Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  In Nagasaki the young travelers boarded a train. Merchants hawked outside their car, advertising “Bento! Bento!” Ruth and friends opened the window to exchange coins for wooden boxes containing chopsticks, white rice, and Japanese pickles. The moon was round and low like a ripe fruit, its luminance settling over the landscape like pollen. The train lumbered a hundred miles northeast where the Sea of Japan seeped inland to form misty bays flecked with shadowy fishing boats.

  In Moji, boa constrictors coiled around half-naked men, musicians played, and laughing faces wavered in torchlight as the city celebrated its harvest festival. The young Americans boarded a ferry in Shimonoseki and sailed across the Strait of Korea to Pusan, to get on another train, their exotic and uneasy pilgrimage moving on. Muted, straw-roofed Korean villages and jagged mountains streamed past Ruth’s window, and she drew the curtain around her sleeping shelf.

  Each night that fall she covered her head with her pillow because she did not want her two roommates to hear her cry in the Spartan gray brick dormitory that seemed like hell. She wrote her parents three times a week, begging them to let her come home. Her long letters ranged from the pathetic to the desperate, including a six-foot-long Japanese scroll filled with her ornate script and morose pondering. Word of her unhappiness reached the school’s administration. One day she was summoned to the office of headmaster R. O. “Pops” Reiner, who a decade later would be captured by the Japanese, strung up by his thumbs, and given the water treatment.

  Reiner motioned for this rather awkward-looking and shy young lady to be seated. He wanted to know if it was true that she was homesick.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied sincerely. “And I’ve lost weight too.”

  “How much did you weigh when you arrived here?” he asked, studying her thoughtfully.

  “One hundred and thirty-three pounds, sir.”

  “I see,” he said. “And how much do you weigh now?”

  “One hundred and twenty-nine pounds, sir.”

  “I see.” His eyes sparkled behind his glasses, but he was too kind to laugh.

  The unhappy letters home continued, and finally, on October 13, Dr. Bell wrote Mabel Axworthy, the young woman in charge of the primary grades:

  [Ruth’s] letters have not been typical of a normal homesickness as much as a feeling aggravated by introspection and failure to get out with the other children properly…. We feel she has been staying in her room too much; not only has she written these long letters to us, but she has also written long letters to other members of the station. They are really exceptional in their descriptive character, but they take time she should be spending either in study, or in play…. We feel Ruth has a slight tendency to revel in the sad side of things, letting her religion (which is exceedingly real and precious to her) take a slightly morbid turn.

  Ruth’s concept of eternity was real and wonderful, and she tended to let her mind drift that way when she was homesick and tired or surrounded by unpleasantness in general. “Some people,” her father frequently remarked, “are so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good.” One day, Ruth and a friend were ironing, and Ruth exclaimed, “Oh, just think, the end of the world may come soon and then we will be so happy!” The friend, somewhat weary of Ruth’s fantasizing about Heaven, blurted, “Oh, you Bell girls surely are stuck on the end of the world!”

  When Miss Axworthy received Dr. Bell’s letter, she asked Ruth to mother the eighth graders. Soon Ruth was so busy looking after them that she forgot herself. It was a remedy that would become habit, and one she would frequently prescribe to others in the future. Her homesickness subsided and her wish for the end of the world was, once again, tucked back into its mental cupboard. This did not mean that she wanted to stay in school. In December she opened her final offensive by announcing to her father that she had been praying and was convinced that it was God’s will for her to come home.

  “Well,” he replied firmly, “your mother and I have been praying too and that’s not the answer we got.”

  Finally, she surrendered to her fate and found, before long, that she was actually enjoying herself. One year she was elected class president. She became the cartoonist and poet for The Kulsi, the school yearbook. A prankster, she was not above stuffing a pair of hose and placing shoes on the feet, and leaving this hanging out from underneath the dorm mother’s bed. Ruth was known to rub shoe polish on the back of doorknobs and model snakes of clay and coil them in shadowy corners.

  After her junior year, the Bells were furloughed to the United States. They rented a stone house in Montreat, North Carolina, eighteen miles east of Asheville. Rosa, who had contracted tuberculosis the year before and dropped out of Pyeng Yang, began treatments at a nearby sanatorium. She and Ruth finished their senior year of high school at Montreat, graduating in the spring of 1936, and Rosa, the beloved older sister, left for Wheaton College, twenty-five miles west of Chicago. Ruth was barely sixteen when she returned to Korea for the year of study. Her parents believed she was too young for advanced American education.

  5

  CHAPTER

  War

  RUTH AT 17

  I pray constantly that God will help us bear the testimony and witness we should. A faith and confidence exhibited only in times of peace does not amount to much.

  —Nelson Bell, 1937

  Throughout the sweltering summer of 1937, Virginia Bell sewed six hours daily. Stacks of print skirts and dresses grew with the threat of war.

  Since the late nineteenth century the Chinese had been embittered by Japan’s expansion into Manchuria, the northeast region of China, with three provinces and more than half a million square miles of farmland, forests, and mountains rich in coal, iron ore, gold, lead, and copper. By the early thirties, Japan’s incursions were rapidly escalating. In March 1932, the Kwantung Army completed the occupation of Manchuria, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo, which became an industrial and military base for Japan’s expansion into Asia. The aggression would culminate in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

  On July 7, 1937, the Japanese attacked Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge (Lu Gou Qiao) near Beijing, beginning the occupation of northern China. That same summer, Chinese Communists and Nationalists ended their own civil war and united against Japan in an attempt to end the violation of Chinese territory.

  Fall arrived on August 8, according to the lunar calendar, and the cloud-spotted, deep blue sky shone like Ming porcelain. The sun was hot, but a steady breeze cooled the compound, rustling like rain through mulberry trees and weeping willows. Mrs. Bell was forty-five now. Her hair was graying, her figure matronly, and the strain of work and daily headaches had begun to show in her face. She had spent the summer working on a new wardrobe for Ruth, who was to board the Empress of Asia on August 19 and sail to Vancouver.

  From there Ruth was to travel by train to Wheaton, Illinois, where she would begin her freshman year of college. Rosa was spending the summer in Waynesboro with her grandmother, reveling in being away from home. She had written cheery letters to her family about college life, and if these observations were supposed to encourage Ruth, they did not.

  “Ruth,” her mother wrote, “is a precious child and still a child and going home will be hard for her. It is certainly the one hard thing missionaries have to do, have their children so far away during these important years.”

  Missionaries could never be certain how their children would fare once they left compounds for America, where they would fall in love and choose careers. In the West, evil was more difficult to define than it was in the Orient, where the fruits of sin were the horrors of infanticide, spiritism, robbery, and murder. As the Bells had done when they chose a high school, they had picked a college where the Bible was respected as the authoritative word of God. Dancing, smoking, and drinking alcoholic beverages were forbidden at Wheaton.

  Ruth was not interested in higher learning, for she had already planned her future. Ruth Bell would spend her life in the arid Himalaya mountains
of Tibet, the Roof of the Globe. She would never marry. She would need a utilitarian knowledge of Tibetan and the Bible, and she certainly didn’t need to sail halfway around the world for that. Her parents smiled at such talk.

  At seventeen, Ruth had shed her adolescent awkwardness. The gap between her front teeth had disappeared, as had her chubbiness and her glasses. At five foot five, she was slender, shapely, and graceful. Her nose was chiseled, her forehead broad and high, and her hazel eyes changed depth and shade with every shadow and light. When she laughed, which was often, they were flecked with gold. In more somber moods they hinted of amber. Never much for premeditation or analyzing after the fact, she acted on impulse more often than reason. Ruth was unusually kind. She was prone to fill the voids in other people’s lives, and not think about her own. She did not seem to notice the fawning attentions of young men and throughout her life would remain oddly unaware of a physical beauty that would rather startle people when she walked into a room.

  While Ruth and her mother made the final preparations for college, Dr. Bell prepared for war. He stockpiled a six-month supply of kerosene, fuel oil, and gasoline. Sugar, flour, and vegetables were plentiful, but the family would have to do without butter. Thirteen-by-eighteen-foot American flags were painted on the roofs of the hospital and their home, and the Stars and Stripes waved from a flagpole. Ordinarily, the missionaries did not flaunt their foreignness, but Dr. Bell was determined that there would be no “accidental” bombings of the mission compound. The boxy RCA Victor radio became the family’s focus, and throughout each day Dr. Bell slipped on the headphones and fidgeted with dials as he fished news from deep static.

  On Friday, August 13, the day Ruth’s baggage was to be sent ahead by launch to Zhenjiang, Chiang Kai-shek sent his best German-trained units to Shanghai where Japanese were garrisoned. The ensuing battle was savage. Chinese dignity and hostility were no match for Japanese weapons, and before the day was spent the city fell. Planes and pilots were assigned to the small airfield near the Qingjiang mission. Chinese began fleeing the larger cities by the thousands, seeking asylum in the less important ones or in the countryside. Launches hovered offshore where refugees could not overwhelm them.

  Dr. Bell canceled Ruth’s travel plans, made new ones, and then canceled again. “She is jubilant over the prospect of staying,” her mother wrote the next day. “There is nothing left for us to decide. It is just impossible to go. We feel like we are on holiday…. We are pretty well blocked-in, but feel we are as safe here as anywhere.”

  While Chinese planes raided Japanese troops in Shanghai, a typhoon roared inland from the Yellow Sea. Bewildered Chinese huddled in doorways and alleys as nature and man ravaged them. Inland, the missionaries and their converts registered no fear. One Sunday morning the Bells sat in church as the bell outside began clanging madly, announcing an air raid. Three hundred and fifty members of the congregation remained seated, and the service continued. In villages where foreigners were fleeing, the missionaries took the fourth commandment literally and rested on the Sabbath.

  On August 14, as Mrs. Bell sat in the living room monitoring the radio, the U.S. consul began urging all foreigners to leave the inland cities. More than two hundred Europeans and several Americans and missionaries had been killed days earlier when a Chinese plane accidentally bombed a Chinese settlement in Shanghai. On Monday, August 16, the Japanese raided Nanjing twice and bombed Yangzhou, a hundred miles south of Qingjiang. The local Chinese panicked. In anticipation of air raids, they dug deep trenches. On foot with low-caliber rifles, they attacked planes.

  The fighting drew closer, and on Tuesday, August 17, as the Bells were eating supper, three Japanese planes attacked the Qingjiang airfield. Two bombs landed near the runway but did little damage. A third landed in an open field and killed a cow; and a fourth bomb did not explode. The Chinese were terrified. Dozens of them pitched belongings over the compound wall and begged for sanctuary inside the hospital and other mission buildings.

  “Every time we leave the compound,” Mrs. Bell wrote, “they think we’re evacuating. Just our being here means a lot to their peace of mind.”

  On August 19, white ensigns fluttered from tugs pulling crowded barges down the Huangpu River to awaiting steamers. It was the day Ruth was to have sailed from China, had it been a different world. Nine hundred refugees jammed the Empress of Asia, and it left Shanghai without her. “Prospects for college that fall,” she wrote, “faded gloriously out of sight.” Her relief would not last long.

  September 1, the American ambassador urged the Bells and colleagues Jimmy and Sophie Graham to leave immediately for the United States. The Grahams had been in the China mission field for forty-three years, and a recent stroke had left Sophie partly paralyzed. But neither sickness nor danger would provoke them to heed the ambassador’s warning. The Bells were of the same mind. “We don’t feel any urge from the Lord,” Mrs. Bell wrote at the time. Five days later, the American consul general wired the Bells: “Urgent: Americans advised make plans proceed Haizhou from where evacuation about September 20 will be by Naval vessel probably to Shanghai telegraph immediately Consulate Shanghai or Embassy.”

  The next day, Dr. Bell wired back: “Message received please wire whether later evacuation possible. Auto roads Haizhou under water [Sophie] Graham invalid travel difficult, local conditions normal. Can you assure us that in complying with your telegram we will proceed either Shanghai Qingdao? Some have financial and mission responsibilities which make this imperative. How much baggage permitted each individual?”

  On September 8, a voice crackled over the radio, addressing the “stubborn missionaries and leader,” warning the foreigners that they had been invited for the last time to leave. The Bells began packing their belongings and storing boxes in the attic. On September 17, at dawn, they piled baggage on the porch and Ruth stood sentry, eyeing the dozen rickshaw coolies milling in the yard. Inside the bare house, the Bells and their domestic help sang “God Be with You till We Meet Again,” waiting for Jimmy and Sophie Graham to arrive.

  The small group would travel north on the Grand Canal by launch, then transfer to a houseboat in Suqian, and take a train to Haizhou, where an American destroyer would be waiting. From there the Bells and Grahams were to sail to Qingdao, a hundred and ten miles north of Shanghai. Japan had too many commercial and industrial interests in Qingdao to bomb it, and many missionaries already had sought refuge there.

  Coolies loaded rickshaws. They picked up poles and trotted along the narrow street to the canal, powerful calf muscles knotting like fists with each slap of bare feet. Houseboats, barges, and sampans crowded the muddy water, and women washed clothing as children bathed with ducks and geese. Chinese friends had gathered on the shore to say good-bye and help the missionaries board. Ruth stared out of her open cabin window at coolies passing through the small water gate in the ancient city wall. They dipped buckets into the canal and left with dripping loads swinging perilously on bian dans. High above the city’s tiled roofs, buzzards glided in a clear sky, and with a sharp blast of a whistle, the barge eased forward. A warm breeze washed through the cabin as friends on the shore disappeared around a bend.

  At two o’clock the next morning, the Bells and Grahams transferred to a houseboat, owned and piloted by a Chinese family who lived on the aft deck. The bow was cluttered with spare oars, pots, shoes, and other belongings wedged into the thatch of the passengers’ shelter or fastened to the boat. A low-burning oil lantern gently bobbed from a post. Ruth unrolled her blanket and settled on the dusty wooden floor between her sister Virginia and Sophie Graham’s servant girl Gwei Yin. A soft wind puffed the boat upriver while Ruth lay half asleep, listening to groaning wood and water lipping. Hours later, at dawn, the sun rose through willows lining the shore.

  Saturday afternoon, September 18, the group docked one mile from the Longhai Railroad, ten minutes after the departure of the 2:20 train they were scheduled to board. From a mud hut telegraph office in the tiny v
illage of Yuin Ho, Dr. Bell sent a wire and was instructed to spend another night in the houseboat and take the next morning’s train to Haizhou, where another band of withdrawing missionaries would wait for them. The next morning, the Bells and Grahams reached the station by 8:30, but this time it was the train that was late, owing to an air raid.

  They boarded at 10:30, and less than ten miles from Haizhou were again delayed when a warning sounded. Twelve Japanese bombers returning for a raid in Xuzhou-fu were fast approaching. Passengers dove from cars and hid in fields as the ominous droning sounded on the horizon. The missionaries sat quietly in train cars, heads bowed, as a gray sea of clouds high above them slowly and heavily settled over the rails, shrouding the creaking locomotive and those cringing in the fields. Bombers roared blindly overhead and were gone. “The Lord,” Mrs. Bell recorded, “is not unmindful of His own.”

  American consular authorities had alerted the Japanese of the missionaries’ evacuation and had been assured of cooperation. Obviously, Japan’s idea of what this meant wasn’t exactly what the Americans had in mind. The Bells and Grahams when they reached Haizhou crouched in a dugout, wondering where the train was, as the city was being shaken by the most severe bombings of the war. Dr. Bell did not believe that the attacks were coincidental.

  “That demonstration in Haizhou Sunday,” he wrote soon after, “was evidently put on for our benefit…. Lovely cooperation, wasn’t it?”

  The train arrived in Haizhou late that afternoon and at 8:00 P.M. Ruth and her fellow travelers boarded a tugboat in the Haizhou harbor for the four-mile sail to the destroyer. The sky was clear, and a full moon followed them out to sea. Ruth stood on deck watching the lit-up American ship get bigger as the tug got closer. Invisible Chinese eyes spied from military posts in black crags on either side of the bay. The tug’s pilot cut the engines and steered alongside the destroyer, and a narrow wooden footway was secured with rope.