Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

3. First Awakening

In the spring Rosalie and Charles were living in Malaysia when she wrote to her mother that her strength was finally returning, although her “nerves were still not much to boast about.” She hoped they might “get steadier.” These days she did not paddle after Charlie as he frantically sought railroad business in Asian countries other than China, which in 1911 was rapidly sliding toward anarchy. Rosalie usually stayed behind in paradisal seclusion at either the famous Raffles Hotel or another British outpost of luxury. She preferred to adhere to her own compass, which pointed to long walks every morning before the heat of the day bore down, and to reading or singing on the veranda when it grew too hot for her to venture beyond it. It bothered her that the British—including her husband— refused to wear clothing adapted to Malaysian heat. They dressed in wool suits, silk dresses, and ankle-length motoring coats as if they were still in England. She told her mother she had tried to convince Charlie to be sensible. “But faith! . . . Charlie’s whites and beautiful pongees are not good form if you please, and poor dear must wear cloth suits. Did you ever hear of such idiocy?” While Charlie insisted on dressing like the rest of his countrymen , she floated about in light sarongs, having learned that if she dressed according to the dictates of heat and humidity and slowed her pace, the climate was bearable, if not pleasurable. [ chapter three First Awakening first awakening [ 53 Charlie endured eye strain and incapacitating headaches brought on by heat stroke. But about herself Rosalie wrote, “I am very brown and handsome and feel another being.” Mrs. Barrow might have been particularly relieved to hear of her daughter ’s well-being after all Rosalie had been through. The baby had lived five days. Rosalie left no personal record of how traumatic this birth and swift death were for her, but Charlie acknowledged his wife’s emotional state. “The sad news of our dear son,” he recalled, reached him in China weeks later. “Rosalie feels his loss so deeply that I am still very anxious about her,” he wrote to his mother-in-law, in the only personal mention of the Edges’ deceased son that survives. Charlie had bought Rosalie a pearl pin before the baby was born, which he wanted her to wear always in the boy’s memory. “I shall do anything in my person to help her from the minute she is with me again,” he wrote. The baby, Hall Travers Edge, named for Charlie’s father, was laid to rest in the Barrow family plot in the Newburgh cemetery near Rosalie’s father, John Wylie Barrow. The Edges’ five-month separation during the last part of her pregnancy and its aftermath had proved difficult for them both. “I have felt most horribly lost without her and the feeling gets no better,” Charlie’s letter to Harriet Barrow confided in October. He had spent ten days in a Peking hospital after he got into a brawl with a man who had offended him. “I wh——pped someone,” he illegibly wrote, as if to obscure the incident. He feared his employer might impose its own penalty on him. Charlie’s letter was touching and tough in its empathy for his wife mingled with his disarmingly candid acknowledgment of an explosive temper. In November 1910, after her ship weathered a “perfectly good typhoon,” Rosalie and Charlie were reunited in Yokohama. Six months later she was resting her nerves in Kuala Lumpur and sending her mother optimistic reports on her health and cultural reflections far more vivid than those she had provided from China. Rosalie loved Singapore’s mix of people, declaring its racial mélange much more appealing than “mere China or Japan.” She enjoyed the “real black savages with painted faces” and satiny skin, and black women so “tastefully, gracefully and withal chastely dressed in one or at most two veils that one cannot but think of Salome a prude with seven.” She was “much amused” 54 ] chapter three by the sight of a “black, woolly-headed savage, with only a very scanty loincloth and gold necklace [who] put up a capacious European umbrella when it began to rain and walk[ed] away with much dignity.” Almostimperceptibly,doubtsaboutherhusband’spurposeinAsiaseemed to be forming in the back of her mind. She regretted how civilization...