Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 5

"All right! Go ahead! Do not be afraid. I am your friend!"

"So I know. All missionaries are our friends."

"Then you need not be afraid to talk."

"No!" said the boy. But he did not talk. His agitation was growing more marked.

"Go on, my boy! Tell me what you came for."

The Korean boy looked at the half open door which led into the kitchen.

The missionary, without a word, stepped over and closed that door, because he understood.

The boy himself closed a door which led into the missionary's study. For in Korea in these days no home; not even a missionary's home, is free from spies.

The boy started to talk hurriedly. The missionary soon saw that he was not talking about the thing that he had come for.

"Come to the point! Come to the point! You did not come to me, in such secrecy, to talk commonplace things like that!" said the missionary a bit sharply.

Then the boy suddenly dropped to his knees behind the missionary's desk and whipped out a big knife. Then he took from his white gown a long piece of white cloth. This he laid out on the floor. Then he opened his sharp knife with a quick motion and before the missionary knew it, he had ripped the index finger of his right hand, from, the tip to the palm, clear to the bone, until the blood spurted all over the floor.

"What are you doing, my boy?" cried the missionary.

The boy smiled a sublime smile and then knelt on his knees over the white cloth and before the missionary's tear-misty eyes wrote across the immaculate cloth in his own blood the words: "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!

Korean Independence Forever! Self-determination!"

Then underneath these words in a few swift strokes in his own blood he drew a picture of the Korean flag. And as he drew, now and then the blood would not flow fast enough; and he took his knife, as one primes a fountain pen; and cut a bit deeper to open new veins in order that the flag of his country and the declaration of his faith might be written in the deepest colors that his own veins could furnish.

Finally, after what seemed hours he jumped to his feet and handed the missionary that flag; crying as he did so: "That is our faith! That is the way we Koreans feel! You are going back to America! We want America to know that our faith in the Independence of Korea has not died! The fire burns higher to-day than ever. The j.a.panese cruelties are worse!

The need is greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our determination is deeper than ever before! I have come here this day, knowing that you are going back to America; I came to write these words in my own blood that you may know; and that America may know; that our faith is a flame which burns out like the beacon lights on the Korean hills, never to die!"

The most scintillating Flash-light of Faith that I saw in the Orient was in the Philippine Islands. We were traveling the jungle trail to visit a tribe of naked Negritos. These are diminutive people who look like American negroes only they are much smaller; much more underfed, and who live in trees very much like the Orangutans of Borneo. They eat roots and nuts. They hunt with bows and arrows.

They are the lowest tribe in mentality on the Islands.

It was a terribly hot, tropical day and I had a sunstroke on the way up the mountainside to this Negrito village.

I did not expect to get back alive.

For three solid hours under a killing tropical sun, without the proper cork helmet and protection, a pile driver kept hammering down on my head. I felt it at every step I took. Finally I dropped unconscious on the trail. After several hours I was able to proceed to the top of the mountain, where the Negritos were camped.

We got there about two o'clock and had lunch. As we ate about fifty Negritos swarmed about us.

They were a horrible looking crowd; stark naked, filthy with dirt; starved to skin and bones; and animal-like in every look and move.

I was so sick that I was not able to eat the lunch which had been provided in baskets. I lay on my back trying to get back my strength.

As the rest of the expedition ate, the Negritos with hungry eyes, crowded closer.

One hideous old man was in the forefront of the natives. He was so hideous looking that he was sickeningly repulsive to me as I looked at him crouched as he was like an animal with a streak of sunlight playing on his face.

This streak of sunlight, with ruthless severity, made the ugly scabs of dirt stand out on his old wrinkled face. That face had not felt the touch of water in years. His whole body was covered with dirt and sores.

Wherever the sunlight struck on that black body it revealed scales like those on a mangy dog. His body was also covered with gray hairs matted into the dirt.

"That old codger represents the nearest thing to an animal that the human being can reach," said McLaughlin, one of the oldest missionaries on the island.

"You're right!" I said. "He looks as much like a Borneo Orangutan as any human being I ever saw."

"And he lives like one, too; up in a tree in a nest of matted limbs and gra.s.s," said another.

"I've traveled among the wild tribes of the world all my life and I have seen the lowest human beings on earth; in Africa, South America, Malaysia, Borneo, Java--Australia--everywhere," said a widely traveled man in the crowd, "and I never saw a type as low in the scale as that old fellow!"

So we discussed him as the lunch proceeded. He did not know, of course, that we had consigned him to the lowest rung on the ladder of humanity, so he just sat looking at us with his animal-like eyes as we ate; and at me as I lay under a tree trying to recover my strength for the trip back.

"He is not a human being!" added a philosopher in the crowd. "He is lower than that stage. He doesn't seem to have a single spark of humanity left in him!"

Then the meal over; the missionaries started to hand out what was left of the food to these starving Negritos. The old man whom we had decided was the lowest type of a human being on earth seemed, after all, to be the leader of the tribe; no doubt because of his age; perhaps because of something else which we were later to discover.

McLaughlin handed out a sandwich to the old man.

"Did he eat it himself?"

"He did not! He handed it to a child near by."

McLaughlin handed out another sandwich which was left.

"Did the old man, whom we had decided was more of an animal than a human being, eat that one?"

"He did not. He took it over behind a tree where another old man was timidly hiding and gave it to him."

McLaughlin handed out another sandwich.

"Did the old man eat that one?"

"He did not. He took it over and gave it to an old woman near by."

And so it continued, until every last piece of food was disposed of.

That old man; whom we had decided was an animal; saw to it, that every man, woman, and child in that crowd was fed before he took a single bite himself.

Then he suddenly disappeared. In half an hour he came back with an armful of great, broad, palm leaves. He spread these out on the ground in the shade of a tree; did this old man; this hideous looking monster; and then motioned for me to lie down on the bed he had made for me. He saw that I was sick.

Then he disappeared once again, and when he returned he was carrying a long Bamboo-tube full of clear, cool water which he had gotten from a mountain spring. He brought it to where I was lying on the bed he had made for me and with this water he cooled my fevered, burning head; and from this water he gave me to drink; he whom we had decided was the lowest type of a human being on earth.

And I am writing here to say; that I have never seen a "cup of cold water given in His name" that was given with a higher, or a deeper sense of the Divine spark of G.o.d in humanity than I saw that tropical summer afternoon, and this water was given by the naked Negrito whom we had decided was the lowest human being on the earth. Yet even in this animal-man; even in this naked savage; there was a spark of the Divine that made us forever have a deeper and a more abiding faith that G.o.d never did and never shall make a man to live on this old earth that He did not have some purpose in making him.

A few days before I took this trip up into the jungles of Luzon to visit this Negrito tribe I had received a copy of a slender volume of poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the cool beauty of the tropical evening preceding this trip I had read the last lines of its introductory poem called "Interim"; and these lines came flas.h.i.+ng into my mind, even as I lay on the hot earth on that Luzon hillside. I can still remember the honey dripping like rain from the Cocoanut trees, and I can still hear the ceaseless and maddening cry of millions of Locusts that hot day; but suddenly came this beautiful outpouring of faith from, the cool depths of a woman's woodland soul:

"Not Truth but Faith, it is That keeps the world alive! If, all at once Faith were to slacken,--that unconscious faith Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone Of all believing--birds now flying fearless Across would drop in terror to the earth; Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins Would tangle in the frantic hands of G.o.d And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!"