FEAR1 BY SOMERSET MAUGHAM I was staying a night with him on the road. The mission stood on a little hill just outside the gates of a populous city. The first thing I noticed about him was the difference of his taste. The missionary's house, as a rule, is furnished in a style which is almost an outrage to decency. The parlor, with its air of an unused room, is papered with a gaudy paper; and on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental pictures, "The Soul's Awakening' and Luke Fildes' "The Doctor'; or, if the missionary has been long in the country, congratulatory scrolls on stiff red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the floor, rocking-chairs if the household is American, and a stiff armchair on each side of the fireplace if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed that nobody sits on it, and by the grim look of it few can want to. There are lace curtains at the windows. Here and there are occasional tables on which are photographs, and whatnots with modern porcelain on them. The diningroom has an appearance of more use, but almost the whole of it is taken up by a large table, and when you sit at it you are crowded into the fireplace. But in Mr. Wingrove's study there were books from floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains of a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a Tibetan banner. There was a row of Tibetan Buddhas on the chimney piece. 'I don't know how.it is, but you've got just the feeling of college rooms 1 From T. P.'s and Cassell's Weekly (London popular journal), October 25 about the place,' I said as I looked about the study. 'Do you think so?' he answered soberly. 'I was a tutor at Oriel.' He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think, tall and well covered, though not stout, with gray hair, cut very short, and a reddish face. One imagined that he must be a jovial man, fond of laughter, an easy talker and a good fellow. But his eyes disconcerted you. They were grave and unsmiling; they had a look that I could only describe as harassed. I wondered if I had fallen upon him at an inconvenient moment, when his mind was taken up with irksome matters; yet somehow I felt that this was not a passing expression, but a settled one rather, and I could not understand it. He had just that look of anxiety which you see in certain forms of heart disease. He chatted about one thing and another, then he said: 'I hear my wife come in. Shall we go into the drawing-room?' He led me in, and introduced me to a thin little woman, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shy manner. It was plain that she belonged to a different class from her husband. Mr. Wingrove was a gentleman, though it was evident that his wife was not a lady. She had a common intonation. The drawingroom was furnished in a way I had never before seen in a missionary's house. There was a Chinese carpet on the floor. Chinese pictures, old ones, hung on the yellow walls. Two or three Ming tiles gave a dash of color. In the FEAR middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately carved, and on it was a figure in white porcelain. I made a trivial remark. 'I don't much care for all these Chinese things meself,' answered my hostess briskly, 'but Mr. Wingrove's set on them.' I laughed, though not because I was amused; and then I caught in Mr. Wingrove's eyes a flash of icy hatred, so that I was astonished. But it passed. 'We won't have them if you don't like them, my dear,' he said gently. 'Oh, I don't mind them.' We began to talk about my journey, and in the course of conversation I happened to ask Mr. Wingrove how long it was since he had been in England. 'Seventeen years,' he said. I was surprised. 163 aries. And they're not so intellectual that it is a great hardship to be deprived of their company.' 'And, of course, we're not really alone, you know,' said Mrs. Wingrove. 'We have two evangelists, and then there are two young ladies who teach.' Tea was brought in, and we gossiped desultorily. Mr. Wingrove seemed to speak with effort, and I had increasingly that feeling in him of perturbed repression. He had pleasing manners, and was certainly trying to be cordial, and yet I had a sense of effort. I led the conversation to Oxford, mentioning friends whom he might know. 'It's so long since I left home,' he said, 'and I have n't kept up with anyone. There's a great deal of work in a mission like this, and it absorbs one.' I thought he was exaggerating a 'But I thought you had one year's little, so I remarked: furlough every seven?' 'Yes, but I have n't cared to go.' 'Mr. Wingrove thinks it's bad for the work to go away for a year like that,' explained his wife. I wondered how it was that he had ever come to China. The actual details of the call fascinate me, and often enough you find people who are willing to talk of it, though you have to form your own opinion on the matter less from the words they say than from the implications of them; but I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was a man who would be induced either directly or indirectly to speak of that intimate experience. He evidently took his work very seriously. 'Are there other foreigners here?' I asked. 'No.' 'It must be very lonely,' I said. 'I think I prefer it so,' he answered, looking at one of the pictures on the wall. "They'd only be business people, and you know' he smiled'they have n't much use for mission 'Well, by the number of books you have I take it that you get a certain amount of time for reading.' 'I very seldom read,' he answered with abruptness, in a voice that I knew already was not quite his own. I was a little surprised, and now I began to be more puzzled. There was something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable I suppose, he began to talk about the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about them that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty; but a faint light was visible in the East. Though the results of missionary endeavor were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They no longer believed in their old gods, and the power of the literati was broken. It is an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's strictures. He dwelt on the good nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and their love for children. 'Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the Chinese,' said his wife; 'he simply loves them.' 'I think they have great qualities,' he said. 'You can't walk through those crowded streets of theirs without having that impressed on you.' 'I don't believe Mr. Wingrove notices the smells.' His wife laughed. At that moment there was a knock at the door, and a young woman came in. She had the long skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian, and on her face a look that was at once cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs. Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr. Wingrove's face. When he saw her, there passed over it an expression of the most intense physical repulsion. It was distorted as though by an odor that nauseated him, and then immediately the look vanished, and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile; but the effort was too great, and he showed only a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amazement. Mrs. Wingrove, with an 'Excuse me,' got up and left the room. "That is one of our teachers,' said Mr. Wingrove in that same set voice which had puzzled me before. 'She's invaluable. I put infinite reliance on her. She has a very fine character.' Then, I hardly know why, in a flash I saw the truth; I saw the disgust in his soul for all that his will loved. I was filled with the excitement that an explorer may feel when, after an arduous journey, he comes upon a country with features new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained themselves, the unnatural voice, the measured restraint with which he praised, that air he had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he said, he hated the Chinese with a hatred beside which his wife's distaste was insignificant. When he walked through the teeming streets of the city, it was an agony to him; his missionary life revolted him; his soul was like the raw shoulders of the coolies, and the carrying-pole burned the bleeding wound. He would not go home because he could not bear to see again what he cared for so much; he would not read his books because they reminded him of the life he loved so passionately; and perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in order to cut himself off more resolutely from a world that his every instinct craved. He martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation. I tried to see how the call had come. I think that for years he had been completely happy in his easy ways at Oxford, and he had loved his work, with its pleasant companionship, his books, his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented man and asked nothing better than to spend the rest of his days in just such a fashion; but I know not what obscure feeling had gradually taken hold of him that his life was too lazy, too contented. I think he was always a religious man, and perhaps some early belief, instilled into him in childhood and long forgotten, of a jealous God who hated his creatures to be happy on earth, rankled in the depths of his heart; I think, because he was so well satisfied with his life, he began to think it was sinful. A restless anxiety seized him. Whatever he thought with his intelligence, his instincts began to tremble with the dread of eternal punishment. I do not know what put the idea of China into his head, but at first he must have thrust it aside with violent repulsion; and perhaps the very violence of his repulsion impressed the idea on him, for he found it haunting him. I think he said that he would not go, but I think he felt that he would have to. God was pursuing him, and wherever he hid himself God followed. With his reason SANTA CLARA convent, at the northern terminus of Calle Cabildo and opposite the ordnance depot, figures prominently in Jose Rizal's novel, The Social Cancer, as the earthly refuge of the heroine, Maria Clara. Pursued by a love made forlorn, as Rizal would have it appear, by untoward religious scruples, Maria took the vows of a nun and immersed her life in the silence of the convent, where sorrow maddened her. To many Filipinos, Santa Clara convent is known as 'the house of the living death.' To prostrate the body in a coffin is a part of the ceremony of taking the veil and final vows. It is unquestionably true of Santa Clara convent, as of all others, that within its massive walls there lies buried many a romance such as Rizal describes, and the fragile spirits who were once grand actors in these affairs devote their days throughout the cloistered years to turning over the ashes of the dead and buried past. It is the lot they have chosen, an abnegation they have themselves laid upon soul and body, a penance taught them by devotion. 1 From American Chamber of Commerce Journal (Manila trade monthly), February The convent of Santa Clara was founded by nuns of the order from Toledo, Spain, in 1621. It covers two hundred thousand square feet of surface, and extends from Calle Cabildo eastward to the border of the block. South of it, long ago, was the military hospital, which was no doubt destroyed by earthquake and fire. The convent building is an austere, forbidding rectangular stone structure with typical tile roof. There is a chapel in connection with it, and a vicar's cottage on the south, religious administration of the Santa Clara nuns being under the monks of the Franciscan Order. With the founders from Toledo came four sisters of their order from Seville and one from Mexico. A tablet in the parish church of Sampalok, Manila, attests the fact that they were cared for there during the time the convent was being constructed, but the work was completed within the year of their arrival in Manila, thus giving the present structure an unbroken history of more than three centuries. In 1851 the number of nuns was forty, but the community has grown since, it is believed, both in numbers and wealth. Formerly the income was two thousand pesos annually from the royal treasury in the islands and five hundred pesos rental from an encomienda, or estate. Now, however, various of the inmates have willed inheritances of considerable fortunes to the corporation, which must be self-sustaining. One such fortune was fifty thousand dollars gold. It was necessary, of course, for the young nun who bequeathed it to sign the will in the presence of legal witnesses. By absolution of the father confessor, she was permitted to raise her veil in the presence of her attorney, so that he might swear to her identity. Upon her lifting the veil, she was discovered to be very young, and of an aristocratic beauty ravishingly perfect. The gaze of magnetic cherubian orbs was kept demurely lowered, but the full lips of youth at the bloom could scarcely repress a smile. The attorney at least remembers the moment vividly, but with the signing of the papers a dainty hand lowered the veil immediately and a chastened heart turned away to penitent worship and a prayer for a recleansed soul. By the north wall of Santa Clara convent runs Calle Almacenes, separating the convent from the ordnance section of Fort Santiago. Almacenes Street was the site of the royal market during the long period when the overseas commerce of the Philippines was a government monopoly. Here the wares from all the Orient were parceled and classified and baled and bought and bartered for shipment on the galleons plying between Manila and Acapulco. Such scenes! Such a clamor of merchandising at the very base of the silent wall with fleets anchored in the river near by from Japan, China, India, and the Molukkas, and queues of busy and polyglot porters, waist-bare and burdened, these Malays with bundles of spices, those Japanese with Satsuma ware and silks, Chinese with gross packages of tea, Indians and Arabs with rugs and tapestries, now trailing from shipside to market, now trotting hurriedly back for another lot, and always scourged by the curses of the supercargo and the lash of the coolie boss! At the market the usurer closed his deals with his merchant patrons. He often handled the confraternity funds, and neither doctrine nor frequent royal reprimand was sufficient to overcome the rigid law of supply and demand assisted, as it was, on the supply side, by the constant monopoly. But all the tumult could not vault the convent walls, nor disturb the quiet isolation within them. On Calle Maestranza, leading into Almacenes, the world was no less present: here were metal dumps, and men moulding balls and casting canister for the arsenal stores west of the convent and for the caches at the guns of the fort. The serene heights of the cloister overlooked all this. Now, in an age entirely changed by science and invention, the scenes are different. Soldiers divert themselves along Maestranza, just out of eyeshot of the fort. The cloister and the little veiled occupant of every cell must know the airs at least of the latest jazz-tunes, the echoes of raucous harmony from groups of bibulous soldiers vocal with the inspiration of bad but potent vino. Is this, on moonlit nights, disconcerting to a saintly ear? There are still sails in the river, myriads of them, but only those of 'little boats that keep near shore.' They traffic in gross products, not fine wares, which are better left to the custody of steel and steam. |