1.07.06. Book 7: 6. On the Surface and Under

6. ON THE SURFACE, AND UNDER THAT first journey-and who ever forgets his first?-was by bullock-cart over the plains. Through country towns, with their huge temples walled like Jerichos, by famous cities, to this day strongholds of idolatry, and through hun­dreds of villages, strewn as it were anywhere on the wide, flat spaces, he passed, and looked, and wondered. The life of the people lay round him here as it had lain for ages, simple to the innocent eye, to which all is as it shows itself, but a complex tangle to one who knows a little more.

He saw many a pretty picture: women at the well, children playing with pebbles on squares marked out in the dust, field labourers carrying their light ploughs over their shoulders, their oxen stalking on in front, setting the leisurely pace. And on countless verandahs opening to the streets he saw grave old men reading from narrow slips of palm-leaf yellow with age, or meditating with that wonderful independ­ence of circumstances seen to perfection in India.

He saw, too, something of the other side, sorrowful, sinful; but not much, he was too new; and as his ear was not open to the talk of the land, he heard little of the word that filled the bazaars, a word spoken under-breath and passed from village to village with care, for it is unlucky even to speak of such things-­talk of the great rounding up of the members of that most powerful of Indian secret societies, just accomplished, or almost accomplished. India must have breathed a great sigh of relief when the last Thug was caught. Of this amazing society Ragland could not have been ignorant; for it had spread its invisible net from the Himalayas to the Cape, and, like every other Englishman, he must have marvelled as the facts emerged and showed it to be religious, root and branch. In the name of the goddess Kali the sacred handkerchief was flung, and from his initiation as a novice, to the day when he strangled his last man, everything a Thug did was done with prayer, and offerings, and regard to the omens. Hindu and Moslem, for once firmly united, partici­pated in one festival, regarded their calling as a divine command, with, as its end, the pre­vention of the over-peopling of the earth, and for its reward the spoil of the victims. Religi­ously organized murder and robbery committed by means of peculiar treachery-for in that lay the glory of the game-strikes the Western mind as anomalous, to say the least of it. But, for good or ill, such is the mentality of this land of contrasts and anomalies.

Ragland, however, had other thoughts in mind, and the beautiful wide roads with their ancient trees, and the wastes where nothing grew but scrubby thorn on which flocks of goats fed noisily, said less to him than to most other travellers; to him they were just ways by which he could reach the orderly, English­-looking settlements, with church and school and bungalow, whither he was bound. The next months were filled with learning about the Christians, the problems presented by the mass movement then in full flood, and the thousand other matters of his day. The men and women who welcomed him were brave and strong, thought nothing of difficulties, and lived for their people. Those were the days of very valiant deeds in the name of the Lord, and if life was in some ways less painful and perplexing than now, it had its pains, its sacrifices. Hidden among the mountains we came unawares upon one of them, a grave where a young mother and her babies were put to rest together. With a six months’ voyage between India and England, men and women came out practically for life-and death. And now a joy awaited him. Allnutt and he had stood at the door of his rooms at Cambridge holding the plate after the meeting at which Henry Venn spoke so straightly to their hearts. A boat race was on that evening, and Venn had looked longingly at the men crowding the enclosure of King’s College, wondering when the day would come that such would offer for a harder race. He did not know then that two picked men, the two who stood on either side of the door as the little company streamed out, had heard and would respond. Both did as the child did in the story of the plate in church: they offered themselves.

"These are the ’Honours’ of Cambridge," wrote Henry Venn years later, about nine who had offered. "Let us but get a glimpse of things unseen and eternal, and see the King of Glory establishing His reign through the whole earth, and calling many officers to join His royal camp and court, and we shall feel in what true honour consists."

Now Allnutt was out, and in the Dohnavur bungalow Ragland wrote a long letter home in which is imbedded one of his peculiarly neat little sentences: "I have been one of the happiest men on the face of the earth for the last eight days, enjoying Allnutt. We parted last night, and so unmixedly happy had our intercourse every day been, and so much was I afraid that human frailty would bring about some change before we separated, that the separation was almost a relief." Who has not known that feeling?

"Dohnavur, a beautiful spot in the south­west corner of Tinnevelly, close (that is on mountain scenery scale) to the last high rock of the Ghaut range"; thus Ragland describes the place. The bungalow is a plain little house, built about a hundred years ago of sun-dried bricks; it has been patched up, added to, and generally dealt with, till there is little of the original fabric but the solid mud walls, and the whole compound would be new to that kindly writer if he could come back. But just outside the compound everything is as it was, the same square-towered church which deliberately faces west, with its huddled-up, partly Christian village on the one side, and on the other stark Hinduism then as now. Being an Englishman, he could not be here without climbing the tower, from which are seen in joyful glorious half-­circle the ever-varying, ever-constant mountains that are our guard and our delight.

It was early November then, just after the first burst of the monsoon. Down the nearer side of the rock, 4,578 feet of seamed and scarred precipice face, he saw the waterfall known as the "Laughter," not because its beauty makes the beholder laugh for joy, but simply because to the practical Tamil it suggests a tooth, such as laughter reveals. Through the telescope when the sun is upon it you can see the leaping spray. Trees cling round it and bend low to look into its pool. You can almost see their leaves shake as the wind blows through them. Perhaps the wraith falls, seen only after heavy rains, were out. Those lovely, elusive waters stream in three white sashes into a valley blue as the blue of bluebells. Seen from the inside of that blue valley, one can watch them plunge headlong into forest that hangs like moss on the steeps.

It was in the Dohnavur bungalow that the story "Cry a Little for Me " was written.

There was a certain devil-dancer’s son who became a Christian, but without entirely break­ing free from his old life. He was from home when his son was born, and an astrologer told the mother that the baby would be an unlucky child-in other words, cursed by the Evil Eye, a fearful fate here. So the poor mother’s spiritual advisers naturally were about to "cause it to depart," and the father upon his return would have been told it had died of fever. But just then he re­turned, and hearing what was proposed, sought out another astrologer, had the baby’s horoscope taken again, learned that he would have a serious sickness when about four years old, and that if he recovered he would live long and prosper. When the child was about three years old he began to fade. His father one day took him on his knee, and bending fondly over him heard him say, "Father, cry a little for me." The father’s tears were not far to seek and he wept. "Stop," said the child. "That is enough. I am going to my Father’s house." And in a few minutes he was gone.

"Cry a little for me." Many a young child, and with deeper reasons, might have said it. But for this comforting more is needed than tears. From Dohnavur Ragland journeyed by quiet country roads bordered by banyan trees bright with masses of crimson figs, through frontier town and mountain-pass to Travancore, and when at last he reached the palm-fringed back­waters of that beautiful little State, he found himself in fairyland.

There we may leave him to do the work of the time and, that work finished, to return as he had come by bullock-cart to Madras. He passed among the missionaries as a good man and true; but they knew him as little as he knew himself. Sitting in a compact curl-up in his cart, he looked like any other man. There was nothing vague, nothing fantastic about him. And yet he was inwardly seething with the distress of an unanswered question. The word that had moved him so profoundly when Henry Venn pressed it upon his heart on that never­-to-be-forgotten day in his rooms in Cambridge, had moved him for another purpose than this that occupied him now. And stirring like wind among the trees of the forest was a whisper in the secret places within him-Yea, and if I be poured out-Did that mean this?