Graves Which Appear Not
TO such mourners life is a great waste place, and the Lord who comforts all our waste places is a God unknown. There is a call in this. There is something stronger than a call in what underlies it everywhere. The subsoil of most non-Christian lands is largely made of graves.
It is possible to lose all sense of truth, that stern uncompromising thing, in a kind of worshipping rhapsody over that which appeals to sentiment, and to love of the mysterious. Such rhapsodies are in fashion now. We are almost ashamed of the crude thoughts of years ago; like the crude woodcuts in our childhood’s Missionary books, those thoughts were rather caricatures than seriously truthful. Or we etherealise where we cannot deny. Our pictures showed us Jagannath cars and flaming piles, and babes flung into crocodiles’ jaws. Granted there were such tragedies, the modern voice says softly, it was only love at its noblest, offering its all to its Love; and the glorious ecstasy carried the soul through pain. So we sit at the feet of the old gods created to satisfy at once both extremes in the nature of man. We forget the source
of the highest in the ancient books. We explain away the lowest. We wrap the result of our fine thoughts’ work in a shining web of words. And we show this web of bewilderment. And we say, Look; this is Indian thought. This is India seen at last, understood by us at last. All who ever went before were too dull to understand. They had no sympathy, no intuition. We are the people who know.
And straight through it all, as if a hand had torn at the dew-bespangled web and shown the dead fly inside, come voices from India’s own people, who have escaped
from the snare:
“Dost thou blame
A soul that strives but to see plain, speak true, Truth at all hazards? Oh, this false for real, This emptiness which feigns solidity — Ever some grey that’s white, and dun that’s black — When shall we rest upon the thing itself, Not on its semblance? Soul — too weak forsooth To cope with fact — wants fiction everywhere! Mine tires of falsehood: truth at any cost.”
The Panditu Rainabai Dongre Medhavi is at Agra. She has seen, as all visitors see, those dreams of delight, the poems in marble there. She asks to be shown the dungeons underneath one of the Pleasure towers. The guide denies the existence of such places. A fee refreshes his memory. He opens a trap-door on one side of the palace, lets her in, shows her the many underground rooms where the queens who had incurred the king’s displeasure were confined, tortured, starved. And he lights a torch and takes her to the further end of the prison. They are under the Jasmine tower. The room is dark, octagonal; in the centre is a pit, over the pit is a beam elaborately carved. Does the irony of it strike you? Our gallows are not carved. From that beam the queens were hung. Into that pit their bodies fell. Then a stream of water caught them, carried them out to the Jumna. The crocodiles did the rest.
There are many voices talking in the Jasmine tower. A single voice is speaking from the dungeon underneath:
“/ leg of my Western sisters not to be satisfied with looking on the outside beauty of the grand philosophies, and not to be charmed with hearing the long and interesting discourses of our educated men, but to open the trap-doors of the great monument of ancient Hindu intellect, and enter into the dark cellars where they will see the real working of tJie philosophies which they admire so much.”
“The real working of the philosophies which they admire so much.” These words, set in the thought of that underground room, and beam, and pit, came to me with forcefulness, when one day I trod on a grave which appeared not.
South India, as compared with North, is manifestly religious. The huge temples attest the fact. Benares is Hindu India’s heart, but Benares’ chief temple “is to the great temples of Tanjore, Madura, and Tinnevelly, what a small village church is to St. Paul’s Cathedral.” Everywhere here we have Hinduism at its grandest, stateliest, and most imposing. Its holy places are most holy. No alien may, as in the North, approach the sacred symbol; great stone galleries and corridors, quadrangular courts and pillared halls guard the approaches to the room, where, as the Hindu believes, the deity is enshrined. Here, then, if anywhere, we should see the philosophy behind all this, wrought out in something
worthy such expression. Here, uninfluenced by Islam, uninjured by change of dynasty, we have Hinduism, Hindu thought, free to work as it will. How does it work?
We had pitched our tents in a mango grove close to one of the southern towns, and were spending our days with the people. We had come to the last day, and were visiting in a quiet street, when we noticed an old lady of distinction who listened as one who understood. She was beautiful to look upon. A beautiful old face is seldom seen in South India; perhaps the hot years tire the beauty out. The old lady fascinated me. She sat quietly listening, one fine hand fingering her rosary, brown berries set in chased gold, her eyes fixed upon me. I found myself speaking only for her, and when I had finished I asked her if we might go home with her. She hesitated. The women laughed. But eventually she led the way through blazing sunshine into a large courtyard, and through it into the dim half light of an old-fashioned Indian house. “Ah! what sun! It scorches one’s very marrow,” she said, and sighed with relief as we reached the cool.
Her house seemed to fit the old lady, who stood on the threshold for a moment, her white widow’s dress showing against the soft shadowiness within. The floor was of brown tiles; the walls were of dull red. The doors and lintels and all the pillars were wonderfully carved. Polished brass vessels stood in rows in one of the passages. There was none of the untidy litter of an ordinary house and courtyard. All was orderly.
In the outer verandah a young man wrapped in a seagreen scarf was chanting poetry. Another, swinging on a board hung by chains from the roof, was listening intently. Each wore the Vishnu mark. There were no children to be seen, and again the unusual orderliness of the place struck me as we followed the old lady into the women’s apartment, the home of the house. There a servant appeared with a trayful of betel, the usual offer of courtesy. Plantains and limes were given to us. Then two young girls came forward and put garlands round our necks. We wondered how they happened to have all these things ready.
My fellow-worker of that afternoon had been recently converted. As nominal Christians, she and her husband had lived for years among the Hindus without ever visiting them like this. The old lady knew her, and not understanding why she came now, listened with a curious keenness, as if she were suspending judgment till the cause was laid out before her. After she had heard about her visitor’s new found joy, she asked us to sing. We began at once with,
“What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
As we broke off to explain the verses, Tamil fashion, the girls interest quickened, and they asked questions which so engrossed us that we did not notice the change in the old face beside us, till suddenly I saw it. That face was like our mountain side, with the storm-cloud rolling down. “Stop! stop!” and the voice was like the rising of the wind as we have it on the “WHEN HE is COME” 205
plain, rushing and deepening. “Stop! Who told you to sing that here? I know it well! I know it well! And your doctrine is thoroughly known to me, and I will have none of it here! Listen! Listen! Listen, I say, I will preach your doctrine!” And she poured forth a rapid summary of the parable of the prodigal son. “There, is not that your doctrine? Do not I well know whither it leads? And I will have none of it here!”
At the first sound of the hymn the chanting had ceased in the outer verandah; now a laugh broke in upon us, and the girls slipped away, as the two men sauntered into the room and stood surveying us. The old lady turned to them hurriedly. I can see that poor face now — wrath, fear, entreaty, defiance, such a mingling of emotions found expression there.
“Yes, I brought her,” she was saying; “woe is me that I did it. She shall go! But how could I know she would sing that song? Ah! be not angry with me. I want not her doctrine. I have said it: she shall go. See, she is going even now!”
The men did not answer. They talked to each other in undertones. We were puzzled. Why thif: outburst? We were ready to go, but the old lady took no notice of us. Lulled for the moment, she sang to herself:
“What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
We kept quiet. We were in the presence of something we did not understand. But God understood. His Spirit was there. Our whole thought then was to efface ourselves.
At last she looked at me, and answered as if I had spoken to her. It was as if a power compelled the truth to come and show itself.
“My life is all one sin,” she said, “one long black sin. The thing I think, and speak, and do is sin. I know it. Oh, I know it. But,” and the voice hardened, “what is that to you? If it is against your religion it is not against mine. My doctrine provides for the thing I do. It is holy, yea, holy.” Then again the voice changed, fell to a whisper. “But it is sin: it is sin; all sin.” When He is come He will convince of sin. He had come. She was convinced. No need of words of ours.
She stopped. The men listened amazed. They saw the tempest-tossed beautiful face. They looked at each other and at us, but, respecting the gesture that asked for silence, neither of them spoke.
The face was hidden now. “And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
But the men grew impatient. She rose as if to go, then praying that we might speak in line with the awful, gentle Voice she had been listening to, I pleaded with her, and she softened for a moment. But not so easily are souls won. “Aiyo! Aiyo! I have heard enough. Too much have I heard for my peace of mind. Go! go! What I do is not sin in our Hindu religion. I am kind to the girls; I call them my daughters. Go!”
And as we went we heard the men laugh, and the hymn that had stirred her so strongly rang out in bitter raillery:
“THE SNAKE NESTS IN THE ALTAR-STONE” 207
“What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
It was all most startling; she seemed to know so much. Had “heaven’s light but revealed a track whereby to crawl away from heaven “? “My doctrine provides for the thing I do. It is holy. What I do is not sin in our Hindu religion. I am kind to the girls; I call them my daughters.” As she said it, we knew where we were: in a house on the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. But what she said was true; what she was doing was “holy, yea holy,” judged by the very code that took shape in the Temple outside.
Some will find this incredible, unjustifiable, narrow, ignorant, intolerant; in short, just like a missionary devoid of imagination. There are those now who couple (God forgive us if the mere mention of such blasphemy is irreverent) the name of the Holy Child Jesus with one or other of the Hindu incarnations — Vishnu’s incarnation as Krishna, for example. “Krishna the Indian Christ,” they even dare to write, little knowing the inwardness of anything so lightly touched. All students of Indian literature acknowledge that the true and the beautiful are found in it. But should it be concealed that in the name of Krishna that house stands, that in his name stand many similar houses, and streets full of houses, that in his name the city of his reputed birth is to-day a polluted city? “My doctrine provides for the thing I do.”
“She misrepresented her doctrine, dragged its thought in the dust of her low desire, missed its meaning completely “; so some would tell us. Who knows best? She lives at the heart of Krishna’s things as no foreigner ever could. She holds to what she says; her doctrine cloaks the sin of her life, nay, rather crowns it, consecrates it. It is not sin.
A thought reveals itself in words. There are certain evil words engraved with iron style on the palm-leaf copies of ancient books. Words cut into the texture of a leaf when it is young cannot be erased when it is old; you cannot rub out a cut; the preservative saffron smeared over the leaf darkens into the lettering. Now comes the philosopher, considers this unpleasant fact, feels its incompatibility with his thought about Indian Thought. Such thought as these words indicate is a blot on the page of his philosophy. So he blows upon the blot, and lo, it vanishes! and floating out as from a cloud of new and mystical conceptions, conveyed in most subtle and exquisite language, we see emerge and evolve an Idea; these things, to put it boldly, bad things, said to be practised by Krishna, “are to be explained allegorically, and symbolise the longing of the human soul for union with the Supreme.” Could anything be more natural? Not what those bad words seem to mean, but what we say they are to mean, is their meaning, says the philosopher.
But most of India’s people are not philosophers, only simple people like ourselves. To them words mean just what they say, as in the main they do to us. And in this case the words are clear. The thought behind the words is clear. As our god did, so may we do; and as he did it, let us now deify the doing.
This is the real working of the philosophy which “BuT INWARDLY....” 209
some admire so much. Indian thought, like Indian character, is a study of contrast. The word “home” does not exist in our Tamil language, but perhaps nowhere is there more family affection. This contrast, or possibility of contrast, meets one at every turn. Things glorious and base, delicately sensitive and inexpressibly coarse, jostle one another, or lie alongside, everywhere. Take a single illustration from India’s literature. Bead parts of one of the epics; all that is noble and very lovely blossoms as the lotus. Read other parts of the same poem — but you could not, — and it would be as if you had plunged down into the slime at the lotus root.
Who was the woman? What was her story? Who were the girls? How had she got them? Oh, the unanswered questions of a single afternoon!
Other questions come to be answered sometimes: “What a pity it is to meddle with so ancient an order of things. After all, is there much difference between heathendom and Christendom? Regrettable things occur at home, as of course you know. Probably their own religion is suited to the people of India.”
It is true that the order of things is ancient But if the ancient is invariably best, why are we Christians to-day? As to the second contention, suppose it were possible to prove England on a level with India (which it is not) as regards practice, there would still be this difference in ideal. In England, when sin is exposed, the conscience of the nation speaks. Here it is drugged, mute. If ever a voice breaks the silence, it will be found to come from a quarter where some Christian influence, direct or reflex, is at work. In England, as in all lands even nominally Christian, there is such a thing as reticence; the very daylight shames needless allusion to pitch. Here, nothing is too unseemly to discuss; life holds no sanctuary. We have vultures on these hills. You see a shadow on the grass, faint, undefined. You look up and see the form of a great bird, black in the blue. It swoops down in circles, drops heavily beside a dead buffalo, and gorges. But though it is so big and gross, the fall of its shadow, as it wheels, is light as a breath on the grass. When one tries to describe the contrast between a land where the nation’s ideal is Christ, the pure and holy, and a land to whose favourite divinity that pitch, the thought of which defiles, is meat and drink, and pleasure, then one feels that words coined in the mint of a Christian language can never be truly expressive. The blackest words are too pale to paint even the faint undefined shadow of that strong contrast’s shape.
Verily, there is a difference. It is caused by the difference in the Faith that informs the life. No other than the Faith of the Lord Jesus Christ can possibly be suited to those whose chief end, even as ours, is nothing less than to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever. How can we, who “with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, laud and magnify His glorious name, evermore praising Him and saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Glory be to Thee, 0 Lord, most high” — how can we be indifferent to the fact that half the world is still shut out from its share in that majestic song? Can we sing on and not care?
IF? 211
“Oh, if our brother’s blood cry out to us, How shall we meet Thee who hast loved us all, Thee whom we never loved, not loving him?”
“God’s in His heaven. All’s right with the world;” two friends met on a hill top and said it. A town lies round the base of the hill. The level of red-tiled roofs is pierced by the spires of a mosque and a temple cupola. If those roofs had been made of glass instead of tiles, if mosque and temple and the houses close about them had been built of glass all through, and the two friends could have looked down, and through, and in, would they have said so? Yes, and no. Yes — for the Lord reigneth; no facts can touch that fact. No — for the prince of this world, though judged, has for the time being power; and though these towns are so sunshiny, so full of the careless joyousness of a people dwelling at ease, there are graves which appear not. And we who walk upon them are sometimes not aware of them till we have passed.