They tell the tale even now among the groves of the Berbulda Hill, and
for corroboration point to the roofless and windowless Mission-house.
The great God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, Most Terrible,
One-eyed, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk, did it all; and he who refuses
to believe in Dungara will assuredly be smitten by the Madness of
Yat—the madness that fell upon the sons and the daughters of the Buria
Kol when they turned aside from Dungara and put on clothes. So says
Athon Dazé, who is High Priest of the shrine and Warden of the Red
Elephant Tusk. But if you ask the Assistant Collector and Agent in
Charge of the Buria Kol, he will laugh—not because he bears any malice
against missions, but because he himself saw the vengeance of Dungara
executed upon the spiritual children of the Reverend Justus Krenk,
Pastor of the Tubingen Mission, and upon Lotta, his virtuous wife.
Yet if ever a man merited good treatment of the Gods it was the Reverend
Justus, one time of Heidelberg, who, on the faith of a call, went into
the wilderness and took the blonde, blue-eyed Lotta with him. “We will
these Heathen now by idolatrous practices so darkened better make,” said
Justus in the early days of his career. “Yes,” he added with conviction,
“they shall be good and shall with their hands to work learn. For all
good Christians must work.” And upon a stipend more modest even than
that of an English lay-reader, Justus Krenk kept house beyond Kamala and
the gorge of Malair, beyond the Berbulda River close to the foot of the
blue hill of Panth on whose summit stands the Temple of Dungara—in the
heart of the country of the Buria Kol—the naked, good-tempered, timid,
shameless, lazy Buria Kol.
Do you know what life at a Mission outpost means? Try to imagine a
loneliness exceeding that of the smallest station to which Government
has ever sent you—isolation that weighs upon the waking eyelids and
drives you by force headlong into the labours of the day. There is no
post, there is no one of your own colour to speak to, there are no
roads: there is, indeed, food to keep you alive, but it is not pleasant
to eat; and whatever of good or beauty or interest there is in your
life, must come from yourself and the grace that may be planted in you.
In the morning, with a patter of soft feet, the converts, the doubtful,
and the open scoffers, troop up to the verandah. You must be infinitely
kind and patient, and, above all, clear-sighted, for you deal with the
simplicity of childhood, the experience of man, and the subtlety of the
savage. Your congregation have a hundred material wants to be
considered; and it is for you, as you believe in your personal
responsibility to your Maker, to pick out of the clamouring crowd any
grain of spirituality that may lie therein. If to the cure of souls you
add that of bodies, your task will be all the more difficult, for the
sick and the maimed will profess any and every creed for the sake of
healing, and will laugh at you because you are simple enough to believe
them.
As the day wears and the impetus of the morning dies away, there will
come upon you an overwhelming sense of the uselessness of your toil.
This must be striven against, and the only spur in your side will be the
belief that you are playing against the Devil for the living soul. It is
a great, a joyous belief; but he who can hold it unwavering for four and
twenty consecutive hours, must be blessed with an abundantly strong
physique and equable nerve.
Ask the gray heads of the Bannockburn Medical Crusade what manner of
life their preachers lead; speak to the Racine Gospel Agency, those lean
Americans whose boast is that they go where no Englishman dare follow;
get a Pastor of the Tubingen Mission to talk of his experiences—if you
can. You will be referred to the printed reports, but these contain no
mention of the men who have lost youth and health, all that a man may
lose except faith, in the wilds; of English maidens who have gone forth
and died in the fever-stricken jungle of the Panth Hills, knowing from
the first that death was almost a certainty. Few Pastors will tell you
of these things any more than they will speak of that young David of St.
Bees, who, set apart for the Lord’s work, broke down in the utter
desolation, and returned half distraught to the Head Mission, crying:
“There is no God, but I have walked with the Devil!”
The reports are silent here, because heroism, failure, doubt, despair,
and self-abnegation on the part of a mere cultured white man are things
of no weight as compared to the saving of one half-human soul from a
fantastic faith in wood-spirits, goblins of the rock, and river-fiends.
And Gallio, the Assistant Collector of the country-side “cared for none
of these things.” He had been long in the district, and the Buria Kol
loved him and brought him offerings of speared fish, orchids from the
dim moist heart of the forests, and as much game as he could eat. In
return, he gave them quinine, and with Athon Dazé, the High Priest,
controlled their simple policies.
“When you have been some years in the country,” said Gallio at the
Krenks’ table, “you grow to find one creed as good as another. I’ll give
you all the assistance in my power, of course, but don’t hurt my Buria
Kol. They are a good people and they trust me.”
“I will them the Word of the Lord teach,” said Justus, his round face
beaming with enthusiasm, “and I will assuredly to their prejudices no
wrong hastily without thinking make. But, O my friend, this in the mind
impartiality-of-creed-judgment-be-looking is very bad.”
“Heigh-ho!” said Gallio, “I have their bodies and the district to see
to, but you can try what you can do for their souls. Only don’t behave
as your predecessor did, or I’m afraid that I can’t guarantee your
life.”
“And that?” said Lotta sturdily, handing him a cup of tea.
“He went up to the Temple of Dungara—to be sure, he was new to the
country—and began hammering old Dungara over the head with an umbrella;
so the Buria Kol turned out and hammered _him_ rather savagely. I was in
the district, and he sent a runner to me with a note saying: ‘Persecuted
for the Lord’s sake. Send wing of regiment.’ The nearest troops were
about two hundred miles off, but I guessed what he had been doing. I
rode to Panth and talked to old Athon Dazé like a father, telling him
that a man of his wisdom ought to have known that the Sahib had
sunstroke and was mad. You never saw a people more sorry in your life.
Athon Dazé apologised, sent wood and milk and fowls and all sorts of
things; and I gave five rupees to the shrine, and told Macnamara that he
had been injudicious. He said that I had bowed down in the House of
Rimmon; but if he had only just gone over the brow of the hill and
insulted Palin Deo, the idol of the Suria Kol, he would have been
impaled on a charred bamboo long before I could have done anything, and
then I should have had to have hanged some of the poor brutes. Be gentle
with them, Padri—but I don’t think you’ll do much.”
“Not I,” said Justus, “but my Master. We will with the little children
begin. Many of them will be sick—that is so. After the children the
mothers; and then the men. But I would greatly that you were in internal
sympathies with us prefer.”
Gallio departed to risk his life in mending the rotten bamboo bridges of
his people, in killing a too persistent tiger here or there, in sleeping
out in the reeking jungle, or in tracking the Suria Kol raiders who had
taken a few heads from their brethren of the Buria clan. He was a
knock-kneed, shambling young man, naturally devoid of creed or
reverence, with a longing for absolute power which his undesirable
district gratified.
“No one wants my post,” he used to say grimly, “and my Collector only
pokes his nose in when he’s quite certain that there is no fever. I’m
monarch of all I survey, and Athon Dazé is my viceroy.”
Because Gallio prided himself on his supreme disregard of human
life—though he never extended the theory beyond his own—he naturally
rode forty miles to the Mission with a tiny brown girl-baby on his
saddle-bow.
“Here is something for you, Padri,” said he. “The Kols leave their
surplus children to die. ’Don’t see why they shouldn’t, but you may rear
this one. I picked it up beyond the Berbulda fork. I’ve a notion that
the mother has been following me through the woods ever since.”
“It is the first of the fold,” said Justus, and Lotta caught up the
screaming morsel to her bosom and hushed it craftily; while, as a wolf
hangs in the field, Matui, who had borne it and in accordance with the
law of her tribe had exposed it to die, panted weary and footsore in the
bamboo-brake, watching the house with hungry mother-eyes. What would the
omnipotent Assistant Collector do? Would the little man in the black
coat eat her daughter alive, as Athon Dazé said was the custom of all
men in black coats?
[Illustration: THE JUDGMENT OF DUNGARA]
Matui waited among the bamboos through the long night; and, in the
morning, there came forth a fair white woman, the like of whom Matui had
never seen, and in her arms was Matui’s daughter clad in spotless
raiment. Lotta knew little of the tongue of the Buria Kol, but when
mother calls to mother, speech is easy to follow. By the hands stretched
timidly to the hem of her gown, by the passionate gutturals and the
longing eyes, Lotta understood with whom she had to deal. So Matui took
her child again—would be a servant, even a slave, to this wonderful
white woman, for her own tribe would recognise her no more. And Lotta
wept with her exhaustively, after the German fashion, which includes
much blowing of the nose.
“First the child, then the mother, and last the man, and to the Glory of
God all,” said Justus the Hopeful. And the man came, with a bow and
arrows, very angry indeed, for there was no one to cook for him.
But the tale of the Mission is a long one, and I have no space to show
how Justus, forgetful of his injudicious predecessor, grievously smote
Moto, the husband of Matui, for his brutality; how Moto was startled,
but being released from the fear of instant death, took heart and became
the faithful ally and first convert of Justus; how the little gathering
grew, to the huge disgust of Athon Dazé; how the Priest of the God of
Things as They Are argued subtilely with the Priest of the God of Things
as They Should Be, and was worsted; how the dues of the Temple of
Dungara fell away in fowls and fish and honeycomb, how Lotta lightened
the Curse of Eve among the women, and how Justus did his best to
introduce the Curse of Adam; how the Buria Kol rebelled at this, saying
that their God was an idle God, and how Justus partially overcame their
scruples against work, and taught them that the black earth was rich in
other produce than pig-nuts only.
All these things belong to the history of many months, and throughout
those months the white-haired Athon Dazé meditated revenge for the
tribal neglect of Dungara. With savage cunning he feigned friendship
towards Justus, even hinting at his own conversion; but to the
congregation of Dungara he said darkly: “They of the Padri’s flock have
put on clothes and worship a busy God. Therefore Dungara will afflict
them grievously till they throw themselves, howling, into the waters of
the Berbulda.” At night the Red Elephant Tusk boomed and groaned among
the hills, and the faithful waked and said: “The God of Things as They
Are matures revenge against the back-sliders. Be merciful, Dungara, to
us Thy children, and give us all their crops!”
Late in the cold weather, the Collector and his wife came into the Buria
Kol country. “Go and look at Krenk’s Mission,” said Gallio. “He is doing
good work in his own way, and I think he’d be pleased if you opened the
bamboo chapel that he has managed to run up. At any rate, you’ll see a
civilised Buria Kol.”
Great was the stir in the Mission. “Now he and the gracious lady will
that we have done good work with their own eyes see, and—yes—we will him
our converts in all their new clothes by their own hands constructed
exhibit. It will a great day be—for the Lord always,” said Justus; and
Lotta said, “Amen.” Justus had, in his quiet way, felt jealous of the
Basel Weaving Mission, his own converts being unhandy; but Athon Dazé
had latterly induced some of them to hackle the glossy silky fibres of a
plant that grew plenteously on the Panth Hills. It yielded a cloth white
and smooth almost as the _tappa_ of the South Seas, and that day the
converts were to wear for the first time clothes made therefrom. Justus
was proud of his work. “They shall in white clothes clothed to meet the
Collector and his well-born lady come down, singing ‘Now thank we all
our God.’ Then he will the Chapel open, and—yes—even Gallio to believe
will begin. Stand so, my children, two by two, and—Lotta, why do they
thus themselves bescratch? It is not seemly to wriggle, Nala, my child.
The Collector will be here and be pained.”
The Collector, his wife, and Gallio climbed the hill to the
Mission-station. The converts were drawn up in two lines, a shining band
nearly forty strong. “Hah!” said the Collector, whose acquisitive bent
of mind led him to believe that he had fostered the institution from the
first. “Advancing, I see, by leaps and bounds.”
Never was truer word spoken! The Mission _was_ advancing exactly as he
had said—at first by little hops and shuffles of shamefaced uneasiness,
but soon by the leaps of fly-stung horses and the bounds of maddened
kangaroos. From the hill of Panth the Red Elephant Tusk delivered a dry
and anguished blare. The ranks of the converts wavered, broke and
scattered with yells and shrieks of pain, while Justus and Lotta stood
horror-stricken.
“It is the Judgment of Dungara!” shouted a voice. “I burn! I burn! To
the river or we die!”
The mob wheeled and headed for the rocks that overhung the Berbulda,
writhing, stamping, twisting, and shedding its garments as it ran,
pursued by the thunder of the trumpet of Dungara. Justus and Lotta fled
to the Collector almost in tears.
“I cannot understand! Yesterday,” panted Justus, “they had the Ten
Commandments. What is this? Praise the Lord all good spirits by land and
by sea. Nala! Oh, shame!”
With a bound and a scream there alighted on the rocks above their heads,
Nala, once the pride of the Mission, a maiden of fourteen summers, good,
docile, and virtuous—now naked as the dawn and spitting like a wild-cat.
“Was it for this!” she raved, hurling her petticoat at Justus, “was it
for this I left my people and Dungara—for the fires of your Bad Place?
Blind ape, little earthworm, dried fish that you are, you said that I
should never burn! O Dungara, I burn now! I burn now! Have mercy, God of
Things as They Are!”
She turned and flung herself into the Berbulda, and the trumpet of
Dungara bellowed jubilantly. The last of the converts of the Tubingen
Mission had put a quarter of a mile of rapid river between herself and
her teachers.
“Yesterday,” gulped Justus, “she taught in the school A, B, C, D.—Oh! It
is the work of Satan!”
But Gallio was curiously regarding the maiden’s petticoat where it had
fallen at his feet. He felt its texture, drew back his shirt-sleeve
beyond the deep tan of his wrist and pressed a fold of the cloth against
the flesh. A blotch of angry red rose on the white skin.
“Ah!” said Gallio calmly, “I thought so.”
“What is it?” said Justus.
“I should call it the Shirt of Nessus, but—Where did you get the fibre
of this cloth from?”
“Athon Dazé,” said Justus. “He showed the boys how it should
manufactured be.”
“The old fox! Do you know that he has given you the Nilgiri
Nettle—scorpion—_Girardenia heterophylla_—to work up? No wonder they
squirmed! Why, it stings even when they make bridge-ropes of it, unless
it’s soaked for six weeks. The cunning brute! It would take about half
an hour to burn through their thick hides, and then——!”
Gallio burst into laughter, but Lotta was weeping in the arms of the
Collector’s wife, and Justus had covered his face with his hands.
“_Girardenia heterophylla!_” repeated Gallio. “Krenk, why _didn’t_ you
tell me? I could have saved you this. Woven fire! Anybody but a naked
Kol would have known it, and, if I’m a judge of their ways, you’ll never
get them back.”
He looked across the river to where the converts were still wallowing
and wailing in the shallows, and the laughter died out of his eyes, for
he saw that the Tubingen Mission to the Buria Kol was dead.
Never again, though they hung mournfully round the deserted school for
three months, could Lotta or Justus coax back even the most promising of
their flock. No! The end of conversion was the fire of the Bad
Place—fire that ran through the limbs and gnawed into the bones. Who
dare a second time tempt the anger of Dungara? Let the little man and
his wife go elsewhere. The Buria Kol would have none of them. An
unofficial message to Athon Dazé that if a hair of their heads were
touched, Athon Dazé and the priests of Dungara would be hanged by Gallio
at the temple shrine, protected Justus and Lotta from the stumpy
poisoned arrows of the Buria Kol, but neither fish nor fowl, honeycomb,
salt nor young pig were brought to their doors any more. And, alas! man
cannot live by grace alone if meat be wanting.
“Let us go, mine wife,” said Justus; “there is no good here, and the
Lord has willed that some other man shall the work take—in good time—in
His own good time. We will go away, and I will—yes—some botany bestudy.”
If any one is anxious to convert the Buria Kol afresh, there lies at
least the core of a mission-house under the hill of Panth. But the
chapel and school have long since fallen back into jungle.