Ruth, a Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham

by Patricia Cornwell

  Cresting waves jerked the two vessels in and out like a berserk accordionist. The gangplank slammed against the tug as the ships rolled together and apart, opening a maw of black churning water between them. Chinese lifted Sophie Graham and perilously made their way across the straining plank while American sailors reached for her. Faces were tense, garments drenched with spray, as men braced beneath the dead weight of a woman almost crippled. Fear was palpable, when, quite suddenly, the sea got quiet, “as if an immense hand had stilled the water and held the ropes,” Ruth wrote at the time. Sophie Graham was passed from one set of strong hands to another. The instant she was safely aboard, water and wind unleashed their fury again.

  The destroyer had traveled less than a mile when nine Japanese warships, with external lights extinguished, materialized in the night. The dark, silent vessels circled, and slowly went on their way again, without explanation, it seemed. The Yellow Sea was as smooth as a millpond, and the American ship plowed ahead at thirty knots, reaching Qingdao at 1:30 A.M. Women and children were not allowed to spend the night on board, and naval boats intercepted the small party and carried them ashore. By 3:00 A.M. the Bells had settled into friends’ cottages on the Jiaozhou Bay. They had arrived with their radio, bedding, summer clothing, and table silver.

  From Qingdao, travel to the United States was possible. Dr. Bell booked Ruth on the USS Chaumont to sail October 22 to Kobe, Japan. “My, but it is hard to see her leave,” her mother wrote. “She is timid and would far rather stay here.” The Friday morning of Ruth’s departure, she and a missionary friend traveling with her were awake by 5:30 and on the quay by 7:00. Ruth paid a steward five dollars for embarkation and hugged her family good-bye. It would take six days to cross the Yellow Sea and sweep around the southern tip of Korea toward Kobe.

  Though Ruth did not want to leave, she was at least comforted that her family was safe in Qingdao. She could not know that in less than three weeks, while she was yet aboard ship, they would return to Qingjiang, unable to stay away from friends and responsibilities any longer. The Bells found conditions in Qingjiang much worse than they had left them. Emboldened Japanese pilots had begun firing machine guns at the hospital to frighten the staff, and bombings had become closer and more frequent. It seemed the brief evacuation had served no purpose beyond getting Ruth out of China. As cold sea waters tumbled together, covering a swath left by her ship, the connection between Ruth and her birthplace vanished, and she drew up a rather peculiar list for a confirmed spinster:

  If I marry:

  He must be so tall when he is on his knees, as one has said, he reaches all the way to Heaven.

  His shoulders must be broad enough to bear the burden of a family.

  His lips must be strong enough to smile, firm enough to say no, and tender enough to kiss.

  Love must be so deep that it takes its stand in Christ and so wide that it takes the whole lost world in.

  He must be active enough to save souls.

  He must be big enough to be gentle and great enough to be thoughtful.

  His arms must be strong enough to carry a little child.

  In Japan, Ruth boarded the SS President McKinley for Seattle. She settled into steerage, directly behind a massive propeller where the ship’s metal hull was the only buffer between her and what seemed a fathomless sea. During her nineteen-day passage, two people would jump overboard. The first suicide occurred early in the voyage, on a cold evening shortly before midnight, and deeply affected Ruth.

  By her account, a young American wrapped in a heavy overcoat, and in the throes of clinical depression, sat on deck smoking. He got up to crush the cigarette butt beneath his heel, and before his medical attendant could intervene, his patient hurled himself over the rail, disappearing into tumbling waves. Minutes later, the ship’s engines abruptly died, and the sudden silence awakened Ruth. She sat up and peered through the porthole, shivering in the raw air seeping around it. Beyond, the dark sea and starless sky were one, and a long needle of light probed the water’s surface as a lifeboat filled with twelve sailors searched for the man who had jumped minutes earlier. A sense of foreboding settled over Ruth as she watched their progress. The atmosphere became sinister.

  Fifteen feet below her “lay a long rope curling and twisting in the water like some phantom snake,” she recorded at the time. “A chill crept down my spine.” She slipped her coat over her gown and hurried to the deck, where a small group of passengers had gathered along the rail. They watched the lifeboat rise and fall while “a wind laughed through the mast tops,” Ruth wrote. “Laughed to see man battle with the elements over one small human body. Laughed at his helplessness.” Her aroused imagination teased her eyes. Several times she thought she saw a body or parts of a body bobbing in the wake. She thought she heard muffled human cries of distress rising above the wind and the wash. After a fruitless search, the lifeboat was hoisted aboard, and Ruth, cold in the dank, salty air, returned to her bunk.

  When she viewed events through her faith, nature became symbolic of eternal truths. It was a tool used by God to reveal glory and love. The blanket of clouds had shielded the train from the vision of the Japanese pilots. The sea had become still when the sailors carried Sophie Graham over the gangplank. Ruth’s description of the suicide, in contrast, portrayed a savageness in nature that reduced people to faceless pawns in a random universe.

  To her, that was the world without spirituality, without the meaning implied by God’s existence and subsequent participation in human lives. Separation from God was the heathenism outside the compound wall. It was the hell of being alone in the universe with oneself. Without a Creator, all creation was heartless. The world was formless, a void, with darkness upon the face of the deep.

  6

  CHAPTER

  An Innocent Abroad

  RUTH, SENIOR YEAR AT WHEATON

  There was a certain other-worldliness about her.

  —Harold Lindsell

  Ruth’s life in America began in the Chicago train station, where she was a solitary stillness amid shuffling shoe leather, and hissing decompressed air, and clanking steel. Bundled in a black wool coat, she was surrounded by battered bags and trunks. Her worldly goods included hand-me-downs reshaped by her mother, three scarves Ruth had made herself (one pink, one blue, and one white), a small collection of favorite books, and a dog-eared King James Bible. She arrived on the Wheaton College campus in size seven saddle shoes that bled chalky white polish whenever it rained, her dignity slightly wounded by the freshman orange and green “dink” planted on her head. She had been in this strange new world no more than a month when she almost got kicked out.

  Several male upperclassmen had vied for Ruth Bell’s attention since the day they spotted the young beauty. Twice they whisked her into Chicago for dinners and ice shows. She was the only freshman on these double dates, and on both occasions her escorts chose to ignore her tiresome 10:30 curfew. Both times, it was after midnight when she was deposited in front of the tightly locked Williston Hall, a peculiar pile of red brick Gothic Revivalism that towered over the sloping lawn and served as the student cafeteria and women’s dormitory. Ruth’s first-floor room was the last one on the west end, just close enough to the ground for her to rustle behind boxwoods and, with a boost from her date, crawl over the sill.

  On her second Friday night of crime, one of Ruth’s friends dropped by her room for a visit and found she wasn’t there, or anywhere, it seemed. A search of the sign-out book in the lobby revealed that Ruth had left no clue as to her whereabouts. A verbal alarm rang through the corridors, finally reaching the ears of the elderly dorm mother, who weeks earlier had portentously advised one of Ruth’s dates, “She’s so heavenly looking she won’t last long on this earth.” The dorm mother scowled through pince-nez, periodically scanning the floors. Sometime after midnight, Ruth appeared in the hallway, toothbrush in hand, heading toward the bathroom. She was quickly intercepted.

  “Where have you been and how did yo
u get in?” the dorm mother demanded.

  “I’ve been on a date and I climbed through my window,” Ruth innocently said.

  She was expeditiously given an appointment with the dean of students.

  Ruth lived by a strict but simple moral code. During her childhood she had never been handed a book of regulations containing dozens of petty sins. The original Big Ten were enough. She had just come from a world of air raid bells, Japanese bombers, and bandits. This new threat called curfew failed to impress her. She had never given the Wheaton College handbook a glance. She was not inclined to burden people with her concerns, and was less inclined to like it when people wished to be burdened with them. Ruth maneuvered in her own way, and along her own routes, and this wasn’t always appreciated, as she was soon to find out from Dr. Wallace Emerson, a psychology professor and the rather stern dean.

  His office was in Blanchard Hall, an imposing fortress of towers and battlements built of limestone covered with ivy. In his chambers, next to the president’s office on the second floor, Emerson sat behind a sturdy oak desk facing a wall of books. Wire spectacles perched on his nose, and a thin mustache and goatee framed an unsmiling mouth. Ruth demurely seated herself at a prudent distance.

  “Anybody has the right to think anything he wants of you,” he coldly announced.

  Ruth’s gaze never wavered during his avalanche of harsh words, her throat tight with tears she did not cry. She would not break, and he assumed she did not care, so he admonished her for what seemed an eternity. Finally, he was silent, his face impassive as he looked at this young woman whose demeanor baffled him.

  “You have disgraced the school,” he said without emotion. “You have disgraced your parents. You have disgraced yourself. You can choose between expulsion for a semester or an indefinite campusing.”

  Returning to China was impossible and Ruth had no intention of moving to Waynesboro. What would she say to Grandmother Bell? How would she explain?

  “I prefer to be campused, sir,” Ruth remarked in a steady voice.

  He nodded and released her. Hurrying to the infirmary where Rosa was in bed with pleurisy, Ruth shut the door and began to sob. Terribly upset, she related the story until a visitor’s knocks sent her into the closet because she did not want anyone to see her cry. Ruth, who had never let a young man hold her hand, much less kiss her, had never imagined before this incident that she might appear to be something she wasn’t. She felt dirty. She perceived herself the victim of injustice. The men responsible for returning her to campus after curfew had gone unpunished. The thought that she had disgraced her parents filled her with despair, for that was something she “would rather die than do,” she wrote at the time.

  Ruth was not allowed to date or to leave the school grounds, restrictions that were perhaps more troublesome for Harold Lindsell than they were for her. The twenty-four-year-old senior was a lanky, brown-eyed blond with a fondness for dapper pinstripe and double-breasted suits. He was considered the campus gentleman-scholar and was, by chance, well acquainted with Rosa, who had told him all about her younger sister. Since September, Lindsell had eagerly awaited Ruth’s arrival. On the November afternoon when he first spotted her in the cafeteria, there had been no doubt who she was. Without delay he headed for the infirmary, deducing that if he visited Rosa long enough, he was bound to meet her sister.

  More than an hour passed before Ruth appeared. Lindsell had not taken off his camel’s hair coat, as if to imply he could stay only a minute. Days later, he telephoned to ask if she would accompany him to the Friday night Literary Society meeting. She seemed a bit flustered. He was seven years her senior, and she already had a date. She did not want to say no and hurt Lindsell’s feelings, and, to her horror, she heard herself accept. On a brisk Friday night in November he escorted her to the meeting.

  “I thought she acted a little strange,” Lindsell later recalled. “It turned out I’d sat her next to the boy who’d asked her out to the same thing.”

  Lindsell began escorting Ruth to classes and enrolled in one of her sketching courses, though he wasn’t remotely artistic. He became her confidant, and his attention flattered her and rebuilt her recently shattered self-esteem. He became her mentor, and this was most helpful, for Ruth was unabashedly ignorant of American innuendo and double meanings. Her parents had never discussed sex with her, and she later claimed to have “learned the facts of life from the Bible.” Her speech rivaled Mrs. Malaprop’s, her naiveté as pure as distilled water.

  On one occasion, Lindsell asked what the Bells ate for Thanksgiving dinner in China. “Bastards,” Ruth replied, meaning bustards. When she attended her first American wedding, Lindsell was an usher and offered her his arm at the door. “Oh, Harold!” she laughed as she shoved it away.

  By the spring of 1938 the Wheaton faculty realized that Ruth’s infractions were committed out of ignorance, not wickedness. They lifted her sentence, much to the relief of the Bells, who had remained steadfast in their trust of her. By this time, communication between them and their daughters in America was erratic. The Japanese were censoring mail in Shanghai, and letters sometimes took more than two months to reach the mission station.

  Throughout northern and central China the land was rent with zigzagged trenches. Soldiers had seized railroads, burned villages, and smashed bridges. Tanks lumbered over rutted roads, white smoke puffing from machine guns as ill-equipped Chinese infantrymen were slaughtered. The Bells’ son Clayton and daughter Virginia were virtually the only American missionary children left in the interior. Their parents firmly believed that nothing would happen to them without God’s sanction.

  Flags with the Rising Sun floated over cities around Qingjiang. Japanese bombers sheared the hospital’s red tin roof, snapping the American flag to attention in their wake. Waiting areas, outpatient clinics, and some three hundred and fifty beds overflowed with Chinese who had been torn by bullets and shrapnel and crushed by falling roofs. Many people had lost limbs and were charred and punctured by rocks and wooden splinters, as Japanese anti-American sentiments became overt.

  In the past, Nelson Bell had placated local platoon leaders by inviting them on personal tours of the hospital facilities. The American surgeon had served them tea and sweets, as he indicated with an almost Oriental deference that inside the compound he, not the military, was in command. Such courtesies, he knew, could work but so long. Many of his colleagues were receiving the treatment that he felt sure was soon to come his way.

  “The destruction of life and property [is] sweeping over us,” he wrote. “The list of Americans who have had their faces jabbed and slapped by the Japanese is a long one and getting longer. The homes, schools, and hospitals of American missions which have been looted and destroyed by Japanese already run into the hundreds.”

  While conditions in China worsened, Ruth began fighting a battle of her own. In the spring of 1938 she was visited by a young man who had attended high school in Korea with her. Now a student at the University of Chicago, he had abandoned the Christian faith of his childhood and challenged her to do likewise. It could be the best thing that ever happened to you, he suggested. It would be her liberation, he urged, and doubts began to sift and shape.

  Ruth gave much thought to all she had been taught. After much debate, she decided she had no trouble accepting the existence of a Supreme Creator, a Universal Truth, a supernatural unifying force. The earth was too ordered, she thought. But what about the Bible? How could she be so sure its words were true? What if Jesus Christ was nothing more than a brilliant philosopher, a Socrates of sorts?

  “He was either God or a liar or crazy,” Ruth announced to Lindsell one day.

  He suggested that she accompany him to the home of a certain seasoned Bible professor. “Perhaps he could pray with you,” he added hopefully.

  “I don’t want prayers,” Ruth replied. “I want proof.”

  She and Lindsell argued for weeks.

  “How do you account for the sin and sicknes
s in the world?” she challenged him. “How do you know that what the Bible says is true? Is there any proof?”

  She argued with her friends, or with anyone who would let her, until classmates wanted to flee when they saw Ruth Bell headed their way.

  “I can’t be sure that God loves me, for who am I amongst so many?” she dejectedly said to Lindsell one afternoon, toward the end of the summer of 1938. “I don’t feel loved or cherished. I’m not even sure He’s aware of my existence.”

  Again, Lindsell patiently and systematically presented what he believed, adding simply, “But Ruth, there is still the leap of faith.”

  This made sense, she decided, and throughout her life she would often explain that if God could be measured, He would be too small. If He could be proven, He would be too simple. She did not have all the answers, but she no longer felt she needed them. The Presence she had sensed since birth was there, like warmth she couldn’t see, like music she couldn’t touch.

  Before school began that fall, she visited her grandmother and invited Lindsell for a weekend. He wanted to marry her. She had just turned eighteen and was too young, she gently explained to her crushed suitor. Ruth remained convinced that she wouldn’t marry anyone now or ever. It did not occur to her that she had yet to meet someone as independent and stubborn, someone as baffling and physically compelling as herself. Far away, in the rural South, such a person did exist.

  7

  CHAPTER

  Billy Frank

  YOUNG BILLY FRANK

  My love has long been yours…

  since on that day

  when we first met;

  I will never quite forget

  how you just paused