Bat Castle (Rangoon: 1847)
C H A P T E R I X
Bat Castle
[ Rangoon: 1847 ]
HE Gyne entered the Moulmein River mouth just in time to meet the City of London, on which Adoniram had engaged passage to Rangoon for his family some weeks earlier. She was to sail in about a week, and Adoniram and Emily had to move fast to get their belongings and the children on board.
They embarked on February I 5, 1847, and at the end of five days were in Rangoon. Ill with a bowel complaint, Adoniram suffered through the lengthy cuStom inspection, which took only two days because, asserted Emily, he “dispensed presents right and left.” Until their goods could be moved, they Stayed with Captain Crisp of the Cecilia, whose house was built “in English Style,” and “the best but one in town.” Adoniram had known Crisp’s father, who also lived in Rangoon, before the war; and the son, thought Emily, was “very kind.”
A few days more saw them in their own house. Emily promptly dubbed it “Bat CaStle.” She described it in a letter to her sister Kitty, comparing it with the “Loggery,” the house of their childhood:
I write you from walls as massive as any you read of in old stories and a great deal uglier—the very eyeball and heartcore of an old white-bearded Mussulman. Think of me in an immense brick house with rooms as large as the entire “loggery” (our centre room is twice as large, and has no window), and only one small window apiece. \When I speak of windows, do not think I make any allusion to glass—of course not. The windows (holes) are closed by means of heavy board or plank shutters, tinned over on the outside as a preventive of fire.... Imagine us, then, on the second floor of this immense den, with nine rooms at our command, the smallest of which (bathingroom and a kind of pantry) are, I think, quite as large as your dining room, and the rest very much larger. Part of the floors are of brick, and part of boards; but old “Green Turban” whitewashed them all, with the walls, before we came, because the Doctor told him, when he was over here, that he must “make the house shine for madam.” He did make it shine with a ven- ‘ eance, between white-washing and greasing. They oil furniture in this country, as Americans do mahogany; but all his doors and other wood-work were fairly dripping, and we have not got rid of the smell yet; nor, with all our rubbing, is it quite safe to hold too long on the door. The partitions are all of brick, and very thick, and the door sills are built up, so that I go over them at three or four steps, Henry mounts and falls off, and Edward gets on all-fours, and accomplishes the pass with more safety.
But the worst trial was the bats. The many beams overhead sheltered
.. thousands and thousands of bats, that disturb us in the day-time only by a little cricket-like music, but in the night —Oh, if you could only hear them carouse! The mosquito curtains are our only safeguard... We have had men at work nearly a week trying to thin them out, and have killed a great many hundreds, but I suppose their little demoniac souls come back, each with an attendant, for I am sure there are twice as many as at first. Every thing, walls, tables, chairs, etc., are stained by them.
As if bats were not enough...
We are blessed with our full share of cockroaches, beetles, lizards, rats, ants, mosquitoes, and bed-bugs. With the laSt the woodwork is all alive, and the ants troop over the house in great droves.... Perhaps twenty have crossed my paper since I have been writing. Only one cockroach has paid me a visit, but the neglect of these gentlemen has been fully made up by a company of black bugs about the size of the end of your little finger — nameless adventurers.
This was the house in which they settled down to work: Adoniram at the dictionary; Emily at the biography of Sarah, housekeeping, and the care of the two little boys.
Rangoon cast a peculiar spell of unreality over both of them. Wrote Emily later:
I have seen all this before! was a feeling that flashed upon me more frequently at Rangoon than here, producing a momentary confusion of intellect, that almost made me doubt if “I was I”; and then came the reflections, whenP—how? —where? and finally it would creep into my mind; why, I learned about it in Sabbath school when I was a little child.... There I was in the identical town of which I had read with such eager curiosity when I was a little child away in the central part of New York; and which then seemed to me about as real as a city belonging to the moon. And stranger still, I was actually associated with one of the movers in scenes, the bare recital of which had, in years gone by, thrilled on my nerves with greater power than the wildest fiction.
This feeling came when Adoniram took her to the “half enclosed neglected British grave-yard”:
The first child of European parents born in Burmah had been buried there; and there was a strong tie between that mouldering little one and ourselves. Over the grave of little Roger stood, but slightly broken, the rude brick monument which was built thirty-three years ago; and a tall azalia, very much like those which perfume the forests of New York, had grown out from the base almost overshadowing it. It was strange to Stand and muse beside that little grave, with one parent by my side, and the other so irrevocably a being of the past. Oh, how she had wept there! and how human she grew —she whom I had formerly only wondered at—-while my own tears started in sympathy.
The same impression stole over her at the pool where Adoniram had baptized the first Burman:
. with a similar, dreaming, wondering feeling, as though walking among shadows and skeletons, I wandered about the grounds occupied by the old mission house. The building was torn down after the war, and the place is now covered by a garden of betel, so thickly planted that it was with great difficulty we could make our way among the long creepers which had climbed far above our heads...
“The house must have been somewhere here,” remarked one of those beings of the past (not a shadow), close to my elbow; “that mound was the site of an old pagoda, and I leveled it as you see. But there is a nice well somewhere—that will be a sure mark.”
A plainly dressed, sober faced, middle aged Burman had been regarding our movements for some time with curiosity, and he now ventured on a remark.
“I am looking for a good well from which I drank water many years ago,” was the reply. “It was close by my house, and was bricked up.”
“Your house!” repeated the man with astonishment. “Yes, I lived here formerly.”
The Burman turned his eye on the tall betel vines with a kind of wondering incredulity; and then back upon our faces.
“It was in the reign of Bo-dmz-parab” (the fourth king from the present reigning monarch).
If... some modern looking personage should walk into your parlor and announce himself as the “Wandering jew,” I doubt whether your smile and shrug would be quite so significant as were those of our new friend. There was the well, however, a proof against imposture; and the next moment it was evidently so regarded by the Burman, for he led the way to it without speaking. It was a large square well — the bricks all green with moss, or silvered by lichens— almost as good as new, and quite superior to anything in the neighborhood. It could not be looked upon without some emotion; and the man stood by us listening to all our remarks as if he hoped to hear something he might understand; and when we went away he followed a little, and then stood and gazed after us in wondering silence. Adoniram had similar feelings. Of course, he had seen all this before—but on his part he felt as if he must have known Emily in some previous existence. It came out one night when he was feeling discouraged and downcast. Emily had tried to cheer him up without success. Finally she had given up and retired to her chair while he continued gloomily stalking up and down the room.
At last [as Emily told it] I turned suddenly to him and inquired, “Would you like to know the first couplet that I ever learned to repeat?” I suppose he thought I was trifling, for he only turned his head and said nothing. “I learned it,” continued
I, “before I could read, and I afterwards used to write it. every where—sometimes, even, at the top of the page, when I was preparing the story on whose success more depended than its readers ever dreamed.” I had gained his attention. “What was it?” he inquired.
“Beware of desperate steps; the darkest day (Live till tomorrow) will have passed away.”
“I declare,” said he with energy, and his whole face brightening, “if I could only believe in transmigration, I should have no doubt that we had spent ages together in some other sphere, we are so alike in every thing. Why, those two lines have been my motto; I used to repeat them over and over in prison, and I have them now, written on a slip of paper, for a book-mark.” He stood for a few moments, thinking and smiling, and then said, “Well, one thing you didn’t do: you never wrote ‘Pray without ceasing’ on the cover of your wafer box.” “No; but I wrote it on my looking-glass.”
Thus they worked and lived together. During the day, wrote Adoniram, “Wife and I occupy remote ends of the house, and we have to visit one another, and that takes up time.” After the day’s work, of course, they were together. “And I have to hold a meeting with the rising generation every evening.... Henry can say, ‘Twinkle, twinkle,’ all himself, and Edward can repeat it after his father! Giants of genius! paragons of erudition!”
For a while life in Bat Castle was enjoyable. On June 2, 1847, her firSt wedding anniversary, Emily could write, “Just one year to-day since I Stood before good old Doctor Kendrick, and said the irrevocable ‘love, honor, and obey.’ It was on many accounts a day of darkness, but it has dragged three hundred and sixty-five very light ones at its heels. It has been far the happiest year of my life; and, what is in my eyes still more important, my husband says it has been among the happiest of his. We have been in circumstances to be almost constantly together; and I never met with any man who could talk so well, day after day, on every subject, religious, literary, scientific, political, and—nice baby-talk. He has a mind which seems exhaustless, and so, even here in Rangoon, where all the English I hear, from week’s end to week’s end, is from him, I never think of wanting more society... ”
Nevertheless, at the end of this happiest of their years together, troubles were accumulating. They had left about half their household goods and possessions with the Stevenses in Moulmein. They had scarcely settled in Rangoon when word came that an incendiary had set the house on fire. The Stevenses had barely escaped with their lives, and the house and everything in it had been burned to ashes.
The loss of their Moulmein valuables could be borne philosophically. But there were other difficulties. Adoniram had begun bringing together the scattered remnants of the Rangoon church with the idea of establishing a new one. Working quietly—almost surreptitiously—he was soon meeting with a dozen or so converts and several inquirers, one of whom he baptized toward the end of March.
He knew the danger. The assistant governor of the city—the real power, since the governor was an old, weak man—was, thought Adoniram, “the most ferocious, bloodthirsty monster” he had ever known in Burma. It was common knowledge that “his house and courtyard resound, day and night, with the screams of people under torture. Even foreigners are not beyond his grasp. He lately wreaked his rage on some Armenians and Mussulmans, and one of the latter class died in the hands of a subordinate officer. His crime was quite a venial one; but in order to extort money, he was tortured so barbarously that the blood streamed from his mouth, and he was dead in an hour.”
Knowing this, Adoniram had taken such precautions that he believed he was conducting his little meetings in Bat Castle without detection. He was mistaken. Saturday, May 29, he learned that orders had been issued privately to have the house watched, “in order to apprehend any who might be liable to the charge of favoring ‘Jesus Christ’s religion.’ ” Fortunately, he had time to warn his disciples to stay away from worship Sunday. And from this time on he never dared to meet with more than two or three at a time.
Even so, a week later he secretly baptized another convert, a young man of unusual qualities. Within two or three days the convert’s father was arrested on charges of heresy and “frequenting the house of Jesus Christ’s teacher.” Luckily, the order came to the attention of the old governor, and the charges were dismissed. But Adoniram could longer deny that the prospects for real missionary work were far darker than they had been thirty years before.
There was one hope. If he could go to Ava — rather “New Ava,” formerly Amarapura, which had once again become the capital—- he might possibly win toleration at the Golden Feet. The old gov—ernor gave him permission to make the trip. The best season for going up the river was approaching. But this hope too was dashed by word that the annual budget for missionary expenses had been cut deeply. Adoniram’s extra expenses in Rangoon for assistants and house added up to eighty—six rupees. The mission secretary wrote him that the mOSt he could be allowed henceforth would be seventeen and a half.
When the letter came, Adoniram could not believe it. It had never occurred to him that money might be lacking. “I thought they loved me,” he told Emily sadly, “and they would scarcely have known it if I had died.”
It is my growing conviction that the Baptist churches in America are behind the age in missionary spirit. They now and then make a spasmodic effort to throw off a nightmare debt of some years’ accumulation, and then sink back into unconscious repose.... This state of things cannot last always. The Baptist missions will probably pass into the hands of other denominations, or be temporarily suspended; and those who have occupied the van will fall back into the rear.
But, as it had before, his “unnatural state of excitement” (as Emily termed it) soon passed and he accepted the setback as the will of God.
On top of this disappointment came sickness. Emily became, according to Adoniram, “as thin as the shad that went up Niagara." She blamed her condition on the food.
As for living, I must own that I am within an inch of starvation, and poor little Henry says, when he sits down to the table, “ I don’t want any dinner — I wish we could go back to Maulmain.” I-lis papa does better, for he never has a poor appetite. For a long time after we came here, we could get no bread at all; now we get a heavy, black, sour kind, for which we pay 'ust three times as much as we did in Maulmain....
Our milk is a mixture of buffaloes’ milk, water, and something else which we cannot make out. We have changed our milk-woman several times, but it does no good. The butter we make from it is like lard with flakes of tallow. But it is useless to write about these things — you can get no idea. I must tell you, however, of the grand dinner we had one day. “You must contrive and get something that mamma can eat,” the doctor said to our Burmese purveyor; “she will starve to death.”
“What shall I get?”
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
Well, we did have a capital dinner, though we tried in vain to find out by the bones what it was. Henry said it was mule-tabs, a species of lizard, and I should have thought so too, if the little animal had been of a fleshly consistence. Cook said he didn’t know, but he grinned a horrible grin which made my stomach heave a little, notwithstanding the deliciousness of the meal. In the evening we called Mr. Bazaar-man. “What did we have for dinner today?”
“Were they good?”
“Excellent.” A tremendous explosion of laughter, in which the cook from his dish room joined as loud as he dared. “What were they?”
“Rats!” A common servant would not have played such a trick, but it was one of the doctor’s assistants who goes to bazaar for us.
There is no record of their having rats again, but there was little else to eat. The Burmese Lent had begun and for four months there was to be no meat and no fowl—nothing but fish, and that halfputrid and procurable only “by stealth, and at great price.”
For a while they lived on boiled rice and fruits until Emily’s whole being revolted. Then some boxes of biscuits came from Moulmein. Adoniram bribed a rascally Mussulman to get them some fowls secretly. He stole most of them back later, but they managed to live on those he left.
Meanwhile the rainy season had arrived. The house had been comfortable during the hot weather; but now, wrote Emily:
We are obliged to get directly before the window in order to see, and we suffer unaccountably from the damp air. We frequently shut all up, and light candles at noon. The doctor has severe rheumatism in his writing shoulder and constant headache, but his lungs do not trouble him so much as during the firSt storms. For myself, I am utterly prostrated; and, although I have taken care of everything and written a little, I have not sat up an hour at a time for six weeks. I have my table by my couch and write a few lines, and then lie down. The wooden ceiling overhead is covered with a kind of green mould, and the doors get the same way in two days if they are not carefully rubbed. Now, do you think I am in any way discontented, and would go back to America to live in a palace? Not I. I am ten times happier than I could be there... A n d then we are so, 50 happy in each other... We are frequently startled by echoing each other’s unspoken thought, and we believe alike in everything...
Adoniram was afraid Emily would waste away and die before his eyes. She was more optimistic. “People like me ‘die’ too many times to be much alarmed by anything that comes upon themselves.” But she admitted that it was a bad time. Funeral processions passed the house every day. “There has been of late a funeral feast in nearly every house in our neighborhood, and the constant tap-tap of nailing up coffins in the night is dreadful.”
Now came catastrophe. One Saturday night...
Dr. J. was seized with terrible pains in the bowels, etc., which he thought was diarrhoea. On Sunday he took laudanum injections, and was easier; but in the night the disease showed itself a dysentery of the worst form which we could find in our books. He had never had it before, either himself or in his family, and was utterly at a loss to know how to treat it. No two books agreed, and you know there is no medical advisor in the place. I begged him to take calomel, and he would have administered it to any other person, but in his own case he procrastinated. He has taken various medicines, and thus checked the disease; but last night... he became alarmed, and for the first time took a dose of rhubarb and calomel. I am afraid, however, it is too late, for he is in a terrible condition this morning. The last resort is a sea voyage, which at this season of the year is a desperate thing. Nothing goes from this port but little native vessels, with no accommodations for a well man, much less a sick one; and they are frequently wrecked.
All these calamities Emily poured out in a letter to Miss Cynthia Sheldon in Utica. Writing was the only way she could express her fears without inflicting them on Adoniram and the children. And this Friday morning in mid-June her forebodings soon drove her again to her pen. Only an hour or so after finishing the letter to Miss Sheldon, she began another to Miss Anable:
The Doctor is awake, but we cannot tell yet whether he is better or worse. He is evidently passing a crisis of some sort. The music and mourners have set up their screeching and howling at a house nearly opposite, and men are busy decorating the funeral car in the streets. We seem to be hemmed in by death. Suppose it should come here; there would be only servants to bury the dead! Something is the matter with Edward. He was wakeful all night, and thiS'morning he screams out suddenly when at his play as in pain, and runs to me as fast as he can. Poor little fellow! He can not tell his trouble. I have just quieted him, and take the moment to write while his head lies in my lap.
The next day Adoniram thought the “backbone of his disease” was broken. “If it is,” commented Emily, “I am afraid there are two back-bones, for I think I never knew a person suffer so severely.” Meanwhile Henry had been seized “suddenly and violently” with a fever and was groaning on a pallet Emily had made for him on the floor. Edward had a disturbing night “and acts as strangely as yesterday. He scarcely ever cries, yet screams seem forced from him as by a sudden blow. He runs to me, but recovers in a moment, and goes back to play. There is something very alarming in this, knowing the brave little fellow’s disposition as I do.”
By next morning Edward's disease had manifested itself. His face was shining, spotted purplish, and so swollen that his eyes were nearly closed. “At a venture” Emily gave him a dose of calomel. Later that day she decided he had erysipelas. By afternoon his fever dropped and the spots on his face turned from purple to red. It was late that night before Emily went to bed “with one of my very worst nervous headaches.”
I was awakened from a troubled sleep by Edward’s screams; but as soon as I raised my head I seemed to be caught by a whirlwind, and fell back helpless. As soon as possible, I made another attempt, and this time reached the middle of the room, where I fell headlong. I did not venture on my feet again, but crept to the bed on my hands and feet, and finally succeeded in soothing him. All this time the Doctor was groaning terribly, and he managed between his groans to tell me that he was in even greater agony than when he was first seized. I was unable to do anything for him, however, and so crawled over to Henry’s cot... I eXpected that both Edward and the Doctor would die, and you may imagine that I had one long cry before I began to contrive what I should do in case the worst should come. This night was the worst. Slowly Adoniram and Edward and Henry began to recover—although two weeks later Adoniram had to lance the immense abscesses which formed on Edward’s head and neck. Emily saw something “angelic” in Edward’s patience and calmness.
He could not help crying when his papa lanced his head; but the moment the sharpest pain was over, he nestled down in my bosom, and though quivering all over, he kept lifting his eyes to my face, and trying to smile, oh, so sweetly! He watched his papa while he sharpened the lancet to open another, and when it was ready, turned and laid his little head on his knee of his own accord... You will say that I write of nothing but my husband and children. Of course not; I think of nothing else. Government intolerance, lack of food and money, sickness... If God intended them to leave Rangoon, He was making known His wishes in no uncertain terms. And Emily was pregnant. To stay longer was impossible. They decided to leave as soon as they could procure passage.
Yet later Adoniram and Emily cherished the memory of their seven months in Rangoon. Through all the horrors, except perhaps at the very worst, bright flashes of humor and affection had passed between them like Sparks of electricity. Neither had ever eXperienced anything quite like the relation they enjoyed. Each seemed to know what the other was thinking. Each had the same ability to see something ridiculous in what should have been most depressing.
They always remembered, for instance, how once when Emily had been too ill to get out of bed—and Adoniram not much better—she had painfully raised herself on one elbow and scribbled three stanzas which she handed to him. He had read with amazement and a broadening smile:
Vive la bagatelle!
High let laughter swell!
Peal forth the song!
Mirth’s careless children, we,
And in the path of glee,
Dance we along.
Vive la bagatelle!
Deep in the bosom’s cell,
Bid Sorrow sleep;
And ’neath the radiant flowers,
Wreathed in Hope’s blooming bowers,
Bury her deep.
Vive la Bagatelle!
Only bright Pleasure’s spell,
Young hearts should hold;
Care will gloom hours enow,
On the shrunk, faded brow,
When we are old.
With difficulty suppressing the smile, Adoniram had told Emily that she deserved a rebuke for her mischievousness. Look at that last stanza! After all, he was old—should he feel gloomy and careworn?
Her own eyes dancing, she retorted that since he criticized the poem she would turn it into a sermon in Ecclesiastes. She took back the paper, thought a moment, then wrote a conclusion:
Vive la bagatelle!
Yet in Truth’s cryStal cell,
One lesson see, ——
God counts the scattered hours, God gave the wasted powers,—
Our judge is be!
With this Adoniram was satisfied—more so than Emily suspected, for a few days later he told the story and repeated the poem in a letter to Mrs. Stevens.
But episodes like this still did not make Rangoon tolerable. August 31, 1847, they sailed away, never to return. A week later, they were again in Moulmein.