Gladys Aylward Leads 100 Orphans Over the Mountains

The path had gone to ice hours before, and still she counted us. One, two, three — her voice cracking dry over the wind, running down the line and back up again like a shuttle on a loom, because if a child slipped away in that white nothing there would be no finding them again. I remember the sound of her voice more than the cold. I remember thinking that a woman so small should not have a voice that carried so far up a mountain.

We had not always been children of the road. Some of us came to her one at a time, the way stray animals come to a warm door. I had heard the story of the first of us long before I ever saw her — a girl bought for a few coins from a woman who meant to let her die, and given the name Ninepence, because that was the price paid for her life. After Ninepence came others, brought by relatives too poor to feed them, or found half-starved on a roadside, or simply left at the gate of the inn because someone in the valley had heard that the foreign woman with the strange, plain face did not turn children away. By the time the soldiers came, there were nearly a hundred of us sleeping under her roof, in a town called Yangchen, in the mountain province of Shansi.

She had not meant, I think, to become a mother to that many. She had come to China meaning to preach, nothing more — a London parlormaid who had failed the examinations of the very mission that should have wanted her most, who had gone on saving her coins from housework anyway, three pounds and then more, paying a shipping clerk in installments until she owned a ticket clear across two continents. She had crossed Siberia in a war she did not fully understand, walked thirty miles alone through snow when a train would go no further, been mistaken for a machinist twice by officials who could not read past one word on her passport, and slipped out of a hotel in Vladivostok in the dark to escape a clerk who wanted to send her to a factory. All of that, before she had preached a single sermon in the country she had crossed the world to reach.

She reached an old woman named Jeannie Lawson in Yangchen, seventy-three years old and running an inn for mule caravans, and the two of them turned that inn into the strangest pulpit in Shansi — grabbing the lead mule's rein as a caravan passed, hauling the whole train of animals and drivers into the courtyard whether the muleteers liked it or not, feeding them well, and then, every night, telling them the story of a man named Jesus. Word of the stories traveled faster than the mule trains did. Within weeks nobody had to be pulled in off the road anymore. They came for the food, and they stayed for the stories, and carried both away with them into the mountains for months at a stretch.

When Mrs. Lawson died of a fall not long after, the mission was left in the hands of a young Englishwoman with a cook named Yang and a stubborn command of a language her own teachers had once told her she was too dull to learn. She learned it anyway, in the dark, over months, until the villagers stopped calling her the foreigner and started calling her Ai-weh-de — the Virtuous One.

It was that reputation, more than anything, that put her in the sedan chair path of the local Mandarin. Foot-binding had been outlawed by the government, and someone was needed to go from house to house, unwind the bandages, inspect the crushed little feet of girls too young to refuse, and enforce a decree that centuries of custom did not want to obey. It had to be a woman. It had to be someone whose own feet were unbound, so she could walk the mountain paths the work required. There was exactly one such woman in that district, and she took the job on one condition — that she be allowed to tell her stories in every courtyard she inspected. The Mandarin agreed. She became, after that, the Storyteller as much as the foot inspector, welcomed into rooms no foreign missionary had ever entered, and it was in those rooms, hearing of children unwanted or unclaimed, that the orphans began arriving at her gate one after another.

Then the war that had been a rumor over the mountains became a fact in the streets. Japanese soldiers pushed into Shansi, and the Storyteller who had once been merely tolerated became, almost overnight, a woman with a price on her own head, because she had been passing what she knew of troop movements to Chinese officers who needed it. I remember the day that word reached the inn. I remember her face did not change much. She had already decided, I think, before any of us understood there was a decision to be made — that whatever happened to her, it would not happen to us.

She gathered every child in that house, from the oldest of us down to the ones who still had to be carried, and told us we were leaving the mountains behind by walking straight through more of them, toward the river, toward whatever government territory still lay unoccupied and safe. Nearly a hundred of us. No trucks. No mules to spare for children, only for what little food we could carry. She put the smallest ones on her back and on the backs of the oldest boys in turns, and she put herself at the rear of the line where she could see all of us at once, and we started walking.

The first days were merely hard. The path climbed and climbed, switchbacked along drops that none of us dared look down into, and the wind came off the peaks like something with teeth. We sang to keep the little ones from crying, hymns mostly, because those were the songs we all knew by heart from her nightly stories, and I have never since heard a hymn without thinking of frozen breath rising off a line of children on a mountain trail.