“Our Glad will never forget us, will you, love?” said her mother. “And we’ll be praying for you every day,” she added, giving Gladys a motherly pat on the hand.
Gladys surveyed the crowd of about fifty people who’d come to wish her well. Even the clerk from Muller’s Shipping Agency was there. Gladys tried to take in every detail so she would always remember the people who had loved and supported her as she worked to make her dream of going to China come true.
Another loud hiss of steam escaped from the locomotive, and Gladys climbed into the carriage. She pulled down the window and waved furiously to everyone. The conductor blew his whistle, and the train began to pull away from the platform. Slowly, Gladys’s friends, relatives, and supporters grew smaller and smaller in the distance, until Gladys sat alone on the train. She was bound for Tientsin, China, with two pounds nine shillings tucked in a pocket in her corset.
It didn’t take Gladys long to make friends on the train. A middle-aged couple took a special interest in her. They had seen all the people farewelling her in London and asked where she was going. Gladys told them that she was on her way to be a missionary in China. The train she was on would take her to Hull, where she would catch a boat to The Hague in Holland. There she would board another train and travel overland through Germany, Poland, and Russia to China.
The couple turned out to be Christians and were on their way back to Holland after attending some Keswick meetings in England. As the English countryside rolled by, Gladys and the couple became firm friends. The three of them boarded the boat for The Hague together, and as the Dutch coastline came into view, the couple made Gladys a promise. They would pray for her every night at 9 p.m. for the rest of their lives. As the couple said good-bye to Gladys on the train in The Hague, the husband shook Gladys’s hand heartily, and his wife kissed Gladys good-bye, as if she were her own sister.
It was not until Gladys had settled into her seat and the train had pulled away from the station that she noticed that the husband had pressed something into her hand. She turned her hand over, and when she opened it, in her palm was a crumpled one-pound note. Gladys was very grateful for the money, though she didn’t know what use English money would be where she was going. But it was kind of him. As soon as she could, she folded the one-pound note, tucked it into one of the pockets in her corset, and quickly forgot about it.
Cities and villages, barns and bridges flashed by as the train wound its way across Europe. Slowly the plains turned into rolling hills, and then the hills turned into mountains. All the while, Gladys sat with her nose up against the carriage window, fascinated by all she was seeing. The farther away the train got from The Hague, the fewer the fellow passengers who spoke English. In Berlin, Germany, Gladys had a difficult time making herself understood to the immigration officer, but thankfully he recognized her British passport and waved her through. The train continued on through Warsaw, Moscow, Irkutsk, and on past Lake Baikal.
Gladys ate meals she made from the food in her suitcase. The eggs her mother had boiled for her she ate in Warsaw, the canned herring in Moscow, and the crackers and cheese while watching Lake Baikal glide by. The only exercise Gladys got on the trip was walking up and down the carriage aisle or walking briskly around the train when it stopped to take on more coal and water for the engine.
Seven days after leaving the Liverpool Street station, Gladys crossed the Ural Mountains that divide Europe from Asia. The first difference she noticed as the train moved across eastern Russia was the extreme cold. Each carriage had small steam radiators for heat, but even sitting sideways with her back against a radiator provided Gladys little heat against the freezing wind that whipped into the train around the edges of the windows. So Gladys kept her fur coat pulled tightly around her.
The next difference that Gladys noted in this part of Russia was the type of passengers on the train. At each stop, more grandmothers and businessmen got off the train, and more soldiers climbed on. By the time the train crossed into Siberia, Gladys was the only civilian on board. This made her very nervous at first. The Russian soldiers were loud and unshaven. Under their arms they carried long loaves of bread, from which they broke off and ate chunks when they were hungry. Any English girl would have found their manners revolting. They ate with their mouths wide open and blew their noses into their fingers. It was hard for Gladys to keep smiling at them. She tried to think of her brother Lawrence. She took his photo from her bag and studied it carefully. He looked handsome in his full-dress uniform. Gladys reminded herself that the soldier sitting next to her, laughing and slapping his friend on the shoulder, was probably someone’s brother. Gladys was grateful that these loud and a bit unruly soldiers were at least polite to her.
After passing Lake Baikal, the train headed southeast in the direction of Harbin, China, where Gladys would transfer to a Manchurian railway train to continue her journey to Tientsin. As darkness fell, the train rumbled on. Gladys dropped off to sleep with her shoulder leaning against the icy window of the carriage.
Gladys awoke sometime later to the conductor yelling at her. She couldn’t understand a word he was saying, of course, but she got the general idea from his actions. He pointed to the small station where the train had stopped, and then he pointed at Gladys and her baggage. He wanted Gladys to take her luggage and get off the train. Gladys shook her head and pulled her two suitcases down from the overhead rack. She stacked them on the floor and sat on them. She decided her little demonstration would get the message across to the conductor that she wouldn’t be getting off the train. The conductor continued yelling at her for several minutes, but Gladys just pulled out her ticket and pointed to the destination of Tientsin, China, written on it. He threw up his hands in disbelief. One last time the conductor tried to convince her to get off. He pretended to shoot a gun and then clutched his chest as if wounded. Still Gladys wouldn’t budge. She had a ticket to China, and every turn of the train wheels down the tracks was a wheel turn closer to her destination. Eventually, the conductor gave up in disgust, and a short while later the train lurched away from the Chita railway station.
The train moved through the black Siberian night. Trees lined the railroad tracks and towered menacingly above the train. Gladys was glad to be tucked in her warm coat inside the train with its lights and heaters. She was even glad for her noisy fellow travelers. The train was now completely filled with soldiers, but their presence gave Gladys courage as they passed through the lonely, desolate countryside. It was very late in the evening when the train whistle sounded and the engine hissed to a stop. A Russian officer stood and yelled something at the men. The soldiers grabbed their knapsacks and formed a line outside the carriage. Gladys watched them march on down the tracks, their breath forming white puffs in the icy darkness. In the distance, wolves howled.
Gladys turned away from the window just as the train was plunged into blackness. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She listened carefully; the train was no longer hissing. A thought occurred to her that caused her to panic. What if the train had stopped here for good? She grabbed her suitcases and made her way down the aisle to the end of the carriage. Suddenly an unfamiliar noise burst into the carriage. Pop. Pop. Pop. Gladys began to tremble. Even though she’d never heard the sound before, she had no doubt it was gunfire, and it was very close. She peered from the train in the direction the soldiers had marched and saw flares of light in the sky.
Gladys no longer felt safe on the train. She had to get off and find shelter. She dropped her suitcases to the ground and climbed off the train. She had to find someone to talk to, but how would anyone understand her? Her heart was thumping hard inside her chest. She looked around and saw a rickety wooden building at the end of a station platform.
Gladys pushed on the door of the small wooden building. The door creaked open. There were no lights inside, but Gladys could make out four men huddled around a small woodstove. Each man held a large mug, and Gladys could smell strong coffee. She recognized three of the men: the engineer from the train, the fireman, and the conductor who had tried so hard to get her off the train in Chita. As soon as Gladys entered the room, the conductor jumped up from his perch on an upturned box and started yelling at her again. She was sure he was saying, “I told you so.” Indeed, he had told her so. After several minutes of ranting at Gladys in Russian, he abruptly sat back down and offered her a cup of coffee. She nodded and pulled up one of her suitcases to sit on. She took the mug from the conductor, and for several minutes they all sat in silence, sipping their steaming drinks.
When Gladys had drained her mug of coffee, the conductor launched into a charade like the one he’d acted out back in Chita. This time he had help from the engineer. First, they pointed to the east and made popping noises. Gladys nodded; now she understood—a war was going on down the tracks. Next they pretended to pick up her bags and walk out the door, pointing back up the railroad tracks towards Chita. Gladys understood this, too, but their meaning was like a bad dream to her. Surely they didn’t expect her to walk back to Chita. She frowned at them.
The two men then launched into a longer act. They pretended to shoot at each other. Then they dragged each other towards the train. They held up all their fingers several times, and reluctantly Gladys nodded her head. They were telling her the train would stay right where it was until it was filled with wounded soldiers, and only then would it return to Chita.
Gladys tried to think of a way to ask them how long it would be before the train made the return journey. She looked desperately around the room until her eyes fixed on an old yellowed calendar. She began a charade of her own. She rushed over to the calendar and started pointing to the days one at a time. Then she looked at the men and shrugged her shoulders. The engineer nodded, he seemed to understand what she was asking. He held up both hands and flashed all ten fingers. Then he shrugged his shoulders and flashed twenty fingers, and then he shrugged again and flashed thirty fingers. Gladys had her answer. The train could be at the station for ten or twenty or perhaps even thirty days. Gladys didn’t have enough supplies with her to last that long, and besides, the men hadn’t invited her to stay or offered to share their supplies with her. And why should they? The conductor had done everything in his power, short of picking her up and throwing her off the train in Chita, to prevent her from being here. It was obvious from the way the men acted that they expected her to walk back up the tracks to Chita.
When she could finally see no other course of action, Gladys picked up her two suitcases, stepped off the makeshift station platform, and headed out into the frozen wasteland. The tiny station building soon faded into the night as she followed the snow-covered railroad tracks. Huge pine trees lined both sides of the tracks. Every now and then the sky behind her would light up with the flash of cannon fire. With each flash, Gladys would catch a glimpse of the silhouetted train in the distance. Soon, though, she turned a bend in the tracks and was completely alone. Two weeks earlier she had been standing on the busy platform of Liverpool Street station saying good-bye to all her family and friends. Now she was walking alone in the middle of the night along snow-covered railroad tracks in Siberia. “I want to go to China to serve you, God. Don’t let me die here,” she prayed over and over with every step she took.
Chapter 4
“It’s Missionary, Not Machinery!”
Gladys awoke shivering. She was pulled up into a ball with fresh snow piled on top of her. She was colder than she’d ever been in her life. She had no feeling in her hands or feet. Still, she had awakened. She was alive. She hadn’t frozen to death while she slept. She looked around. It was still dark, and for the moment it had stopped snowing. Looking up she could make out the forms of pine trees looming over her. Bit by bit, in her cold, foggy mind, she remembered how she had come to be sleeping in the Siberian snow. Gladys groaned as she stumbled to her frostbitten feet. She fumbled for her two suitcases. She had to keep going. Somehow, she had to make it back to Chita.
