The Keys of the Kingdom (32 page)

As he lingered there, with his thoughts for company, he suddenly discovered Mr Chia at his elbow. He greeted his old friend quietly.

As they talked of the fineness of the weather and the general excellence of trade, Francis sensed more than the usual kindness in the merchant’s manner.

Suddenly, having appeased the proprieties, Mr Chia guilelessly remarked: ‘It is pleasant to observe the excess growth of goodness, though many would consider it a superfluity. For myself I much enjoy walking in other mission gardens. Moreover, when the Father came here, many years ago he received much ill-usage.’ A gentle and suggestive pause. ‘It seems highly probable, even to such an uninfluential and lowly-placed citizen as I, that the new missioners could receive such execrable treatment on their arrival that they might be most regretfully forced to depart.’

A shiver passed over Father Chisholm as an unbelievable temptation assailed him. The ambuiguity, the forced understatement, of the merchant’s remark was more significant than the direct threat. Mr Chia, in many subtle and subterranean ways, wielded the greatest power in the district. Francis knew that he need only answer, gazing into space: ‘ It would certainly be a great misfortune if disaster befell the coming missioners … But then, who can prevent the will of heaven?’ to foredoom the threatened invasion of his pastorate. But he recoiled, abhorring himself for the thought. Conscious of a cold perspiration on his brow, he replied as calmly as he could:

‘There are many gates to heaven. We enter by one, these new preachers by another. How can we deny them the right to practise virtue in their own way? If they desire it, then they must come.’

He did not observe that spark of singular regard which for once irradiated Mr Chia’s placid eye. Still deeply disturbed, he parted from his friend and walked homeward up the hill. He entered the church and seated himself, for he was tired, before the crucifix on the side altar. Gazing at the face, haloed with thorns, he prayed, in his mind, for endurance, wisdom, and forbearance.

By the end of June the Methodist mission was near completion. For all his fortitude, Father Chisholm had not brought himself to view the successive stages of construction; he had sombrely avoided the Street of the Lanterns. But when Joseph, who had not failed as a baleful informant, brought news that the two foreign devils had arrived, the little priest sighed, put on his one good suit, took his tartan umbrella, and steeled himself to call.

When he rang the door bell the sound echoed emptily into the new smell of paint and plaster. But after waiting indeterminately for a minute under the green-glass portico, he heard hastening steps within, and the door was opened by a small faded middle-aged woman in a grey alpaca skirt and high-necked blouse.

‘Good afternoon. I am Father Chisholm. I took the liberty of calling to welcome you to Pai-tan.’

She started nervously and a look of quick apprehension flooded her pale blue eyes.

‘Oh, yes. Please come in. I am Mrs Fiske. Wilbur … my husband … Dr Fiske … he’s upstairs. I’m afraid we are all alone, and not quite settled yet!’ Hurriedly, she silenced his regretful protest. ‘No, no … you must step in.’

He followed her upstairs to a cool, lofty room, where a man of forty, clean-shaven, with a short-cropped moustache, and of her own diminutive size, was perched on a stepladder methodically arranging books upon the shelves. He wore strong glasses over his intelligent, apologetic, short-sighted eyes. His baggy cotton knickers gave his thin little calves an indescribable pathos. Descending the ladder, he stumbled, almost fell.

‘Do be careful, Wilbur!’ Her hands fluttered protectively. She introduced the two men. ‘ Now let’s sit down … if we can.’ She unsuccessfully attempted a smile. ‘It’s too bad not having our furniture … but then one gets used to anything in China.’

They sat down. Father Chisholm said pleasantly:

‘You have a magnificent building here.’

‘Yes.’ Dr Fiske deprecated. ‘ We’re very lucky. Mr Chandler, the oil magnate, is most generous with us.’

A strained silence. They so little fulfilled the priest’s uneasy expectations he felt taken unawares. He could not claim gigantic stature, yet the Fiskes, by the very sparseness of their physical economy, silenced the merest whisper of aggression. The little doctor was mild, with a bookish, even timid air, and a smile, depracating, about his lips, as though afraid to settle. His wife, more clearly distinguishable in this good light, was a gentle, steadfast creature, her blue eyes easily receptive of tears, her hands alternating between her thin gold locket chain and a frizzy pad of rich, net-enclosed, brown hair which, with a slight shock, Francis perceived to be a wig.

Suddenly Dr Fiske cleared his throat. He said, simply: ‘How you must hate our coming here!’

‘Oh, no … not at all.’ It was the priest’s turn to look awkward.

‘We had the same experience once. We were up-country in the Lan-hi province, a lovely place. I wish you’d seen our peach trees. We had it all to ourselves for nine years. Then another missionary came. Not,’ he inserted swiftly, ‘a Catholic priest. But, well … We did resent it, didn’t we, Agnes?’

‘We did, dear.’ She nodded tremulously. ‘Still … we got over it. We are old campaigners, Father.’

‘Have you been long in China?’

‘Over twenty years! We came as an insanely young couple the day we were married. We have given our lives to it.’ The moisture in her eyes receded before a bright and eager smile. ‘Wilbur! I must show Father Chisholm John’s photograph.’ She rose, proudly took a silver-framed portrait from the bare mantelpiece. ‘This is our boy, taken when he was at Harvard, before he went as Rhodes Scholar to Oxford. Yes, he’s still in England … working in our dockland settlement in Tynecastle.’

The name shattered his strained politeness. ‘ Tynecastle!’ He smiled. ‘That is very near my home.’

She gazed at him, enchanted, smiling back, holding the photograph to her bosom with tender hands.

‘Isn’t that amazing? The world is such a small place after all.’ Briskly she replaced the photograph on the mantel. ‘Now I’m going to bring in coffee, and some of my very own doughnuts … a family recipe.’ Again she silenced his protests. ‘It’s no trouble. I always make Wilbur take a little refreshment at this hour. He has had some bother with his duodenum. If I didn’t look after him who would?’

He had meant to stay for five minutes; he remained for more than an hour.

They were New England people, natives of the town of Biddeford, in Maine, born, reared and married in the tenets of their own strict faith. As they spoke of their youth he had a swift and strangely sympathetic vision of a cold crisp countryside, of great salty rivers flowing between wands of silver birches to the misty sea, past white wooden houses amidst the wine of maples and sumac, velvet-red in winter, a thin white steeple above the village, with bells and dark silent figures in the frosted street, following their quiet destiny.

But the Fiskes had chosen another and harder path. They had suffered. Both had almost died of cholera. During the Boxer rebellion, when many of their fellow missioners were massacred, they had spent six months in a filthy prison under daily threat of execution. Their devotion to each other, and to their son, was touching. She had, for all her tremulousness, an indomitable maternal solicitude towards her two men.

Despite her antecedents, Agnes Fiske was a pure romantic whose life was written in a host of tender souvenirs she so carefully preserved. Soon she was showing Francis a letter of her dear mother’s, a quarter of a century old, with the formula for these doughnuts, and a curl from John’s head worn within her locket. Upstairs in her drawer were many more such tokens: bundles of yellowing correspondence, her withered bridal bouquet, a front tooth her son had shed, the ribbon she had worn at her first Biddeford Church Social …

Her health was frail and presently, once this new venture was established, she was leaving for a six months’ vacation which she would spend in England with her son. Already, with an earnestness that presaged her goodwill, she pressed Father Chisholm to entrust her with any commissions he might wish executed at home.

When, at last, he took his leave, she escorted him beyond the portico, where Dr Fiske stood, to the outer gate. Her eyes filled up with tears. ‘I can’t tell you how relieved, how glad I am at your kindness, your friendliness in calling … especially for Wilbur’s sake. At our last station he had such a painful experience – hatreds stirred up, frightful bigotry. It got so bad, latterly, when he went out to see a sick man he was struck and knocked senseless by a young brute of a … missionary who accused him of stealing the man’s immortal soul.’ She suppressed her emotion. ‘Let us help one another. Wilbur is such a clever doctor. Call on him any time you wish.’ She pressed his hand quickly and turned away.

Father Chisholm went home in a curious state of mind. For the next few days he had no news of the Fiskes. But on Saturday a batch of homebaked cookies arrived at St Andrew’s. As he took them, still warm and wrapped in the white napkin, to the children’s refectory, Sister Martha scowled.

‘Does she think we cannot bake here – this new woman?’

‘She is trying to be kind, Martha. And we also must try.’

For several months Sister Clotilde had suffered from a painful irritation of her skin. All sorts of lotions had been used, from calamine to carbolic, but without success. So distressing was the affliction she made a special novena for a cure. The following week Father Chisholm saw her rubbing her red excoriated hands in a torment of itching. He frowned and, fighting his own reluctance, sent a note to Dr Fiske.

The doctor arrived within half an hour, quietly examined the patient in Reverend Mother’s presence, used no resounding words, praised the treatment that had been given and, having mixed a special physic to be taken internally every three hours, unobtrusively departed. In ten days the ugly rash had vanished and Sister Clotilde was a new woman. But after the first radiance she brought a troubling scruple to her confession.

‘Father … I prayed to God so earnestly … and …’

‘It was the Protestant missionary who cured you?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘My child … don’t let your faith be troubled. God did answer your prayer. We are his instruments … every one of us.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘ Don’t forget what old Lao-tzu said – “ Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers”.’

That same evening as he walked in the garden Maria-Veronica said to him, almost unwillingly:

‘This American … he is a good doctor.’

He nodded. ‘And a good man.’

The work of the two missions marched forward without conflict. There was room for both in Pai-tan, and each was careful not to give offence. The wisdom of Father Chisholm’s determination to have no rice-Christians in his flock was now apparent. Only one of his congregation betook himself to Lantern Street, and he was returned with a brief note: ‘ Dear Chisholm, the bearer is a bad Catholic but would be a worse Methodist. Ever, Your friend in the Universal God, Wilbur Fiske. MD
PS
If any of your people need hospitalization send them along. They’ll receive no dark hints on the fallibility of the Borgias!’

The priest’s heart glowed. Dear Lord, he thought, kindness and toleration – with these two virtues how wonderful Thy earth would be!

Fiske’s accomplishments were not worn on his sleeve: he was revealed gradually as an archaeologist and Chinese scholar of the first order. He contributed abstruse articles to the archives of obscure societies at home. His hobby was Chien-lung porcelain and his collection of eighteenth-century
famille noire
, picked up with unobtrusive guile, was genuinely fine. Like most small men ruled by their wives, he loved an argument, and it was not long before Francis and he were friends enough to debate, warily, with cunning on both sides, and sometimes, alas, with rising heat, certain points which separated their respective creeds. Occasionally, carried away by the fervour of their opposite views, they parted with a certain tightness of the lips – for the pedantic little doctor could be querulous when roused. But it soon passed.

Once, after such a disagreement, Fiske met the mission priest. He stopped abruptly. ‘My dear Chisholm, I have been reflecting on a sermon which I once heard from the lips of Dr Elder Cummings, our eminent divine, in which he declared: “ The greatest evil of today is the growth of the Romish Church through the nefarious and diabolical intrigues of its priests.” I should like you to know that since I have had the honour of your acquaintance I believe the Reverend Cummings to have been talking through his hat.’

Francis, smiling grimly, consulted his theological books and ten days later formally bowed.

‘My dear Fiske, in Cardinal Cuesta’s catechism I find, plainly printed, this illuminating phrase: “Protestantism is an immoral practice, which blasphemes God, degrades man, and endangers society.” I should like you to know, my dear Fiske, that even before I had the honour of your acquaintance I considered the Cardinal unpardonable!’ Raising his hat he solemnly marched off.

Neighbouring Chinese thought the ‘doubled-up-with-laughter small-foreign-devil Methody’ had completely lost his reason.

One gusty day towards the end of October Father Chisholm met the doctor’s good lady on the Manchu Bridge. Mrs Fiske was returning from marketing, one hand holding a net bag, the other clasping her hat securely to her head.

‘Goodness!’ she exclaimed cheerfully. ‘ Isn’t this a gale? It does blow the dust into my hair. I shall have to shampoo it again tonight!’

Familiar now with this one eccentricity, this single blot upon a blameless soul, Francis did not smile. Upon every possible occasion she guilelessly assumed her dreadful toupee to be a perfect mane of hair. His heart went out to her for the gentle little lie.

‘I hope you are all well.’

She smiled, head inclined, being very careful of her hat. ‘I am in rude health. But Wilbur is sulking – because I am off tomorrow. He will be so lonely, poor fellow. But then you are always lonely – what a solitary life you have!’ She paused. ‘Do tell me, now that I am going to England, if there is anything I can do for you. I am bringing Wilbur back some new winter underwear – there’s no place like Britain for woollens. Shall I do the same for you?’