Edith stayed behind in London while her mother and Alfred were in the United States. And in London she gave birth to a second child, a son they named Lionel.
There was other news too. Priscilla decided that C.T. needed a secretary and announced that a Miss May Wilson had been dispatched to the Congo. Miss Wilson was bringing with her a supply of paper and her own typewriter. C.T. was not sure whether he liked this idea. Up until now he had been handling his own correspondence, though in a quiet moment he did have to admit that at sixty years of age it was getting a little much for him.
While he was somewhat indifferent about the arrival of Miss Wilson, C.T. looked forward to Alfred’s return. He had no idea of the great struggle that lay ahead for both of them.
Chapter 15
A New Venture
Welcome back!” C.T. said as he gave Alfred a hearty slap on the back. He turned to Edith and hugged her. “God understands your sacrifice,” he whispered in her ear. He was referring to the fact that Edith had left both of her children, two-and-a-half-year-old Susan and baby Lionel, back in England with her mother-in-law. Both children had chest complaints, and doctors had warned Alfred and Edith that it would endanger their lives for them to return to the Congo with their parents.
It was early 1921, though C.T. had all but forgotten the importance of European time. He had been living in the Congo for five years now without a break, and he did not want one. “No,” he told anyone who asked. “God told me to come to the Congo, and I’m not leaving until He tells me to!”
By now C.T. walked with a stoop, and all of his teeth were either broken or missing completely. “Don’t you want to go home and get a new set of teeth made?” people would ask him.
“If God wants me to have some new teeth, He can just as easily send someone to me as send me to them!” C.T. would reply.
His fellow missionaries laughed at this and remonstrated him for being impossible, but C.T. did not care.
Now that Alfred and Edith were back in Nala, C.T. thought about moving to another location. He had made several preaching trips south to Ibambi, and he was impressed with the amazing number of new believers in the area. After praying about it, C.T. felt that God was directing him to move there.
Word that Bwana Mukubwa was on his way to Ibambi spread quickly, and hundreds of Christians gathered to sing hymns for C.T. as he walked through their territory. C.T. was overwhelmed by the gesture.
Once in Ibambi, it did not take C.T. long to set up house. He still used the same folding chair and cot that he had brought to the jungle with him. On his second day in Ibambi, he began learning Kingwana, the local language. And just as in Nala, Ibambi soon became a hub of Christian activity in the area.
Five hours’ walk beyond Ibambi lay the village of Chief Imbai. The residents of this village had constructed a church that seated 1,250 people. The church was known as the “cricket pitch church,” because it was the length of a cricket pitch. Sometimes when C.T. stood at the front of this church, he thought of his cricketing days. Staring down the long building, he imagined he was up to bat, his eyes focused on the bowler at the other end of the pitch. But his cricket days seemed far off to him now—a lifetime away, in fact. What mattered to C.T. now were not the cheers of the spectators or the opinion of sports commentators but the souls of those around him.
Always C.T. looked for signs that the African converts—men, women, and children—understood the gospel and that their lives were truly changed by it. He saw many such signs. In fact, Chief Imbai was a case in point. He had been called before the Belgian officials and told, “You are entitled to ask six hundred francs a year in rent for the church Bwana Mukubwa uses. We will write up the documents and help you collect the money.”
“Oh, no!” Chief Imbai replied. “I have given that land to God, and I cannot take any money for it now.”
The Belgian officials could not believe what the chief was saying, and so they repeated the offer three times. Each time they got the same answer, until they came to accept the fact that Chief Imbai refused to take any of the payment to which he was entitled.
At another village, three hours’ walk from Ibambi, six hundred Africans met every Sunday for worship. Many of them brought mats with them so they could sleep the night in the church and continue the service on Monday.
Wherever C.T. was, he preached and read the Bible aloud. Often, when he stopped, the people sent up howls of protest. “Don’t stop now,” the old men and women would yell. “We have not heard these words before, and we may die before we hear them again, so keep reading to us.”
In all his forty years as a missionary, C.T. had never seen such openness to the gospel. More native missionaries than ever before were going out to witness to other tribes, and the stories they told were amazing. One missionary was beaten for witnessing in a village, and when the beating was over, he got up, shook the chief’s hand, and thanked him for the honor of being beaten for Jesus. Another missionary was put in jail, and within a few hours many of his new converts crowded around the jail, asking for the privilege of being locked up along with their brother.
These stories and many others like them convinced C.T. that he was in the right place. Although the mission board at home and his two sons-in-law in the Congo tried to persuade him that he needed to go home for a break, C.T. would not hear of it. He wrote to the board, trying his best to explain himself.
And do you think that I can consent to turn a deaf ear to the cries of these people clamoring for the gospel and craving for teachers? If I can’t send them teachers because there are no teachers to send, yet at least I can stop one yawning gap myself. If I am not so efficient as youngsters, yet at least I may be more efficient than an absentee, a nobody. And if others have failed to hear and respond to these awful pleadings of sinful men going to hell, yet desiring to know the way to heaven, at least my presence can assure them that there is still some who to save them will count life and all they hold dear as of no account in comparison.
Bouts of malaria continued to plague C.T. at regular intervals. One night, soon after he had settled in at Ibambi, he was so ill that Alfred and Edith came to take care of him. They brought news that Pauline had given birth to a healthy boy, whom she and Norman named Noel. Alfred bathed C.T. and sat with him until midnight and then returned to the adjoining hut to get some rest.
About two hours later C.T. was awakened by a piercing scream. It was Edith. Moments later she dashed into C.T.’s hut. “Father, it’s Alfred,” she gasped. “He started convulsing, and now he’s not moving.”
C.T. willed himself to get up from his cot, and leaning on Edith for support, he shuffled over to examine his son-in-law. Alfred lay in bed under his mosquito net, breathing lightly. C.T.’s shaking hands ran over Alfred’s neck and chest and down to his wrist to take his pulse.
“This must be some kind of fit,” C.T. told his daughter.
C.T. sat propped up beside Alfred the rest of the night, though it would have been difficult for anyone looking in to say who was the nurse and who was the patient. By morning Alfred was conscious again, though he was weak and disoriented. It was weeks before he was able to take up his normal workload again.
By now forty missionaries were working in the Congo with WEC, and letters arrived from Priscilla saying that WEC had finally expanded its work into the Amazon, sending three missionaries there as an advance team. And thanks to Priscilla and Alfred’s visit to the United States the year before, an American arm of WEC had been established. Now WEC U.S.A. was promising to send missionaries to the Congo within the year.
As for the missionaries already serving with C.T., many of them were courageous and self-sacrificing. However, inevitably some began to question the austere life C.T. asked them to lead. They asked what was wrong with having a day off or a wooden table and chairs and glass windows in their huts, and even food supplies from home so they could enjoy a Western meal once in a while.
C.T. hardly knew how to respond to these “soft” missionaries. As in the past, he found his outlet in pouring out his feelings in his journal.
While here in the saddle I intend to ride and get others to ride, and not be carried to heaven on a flowery bed of ease. Let us do one thing or the other—either eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, or let us gamble with life and death and all for our Lord Jesus. None but gamblers wanted out here; let the grumblers go home.
Several months later, news came that Noel Grubb, Pauline and Norman’s son, had died suddenly on his first birthday. C.T. grieved for his daughter and son-in-law, remembering the two sons he had buried, but he continued to bury himself in the work around him. He spent his weekdays teaching and translating in the Kingwana language and his weekends evangelizing in the outlying areas.
C.T. liked to start his weekend trips at seven o’clock on Friday night. That meant he could work all day Friday and then, when it got dark, set off for his destination. In his younger days, he had walked or bicycled everywhere he went, but now he allowed eight strong men to carry him in a canvas pole-chair. Those carrying him were committed Christians. Otherwise they could never have been induced to venture out at night into leopard-infested jungles. C.T. hated being treated as someone important, but he had to concede that he was too weak to get far on his own.
C.T. took very little with him on his trips, just a few blankets, a lamp, some medicines to give out along the way, and his Bible. He would climb into the pole-chair, which would then be gently lifted onto the willing shoulders of his carriers. The leader would carry a spear and a lantern and head off into the night. C.T. would normally order a halt around midnight and settle down to rest until daylight. Then the party would carry him on the last few miles to their destination. Meanwhile, the natives along the way beat news of Bwana Mukubwa’s arrival, and hundreds of people would start out to meet C.T.
When he arrived at a mission station, C.T. would have a cup of tea and talk to the missionaries about what was going on in the local area. Then he would lie down for a while to gather strength for a big midday service. C.T. was always awed by the number of people who straggled in to hear him speak. It was not unusual for over two thousand people, prompted by the drums, to gather for a service, where they would sing hymns, pray, and listen to a sermon. At night a large, fallen tree limb would often be set alight to warm anyone who wanted to stay overnight. Most people did stay, and sometimes they’d stay the night after that. It was not unusual for C.T. to have to announce on a Wednesday morning that he had to get back to his other work and say good-bye to the gathered crowd.
It was a grueling schedule, but one that C.T. drove himself to keep. C.T. felt that not a minute was to be wasted!
In the rainy season of 1921, two sets of people came to Ibambi. The first comprised an Englishman and his three porters. The man strolled into C.T.’s hut one afternoon and greeted C.T. as one would greet an old friend.
“My name is John Buck. I have come a long way to meet you, sir,” he said.
“Well, drink tea with me and tell me who you are,” C.T. replied.
“I suppose I should start at the beginning,” the visitor said as he sank into one of C.T.’s spare folding chairs. “I am a dentist, and a year and a half ago God told me to go to the Congo and fix your teeth. I applied to WEC to be a dentist missionary, but they rejected me because I was too old.”
C.T. studied John Buck’s face, and, concluding that John must be only half his own age, he laughed.
“Anyway, I still had my heavenly orders to fix your teeth, so I gave up my business in London and sailed for Africa. I would have been here sooner, but I took six months’ work in Nairobi to earn the money for the rest of the journey. So here I am.”
