The Stab of a Knife

Slowly, very slowly, the months crawled past. Mimosa had to go to work, or the food would have failed. So she combed her hair with her fingers (for after the birth of one’s first child it is not allowed to dress one’s hair before going out, or to wear the dear little frivolous bell bangles on arms and ankles), and she went to the fields and worked. Her husband lay like a log on his mat, and was one more to feed. Kinglet could be trusted to attend to his needs, and when she could not take them with her he would watch over Mayil and Music.

One day her brothers came to see their elder sister, a widow who lived near, and they took little Mayil to spend the day with them.

In the evening when Mimosa returned from the fields, and was going as usual to prepare the evening meal, deep in her heart, “just here”” — and she showed where the words cut — “pricking, pricking like the prick of the point of a knife,” was this: “Go first and see to Mayil! Go first and see to Mayil!” And she obeyed. Flying across to the other house and breaking in upon

the company gathered there, she found them playing cards. In a flash, as she shows it, one sees the very gesture of the card-players, the halfclosed eyes, the swaying forms, hears the peculiar little sounds of the game, as she saw and as she heard them in that one unforgettable moment.

“Oh, you to play while my little peacock lies dying!” She flung her indignation at them and fled with her child stiff in convulsions in her arms.

What had happened she never heard. If it was known, no one told. For a fortnight Mayil lay at death’s door, then slowly turned and came back to her.

But he lay in mortal weakness, and the neighbours, moved by sight of her anxiety, urged her to offer a chicken and a few cocoanuts. “So little, does she grudge so little?” They told her what would happen if she did not do it. Her child would die. They watched her then, as she knelt before her God, the God invisible, who was, she said, the only true God. But it must have been that He did not hear, or, hearing, did not care, for He did not come to her relief. He abode still in the same place where He was, that far, - far place to which, as all who came assured her, prayers, without gifts to further them, could never find the way.

There was no doctor, of course; there is no mission hospital in this whole reach of country, no place of any kind where a little child would be sure of skilled care, no way of help that was not far beyond her means to secure. So the little Mayil lay with his two fingers tucked into his mouth in his old baby way, thinking to comfort himself so; and his mother, with her very heart breaking for love of him, saw him slowly growing worse.

It was very hard for Mimosa to be without going to work. Several times during this illness she had had to leave him to get money to buy food. He had fretted sorely. If only he might quickly recover she would be able to take him with her. It was too dreadful to leave him and know he would pine for her all day.

And now comes what to some of us seems the most poignant page of this story. Mayil was recovering when a wise woman told his mother that, if only she gave him two duck’s eggs chopped fine in water, he would immediately be well.

So, impressed by the wise woman’s confident assurance, she bought two duck’s eggs, boiled them hard, chopped them fine, mixed them with water, and fed Mayil, almost expecting to see the little thin limbs fatten visibly, so sure was the wise woman.

But at once he became very ill. Dysentery set in. Daily, hourly he grew worse.

Just then, while her husband still lay prostrate and her precious little son was so ill, the rain came on; the roof, unrepaired, leaked; and the mud walls fell in on the floor, all but on top of them.

How her husband was got out Mimosa does not remember. In the pouring rain she searched for shelter and found an empty house, but the rent asked was too high. Near by was her widowed sister. That sister did not love her, her ways were not hers. But, fearing the talk of the neighbours who would feel it too barbarous to refuse shelter under such circumstances, she opened her house to the family; and to her other labours Mimosa added the gradual repair of her home. Somehow she got a few palm leaves for the roof, bit by bit she gathered up the fallen mud, built it into place; but, before she had finished it, the shock of the disturbance and the chill had so acted on her little Mayil that even her eyes, that refused to see, saw at last that he must go.

She took him in her arms. We who know her can see her as she did it. Never were tenderer mother-eyes, gentler, braver hands.

“My little one,” she said, “listen. I have taught you to pray. Shall I pray now that you may be taken out of this pain? Let us pray to the Lord” — and she used the word her father had used in his dying hour, the Lord the

Supreme. Then she prayed, and she said: “It is well, O Lord, whatever You do. It is well.”

And Mayil said nothing, but lay with his two little fingers in his mouth. “These” — and she held up and touched her own as if they had been Mayil’s — “it was the way he lay when he was a baby wanting me. And while he was sucking his fingers for comfort, the Lord took him.”