That night, as they entered the village of Chowtsun, Gladys had better luck. An old muleteer who had stayed at the Inn of Eight Happinesses the night before told her that Mrs. Lawson was not in Yangcheng. Yang had told him she’d taken a trip farther up into the mountains. No one knew for sure where she was headed. Yang, apparently, had heard nothing about any accident.
Gladys could feel her stomach churn. Mrs. Lawson wasn’t with gentle old Yang after all. She was in the hands of strangers in some mountain village, that is, if she was still alive. Gladys had to find her, and fast.
It took four more days of questions before Gladys found the small, walled village of Chin Shui, where she found Mrs. Lawson. The situation was worse than anything Gladys could have imagined. Gladys found Mrs. Lawson, battered and bruised and covered in dried blood, lying in an open courtyard on a pile of coal. At first Gladys thought Mrs. Lawson was dead. But as she rushed to her, Mrs. Lawson opened her eyes and smiled. “Gladys? Is that you, Gladys? I’m so glad you are here,” she said.
Gladys sat down on the heap of coal beside Mrs. Lawson and lifted her friend’s head onto her lap. Mrs. Lawson winced in pain. Gladys called for hot water and a cloth and began sponging the black dust and encrusted blood from the old woman’s face. As she cleansed Mrs. Lawson, Gladys became more and more angry. She looked up, and above Mrs. Lawson was a balcony with a broken railing. Suddenly, Gladys knew what had happened. Mrs. Lawson had fallen from the balcony, and she had been lying out in the cold on this pile of coal for over a week. No one had tried to move her inside or dress her wounds. Gladys knew that it was only because Mrs. Lawson was such a stubborn old thing that she was still alive.
Gladys took charge. A curious crowd of onlookers had gathered to see what was happening. In her best Yangcheng Chinese, she began to bark out orders.
“You six, over here. We need to lift this woman.”
“Bring your lanterns over here.”
“Get me some strips of cloth.”
“Tell the innkeeper we need a private room with a warm k’ang, and we need it right away.”
Just as Gladys had hoped, the unusual experience of being told what to do by a foreign devil spurred them into action. Within an hour, Mrs. Lawson was cleaned up, with her wounds dressed. As far as Gladys could tell, the wounds were not life threatening. Mrs. Lawson seemed to have broken most of the bones in both of her hands, and she had cuts and bruises all over, but nothing else seemed to be wrong.
As she lay on a padded bedroll on a k’ang, Mrs. Lawson looked up at Gladys with grateful eyes. “I’m so glad you came,” she repeated over and over.
“So am I,” replied Gladys, truthfully. She shuddered as she thought about what might have happened if she’d been just a day later.
When Mrs. Lawson slept, Gladys crept from the room to ask some very important questions. She found the innkeeper and fired away. “Why did you leave Mrs. Lawson on the coal pile for over a week?” she asked.
The innkeeper replied, “Everyone was sure the old white devil was going to die at any minute. We asked ourselves, ‘Why cause her pain by moving her?’”
“Then why didn’t you clean her wounds?” asked Gladys, continuing her questions.
The innkeeper looked a little sheepish. “She is a white devil, no one wanted to touch her…and she never asked for food, so we did not feed her,” he added, guessing Gladys’s next question.
Gladys shook her head. Sometimes she wondered whether she would ever understand the villagers’ reasoning. How could they let a semiconscious woman starve to death in the cold because she didn’t ask for food! Frustrated, Gladys gave up on questioning the innkeeper and went back to see how Mrs. Lawson was doing.
By the next morning, Gladys had decided on a plan of action. She would stay at the inn with Mrs. Lawson until she was strong enough to go back to Yangcheng. The nearest European doctor was in Luan, six days away by mule train, and there was no way Mrs. Lawson could make such a journey in her present condition.
For six weeks, Gladys stayed at the inn in Chin Shui nursing Mrs. Lawson. At first she’d had great hope for Mrs. Lawson’s recovery. Her wounds began to heal, and her hands were getting stronger. But something was not right. As the rest of her body got stronger, Mrs. Lawson’s back got sorer, and her mind became more confused. Things weren’t going as Gladys had hoped, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Finally, she decided that Mrs. Lawson needed to see the doctor, no matter how torturous the journey to get to him might be. With the help of the cook at the inn, Gladys found a muleteer who was prepared to take her and Mrs. Lawson to Luan.
To make the trip as comfortable as possible, Gladys slung a blanket between two mules and had Mrs. Lawson lifted carefully into it. Mrs. Lawson lay between the two mules for six long days. When they got to the hospital, Gladys wondered whether it had been worth the effort and discomfort after all. The English doctor examined Mrs. Lawson and told Gladys she was slowly dying and there was nothing that he or anyone else could do about it.
The next day, Mrs. Lawson begged Gladys to take her home, so Gladys arranged one last journey for the seventy-four-year-old missionary. The two women returned to Yangcheng, where Yang was waiting for them. When he saw Mrs. Lawson’s condition, Yang made a special batch of her favorite soup and ordered her coffin. Two weeks later, Mrs. Lawson was buried in the coffin as Gladys and Yang wept. Mrs. Lawson’s funeral was the first Christian burial ever held in Yangcheng.
After the funeral, as Gladys sat beside the grave of the woman she’d come halfway around the world to serve, fear crept into her heart. Mrs. Lawson’s death had changed everything. Gladys was now the only European in the district. The closest person she could speak to in English was two days away by mule train. Gladys felt more alone than she’d ever felt before, more alone than when she was in the Siberian wilderness walking along the railroad tracks back to Chita. She was deep in the heart of China with no money, no friends, and no missionary organization to back her.
Still, alone as she was, Gladys told herself she had to go on. All around Yangcheng, people needed to hear the gospel message, and she was the only one left to share that message with them.
Chapter 9
The Honorable Foot Inspector
No one knew why Mrs. Lawson had gone to Chin Shui. Perhaps she was looking for a new location to start another inn. Perhaps she needed to get away and think about things after she’d lost her temper and thrown Gladys out. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Lawson never told anybody why she was leaving Yangcheng or where she was going.
Gladys soon discovered something else Mrs. Lawson hadn’t told her: how much it cost to run the inn. It was true that the Inn of Eight Happinesses made enough money to cover the cost of rent, coal for the k’ang, and food, but each year a large amount was paid in taxes to the mandarin. Mrs. Lawson had paid this amount from her small monthly income and had said nothing about it to Gladys or Yang. But with Mrs. Lawson gone, there was no extra income to pay the taxes, which were now due.
Gladys had no idea where the money to pay these taxes would come from. She discussed the problem with Yang, who offered only one solution: She must go and bow before the mandarin.
“What difference would that make?” Gladys asked impatiently. “I don’t see any point to it.”
“You don’t need to have a point. It is just something you should do. You will see the point when you get there,” replied the old cook.
“How do I do it, then? What do I say?” Gladys asked.
Yang frowned. “That’s a difficult question. I will ask in town.” With that he headed out the door.
Yang was back about an hour later, but he didn’t have good news to report. Since Mrs. Lawson and Gladys were the first two foreigners to live in Yangcheng, there were no set rules for how many times Gladys should bow to the mandarin, or exactly what she should say to him, or in what order. This posed a difficult problem because, as Yang pointed out, making a mistake in protocol when addressing the mandarin could be deadly. Gladys thought of the mandarin’s soldier with his long curved sword at the execution in the marketplace and shuddered at just how deadly some mistakes could be with the mandarin.
In the end, Yang decided that Gladys should put on her best clothes and ask the mandarin’s secretary whether he would grant her an appointment to see the mandarin. If he agreed, they would then work out the details of what she should say at the meeting. Gladys just shook her head. She had no “best” clothes. The only clothes she had were the quilted blue trousers and jacket she was wearing, and they weren’t suitable clothes to bow before a mandarin in. The mandarin was the highest official in the district. It would be completely disrespectful to have an audience with him in such clothes, and Gladys didn’t have the money to buy any other clothes. The case was closed. Gladys would not be seeing the mandarin anytime soon. She would just have to find some other way to deal with paying the taxes.
About a week later, Gladys was upstairs writing a letter to some friends in England when she heard a commotion downstairs. She could hear unfamiliar sounds, like the clanging of bells and the rhythmic thump of marching feet. She hurried downstairs to see what it was. Yang met her in the doorway. “The mandarin is coming. The mandarin is coming,” he blurted out.
Gladys was excited. The mandarin rarely came out of his palace, or “yamen,” as it was called. If she hurried, she could see him passing by the Inn of Eight Happinesses!
“Where is the best place to see him pass?” she asked Yang.
Yang stared at her. Then a look of understanding crossed his face. “No, no. He is not passing by, he is coming here. Here to the Inn of Eight Happinesses. He wants to talk to you.”
Gladys’s eyes grew wider and wider. “But why me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Yang replied. “You should have gone and bowed to him when I told you to. Now maybe he is angry.”
Yang backed his way out the door, and before Gladys could ask another question, he had turned and fled down the street in the opposite direction from the mandarin. As she watched him disappear around the corner, Gladys thought he ran surprisingly fast for an old man.
By now the procession was so close that Gladys could see the neat rows of soldiers marching in front of the mandarin’s satin-draped sedan chair, which was carried on the shoulders of eight servants. Behind the chair were several advisors dressed in beautiful embroidered gowns.
Gladys stood rooted to the spot, unable to do any more than pull a few wayward strands of hair back into her bun and adjust her well-worn jacket.
Suddenly a shout came from the soldier leading the parade, and the entire procession came to a halt. The servants set the sedan chair down, and with a loud clang of bells, another servant pulled back the curtain around it and offered the mandarin his arm. With a flourish, the mandarin took it and stepped out. His eyes swept the courtyard. Gladys bowed low, and then bowed again. She wished she knew what to do next, but she didn’t. So she bowed once again, just in case it was necessary, and then she waited for the mandarin to make the next move.
He broke the silence. “You are Gladys Aylward, I presume?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gladys replied, in her best Yangcheng dialect.
“I have come to ask your help,” the mandarin continued.
“My help?” Gladys echoed in amazement. She couldn’t think of a way she could possibly help a mandarin.
“Yes,” replied the mandarin. “I have a problem, and only you can solve it for me. There is a new government in Nanking, as you must know, and as all new governments do, they have made new rules. One of the new rules is that foot binding is to be stopped in China. The new government is holding each mandarin personally responsible to make sure foot binding stops in his district.”
Gladys nodded. She was pleased to hear that the cruel practice was going to be banned, but she had no idea how it involved her.
