1.07.24. Book 7: 24. Fifty Years Afterwards
24. FIFTY YEARS AFTERWARDS
JUNE 3, 1851, a breathless date, for no rain from the western hills had come as yet to cool the air, and the pitiless heat of six parched months makes the average Englishman feel akin to the yellow stubble of grass in the dry watercourses. All flesh is grass, and withered grass, in June before the rains. On that date, in that heat, the man, whom we now know a little, wrote the words we copied before: "Of all plans of ensuring success, the most certain is Christ’s own, becoming a corn of wheat, falling into the ground, and dying."
June 11, 1901, on just such a day, those same words were repeated slowly by a man like-minded, Walker of Tinnevelly. No life of Ragland was to be had then, the ancient blue Memoir was discovered later; but this one sentence was like a winged seed, it had flown down the fifty years to us. More than any other human words, they influenced the man who quoted them now. On that day, sultry to exhaustion, after a long, sticky railway journey and a hotter, stickier bullock-cart drive, we had walked from the nearest mission station to Ragland’s grave. A bare, baked road, six hot missionaries trudging along in more or less silence, for there was no visitor to delude into the belief that nobody was particularly tired-it does not sound an inspiring spectacle. Nor was it. Dust lay thick everywhere, the heat was visible, as it is in our hottest days: you can see it in tremulous waves flowing knee-deep along the levels, breast-high sometimes where spaces are vast. The sun, knowing he was near his setting, thrust at us in long, sharp, slanting stabs, and the wind we longed for lay low and said nothing. In silence, then, we stood beside the place where the shell of Ragland lay, near by the house where he had died. Desolation reigned. Not a green thing breathed. But that word, quick as the day it was first written on paper long since turned to dust, was at work then, is at work to-day, imperishable as energy. Which was the boy’s window? It was rather a small question to ask, and it broke on the great silence like the foolish little chirp of a bird. But it would have been interesting to know, and we walked round the poor, weather-beaten house, looking in through the gaping holes, trying to see, trying to hear. If walls could speak, what a strange confusion of words there would be! Or would each house have its dominant word? This surely would. We could almost hear it now, Word of words, Name of names, Jesus. That boy never forgot it. One day, a man grown, and still a Hindu, he stood by a dying friend. "I have learned ten thousand stanzas," the dying man gasped in his awful mortal terror, "but the bough that I clutch breaks in my hand, the branch that I stand on snaps under my feet." And he turned in his agony to the man by his side. There was silence for a while.
Lord, in the darkness I wander, Where is the lamp? Is there no lamp?
Nothing know I, but I wonder, Is there no lamp? Where is the lamp? The words (thus very freely translated) were wrung from the heart of the noblest of Tamil poets:
Lord, in the vastness I wander, Where is the way? Is there no way?
How may I reach Thee, I wonder, Is there no way? Where is the way?
They cried again through the dying man’s soul. Was there no one to light a lamp, no one to show a way?
Then the younger man in sore distress remembered; told of the open window, the look, the smile, the one great Word, "Jesus." And that memory of a Christian death was all the light the Hindu had to die by.