Part 4

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?

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.

THE FINANCES OF THE GODS

Copyright, 1891, by Macmillan & Co.

The evening meal was ended in Dhunni Bhagat’s Chubara, and the old priests were smoking or counting their beads. A little naked child pattered in, with its mouth wide open, a handful of marigold flowers in one hand, and a lump of conserved tobacco in the other. It tried to kneel and make obeisance to Gobind, but it was so fat that it fell forward on its shaven head, and rolled on its side, kicking and gasping, while the marigolds tumbled one way and the tobacco the other. Gobind laughed, set it up again, and blessed the marigold flowers as he received the tobacco.

“From my father,” said the child. “He has the fever, and cannot come. Wilt thou pray for him, father?”

“Surely, littlest; but the smoke is on the ground, and the night-chill is in the air, and it is not good to go abroad naked in the autumn.”

“I have no clothes,” said the child, “and all to-day I have been carrying cow-dung cakes to the bazar. It was very hot, and I am very tired.” It shivered a little, for the twilight was cool.

Gobind lifted an arm under his vast tattered quilt of many colours, and made an inviting little nest by his side. The child crept in, and Gobind filled his brass-studded leather water-pipe with the new tobacco. When I came to the Chubara the shaven head with the tuft atop and the beady black eyes looked out of the folds of the quilt as a squirrel looks out from his nest, and Gobind was smiling while the child played with his beard.

I would have said something friendly, but remembered in time that if the child fell ill afterwards I should be credited with the Evil Eye, and that is a horrible possession.

“Sit thou still, Thumbling,” I said as it made to get up and run away. “Where is thy slate, and why has the teacher let such an evil character loose on the streets when there are no police to protect us weaklings? In which ward dost thou try to break thy neck with flying kites from the house-tops?”

“Nay, Sahib, nay,” said the child, burrowing its face into Gobind’s beard, and twisting uneasily. “There was a holiday to-day among the schools, and I do not always fly kites. I play ker-li-kit like the rest.”

Cricket is the national game among the school-boys of the Punjab, from the naked hedge-school children, who use an old kerosene-tin for wicket, to the B. A.’s of the University, who compete for the Championship belt.

“Thou play kerlikit! Thou art half the height of the bat!” I said.

The child nodded resolutely. “Yea, I _do_ play. _Perlay-ball._ _Ow-at!_ _Ran, ran, ran!_ I know it all.”

“But thou must not forget with all this to pray to the Gods according to custom,” said Gobind, who did not altogether approve of cricket and western innovations.

“I do not forget,” said the child in a hushed voice.

“Also to give reverence to thy teacher, and”—Gobind’s voice softened—“to abstain from pulling holy men by the beard, little badling. Eh, eh, eh?”

The child’s face was altogether hidden in the great white beard, and it began to whimper till Gobind soothed it as children are soothed all the world over, with the promise of a story.

“I did not think to frighten thee, senseless little one. Look up! Am I angry? Aré, aré, aré! Shall I weep too, and of our tears make a great pond and drown us both, and then thy father will never get well, lacking thee to pull his beard? Peace, peace, and I will tell thee of the Gods. Thou hast heard many tales?”

“Very many, father.”

“Now, this is a new one which thou hast not heard. Long and long ago when the Gods walked with men as they do to-day, but that we have not faith to see, Shiv, the greatest of Gods, and Parbati, his wife, were walking in the garden of a temple.”

“Which temple? That in the Nandgaon ward?” said the child.

“Nay, very far away. Maybe at Trimbak or Hurdwar, whither thou must make pilgrimage when thou art a man. Now, there was sitting in the garden under the jujube trees a mendicant that had worshipped Shiv for forty years, and he lived on the offerings of the pious, and meditated holiness night and day.”

“Oh, father, was it thou?” said the child, looking up with large eyes.

“Nay, I have said it was long ago, and, moreover, this mendicant was married.”

“Did they put him on a horse with flowers on his head, and forbid him to go to sleep all night long? Thus they did to me when they made my wedding,” said the child, who had been married a few months before.

“And what didst thou do?” said I.

“I wept, and they called me evil names, and then I smote _her_, and we wept together.”

“Thus did not the mendicant,” said Gobind; “for he was a holy man, and very poor. Parbati perceived him sitting naked by the temple steps where all went up and down, and she said to Shiv, ‘What shall men think of the Gods when the Gods thus scorn their worshippers? For forty years yonder man has prayed to us, and yet there be only a few grains of rice and some broken cowries before him, after all. Men’s hearts will be hardened by this thing.’ And Shiv said, ‘It shall be looked to,’ and so he called to the temple which was the temple of his son, Ganesh of the elephant head, saying, ‘Son, there is a mendicant without who is very poor. What wilt thou do for him?’ Then that great elephant-headed One awoke in the dark and answered, ‘In three days, if it be thy will, he shall have one lakh of rupees.’ Then Shiv and Parbati went away.

“But there was a money-lender in the garden hidden among the marigolds”—the child looked at the ball of crumpled blossoms in its hands—“ay, among the yellow marigolds, and he heard the Gods talking. He was a covetous man, and of a black heart, and he desired that lakh of rupees for himself. So he went to the mendicant and said, ‘O brother, how much do the pious give thee daily?’ The mendicant said, ‘I cannot tell. Sometimes a little rice, sometimes a little pulse, and a few cowries, and, it has been, pickled mangoes and dried fish.’”

“That is good,” said the child, smacking its lips.

“Then said the money-lender, ‘Because I have long watched thee, and learned to love thee and thy patience, I will give thee now five rupees for all thy earnings of the three days to come. There is only a bond to sign on the matter.’ But the mendicant said, ‘Thou art mad. In two months I do not receive the worth of five rupees,’ and he told the thing to his wife that evening. She, being a woman, said, ‘When did money-lender ever make a bad bargain? The wolf runs through the corn for the sake of the fat deer. Our fate is in the hands of the Gods. Pledge it not even for three days.’

“So the mendicant returned to the money-lender, and would not sell. Then that wicked man sat all day before him, offering more and more for those three days’ earnings. First, ten, fifty, and a hundred rupees; and then, for he did not know when the Gods would pour down their gifts, rupees by the thousand, till he had offered half a lakh of rupees. Upon this sum the mendicant’s wife shifted her counsel, and the mendicant signed the bond, and the money was paid in silver; great white bullocks bringing it by the cart-load. But saving only all that money, the mendicant received nothing from the Gods at all, and the heart of the money-lender was uneasy on account of expectation. Therefore at noon of the third day the money-lender went into the temple to spy upon the councils of the Gods, and to learn in what manner that gift might arrive. Even as he was making his prayers, a crack between the stones of the floor gaped, and, closing, caught him by the heel. Then he heard the Gods walking in the temple in the darkness of the columns, and Shiv called to his son Ganesh, saying, ‘Son, what hast thou done in regard to the lakh of rupees for the mendicant?’ And Ganesh woke, for the money-lender heard the dry rustle of his trunk uncoiling, and he answered, ‘Father, one half of the money has been paid, and the debtor for the other half I hold here fast by the heel.’”

The child bubbled with laughter. “And the money-lender paid the mendicant?” it said.

“Surely, for he whom the Gods hold by the heel must pay to the uttermost. The money was paid at evening, all silver, in great carts, and thus Ganesh did his work.”

“Nathu! Oh[=e], Nathu!”

A woman was calling in the dusk by the door of the courtyard.

The child began to wriggle. “That is my mother,” it said.

“Go then, littlest,” answered Gobind; “but stay a moment.”

He ripped a generous yard from his patchwork-quilt, put it over the child’s shoulders, and the child ran away.

AT HOWLI THANA

His own shoe, his own head.—_Native Proverb._