1.07.02. Book 7: 2. Cambridge: Cabul
2. CAMBRIDGE: CABUL
WHY are men in books and in most other places so exceedingly interesting, while the same ranged in rows in pews are just merely formidable? Ragland had known all along, of course, that ordination implied weekly sermons, but he does not seem to have realized what he was in for, and the shadow of this duty distressed his weeks. Shortly after being elected Fellow he was ordained, and became curate of Barnwell, Cambridge, later of St. Paul’s, New Town. So, in spite of what he called "general emptiness," sermons had to be prepared, and Saturday evening would see him pacing up and down the grass plot in the college quadrangle in most visible trouble. Sometimes he worked on till three or four o’clock on Sunday morning, and when indignant nature got him at last to bed, he would be up by seven and at it again. For all his life he was possessed by a conscience with an uncomfortably high standard of duty. Such men, when they get out into a large room, are like John Gough, V.C., of whom it is written that duty, discipline, and the joy of life were the rules he walked by, "and if you found yourself in his company you had perforce to walk with him, keeping up with his stride as best you could." But coop them up within narrow bounds, and they become pin-cushions, and more pin than cushion.
These Saturday ruffles over the Sunday’s sermon do not sound like the joy of life, but, for all that, it was joyful. He had any number of friends among the undergraduates. A Cambridge tradition tells how he challenged one of them to race him, and then, just as the other was winning, he scooted across the grass plot (sacred to Fellows) and won amid shouts of derisive laughter from the vanquished. The men loved him for the fun that was in him and the genuine generous character, and he loved them and delighted in their company. One of his best-remembered ways was the ingenious use he made of the means that were now at his command to do all manner of little kindnesses, extremely privately, sometimes quaintly, but always with the most unusual joy:
"Oh, the gratification it is! If the covetous knew this, how it would save them the trouble of hoarding." Nothing could persuade him to hoard, and his gifts were generally given for the need of the day. "Money is like muck, no good unless it be spread," was distinctly his opinion, and he held to it with some tenacity. Years afterwards we find him, when (anonymously) he passed on to C.M.S. a legacy of £500, explaining clearly his one condition: it must be used for present need. He was in India then, and the present need was all about him; but during those Cambridge years he never even dreamed outside England. Life to him was a book-lined room full and running over with the blessings of tranquillity.
"The whole world before Thee is as a little grain in the balance, yea, as a drop of the morning dew that falleth down upon the earth." Look with God on the other side of this grain of dust, this globe of dew, and see the mightiest contrast imagination can conceive to that peaceful book-lined room.
See a defile, dark even at midday, five miles long, between tremendous mountains. Through its depths a river rushes. Frost holds the waters on higher levels. These flow too fiercely to be stayed, but the rocks are slippery with sheets of ice, and snow lies everywhere.
Down in the gloom of that dismal gorge a host is toiling painfully, sixteen thousand men, women and children, English and Indian, in peril together. A shot; another; shots from all sides; every crag a foe. Long guns, long Afghan knives, confused noise, garments rolled in blood. But why describe? There was no battle, only a slaughter. One man alone on a jaded horse reached the walls of Jellalabad. One, out of sixteen thousand. A few were in captivity, the rest were dead. And in the secret cells of underground prisons, utterly lost to the knowledge of men, Englishmen were being slowly done to death, some avowedly for Christ’s sake, others "just for the pride of the old countree."
Why revive forgotten grief? And how will it sound at home?
Massacre, torture, and black despair, Reading it all in my easy-chair. Will it be only that?
Writing on Asian soil, within sight of a temple tower that would shelter such deeds to-night if he who now letteth were taken away, it does not feel remote. But the tale is told because it belongs to the story. The month of Ragland’s ordination saw these things happen. Christmas Eve, 1841, in Cambridge-holly, and mistletoe, and carols, universal kindness for the sake of the Babe of Bethlehem: that same Christmas Eve in Cabul -but the words have not been coined that can show it, and it opened on that dark defile among the mighty mountains.