Mosaic

ITINEKATTNG work is a work without an evident end. It is full of fragments variously cut and coloured which sometimes seem to be strewn about to no purpose. And you want to retrace, and gather the pieces together, and fit them into something. But you probably find this is not your business. Occasionally, however, you are allowed to go back and see how God has been fitting into His great mosaic the pieces you thought scattered and lost, and you see how He thought of each little piece, when He formed the design at the first.

Star has recently lost her father. He had been drawing nearer to us all in friendliness, and had given up idolatry; but he had not accepted Christ, because as head of his caste he had so much to lose. And yet, as death came swiftly, he would not allow them to do anything idolatrous. “No, it is no use,” he said. And almost his last thought was for the child he had pursed once, but forgiven. “Don’t write to her till I am gone; she cannot come in time.” And all his thoughts were kindly and gentle as he passed away.

When he passed the priest took possession. Everything was done in style. Four hundred rupees were spent on the Brahmans and relations, who were sumptuously feasted for days. By the time we got there, things had settled down into a tired-out quietness. Even the poor mother had hardly spirit to rise to the customary wail, and the call of the little sisters, “Father! our sister has come!” sounded wearily.

It was a difficult day. Between those who love our Lord and those who do not, there is a separation which no affection can quite cross. Star could not do all they wanted her to do, so they thought her unfeeling. They did not know of the heart-broken crying, night after night, as she woke up dreaming about her father. She did not wail in the orthodox way, using unmeaning, untruthful expressions; so they thought she did not care.

There was loneliness outside, that curious loneliness which comes when you return to a place which once knew you well, and now knows you no more. The very houses and streets were dear, but they looked coldly upon her. She had sat among her own, indoors, and after the first greeting they had looked upon her askance. She went out to renew her friendship with the familiar things, and they said to her, “We do not belong to you.” The little sisters ceased calling to their father to come, and began to talk of a wedding and jewels. “If you will marry according to caste, and wear suitable jewels, we will all join the Way.” We were hospitably entertained, and treated with more than common kindness; they even let us share in the family meal (as they were mourning, caste rules were relaxed), and Star’s mother insisted on feeding me with her own hand, pressing dainty morsels rolled in moist balls into my mouth. But there was always the sense of separation, the chasm between. They would not let Star mention the Lord Jesus: “Have you not written us many letters? Is that not enough?” They pressed jewels upon her: “Your ear lobes ought to be dangling to your shoulders, and crammed with jewels. We are ashamed of your appearance.” They filled the day with conversation about such matters, and Star’s sore heart grew sorer. The house to her was full of her father, and they could talk of these trivial things. The day was shadowed in other ways; we were so often reminded that under all the colour of this colourful land there is something heavy and black.

Among Star’s cousins is a young wife whose wistfulness told us at once that she had no little children. A childless wife is not honoured here; and a look grows into the face which tells the tale of the years. We went to her house; it is large and roomy, built to be filled, but empty. “Her husband deals in magic,” some one explained, and we understood. Childlessness, according to tradition, is the price paid for possession of occult power. The magician’s generation ceases with himself.

Then story after story was half whispered, half gestured; stories full of mystery, told with perfect simplicity and no sense of surprise or untruth, but always under breath, as if they feared the Power would overhear. These stories were all about the influence of a certain curalai, a medium belonging to the girl’s husband; it was kept in a corner of the house where we sat, and they offered to show it to me, but the thing, besides being in measure Satanic, was made of an infant’s bones, and I had no desire to see it. “If lie brought it out, and so willed it, he could mesmerise you perfectly,” they all affirmed with confidence, and I felt half inclined to let him try, and prove the fallacy, but resisted the temptation; it would have done no good. The East is the home of spiritualism and hypnotism. The secrets connected with mental suggestion and subconsciousness are open secrets here. But though this wonderful old land, with its wonderful old ways, lies all round us, most of us live in it without knowing much about it. It hides itself from us. Even its language has its hidden talk, an ingenious combination of vocals and consonants worked into the colloquial. India is a cabinet of drawers, and secret drawers. We only know enough to know that we do not know.

From this home we went to another where the parents of one of Mr. Walker’s convert boys live. We were shown into a courtyard packed with servants teasing cotton. The air was full of the white fluff, and we found it difficult to speak. But the good-natured, laughter-loving people were ready to listen; it made a little diversion in their day. After we had finished with them, their master, our boy’s father, led us up a narrow ladder to a loft at the top of the house. We had heard that loft described, and looked round it with interest. “Yes,” said the old man, reading our thought, “this is the room I locked him in. For five days and five nights I kept him here. I tied him to that pillar. I locked up that window lest he should slip through it out on the roof.” All this frankness was surprising; one learns to look behind frankness in India. “But now all desire that he should be a Hindu has faded from my mind. I have not the least feeling of anything but complete satisfaction that he should be a Christian. I beseech you to tell the Iyer this, and to persuade him to send the boy home. See! his mother is pining to death for her son.” And the mother was dramatically produced.

For a moment I smiled. The old man’s ulterior object was so very evident. I wondered how he could expect us to be so easily caught. But a glance at the mother sent a pang through me. It was true: she was pining to death for her son. The Sword and Variance cut cruelly.

I dare not give the parents hope that the Iyer would send the boy back. It would have been too dangerous. “What happened last time your word was trusted and he was brought to see you? “” Ah, that was an unfortunate misadventure,” and the old man waved his hand lightly as if waving off its memory. An hour or two later we passed the place where the “misadventure “occurred. One of our little party had been through it, and described it to me with spirit:” Hundreds of the boy’s caste men, led by his father and mother, came rushing for us at once like a fury of great waters. See, here they seized the bulls and tore them out of the cart. And here the mother threw herself down on the ground and raved and would not stir. So many people pressing all round, and roaring, all their mouths open, and all their hands stretched out — and we in the “KEPT” 235

midst of it. Oh, such angry faces! Oh, how they shouted, and they hissed upon us like snakes. Then God came to our deliverance. For the aged Headman sent to his son and said, ‘Years ago a white man helped me. There is a white man in trouble now. Go and help him in his need.’ But when the son came he was dismayed. ‘The people are too strong for me. What can I do? I am but one.’ Then suddenly God bestowed courage upon him, and he threw up his arms and shouted, and he quelled the riot, and we passed through.”

That day, together in the bungalow, Mrs. Walker and I had read Daily Light, and found comfort in it: “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me.” We did not apprehend such danger, but we knew there was peril in the experiment of taking a bandy load of converts back to their own village to witness to their own people, even though we had the promise of safe conduct. But good came out of apparent harm. That day has its place in the mosaic.

We left Star’s home in the evening, and, some miles from it, came upon a patch of garden ground. Out on the great sand waste, where nothing grows but palm and scrub, there is a company of true believers led by a simple countryman, who, unknown to the preacher, was converted through an ordinary sermon in church. This man went home, started what would now be called a Prayer Circle, led it, went out witnessing to the surrounding villages, and so impressed the little group of Christians in his village with the immense importance of this witnessing work, that, out of their poverty, they subscribed towards the expenses involved. In country, as in town, the number who receive the truth is small. Village after village, the pastor tells you sorrowfully, is without a single real Christian, and the towns stand almost unmoved. But the witness is being borne.

In the adjoining village we saw more of the mosaic. The pastor and his wife, the same who helped Gladness, are warm and most courageous where converts are concerned. Their brave influence has helped many. When we remembered how this came about, we wondered at the ways of God, who expends so much thought upon preparing one to help another, and then so works that those who need a certain sort of help are brought in touch with those prepared to give it. The mosaic is being fashioned everywhere.

Among those about whom we inquired, there were some whose stories seem like broken bits of a broken plan. As many have asked about them we mention them here. Treasure and Gold, two girls who once were almost martyrs for Jesus’ sake, had been married to Hindus and sent far away. We went to the place on the lake, near its little temple, where Gold had been almost drowned. We stood on the same lake-side where Treasure stood to be scourged. They had been pressed too far. They had both quite given in.

The little child, the rose-bud crushed, had been forgotten by everyone; spoiled flowers are soon forgotten in this forgetful world. The child we last saw drugged was dead; her first year killed her, the woman said, and before I could stop them, they told me how. The story sickened us for days. What must the holy Son of God “LENT” 237

have suffered in spirit day by day, all through those years of human life, as He saw life’s sin, and heard its moan, and knew it never need have been.

But by far the most sorrow-laden hour was spent in the village from which the little child was taken to the temple near our house. We saw the relative whose word could have prevented it. He told us the child was in the village “lent by the temple.” We saw her, a child changed — most piteously changed. All we had feared had been done.

“They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone; The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own. The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone. Ease caitiff’s who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her. Ye left her there — alone.”

Married to the god, “tied to the stone,” it is their very idiom: oh, the burning, unspeakable wrong of it! Cold, cold, one may try to be, and it is easy to be cold when one only reads of it; but when one sees it, sees the changed child-face, sees the passing of the innocence that will never come again; feels, as if one’s own soul felt it, the brand of the iron, the sting of the shame, then it is not easy to be cold. India sees a pathetic picture in the lamb in the slaughter-house, “which crops the fragrant shoots that dangle from the slayer’s hand.” When will she see something far more pathetic in the play of these small child lambs in the shambles within her Temple courts?

But as I looked back to that heart-breaking sight, the sight of that little doomed lamb being led through the wood and away, it seemed as though I were looking upon a piece of the mosaic, a blood-red bit meant to fit somewhere, even now fitting into its place. For have not many eyes followed that child in her walk through the wood? Have hearts not ached to run after her, and catch her, and save her, as she turned and waved her little hand? And the child they saw drugged on the floor? Have some not looked again and again, and then looked up in anguish, that found relief only in strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save? Has the pain all passed in vain? and the prayer? Is there no connection between that first breaking out of prayer and the beginning of what looks like an answer? Nine months after that first prayer, the word came unmistakably, “Come, search for the little lost lambs with Me.” Since then, the search has gone on, and some have been found. Will not the Good Shepherd go on finding His lambs? Perhaps the Temple children’s time has come at last.

The Fort lay on our homeward way. No one had visited it since we last went, though afterwards a sister missionary had a good entrance there. We had been travelling for days, and had a long journey before us that night, but the hope of an opened door braced us, as we went in. Again the unchanging silence. The very sunshine seemed stiller here than outside. We found our way as of old to the shadiest street, and waited awhile, but no one came; so we went on, found a deserted house in good repair, explored its rooms through barred windows; went on farther, saw shrines, near the temple, small shrines full of idols; saw traces everywhere of life, strong though so old, but saw no life: only a black goat “THERE is DEATH HERE” 239

wandered free, and the sparrows chirped, and squirrels darted across the path.

We ventured to knock at last. The door suddenly opened, and as suddenly shut, then opened again, and a woman’s voice called, “Whoever you are, by the way you came — Go! There is death here: go!”

We found an awning of mats, where four ways met, and waited, wondering if anyone would come. No woman would, we knew, but a man might. Presently one came. “Are you the pulse-feeling Missie Ammal? The Government sent one here last week, and we showed her the kindness of allowing her to feel our women’s pulses.” The questioner was a young man educated outside, as some of the younger generation are. He was interested in our message, and promised to influence his people to listen to it, or, as he put it, “learn.” The Headman, “Absolute Truth -speaker,” would, he was sure, put no obstacle in the way of the women and children being taught. We could not see him; he was mourning, as all the Fort was, because of the death of one of the Clan.

Several bright little girls came out very shyly, and we made friends with them. A servant passed, fattening himself against the wall before he got within contaminating radius. The children drew their small garments close about them lest his very shadow should fall and defile. The man seemed almost to shrivel up in his servility. The children glanced at him not unkindly, but the pride and the ignorance of centuries was painted as by an invisible hand upon their little faces then.

After a while they left us, and we went to one of the tamarind trees near the door of the Fort, and kneeling there in the shade prayed for the place as we never prayed before. We left it then, wrapped in that strange hush, unbroken by even the sound of the chant they raise for their dead.

We travelled straight on that afternoon and night, stopping only at midnight to dine, and then chiefly because the bandy-man had lost his way. And as we sat there in the quiet dark, with the silence of the sky above us and the plain about us, the solemnity of life in this land pressed upon us, bore in upon us, penetrated us. The people pass across the plain so quickly. Oh, are we half in earnest to reach them before they pass?