1.07.22. Book 7: 22. The Stub of a Sword

22. THE STUB OF A SWORD

IT was the good wet month of October 1858, on the plains of North Tinnevelly, near the town of Siva’s Benares. After the panting heat of the three previous months the very earth seems to cry out for the rains. October, generally about half-way through, brings them grey sheets that fall straight and solid, as if sluice-gates above were opened and the water descended in bulk, not drops. Glorious days are to follow, days when the world washed clean, and consoled, sings and shouts for joy. Open your heart to the sound of the land, not to the birds’ talk only or to the multitudinous tiny talk of the unseen life among leaves and grass, but to those thousand little singing voices of the lowliest weed-flowers of the earth, and you know that every created thing carries its note within it, sings it forth and contributes to the rapture of the world. Why be reminded that it is but for a moment, that everything that can feel will be stretched on the frying-pan not six months hence? There is nothing less rememberable or recoverable to memory than heat. The very thought of it passes like a little puff of smoke. So in the house lately furnished, the one in­harmonious thing on the Plains, for it was new and raw and starey-eyed, Ragland and his band settled down with thankfulness. What did it matter that the Tamil carpenter, unlike his brother of China and Japan and even of our Indian West Coast, thinks of a roof in terms of a lid, and that only? So long as the close-­clipped roof kept out the drenching rain it spelt luxury to the men underneath. And the solid bare walls were luxury, too, after flapping canvas. After long sojourn in tents the veriest hut is luxury. And Ragland indeed needed luxury now, he had owned to being ill. So had his fellow-worker Meadows, and he (Meadows) had started on the month’s journey to get medical help in Madras. But Ragland knew the journey would be wasted time for him; he did not believe in the treatment, drugs and leeches and blisters then used for his trouble, but in food and rest. And yet, as he carefully explains in a letter home, in India your doctor is your friend, you cannot ask for advice and then refuse to follow it. It is not a question of fee, but of kindness. If he went to Madras he would either have to submit to reducing treatment and lose the little strength he had (" Spare me the stub of a sword," he says in effect as he enlarges upon that), or return to England to escape from it. This last he says he does not intend to do because he knows if he went home he would never get out again. So, to the great relief of his fellows, he decided to stay and do the hundred odd things he could do to help, and in utter contentment of spirit settled down to the wet-weather work in the bungalow. But he was very tired. Five unbroken, strenuous years of work on the Plains lay behind him, and all the time there had been that which one in sympathy with the Father finds hardest to bear, the grief of seeing His poor children blindly turning away from their good. Morning by morning all over South India the silence before dawn is crossed and jarred by the melancholy, long-drawn wail of the conch. Flashes then across the inward sight the priest in charge of the idol in the temple near by; one sees him as he blows his shell, follows him as, having wakened the sleeping god, he proceeds to minister to it through petty barren rites, aches-yes, aches is the only word-to lead him to the living fountains of waters, recalls his refusals. Thus, for the man who has ears to hear and a heart that cannot help loving, the Indian day begins. And at sunset, through the treasures of colour and the general sense of peace, once more that wail proceeds discordant, empty of triumph as of hope. And often in the night, always in these parts on Tuesdays and Fridays, and often at other times, there is the persistent beat of the tom-tom that tells of demon-worship un­ashamed. The listener must be strangely im­pervious to the thousand cries and calls and feelings of the air if he can lie and listen and turn again to sleep without a pang. Surely when we see our Lord Jesus we shall not ask Him to forgive us for our foolish over-caring, but rather that we cared so little, cared so coldly that souls are perishing for whom He died.

Ragland was his Lord’s dear lover. Here and there among the old biographies that fill dull-looking bookcases we find the tracks of such and kindle our poor little fires at their bright furnaces. They appeared merely ordinary to the people about them, for they wore no grand airs; but they walked with their God, and they went on; love held them on. They endured and did not give way. Of such was Ragland. He was ill now, but it never crossed his mind to give in. The pain of the land lay upon him, the pain of his hidden hurt, but here in the lull of the fight he stood, and asked only for strength to go on. Not that he was above temptation to weakness:

"I am very well now," he had written two years before, cheerfully ignoring the lung. "Nevertheless I long for rest from travelling. Rest from travelling-how quickly this little string of words suggests the thought of the longed-for rest!" And he anticipates that for a moment and then adds, "Oh that I knew something of the love of Jacob which made his seven years of servitude seem only so many days." But he never listened to the voices that would have weakened him. The fear of fatigue never deterred him, was the witness borne to him afterwards.