All things to all men
By W. N. COLLINS
Reprinted with permission from the Catholic Digest, July 1944.*
Father Ferrary threw one of his parties the Saturday night before Thanksgiving, mostly for U. S. Army and Navy and Air Force men, as usual, but this time also for Miss Peggy Ma; Peggy was leaving almost immediately to go to school at St. Elizabeth's in New Jersey. I got in on it, too, just as I often wangle my way into one of his parties, but this time I had a right to be there, because if it hadn't been for me Peggy might not have been going to St. Elizabeth's nor might she even have had the blessedness and balance of Catholic young womanhood.
The author of the following for the last three years has been a professor at the National Central University of China. He was at one time a professor at the University of Michigan, and was in England for 11 years as adviser to Kuo Tai Chi, former ambassador to England. Professor Collins is not a Catholic.A Cantonese restaurant served the meal in the large room downstairs at Father Ferrary's and it was 8:15 when we sat down to eat, 35 of us. Father Leo Ferrary doesn't hold down expense for these servicemen dinners, ridiculously frugal as he is all other times. A fine soup was followed by six kinds of meats garnished with hard-boiled eggs; there was a course of well-browned fish tidbits, and fish is an A-plus luxury in Chungking these days; there was roast chicken with crackly skin and flavorish meat; some meatballs of I know not what but with an almost oysterish flavor; a great dish of port (hard to come by in Chungking these days, and I have a kind of passion for the sweet sauce; a steamed duck was almost lost beneath a pile of succulent bamboo and dried mushroom; and a vegetable course almost made me renounce my opinion of flavorless and unnourishing vegetables in Szechwan. Then came along a delicately flavored thin liquid dessert with fluffy sponge cake, and this liquid dessert almost deserves a paragraph to itself. A mystical gleam comes into Szechwanese eyes when you speak of it. The two Chinese characters of its name are in English literally silver ears and it has both delicacy and potency. It is sophisticated and expensive. It is at once almost palatable and most healthful and most aristocratic. I will not go on about it, but Szechwanese will go on about it if you get them started on the subject.
"Silver ears" was followed by (for the Chinese will serve things that way, soup at the last and dessert somewhere past the middle) a huge dish of noodles, which I was by then too replete to taste, and I was sorry, for noodles can be so good, just as they can be so meager, and these, I could see, were by no means meager. The wine was peach wine from the country, from a place Father Ferrary knows. We topped off with large tangerines, now at the height of their season, lovely to look at and sweet for once. Such things have never been given expert attention in China and in consequence they are tart and make one's mouth pucker.
We dined by candlelight because Saturday night is the night Father Ferrary's part of town is rationed on electricity, but the lights came on as we were singing. They sang a song that is by now a favorite of mine, White Christmas. A sergeant did a trombone imitation as accompaniment to singing, with marvelous effectiveness--it was not only fun but an embellishment. The same sergeant stood up and sang Ave Maria superbly in Latin, unaccompanied, and along in the evening they sang Silent Night. The old reliables like Old Black Joe, Irish Eyes, and Show Me the Way To Go Home were sung in chorus. Mancin had constituted himself master of ceremonies by this time and was at his very best. He was not at all lit but was gently illuminated by the slow, sure pervasiveness of the peach wine and imparted a glow to the whole party as he stridently announced each song and drew hesitant soloists to their feet. Then everybody sang God Bless America and a new version of The Old Gray Mare with lines about "the Stars and Stripes Over Germany" and "the Stars and Stripes Over Tokyo." It was a dandy song. Then came the Artillery song, of which the line, "As the caissons go rolling along," still rumbles in my memory.
Nobody but Father Ferrary could manage the justaposition of commissioned officers, ranks, and ratings of forces and civilians, and along with the sacred and the mundane, the religious and the hilarious with the same utter freedom and yet complete socialness, giving each its due and yet each keeping its place. In the isolation of Chungking, amid the confusion, despondency, and distant hope, what a pastoral thing it is to provide such get togethers for American young men on an occasional evening. And what a right thing it is, too, to gather them with not a thought whether they are Catholic or non-Catholic. But that is Father Ferrary's Americanism all over. And among this medley he has always a considerable sprinkling of Chinese friends, young ladies to add feminine grace, Chinese officials, professional and businessmen, all of them quickly getting into the spirit of the occasion, each with a contribution.
The four Chinese girls who were the only roses among the 31 thorns had the time of their lives at the party, but Peggy Ma, the dinner's guest of honor, had a quiet triumph all her own, that she did not realize and that would have been spoiled if she had realized it. I had introduced her to Father Ferrary last May, and when I got back from Kansas in October I found her completing her Catholic instruction and having a happy Baptism, with Lady Seymour, wife of the British ambassador, as her godmother.
Father Ferrary is a baffling mixture of the prelatical and pastoral, priestly and personal, dignified and colloquial, idealistic and practical. If I were in his place (for, after all, he is the Apostolic Delegate's representative in Chungking and therefore, in Chinese eyes, charged with all the utlimate duties of a Vatican representative in Chungking while the Apostolic Delegate is still in Peiping) I would let others teach catechism to young men and women, but he will put himself at their disposal when they apply. And it is one of the sights of Chungking to behold him careening along on his motorcycle to the Waichiaopu (the Chinese Foreign Office) on behalf of American or Spanish or French or German or Italian or Portuguese missionaries who need new passports, or protection from eviction, in any province, north, south, west, east. Off and on you'll find him tinkering away at home at his motorcycle, hoping to get it in shape to run next time he needs it - until some serviceman comes along and says, "Father, let me have a look at the rattletrap."
He camps out rather than resides at St. Joseph's, some say because he isn't willing to spend the necessary money on himself. But I give him no such credit; I think he just likes to live that way. St. Joseph's isn't much after wartime bombings, and such as it is, he has to share it with a detachment of Chinese military police. The walls are gone, and there is only a lump of the altar left under the open sky. The front alone remains - the main entrance and the clock tower, annd that front is occupied by the gendarmerie. So St. Joseph's and Father Ferrary supplement each other, it being all front and he having no front at all.
I think he might live in a little more comfort and dignity. But, no, he is pastoral more than prelatical; only you have to be somewhat prelatical if by exigencies of war you are directed to represent to the Chinese Foreign Office the emergency needs of the Catholic missionaries in occupied China and smooth out all the problems of the one Church with the many nationalities of her clergy and their interests material and spiritual and personal. The Chinese authorities sense this in him, this Francisan commonness of kindly understanding and sympathy and association, as well as the distinction of thought in his representations to them, and the deep competence of his 20 years in China. Their knowledge of his way of living adds regard to their respect for his ability. So, considering all his responsibilities and activities, I suppose he must be allowed to indulge his one special vice whenever opportunity offers.
Father Ferrary is a terrible walker and climber. Tyrolean ancestry may account for it; nothing can exonerate him for it. No one should ever let himself be enticed into the country with him without knowing the perils, the progressive exhaustion, the sullen but hopeless resistance, the final prostration, that comes of accepting any suggestion from him that it would be pleasant to take a little rural walk.
Once last autumn he crossed my path out in the country around South Springs, with two husky American sergeants, headed 25 miles farther into the hills for a week's shooting. I knew what they were in for, but I didn't feel called on to warn them. Father Ferrary was chanting the equivalent of "There's b'ar in them thar hills, there's deer; there's wild boar; there's tigers." They finally struggled back to the so-called civilization of Chungking, after a week of rain, looking rather like the old-time "before-taking" pictures of medical advertisements. He had kept them chasing up and down hill, twisting along invisible trails, the whole week through and all they shot was a porcupine. I was not sorry for them. They could always have shot Ferrary and said they mistook him for a chamois or a mountain goat. He would have had it coming to him. But he came back fresh as ever, quite rejuvenated.
I can outmatch him at the table. Let him outmatch me on the trail and in his living of the Franciscan ideal. I am physically and spiritually lazy; I must learn a little from his large-mindedness and greatheartedness and so tolerate his virtues (which is often much harder to do with friends than to tolerate their defects) and let him go his own pretty stubborn way. If he is long-winded in walking at least he is short-winded in talking, and most people are the opposite. I will be large-minded myself, even as I am large-stomached, and continue to eat his meals and try his patience and accept the honey he gets from down country. I will be gracious to him, considering that I never by any chance gave him a dinner in return and usually neglect to pay him for the honey.
*This article originally appeared in China Correspondent (January 1944). Reprinted from Catholic Digest, P.O. Box 64090, St. Paul, MN 55164-0090. July 1944. Copyright 1998 by the University of St. Thomas. Reprinted with permission.
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