Backgrounds

One evening, while these things were happening to Mimosa, we at Dohnavur spent an hour with the polariscope just acquired fer our microscope. Joyfully we tried the different combinations offered by polarizer, selenite, and mirror. Feathery crystal of barium platino-cyanide, like sprays of peacocks’ feathers, fairy cornucopia from a fern, the little thorny marvel of a sole’s scale — these and a score of others held us enchanted. Then as the blues and lilacs and violets and purples paled into something like the steelblue of sheet lightning, we wanted the indigo of the thunder-cloud for background, and for those opalescent seashell colours, that are like nothing earthly, but must be sought for in air and water, we wanted the beryl of the sea; and so it went on till we knew the perfect background for each delight; the difficulty was to get it.

We had just touched perfection with an exquisite blue against brown like the bark of a tree — only that polariscope colours are never flat but always, as it were, an atmosphere — the little spikes on the sole’s scale were gleaming poniards,

and iridescent lights played on the plated armour; not a pearly tint was lost, when one of the children, eagerly sharing this pleasure with us, moved the adjustments and lost the perfect foil.

We tried to recover it, but in vain. We did not know the laws of light well enough to find it. Or it may have been that the setting sun had dropped his cooler tones and was only all red flame. Whatever the cause, till days afterwards, when we found it again, we thought of it as a kind of little, visible, lost chord, beautiful, elusive, within the fraction of a turn of a wheel, but out of reach of our commanding. If only we had better known the laws of light, if only we could have stayed the going down of the sun, should we not have found it with a touch?

We all have our small and private windows which look out upon great matters. This little clear window did for us that day look out upon far fields. What if we could look through some heavenly polariscope and read, as, perhaps, the angels read, the meaning of the background for the colours of our lives? But then we should miss the blessing of those who do not see and yet believe.,

It is difficult to imagine oneself stripped of all helps to faith, whether from the text of the Book itself or these its illuminated illustrations; but if this story is to be understood, and not merely taken at a run and forgotten, there must be some mental effort here. Mimosa stood alone among her people, a woman charmed by a beauty she could not show to them. Round her were the blazing streets, the little, hot houses, the curious, unsympathetic faces, the crowding work of life. But always it was as if One only just out of sight were moving through those streets with her. What He did with her was good. Was He not all-powerful, so that He could direct everything? Had He not shown her by a thousand secret signs that she was loved? Would she, who was only a human mother, deny one good thing to her little son if she had the power to grant it? No more would He.

In this way, by the low-set stepping-stones that lead across the stream that divides the material from the spiritual, she found herself in a place where nothing could shake her. The strange colours of her background could not perplex her. And this was what she really meant when she said, not asking for blue days, but looking up steadfastly into grey skies, beaten by rain and wind, “I am not offended with You,” no, not even while her poor husband lay mad and blind, and the people pointed at her and said: “Did we not say Parpom?”