A Woman's Life for Kashmir : Irene Petrie, a Biography

(J BV Carus-Wilson, Ashley Kashmir 3280 A woman s life for K38C3 1901 A WOMAN S LIFE FOR KASHMIR Irene Petrie A BIOGRAPHY By Mrs. Ashley Car\is-Wilson, B.A. "WitK an Introduction By ROBERT E. SPEER WitH Portraits Map and Illustrations CHicago New TforK Toronto FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 19O1 THE CAXTON PRESS NEW YORK. \ \<\o\ C IRENE PETRIE TO MY CHILDREN MARTIN MACDOWALL, LOUIS CHARLES, AND ELEANORA MARY Introduction great missionary biographies are the records THEof incompleted lives. May it not be that the influence exerted by the record is the completion of the work that seemed to be prematurely laid down ? David Brainerd died at the age of thirty, Henry Martyn at thirty-two, Keith Falconer at thirty-one, Mackay at forty-one,, There are biographies of older men, Livingstone, Judson, Patteson, French, which have powerfully affected men, but a disproportionate number of the effective books have dealt with short lives. This life of Irene Petrie is another illustration of this fact. She spent four years in missionary service, and died at the very beginning of her work. It was one more incompleted life awaiting fulfilment in the lives of men and women who will take up the work which she loved and served, through the holy persuasion of her example and spirit. Irene Petrie was one of the first representatives of the missionary movement among students to fall in the forefront of foreign missions. The call came to her in 1891, -and in 1893 she sailed for India. In 1897 she passed away at Leh in the Himalayas. Here is the first biography of a Student Volunteer. It supplies a vacant place in missionary literature. What lives of missionary women have we ? An earlier generation read of the wives of Judson and of Fidelia Fiske, and some have read of Mrs. Hinderer, Miss Tucker and Madame Coillard, and later of Mary Reed; but none of these lives furnished, as Irene Petrie s did, a picture of a young, cultured, attractive woman, devoting her rich talents to missions and fall ing in her work on its very threshold. To that great class of young women in our country who have passed or are passing through our schools and colleges, or who outside our schools and colleges are interested in true culture and the finer things in life, this picture of "the most brilliant and cultured of all the ladies on the Church Missionary Society roll, "as Mr. Eugene Stock called her, must especially appeal. There is no other missionary book for them, nor any other biography, like this. Irene Petrie s devotion of the gifts which they most admire to what she deemed the worthiest work in the world, must help many of them to discern the values of life in juster proportion. May it lead many of them also to yield their lives as Irene Petrie yielded hers, to the " Lord and Master of us all "! ROBERT E. SPEER. NEW YORK. PREFACE years ago the general reader was captured SOMEby the autobiography ol a Russian girl, well born, attractive, gifted, ambitious, and successful as a musician and artist. She confessed more frankly than many confess it that on setting out in life her most " earnest prayer was : O God, grant me happiness. Make my life what I should like it to be." She died " young, leaving this testimony : I am so unhappy. All is wretchedness and misery. I don t know whether " I in it is with a of believe God or not ; and feeling profound pity that one closes the record of her life. The story of another girl, with similar gifts, who was likewise ambitious, and across whose short life more than one deep shadow fell, is told here. Judging by hundreds of letters from people differing widely in character and circumstances, one impression left by her career upon all who knew her was stronger than any other. Many say that she was very clever, very winning, noble but far more reiterate that she before very ; was all in to exclaim with things very happy ; ready, fact, Browning s David, who stands as a type of the capacity for delight of the richly endowed mind in the vigorous, youthful body, How good is man s life, the mere living ! How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy! viii PREFACE The following words of two who knew Irene Ptstrie well may be taken as an expression of what all who " knew her well felt : She always gave me the idea of one satisfied. Her joy was full. We saw it in her face as a schoolgirl, and in later years. That happy face will ever be before us when we think of her." " That almost joyous cheerfulness and sweetness of spirit drew even strangers to her, and made her loved wherever she went." Her story is worth telling if only to unfold the secret of an unfailing delight in life, which is not always the lot of even the able and the fortunate, the upright and sincerely religious. What she did is worth telling also, and is far more easily told than what she was. Almost indescribable is the charm of personality that made her a strong influence both at home and abroad, caused one ac quaintance at least to characterise her as " my ideal woman," and led the historian of the Society with which she laboured as an honorary missionary to " write : India lost a woman missionary, probably the most brilliant and cultured of all the ladies on the 1 C.M.S. roll, Miss Irene Petrie." Far different was her own estimate of herself, when in the supreme hour of her life she said that she was " only one of the least." Such an utterance forbids the language of praise, though one must try to convey the impressions her life made on other lives, using words other than one s own throughout. Statements that must seem inadequate to those who knew her may seem exaggerated to those who did not know her, so unready are we to believe in the potentialities of Divine grace working through a fully yielded soul. 1 History of the Church Missionary Society, vol. iii., p. 784, PREFACE ix It has not been easy for the one survivor of her family to speak, in the earlier chapters especially, of much that lies now in the sacred hush of death. But because some would disparage missionaries as foolish visionaries, and others would throne them as beings apart, living without effort up to a higher standard than we need even inquire after, her home days cannot be entirely omitted. A well-known writer recently taken from us counselled, after the experience of a prolonged s life, that as much should be told concerning Irene early years, as many things mentioned that are typical of her condition and generation, rather than peculiar to herself, as would serve to show that she lived to all appearance the life that hundreds of other girls are living to-day, amid the same temptations and the same opportunities. Yet her going forth as a missionary was the outcome of no sudden impulse, made no violent wrench from that early life, but was rather the fruitage of its blossom, the full application of the principle on which she had always tried to act, of giving not merely her substance but herself to others in every possible and wherever the need was and thus way, greatest ; most truly, though most unostentatiously, selling all that she had for Christ s sake by reckoning it not her own. Of the forty-five months which elapsed between her departure from England in October 1893 and her death, five were spent at home, and three on the three journeys to and fro three were in travel short ; spent during vacations in India. The remaining thirty-four were months of incessant labour, of which four and a half were at St. Hilda Lahore four on the spent s, ; Jhelum and at Kashmir and and a half Gulmarg, ; twenty-five in Srinagar viz. eight in "the Barracks," five and b x PREFACE a half in the Zenana House, and twelve at Holton Cottage. In this period of less than three years she mastered and and made some in Urdu Kashmiri, progress Hindi ; and she diligently instructed in the faith of the Gospel five different classes of people : children of Europeans, schools through Sunday ; Eurasians, especially women and children her own ; servants, mostly Mohammedans ; Hindus Kashmiri schoolboys, mostly ; and zenana women, Hindu and Mohammedan, of many different degrees socially and intellectually. Her musical and artistic powers were turned to account to secure friends and funds for the work in a of her variety ways ; pen spoke of it to many at home both in magazine articles and in private letters. And though she never allowed herself to be drawn into society to the hindrance of her work, the recollection of her intercourse with " " station people made a resident in India assert that looking only at her influence on her compatriots, one could never say that her life had been thrown away. Short as her career was, it was long enough to lead a former clerical secretary of the C.M.S. to " write thus : I was fully expecting that through God s grace working upon her great natural abilities, attain ments, and physical health, she would in a few years have become an inspiring missionary leader throughout North India." t( " But just when the hope of unaccomplished years seemed brightest, the summons hence came, swiftly, silently, most unexpectedly, and (as another writes) "the sudden and pathetic close to that young and beautiful life deeply touched all who heard of it." " Our lost Irene, .

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