Between the Twilights/Chapter 14
XIV
THE TIE THAT BINDS
“The Hour of Union”—with the west, a red gold lake of fire, turning to the colour of smoke—there, behind the tall gray steeple from which comes the Christian’s call to prayer.
The crows which have been so noisy all day long spread their wings for flight; the palms across the road and the great star-flower tree at my gate are among their bedding places, I know of old. All things travel toward the Silence, and my soul stretches herself at ease, up here in the open spaces of my roof.
What is it saying, the Christian Bell? “Vivos Voco: mortuos plango: fulgura frango,” speaking its unknown tongue to a people that understandeth not, nor wishes to understand. Vivos voco, vivos voco. … But no bell calls the Hindu to worship. She worships when she will, not necessarily in groups; she rarely passes a temple without worship, most often just silent prostration: sometimes she will creep in and ring the bell that hangs beside the bull, her timid call of ceremony on the god: or she will run in to leave a flower, or to comfort her heart, poor soul, with prayer for the moment’s need. Nor need she pray always in a Temple. I have seen her light a light at cross-roads—the very tragedy of a prayer—among the wheels of traffic in a busy town, a special prayer this, for a new little life that is to be. Vivos voco. … No need to call where religion is not imposed, rules of a school whose head master is God. The head master will punish infringement of those rules, so teach the ushers sometimes. … But to the Hindu sin is not an offence against any Being; it is but putting one’s self out of harmony with one’s highest attainment. Do it, an you will, you anger none. You but travel so many more rounds of the wheel of life … on and on … on and on … reaping in the next cycle what you have sown in this … Oh! the weariness of the pain of birth and re-birth! Oh! the helplessness of trying to escape. There is no escape. Life is inexorable. Life is more inexorable than Death. ***** And now the gray overhead is tinged with rosy pink. How long after the sunset lives the memory of the sunset? This is the marriage of day and night, the twilight hour, the time of affection, the time of peace. … Now the clouds are staining the great roof of the world—their bridal congratulations. Soon, they also will have fallen back upon silence (for is not colour speech after its kind?) and then the God of Night will sprinkle stars all over the floor of the bridal chamber where day and night lie hiding while we sleep. For while we sleep, night walks with day in three great strides across that star-strewn floor, back to the east where we find her again. “As the Sun sets, but never dies, even so shall the Sun of my Life set; but I shall not die.” … “Mortuos plango”. … But why wail if I do not die? Death is release: death is but the next chance: the new start. Who wails the dead? going where all the sunsets go to come again, even as they.
Say I have done evil: well! I made my choice. Now I go to pay like a man. Say I have done well: I go to my reward, through the same door as had I sinned, for but two doors has this House of Life for all, the same exit the same entrance. And but two doors will have the next house, and the next … the many mansions on the way of Peace. For Peace comes at long last; there is always that; we may make it come now, this minute, if we choose, if we lay aside desire … “He attaineth Peace into whom all desires flow as rivers flow into the Ocean, which is filled with water, but remaineth unmoved … not he who desireth desire.”
But, the chances are endless, why come so soon to the Peace-place. Let us enjoy all enjoyment, this house and that, and that … Oh! the weary wander to the House of Peace. Oh! the loneliness of the way: for none may hold my hand as I walk. None may even be my sponsor. No man shall save his Brother’s soul. This journey to God, to Peace, must be my own journey of discovery. Oh! the loneliness of this constant converse with Fate! It is the loneliness which men are wont to associate with death: when the Eastern ceases for this—dialogue—he has attained Heaven, absorption into the Divine. … Oh! the loneliness! Oh! the joy of loneliness and solitude; the joy of aloofness, each for each. The Soul and God together, alone together side by side, and at last, alone and one … one Great Soul. For our souls are carrier pigeons, homing to God. Mortuos plango. No, the carrier pigeon has brought its message through all the worlds, to God Himself. The pigeon rests at peace in the home of Light.
Fulgura frango … Fulgura frango. But what need to break the lightning, what need? What is, is good; what happens is ordained. Fight not with Fate. Love it. Conquer by loving it … Never resent, never resent. Submit to the evil, and behold it is good. All is illusion in a world of dreams; who can tell if the lightning be good or bad? Better not break it, lest worse befall; better not. ***** Even as one looks the illusions of vision are fading, steeple, trees, house-tops, are only blurs of grayness, and the other voice of prayer smites the stillness—“There is no God, but God” …
Beware, beware of resisting Fate; beware, there is who kills and who makes alive. None may oppose Him; why break the Lightning? ***** Oh! the time Between the Twilights is good: one floats on the sea of silence, and is nothing—just part of the Great Creation—absolutely at rest, at one with Nature, at peace with one’s self, with one’s neighbour.
Shall we remember in the next House, the furnishings of this? I asked of my Wisest of the Wise.
“It will be as you desire, as you intend,” was the answer; and then, musingly, “Most wish to forget, most wish to forget.” …
There is in her the strangest mixture of ritual and freedom from ritual. That is because she is a woman. Hinduism, as we find it in India now, is but a tradition, of which the women keep the record. You may believe what you will, there are no articles of belief, there are idols for the ignorant, there is poetry, allegory, which you may interpret as you will; there are the beautiful songs of the Bhagavad Gita, there is the propitiation of evil spirits, there are the extortions of the ash-smeared; there is the ecstasy of the wife-worship of Life, of her husband, her child. There is the crown of self-sacrifice, and there is the demand of the stronger for the service of the weaker. All stand for Hinduism; but none connote Hinduism. Of its essence is caste … and here we are back again at our marriage register. The one fear of the Hindu is, lest so-and-so will not marry into his family. If he does that which would prevent marriage he has ceased to be a Hindu. …
And the things which might prove a bar to marriage among Westerns do not of necessity prove here a bar to marriage. There is no excommunication for sin; there is excommunication, out-casting for breach of a ceremonial rule. The man under Western influence may be ashamed of a son-in-law who has served his time for a crime. Not so the orthodox Hindu: has he not paid the penalty for his sin, why cast it up against him? That account is closed.
If you wish to know what things would out-caste, ask the women. They have learned from their grandmothers, and they from theirs.
In the long ago travelling Priests would wander from house to house, telling tales from the old Epics, or building up that great fabric of folk-lore which we find in all parts of India. Often they would act the tales they told or sing them, and this made great entertainment in the lives of the women—Mystery Play, Oratorio, brought to their doors. In these latter days your Priest will whisper in your ear the name of the God you must worship, and he will direct your worship, and chiefly your charity; but he gives you no bundle of ethical maxims, no credo: and in a woman’s private chapel her own temperament supplies the religion. As I have said, most usual is the worship of the Baby Krishna, though there is also the Shiva cult which I have described, both with the same idea running through them, the reverence for Creation. Then to the timid, religion is often but a faggot of superstitions—what to avoid, what brings luck … every home provides some old dame learned in this lore.
In one thing, however, all are alike. They will keep faith with Gods, not always with men; that matters little, for no one has taught them that sense of honour, product of the self-corporate, got from living in masses in the world. But the Gods are another matter, the Gods can punish. And the courage with which the frailest will keep faith, at what cost, offering a child in performance of some vow to a Temple, measuring her length along the ground in pilgrimage … this is one of our paradoxes in India.
In the lives of most there is room for little beside the worship of the husband, with its perfection of self-sacrifice, which seems to exhaust all of altruism that the religion holds. And that is perhaps the chief difference between the standpoint of the West and Hinduism. When you benefit your fellow-men, it is more to buy merit than out of compassion. I suppose compassion dries up at the fount, so to speak, in the consciousness or sub-consciousness that misery is only another illusion, that in a way you have elected the present suffering, that at any rate you might have the very best of times in your next genesis. But however it may be, philanthropy among the orthodox is an acknowledged soul-saving arrangement. Listen to the very beggar in the street. “Gift me and buy merit,” is his prayer. He is not ashamed to beg; you are climbing to heaven on his shoulders. In a way it is you who are in his debt.
This absence of altruism is a fact which experience is always emphasizing; and I deem it the more noteworthy, inasmuch as in the field of thought and meditation the heights climbed are very great indeed, it is quite common to come across a mysticism parallel to the mysticism of the West. But I would not be misunderstood; though the doctrine of works and merit is the most general kind of Hinduism, I have met a higher. “Good works are fetters of gold, but still fetters,” as said my orthodox interpreter of religion, and he went on to explain that even the desire for goodness could be an obstacle on the way to God. Whereafter he told me this beautiful story.
There was once a woman who had lived an evil life. She was a Mahommedan, and she said to herself, “I will go the Pilgrimage and wipe out my sins.” So she set forth, taking with her a dog she loved. And as she wandered, her face Mecca-wards, the other pilgrims shunned her, for they knew her ill-repute. But she heeded them not, her mind being full of the so-soon purchase of sanctity. … And it came to pass that a few miles from Mecca the dog fell ill, and she said within herself, “I cannot leave it behind. I must needs stay and tend it.” So, albeit with a sigh, for Mecca was almost in sight, and she had longed so great a while to be holy even as those other women by whom she was shunned, she turned away from the path in search of water. But it was a place of sand, and it was long before she found a well, and then she had perforce to make a rope of her hair and a bucket of her clothes to draw water for the poor beast … and, in tending him, day changed into night, but she heeded not—her whole soul in the desire that he might live.
And when the pilgrims reached the Holy City, and were preparing for the evening prayer, a voice forbade the recital. … “This,” said the Voice, “is not the place where God is to be found; go back to where she whom you deem evil tends a fellow life, for there to-day dwells God Himself.”
Faith is naturally a large factor in the religion of the Hindu women. Belief is so easy to her. She is troubled with never an intellectual doubt. Indeed, intellect, in her opinion, is an interloper in the regions of Faith. Where is the scope for Faith if you use your intelligence? she will argue.
There is a story told, one of many such, of a South-Indian woman, who believed that upon a certain day of the new moon, the God at a certain shrine would work whatever miracle were claimed by the faithful as a proof of his power; so, being drunk with ecstasy after long years of meditation, she set forth to the Shrine, having first cut out her tongue. … “My tongue which has often,” said she, “spoken words of unwisdom, will be given me anew of the God. This is the miracle I claim.” Day after day of her pilgrimage she trudged cheerfully, joy in her God at her heart. Day after day she carried but her water gourd and a small quantity of grain tied in the end of her saree, and she walked with the help of a tall bamboo pole, for she was bent with age; but the wisdom light streamed from the gates of her body, so that all knew her for holy, and crowds gathered about her, curious as to the faith that was in her, but she heeded them not; day after day through tracks of burning sand, through jungle or by river bed … and at last the temple was in sight. ***** The miracle was that her faith failed not when her tongue did not grow. After the first shock of realization, her mind groped after some explanation which satisfied, and the God lost no worshipper.
So, in Western India, I have known one—a Queen and a daughter of a King—also bowed with years, who had waited half her life for the fulfilment of a promise.
God would see to it that the promise was kept. Why waste resentment on him who seemed a breaker of promises; God would resent for her. She was brought to the verge of death, she had long been the house-mate of poverty; her faith was proof against all. When I saw her last she sat among the squirrels on a dung-smeared veranda in a courtyard, where cows and buffaloes were stalled. The squirrels played about her; she had been herself a squirrel, she told me, in her last generation, wherefore they loved her; and she sat telling her beads as she had sat for fifty years, her hand in the embroidered sock of orthodoxy.
Had any devil prompted me to suggest to her justification for unfaith, I should simply not have been believed. For—of these is the kingdom of heaven. ***** One more memory stands out from the crowd. It is the lamp-lighting hour in the Temple of the Foot. We have come through the narrow streets, past the sellers of old brass and copper, past the gold and white pyramids of flower-sellers. The air is heavy with the perfume of jasmine, the sacred bulls are sauntering up the steps from the river, pushing through the worshippers with the arrogance of the beloved. A kind priest has lighted us under the archway, and we are in the inner courtyard. Yes, we may come through the forest of columns, standing straight and white and cool in the cloisters, and we may linger close by the great carved door to watch the pooja. It takes some time to see in the darkness … everything is still, so still. There is a great basin of black marble, and in the middle of it the impress of a great foot. … A priest sits on his heels beside the basin, anointing the foot with sandal-wood oil, washing it, offering it flowers and incense.
Another Priest walks round and round the basin crooning mantras. The real worshipper is a poor woman in an advanced stage of leprosy, the flickering light from the little shells of cocoanut falls upon the masses of white and yellow flowers, upon the fruits and incense, upon the costly offerings, upon the poor mis-shapen face. It is still, so still, so full of mystery, her face, the flowers, the Priest, leaping into life like a pulse-beat, with the flare of the cotton wick. … Shiva’s great white bull sits watching his master’s symbol in the Temple beside us: other worshippers there are none, and the pandas have wandered to the bathing ghat, to encompass the unwary. … Sudden my soul hears through the stillness the message of a child in the strains of that beautiful anthem of Stainer’s. His voice rises clear and exultant so that I can hear it across the seas from the Cathedral of old gray stone in the City of Cities. … “God so loved the World.” …
The Priest is passing the shell-lamp over the foot itself, in the circles of some ritual, and the leper bends forward out of the darkness to see the sacred markings. … Oh! the horror of the ravages of the flesh! … “God so loved the World.” …
The Priest sprinkles the foot with holy water, spooning it out of his copper vessel with practised hand, and the perambulating Priest redoubles his mantras. … The face of the leper is a-quiver with peace, and with a joy that is without dissimulation. … “God so loved the World.” …
The pooja is over, the officiating Priest has pressed the little cotton wicks into darkness. The leper makes her timid way out of the Temple, ringing the great bell in the cloisters, as she returns to her pilgrimage of pain in a world of illusions. … “God so loved the World,” … and it was the leper in the Temple of the Foot who first gave me a glint of the probable meaning of these glad tidings.
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