Darkened Windows
WE have just returned from visiting Beautiful’s mother. That house, with the usual illogical logic of the Old-world Indian village, is open to us though the others are all shut. Mother and daughters received us affectionately, let us share their grief with them, let us sit with our hands in theirs, and mourn with them. The daughters, Beautiful’s sisters, had stopped weeping a fortnight ago. The mother’s heart weeps longest. She wept on as if, in the language of the East, her eyes were fountains of tears, and always she ended with a sob that cut one’s very heart, “Oh, my blossoming bud! my lotus flower! If only your head could have lain in my lap, and I could have tonded you myself, I could have borne to let you go. But it was not so, it was not so.”
“It is no use to try to comfort her,” said the daughters, when we tried, “see, her heart is closed against comfort. The dropping of words is as moonlight on stone. There is no more comfort ever for her. There is none in our religion.” And when we tried to open the comfort of ours to them, they said, “All we have left to us now is our own religion.” Words did indeed seem useless, and the sight of that sorrow that would not be comforted left us too sorrowful for words.
Evening was darkening the plain as we crossed it for home. We were all feeling heavy-hearted because of the perplexing way in which might had conquered right in a recent case in Palamcottah. A Hindu girl who had been taught in her own house, had waited patiently till she believed herself of age to become a Christian. Then she had come to the mission-house for protection, and had been received by our comrades there. The parents did their best, but could not persuade her to return home. Then they brought a charge against the missionaries, which was tried by the District magistrate, and thrown out as false. The girl’s faith and courage, through all the painful ordeal of giving evidence in court, bore witness to her sincerity. Then the relatives filed a Civil suit. While the trial was proceeding, a crowd collected about the Court-house. When the missionaries and the girl came out, they were overpowered, and she was carried off by force. For three days it was known that she held out. On the fourth day she gave in. On the evening of that day, she was produced before the magistrate. She was willing then to go back with the man to whom in the interval she had been married. This in barest outline is the story which to live through has meant much. “Is Satan too strong?” the girls asked wistfully. “She bore so much before she gave in. Does he conquer everywhere? Why does God allow such things to happen?” Everything in us asks why?
“The secret things belong unto the Lord.”
Then a deeper silence fell upon us. Beautiful’s face, and her mother’s grief, and the face of that convert girl, and our dear comrades’ grief — these differing things all mingled together to trouble us. The secrets of God seemed to press all about us. All round us stretched the plain, reaching away into dimness like the dimness of an unknown land dark with those secrets. For question leads off into question; there is no end to it; and “Oft oppressive unto pain becomes the riddle of the earth.” And the ways of God and the ways of the devil seem to become confused, till everything is a bewilderment, and all life just a labyrinth with the clue lost long ago. There is torture in the too persistent “Why?” There is torment in the questions that spring upon us from the blackness of second causes: “the dark enigma of permitted wrong” is terribly intense. And it faces us sometimes so nearly, and it lashes us with the sharpness of thoughts that are like whips.
“What I do them knowest not now; but thou
shalt know hereafter.”
A text taken out of its context, but a text that finds place in the greater context of life, it spoke to us then with a voice that was not void of power. We remembered how little we knew; we are like horses in training, running in circumscribed circles, thinking short-reaching thoughts. Beyond our utmost reach sweeps God’s great thought-horizon. Sometime, somewhere, we shall understand, and even if we never might, it could make no real difference; we know enough of our God to know all must be well.
“I would rest
My head upon Thine, while Thy healing hand* Close covered both my eyes beside Thy breast, Pressing the brain, which too much thought expands, Back to its proper size again, and smoothing Distortion down till every nerve had soothing And all lay quiet, happy, and suppressed.”
Not to our guardian angel, but to the Lord of all the angels we said it, each in our own way. “0 troubled and bearer of burdens, He answered,” so the Tamil reads, “come to Me; I will cool your weariness.” Not, I will answer your questions, but — “I will give you rest.”
The more we experience the heart-rest Jesus gives, the more we come to know Him as a personal near Friend, the more it grieves us to see so many people going on without Him. For the moment leave aside the sin of heathendom. Think only of its sorrow. Think of these lovable people, who are so kind and human, so like ourselves in capacity to suffer, going on, ever on, without the one thing which is everything to us. If Hinduism has a word of comfort for the mourner, that word has not reached the villages where most of its millions live. We are welcome now in all the towns and villages surrounding us, except in the few where something has for the moment alarmed the people, as in Beautiful’s village. They seem to love us; we are often sorry because they care for us so much, and not at all for our Master. We want to be transparent windows through which they will see Jesus. When they stop and look at us we feel we are somehow clouding the glass. This intimacy with the people of almost all castes often brings us into close touch with them in their sorrows; and we have been allowed to spend hours in the secluded women’s quarters, listening to their life stories, sharing in their troubles. This has given us a rare opportunity to discover the best and the worst there is to know. The best, perhaps, is the marvellous patience of the people in their pain. You never hear murmuring. It is fate: resignation is virtuous, is the general impression. The worst, where sorrow is in question, is the heartless indifference sometimes engendered by this cold creed, and the utter absence of true comfort at all times.
South Indian life, as seen from outside, is cheerful. By comparison English life is sombre, like the drab of its clothes in comparison with our vivid reds, or the grey of its atmosphere in contrast to our clear blue. But truth lies in and under, not on the top of things. Look in and under in India and you see this:
“Can you give me back my sight?” She was a middle-aged woman, grown old too soon. She was poor, but her caste was exclusive, and she sat gathered up in a tight bunch lest my dress should touch her’s as I sat on the narrow verandah beside her. She had crept out of the dark room behind, a few minutes earlier, drawn by the hope of help. Only a poor middle-aged woman, with nothing romantic or pathetic about her, quietly waiting for the call that would tell her we had come. I looked at her a minute before I sat down beside her, and I knew I was looking at one who had sorrowed uucomforted.
She told me all about it in a voice that was all monotone. “I gave my husband to death. He died. I gave my ten children to death, and they died. One by one I saw them die. These eyes saw them fade and die. They did not die as little ones. No; I nourished them and cherished them, and each had grown up tall and strong, when, one by one, they went from me, and my arms had to let them go. And then I sat in my house and wept. I had nothing to do but weep. So my eyes have lost their power to see, and alone, alone, I am growing blind. Can you give me back my sight?”
One could see that she dreaded blindness with a dread unspeakable, and the loneliness was overwhelming her. There was fear in her face, and such entreaty, and yet she spoke so patiently, even the passion of appeal had no impatience in it. She had two terrible swollen sores, each bad enough to make her ill; but when I noticed them, she said, “Oh, never mind! They are nothing to me. What is pain and what are sores to one who is growing blind?”
The neighbours had gathered in little groups and listened while we talked; now they began to talk together to me. “She has sat for years alone in the dark!” “She only tastes food once a day!” “She never eats proper curry and rice!” “She never, no never ceases from tears!” “Never a day but she weeps many tears, and the tears have dissolved her eyes!”
As they spoke, the tears ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away with her old torn cloth, and looked out across the sunny street where the children of others played, and she strained her eyes as she looked at them, as if she almost hoped to see her own ten playing there. And then she looked up and clasped her hands, and held them high above her head. “Alone among the people I sit and weep, and things are growing dim to me, and I am growing blind!” Then, breaking off, she held up her hands as if in eager but mute appeal to the distant, deaf, and pitiless power she thought of as her god.
To be blind and to be lonely — without Jesus! It was more than one could bear to think of for anybody. That so very many are blind and lonely — without Jesus — does not make it the less sorrowful for one of the many, and what we may not realise as we think of the many, becomes real indeed as we look at the one. I looked at this woman now — the thin form, thin with fasting, and the sores, fruit of that fasting, and the eyes, worn out with weeping — those years had left their mark. And I leaned my head against the pillar and turned my face away, and tried not to let them see how much I cared.
But they saw, and their exclamations told her; and with such a loving gesture, as if she would have thrown her arms round me, only her caste rules withheld her, she besought me not to trouble, not to have a thought about her. “For, indeed, I am not worth it. I am suffering for my sin.” (She meant the sin of some previous birth.) “Joy and grief are a whirling wheel. Who can stay what has to be? The fate written in one’s head is hidden by one’s hair, but it is written, who can reverse it? As a sky without a moon am I, a sore without a salve. It is my fate. It is my fate.” Then she stopped and looked tenderly towards me, and said, “Oh, Amma! trouble not for me. Have I not myself shed tears enough? Let none be shed for me!”
I suppose it is well for us that we do not, as we put it, “feel everything.” The feeling faculty within us seems to be usually overspread with a sort of merciful dulness, but sometimes it is as if it were skinned, and we do feel. I think if you had been there that day you would have felt this — to see her so suffering, to hear her trying to comfort you.
I tried to arrange for her to come in and have her eyes attended to, but caste interfered. And even if she could have come it is doubtful if much could have been done. Her eyes looked, as the women said, as if they had been “dissolved.”
She listened wistfully as I told her about Jesus, but I think her mind had no room for any thoughts save those which had filled it for so long.
And so an hour passed, and she was weak with long fasting and sitting in darkness, and the pain she counted as nothing overcame her, and she crept back into the little windowless room which opened off the verandah, and lay down on a mat spread in the corner, and we left her there alone.
A few weeks later we went again. She was somewhere toiling and worshipping; for a sudden desperateness had seized her, and the calmness had passed, the people said. We waited till late, and she returned spent and weary, but loving still. “Dear Amma,” she said, as we told her again of the only comfort, “I have but one thing left to me; I have been bereft of all but it. Would you ask me to do that which you know would spoil the one thing left to me? You forget I have still my caste: I have kept it all these years. Would you have me believe your Jesus Lord, and lose the one thing left to me?” And then reproachfully she turned those almost sightless eyes on me, and went into her house.
0 thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, have we come too late? Are life’s fair colours forever covered over, its windows of agate darkened forever? Oh for the Voice to sound through the silence, for the Face to shine through the dimness, for the comforting touch of Christ!
And the question that came to me as we left her, was the question that never comes less urgently although it comes so often. The answer to that question lies between each one of us and God.