XLVI Return to Middle States — The Holy Land — My Friends the Missionaries — Two Consuls in Jerusalem
In the sketch of my husband’s life-work, written by a faithful co-laborer in the vineyard which is the world, and appended to this story, his reasons for returning to the Middle States are briefly given. As I near the latter chapters of my record, I am hampered by the necessity of treating cautiously of persons and incidents too near the present day to be spoken of with the freedom time made justifiable in earlier reminiscences. Those twelve years in the City of Churches were crowded with events of more or less moment. They were busy, and not unhappy years. Our home-group, reduced to four by the marriage of our eldest daughter, was made still smaller by the marriage of her sister on March 5, 1889, to Frederic Van de Water, of Brooklyn. The choice was wise, and the union has been one of rare blessedness.
“In-laws” have no terrors in our circle. No sinister significance attaches to the term “mother-in-law.” The adopted sons were loyal and loving to the parents of their wives. Not a cloud darkens the memory of our intercourse. The only obstacle to Belle’s marriage was thus stated in whimsical vexation by her father:
“It is hard that, when there are said to be fifteen hundred proper names in the English language, my girls must select men who have the same. It leads to no end of confusion!”
Our boy, now grown into an athletic six-footer, was graduated from Columbia University in 1893. We three had lived in great peace and contentment during his college course. We talk often, and wistfully, of those four years of church-work, social duties, literary tasks, and academic studies, which filled hands and heads. We spent our winters in town. Sunnybank grew to be more and more a home in the summer months. It was like a return to the time when our own babies filled house and verandas with merry prattle, and our hearts made music; for there were, at the date I name, four boys to repeat the history for the proud grandparents. But for the great sorrow that had broken up Christine’s happy home in February, and brought her back to us with her two boys, and the birth, a fortnight thereafter, of Belle’s second boy, the years slipped by brightly, without other signal event until “Bert’s” graduation at the June Commencement. There was, for me, one notable exception to the gentle flow.
It was, I think, in mid-June, that I had a letter from the proprietor of the Christian Herald, a religious paper of wide circulation, asking me to write a serial that should run through six months’ issues of that periodical. Just at that time my mind was working upon a projected story (published afterward in book-form under the caption The Royal Road), and this seemed a promising medium for circulating it among the classes I wished to reach. Accordingly, I called at the Christian Herald office to discuss the plan. My brief and satisfactory interview with the managing editor over, I arose to go when he invited me to step into the adjoining room, where the proprietor would like to speak with me for a minute. I was courteously received, and final arrangements for the publication of the serial were made. I was again on the point of departure, when the proprietor directed my attention to a new and handsome map of the city of Jerusalem, spread out upon his desk, inquiring, in an offhand way:
“Have you ever visited the Holy Land?”
“Never,” I replied, adding involuntarily, “It has been one of my dearest dreams that I might go some day.”
“It would be a very easy matter for you to fulfil the wish,” in the same easy, unpremeditated tone.
“Easy?” I repeated. “Yes; in my dreams!”
“In the flesh, and in reality. Will you sit down for a moment, please?”
He proceeded then, in less time than it will take me to write it, to unfold a plan in which I soon saw, although he did not say it, that the serial story, my call, and the map of Jerusalem, conspicuously displayed on his desk, were so many stages of a carefully concerted scheme. He wanted me to go to Syria, with the express purpose of investigating the condition of the women of that land, and getting an insight into their domestic life, and at the same time incidentally gleaning material for sketches of historical localities—in short, to gather material for such “familiar talks” as I had held with American women upon household and social topics. These were to be supplied to his paper, week by week. His provision for travelling expenses would include those of my husband, or any other escort I might select. The sum he named as remuneration for the work was handsome, but this circumstance made a slight impression upon me at the time. Our dialogue ended in my promise to take the matter into consideration, and to let him have my decision in a day or two. I hope he never guessed at the whirl of emotions lying back of a sober face and calm demeanor.
I recollect walking out into the bustling streets as if I trod upon air, my head ringing as if nerves were taut harpstrings, my heart throbbing tumultuously. I scarcely knew where I was, or whither I was going. Something, somewhere—it seemed in the upper ether, yet so near that I heard words and music—was singing rapturously:
“Jerusalem the Golden!
Methinks each flower that blows,
And every bird a-singing
Of that sweet secret knows.
I know not what the flowers
May feel, or singers see,
But all these summer raptures
Are prophecies of thee!”
It was my favorite hymn, but it was nothing in me that sang it then.
“One of my dearest dreams!”—ever since, as a child, I had fed a perfervid imagination upon Bible stories, and chanted David’s psalms aloud in the Virginia woods, to tunes of my own making. One of them broke into the jubilant Jerusalem the Golden pealing in the ether overhead:
“My feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!”
Was I, then, so near the fulfilment of the heavenly dream?
We sailed for the Holy City in September—my big boy and I. Doctor Terhune could not go, and we had always promised that our son should have a foreign trip when his university work was done. The opportunity was auspicious.
Each of us told as much of the story of the memorable seven months abroad as we were willing the public should read—I, in the letters published first in the Christian Herald, subsequently in book-form under the title, The Home of the Bible; Bert, in a smaller volume, Syria from the Saddle, a breezy chronicle of a young man’s impressions of what he saw and heard while in Syria. I considered it then, and I think it now, a remarkable book, coming, as it did, from the pen of a boy of twenty-one. He celebrated his majority in the desert-places between Damascus and Jerusalem.
Two or three incidents, eventful forever to us, may be mentioned briefly in this personal narrative.
I am not a believer in dreams. I do attach importance to “coincidences,” holding some that have fallen into my life in reverence the more sincere because I cannot explain them away.
One night in Paris, where we spent a fortnight on the way to Syria via Egypt, I had a long and distressing dream of carrying a poor ailing baby along dark streets and over fences and fields. My arms ached under the weight of the limp body; my heart and ears ached with the piteous wailing of the sufferer, for whom I could do nothing. I awoke in the morning, utterly worn out in nerve, and depressed unreasonably in spirit. That forenoon I wrote my daughter:
“It was an ugly, gruesome dream. Your aunt Myrtle would see in it an omen of evil. She says that a death in the family has always followed her dream of the sick baby she cannot put out of her arms. It is an old superstition. You may recollect that Charlotte Brontë alludes to it in Jane Eyre. I have so such dreads. Yet I find myself wishing that I had not had that ‘visitation.’ It has left a very unpleasant impression on my mind—a sort of bad taste in my mental mouth. I am thankful that it came to me, and not to Myrtle.”
My sister had been ill before we left home, but was convalescent when we sailed, and a letter from her husband awaited us in Paris, conveying the cheerful assurance of her confirmed improvement in health and strength, and bidding me have no further anxiety on her account.
It was, therefore, a terrible shock when a letter, forwarded from place to place, overtook us in Northern Syria, informing us that my dear little “sister-daughter,” as she loved to call herself, had died on the night of November 3, 1893—the very night through which the “gruesome” dream had pursued me from midnight until dawn. Christine wrote in reply:
“When we read your letter of that date, Belle’s eyes met mine in silent, awesome questioning. Merely a coincidence? Perhaps, but strange!”
I can add no other comment.
My second eventful incident hinges upon a short severe illness that prostrated me, the third day after we landed in Beirut from the steamer we had taken at Port Saïd. I had already made acquaintance with President Bliss and some of the professors in the American College, crowning one of the heights of the beautiful town, and I sent at once for Doctor Schauffler, whom I had known slightly in Springfield, Massachusetts.
On the fourth day of my illness I asked him, plaintively:
“Do you know there is not a woman-servant in this hotel? The person who ‘does’ my room has a long white beard and wears a skull-cap. Bert calls the photograph he has made of the nondescript: ‘Le femme de chambre!’ It is very funny—and rather dreadful!”
“The beloved physician” eyed me in thoughtful compassion.
“We are so used to that sort of thing here that we rarely think of it as out of the way. No decent woman would take a position in a house where she must work with men. She would lose caste and reputation, forthwith. Hence, ‘le femme de chambre.’ I can see that it must be intensely disagreeable to you.”
There the matter dropped. I was still in bed when, at four o’clock that afternoon, he paid his second visit. He wasted no time in apology or solicitation. His carriage was at the door, packed with cushions. I must be taken out of bed, rolled up in rugs and shawls, carried down-stairs by my son and my dragoman, deposited in the carriage and driven up to his house.
“Where there are women-servants,” he added, laughingly, “and where a cordial American welcome awaits you. Doctor and Mrs. Webster, of Haifa, are visiting us, and you will be well looked after. And Mrs. Bliss is coming over to drink afternoon tea with you. So, we have no time to lose.”
That was the beginning of ten days of such luxurious rest and continuous petting as I had never expected to find out of my native land and my own home. I rallied fast under the new conditions of invalidism. In two days, I left my bed and lay, for most of the forenoon and all the latter part of the day, upon a luxurious lounge in the square central hall, from which doors led on all sides to the other parts of the house. The ceilings were twenty feet above me; the casements opened down to the tiled floors; palms, and other tall plants rounded the corners of the hall, and vases of cut flowers filled the cooled air with fragrance. As I lay, I could see trees laden with oranges and tangerines in the gardens below; hedges of cactus and geraniums, the latter in the fulness of scarlet bloom, intersecting the grounds of the college and the neighboring dwellings. The colony of President and professors was one united family, and they took me—sick, and a stranger—into the heart of the household. I recall, with pride, that not a day passed that did not bring me a call from Doctor Bliss, the genial and honored head of the noble institution, while Mrs. Bliss’s neighborly attentions were maternally tender. I had not been at the hotel in the lower town for an hour before she appeared, laden with flowers and an offering of “American apples, such as one cannot buy in the East.” The next day, and for every day following, before Doctor Schauffler carried me off with benevolent violence, she sent to me home-made bread, having heard (as was true) that the hotel bread was generally sour.
I looked forward with especial pleasure to the afternoon-tea hour. The gathering about my lounge would have graced any salon where wits do congregate. The silver-haired President never failed to put in an appearance; Doctor Post, the distinguished senior of the medical professors, and his charming daughter, afterward my cicerone in the visits I paid to Syrian women in their own homes; Doctor and Mrs. Eddy, whose daughter was just then surprising the social world of Constantinople by taking her degree in medicine, and with honor; the Jessup brothers and their families, known to all readers of church and charitable literature by their achievements in the mission-field; Doctor and Mrs. Porter, in whose house we had celebrated Thanksgiving Day the evening succeeding our arrival in Beirut, singing, at the close of the joyous festivities, “My country, ’tis of thee,” with all the might of our lungs, and with hearts aglow with patriotism distance and expatriation could not abate—these, with a group of younger professors, tutors, and winsome girls, were the ministering genii that buoyed me speedily back to robust health.
They gave me a concert, a night or two before our parting. The light in the great hall was a pleasant chiaro-oscuro, the music-room opening out of it being brilliantly illuminated for the performers upon piano, violin, violoncello, guitar, and flute. From my sofa I had a full view of them all, and through one long window a moon, but four days old, looked at us through the orange-trees.
Is it strange that the chapter in my Home of the Bible, headed “My Friends the Missionaries,” was penned with grateful memories too tender for speech?
We had in Jerusalem another true, hearty, and affectionate home-welcome. Dr. Selah Merrill, the well-known archæologist and Oriental scholar, had then been United States Consul at Jerusalem for nine years. The change of administration in Washington had put in his place Rev. Edwin Wallace, and we found both consuls still in residence upon our arrival. It was a happy combination for us. The consuls and their wives were settled in the one good hotel in the city—the “Grand New”—to which our incomparable dragoman, David Jamal, conducted us. We fraternized at sight. Doctor Merrill and his successor were upon most amicable terms, the senior and late incumbent doing all in his power to lessen the labors of the novice. The fatherly kindness of one, and the gentle deference of the junior, were beautiful to behold. We two travellers shared the advantages enjoyed by Mr. Wallace in his first visits to memorable places in the new home, of which he has written eloquently in his book—Jerusalem the Holy. I shall always esteem as one of the rarest bits of good-fortune which befell us in our wanderings in storied lands, that Doctor Merrill was emphatically our “guide, philosopher, and friend,” during our stay in Southern Syria. He, it was, who made out our itinerary when he could not conduct us personally, as he did in our expeditions in and about Jerusalem.
I reckon the four, who made the City of the Great King home to us, among the friends to whom my obligations are not to be described in words. And what royally “good times” we had together! Had it been in the power of Mrs. Merrill and Mrs. Wallace to spare me every possible inconvenience of tent-life and Eastern transit, I should have been lapped in luxury throughout our tour of village and desert.
Of these I have written elsewhere, and at length.