Whereintwenty-sevenslow yearsare addedone uponanother
THE years that followed were but the melting together of the pearls of Kuei Ping’s life. They held the gems of joy and of sorrow. She took up again the task of learning from Madame Chia the ways of household management, observing as carefully as possible the honorable mother’s wishes, coming to love her for her patience and her ability. She went often during the remaining days of Madame Yen’s life to the bedside, sometimes reading to her grandmother from the Book of Life she had received from the West, sometimes listening quietly as the old lady told her bits of wisdom she had learned from her own living.
The second of the new years within the compound gave to Kuei Ping a baby girl. Fuh Tang, growing steadily weaker, brightened with the coming of the gentle little child. Kuei Ping watched him as he played with the baby and let a hope grow in her heart that he would be well again. The entire household came to share that hope. A year passed in which each of the days was a glorious promise of more.
Then the end came suddenly in a short spasm of suffering. When it was over Kuei Ping could not feel that Fuh Tang wasfinished with life, but that he had passed on where there was no more of earthly suffering.
The long days that followed bore their pain of loneliness. The sleeves of his garments hung so empty and lay so still as she folded them away. Bo Te cried piteously for the return of his father. Stilling his cries and lulling to sleep the little daughter, Kuei Ping felt herself to blame that she had wanted freedom and perhaps had bought it with Fuh Tang’s life. Then there came over her a great thankfulness for what he had given her—the right to come and go as she chose through the compound door, two children to guide in their wanderings beyond it, and a love that seemed nearer now than it had since those days when the weariness had first begun to come upon him.
Her days were different from those of the women whose homes joined hers along the hutung only in that she had greater personal freedom and that she sought to live by the pattern of the life of Christ. The duties were the same round of daily household tasks. Time and time again she found it hard to live as near like the Master in kindliness and love as the women whom she knew who still worshipped in the old familiar ways. But as her daughter grew older she was tenfold thankfulfor the little she had learned of Christian faith and of the place it gave to women.
While Kuei Ping’s children were small she taught them, gathering about her each morning, as her uncle had done before her, all the children of the compound. She followed in her lesson plans the same teaching of nature from the plants in the garden, the same beginning of five written characters from the old classics each day, but to the worn book of Rites she added the parables from the book of Christ. A dream grew then,—to found a home school in which all the children of the neighborhood who would, might come and learn not the western way of life, but the home way enlightened by the teachings of Jesus.
Almost miraculously she and her little village passed untouched through the Boxer rebellion. Perhaps it was their smallness that saved them from the destroying hand of the fanatically-crazed men who sought to save their country as the center of the universe, complete in itself, and to drive out all other influences. Kuei Ping likes to think of it as a modern miracle.
But the fall of the Manchus and the coming of a Republic so cut down her means that the little school had to be pushed back againinto the realm of dreams after it had grown to a reality with twenty day students. One entire side of the home had been used for the plan. Now only a few rooms of the compound were Kuei Ping’s even for dwelling quarters, for other Chia relatives came seeking shelter. Their official incomes shaved to a mere pittance, the fatty places in which they had squeezed more than twice their earnings taken away, the piteous flock did not know what else to do.
It was then that Kuei Ping faced the problem not of dividing what she had with others but of earning for her own children their livelihood and of preparing them to fill the place in life which she had so blithely planned for them. Again her thoughts turned to the West where women knew how to do things with which to earn money. Bo Te, now called by his school name Kwan Wa, begged to give up his education and to seek for work. He had only two more years of study before the completion of his chosen course, and as he had been offered the opportunity of a scholarship she refused to consider the suggestion.
It was then that she began to teach foreigners Chinese. Miss Porter, to whom she went with her problem, sent her the first two pupils. She found two rooms in a section ofa courtyard near enough to the mission school for her daughter to attend classes with other girls of her own age. The expenses of her life were small, her group of private pupils grew larger and as she came to earn even a little more than she needed, this she added to a tiny growing heap of savings. Bit by bit she revived again the hope that when her son had finished his education she would build her school. As a part of this growing plan she held as capital the string of pearls bought so long ago. The jewels, treasured as they had been through each period of vicissitude in her life, had come to have an intrinsic beauty which strengthened her desire to use them where they would luminate the lives of others.
The affairs of government rocked above her head. She was conscious of them but they did not shake her determination to secure the title to a part of the old home where her maternal grandmother had spent her life, to be used for her school.
Then her little daughter fell ill of fever. Long months of nursing made her better but the foreign doctor urged the seashore and Kuei Ping again delayed her school plans, and took from her savings.
Kwan Wa’s marriage and an opportunityto begin the school came in the same year. His work for the year took him to Mukden and his salary was sufficient to make her earnings unnecessary for the family needs.
He, too, shared her plan for the home school and widened that dream to a plan that they should build near it a church for the worship of the Christian God whom they sought to follow.
It was a joyous day when Chia Kuei Ping at last saw the dream again a reality. No new buildings were built. The old compound in which her mother had lived before she was married was large enough for a part to be used as a dwelling and a part for classes. Each overlapped the other so that they were one—a home where education and living are one and the same.
The plan grew more rapidly than she could well manage alone. Then she discovered a man and his wife, childless, followers too of this new religion from the West but members of another of its man-made branches, who wished to help. They came to her to add to her teaching staff, giving their time and their small income to the project.
Again as time passed and the word of the school and its teachings spread, she foundthat her doors must be widened and her pocketbook fattened to make possible the needed expenditures. It was then that she returned to the task of teaching foreigners to speak Chinese, riding the twenty long miles to and from her home twice a week to the city of Peking.
A small inheritance came from her father’s family and this was laid aside as the beginning of the church she dreamed of building, where in a place set apart those who wished to enter might find a quiet place for communion with God. Into this building she put her dowry pearls, at last.
On her fiftieth birthday the people of her village laid the corner stone of the new church and even those who followed still the ways of worship of their fathers lent their hands to the building.