1.02.15. Book 2: Ch 15. As it was, and is, but shall not ever be
CHAPTER XV IN the seventeenth century there was, we read, an extraordinary kind of commerce in children. A set of men existed in Europe, even in England, who bought little children, drugged them, and then by divers secret means known to those who practised the wicked art, changed them. Changed their forms, if mountebanks were wanted; kneaded their features, and so dealt with them that they were for ever spoiled, if things to laugh at were required. In the reign of William and Mary this iniquity was stopped. The men and women who did such things were hunted out of England. Now it is almost forgotten that such a crime ever existed. In the East something similar to this has been, in various shapes throughout all time. In India it is going on to-day, only instead of mutilating the faces of children, it is their minds and spirits that are dealt with till what was innocent and lovable is turned to the contrary. And this is a trade, a commerce, premeditated. It is part of a huge system; it is that which we exist to fight.
Here in this peaceful place of mountains and forests and clean glad waters, it is quite difficult to realise what lies on the other side of the mountains, and down and all round about us on the plains. And yet our forest house is so situated that we can never quite forget. From its porch, we can all but see into a temple known to us in its every intricate corridor, a wicked dark place. Through our open windows in festival times come the glimmer of its lights and the sound of its tom-toms. From the rocks above we can count five or six temple towers, each the centre of a system stretching to the east where by the sea great temples rise; and over the mountains to the west where, in the beautiful Travancore country, things go on that are never told in books; and south, to Ceylon, connected by invisible lines across the sea with this same traffic; and to the north how far only God and the good angels and bad demons know. So even here we cannot ever forget why we are in India, and our forest life is in its way as much part of the warfare of life as any other part.
Among the Brownie’s nurslings was one from the west; forests of palms surrounded her home, forests like seas of dark green palm. Backwaters, dreams of beauty; broad, shallow, lovely rivers; quaint old-world towns and villages, make the land beautiful. But Eden was beautiful, mere beauty does not keep out serpents; a serpent in the shape of a very evil man on the watch for little children, found this child at play among the palm trees, decoyed her away, and disappeared with her.
He reappeared on our side of the mountains, a devout worshipper at a particularly famous temple, and now the child had a new "mother," who attended her everywhere.
If Zora’s own poor mother could have seen her then what would she have felt? Zora had cried for her mother; she had been punished by being burned with a red-hot blade of a knife. She had tried to run away; they had drugged her then, so that she could not run.
It was night, "pin-drop silence" as the book afore quoted puts it. The festival had not begun properly yet, or it would have been far from pin-drop in that crowded town. Most people, tired out after long journeying, were asleep. Near by ran a wide river, on whose stone platforms many slept within a foot or two of the water. It was full now, the south-west monsoon had turned it from a hot sandy waste with a trickle in its heart, to a glorious, broad tide, strong enough to sweep down an elephant as a straw to the sea. But it had risen to its highest and the sleepers stretched themselves on the stone calmly, though many a man had been washed off those same platforms in the time of the rising of the river. On the farther side of the river, quietly moved through the darkness an old woman and a man. Alone awake in that sleeping town they walked fearlessly but very quietly in and out of its lanes, and on to its great central temple. Here they stopped. The man went first, cautiously threading his way through the white-sheeted forms spread about like corpses on the ground, till he reached a certain low window, then he beckoned to the woman.
Agile as a cat was that old woman. In one moment she was through the window, left unbarred by some blessed mistake. Down she dropped into the little dark room, picked up a child sleeping near, touched the woman, the child’s reputed mother, and beckoning to her, with the power of all heaven in that sign, she handed the child out through the window to the man who was waiting, climbed out herself, and was followed by the other, who walked as a woman walks in her sleep.
Much had happened between that first carrying off of little Zora, and this. But the middles of stories are often tedious and sometimes not very profitable, so Zora’s is one of beginning and end only. The end, which however was really a happy beginning, began at Dohnavur a few days later. At first it seemed anything but happy; Zora was ill, terrified, lifeless; we almost feared those cruel manipulating hands had spoiled the poor little four year-old mind beyond repair. For two whole years we feared it, but we do not fear it now, and among the first of the many healing influences which in the end wrought such a change that Zora is now one of our merriest as well as keenest workers for other children, was the Brownie’s faithful love.
How she loved that desolate morsel, petted her, played with her, comforted her, was a little child with her. With such a little child she was in her element, and in a work like ours such a worker never need be idle. Even as I write a tiny boy has been brought (for because those traffickers in children take boys as well as girls, we too do so now), and I hear he is more pitiful even than Zora was, though he has what she had not at first, a very sweet smile. So the happy years passed, and the Brownie learned to pray with us as we prayed the prayer of the fighting sailor, "Make it appear that Thou art our Saviour, and mighty Deliverer." Make it appear, it will not so appear unless children are mightily delivered. Deliver them then, 0 Christ, our Lord.
Running Water A SONG FOR ONE IN LIKE TEMPTATION.
No, not for you He thirsted as He died:
No, not for you my Lord was crucified;
Woods, streams, and mountains, innocent are ye: Not yours, but mine, the shame of Calvary. And dear as ye must be to Him, ye trees, And running waters in your purity, To heart that broke to save them, deafer these, Sons of a poor undone humanity.
O stainless things, I would not love you less, How could I, you being what you are to me? But I would love th’ unlovable, confess Mankind as something more beloved than ye.
Give me Thy thirst: kindle, 0 Christ, Thy fire, Passion of fire, and love’s sincerity; My wild-wind harp, take, make of it a lyre Whose music shall win men to turn to Thee.