I Could Be Crucified Once
So passed several uncomfortable years. Mimosa acquired a tiresome trick of shrugging her shoulders, and ‘‘ answering back’’; for she did not by any means grow into a sweet little saint all at once, and the rather frequent and sometimes severe chastisements left her sometimes in a very unsaintlike frame of mind. It was all so bewildering. If God, the God to whom she clung the more fiercely for these sharp smitings, little limpet that she was, were indeed as she had heard and believed, living and powerful and loving, why did He not keep her mother’s hands off the whisk which was her favourite instrument of correction? It was a question that found no answer. Was the child forgotten by the Love that had shone upon her?
Love never forgets. Gradually through her troubles a gentle sense of still being loved stole in upon her soul. She knew, though how she could never have told, that the God she would not forsake had not forsaken her. And all alone, without a single friend who understood, or a single touch of human compassion, she was comforted. And gradually she learned patience, learned to accept her discipline.
18 ““Then came the time when I went into maraivu.’’ This was not tyranny, it was only the custom of the caste. The word means seclusion, and the custom springs from fear. For when the Mahommedan conquests changed the ways of the old Hindus, they felt the secluded life safer for their growing-up girls, and to this day, just when the mind in her is all one eager question, the child is shut up within narrow limits, and there that child stays till her marriage releases her.
“Didst thou ever break through and run out?”’
“No, never; how could I? The Rule is to stay in.’”
““But how didst thou endure it?”’
“* There was no other way but to endure it.”’
““Does no girl ever break the Rule?”’
““Never, never.’? And Mimosa added, what translated into modern English would be: “‘ It’s not done.”’
And she was such a vivid girl. Into her at her creation her Maker had inspired a soul that moveth to activity, and breathed a vital spirit. But this activity of vitality displeased her elders, who disapproved of “learned girls”; learning was for boys. So Mimosa was cooped up in small rooms and set to small tasks, and heard only the smallest of small talk, and the inquiring mind crowded with questions was treated as a freak.
“What is that to thee? Art thou not a womanchild?” Thus passed the dull, drab years.
She had much to endure. Sometimes it was as if the winds that blew about her had blown out the one little candle that stood unsheltered in the midst of them. Several times she yielded and bowed before the idols. These were her darkest periods; but she was not forsaken, the Love that followed found her. And then, all the more because she had weakened, the full blast of trial fell on her again.
“I could be crucified once,’ said Neesama San of Japan, and he was a man at liberty, strong, and with full knowledge. “But this daily crucifixion!” And now something hardly less was appointed for this Indian girl who had heard so little, and was to hear nothing for many years. Is not the courage of the love of God amazing? Could human love have asked it of a soul? Fortitude based on knowledge so slender, deathless, dauntless faith, who could have dared to ask it but the Lord God Himself? And what could have held her but Love Omnipotent? We have yet to prove more bravely the forces of that love.