The Unlucky Fifth
AnD now crashed down on her a blow; nothing she could do could ward it off from herself and her beloved. Her fifth child was a boy.
The neighbours came to see. They compassed her about like bees. They pitied her, they blamed, according to their various dispositions; they wagged their heads and turned up the palms of their hands; and they prophesied terrible things.
Poor Mimosa, she was not wiser than her generation. Had she not seen disaster follow upon the birth of her elder sister’s fifth child (who was a boy)? And had not prosperity attended her own family in the years following Star’s birth; for Star was a fifth child, a daughter of good fortune. To go no farther than her own household, had not the finding of the jewel and the blessing on the field followed the birth of her fourth, the Fortunate Fourth?
She listened now, downcast, unable to escape from the feeling that she had failed them all; vague fears haunted her; she had no word of excuse or of explanation for her fault.
“Let him perish. It is the only suitable thing
to do.” 93 “Give him away. Get rid of the danger. Give him away.” For there are those in India who welcome such gifts and train them for their own purposes.
“Kill him.” There is a cactus hedge outside that village where such children may be laid. The crows find them and then the village dogs.
But Mimosa, true mother in every instinct, could bear no more. “Let my baby perish? Give him to a stranger? Kill him?” And her voice rose at every question. “Depart from me, ye women. Be he ever so deadly a child of ill-luck, he is my true God’s gift to me.” And she snatched the baby from reach of their eyes and held him close to her breast. “Go, go, go, and come.’ And she would have none of them.
And after they had gone, lamenting and threatening, and explicitly announcing their opinion of her, his poor fool-mother, she turned to her God. Their Azyo’s and Aiyaiyo’s deafened her ears, distracted her soul, for every kind of dreadful emotion can be crammed into that expletive. She could not speak for a while. And then at last she found words, and she prayed that her despised fifth might grow in strength and in beauty, so that all must see he was fair to God. The more they terrified her with their forebodings, the more beautiful might he be. Oh, that they might be compelled to admit her God was stronger than all the gods, even the gods of ill-luck — even Saturn, if indeed he had returned.
She gave him no name. What name could she give to such a son? All Indian names have known meanings, and a Tamil will change a letter in a word rather than use it unsuitably. Z is a letter for feminine name endings, WV for masculine. When a Christian wants to call his offspring The Sorrows of Mary, if the child be a girl, the Madonna is Marial; if a boy, Marian. With the usual careful regard for the suitable, Mimosa, not finding it, waited. But when, later on, we suggested Gift of God, she was delighted. That was exactly it.
Her prayer was answered, and the boy grew strong and fair. He could sit up alone at six months, and never ailed for an hour. Then measles came to the village, and measles is to India what smallpox is to England. All four boys sickened, her jewel child nearly died, and the baby boy lay in her arms a little bundle of bones.
Would it have been wonderful if her faith had failed? Her husband, though restored to sense and sight, was entirely regardless of her distress, and he never took the least interest in her precious little fifth. She had not money to buy the remedies prescribed by the barber who doctored the village, and, what was much more serious, could not buy the extra nourishment required by the poor little fellows to fortify them to fight their illness, and they got weaker and weaker. Kept at home as she was now, she had even less money than usual.
The temptation to give up the faith that seemed to have failed and to resort to the ways of those about her must have been tremendous through those weeks. There were the demons of disease to be appeased, and that vindictive god of ill-luck. ‘Only a cocoanut and a few flowers! Was it much to give to win health again for the poor sick children?” said the voices around her again; and again they urged charms to be bought or found; one, sinless and inexpensive, a frog which, if tied in a bag round the neck of the sick and starved to death, gives its slowly departing strength to the sufferer, at least should be tried. There were many workers in magic among the people of the village. They had ways of winning help. Mimosa never doubted that. Nor can one who has been among them doubt it either; “they also did in like manner with their enchantments.” There are no obsolete words in the Book written for all time. Call the strange powers exercised by those who give themselves to evil by any name you will, those powers are.
Mimosa knew where to turn for help — at a price. But she would not pay that price, so she was bombarded again by the ceaseless chatter of the women: “Return to thine own gods, and will not thy troubles cease?”
“Fear not, O thou fool-woman, the gods are merciful. Offer the appointed sacrifice, and all will yet be well.”
‘““What hinders thee? See, thy days are as the surface of the water that is stricken by the wind. Wave after wave come thy distresses; they chase one another. So it must be with those who depise the ancient gods.”’
‘And thy father, art thou better than he? Or wiser? Did he forsake the gods of his people? Did he not hear the foreign talk and refuse it? Art thou superior to thy father?’’ For that. by his last words he had confessed a faith, till then hardly known to himself, had never occurred to anyone.
““See her, the wisdomless!’’ they would continue relentlessly. And harder words came at call, and they pushed her and struck at her and trampled her down.
And she was as sensitive as the mimosa by the roadside that the cattle tread down on their way home in the evening. A breath, and a tremor runs through the little thing; it can feel even the changes in the air caused by thunder. Touch it, and one by one the leaflets close, each pinna droops and the leaf-stalk drops with a jerk.
Only the pretty lilac balls look up to the sun. ‘It is dead,’’ says the child who sees it thus for the first time; but it is not. By the ditch where it grows, there is a trickle of water from the rice fields. Nourished by this it takes heart again and shows its delicate bravery, as if nothing rougher than the flicker of a butterfly’s wings were in the world at all.
Succour came to our human Mimosa. The secret hidden waters flowed about her roots and, like her namesake by the roadside, she took heart to live again. The very trials that befell her were turned to means of strength for her; by them she proved her Father. For ‘‘if the work be of God He can make a stepping-stone of the devil himself to set forward the work.’’
All four boys recovered. ‘“‘ By my God was their healing,’’ she said in speaking of it afterwards. ‘‘ By Him alone it came, for none of the things I would have done for them was at that time able to do.’’ And, moved by the love which cannot rest without giving, unconcerned by questions about how the Lord of all the universe could care to receive her trivial gifts, she sent part of her first earnings, by the hand of her little boys, to the church.