1.02.10. Book 2: Ch 10. Cleaning Up

CHAPTER X THIS chapter began with the fixed intention of keeping to the plains; but the forest allures: I hear its call; I feel its breath. Keep it out of our book I cannot; it will end in being steeped in it.

South Indian mountains are built of gneiss veined in parts with lovely coloured stone, which the children find in bits in the river bed, and which we turned out in quantities when the house was going up. Great boulders are strewn all over the ravine, blocks of granite-weatherworn and beauti­ful. Here and there buried in greenery we come across what looks like a playground of giants. Did they play ball in those days of the making of moun­tains? We often find traces of an interrupted game of ball; sometimes they played at making caves. Near the house there is one such, called the Cave of the Good Samaritan because a near relative of that kind man discovered it, and got a ladder made down into it; for the giants forgot the staircase. In this cave I am to-day. It has followed the fashion of the mountains and shaped itself horse­shoe wise. Round me on three sides and narrowing towards the fourth are tree-crowned rocks, fifty feet or more from base to summit; ten feet from the ground at the place where the cave is contrived, there is a little level space, walled by the dark rocks and roofed by the greenery seen as a tracery against the sky. This platform drops, where the horse­shoe opens, straight down to that which has come unbidden and mixed itself up in the Brownie’s story, the Ferny Rill. When first we found it, it was not a rill but noisome, choked-up swamp, a haunt of mosquitoes, of whom, alas, a few remain for the discipline of our characters. Sluggishly crawling from under the rock was water of the consistency of badly made coffee. All it could do, poor leaf-smothered thing, was to ooze through the jungly undergrowth and try to look after a clump of cane, the beautiful-cane of commerce whose palm-like foliage fills the nearer foreground where the horse-shoe opens.

We cleaned up the swamp, found a gravel bed and clear water, helped it on its way, planted ferns by it, tree ferns from higher levels, and that joy of ferneries, the lygodium scandens. At this season our rill is perfumed with an air so sweet that when it meets us as we go down to it we stop to drink it in, and wonder whence it comes: "There is no air like that which comes as through a filter made of a hundred scented trees, a subtle mingling of their clean woody odours," as Seton Merriman writes of the mountain air of Corsica, and India is a land of scented trees. Or it may be from some high flowering thing, for the trees hereabouts are towering pillars, creeper-covered, and far overhead the creepers fling out tassels and festoons. Perhaps from one of them this sweetness drops. The Rill-the Brownie. How many a might-be ferny rill in this crowded India works its way feebly through the undergrowth of life, choked by the debris of things, the crushing pettiness of the futile, losing itself finally in some poor swamp. How many in England and in all lands. Wasted lives we call them, and perhaps wonder a little sadly over them, puzzled by the scheme of things that includes them in its scope: If we had the handling of it, should we not considerably improve it? "I be creator, chopping and changing it?" No, but there is a chopping and changing open to us and intended. Somewhere is the swamp we are meant to re-create. Let us find it then, set to work to turn it into a rill, plant fair things by its edges, see it sparkle under God’s blue sky, feel it fill with the breath of the blessed flowers of God, know some­thing of that unearthly joy, the joy of being in the least little measure fellow-workers with the first great Maker of Gardens: And the Lord God planted a garden. Shall we ever get to the end of those words?

There was debris to clear away, of course, in our Brownie. She had thought the good things of life were to be found in getting, not giving; she had all sorts of upside-down ideas about what was fitting and what was not, the conventions of existence-and India is as full of them as any London drawing-­room-had seemed important to her; of the things that really count she knew little. But the rill was cleared and ferns began to grow, and sweet airs hung about it, and there was one less swamp in the world to make the angels sorrowful. Poor angels, they must sometimes long to see all the world’s jungles cleaned; and how they must wish, if they are subject to such human things as wishes, that they might join us visibly sometimes, and set to, and help us to clean up.

We had an unexpected cleaning up to do in our ravine when first we bought it. It had been owned by a Mohammedan who had bought if from a Hindu who had set up a shrine which the Mohammedan, not desiring to invite the wrath of any gods, had left untouched. When first we explored the upper river-side we found a Persian rose tree growing by the water, and oleander, and jasmine; the pink of the roses and oleander sang like a new, clear note through the harmony of green and grey, arresting us at once. Now, few love flowers in this South land enough to plant them just for joy’s sake, and we were as much puzzled as pleased, for we did not know about the shrine, till one day we came upon it. Siva’s symbol, a stone sacred all over India; and a cast-iron idol, called the Demon of the Chain, a most fierce godling. Set in front of it, just as the Hindu had left them years ago, were a censor, lamp and bell. At first we thought it would be good to do as Gideon was commanded to do, and throw down the altar of Baal, but we knew that would not impress the coolies who by that time were with us, nearly so much (for they would never go near the place) as would the sight of those things made impotent: so we carried them to the coolie hut, which as there was no place else we all shared with them. This hut is hardly a house, there are no rooms, only four verandahs opening on a square courtyard, unroofed of course, into which the rain pours in wet weather, and out of which it drains by a channel cut through one of the walls. It is built of stone and mud, thatched with grass, and its floor is beaten earth, cheerful mud in rain.

We, the Tara set and I, had one verandah; for coolies were hard to get in sufficient numbers and those eager children were worth more to us than twice their number of hired carriers; it was they who did most of the carrying away of the excavated earth from the house site, and with Preena as leader they took a full share in all our under­takings. On the other three sides of the hut the coolies we had been able to get, some thirty of them, cooked their rice and curry in the evening, each set by his own little fire; and after supper they and the caste-men from the grass huts all round, carpenters and masons, superior people and unable to mix with coolies, gathered round and listened for as long as we could keep awake to talk to them. This was the opportunity for the Demon of the Chain. The meeting over we all crept into our respective corners (ours was made private with mats), and in the quiet that followed the meeting we heard the coolies discussing which, of all the awful things that might be expected, was most likely to occur that night. They knew as we knew that on one occasion a tiger had jumped over the low roof into the middle of the square. Would it be a tiger? Or would the roof fall in upon us? Or would we just quietly expire, being breathed upon by the offended demon? They were really alarmed, and if it had not been too cold for them outside they would have stampeded; as it was I half feared they might at earliest dawn, if they survived their terrors. So I emerged, and though Judith in her wisdom besought her people not to bind the counsels of the Lord, a word I always remember in such moments, I felt I must and might, and I assured them not a hair of their heads would perish that night. Neither did it. They all awoke in health. Months afterwards I heard they ex­plained the marvel thus: "The Demon is: It lives. But as soon as the Aroma and her children came It fled from before their faces into the depths of the jungle; and It fears to return."

However that be, the village from which those men came is moving towards Christianity now; we have been asked to go and take meetings there. And of the caste-men who listened, two confessed Christ in baptism. "We will be baptised in the Forest where first we heard the Good Words," they said, and thus it was, our pastor coming up for the purpose, to the joy of us all and of our pool to whom such a joy was new. The bell we kept for ringing to various functions in the house. Siva’s symbol (God’s stone, returned to its rightful Owner) became a hearthstone to preach to every Hindu who enters the place that the gods of the nations are idols but the Lord made the heavens. And the roses and oleander and jasmine, used in the old days for garlands for the departed demon, make beautiful the house that He has given to us to set His name there. Not ... But

They shall not be sought for in publick council, nor sit high in the congregation. . . . But they will maintain the state of the world.­- Sir 38:33-34