Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  The Walkers had been in Bantang a year when the MacLyons died of typhoid, one after the other, the onset of Mary's illness and Stan's death only three weeks apart. They were buried under matched head-stones which read: gone for the glory of christ.

  Now the late-night meals by wax candle ended. Everyone agreed that it made more sense to eat together at a reasonable hour; and Laura Walker gave up her attempts to redecorate the Mission, as Raymond was blind to her improvements—the improvised curtains she had sewn from Chinese silk, the fresh vases of lilies and Tibetan roses she set out—and Mrs. Chester was wholly uninterested in her suggestions: having lived in this clay house now so very many years, she declared that she saw little reason to change it. During the long voyage to Bantang and the first year in the Mission, Dr. Chester's lectures on Tibetan life and customs had fascinated the Walkers, but after eighteen months, the Walkers noticed that Dr. Chester had begun to repeat himself. More than once he had talked about the particular way in which a single Tibetan woman might be married at once to several brothers, and more than once Mrs. Chester had made the same mild joke, "Dr. Chester, I should certainly not have liked being married to your brothers. That is more than a woman deserves." Laura wondered more than once if she needed to chuckle again. The evenings at the Mission Station grew intolerably long. Dr. Chester for his relaxation read from his pile of musical scores, but when Laura begged him actually to make music, he replied that unless there was a symphony orchestra handy, he was lacking an instrument. Dr. Chester found his own joke intolerably droll. Mrs. Chester was the type of woman who enjoyed novels, which she read slowly and thoughtfully, and then passed on to Laura, who despite her most valiant efforts simply could not see the attraction of the medium: she could never persuade herself that the comings and goings of imaginary characters were worthy of her attention.

  The long evenings were not preceded by thrilling days. The Walkers chafed under the daily routine prescribed by Dr. and Mrs. Chester. It was hardly the high drama of saving souls that they had hoped for. Every morning, Raymond and Laura studied the Chinese language for two hours and the Tibetan for another two. This, they admitted, was a necessary duty, and after two years of study, Dr. Chester decided that both members of the couple were competent to deliver their first sermons. Laura chose to preach on "Sin, Salvation, and God's Love," Raymond on "Christian Prayer and Values." Laura had worked hard all her life, but here in Bantang, domestic affairs occupied far less of her time than she was used to, for the Mission employed a number of Chinese and Tibetan helpers who, having given up their families to gain their souls, needed employment, which the tender-hearted Chesters could not refuse them. This legion of servants occupied themselves with the daily household chores—with the goats (the Mission had a flock of over one hundred) and the chickens, the cooking, the clothes, the cleaning, and drawing fresh water from the well. In the afternoons, Laura accompanied Mrs. Chester on a round of the city's Christian charitable institutions: the small hospital, the orphanage, and the school. At the hospital, Laura sat by the bedside of the sick; at the orphanage, she introduced and led the games of her childhood, touch-tag and hide-and-seek; and at the school, she delivered every day a brief lesson on Christian living. These were assignments that she might have accepted happily were it not for Mrs. Chester's constant stream of advice. Laura was not the type of woman who frequently allowed herself the luxury of harsh thoughts, but she did admit shyly to her husband that when Mrs. Chester was stricken with a mild fever and spent three weeks in bed recuperating, the days had passed more easily.

  One incident in particular set Laura against Mrs. Chester. It was the Walkers' second spring in Bantang, and on a day when the mountain air was remarkably clear and the sky a deep cobalt blue, Mrs. Chester, enchanted by the season, proposed to Laura that in place of their usual rounds, they visit a village some five or six miles from town where an old Christian woman lived, one of the first Chinese converts of the region. They set out in the early morning, but the village proved farther from Bantang than Mrs. Chester had recalled, and the two women did not arrive until well after noon. They took a long tea with the old Christian woman and did not set out on the road back until late afternoon.

  Now, the roads around Bantang were generally safe by daylight but not without danger at night, and the two women walked quickly. They were halfway back to Bantang when they passed a small tribal woman crouched beside the road. The small woman made a cooing sound at them and smiled. Her teeth were stained black with betel nut, and her lips were the color of tar. The woman gestured at Mrs. Chester and Laura. She spoke to them in Chinese with a tribal accent as thick as Laura's midwestern drawl: "The wind has whispered me stories of the white folk in Bantang, but the wind has never told me what you do here."

  Laura was not confident in her Chinese, and she deferred to Mrs. Chester, who explained that she and her husband had come from the white man's land across the endless seas to teach the people about Jesus, His Love, Sin, and Salvation.

  The tribal woman, still squatting by the road, frowned. "Teach me, then," she said. "If you've come this far, I owe you my ears."

  Mrs. Chester looked around. They were on a dark patch of road, and the sun was fast approaching the mountain horizon. There was still another hour's walk to the outskirts of town. Dr. Chester would be anxious. "We don't have the time to teach you just now," she said. "We must teach you another day."

  The woman listened with a cocked head, then spat blood-red betel juice on the side of the road. "Don't tell me you've come all this way to teach me and then say you don't have time," she replied.

  Mrs. Chester and Laura returned home safely that night. Laura recounted the incident to Raymond, and they agreed that Laura should find the tribal woman at once the next morning and explain the Gospel to her. But the next day the road was empty, and Laura couldn't help feeling that a woman of greater faith and integrity than herself would have insisted on teaching the woman by the side of the road, no matter the hour of day or night or the danger.

  For his part, Raymond found himself relegated to a position as Dr. Chester's clerical assistant. Great volumes of mail from well-wishers and the inquisitive arrived by the weekly post for Dr. Chester, alerted to the work by his dispatches in National Geographic, and he would deposit these with Raymond, asking him to draft replies, so that Dr. Chester could continue work on his translation. Raymond prepared responses which ended either, depending on the formality of the communication and the intended audience: "Yours in the Hope of His Coming" (meant for well-wishers, general curious questions and requests, people with whom Dr. Chester did not have a close personal relationship); "Yours in the Service of Christ" (or, alternatively, "Yours in the Joy of His Service," meant for other missionaries and members of the clergy); or simply "Yours in Christ," a salutation which Dr. Chester felt appropriate to use only with the most intimate of his epistolary partners. At the end of the day, Raymond left the letters for Dr. Chester to sign. The Missionary Society required a lengthy written report every three months, and an accounting of the Mission Station's finances, and pounding these out on the Mission's portable typewriter was also made part of Raymond's responsibilities. Raymond was not a good typist. "Accounting is a part of evangelism," Dr. Chester said, seeing Raymond struggle with the books. "We pray for money to continue our work, and our Lord expects us to husband carefully His gifts." When Raymond took Dr. Chester aside after a year in Bantang and explained his desire to engage in a more active evangelism, Dr. Chester proposed that Raymond preach in the afternoons in front of the market. The market in Bantang was not a large one, and very quickly the traders in barley, sheep, yak meat, salt, and tea grew accustomed to the sight in the late afternoons of the lean, handsome American standing on a crate, stammering his way through an incomprehensible speech in poor Tibetan.

  The most frustrating thing for the Walkers about their life in Bantang was that the size of the Christian community there held steady. Those who would be converted in this small city, it seem
ed, had been converted. Later in life, Raymond Walker would say that there was no better preparation for missionary life than to be assigned the task of tilling a stony mission field, but at the time the effort did not amuse him at all—the long wearisome unproductive days in which he wandered the streets of Bantang, cornering everyone who would listen. It bothered Raymond intensely that everywhere around him were souls to be won for Christ and that he did not possess the means to win them. Dr. Chester did not seem to care, or to realize the profound urgency of the moment.

  One night Raymond had a dream. He was in a train station, and enormous queues of Chinamen streamed past him to board an old steam train. Raymond stopped one of them and asked him the destination of the train. The Chinaman, old and wizened, replied that it was the train to Hell. The destination was confirmed by the cry of a huge Negro porter: "Hell Express! All aboard!" Raymond tried to hold the old Chinaman back, but in his dream his limbs lost force and the man slithered easily from Raymond's hand. Raymond grasped at an old woman headed for the platform, and she, too, slipped from his hands and climbed aboard the train, which bulged with humanity, limbs protruding from the windows and doors. Then the terrible thing happened. In the great shuffling crowd, Raymond himself was swept aboard. "This is the train to Hell!" he cried. "Let me down!" But Raymond could not pass through the crowds, and he awoke in a sweat just before the train steamed out of the station.

  The next morning, Raymond told Dr. Chester that he was ready to leave Bantang. He wanted to travel to the faraway tribal villages to spread the Word—the trip he had planned with Stan MacLyon. Dr. Chester, hardly bothering to look up from the page of Tibetan characters he was proofreading, forbade the expedition: with a wave of his soft, pink hand, he explained that the roads and hills were filled with robbers, brigands, and warring factions, and he would not allow the young father to take such risks, not when he was performing valuable service to God in the Mission itself. Something in Dr. Chester's response provoked the younger man, who remembered the way his father had looked past him when he had explained the angelic choir.

  "You forbid me?" His voice was tight, and he plucked at a cuff link to keep his hands from sweeping all of Dr. Chester's papers—his translation of the Bible, his mountain of correspondence, his notes for National Geographic—off his desk.

  "I must," said Dr. Chester, taking off his round spectacles, then wearily rubbing the bridge of his nose. "You leave me no choice. I will not have a widow and orphan here at Bantang station to suit your wandering fancy."

  "You mean that you will not have your correspondence unanswered, that the Gospel might be spread," replied Raymond.

  Raymond stormed out of Dr. Chester's small office and plunged himself into the tumult of the market. That evening the merchants and traders remarked to one another that the white man had been even more agitated than usual.

  For almost a week, Raymond did not bother with his usual duties at the Mission. Dr. Chester's papers lay in a muddle, and the younger missionary, in open defiance, set about putting together a small caravan to tour the neighboring villages. He took his morning tea at the market and spent his days in town. Dr. Chester, for his part, was furious also— furious that the authority he had veritably built with his own hands at the Mission Station was denied. Dr. Chester was not a large man, and he was no longer young, but when angry in his past he had confronted other men larger than himself and frightened them. Now, late at night, Dr. Chester imagined confronting Raymond Walker.

  It was the wives who finally eased the tensions, as so often in these cases. With Thomas so very little, did Raymond really want to leave her just now? Laura asked her husband. Wasn't Dr. Chester himself equally impatient as a young man? Mrs. Chester asked the doctor. Dr. Chester was obviously unsettled by the zeal of a younger man, consoled Laura. Think how difficult it must be to enter the Mission field in the shadow of a giant, soothed Mrs. Chester. Then in the subtle way of wives, each commanded her mate to make peace. One afternoon Dr. Chester found Raymond in the market, and that evening the foursome ate dinner together again. The next day, Raymond returned to the typewriter.

  All winter, a tenuous peace held at the Mission. Raymond did not renew his demands, and Laura held her tongue as Mrs. Chester explained the proper way to fold a sheet or soothe a fevered brow. But the underlying tensions remained: neither Walker admitting it to the other (but both admitting it to their grandchildren many years later, who in turn told me), both Raymond and Laura began to pray for deliverance from the Mission at Bantang. They asked God to allow them to be of greater use to Him and His Kingdom, and God answered their prayers in His terrible ironic fashion.

  Half a year after Raymond Walker and Dr. Chester quarreled, the Grand Tigi of Gartok, the lord of eastern Tibet, invited the Walkers and the Chesters to preach the Word at his court. The Tigi had heard rumors of the fascinating work in which the missionaries were engaged; now he wished to discuss these vital spiritual matters with the foreigners himself.

  Such an invitation was of the most extraordinary and rare nature. Bantang lay on the Tibetan frontier, but the interior of Tibet was a closed nation. The last white man to visit Lhassa had been Dr. Chester, almost ten years earlier, and as far as anyone knew, Laura would be only the second white woman to enter the kingdom at all, following in Mrs. Chester's footsteps. Thomas's visit would be unique. Dr. Chester organized the preparations: the appropriate gifts for the Grand Tigi, the retinue of guards to shepherd the group safely across the border, the hardy ponies, and of course early versions of the Tibetan New Testament to distribute to the curious. (These books had only recently arrived from the printer in Shanghai, and the fortuitous coincidence of their arrival and the invitation to the interior of Tibet, the missionaries agreed, was surely proof of the Lord's desire that His Word be spread.) For several weeks, the Mission was in high excitement as the work approached. But only two days before the party was supposed to set out from Bantang, Dr. Chester received a message by courier: Père Antoine, the Catholic missionary who worked to the southwest, was desperately ill with influenza. Normally this would have been a job for Raymond, as the junior missionary at the station, but Dr. Chester offered in his typical gallant fashion to tend Père Antoine in Raymond's place. Dr. Chester insisted that the Walkers travel on as planned, lest the missionary party, setting out too late in the year, find itself unable to reach Tibet, hidden behind the great wall erected annually by the first of the Himalayan snowfalls.

  Only Mrs. Chester did not support this arrangement.

  "Dr. Chester," she said, "don't you perhaps think that Raymond ought to accompany you on your visit to Père Antoine? The hills, you know …"

  She brought up the subject over the breakfast shared by the four missionaries, and this was her mistake: had she been alone with Dr. Chester, perhaps she might have found a small hole in the iron wall of his pride; in front of Raymond, any admission of weakness was unthinkable. Dr. Chester looked up from his bowl of rice, his round spectacles steamed over. "I do believe, Mrs. Chester, that I will have some of that excellent chutney after all," he said.

  "I'm quite serious, Dr. Chester. I heard just last week from one of the ladies at the—"

  "That chutney, if you please."

  "Dr. Chester!"

  Dr. Chester sat up straight in his chair. He was still in his pale silk dressing gown. "Mrs. Chester," he said finally, "I do believe we must recall that we are here to spread the Gospel. Raymond is not here to keep track of these old bones"—he patted his sternum—"but to make sure that the Word is spread."

  Mrs. Chester knew that there was no appeal to this decision. She shot a distressed glance at the end of the table, where Raymond seemed quite fascinated by the oily swirls of his tea and Laura was much occupied suddenly with feeding Thomas, who was himself quite busy with a piece of toast. The matter was settled. The next morning, with little Thomas holding on tight to the pommel of Raymond's saddle and Laura secure on her mule, the party set out for Tibet as planned.

  N
ow for the first time the Walkers would be alone in the Orient, in Tibet!—that most mysterious of lands, with the opportunity to spread their faith in the manner of their own choosing. From the start it was a journey of miracles. The most dangerous portion of the voyage was certainly the four-day journey from Bantang to the Tibetan border: this was, as Dr. Chester had said, a land of brigands and robbers. Here in this wild mountainous country, the Shang Chen Tibetan tribe fought furious guerrilla battles with the Druwasa; and the Tibetans under the lama Ra Nah fought with the Chinese. Missionaries were generally accorded safe passage through these dangerous internecine skirmishes, but overexcited warriors had been known to attack even women and children. It was Laura who noticed the mysterious retinue of soldiers in white accompanying the Walkers' party, and she pointed them out to her husband, who explained to his wife that these dim shadowy warriors were certainly an angelic host sent by God in answer to their prayers for safe travel. The Walkers crossed the frontier without incident.