The most frustrating thing for the Walkers about their life in Bantang was that the size of the Christian community there held steady. Those who would be converted in this small city, it seemed, had been converted. Later in life, Raymond Walker would say that there was no better preparation for missionary life than to be assigned the task of tilling a stony mission field, but at the time the effort did not amuse him at all — the long wearisome unproductive days in which he wandered the streets of Bantang, cornering everyone who would listen. It bothered Raymond intensely that everywhere around him were souls to be won for Christ and that he did not possess the means to win them. Dr. Chester did not seem to care, or to realize the profound urgency of the moment.
One night Raymond had a dream. He was in a train station, and enormous queues of Chinamen streamed past him to board an old steam train. Raymond stopped one of them and asked him the destination of the train. The Chinaman, old and wizened, replied that it was the train to Hell. The destination was confirmed by the cry of a huge Negro porter: "Hell Express! All aboard!" Raymond tried to hold the old Chinaman back, but in his dream his limbs lost force and the man slithered easily from Raymond's hand. Raymond grasped at an old woman headed for the platform, and she, too, slipped from his hands and climbed aboard the train, which bulged with humanity, limbs protruding from the windows and doors. Then the terrible thing happened. In the great shuffling crowd, Raymond himself was swept aboard. "This is the train to Hell!" he cried. "Let me down!" But Raymond could not pass through the crowds, and he awoke in a sweat just before the train steamed out of the station.
The next morning, Raymond told Dr. Chester that he was ready to leave Bantang. He wanted to travel to the faraway tribal villages to spread the Word — the trip he had planned with Stan MacLyon. Dr. Chester, hardly bothering to look up from the page of Tibetan characters he was proofreading, forbade the expedition: with a wave of his soft, pink hand, he explained that the roads and hills were filled with robbers, brigands, and warring factions, and he would not allow the young father to take such risks, not when he was performing valuable service to God in the Mission itself. Something in Dr. Chester's response provoked the younger man, who remembered the way his father had looked past him when he had explained the angelic choir.
"You forbid me?" His voice was tight, and he plucked at a cuff link to keep his hands from sweeping all of Dr. Chester's papers — his translation of the Bible, his mountain of correspondence, his notes for National Geographic—off his desk.
"I must," said Dr. Chester, taking off his round spectacles, then wearily rubbing the bridge of his nose. "You leave me no choice. I will not have a widow and orphan here at Bantang station to suit your wandering fancy."
"You mean that you will not have your correspondence unanswered, that the Gospel might be spread," replied Raymond.
Raymond stormed out of Dr. Chester's small office and plunged himself into the tumult of the market. That evening the merchants and traders remarked to one another that the white man had been even more agitated than usual.
For almost a week, Raymond did not bother with his usual duties at the Mission. Dr. Chester's papers lay in a muddle, and the younger missionary, in open defiance, set about putting together a small caravan to tour the neighboring villages. He took his morning tea at the market and spent his days in town. Dr. Chester, for his part, was furious also— furious that the authority he had veritably built with his own hands at the Mission Station was denied. Dr. Chester was not a large man, and he was no longer young, but when angry in his past he had confronted other men larger than himself and frightened them. Now, late at night, Dr. Chester imagined confronting Raymond Walker.
It was the wives who finally eased the tensions, as so often in these cases. With Thomas so very little, did Raymond really want to leave her just now? Laura asked her husband. Wasn't Dr. Chester himself equally impatient as a young man? Mrs. Chester asked the doctor. Dr. Chester was obviously unsettled by the zeal of a younger man, consoled Laura. Think how difficult it must be to enter the Mission field in the shadow of a giant, soothed Mrs. Chester. Then in the subtle way of wives, each commanded her mate to make peace. One afternoon Dr. Chester found Raymond in the market, and that evening the foursome ate dinner together again. The next day, Raymond returned to the typewriter.
All winter, a tenuous peace held at the Mission. Raymond did not renew his demands, and Laura held her tongue as Mrs. Chester explained the proper way to fold a sheet or soothe a fevered brow. But the underlying tensions remained: neither Walker admitting it to the other (but both admitting it to their grandchildren many years later, who in turn told me), both Raymond and Laura began to pray for deliverance from the Mission at Bantang. They asked God to allow them to be of greater use to Him and His Kingdom, and God answered their prayers in His terrible ironic fashion.
Half a year after Raymond Walker and Dr. Chester quarreled, the Grand Tigi of Gartok, the lord of eastern Tibet, invited the Walkers and the Chesters to preach the Word at his court. The Tigi had heard rumors of the fascinating work in which the missionaries were engaged; now he wished to discuss these vital spiritual matters with the foreigners himself.
Such an invitation was of the most extraordinary and rare nature. Bantang lay on the Tibetan frontier, but the interior of Tibet was a closed nation. The last white man to visit Lhassa had been Dr. Chester, almost ten years earlier, and as far as anyone knew, Laura would be only the second white woman to enter the kingdom at all, following in Mrs. Chester's footsteps. Thomas's visit would be unique. Dr. Chester organized the preparations: the appropriate gifts for the Grand Tigi, the retinue of guards to shepherd the group safely across the border, the hardy ponies, and of course early versions of the Tibetan New Testament to distribute to the curious. (These books had only recently arrived from the printer in Shanghai, and the fortuitous coincidence of their arrival and the invitation to the interior of Tibet, the missionaries agreed, was surely proof of the Lord's desire that His Word be spread.) For several weeks, the Mission was in high excitement as the work approached. But only two days before the party was supposed to set out from Bantang, Dr. Chester received a message by courier: Père Antoine, the Catholic missionary who worked to the southwest, was desperately ill with influenza. Normally this would have been a job for Raymond, as the junior missionary at the station, but Dr. Chester offered in his typical gallant fashion to tend Père Antoine in Raymond's place. Dr. Chester insisted that the Walkers travel on as planned, lest the missionary party, setting out too late in the year, find itself unable to reach Tibet, hidden behind the great wall erected annually by the first of the Himalayan snowfalls.
Only Mrs. Chester did not support this arrangement.