Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 7

"In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the organs of the body, and one in the heart of a man who came to me because he couldn't breathe very well."

"No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I don't think I could myself if I had a needle in my blood-pump!" I said with a smile.

"These fancy needles that the old Korean doctors thought a good deal of they put a handle on," he continued.

"What was that for?"

"So they wouldn't lose their needles in a body. The other, or common needles, they just stuck into the body wherever the wound or sore place was and left them there."

"And what, may I ask, was the idea of this playful Korean surgery! Was it something like our 'b.u.t.ton, b.u.t.ton, whose got the b.u.t.ton?'"

"No, the idea was that there were devils in the wound. If it was a swelling there was a devil in that swelling. If it was typhoid fever, and there was pain in the bowels, there was a devil in the inward parts affected, and so, after carefully sterilizing the needle by running it through his long, black, greasy hair, the native doctor would run it into the affected part of the body to kill the devil or let it escape from the body."

"The old idea of a fear religion, a fear social life, a fear family life and a fear surgery prevails in Korea as it does in China?" I said by way of a question.

"It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me it is the most awful thing about working out here. The awful sense of constant fear that is on the people always and everywhere."

Pounded-up claws of a tiger; the red horn of a deer; pulverized fish bones; roots of trees, pigs' eyes; and a thousand poisons and fear-remedies make up the medical history of the Oriental doctor.

"Why do they kill girl babies?"

"Fear!"

"Fear of what?"

"Fear of devils! The devils will be displeased if a girl baby is born.

Therefore kill the baby.

"Throw the babies out on the ground in the graveyards. Let the dogs eat the babies."

I heard the dogs howling in a cemetery one night about two o'clock in the morning as I was coming through the thousands of little conical mounds, with here and there an unburied coffin.

"The dogs are having a baby feast to-night," said an old missionary.

"Why?"

"To appease the devils."

"My G.o.d man; you don't mean that they let the dogs eat their babies because they are afraid of the devil?" I cried.

"I mean just that," replied the missionary.

"Fear! Fear! Fear! Everywhere. Fear by night and fear by day. They never escape it. It is fear that makes them wors.h.i.+p their ancestors. It is fear that makes them wors.h.i.+p idols. It is fear that makes them kill their girl babies. It is fear that makes them build their little narrow winding streets, which after a while must become so filthy; fear that if they do not, the devils will find them; and if they do build their streets narrow and winding the devils will get lost searching for them.

Oh, G.o.d, fear, fear, everywhere! The Orient is full of a terrible and a constant fear!"

I looked at my friend astonished. He seldom went into such emotional outbursts. He was judicial, calm, poised; some said, cold. But this constant sense of fear that was upon the people had finally broken down his reserve of poise.

"The chimneys are beautiful. See that beautiful upward dip in the architecture. They are like the roofs," I said.

"But that beautiful, symmetrical development did not come out of a sense of beauty. It came to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs.

The devils will glide off into s.p.a.ce and will never be able to get down the chimneys." It is so in other Oriental countries.

The same is true in the Philippine Islands. The whole fabric of human life is permeated with the black thread of fear.

It is true of China and Korea; it is true of Borneo to a marked degree; and it is true of that great ma.s.s of conglomerate humanity that we think of as India.

These and other flash-lights of fear remain, and shall remain forever in my mind. But of a fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of millions of human beings; pictures of fear stand out, blurred here and there; but clear enough in outline so that I can still see the human faces against a background of midnight darkness.

Three pictures are clearer than the others. Perhaps it was because the flash that focused them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Perhaps it was, that the plate of my soul was more sensitive the days these impressions were focused. But they stand out; three flash-lights of fear above all:

One was told me by Zela Wiltsie Worley, a college girl, now a missionary's wife, who has known what it means to lie on the floor of her home an entire morning with machine gun bullets cras.h.i.+ng through her home, between the fire of two revolutionary armies.

"I was talking with my Amah--she is the girl who cares for our children," said Mrs. Worley.

I nodded that I understood that.

"We were bathing the baby--our first wee kiddie--and the Amah seemed to have an unusual inclination to talk. I had been joking with her and asked her if she did not want to buy Clara Gene. In fun we started the characteristic Chinese haggling over price, she trying to 'jew' me up and I trying to 'jew' her down.

"'Oh!' she said, 'girl babies are very expensive the last two or three years. Now you have to pay over ten dollars to get a nice fat one!

Before that, if you did not drown them, you had an awfully hard time to get rid of them. There was a man in our town to whom we took the babies--the girl babies I mean. He would go up and down the streets with them and sell them to any one who would give him a chicken and a bowl of rice in return.'

"'But do they drown the girl babies now?' I asked the Amah.

"'Oh, yes, of course, if you already have one or two boys. You know, in my village I am the only Christian. My own family and the rest of the village wors.h.i.+p idols. They are afraid of their G.o.ds. They do not know any better. Why my sister almost drowned my second little boy by mistake. He had just arrived and she thought that he was a girl, and had already stuck his head down in a pail of water when I rescued him.'

"'But who usually kills the girl babies?' I asked. 'Surely not the mother?'

"'Yes, she does. She is so afraid when she finds it is only a girl, afraid that the G.o.ds will be angry because she has brought another girl into the world, that she kills it!'

"'Do they bury it then?'

"'Sometimes they wrap it up, and throw it under a pile of rubbish. You know, we do not have coffins made for any of our babies who die before they have had their first teeth! I have seen so many babies drowned, Mrs. Worley. I never did like it. They cry so!'

"Then I inquired of our Chinese teacher's wife if she knew of girl baby killing still going on in China.

"'Just last week,' this teacher's wife said in answer to my inquiry, 'the woman next door went back to her village two miles from here and she saw her own sister drown a baby while she was there.'

"I asked an English missionary if she knew that this fearful custom was still prevalent over most of China with its more than four hundred million souls.

"She told me that it was the custom in Ning-daik for the women just to throw the girl babies under their beds, and they would 'be gone in a day or two.'

"And it is all because of their awful fear that the G.o.ds will be displeased if they give birth to a girl baby!"

The second outstanding flash-light of fear comes from Java.

In the chapter on Physical Flash-lights I have described the old volcano of Bromo. It is a terrible thing to look into. Great fissures in the earth, belch thunder, sulphur, fire, and lava. Great rocks as large as wagons shoot into the air to the rim of the two hundred-foot crater, and then drop back with a crash.