages of love to those who were not with her, some of them being on the other side of the ocean, and sought to lighten the grief of those around her who so longed to keep her with them. ”Do not grieve for me,” she comforted her sister.
”Think of me as you used to think of me when I was in America, only I shall be in a more beautiful place.” Three days before her death she gave explicit directions about her funeral, wis.h.i.+ng that everything in the Chinese funeral rites which savoured at all of non-Christian religions might be eliminated, that in her death, as in her life, she might witness clearly and unmistakably to her loyalty to Christ.
When the last call finally came, on the sixteenth of March, it found her ready and glad to respond. She told her sister that she had heard the beautiful music and seen the great light and wanted to go. ”That evening,”
reads a letter from one of her co-workers, ”we missionaries all gathered in the reception hall of their little house, together with her relatives and more intimate friends. It was one of the most touching scenes I have ever witnessed, for we were all drawn together by the bond of grief over the loss of one we loved.”
Although, in accordance with Anna's wishes, her funeral was conducted with the utmost simplicity, the funeral procession caused universal comment. One of the missionaries describes the scene: ”As the procession of almost forty chairs pa.s.sed down the street all stopped to watch it pa.s.s, and despite the unrest due to the recent riots at Nanchang, we heard nothing but kindly remarks. The fact that foreigners were following one of their own people to the grave, paying the Chinese girl the honour they would have shown to a great man among themselves, seemed to impress the Chinese in a peculiar way.”
Another writes: ”During the day the neighbours, Christian and non-Christian alike, came to pay their respects.... A very large company of people attended the funeral, including a number of missionaries of other denominations. There was a procession of forty sedan chairs to the Christian cemetery, which is about two miles beyond the East Gate. For the half mile from the home to the city gate both sides of the street were lined with people, who stood quietly and respectfully while we pa.s.sed. The absence of the numerous heathen symbols, and of any cover for the casket save the floral tributes, was observed; and the fact that even the foreigners had their chairs draped with white, 'just like us Chinese,' was also noted. An English gentleman from the foreign concession, who was to pay a call on the captain of one of the war vessels the next morning, said, 'I shall tell him that I have witnessed a procession to-day which will do more to bring peace and harmony between the Chinese and foreigners than all the war vessels will do.'”
Measured by years, Anna Stone's life was short. Measured by the time which she was enabled to give to her work after her return to China, her service was brief. Almost all her life had been given to preparation for service, and it may seem as if she had hardly begun her life work when she was bidden to lay it down for the richer service of another life. But if to be is more than to do, and if Anna Stone's life be measured by what it was, rather than by achievements which could be recorded, we must count her years of service to have been many. Through all the years of preparation for her work she was, in fact, serving in the truest sense, through what she was. Bishop Joyce often said that her presence in the home was a benediction. One who had close contact with her work pays the following tribute:
”Hers was a rare character. So simple, unaffected, and tender and yet withal so strong. Like the blameless knight of old, 'her strength was as the strength of ten because her heart was pure.'
Gifted with a winsome personality, and a voice of great sweetness, she literally sang her way into the hearts of all who heard her, while the illumination of her life 'hid with Christ in G.o.d'
particularly impressed those who saw in her a product of the missionary enterprise of our church. All who came within the influence of her radiant presence were the better for it.”