Doubt had crept in at the end. She had time in the last paragraph to turn her thoughts to other subjects, now that her sons were safe and fully recovered at last. Henry was sleeping. Freddie was seated on the floor beside her, sorting stones into little piles and counting aloud. Every now and then, he looked up at Addie and frowned. He seemed to recognize some deficiency in his mother; he sometimes gave her looks that suggested it. “I suppose,” she wrote, “we might count ourselves successful if we manage to bring a single soul into the light, even while leaving China’s other millions in darkness.”
Addie covered the page in slanting print while keeping one eye on Freddie, to make sure he didn’t put a stone in his mouth and choke. She worried about such absurd and unlikely dangers, when of course it was the banal ones that actually killed. In China, children dropped away like dried leaves when sickness descended on a household. Somehow her boys had been spared this time, and her exhausted relief was evident even in her handwriting, which seemed to move toward the edge of the page in a stumbling gallop. Do you think, Louisa, that we’re doing any good here? She held the pen over the paper, thinking. I wonder sometimes.
Owen, however, was certain that God had personally appointed the two of them to carry out His mission in China, and Lu-cho Fu would one day be the exact point from which a whole wave of Christianity would spread out over the land. He was equally certain that his daughter had been gathered into the bosom of God for good reason, that his sons would both grow to carry on the mission their parents had begun, and that the Riddells were solid Christians through and through.
He was not quite so certain of his wife’s capabilities.
Or at least so Addie sometimes thought.
The Riddells had established the mission in Lu-cho Fu several years before Owen and Addie arrived, and it had continued to expand ever since. The number of converts was nothing great—there were maybe five dozen Christians in the whole area now—but the school was popular. It was small at first, and after the Bells came, it continued to grow: they now tutored twenty-two boys and girls from ages eight to fourteen, and had graduated nearly a dozen more. It was difficult to tell how many were Christians at heart, but there was more than one way to shine a light in the dark.
Yet Owen wasn’t satisfied. He’d come to China with the goal of converting large numbers of people, whole towns and villages. The mission performed many kinds of work—they received regular packages of medicines from T’ai-yüan and were able to treat a variety of illnesses and accidents; they held classes; they actively campaigned against the barbaric practice of foot-binding—but all this was secondary to him. True conversion was a matter of the soul, rather than the mind or body. The only real triumphs Owen ever admitted were those few instances when a person was shaken to his very core by the sudden revelation of God’s power and grace; the true convert was the person who needed nothing from the mission except the knowledge of Scripture.
Such conversions weren’t easy to effect, and they took up much of Owen’s attention. He studied the cases in which they’d managed to win over a person simply through talking or by sitting and studying the Bible together. What was the secret? Why was one person open when another was closed? Over the years he had come to think that it was largely a matter of the person’s character, he told Addie. It took some amount of bravery to become a Christian in this place because it went against the traditions and beliefs of the population. There were even instances when converts had been disowned by their families, shunned. Not everyone was up to it. But then, conversion of a nation didn’t require that every person was courageous. It only required that there were enough brave souls to begin the wave. After a time, the wave took on its own momentum.
One of Owen’s favorite causes was music. In reading the dispatches of missionaries in other parts of the world, he learned that the singing and playing of hymns was central to the success of Christians in places like Africa and Hawaii and the Philippines. “What we need,” he said, “is to engage the people with methods like these. What we need is more music. ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.’ So says Psalm 98.”
The Chinese were not strong singers; it was the missionaries themselves who carried the hymns during service. Owen had other plans. Over breakfast one morning, he explained his idea.
“An organ?” Addie said, incredulous.
“Why not? We could install it in the chapel.” The chapel was a small hall at the back of the Riddells’ house, behind the second courtyard. They held services in the space, which had six rows of benches, room enough for fifty or sixty people to squeeze in, though they never had that number. There were no stained-glass windows, no pulpit. There was only a cross hung on the wall, and some scrolls written with Chinese translations of short passages of Scripture. “If we knocked down the wall into the next room, there would be space there for a very small organ,” Owen went on. “It might not be one to compete with a cathedral, but it would certainly be an improvement.”
Addie was accustomed to her husband sounding ideas when they were alone, and she was occasionally useful in asking questions he didn’t think of himself. She inquired now whether they wouldn’t do as well to get a piano instead. “It’s much more manageable, don’t you think?”
“Not with the tuning, it isn’t. And anyway, the impact is less.” Owen shook his head. “People need to be impressed every now and then, and a piano won’t do it. But an organ, now that’s a sound to inspire. Isn’t that right, Freddie?”
Their son nodded solemnly. He had already finished his breakfast, a roll and a boiled egg, exactly what Addie and Owen were eating. Now he was drawing with his finger on the tabletop, content with whatever thoughts filled his head. He had been a mystery to Addie from the beginning, and only grew more foreign to her after the birth of his brother, who was taking up all her attention now. She was trying to feed Henry bites of mashed noodles and milk, but he was restless on her lap, moving his head from side to side so that she had trouble fitting the spoon into his mouth. “Eat up, He Li,” she murmured. It was what the locals called him, a translation that she’d found herself using, too. It felt oddly disconnected from the names she and Owen went by in town. They were Cheng Hsien-sheng and Cheng Taitai; Bell, it turned out, was a popular name in Chinese, too.
“What do you think?” Owen said. “Do you think it’ll be a draw?”
“A draw?”
“For the mission.” He tapped his fingers on the table as he watched her trying to feed their son, bits of noodle falling onto the cloth that she’d tucked under his chin.
From the courtyard came footsteps, and a moment later Li K’ang came in to clear away their plates. Owen’s was filled with crumbs and the shells of two boiled eggs, but Addie hadn’t managed to have more than a bite of roll dunked in milk. “I haven’t eaten to full yet,” she said in halting Chinese. “Please leave it for now.”
“Should I get Hsi-yung to come help?” he asked.
Hsi-yung, Li K’ang’s sister, was living with them now. Addie had formed a sort of friendship with the young woman, who spoke to her constantly, seemingly unbothered by Addie’s ignorance of the language. Hsi-yung was nineteen years old, nearly Louisa’s age. She had come to stay for several months after Freddie was born, and Addie recalled how the girl walked the baby around the room, stopping by the window to look out on the courtyard. She was thin and very small; in her arms Freddie looked like a bigger baby, a different one. And though Hsi-yung was quiet then, Addie would get the sense that she was conversing with him in some way, and she was left out completely, no longer part of their world.
That was before, when Hsi-yung first came to stay with them. She’d gone back to her home in the mountains after that and had her own baby, a girl, and when Addie was pregnant again with Grace and was nearly confined to bed for the final month, the girl had returned. She’d gone away yet again but returned after Henry’s birth to help. Addie thought Hsi-yung might be pregnant a
gain now, following a visit home two months before. It was odd, when Addie considered it, that the girl had a life and family up in the mountains and was here helping take care of Freddie and Henry, to gather up the soiled diapers for washing, or to watch the boys while Addie worked on the endless correspondence that took up much of her time. It was a pity if you thought too much about it, so Addie generally tried to put it out of her mind.
Li K’ang was looking at Addie, waiting for an answer. She waved a hand at him tiredly. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s all right. Please don’t call your sister.”
He rearranged the bowls and plates on the table, moving the bowl of eggs closer to her. “Shall I peel an egg for you?”
Addie shook her head. “I’ll eat later.”
He lifted the teapot, testing its weight to determine whether it needed more water. Owen’s bowl was empty, but Li K’ang wouldn’t take it away until Addie had finished as well. He made a cup of one hand and swept into it the shards of eggshell beside Owen’s bowl. Then he took the teapot in his other hand and went out through the door.
Owen watched him go, and with his face still turned away, said, “I’ll write the Missionary Board to make the proposal for the organ. It’s just the sort of thing a congregation might want to sponsor.”
“Especially if they can’t use the money to get another Bible woman into the field,” Addie remarked. The reports from the Board frequently mentioned the chronic shortage of female missionaries. Congregations back home sent money to support them, but there weren’t enough women to fill the demand.
“It seems to me that you and Mrs. Riddell are holding down the fort.”
“I suppose.” She paused. “I think the organ’s an excellent idea, Owen.”
He shrugged and, watching as she attempted to guide the spoon into their son’s mouth again, said, “He doesn’t want to eat this morning, does he?”
Henry stopped to blink at his father, and his mouth fell open. Addie took the opportunity to deliver the spoonful of mashed noodles. “But, Owen, won’t we have to find someone to play the organ?”
“Mrs. Riddell knows how. She played at their church back in Rhode Island.”
“You’ve already spoken to her about it?”
“What,” he said, smiling, “are you jealous that I’ve been talking over this business without you?”
“A little.” It wasn’t that Owen and the Riddells had been making these plans on their own that bothered her. She was used to being absent from some of their meetings. Julia had three servants to help her, and she seemed able to handle her house and family, in addition to any number of mission concerns, with ease. Other than coming to help teach the girls’ classes, she did nearly everything from within the walls of their house, which doubled as the boys’ school and the infirmary, as well as the church. The Riddells’ home had always been the center of the mission, and perhaps that was the problem: simply by staying at home, Julia remained an active participant in all the major goings-on, whereas Addie, confined to their own house a half mile away, was cut off from everything and everyone, except for Freddie and Henry, Li K’ang and his sister, and Wei-p’eng. How small the world she occupied had become. She had not set foot outside their house for three days. “And Julia is confident she can do it?” she asked. “It’s been at least a decade, I should think, since she played.”
“Would you like to give it a go instead?”
Addie paused. “I was never very good at music.”
“That’s right,” he said with a little laugh that was not meant to signify anything other than that she had got at the point he was intending her to. “In any case, we have to figure out how to get one here first.” He turned to Freddie, who was still kneeling on his chair, drawing invisible shapes on the table. “How about you, son? Would you like to work the keys? Your brother here can crawl around on the foot pedals.”
The food had ended up on Henry’s cheek again, and when Addie reached up to wipe away the mess, he squawked and thrust his face aside, and she ended up swiping the cloth over his ear. He made the same sound again and then began crying. “All right,” she said, lifting him under his arms and turning him around on her knee so he was facing her. His face was wrinkled and turning pink as he cried, his eyes open but thick with tears. She brushed her hand over his head and got up to go into the other room to nurse him. How she looked forward to the time when she would be finished nursing. Then she’d be able to go out again, to leave the boys in the care of Hsi-yung alone. Her body would be hers again. Her mind, her concentration—all of it, hers.
She didn’t hear anything more about the organ until nearly four months had passed. Then one late spring day, when the first mail packet arrived after some time, she found Owen with a letter in his hands. “They don’t see the purpose,” he said with a frustrated sigh. He held the letter up to Addie and then took it away again before she could see what was written. “I made a good case, and the Board refused. It took them just two sentences to do it. They don’t understand a thing about what works over here.” He folded up the letter and tucked it back in the envelope. “We’ll have to find another way.”
He enlisted Addie to write to every congregation that sponsored their efforts, so at the end of each bulletin she sent describing their latest efforts and victories, she made a plea for funds and help. She didn’t know much about organs, but she thought Julia might provide the necessary knowledge if the time ever came. Privately, she thought it an absurd idea—even in America, few churches had organs. She thought Mr. Riddell felt similarly; whenever the topic came up, he got a distracted and faraway look on his face, as if the plan were too difficult for him to comprehend. It was, Addie knew, the same look she showed whenever a conversation in Chinese was taking place—she could understand some of the words, but it was easier to tune it out, to let the sounds wash over her.
“We are in search of support—financial and practical—for procuring a small and modest pipe organ to add to the atmosphere of worship in our chapel here,” she wrote, with more enthusiasm than she felt for the project. “It is an undoubted fact that such a gift to our mission would result in dozens more conversions, as the people here are in awe of such marvels as we take for granted.” Secretly, she hoped her husband might give up his campaign.
During the sixth year of their stay in Lu-cho Fu, Owen got permission from the Board for the whole family to return to the States for a visit. They’d wanted to go the year before, but the war with Japan had intervened. Now that it was over and the ports were all open again, they arranged passage on a steamship from T’ien-chin. At the end of February, they set off from Lu-cho Fu. They were repeating the trip of six years before, but this time in reverse.
Whenever Addie thought back on this trip in later years, it would seem as if the whole thing were a dream. It took more than two months to get back to the States, but once they were on American soil, it was easy to cross the remaining distance. After the train in China from T’ien-chin to the port, the train they took from San Francisco seemed almost impossibly fast. And then they were at the station in Ohio, and there was a whole crowd of people to greet them, so many faces and voices that both Freddie and Henry were crying within minutes of getting off the train.
It was thrilling and exhausting, hearing English spoken everywhere, noting the different style of dress that she had only seen in magazines shipped across the ocean (all the women, even her mother, wore walking suits during the daytime now, and Addie felt dowdy in her old dresses). She found that she could no longer abide eating sweets. She was struck by the attention everyone paid to time.
After Ohio they went to Illinois, and her impressions of the visit were only of an immense nighttime darkness and waves upon waves of corn; her brother-in-law showing them all how to milk a cow; Louisa standing with both hands at her back, surveying them from a distance with an unreadable expression on her face. She was not the girl Addie had left six years before. She was a woman now, with a collection of private heartbreaks that s
he dragged around with her like a sack. Her pregnancy was already much further along than any of the others had been, yet still her worry was evident. At the end of two weeks, when the time came to part, she put her face close to Addie’s and said in a voice much louder than the whisper she seemed to have intended, “Don’t you dare never come home.”
Owen had arranged for them to take the train to St. Louis and then to board the cross-country line that would take them to San Francisco. He had a surprise, he said, and though Addie didn’t know what it was, she accepted the plan without question. When they got off the train at Union Station, only opened the year before and now the largest and busiest station in the world, Addie was nearly overcome by the opulence and the size of the crowds. In the Grand Hall, the ceiling was gold leaf. The building seemed to go on for miles. It was beautiful and terrifying, and seemed to presage some great fall, like the tower of Babel. “What a wonderful surprise,” Addie said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” In her arms, Henry had turned his face to her chest and was breathing hotly into the fabric of her dress. Even Freddie was clinging to her skirts, no doubt afraid he would be swept away by the crowds unless he held on.
But Union Station wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was some cargo that was waiting for them in St. Louis. Earlier in the summer, while Addie and the boys were in Ohio, Owen had gone up to Philadelphia to speak to a congregation that had supported their mission over the years. In May, a Catholic school had closed down, and included among the items sold off was a small pipe organ that had graced the chapel for the last fifteen years. It was this congregation that had bought the organ, and it was this organ that would make the trip with the Bells all the way across the country to San Francisco, across the Pacific to China, and across the mountains of Shansi to their little town of Lu-cho Fu, where they would never succeed in installing it in the tiny chapel in the Riddells’ house—where it would sit in its many parts in a spare room for several more years, until the arrival of a new missionary requiring a room would necessitate that they get rid of the organ at last, without ever once making the sound that was to have inspired so many.
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