1.02.17. Book 2: Ch 17. Of the Self-same Stock

CHAPTER XVII

CRASH and scuffle among the tree tops, then a spring of that huge black creature, the monkey of these forests, white-capped, long-tailed, big as a middle-­sized man. Down he leaps from branch to branch, and as his tree is high this takes two or three seconds. Then there is a single wild vault across an unbeliev­able void to the opposite side of the ravine, where upon another tree top he resumes his interrupted breakfast. A minivet, blood scarlet, and another glowing orange, flicker among the leaves, or are they autumn leaves alive? That jewel of joy, the fairy bluebird, dressed in black and blue, with babies in attendance in pure electric, flashes across the valley, showing bright against the darker blue .of the pre­cipitous hills. Up in the rain-filled sky the swifts dart about like little pictures of aeroplanes. Two rainbows are lying on the mountains; two waterfalls leap sheer several hundred feet, and the rainbows are so laid that each has caught a fall and painted it. A rainbow seen close to, against forests and water and mountains, is quite another thing from one seen against distant sky. The colours show in a different way. We are at the rainbow’s foot, place of dreams and fairy fancies, the place every eager child wants to find.

* * * * * *

Here I am, but here I am not. "Not where I breathe but where I love I live," not where I breathe but where I was I am. I see again things seen for the first time only a month ago.

It was night in the great Indian city, far from its pleasant places were we, an Indian sister and I, down in the deeps of the city among its buried old temples let into the streets, its curious endless maze of bazaars, blind alleys, drain-lined lanes. There were crowds everywhere, but not a white face had we seen for hours.

Down a side street we walk, inconspicuous among the people, turn into an odorous yard where small boys are thumping a tom-tom. We glance at them, but not so as to attract attention; they are among the boys we have come to seek, but they are the most easily found. Here they are in the open, dark-skinned little lads, happy in their tom-tom beating, cracking jokes with one another, stopping when they feel inclined to play, but soon resuming their exciting business, tom-tom, tom-tom, tom-a­tom, tom-tom.

We pass them, buy two second class tickets ("No need to waste eight annas more on first, second are nearly as good," whispers my companion), ask when the performance of the night is to begin, find that we have some time to spare, and wonder how it should be spent. Swings through me then quite a new thought: "Where do the children live?" I ask the ticket seller. Having no idea of our identity he tells us, and we are off before he has time to discover it.

Through an intricate tangle of streets we run, our double rickshaw blundering through the crowd like a beetle bent on business among a swarm of ants. The rickshaw coolie knows his city, every runlet among these countless arteries of streets is familiar to him. At last he stops before a big ordinary looking house in an ordinary street. The door is open. Without stopping to give the people within time to consider us, we walk straight in. "I have come to see the children," I say to the first man I meet, as if it were the most usual thing in the world for a foreign woman to penetrate into this den. But does he recognise the foreign? The central hall in which we stand is ill lighted; with Indian garments worn in the Indian way there is little foreign to notice. He lets us pass. What next? How get further? A boy runs to meet us, holds out eager hands. "Come, Amma," he cries in welcome; it is as if he had been waiting for us, "Come," then in English, "Shake hands," and he holds out his hand gravely. As gravely I shake it.

"These are my friends," continues the child, introducing with an easy grace two little lads, who advance politely. "Shake hands." We shake hands all round.

"Where are the other boys?"

"Here, I will show." And he "shows," leading us straight to a room whence proceeds the sound of boys’ voices chanting their parts aloud.

It is a large room, stone-paved, high-walled, with two heavy black doors, one leading to the hall, the other opening into the recesses of the house. And it is full of boys. Twenty-five or more immediately surround us, lads of all ages between seven or eight and seventeen or eighteen; beautiful boys, Brahmans of the Brahmans. The little lad who has led us in is ivory-fair, a very lovely child. "Sit down, Amma," say the others, surprised but delightfully polite as they drag in a chair from somewhere; but it feels too amazing to be true, for no power on earth could have opened those doors to me; I can hardly believe I am here, inside, with the boys of whom I have heard so much but whom I have never seen before. And the feeling of strangeness does not lessen as they crowd round, friendly and lovable and keen to make the most of this welcome interruption to the apparently strictly enforced routine. For twenty wonderful minutes we talked together, they told me about their lives, their training, their habits-would have taken me to the back regions to see their oil-bath arrangements, had I not feared to lose precious minutes in mere seeing; there was so much to hear. They were in full flow, and I was learning all I wanted to learn, when the outer door was flung open and an angry man rushed in upon us like a whirlwind.

"Off to your lessons, boys!" and he blew them off with a storm of words through the other door, and turned the key upon them.

We waited till the hurricane had spent itself, then calmly rose and departed with the usual salaam, which he returned, apparently too confounded for speech with us at least. But we heard the house-­door bang behind us and knew that our adventure could not be repeated. Was it "chance" that had opened that door? Was it chance that years ago led us through the wood just as a child was being taken to the temple there to be married to the god?* Were not forces· of prayer unloosed that day that have never lost their power? Has the time come for the boys in perilous places to be delivered too? Is this night’s work to unlock new powers on their behalf? Who knows? "That which thou seest write." To him, to her, who reads belongs the answer.

* "Things as They Are," chapter xxiv. But there was more to see. And we found our way back to the great open iron-roofed shed, called by courtesy a theatre. Nothing more unlike the English idea of such a place could be, except that there was a stage, with its curtain and footlights. All the rest of the inside structure was frankly Eastern, and, as it filled, the roar of voices was like the roar at a large railway station in India, where every man shouts down his fellow as a matter of course. But when, after much agitation, the curtain rolled up and a throne was discovered on which, robed in a shimmer of pink and gold and jewels, sat a little queen, the roar subsided into a murmur like the murmur of waves on the shore.

Spellbound we too gazed. The child-it was our little first friend-was playing an Indian musical instrument, which showed to perfection the delicate sensitive hands, and as he played he turned his little head slowly from side to side and bowed in the approved fashion of beautiful queens. From that point on he held the audience. The roar from some fifteen hundred throats would burst out again between the acts or when others were acting; but let that exquisite child appear, whether as frolicsome boy or dainty queen, and the whole mass of excited humanity gave itself up to gaze. Now I understood why such children are practically priceless. Every seat in the theatre was filled: it was that child who drew the crowd and held it. His acting was very wonderful. As the sordid plot unfolded he was the central figure. There was a king, a handsome youth gorgeously apparelled, excellent in his way; numbers of court ladies, the boys of our brief friendship; a clever fool ("he is the fool," the dear little lads had said pushing that bright boy forward); a musician who pattered on a kind of harmonica, his nervous fingers working interminably, whether he was actually playing or not. Every word of song and dialogue was clearly sung or said in perfect Tamil, but only the front seats could have heard much of it, for the railway station roar prevailed always except when that child and his attendant children were the chief actors. Once the pandemonium was such, though never for a moment did it seem to surprise anyone, and the audience so much occupied with its conversation, that it did not perceive the child who, after a dull interlude, had come forward again, and for that one moment he stood, his little hands stretched out imploringly. Evidently it was very necessary that he should succeed. There was an anxious look in his eyes then, but it passed. With a great shout the crowd returned to its allegiance and the rumble and the roar stopped suddenly. The charm of the child had won. And we left the theatre that night with hot hearts and wet eyes, for from the hour we had entered it, behind and below the apparent it was as if we had seen kneeling in a comer among the stage scenery the figure of a little girl, and through the clamour we could hear her pray aloud, "Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, take care of me to-night." That child is safe in Dohnavur now, but who could forget her story? Kidnapped or bought by a certain dramatic company, she had been carried off to a far city, and the whirl and terror of new sensations, helped possibly by some benumbing drug, had dazed her memory as regards her past. But some things stood out clear. She had somewhere heard of the Lord Jesus Christ. The one who taught her had spoken in English. All she knew, therefore, was in English. She had seen "at the time of the lighting of the lamps" those about her kneel down and pray-"Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, 0 Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ." And there in her desolation, alone among strangers, that little eight­-year-old girl used to pray in the words heard in that dim other life for the protection she needed even more than she knew. For life in a dramatic company in India is no safe life for a child. The temple service and the drama are inter-related; not officially perhaps, but cer­tainly spiritually. The only women in the theatre that night were temple women, and women of their kind. Theirs was the influence round about such children. Of the clean gladness of normal child-life they knew nothing, would never know anything. And yet we had held their hands in ours, looked into their eyes, listened to their talk. It was hard to recognise that we were a million miles away from them. Chasms divided us. 0 to find a bridge across! God help us to find a bridge.* *Brothers of the Lotus Buds, by Godfrey Webb-Peplos, tells the story of the boys. From Pool to Sea In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die.­- Wis 3:2.