Behind the Door
"When any person is known to be considering the
new Religion, all his relations and acquaintances
rise _en masse_; _so that to get a new convert is
like pulling out the eye-tooth of a live tiger_."
_Adoniram Judson, Burmah._
EVERY missionary who has despaired of hitting upon an illustration vivid
enough to show you what the work is really like among Mohammedans and
Caste Hindus will appreciate this simile. After our return from Dohnavur
we found that the long-closed villages of this eastern countryside had
opened again, and the people were willing to allow us to teach the girls
and women. For two months this lasted, and then three boys, belonging to
three different Castes, became known as inquirers. Instantly the news
spread through all the villages. It was in vain we told them we
(women-workers) had never once even seen the boys, had in no way
influenced them; the people held to it that, personally responsible or
not, the book we taught to the girls was the same those boys had read
(an undeniable fact); that its poison entered through the eyes, ascended
to the brain, descended to the heart, and then drew the reader out of
his Caste and his religion; and that therefore we could not be tolerated
in the streets or in the houses any more, and so we were turned out.
[Illustration: "It took me such a long time to learn to draw nicely,"
said Victory when she saw this photo; "I used to go to the Brahman
street every morning and practise it there." A design is drawn with a
piece of chalk on the ground in front of every house each morning during
part of December and January, in memory of a goddess who used to amuse
herself by drawing these patterns and planting flowers in them. All
sorts of geometrical designs are drawn by the women and children, and
the regular morning drawing is part of the day's work.]
In one village where many of the relations of one of these three lads
live, the tiger growled considerably. One furious old dame called us
"Child-snatchers and Powder-mongers," and white snakes of the cobra
species, and a particular genus of lizard, which when stamped upon
merely wriggles, and cannot be persuaded to die (this applied to our
persistence in evil), and a great many other things. The women stood out
in the street in defiant groups and would not let us near enough to
explain. The men sat on the verandah fronts and smiled, blandly superior
to the childish nonsense the women talked, but they did not interfere.
Villages like this--and Old India is made up of such villages--are far
removed from the influence of the few enlightened centres which exist.
Madras is only a name to them, distant four hundred miles or so, a place
where Caste notions are very lax and people are mixed up and jumbled
together in a most unbecoming way.
Education, or "Learning," as they call it, they consider an excellent
thing for boys who want to come to the front and earn money and grow
rich. But for girls, what possible use is it? Can they pass examinations
and get into Government employ? If you answered this question you would
only disgust them. Then there is a latent feeling common enough in these
old Caste families, that it is rather _infra dig._ for their women to
know too much. It may be all very well for those who have no pretensions
to greatness, they may need a ladder by which to climb up the social
scale, but we who are already at the top, what do we want with it?
"Have not our daughters got their _Caste_?" This feeling is passing away
in the towns, but the villages hold out longer.
In that particular village we had some dear little girls who were
getting very keen, and it was so hard to move out, and leave the field
to the devil as undisputed victor thereon, and I sent one of our workers
to try again. She is a plucky little soul, but even she had to beat a
retreat. They will have none of us.
We went on that day to a village where they had listened splendidly only
a week before. They had no time, it was the busy season. Then to a town,
farther on, but it was quite impracticable. So we went to our friend the
dear old Evangelist there, the blind old man. He and his wife are lights
in that dark town. It is so refreshing to spend half an hour with two
genuine good old Christians after a tug of war with the heathen; they
have no idea they are helping you, but they are, and you return home
ever so much the happier for the sight of them.
As we came home we were almost mobbed. In the old days mobs there were
of common occurrence. It is a rough market town, and the people, after
the first converts came, used to hoot us through the streets, and throw
handfuls of sand at us, and shower ashes on our hair. In theory I like
this very much, but in practice not at all. The yellings of the crowd,
men chiefly, are not polite; the yelpings of the dogs, set on by
sympathetic spectators; the sickening blaze of the sun and the reflected
glare from the houses; the blinding dust in your eyes, and the queer
feel of ashes down your neck; above all, the sense that this sort of
thing does no manner of good--for it is not persecution (nothing so
heroic), and it will not end in martyrdom (no such honours come our
way)--all this row, and all these feelings, one on the top of the other,
combine to make mobbing less interesting than might be expected. You
hold on, and look up for patience and good nature and such like common
graces, and you pray that you may not be down with fever to-morrow--for
fever has a way of stopping work--and you get out of it all, as quickly
as you can, without showing undue hurry. And then, though little they
know it, you go and get a fresh baptism of love for them all.
But how delighted one would be to go through such unromantic trifles
every hour of every day, if only at the end one could get into the
hearts and the homes of the people. As it is, just now, our grief is
that we cannot. We know of several who want us, and we are shut out from
them.
One is a young wife, who saw us one day by the waterside, and asked us
to come and teach her. For doing this she was publicly beaten that
evening in the open street, by a man, before men; so, for fear of what
they would do to her, we dare not go near the house. Another is a widow
who has spent all her fortune in building a rest-house for the Brahmans,
and who has not found Rest. She listened once, too earnestly; she has
not been allowed to listen again. Oh, how that tiger bites!
Next door to her is a child we have prayed for for three years. She was
a loving, clinging child when I knew her then, little Gold, with the
earnest eyes. That last day I saw her, she put her hands into mine,
caring nothing for defilement; "Are we not one Caste?" she said. I did
not know it was the last time I should see her; that the next time when
I spoke to her I should only see her shadow in the dark; and one wishes
now one had known--how much one would have said! But the house was open
then, and all the houses were. Then the first girl convert, after
bravely witnessing at home, took her stand as a Christian. Her Caste
people burned down the little Mission school--a boys' school--and
chalked up their sentiments on the charred walls. They burned down the
Bible-woman's house and a school sixteen miles away; and the countryside
closed, every town and village in it, as if the whole were a single
door, with the devil on the other side of it.
But some of the girls behind the door managed to send us messages. Gold
was one of these. She wanted so much to see us again, she begged us to
come and try. We tried; we met the mother outside, and asked her to let
us come. She is a hard old woman, with eyes like bits of black ice, set
deep in her head. She froze us, and refused.
Afterwards we heard what the child's punishment was. They took her down
to the water, and led her in. She stood trembling, waist deep, not
knowing what they meant to do. Then they held her head under the water
till she made some sign to show she would give in. They released her
then, rubbed ashes on her brow, sign of recantation, and they led her
back sobbing--poor little girl. She is not made of martyr stuff; she was
only miserable. For some months we saw nothing of her. We used to go to
the next house and persuade the people to let us sing to them. We sang
for Gold; but we never knew if she heard.
One evening, as two of us came home late from work, a woman passed us
and said hurriedly to me, "Come, come quickly, and alone. It is Gold who
calls you! Come!" I followed her to the house. "I am Gold's married
sister," she explained. "Sit down outside in the verandah near the door
and wait till the child comes out." Then she went in, and I sat still
and waited.
Those minutes were like heart-beats. What was happening inside? But
apparently the mother was away, for soon the door opened softly, and a
shadow flitted out, and I knew it must be Gold. She dropped on her knees
on the little narrow verandah on the other side of the door and crept
along to its farther end, and then I could only distinguish a dark shape
in the dark. For perhaps five minutes no one came except the sister, who
stood at the door and watched. And for those five minutes one was free
to speak as freely as one could speak to a shape which one could barely
see, and which showed no sign, and spoke no word. Five whole minutes!
How one valued every moment of them! Then a man came and sat down on the
verandah. He must have been a relative, for he did not mean to go. I
wished he would. It was impossible to talk past him to her, without
letting him know she was there; so one had to talk to him, but for her,
and even this could not last long. Dusk here soon is dark; we had to go.
As we went, we looked back and saw him still keeping his unconscious
guard over the child in her hiding-place.
There are no secrets in India. It was known that we had been there, and
that stern old mother punished her child; but how, we never knew.
If any blame us for going at all, let it be remembered that one of
Christ's little ones was thirsty, and she held out her hand for a cup of
cold water. We could not have left that hand empty, I think.
After that we heard nothing for a year; then an old man whom we had
helped, and who hoped we intended to help him more, came one evening to
tell us he meant to set Gold free. It was all to be secretly done, and
it was to be done that night. We told him we could have nothing to do
with his plan, and we explained to him why. "But," he objected, "what
folly is this? I thought you Christians helped poor girls, and this one
certainly wants to come. She is of age. This is the time. If you wait
you will never get her at all." We knew this was more than probable; to
refuse his help was like turning the key and locking her body and soul
into prison--an awful thought to me, as I remembered Treasure. But there
was nothing else to be done; and afterwards, when we heard who he was,
and what his real intentions were, we were thankful we had done it. He
looked at us curiously as he went, as if our view of things struck him
as strange; and he begged us never to breathe a word of what he had
said. We never did, but it somehow oozed out, and soon after that he
sickened and very suddenly died. His body was burnt within two hours.
Post-mortems are rare in India.
Another year passed in silence as to Gold. How often we went down the
street and looked across at her home, with its door almost always shut,
and that icy-eyed mother on guard. We used to see her going about, never
far from the house. When we saw her we salaamed; then she would glare at
us grimly, and turn her back on us. Once the whole family went to a
festival; but the girl of course was bundled in and out of a covered
cart, and seen by no one, not even the next-door neighbours. There was
talk of a marriage for her. Most girls of her Caste are married much
younger; but to our relief this fell through, and once one of us saw her
for a moment, and she still seemed to care to hear, though she was far
too cowed by this time to show it.
Then we heard a rumour that a girl from the Lake Village had been seen
by some of our Christians in a wood near a village five miles distant.
These Christians are very out-and-out and keen about converts, and they
managed to discover that the girl in the wood had some thought of being
a Christian, and that her being there had some connection with this, so
they told us at once. The description fitted Gold. But we could not
account for a girl of her Caste being seen in a wood; she was always
kept in seclusion. At last we found out the truth. She had shown some
sign of a lingering love for Christ, and her mother had taken her to a
famous Brahman ascetic who lived in that wood; and there together,
mother and daughter stayed in a hut near the hermit's hut, and for three
days he had devoted himself to confuse and confound her, and finally he
succeeded, and reported her convinced.
[Illustration: This is the tangible brass-bossed door outside of which
we so often stand on the stone step and knock, and hear voices from
within call, "Everyone is out." The hand-marks are the hand-prints of
the Power that keeps the door shut. Once a year, every door and the
lintel of every window, and sometimes the walls, are marked like this.
That evening, just before dark, the god comes round, they say, and looks
for his mark on the door, and, seeing it, blesses all in the house. If
there is no mark he leaves a curse. This is the devil's South Indian
parody on the Passover.]
We heard all this, and sorrowed, and wondered how it was done. We never
heard all, but we heard one delusion they practised upon her, appealing
as they so often do to the Oriental imagination, which finds such solid
satisfaction in the supernatural. Nothing is so convincing as a vision
or a dream; so a vision appeared before her, an incarnation, they told
her, of Siva, in the form of Christ. Siva and Christ, then, were one, as
they had so often assured her, one identity under two names. Hinduism is
crammed with incarnations; this presented no difficulty. Like the old
monk, the bewildered child looked for the print of the nails and the
spear. Yes, they were there, marked in hands and foot and side. It must
be hard to distrust one's own mother. Gold still trusted hers. "Listen!"
said the mother, and the vision spoke. "If the speech of the Christians
is true, I will return within twenty-four days; if the speech of the
Hindus is true, I will not return." Then hour by hour for those
twenty-four days they wove their webs about her, webs of wonderful
sophistry which have entangled keener brains than hers. She was
entangled. The twenty-four days did their work. She yielded her will on
the twenty-fifth. So the mother and the Brahman won.
These letters are written, as you know, with a definite purpose. We try
to show you what goes on behind the door, the very door of the
photograph, type of all the doors, that seeing behind you may understand
how fiercely the tiger bites.