1.02.08. Book 2: Ch 8. Glow-worms' Eggs
CHAPTER VIII
ROUGHEST travelling at home is luxury compared to bullock-cart travelling in India across open plains deep in sand, on roads which, off the main thoroughfares of the land, are execrable, down dried-up water-courses, if it be the hot weather (and then sickening heat is added to the comforts of the way), or through sticky mud and muddy water of uncertain bottom, if it be the wet season. Certain parts of China sound as nice, but in those parts there is, we hope, less prostrating heat. The direct rays of the sun in tropical India have to be experienced to be understood; the mere reflected glare can kill. But had that journey across country been ten times as tiring as it was, it would have been fifty miles of joy to the three who now nearing Dohnavur on a certain memorable day could hardly sit in the carts, so impatient were they to arrive. And when they did-but there are some things too rapturous to write about.
It took a week or more to hear the Brownie’s story, settle her into the new life and begin her education. At first, too, there was the rather disquieting possibility of a law suit. We could not have proved her over sixteen and, as I said before, eighteen was the safe age. Her people would certainly have got her had they gone to court, that is, according to the courts of earth they would have got her; but to us who have seen, as I have told, the reversal of a decree set forth in an earthly court, seen the case won in the heavenly court, seen that awful, glorious paragraph in the 18th Psalm which by a powerful word rends the heavens, and reveals what is, even the Arm of the Lord stretched forth between the riven thunder-clouds-"He sent from above, He took me, He drew me out of many waters"-to us who have seen this tremendous poetry move in tremendous deed here and now, in this matter-of-fact twentieth century, nothing seems difficult, nothing impossible. But in those days we had not seen, and I remember how we prayed that the quietness of our God might be upon the uncles that they might be unable to move.
We found the Brownie extraordinarily enlightened. Continually in teaching her, as often in teaching other converts who had learned nothing before they came to us, but had only heard of our Lord in open-air preaching, we found ourselves recalling those mysterious words in St. John, "That was the true Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world."
I stopped there for a moment and thought, searching for a picture to tell what words cannot. The shadows of the leaves are dancing like grey elves on the grey rocks opposite; that is the Dance of the Day, familiar everywhere; but the Dance of the Night in these forests, after rain, is something so unlike anything one sees at home that it is not easily shown. And I think it is the picture I was seeking.
Imagine a waterfall pure white in faint moonlight; see behind it a cave, black as a hollow carved in jet; see that cave one dazzle of pale, green, moving lights: that is the Dance of the Night. And in the open over the water, up and down in the shadowy wood, everywhere they are dancing, myriads and myriads of fire-flies starring the trees, lighting the stream, everywhere one mazy movement of throbbing, living light.
We found the mother of them, one dewy early morning. She was crawling round our door as if looking for a way in, a long, dark-brown important-looking person, carefully carrying her two large lights. We welcomed her in, and that evening in the dark read by her light the words I have quoted from St. John, her lamps trailed across the page which opened by chance at those words, and we read them as easily as one reads by any small clear light, so bright were those lovely green ovals.
She was a placid creature, quite easily observed. Before we read her story in Fabre, whose insect books are useful for such purposes, we had seen all he describes, seen her project her wonderful little tidying apparatus and tidy herself after meals (it was almost like seeing a pocket-comb produced and used, only the pocket-comb "worked" itself); seen her chloroform her prey, the fat snails we gave her, before converting them into soup, seen her in fact live her leisurely, illuminated life. The wonder of that life lies in its light: the Indian firefly is a beetle; his beginning is an egg; the egg is luminous from the moment of its creation. We have seen the eggs laid in the moist sand. They were like pale pearls alight.
Light, light, shall we ever get to the end of the wonders and the mysteries of light? Think of the wealth of it there is to spare when the very beetles can begin in light, be cradled in it, nursed in it; light pure as light can be, part of their very being.
It reminds one of nothing so much as the lavishness of gold used for the decoration of the pupa case of the Danais butterfly, that exquisite blue-green pocket with its rows of golden balls, not yellow, but as if made of real gold dust. And we have butterflies whose feathers are far more golden than the under side of the dove’s wings in sunset, which the rejoicing poet saw as he looked up one evening apparently after a depressing day; we have seen exactly the same thing when the white herons fly home across the rice fields at sunset. Feathers of yellow gold, he wrote, pleased I am sure to have got the exact word. But these butterflies have on their wings something of the apparent quality of gold, as golden as gold. For the earth is full of God’s riches, and He puts these things in it for our comfort perhaps, knowing some of us are often short of the other gold which is so useful for the present. He who has gold to spare for pupae and butterflies’ wings, say the little clear voices that sound from all creation, will find enough for us to do all He means us to do; just as those lighted eggs seem to tell of a light so abundant that we need never fear we shall be left to walk in darkness.
How did that light get into the egg?
Nobody knows. We live among mysteries. No one even knows exactly what the light is. Learned words describe it. They do not really explain it, they are rather like the doctors in Matthew Arnold’s poem who shake their sapient heads and give the ills they cannot cure a name. We give the things we cannot know a name; when we go back and back to the how, we are shut up to mysteries.
"Certain tissues of the bodies of these beetles have the power of giving off light, just as other tissues exert a mechanical action or emit electrical energy. The luminosity is under the control of the insect and heat is not produced. It has been remarked that these insects can convert a quantity of energy into its full equivalent of light without loss due to the production of heat: no means are known of doing this artificially, and even the most modern devices for light production convert only a fraction of the energy into light." Wonderful, yes. Explicable, no. We live among mysteries.
We live among them too in the spiritual world. Who can understand how this other Light, this Light that lighteneth every man that cometh into the world, enters into the soul of him, saturates it with light, which no darkness can entirely quench till, if, that awful day comes when it chooses darkness rather than light? Then, or so it appears to us, the light goes out. But there again we touch a mystery. Our Brownie had not so chosen; her light had not gone out; at the first glimpse of a greater, all within her had responded, and that other mystery, the will, had willed for more. To watch the effect of spiritual truth now for the first time being brought to bear upon her from outside, was like watching two lights meet and merge.
I shall never forget teaching her about our Lord’s death on the Cross. She was very ignorant, never having learned to read, and so I read slowly from the 19th of St. John, stopping only to explain an out-of-the-way word or expression, trusting to the revealing Spirit to do the rest. We were on our knees: how can anyone read such words comfort ably sitting down? How bear them? The Brownie, to whom the whole tragedy was appallingly new and vivid and awful, broke down utterly. "How could they hurt Him? How could they?" she sobbed hotly. 0 God, forgive us that we can read that story ever, and be cold. The Minor Operation
Again, there is another that is slow, and hath need of help, wanting ability, and full of poverty; yet the eye of the Lord looked upon him for good, and set him up from his low estate.- Sir 11:12.