1.07.09. Book 7: 9. From the House Roof
9. FROM THE HOUSE ROOF
LIFE of the orderliest sort, office, routine, parochial work, committee meetings, "social duties"-and these bored him badly; hear his feeling little word about purposeless callers: "Many visitors. They take up my time and weary my spirits, and I do them no good, nor they me at all in proportion to the expenditure of time."
Suddenly up shot a flame (but the fire had burned below for a long, silent year): this quiet man in his office chair who turned to the world a soul as even as a calm, ("You could time your watch by Ragland," they used to say at Cambridge), was one tingling wild desire to fly it all, to fly to some distant place where there was no office or committee meeting or polite society: "Some place where there is no English protection, and where very great hardships have to be endured, and life, in short, carried in the hand"-to Japan, then closed, the land where they crucified their martyrs as his Lord was crucified. "Should I go," he writes significantly, "it will be without asking any counsel from dear friends." And he likens the longings that possess him to the longings of a lover: "The thought makes my heart burn and makes me indeed ask, Am I in my senses?" But this was only to his mother-friend, to whom he had opened his fugitive hopes. For he was not in the least understood. His curious spiritual restlessness offended people. One can hear the ponderous sentences of perplexed expostulation pounding flat-footed down on him. But there are some now who will understand. Life in India can be as formal, as petty, as remote from the valiant endeavours of a real campaign for Christ and souls as life can be in England. Ragland was being slowly sucked into such a life. He had to break loose somehow, and there were so many to tell him he was making a mistake, and that he should be patient (as if this yielding to the strange, strong current surging through him night and day must needs be impatience), that he did in fact begin to feel he must be very wrong, and four months later, to revert to an early metaphor, we find the poor lawn busy turf-laying: "I am so sorry I said a word on the Japan matter; such a very improbable thing." And again, "I have not a word to say worth saying. To say what I think would be to wish for a quiet following of Christ, without caring for such high things as to be a missionary at the risk of my life (I am sometimes ashamed of myself for what I said), but a steady holy following of Him every day the same." But he still feels the bluster of the storm, and comforts himself by remembering how "some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship got safe to shore: clinging to some simple promise, which a high-minded one would think unbeseeming those who have known Christ for years."
He calls the plan "visionary" now, which means the decent turf has covered it from the cold scrutiny of man. Visions are for other eyes. But something had happened within him, a new passion had awakened; the lava still flowed. He would walk up and down his roof in the late evenings while the noisy Hindu worship was going on in the temple court below. He might close his eyes and try to commune with his God, but the coloured lights and flaring torches struck through his eyelids, pricked him back to earth.
Then he would ponder over it, this that pulled him down from heavenly places. Go and stand at that temple-court door and preach to the worshippers? But he had not had time to get the language well. They would not listen. Ask someone else who had Tamil better to come? All were engaged with equally needy people. "But it seems sad to watch them night after night, and to feel that prayer is all that can be done. The pagoda near me, the streets on streets round about it, the very many other pagodas throughout Madras, and the multitudes of streets round about them, have no one with time to attempt anything to deliver the souls in them from the power of Satan. They must go on with their tom-toming and jingling of bells, just as if there were no Christians, to say nothing of missionaries, in the land." The words read almost true to-day. Leave the open roadways of Madras, where churches look across at each other, go to the city proper, and though you know, thank God, there are little lamps burning bravely somewhere among those dark streets, it is possible to walk for hours and never see them. It is possible to pass thousands of people without, so far as you know it, meeting one who has even the look of being about the things of the Father. You may sit in the late evening on the stone steps of a temple and (if you are inconspicuous) look in and see and hear many things not set down in any missionary book. You may penetrate into rooms that do not care to open their small barred windows to the clean light of God; you may see the huge, cynical, sensual creature straight from the holy Benares, stretched full length in his foul den, waiting for the coming of his dupes. But the white angels you do not see; and certain streets in that city are so, that if they did come you feel they would have to pick their steps carefully. The very air of the place still is "as if there were no Christians, to say nothing of missionaries, in the land."