CHAPTER XVIII

CHARACTERISTICS

More than once, since I began to write this book, it has been remarked to me by persons whose thoughts of Mrs. Lewis were altogether kindly, that she was an ordinary woman, and that the interest of her life is rather due to circumstance than to personality. Dissenting profoundly from this judgment, regarding her as one of the most extraordinary women I have ever met, I have wondered how such an opinion could have arisen. And I have to confess that if the lack of specific brilliant endowments makes a person ordinary, then perhaps there is excuse for speaking of Mrs. Lewis in such terms. Of genius, in the usual acceptation of the term, she had none. And no one was more perfectly aware of this than herself. She had no great learning. She was not a great speaker. Her speeches were quiet, earnest, matter-of-fact statements of the things which she had seen with her eyes, or which she most surely believed in her heart. She was not a brilliant writer. Her letters are interesting, and often fascinating, because she tells, with artless directness, stories of life and work which are remote from common experience. And withal her personal bearing was quiet and unobtrusive to a degree.

Mrs. Lewis was an extraordinary woman, not by reason of unusual mental endowments, but rather by reason of distinguished moral and spiritual qualities, which achieved such co-ordination and control and consecration of modest gifts, as resulted in the building up of exalted character and the accomplishment of splendid work. Her life affords an illustration of the truth that common gifts, conscientiously used to the utmost limits of their content, become uncommon, and that whoso does his absolute best in a good cause avails himself of the mystic forces of a divinely ordered universe, unconsciously, if unconsciously, fulfilling Emerson’s injunction: “Hitch your waggon to a star.”

If Mrs. Lewis’s gifts were common gifts, they were good gifts, and she had good store of them. No woman could have done what she did without a splendid physical constitution, managed and conserved with the wisdom of common sense. Her powers of endurance under exhausting and perilous conditions often elicited her wondering gratitude. In exigent circumstances, when the call of God came to her, she could take the biggest risks, brave woman that she was. But in normal conditions her devotion to her vegetable garden and her religious solicitude for all the details of domestic management which made for hygiene, proved how precious in her eyes was the matter of health, without which the work could not be done. The reader will remember that in her discussion of the qualifications of a woman missionary, next after spiritual fitness she places a sound constitution. In her judgment an imperfect recognition of the fundamental importance of this matter was the simple and lamentable explanation of much sorrow and disappointment and loss.

Possibly not without subtle relation to her sound physical constitution was her notable force of will, which has been sufficiently illustrated in the foregoing pages. And I think it likely that the calmness which was one of her marked characteristics was due to her consciousness that when all was said she would do what seemed to her to be right, to the limit of her powers, irrespective of opposition, protest, or demur. Irritation, fuss, and fluster are the froth of weakness. She knew herself to be strong. She feared God and nothing else, and declined to waste her energy in superfluous perturbation.

In her native force of will is to be found the explanation of her extraordinary power of work. The amount of labour which she got through day by day in the debilitating climate of tropical Africa is amazing to many people of normal health, who perform their tasks in the comparatively bracing atmosphere of the homeland. What she willed to do she did. Fluctuations of mood were disregarded; petty distractions were disallowed. Enlightened and determined, she kept her course, as a liner forges on its way in spite of contrary winds, or buffeting seas, or enervating calms. Of course the volume and value of her work were immensely increased by her strict observance of method. She worked by plan; and here again it is force of will that tells. We are all of us methodical in ideal. The most casual of mortals has probably made schemes of work and time-tables enough to suffice for the good ordering of half a dozen lives. We resolve to make plans, exhaust our impulses in the seductive labours of construction, and fail in the detail of fulfilment. Mrs. Lewis made her plans and did what she planned to do. In an early