Part 13 (2/2)
But one day, suddenly, trouble came. The parents appeared in the Dohnavur compound and claimed their daughter; and we had no legal right to refuse her, for she was under age. We shall never forget the hour they came. They had haunted the neighbourhood, as we afterwards heard, and prowled about outside the compound, watching for an opportunity to carry the child off without our knowledge. But she was always with the other children, so that plan failed. When first she heard they had come, she fled to the bungalow. ”My parents have come! My father is strong!
Oh, hide me! hide me!” she besought us. ”I cannot resist him! I cannot!”
and she cried and clung to us. But when we went out to meet them, she was perfectly quiet; and no one would have known from her manner as she stood before them, and answered their questions, without a tremble in her voice, how frightened she had been before.
”What is this talk about being a Christian?” the father demanded stormily. ”What can an infant know about such matters? Are you wiser than your fathers, that their religion is not good enough for you?” And scathing mockery followed, harder to bear than abuse. ”Come! Say salaam to the Missie Ammal, and bring your jewels” (she had taken them off), ”and let us go home together.” The child stood absolutely still, looking up with brave eyes; and to our astonishment said, as though it were the only thing to be said: ”But I am a Christian. I cannot go home.”
We had not thought of her saying this. We had, indeed, encouraged her as we had encouraged ourselves, to rest in our G.o.d, who is unto us a G.o.d of deliverances; but we had not suggested any line of resistance, and were not prepared for the calm refusal which so quietly took it for granted that she had no power to refuse.
The father was evidently nonplussed. He knew his little daughter, a timid child, whose translated name, Fawn, seems to express her exactly, and he gazed down upon her in silence for one surprised moment, then burst out in wrath and indignant revilings. ”Snake! nurtured in the bosom only to turn and sting! Vile, filthy, disgusting insect, born to disgrace her caste!” And they cursed her as she stood.
Then their mood changed, and they tried pleadings, much more difficult to resist. The father reminded her of his pilgrimage to a famous Temple at her birth: ”He had named her before the G.o.ds.” Her mother touched on tenderer memories, till we could feel the quiver of soul, and feared for the little Fawn. Then they promised her liberty at home. She should read her Bible, pray to the true G.o.d, ”for all G.o.ds are one.” I saw Fawn shut her eyes for a moment. What she saw in that moment she told me afterwards: a fire lighted on the floor, a Bible tossed into it, two schoolboy brothers (whose leanings towards Christianity had been discovered) pushed into an inner room, the sound of blows and cries.
”And after that my brothers did not want to be Christians any more.”
Poor little timid Fawn! We hardly wonder as we look at her that she shrank and shut her eyes. I have seen a child of twelve held down by a powerful arm and beaten across the bare shoulders with a cocoa-nut sh.e.l.l fastened to the end of a stick; I have seen her wrists twisted almost to dislocation--seen it, and been unable to help. I think of the child, now our happy Gladness, lover of the unlovable babies; and I for one cannot wonder at the little Fawn's fear. But aloud she only said: ”Forgive me, I cannot go home.”
The father grew impatient. ”Get your jewels and let us be gone!” Fawn ran into the house, brought her jewels, and handed them to her father.
He counted them over--pretty little chains and bangles, and then he eyed her curiously. A child to give up her jewels like this--he found it unaccountable. And then he began to argue, but Fawn answered him with clearness and simplicity, and he could not perplex her. She knew Whom she believed.
At last they rose to go, cursing the day she was born with a curse that sounded horrible. But their younger daughter, whom they had brought with them, threw herself upon the ground, tearing her hair, beating her breast, shrieking and rolling and flinging the dust about like a mad thing. ”I will not go without my sister! I will not go! I will not go!”
And she clung to Fawn, and wept and bewailed till we hardly dared to hope the child would be able to withstand her. For a moment the parents stood and waited. We, too, stood in tension of spirit. ”They have told her to do it,” whispered Fawn, and stood firm. Then the father stooped, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the younger child, and departed, followed by the mother.
All this time two of our number had been waiting upon G.o.d in a quiet place out of sight. One of the two went after the parents, hoping for a chance to explain matters to the mother. As she drew near she heard the wife say in an undertone to her husband: ”Leave them for to-day. Wait till to-night. You have carried off the younger in your arms against her will. What hinders you doing the same to the elder?” And that night we prayed that the Wall of Fire might be round us, and slept in peace.
As a dream when one awaketh, so was the memory of that afternoon when we awoke next morning. And as a dream so the parents pa.s.sed out of sight, for they left before the dawn. But weeks afterwards we heard what had happened that night. They had lodged in the Hindu village outside our gate. There has never been a Christian there, and the people have never responded in any way. It is a little shut-in place of darkness on the borders of the light. But when the parents proposed a raid upon the bungalow that night they would not rise to it. ”No, we have no feud with the bungalow. We will not do it.” The nearest white face was a day's journey distant, and a woman alone, white or brown, does not count for much in Hindu eyes. But the Wall of Fire was around us, and so we were safe.
If the story could stop here, how easy life would be! One fight, one fling to the lions, and then the palm and crown. But it is not so. The perils of reaction are greater for the convert than the first great strain of facing the alternative, ”Diana or Christ.” Home-sickness comes, wave upon wave, and all but sweeps the soul away; feelings and longings asleep in the child awake in the girl, and draw her and woo her, and blind her too often to all that yielding means. She forgets the under-side of the life she has forsaken; she remembers only the alluring; and all that is natural pleads within her, and will not let her rest. ”Across the will of Nature leads on the path of G.o.d,” is sternly true for the convert in a Hindu or Moslem land.
And so we write this unfinished story in faith that some one reading it will remember the young girl-converts as well as the little children.
Fawn has been kept steadfast, but she still needs prayer. These last five years have held anxious hours for those who love her, and to us, as to all who have to do with converts. ”Perpetual knockings at Thy door, tears sullying Thy transparent rooms,” are words that go deep and touch the heart of things.
CHAPTER XXVI
The Glory of the Usual
[Ill.u.s.tration: AFTER HER BOTTLE.]
”AND all things were done in such excellent methods, and I cannot tell how, but things in the doing of them seemed to cast a smile”--is a beautiful sentence from Bunyan's _Holy War_, which has been with us ever since we began the Nursery work. Lately we found its complement in a modern book of sermons, _The Unlighted l.u.s.tre_, by G. H. Morrison. ”No matter how stirring your life be, it will be a failure if you have never been wakened to the glory of the usual. There is no happiness like the old and common happiness, suns.h.i.+ne and love and duty and the laughter of children. . . . There are no duties that so enrich as dull duties.”
The ancient voice and the new voice sing to the same sweet tune; and we in our little measure are learning to sing it too.
As we have said, India is a land where the secular does not appeal. When we were an Itinerating Band, we had many offers from Christian girls and women to join us, as many in one month as we now have in five years.
Sometimes it has seemed to us that we were set to learn and to teach a new and difficult lesson, the sacredness of the commonplace. Day by day we learn to rub out a little more of the clear chalked line that someone has ruled on life's black-board; the Secular and the Spiritual may not be divided now. The enlightening of a dark soul or the lighting of a kitchen fire, it matters not which it is, if only we are obedient to the heavenly vision, and work with a pure intention to the glory of our G.o.d.
[Ill.u.s.tration: NORTH LAKE AND HILLS.]
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