The Final Race Read online

  “Is that a yes?”

  Florence nodded. “That’s a yes!”

  For the first time, Eric gave his new bride-to-be a chaste kiss, then said, “We’ll have to keep this to ourselves. I must speak to your father first.”

  “Of course,” she agreed. “Yes, of course.”

  Eric contacted Jenny in Scotland, asking her to send an engagement ring via a missionary friend headed to Tientsin. As he waited for its arrival, he spoke with Mr. MacKenzie, who gave his blessing but insisted that Florence complete her training to be a nurse first.

  Eric agreed.

  When it arrived, Eric placed the five-diamond token of his love on Florence’s ring finger. Their engagement became official. They had a long, arduous wait before them, but at least they could openly declare their love for each other.

  Florence, along with her sister Margaret, made arrangements to leave for Canada the following summer.

  In March 1930, Eric asked the LMS for a two-year furlough to Scotland that would begin the same month Florence departed for school in Canada. His plan was to spend his time furthering his studies at the Scottish Congregational College. He would then return to China to teach at TACC and wait for Florence’s return.

  In early April, A. P. Cullen and Eric Scarlett left Tientsin for Pei Tai Ho to make certain the LMS cottages were ready for the summer’s vacationing missionaries and their families. After arriving by train, they climbed on top of donkeys to ride the five miles from the station to the cottages. Cullen and Scarlett had barely gotten on their way when three men stepped out from behind bushes and demanded that the missionaries hand over their money.

  Cullen, slightly ahead of Scarlett on the road and speaking in Chinese, demanded that they be allowed to pass.

  The men pulled pistols from their waistbands and commanded that Cullen and Scarlett give them what they wanted.

  “Now wait a minute,” Cullen said, hoping to reason with them.

  One of the bandits fired his gun. A sudden thud behind Cullen caused him to turn. Scarlett lay on the ground, face up.

  The three men panicked. One grabbed Cullen, pulled him from the donkey, and stripped him of his wallet and gold watch while the other two opened the suitcases Cullen and Scarlett had brought with them, riffling through them in search of valuables.

  “Hurry, hurry!” one of the Chinese men called out. They turned to go, but not before firing another shot, this one barely missing Cullen.

  As soon as he was able, Cullen hurried over to Scarlett. “Stay with me,” he urged as he ripped the shirt of his friend open to find blood pouring from a bullet wound just above the heart. Cullen felt for a pulse and attempted to apply pressure to the hole in Scarlett’s chest. The pulse was weak, but at least it was still there. “Stay with me, Scarlett.”

  Cullen jerked his head up at the sound of footsteps. Townspeople, curious at the echoing of gunshots, now gathered around him. “Go get help!” Cullen called to some of the boys.

  Again he felt for a pulse in search of a sign that Scarlett held on to life.

  But there was none.

  Two days later, Eric and his future father-in-law met the train carrying Scarlett’s body at the Tientsin station. On Saturday, Eric helped carry the casket from the funeral service held at Taku Road Church to the Canton Road Cemetery. There A. P. Cullen led the graveside service.

  Five days later, Eric Liddell sat at his desk and wrote another letter to the LMS foreign secretary:

  Since I last wrote you a good deal has happened so that my plans have had to be altered. The death of Mr. Scarlett means that it would place the College in a very difficult place were I to go home this year. . . . Would you please cancel any arrangement for deputation that you have made for me. I am sorry to do this, especially as Dad is none too well, but I am sure I am right.[40]

  On April 12, the annual Easter baptismal service included nine students from Scarlett’s class. In a letter to friends, Eric wrote, “This Easter Service, and the seeing of all these students taking their allegiance to our Saviour, was like a ray of light penetrating the darkness of the days we had passed through.”[41]

  In May, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh MacKenzie officially announced the engagement of their daughter to Mr. Eric Liddell. Shortly after, Florence and Eric said a painful good-bye as she and Margaret left China with another missionary family, heading first to Great Britain, where they would visit with Eric’s family in Scotland, and then on to Canada.

  Eric could and would write to her, of course, and she to him. But it would be a good, long time before they saw each other again or held each other in their arms.

  Another separation, which Eric had become all too familiar with . . . but this time—even more than all the times before—drove a deeper sense of distance into his heart.

  [38] Ellen Caughey, Run to Glory: The Story of Eric Liddell (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 2017), e-book.

  [39] Eric Liddell, circular letter, 1928, Eric Liddell Centre, accessed September 19, 2017, http://www.ericliddell.org/about-us/eric-liddell/personal-correspondence-of-eric-liddell/.

  [40] David McCasland, Eric Liddell: Pure Gold: A New Biography of the Olympic Champion Who Inspired Chariots of Fire (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House, 2001), 149.

  [41] Ibid.

  CHAPTER 12

  ONWARD AND UPWARD

  Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away.

  Song of Solomon 8:7, NIV

  Autumn 1930

  Eric and Rob, shirt sleeves cuffed to just under their elbows, stood in the Tientsin home of their parents, carefully wrapping and boxing the items their parents had written to them about.

  Eric held a crystal figurine up to the sunshine bursting through a nearby window to watch the light play within the prisms. “Mother always fancied this,” he said, then looked at Rob, who raised his brow in agreement.

  “I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” Rob noted. “When they left for Scotland, I felt sure they’d return soon enough.”

  Eric nodded as he wrapped the figurine in a sheet of paper before nestling it in the packing box at his feet. Recent news that the LMS medical council had determined their father no longer physically able to return to China had come to them in an ink-stained letter. Along with the shock of it all had been the request that their oft-left sons sell their furnishings and send the rest to Scotland.

  “Look at this,” Rob now said, holding up a tiny framed photo of baby Eric swathed in a white christening gown.

  Eric crossed the room and took the photo from his brother, who punched him lightly. “Sweet thing that you were,” Rob teased.

  Eric chuckled, then studied the colorized photo a final time—the blond of his hair, the blue of his eyes, the rose in his cheeks—before handing it back to Rob.

  He couldn’t remember the day, of course, but he’d heard his mother and father tell the story so many times he often felt as though he could.

  “Eric Henry Liddell,” his father had said as he poured water over his head, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” James had spoken the blessing over his newest son, splashing his forehead the appropriate three times and, in doing so, uniting Eric in the eternal grace of Christ. James had told Eric that as a missionary, he delighted in sharing the joys of baptism with anyone. “But baptizing my own children . . . I savored those opportunities.”

  * * *

  GLOBAL DEPRESSION CAME in more ways than one. Voices of opposition arose in Britain stating that the Chinese should teach themselves or that the college was too expensive and the missionaries should simply engage individuals on a one-on-one basis.

  The opposition came from China as well. Earlier in the year Eric had taken a piece of London Missionary Society stationery from his father’s desk. After crossing out his father’s initials and replacing them with his own carefully penned E. H., Eric began a letter to Effie Hardie:

  We have just had our half yearly exams and broken up for the Chinese
New Year holidays. We are not meant to have a holiday this year as it is against the government regulations. Still they cannot stop an old custom like that so easily. An order went out saying that all the little shops were to stop selling the usual little new year gifts & of course that meant absolute ruin to them. Some of the little shop owners committed suicide so that a petition went from Tientsin asking the government to withdraw the regulation. Fortunately they did. . . . Since then it has been increasingly hard not because the students are definitely making trouble but just because of the absolute slackness & indifference. I see that a College at Chi Nan has had to close altogether because the Provincial leader is against Christianity. I suppose we are getting some of the feeling from there.[42]

  If Effie Hardie could not sense the foreboding in Eric’s words then, she surely understood it later. He ended the letter with a note that he would be in Scotland by August.

  Instead, by August, Eric had buried his friend Eric Scarlett, had notified the board that he would not return to Great Britain as planned, had seen Florence off at the train depot, and he and Rob—who lived and worked two hundred miles away in Siaochang—had packed up their parents’ home.

  As for Florence, she and Margaret had traveled from China to Scotland, where they’d been welcomed by the family that would soon be her own. Scotland had been an enchanting experience for the MacKenzie girls and of epic proportion for Florence. When the Liddells left China, young Flo—a little girl whose auburn curls bounced as she walked—had simply been the daughter of their friends. She had been Jenny’s piano student and Eric’s Sunday school class pianist. But when she arrived in Scotland with Margaret, she wore the ring Eric had sent to Scotland for.

  The British public had also heard of their plans to marry, and as news spread westward, most received the eyebrow-raising news with joy. Certainly, Eric’s family was among them. And after a brief vacation with them, Florence and Margaret continued on to Toronto where, oceans away from her love, Flo began the rigors of nursing school.

  While Florence spent special days with Eric’s family, Eric received the extended benefit of that treatment from her family in Tientsin. While he was not one to openly gush about his feelings in front of friends, no one in the MacKenzie household minded him bubbling over while talking about Florence. And Eric didn’t mind the extra stories about his fiancée that only her young brothers could gleefully tell. While such delightful anecdotes never seemed to receive distribution in wide release, Eric playfully reminded Florence in their private letters.

  Eric knew their fledgling flame of love needed fuel to burn and glow, but he also knew that too much yearning too soon would not be helpful for either of them. They would be separated not weeks or months but years before they joined together as man and wife. This time of long farewells had been the formula of his childhood and young adulthood. Time and again he had said good-bye to family members. In some ways, he’d grown accustomed to this type of lifestyle. But Florence had not experienced such, and Eric had never been separated from someone he planned an intimate life of marriage with.

  As Mary Liddell had modeled for her sons all those years previously, Eric put his heart down on paper to Florence—under the letterhead of the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College stationery, which bore the insignia “Onward and Upward”—as often as he could. In turn, Florence shared with Eric her excruciating schedule as a student nurse. Each week she spent nearly sixty hours between her clinical work and time in the classroom. Her day began each morning by five forty-five and went nearly nonstop until ten o’clock at night. More than anything, she kept her eyes on the calendar. With each day that passed, she and Eric drew closer to the day when they would see each other again, and closer still to the day when they would marry.

  Life in China marched—as the letterhead stated—onward and upward.

  Eric developed an appreciation of Dr. Lavington Hart’s vision for the TACC, and his concept of Christian education fit Eric’s ideals perfectly. Variant methods of missionary activity had been scrutinized to produce results. As Eric expressed in his letter to Effie Hardie, some argued against too much proselytizing and felt that Christians should simply live passively in their context, allowing God to do the work of bringing people to faith. This thinking fit well with the anti-Western sentiment of the Chinese. But Eric was an active missionary, which came out in how he thought, spoke, wrote, and lived. He constantly concerned himself with the salvation of others, especially his students. He designed daily readings for them, hoping to introduce them to walking in the Word and in prayer every single day.

  Eric loved sharing his faith with the students in all facets of life, not simply in short bursts of contrived opportunity or random conversations. Devotions, classroom teaching, out-of-class study sessions, fellowship groups, sports activities, and private outings and gatherings fostered the growth of relationships. Eric especially appreciated the tutor model that Dr. Hart had established before his retirement. The current British missionaries—A. P. Cullen, Carl Longman, Gerald Luxon, and Eric Liddell—each served as a tutor-mentor for a particular class through that class’s duration at the college. Over the course of four years, Eric had gotten to know a good majority of his students quite well.

  During the years Eric served as a teacher, one of his greatest delights was the occasional invitation to Dr. Hart’s office, where he would witness a handful of students who, toward the end of their time at the college, confessed their faith in Christ.

  Eric expressed this passion to Miss Effie Hardie in a letter dated February 19, 1929:

  This is the last day with my class, as they leave in June. I am hoping some of them will definitely come out for Christ before that time and would be glad for your prayers definitely for them. What a work lies before them if only they get to know a living personal every day Saviour. Their work can be far greater than ours out here in their own land.[43]

  Often on Sunday afternoons Eric invited students over to his study for tea. He aimed at learning more about each of them—their families, their homes, their interests—as well as conveying to them that he was interested in being not only their teacher but also their friend. This created a doorway of opportunity to share what Jesus had done for him, was doing for him, and promised to do for him—and for everyone.

  Eric did his best to encourage his students to examine the Bible daily and suggested that they meditate on it. He found, like a farmer tending his crops, that not all the sown seeds would sprout or grow at the same pace. Tending to each student on an individual basis proved to be an intricate challenge.

  The passing days didn’t ease Eric’s missing his friend and colleague Eric Scarlett. They had enjoyed batting around evangelical thought and experience as it played out in the daily lives of their students. Eric recalled how, only the year before, they had dined with the Chinese students at lunchtime. Now, Eric continued the tradition alone, painful as it was, especially when the students would want to debate about the necessity of the British presence in China.

  Eric also kept up his athletic regimen of football (soccer), rounders (a European form of baseball), basketball, tennis, and running. He even had a minor taste of mortality, as he admitted to losing a 100-meter race to some of his younger Chinese students. The students would not always point out that Eric had given them a 10-meter head start. Still, Eric could tell his body felt different in his late twenties than it did in his early twenties.

  A not-too-surprising request came early in the fall for Eric to serve as coach for the football team. Eric wrote to Florence, telling her of the assignment. “We have a long way to go yet,” he shared, “before we get that spirit into our games that I should like.”[44]

  Coaching brought joy to Eric, giving him the opportunity to pass on his love of healthy competition even while teaching with the highest degree of integrity. Trial, error, painful lessons, and controversial decisions all helped his team learn respect, trust, discipline, and how to work together—touchstones of Eric’s daily lifestyle.
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  Eric’s sportsmanship values had permeated through the roster by season’s end. His tendency to win, however, did not transmit so effortlessly. Still, his follow-up assessment of the season carried with it an air of moral victory when he realized that the students put more effort into a losing game and that they took the referee’s decision in a better spirit than they had done previously.

  Eric knew that winning was not always possible and didn’t truly matter in the end. Fostering others to know victory in Christ was the real match.

  Eric’s 1930 end-of-year report states,

  The Spirit of our Master slowly works his way into our games, work and services. We do not see, like a builder does, great changes in a week or two, but here and there comes a word of cheer and a sight that makes you sure that the work is slow but sure. Here a boy begins to face life and definitely decides that he will face it, building his life with Christ as its foundation, and there another in the quiet makes his surrender too. . . .

  The past year has in some ways been disappointing—for one thing, the difficult problem of getting a suitable Christian Principal has not yet been solved—but nevertheless we face this coming year with confidence and cheer, for we hear our Master saying, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”[45]

  January 1931 ushered in a new urgency in Eric’s pressing decision of how best to spend his academic focus in Britain. The previous year Eric had requested a two-year furlough from his local missionary board at the college. This allotted plenty of time to finish his seminary training and would closely coincide with Florence’s completion of her nursing studies. Additionally, he reasoned, he could continue with advanced teaching education, which would make him even more effective in and out of the classroom. Eric figured that with his imminent return to the mission field and forthcoming wedding plans, never again would he have the singular freedom or time to invest in his studies.