Free Avenue of Eternal Peace by Nicholas Jose Page B

Zachary saw far enough. As a beginner in business with a run of good luck, he already felt anxious to make some sacrifices to balance the books. His first son would carry on the firm. But his second son was given the second name Thomas for the disciple who took the word east to the heathen. His first name was a reminder of Saxon origins. Waldemar Thomas Frith.
    As fate had it, the third child—a daughter—was the stay-at-home whose husband ended up taking over the firm. The first son turned out to be a black sheep and unbeliever who ran off to the colonies, from where he wrote such enticing letters that young Waldemar went racing after him and, at the age of nineteen, stepped ashore at Port Phillip Bay: but something about Melbourne offended him. He worked as a pharmacist’s assistant acquiring a certain medical knowledge and broader acquaintance with some soft and some very hard cases. The snobbery, pomp, ignorance, wretchedness of Marvellous Melbourne had an unfamiliar and shocking accent, though perhaps no worse than the same things at home. He was a free thinker.
    In the damp winter of 1891 twenty-year-old Waldemar, who had a weak chest, caught flu that became pneumonia. Matter clogged his lungs. For six months Retta Glee, a Scottish nurse in the hospital, made it her mission to cure him. She was by his bedside at every opportunity to make sure that with her care and prayer he would pull through. Letters came from the anguished mother and pious father in Bristol, always the more affecting for being so far behind current developments, until when Waldemar was at last cured, and delicately, breathlessly walking about in the sunshine, the sternest letter of all came from Zachary, ‘your loving father’. While the mother prayed, the father had made a contract. If the Almighty saw fit to spare His creature on this occasion, the child would devote his life to service: if Waldemar survived the disease, he was to become a missionary. In the febrile condition of his convalescence, Waldemar received the commandment with passive recognition that his life had been saved for a purpose. When Retta saw the letter, she confirmed that it was a matter of duty, less to God than to his earthly father.
    Waldemar wished to aim higher than his circumstances in the colony allowed. He cared little for Melbourne, but more for Retta who he feared would not like to leave the dear ones of her family. But he could not go alone. He put it to her: if he pledged his faith, would she pledge hers? When they squeezed hands, kneeling on dusty ground under a lime tree in the Botanic Gardens one blazing afternoon, their destiny became the Mission.
    They honeymooned on the voyage back to the Mother Country and on arrival in London embarked in an appropriate institution on a training scheme two parts medical, two parts Christian doctrine and one part Mandarin, and a year later presented themselves at Clifton for uplifting farewells before sailing for the Orient.
    Reaching Shanghai, they were put up in the flourishing commercial headquarters of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and a few days later took a transport boat up river to Hankou. They shared the one ‘first-class’ cabin on the boat with two young girls headed for an American Baptist station, and a traveller gentleman who did recitation. The deck was covered with bodies curled against each other. Christian enlightenment had penetrated not far; and the new recruits, savouring their relatively clean and spacious cabin where candles were in good supply, felt already somewhat besieged. Waldemar stood on the deck, hands behind his back, and gazed at the wide river, recording later in a letter the ‘marvellous contrivance’ by which coolies on the bank were able to pull the craft upstream. He never ceased to marvel at China’s contrivances; and Retta never ceased to make sure that the drinking water was boiled.
    They stayed in Hankou for in-the-field training before