At last, Gladys was out on the pitch-black street without the official following her. Other than the light from the hotel lobby, not a light was to be seen. After leaving the glow of the hotel lobby, Gladys had to squint to see the man in front of her. She and the man stayed close to the sides of buildings as they walked. Gladys stumbled through potholes, wondering where she was going. Slowly, as she began to adjust to the situation, she noticed some clues. There was a salty smell in the air, like the smell of the dock in Hull where she’d caught the boat to Holland three weeks before. On the skyline in the distance she could make out some tall, thin towers, far too thin to be buildings. Gladys was sure they were headed towards the docks and guessed that the towers were cranes. Was she about to be put on a ship to China instead of on a train? She didn’t care, as long as whatever it was took her away from the danger she was in.
Gladys stumbled on over railway lines and into a large paved area. Packing cases were stacked everywhere, and from behind one packing case emerged the girl from the hotel with the long black hair. Gladys walked towards her. When she looked back, the man in the overcoat was fading into the shadows of the night. Gladys wanted to thank him, but she knew she dare not call out to him. Within seconds he was gone. Gladys turned back to the girl.
“You made it,” the girl said with admiration.
“Yes,” replied Gladys. “Why are you helping me?”
“When we are able, we help those who need help,” was the girl’s reply. Then she went on. “But now I can do no more for you. You must take the next step alone. See that freighter over there?” She pointed towards the dark outline of a ship in the distance.
Gladys nodded.
“It is a Japanese ship,” she went on. “It sails at dawn for Tsuruga, Japan, and you must be on it. No matter what, you must be on it.”
“But I don’t have any money for the fare,” interrupted Gladys.
The girl looked her straight in the eye. “Beg the captain, do whatever you have to do, but get on that ship. It is your only hope.”
Gladys nodded again.
“The captain of the ship is in that hut over there. You must make him take you with him.” The girl pointed to a ramshackle wooden hut in the direction of the ship just beyond the stacks of packing crates.
A little frightened, Gladys knew what she had to do. She reached for the young girl’s bare hands. “You’ve saved my life, and I have nothing to give you,” she said. Then she had an idea. She stripped off her woolen gloves and handed them to the girl. Then she took the old pair of stockings from her coat pocket and handed them over as well. “They’re not much, but they’re all I have.”
The girl nodded and smiled and then nudged Gladys toward the hut. “Good luck,” she said as she turned and slipped away into the shadows.
The single lightbulb that lit the inside of the hut blinded Gladys’s eyes for a moment as she walked in out of the darkness. As her eyes adjusted, she saw four Japanese men playing cards around a makeshift table.
Gladys took a deep breath. “I need to talk to the captain of the freighter,” she said.
The man closest to her stood up and in good English said, “What can I do for you?”
“I must get on your ship,” said Gladys frantically.
The captain looked at her fur overcoat with no sleeves, her crumpled orange dress, filthy shoes, and gloveless hands and asked whether she had money to pay for the trip.
“No, I have nothing. But you must let me on your ship. You must. I’m a British citizen, and I must get away from here,” begged Gladys, thrusting her passport at him.
The captain flicked through it. “You have nothing of value at all?” he questioned. “No jewelry, no watch, no money?”
Gladys shook her head. She had forgotten about the one-pound note in her pocket. Anyway, it was such a small amount it wouldn’t have bought her passage on a ship. She held her breath and waited for what he would say next.
“A British citizen in trouble,” he said. “We cannot have that. But I cannot take you as a passenger if you can’t pay.”
Gladys’s heart sank.
“But,” continued the captain, a little smile on his lips, “a prisoner, I could take you as a prisoner, and then you would be under my protection. I would have to hand you over to the British authorities in Tsuruga. Would that do?” he asked kindly.
Tears of relief welled in Gladys’s eyes. “Yes, yes,” she enthusiastically replied, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I will gladly be your prisoner. Anything is better than staying here.”
The captain reached into the satchel he had with him and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Please sign the form, and then we will go.”
Gladys couldn’t read a word of what she signed. It was all written in Japanese, but somehow she trusted the captain. As soon as the paper was signed, the four men rose from the table and headed into the darkness. Gladys gratefully followed them.
They reached the pier where the freighter was moored, and the sailors jumped aboard. There was only a foot-and-a-half gap between the ship and the pier. Instead of jumping straight aboard as the sailors had, Gladys put her bags down for a moment to take a deep breath before she jumped. It was a bad decision. Suddenly, Gladys heard the sound of jackboots running on cobblestones. She grabbed her bags, but it was too late. Six large Russian soldiers surrounded her and towered over her. She looked to the ship for help; the sailors watched, but they did not move. She was still on Russian soil, and she supposed the sailors dared not interfere with the soldiers.
Gladys had to think fast. Suddenly, she remembered the pound note in her coat pocket. She spun around and threw her bags onto the ship. Quickly, she pulled the pound note from her coat pocket, waved it in the air, and then let it go. As it fluttered to the ground, six pairs of eyes focused on it, and six pairs of hands grasped for it. While the soldiers’ attention was momentarily diverted, Gladys jumped aboard ship and began running up the stairway towards the captain on the bridge. The soldiers yelled at her, but it was too late. The captain had given the order to cast off, and the freighter began to drift away from the dock before the soldiers could do anything. Gladys was safe. She was headed for Japan and away from Russia.
Another passenger—a German woman—was onboard with Gladys. The two women swapped stories of their perilous journeys through Russia. The German woman’s hands were bandaged, and she unwrapped them to show Gladys. The skin had been peeled back on several of her fingers, and Gladys could see muscles and even parts of bone underneath. She couldn’t imagine how the woman could have injured herself in such a way. Then she heard the story of what had happened. The German woman had been robbed by a mob of Russian men. Everything, including her luggage, money, coat, gloves, and scarf had been stolen. The robbers also demanded the rings the woman had been wearing. When she hesitated, they ripped them off, tearing skin and flesh from her fingers. After hearing the woman’s story, Gladys was even more grateful to know that every turn of the ship’s propeller was taking her farther away from the Communist nightmare she had just traveled through.
Things went much better for Gladys when she reached Tsuruga, a small port on Japan’s west coast. The captain of the ship personally handed his “prisoner” over to an official from the British consulate who brought Gladys a huge meal and paid for her train ticket to Kobe, though not before telling her he thought she was crazy. In Kobe, Gladys found a missionary compound and was welcomed inside. She had a wonderful hot bath and slept in a comfortable bed for the first time since leaving London. While she slept, one of the missionaries took the unused part of her train ticket from Chita to Harbin and traded it for a boat trip to Tientsin. And so on Saturday, November 5, 1930, twenty-one days after leaving London for China, Gladys began the final leg of her journey on a steamship.
As the ship weaved its way through the southern islands of Japan and then steamed out across the Yellow Sea, Gladys thanked God that the journey was nearly over. In Tientsin, Mrs. Lawson would be waiting for her. Soon she would finally be able to begin her missionary work in China.
Little did Gladys know that Mrs. Lawson had not seriously expected a housemaid from London to actually make it all the way to China, and Mrs. Lawson was nowhere near Tientsin. If Gladys wanted to work with Mrs. Lawson, she was going to have to find her first.
Chapter 6
The Road Ends Here
Gladys felt the color drain from her face. “How long would that take?” she stammered to ask the principal of the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin. She had just been told that Mrs. Lawson hadn’t been in Tientsin for quite some time, and the last anyone had heard of her, she was to the west in the town of Tsechow in Shansi province. Gladys wanted to burst into tears. Everything about her journey was turning out to be a hundred times harder than she’d imagined.
The principal, a short man with a balding head, smiled kindly at her. “It’s quite a journey to Tsechow, but a very pretty one. First you must travel one hundred miles by train to Peking, and then take another train about two hundred and fifty miles southwest to Yutsu, where the railway ends. From there you’ll have to take buses south until you reach Tsechow. All in all, it will take you a day to get to Peking, three more to Yutsu, and perhaps another fifteen to twenty days by bus to get to Tsechow.”
Gladys echoed, “Fifteen to twenty days?” She was too stunned to ask anything else. She’d traveled for three weeks to get to Tientsin, only to find out she still had another three or more weeks of traveling ahead of her before she reached Mrs. Lawson. She was barely halfway through her journey! Her shoulders slumped forward, and she slid into a nearby chair, thinking about all she’d been through to get this far and what might lie ahead for her.
The missionaries in Tientsin were kind to Gladys, who spent several days with them, resting from her trip across Russia and Siberia and eating every bit of food they gave her. The missionaries also gave her the money she needed for the last leg of her journey. They understood her disappointment, and they encouraged her to go on and find Mrs. Lawson. Virtually no Christians lived in the part of China that Mrs. Lawson had gone to, and missionaries were much needed in that region. Not only that, since Mrs. Lawson had lived in China for nearly fifty years, there was a lot Gladys could learn from her about being a missionary to the Chinese.
Three days after arriving in Tientsin by ship, Gladys felt strong enough to continue her journey. She was grateful for all that the local missionaries had done for her. They had even located a Christian businessman, Mr. Lu, who was traveling in the same direction and would escort Gladys most of the way to Tsechow. Wearing her freshly washed clothes, and with her suitcase restocked with tea and bags of rice and noodles, Gladys set out to find Mrs. Lawson.
Mr. Lu was a wonderful traveling companion. He spoke good English, and he explained a lot of the history of China to Gladys as they went along. At school, Gladys had finished at the bottom of her history class. But what Mr. Lu was explaining to her wasn’t dusty history from a school textbook. As they rolled past pagodas and temples, villages and neatly cultivated rice fields, the history Gladys was hearing about seemed to come alive right before her eyes.
In the distance, Mr. Lu pointed out the mountains that the Great Wall of China ran along. He explained that the Great Wall was built to keep out the Tartars. Well, not really the Tartars themselves, but their horses. He explained that men could climb over the wall, but there was no way to get a horse over it. When the Tartars had to leave their horses on one side and go on without them, they were not nearly as strong or invincible as they had been with their horses. Mr. Lu tried to be polite as he explained that China had always fought to keep foreigners out, and Chinese people, especially those who lived in the country, still thought foreigners were devils. Gladys laughed nervously as he told her this. She wondered how anyone could think of her as a devil. She would find out soon enough.
