1.02.12. Book 2: Ch 12. Lover of the Unlovables

CHAPTER XII THE mosquitoes of the Cave proved too disci­plinarian. Sella, who thoughtfully came to enquire after my welfare, suggested the Mosquito Song, and she balanced herself on one foot on a projecting stone, and began hopefully:

I’ll speak to you in Tamil, Po, Polite and pleasant Mosquito.

I’ll speak to you in English, Go, You horrid little Mosquito. And if you won’t I’ll shortly spill Your sinful little soul, and will Gloat on your mangled corpse, and so Take good advice and promptly go, Abominable Mosquito. But the creatures took no notice. It was we who had to "po," and we dropped down to the Ferny Rill and found our way to the river, and sat under The Tree. He is a tree by himself. His uplifted arms seem to pierce the blue. From his branches hang the great curly ropes of the liana* we call the monkey-swing creeper from its habit of making most wonderful swings for the monkeys, who cross these tree-tops sometimes in troops of forty or fifty at a time, or perch like huge fruit in most precarious positions, or swing in their perfect swings. Great black monkeys they are, some with long tails and white caps, others with short tails tufted like lions’, and big ruffles round their necks; these last huge beasts are dangerous, and attack man. A friend of ours had one which had killed a child. Some­times the common brown monkeys come, but they are interlopers and seem to know it; this is the Black Monkeys’ land, and of the two kinds the White Caps are the more interesting for they are the kind King Solomon’s sailors brought to him from these parts, whose Tamil name is in the Hebrew Bible. "Whoo Whoo," they say, "Who who was he, that King who made us famous: who who?"

*Entada Scandens.

These monkeys seem to fear nothing except tigers. The foresters tell us they are so petrified by fear when a tiger comes, sits under their tree and grimaces and growls, that they seem tin able to escape as they easily could over the roof of the forest; and sooner or later one drops to the waiting beast below. But since we watched potter-wasps putting caterpillars to sleep, and glow-worms snails, we have comforted our­selves. Must there not be other ways of which we do not know, as merciful as those of which we do know a little, by which what looks harsh is made gentle?

We experienced something of the same sort our­selves once. Some of us were coming down the hill when a snake crossed the path, and lashed out at us. I had never seen a snake attack before.

Very few do it. There was no time to recognise it; its movements were so rapid. First at me, then at one of the children, then at another it sprang, and we all stood absolutely fascinated for those few seconds, not one of us even thinking of moving. Another spring and it was in the jungle. "We weren’t even frightened," said the children, and it was true. Surely the tender mercy of the Lord reaches to His creatures of the forest. My tree-to return to him-because of the way he co-operates with his brethren and a great lichen­-painted, overhanging, green-grey rock to make cool­ness and shade, is to me at this moment the tree of trees. High above, mixed with his foliage, streamers of his liana tendrils swing like pennons in the blue air. From these hang curved brown pods, in pairs, thirty to forty inches long, each containing a dozen or so large seeds, polished like chestnuts, perfect playthings for babies, as they are much too big to swallow and cannot be broken or bitten. These seeds we find everywhere, and carry down to the Dohnavur nurseries in basketfuls. But his birds-all day long they whirl and flutter and sing among his branches. Sometimes there is a shoot of blue, and the fairy bluebird, that gem of creation, flashes like a jewel through the air; or it is the dear little green bulbul hard to see among the green leaves; or the woodpecker, who is always in a tearing hurry, talks rudely and hardly lets you catch, a glimpse of his gorgeous colours. And all the time the river and the woods about it ring with the grass-green barbet’s kootroo-kootroo, and the whistling schoolboy’s whistle rarely twice alike.

It is he who haunts mountain rivers, and whistles us awake, dear bird, half an hour before sunrise every morning, and in the evening calls us to vespers; wet or fine matters not to him. His whistle is never what the correct call perfect, so in their folly they call him the idle schoolboy, whereas he is not idle at all but always practising even if, like most of us, he never quite attains.

Then there are yellow bulbuls and little flame­-coloured and copper-coloured and withered-leaf-red and orange minivets, whole aviaries of them, and butterflies almost as large; one brought to me a moment ago measures six inches across and she is quite ordinary. These float drowsily down by the water, or to their own surprise apparently, find themselves gallivanting high in air, caught by a playful breeze. But of all the sights my tree sees, and of all the sounds he hears, not excluding the beasts’ at night, I think the most amazing is the great-hornbill’s. When first the children heard him they fled. It was like an animal noise, and a very snarling noise at that, dropping down from the sky. We could hardly believe it was a bird’s, till we saw the cause of it flapping his great black and white wings and stretching out his enormous yellow beak high above the tree-tops. Always when he appears there is a rush to see him for he is a truly wonderful bird.

He frequents dense forests. In nesting time he builds a wall round his beloved, who is comfortably ensconced in the hole in the trunk of a tree-it is our ambition to find that tree. In the wall he leaves a window, and through it he feeds her till her work is finished and the young birds can fly out.

All this my tree must know and see and hear; and something of the joy of life, this wonderful wild­wood joy seems to swing in his topmost branches, and slip down his long trunk, and touch me as I write. There is so much sadness in the world, so many hearts ache, so many tears fall, it is rather wonderful to be away for a little while in a tearless world, left just as God made it. There is something exhilarating too, in companying with these elemental things; they seem to carry one back to the be­ginnings, the fundamentals, the things that cannot be shaken, ancient verities of God. And to those weary of the stifling and uncertain in Oriental life, the ceaseless effort to get things done, the equally ceaseless effort to retain and to develop to ever finer perception one’s sense of eternal values, to maintain sincerely the fight of faith-to such the calm strength of mountains is an uplifting, steadying thing, the pure clean joy of forests is precious, the ministry of rivers blessed healing.

Just at this moment, my river, pleased because it has been raining lately, is singing and dancing for joy. Sometimes we spend a whole day with him; climb his boulders, up which you scramble if you are young, and hoist yourself by means of a kind brown hand and a hooked stick if you are old, and he takes you to his secret places, far, far up. Pools he keeps there, no human eyes ever saw before, little falls that catch the light and weave their spray into rain­bows; fairy rainbows we call them, but angels’ rainbows would be a better name, for the delighted angels must oftener enjoy them. By one of these upper reaches is a cave, cool on the hottest day, and you can sit in it and hear the gurgles of tiny runlets slipping between stones mixing with the deeper tone of the song he sings among his dripping rocks. A great tree trunk has fallen across him just where he creeps out of the upper forest, making a kind of boundary beyond which he will not easily suffer even his personal friends to pass. This trunk is covered with orchids, for through the rainless months a mist rises up from the earth and waters the whole face of the ground, and things that love damp places grow all about, treasure new to us, and the lastrea, and blechnum and rare lovely davallia and sella­ginella of our home ferneries, and, even more eagerly welcomed, the lady ferns and hart’s tongues, and mosses of home. And it is all dim and green and cool; and being tropical river and wood there is always that alluring mystery of the unknown hanging over it all. One never knows what new joy may be waiting round the next boulder. But we cannot linger long or we shall be belated. In all our climbing expeditions it is an unwritten law that we go up where we can, and trust to a friendly fortune to help us to get down. But we must leave time for it. It takes time to negotiate what sometimes, from above at least, looks like the edge of the eaves of a house, the wall being what we have to descend. More than once we have all but had to sleep out in the woods, and as this would mean lighting a fire, a thing to be avoided in the reserved forest, we have been thankful when, some­how, anyhow, we got down before nightfall.

Sometimes we forsake our river, and make friends with the mountain that he thinks of as a father and we as the king of the hills, though he is not the highest; 5,017 feet is his registered height. Upon his summit are huge boulders naked to the winds of heaven, and the story is that on him Rama rested when he went to search for Seetha, and that he ate some fruit up there and left the kernels lying about. Nothing more likely in a land where "Bury or burn" your debris is a dictum unknown.

First, there is a belt of forest to get through as best you can, then steep open fells, if anything so uncertain as those upper grassy levels can be called fells. They have a way of dropping suddenly from under your feet, and when they drop they drop far. From a rock up there which we call the Cathedral Rock, the house appears like a little neat doll’s house, so extraordinarily neat and nice that we wonder how our clumsy selves ever got into it. From that rock which is we reckon about 2,000 feet above the house, every word spoken by us drifts down; not shouted words, but an ordinary, "Take care, Neela, don’t slip," spoken to the child next one. And the dolls belonging to the house below hear and call out to us; and the thin little voices float up. Once one of the children started a song, "Lord, here Thy great Cathedral stands," and instantly the dolls’ voices joined ours and we sang together, the voices from below floating up in the most solemn way in the great silence.

It was like listening with God. Do our words, our common everyday words, rise up like that? Is there anything to stop them from reaching very Heaven? (How awful then, are words.) Suddenly on that still mountain-side words lost their trifling aspect. It was stripped off them. How many words would be left unsaid if we thought of them setting forth as soon as spoken on that infinite journey through space. But the children are seldom for long impressed by any serious reflections. The vastness of the great cathedral solemnises them for a minute or two and they listen, hushed, to the curious unfamiliar voices of their own below; for the voices are like wires for thinness, something like the voice heard through a telephone. Then tired of being quiet enough to listen they clamber off to hunt for grass orchids, warily, for a slip would mean a very long fall, and shouting so excitedly when they come upon a find that the grave old mountain wonders at their ways. Not an animal do we see though we come across their tracks. They too have heard the shouts, and dis­approving have retired. But they will come back, for they know no one carries a gun here. The ravine is sanctuary to them. But we have wandered far from my tree, and now on the other stone underneath it sits Rukma, watching the great black and blue butterflies flickering up-stream.

"Rukma, what do you remember of Suhinie?"

"She was fatter than the rest of us and could not run as well, but she used to come and join our races, and take it so good-naturedly if we laughed." Thus Rukma the athlete, who runs like the wind and dives like a kingfisher, and knows nothing out of reach in the world of joyous physical activities. But Rukma had other remembrances. "Afterwards when she was a nurse, if there was a poor, thin, cross baby anywhere, she took to that baby, and loved it, and played with it till it got happy. That’s what I remember best of her." And she added, "If she did anything wrong she was sorry at once." For the Brownie was not perfect; though indeed she was to be quickly perfected. She had little flaws of temper, in spite of her exceeding good-­nature. But as Rukma says, she was sorry at once. And after all this book does not profess to be more than the slightest of life-sketches. It does not poke into all the holes and corners of our Brownie girl’s existence; there is hardly time for that. But if it did we should meet nothing worse than, if she did anything wrong she was sorry at once; and Preena who was the small, charming but distinctly wilful Elf when the Brownie reigned in the nursery, re­members her thus: "She was the sister who never was cross," for as Ponnammal once put it in speaking of her devotion to an unattractive baby, "she was a lover of the unlovables."

What an affliction a sense of the comical is: even as I write this more or less serious chapter, the remembrance of a toilsome day when the forest house was being built, attacks me.

We were trying hard to get the roof on and tiled before the monsoon rain was due. Premonitory thunderstorms had begun and the roof had stuck: for the carpenters depended on the wood sawyers, and these again on the wood fellers, and these on their coolies, and these last had failed to appear, having a feud with the head carpenter, a most unsatisfactory person, so that all down the line there was confusion. The stone and mud walls were of course open to the weather; we were trying to get them covered with cocoanut mats brought up for the purpose, were indeed in the middle of forking up the slippery things to the men on the tops of the walls, when a coolie arrived from Dohnavur.

There seemed no urgent reason why he should have been sent, and four annas of apparent waste troubled my spirit, already tired by the mishaps here, but here he was; so I gave up forking mats and sat down resignedly to make the best of the unnecessary coolie. And this cutting from our daily paper fell out of the first letter I opened from the bungalow:

"The Great Poetic Movement in India proceeds apace. Its latest adherent is Dr. F., etc., etc., author of etc., etc., issued by the Bardic Brother- hood. In a composition entitled ’Britannia and Mother Hind,’ he triumphantly proves that the East is more spiritual than the West, thus:- O pardon me, Britannia sister mine, The Indians have a great spiritual shine: In morals mine is a higher code than thine.

Although a serious critic of British administra­tion, he recognises that the great heart of the British democracy is sound, and he is able to represent Britannia as saying eventually:- Let us now hope that Indians’ needs at once Shall answered be, so that th’ Empire British Be stronger and consolidated well, Of grievance there be not the slightest smell.

But, whether because we are reactionary or for some other reason, we prefer Dr. P. in the mood of ‘The Angel in the House.’ For example:- Of friends, relations all, A mother’s love is best, . . At baby’s rhymeless squall She takes it to her chest." That paragraph cleared the air, though how, per­haps only the Maker of us could explain, and now shall do duty for describing in a way I could never attain unto, this dear little Brownie of ours.

"At baby’s rhymeless squall She took it to her chest."

Tiger Pugs They fought with gladness the battle of Israel.- 1Ma 3:2, R.V.