No, if the folks in Tulsa found Raymond's motivations for becoming a missionary mysterious, it certainly wasn't for lack of effort on his part to explain things: when Raymond tried to explain to his father that he was a changed man, his father asked if he wanted to get himself involved in real estate, because he knew a man in Oklahoma City who was looking for a junior partner; and when Raymond talked about things with his mother, she gave him a strange pained look. It was a frustrating time. The only one who had really listened was the pretty nurse with the round cheeks at the VA hospital where Raymond went twice weekly to treat his injured shoulder, and the two of them sat talking for hours in the hospital's rose garden. When he had told her about the angels, her eyes had grown misty, and Laura had smiled and said, "That must have been lovely. I wish I had heard the angels." Lovely—that was just the word Raymond had been looking for. He said, "It was. It was lovely." Then they got to talking more, and Raymond told her what he hadn't told anybody else: that he had been turning things over in his head, slowly thinking it through, and the only explanation he could come up with for everything he'd seen was that the world was in the midst of the Final Battle. The end was coming, just like in prophecy, and it wouldn't be long now before God judged each and every man. He admitted that the spectacle of the nations turning upon each other in this awful combat had shaken him to his core: the combatants were men who had been given the gift of the Gospel and then squandered it. He had gone back and read Daniel and Revelation, and things were just so clear to him, what was coming, the terrible Day when every man would be judged fairly. He hadn't been living right, he confessed to Laura. He hadn't been living right at all, he said, and by the things he had seen, the giant explosions, he knew that the world could end. It was a distinct possibility. And Laura said that when you saw a cyclone coming, you closed the blinds, put the family in the root cellar, and warned the neighbors.
And so Raymond found himself standing on those hillsides in Tibet and China and the Dyalo country, staring out at the weathered tribal faces. What hard lives these gentle people faced! He had come, he told them, to tell them the terrible Good News: that they would be judged soon, and judged hard, but judged by a God who delighted to love them and help them. He had come as fast as he could with his wife and his children from the white man's land to tell them to take precautions: the river of time was rising, and their homes would soon be flooded, and their rice fields washed away. But there was a way out, Raymond Walker added. He could lead them to the high ground.
It is an unfortunate fact which every traveler eventually comes to know, but there is no place in this world so exotic, so remote, or so beautiful that boredom does not eventually set in; and the Walkers after two years in Bantang, which although exotic and remote was not beautiful, were bored.
The death of the MacLyons had been a hard blow for the young couple: the MacLyons had been of the Walkers' generation, and the four young missionaries had been great friends, a buoyant counterweight to the staid gravity of the older Chesters. At night, Mary MacLyon had brought out a harmonica and Stan MacLyon a banjo, and the foursome had stomped and hooted their way through a hundred familiar tunes, whereas the Chesters retired early to bed. From the moment the Walkers arrived in Bantang, Stan and Raymond had started to plan an evangelizing tour into the mountain villages, while Mary and Laura discussed re-painting the interior of the gloomy Mission. The foursome had taken to eating their meals together late at night by the light of wax candles, and although the Chesters were, of course, invited to eat with them, the invitation was inevitably declined on account of Dr. Chester's indigestion should he dine late. Stan and Mary were the sort always willing to tell another joke, or stay up an hour longer, or put together a skit, or bring home strangers they found on the streets of Bantang. After Thomas was born, Mary insisted on waking up with the baby as often as Raymond and Laura; Mrs. Chester, by contrast, had no particular skill in dandling a baby, and Thomas tended to cry when she walked into the room. When the MacLyons prayed, they rocked on the balls of their feet, and shouted and wept; they closed the Bible after daily readings bathed in a sheen of sweat. Stan had an odd and wonderful gift: he could see the faces of Old Testament characters in the faces of the people of Bantang. The dissolute tax collector with his anxious hooded eyes fingering his official seal was crazy old Saul playing with his javelin, once Stan MacLyon pointed it out. The Walkers found Stan and Mary's wild, passionate, mystical faith exhilarating.
When the Chesters prayed, on the other hand, it was a sober thing: Dr. Chester read passages from Scripture, Mrs. Chester said "Amen," and Dr. Chester in his meticulous way gave commentary. The Chesters of course were wonderful missionaries, but they had been manning this particular Mission Station now for almost thirty years. In their youth, they had had great adventures: as a young man, Mr. Chester had dreamed that he would live his life on muleback, spreading the Gospel, his wife on another mule, their worldly possessions on a third. Mrs. Chester had been wooed by this dream, and for many years they had so lived. Dr. Chester had explained the Gospel to the Dalai Lama himself, and Mrs. Chester had raised four children in this inhospitable and almost savage country, of whom three survived. After Mrs. Chester broke her hip, the Chesters had established the permanent Mission Station at Bantang, and nursed the station through famine, revolution, and civil war. In their day, they had seen two dozen young missionaries come and go through Bantang station, every single one of them devoted Christians, and the Chesters had come to realize that success as a missionary was not so much a question of exuberance as endurance. Sometimes they found themselves slightly wearied by the young people. Something of the mentality of the Chinese Mandarin had worn off on them: Dr. Chester admitted that he was less eager to proselytize as he grew older, although no less eager to see his faith spread, and Mrs. Chester, on her last home furlough, had shocked the ladies of a number of midwestern Christian congregations by saying that in her humble opinion, if lacking, of course, the grandeur of the Christian faith, Tibetan Buddhism nevertheless seemed to contain a number of truths. Dr. Chester looked forward to the completion of his translation of the Bible into Tibetan, which he had promised the Dalai Lama he would personally present to His Holiness in Lhassa, and he harbored a secret hope, a new dream for his old age: that in exchange for this great labor, the Dalai Lama would allow the Chesters to remain as permanent guests in the interior of Tibet. This would be their retirement, which they would pass together in dignified conversation with the Buddhist monks about the meaning of the universe.
The Walkers and MacLyons all had noted how remarkably affectionate the Chesters were. Dr. Chester was silver-haired, with a neatly trimmed silver mustache and round cheeks which turned red in the mountain cold; talking to Laura, Mrs. Chester more than once confessed herself guilty of the sin of pride when she considered her good fortune in being the possessor of this still-handsome man. Mrs. Chester dressed only in the dreariest of black dresses, which covered her completely from her thick neck to her heavy ankles, and yet she never appeared in public in season without the fresh gardenia or lotus in her lapel that Mr. Chester had picked for her that very morning from the flowery little garden he tended behind the Mission. After forty years of marriage, the Chesters still wandered the small city hand in hand, Mrs. Chester's fine hand reaching out of her long robes to find Dr. Chester's heavy paw. Holding hands was considered mildly vulgar in Chinese eyes, but neither member of the couple was willing to forgo this innocent pleasure simply to placate local custom. The Chesters were content chiefly with each other's company: if the stories Dr. Chester repetitively told bored the younger missionaries of the station, in Mrs. Chester's eyes there was no more thrilling raconteur than her husband; and Dr. Chester was deaf to any audience's stifled yawns when his wife pressed him, Morris, please, to continue.