Gladys climbed down from her perch on the mule, picked up her bags, which the muleteer had deposited on the cobblestones beside her, and followed Mrs. Lawson into the dilapidated building, wondering as she did so what she’d gotten herself into this time.
Chapter 7
Inn of Eight Happinesses
Mrs. Lawson led Gladys across the courtyard, down a passage, and into a large room. There was a k’ang along one wall, and several wooden boxes fashioned into a table and chairs were along the other. Mrs. Lawson motioned for Gladys to sit down and called out something in Chinese. In response, an old Chinese man bustled into the room. Mrs. Lawson introduced him to Gladys as Yang, the cook. Yang smiled a toothless smile at Gladys and then listened to the instructions Mrs. Lawson gave him in Chinese. When she had finished, Yang bowed and left the room.
Mrs. Lawson explained that she had rented the big house for two years. The people of Yangcheng thought it was haunted, and no one had been in it for years. Of course, being “haunted” meant she had been able to rent it very cheaply. Gladys smiled as best she could, but the place was nothing at all like the homey, comfortable house she’d imagined. And Mrs. Lawson wasn’t the sweet old lady she’d expected. Mrs. Lawson barked out questions and then didn’t bother to wait for a reply.
Gladys was wishing Mrs. Lawson were more like Mrs. Smith in Tsechow, when Yang reappeared with a steaming bowl of noodles and vegetables. Gladys gulped the soup down. In her excitement to get to Yangcheng, she’d forgotten just how hungry she was. After enjoying two bowls of soup, she cleared her throat. “Where would you like me to put my things and sleep tonight?” she asked.
“Anywhere you can find. I don’t care. One room is as messy as the next, and none of them have doors,” Mrs. Lawson replied.
Gladys picked up her bags and wandered around the house. The rooms on the second floor had balconies that overlooked the courtyard below, although the view wasn’t scenic. In the end, Gladys settled on a downstairs room that had more junk in it than most of the other rooms but didn’t smell as bad.
After choosing a room and putting her bags away, Gladys decided to stretch her legs and take a short walk around her new neighborhood. She slipped through the gateway and out into the narrow street where the muleteer had let her off less than an hour before. Farther down the street, a group of women carrying water jars stopped to stare at Gladys, who waved to them. Suddenly, without even talking to one another, each of the women put down her jar, picked up clods of mud and dirt, and hurled them at Gladys. Some little children ran from a nearby courtyard and giggled with delight at what was happening.
Gladys turned and fled, clods of mud thudding against the back of her pants as she ran. Once she was safely inside the courtyard of Mrs. Lawson’s house, she burst into tears. Mrs. Lawson came out to see what the commotion was and instructed Gladys to come inside. It would not do to have her crying where people could see.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, once they were inside.
“It’s the people out there,” sobbed Gladys, as she wiped clumps of mud from her pants. “The women threw mud at me, and then the children laughed at me. How will I ever tell them about the gospel message if they won’t let me come near them?”
Mrs. Lawson frowned a little. “Getting upset about it won’t help, though I must admit in all my fifty-three years in China I’ve never seen a less friendly group than the people of Yangcheng. But you’re so lucky,” she went on. “You have black hair and brown eyes like they do. Imagine how much they fear me with my white hair and blue eyes.”
Gladys nodded. She hadn’t thought about how it must be for Mrs. Lawson. The hair of older Chinese people sometimes went a little gray, but never snow-white like Mrs. Lawson’s.
“They call us lao-yang-kwei, foreign devil. But we must get used to that. Think of it as a challenge. We have to work out some way to reach these people with the gospel message. God has given us a difficult task,” said Mrs. Lawson, then adding briskly, “but not an impossible task.”
Gladys wiped her eyes. It was a challenge she wasn’t sure she was up to, but she would try her best to keep going.
The weeks began to roll by. For Gladys the time was filled with cleaning up the house and having language lessons with Yang, who was teaching her the local Yangcheng dialect of Chinese. Yang was a very patient tutor, and Gladys spent a lot of time in the kitchen with him. Most evenings she would also take a stroll with Mrs. Lawson. Gradually, the people of Yangcheng began to accept the sight of the two foreign women. The women were still jeered at, and sometimes spat on, but after several weeks, the mud throwing stopped.
It was on one of her walks that Gladys saw something she would never forget. As she stepped from the courtyard, she noticed the street was empty. There were no children playing, no old women gossiping, and no street peddlers selling their wares. She was wondering where everyone could be, when she heard a cheer go up from the direction of the marketplace. Gladys hurried toward the sound of the cheering. Only the week before she had seen a performing bear in the marketplace, and Mrs. Lawson had told her that jugglers and acrobats often traveled through the area and performed there. Sometimes the crowd would throw money, small copper coins worth a fraction of a penny, at the performers’ feet as payment. As Gladys rounded the corner, she saw a huge crowd gathered. She hoped the entertainment hadn’t started yet.
Gladys was trying to angle into a position where she could see over the crowd, when she felt someone grab her hand. She looked around, straight into the eyes of the woman who lived next door. Gladys smiled at her, amazed by her friendliness. The woman dragged Gladys to the front of the crowd just as a hush fell over the crowd. Gladys caught her breath and looked around. There were no bears, no traveling acrobats or jugglers, just a single man kneeling on the cobblestones with his head down. Beside him stood one of the mandarin’s soldiers. But what was all the fuss about? Gladys had no idea.
Suddenly, the soldier reached for the long curved sword hanging at his waist. With a single action, he pulled the sword from his belt and lifted it high above the kneeling man’s head. Another roar went up from the crowd, and in a sickening instant, Gladys understood what was happening. She had a front-row seat to an execution. Before she could turn away, the sword had swished through the air. The kneeling man’s head fell to the ground, rolled several times, and stopped face up at Gladys’s feet. Another roar went up from the crowd. Gladys held her hand over her mouth as she pushed her way through the crowd. She thought she was going to be sick. She had to get away from the scene. She ran all the way back to the house. Inside Mrs. Lawson was writing in her journal. She looked up when Gladys came rushing into the room, sat down on the nearest box, and broke into sobs.
“What’s the matter this time?” she asked.
“They killed a man, right in the marketplace, right where I was standing,” wailed Gladys.
“So you saw an execution, did you?” said Mrs. Lawson, calmly.
“Yes,” stammered Gladys. “And the worst thing was everyone watching and then cheering. It was horrible. Horrible. How could they do that?”
Mrs. Lawson sighed. “You’re in China now, not England. Here public executions are common. They’ll display the head on the top of the wall. Sometimes there will be ten or twenty of them lined up in a row. The body will be thrown over the city wall into the ravine. Of course, there’s a procedure. They don’t just kill anyone. There would have been a trial. The mandarin would have found the man guilty of some crime, most likely robbery, and sentenced him to death. It is the Chinese way, and we must accept it.”
“But the crowd loved it. Little children watched. How could they do that?” asked Gladys, still sobbing.
“It wasn’t too long ago that public executions were carried out in England,” Mrs. Lawson pointed out. “All people are capable of taking pleasure in the pain of others. We must accept things as they are and work hard to bring change through sharing the gospel message. That’s the only way they will understand the sadness of a wasted human life. In the meantime, go and wash your face. Crying never helped anyone.”
With that, the conversation was over, and Mrs. Lawson returned to writing in her journal.
Gladys never mentioned the incident again to Mrs. Lawson. She didn’t want another lecture, no matter how true what Mrs. Lawson said might be. She wished Mrs. Lawson were a little more motherly, but Gladys decided that at seventy-four years of age, Mrs. Lawson wasn’t likely to change, so Gladys had just better get used to the old woman’s gruffness.
About this time, Gladys began to doubt whether they would ever be able to find a way to talk meaningfully with the townspeople. Even though the two of them were now tolerated, no one was interested in attending a Bible study or any other such activity the women offered. Something had to change, but neither woman was sure what it was, that is, until they went for one of their late afternoon walks together.
Gladys loved to look out over the city wall and watch the last few straggling mule trains wind their way up to the village. She’d already decided that one day she would to go to the end of the trail and back with a mule train. “Just think of the possibilities,” she said, unaware that she was thinking out loud.
“Of what?” asked Mrs. Lawson.
“Of traveling with a mule train,” she said dreamily. “All those little towns like Yangcheng, where they stop each night. If a muleteer were a Christian, he could spread the gospel message to so many people who have never heard it before. It would be so effortless.”
Mrs. Lawson grabbed Gladys’s arm and swung her around so they faced each other. “That’s it. That’s it. Why didn’t I see it before?” she said excitedly.
“See what?” asked Gladys, not following the conversation.
“We’ll turn this house into an inn,” exclaimed Mrs. Lawson.
Gladys wasn’t used to seeing Mrs. Lawson excited about anything. “An inn?” she echoed.
“Yes. It’s the perfect answer. We can’t get the people into a church, but we can get them into an inn, especially if it’s the cleanest inn on the whole trail.”
Gladys nodded, thinking back on her own mule trip. She would like to have stayed at an inn without lice and fleas. “But we didn’t come to be innkeepers, did we?” she asked, a little unsure of what exactly Mrs. Lawson had in mind for them.
“Don’t you see it?” Mrs. Lawson was becoming a little impatient. “We get the muleteers in. We water the mules, feed the men a good meal, and then offer them something no other inn does.” She pursed her lips for a moment, apparently waiting for Gladys to appreciate the full impact of what she was about to say. “Then I tell them Bible stories for free. They’ll love it. All Chinese people love entertainment. Noah, Moses, Jesus, Paul—they’ll love the stories. And you mark my words, those stories will be told and retold all along the trail. Only God knows how many people could hear about the gospel as a result of our inn.”
Mrs. Lawson stopped and folded her hands. Gladys was surprised. Mrs. Lawson spoke as though the inn were already up and running, and not a leaky old house with broken windows, missing doors, and no coal for the k’ang. Still, as Gladys looked back down at the last mule train hurrying to reach Yangcheng before the sun disappeared completely, a thrill came over her. This was a project she could throw herself into.
The next few weeks were busy and happy ones for Gladys and Mrs. Lawson as they worked together turning the house into an inn. There was repair work to be done, millet and vegetables to be purchased, coal to be ordered, and the courtyard made into a mule stable. Thankfully, Mrs. Lawson had a small income that provided enough money to make the repairs and buy the provisions. The women calculated that when the inn was running, it would pay for itself and provide enough money to pay Yang, while leaving a small amount for extras.
