1.02.06. Book 2: Ch 6. Succoured
CHAPTER VI
AFTER a while the beatings ceased and the uncle tried persuasions of another sort. The Brownie was petted, given a jewel or two, told she would have many more, and nice clothes, and everything she wanted, if she would consent to a marriage the uncles had arranged for her. In India it is not necessary that a girl should consent to her marriage. Only the very kindest would feel it necessary; but it makes an uncomfortable scene if a girl resists too much. It is much better she should be compliant. And usually she is. If she has good parents she knows they have done their best for her; a curious best it is sometimes; but again it often works out fairly happily. At any rate it is the custom for parents and guardians to arrange the weddings of the girls of their families (a son has generally more say in the matter) and it is accepted as the natural thing. No one dreams of making a fuss about it. But the Brownie knew that the moment she was married she was doubly bound to Hinduism, and she had determined to "join the Way" as she would have expressed it. She knew absolutely nothing of it or its doctrines. She knew only what she had heard that once in the palm wood, and again in the five or ten minutes we had talked to her and the fawn-child in the bungalow. But there is a word which says, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me," and "all men" includes little girls. In those few minutes He Who was lifted up so that this child could see Him, drew her. There is no other way to explain it. So she refused all the blandishments showered upon her at this time, risked a return to the discipline of the rod (perhaps it is quite impossible for you and for me to understand exactly what that meant of real downright heroism, for we have never felt the tingling of that rod), and she possessed her soul in patience. Her home now was in a small country town, steeped to the eyes in superstition of every sort, dense with Hinduism of the least elevated kind, benumbing in every way. And in the whole town there was only this one child who cared in the very least about the Lord Jesus Christ, and she was shut up according to the custom of her caste, within the four walls of a house, a house where she was not loved. Love can make any four walls lovable, they would feel protective to the loved child. To the unloved they were prison walls, and the air inside must have stifled her many a time, even as the air of that other prison house had stifled her mother years before; but she kept her soul alive by recalling again and again the fragment of truth she knew. Truly there must be eternal honey in the flowers of God, else she would have sucked her two or three poor little blossoms dry, for no other sustenance had she. Courage to hold on, faith to believe that somehow we should find her and help her, these were hers, and nothing could kill the faith in her. At last, some three years after the beginning of things, a queer, half-witted but sincere old Christian woman, once a devil-dancer, happened to go to that town for work, and happened (I use the word as it is useful, but it holds more than a mere happening) to get on the Brownie’s tracks. They met, held speech together, and the Brownie made up her brave little mind to escape to us, or perish in the attempt.
I cannot explain her courage except by remembering that wonderful, tiny, but exhaustless store of her secret honey. If a little of earth’s honey drunk straight from the honeycomb could make a tired-out soldier strong to fight through a long day ("See how mine eyes have been enlightened because I tasted a little of this honey," he said) how much more the heavenly, the nectar of the flowers of God? She knew that her protestations against marriage would have small effect upon her uncles. They would certainly soon force her through the ceremony, driving her at the end of that dreaded rod through the idolatrous parts of it, choking her remonstrances with the strangling cord, which once tied round her neck made her slave for life to the unknown man they had chosen as her master, to use a common and appropriate Tamil word for husband.
There was nothing for it then but escape.
How she effected it we never fully understood. I suppose because it cannot be understood naturally. But our religion is full of the supernatural, as men call it, and a thing quite out of the ordinary is nothing, and this was that. The old ex-devil-dancer was extremely queer-headed, not at all the kind of adviser one would have chosen to deal with a difficult matter. But fools do certainly rush in where angels fear to tread, and sometimes the fools succeed in a most astonishing and blessed fashion. In broad daylight, without a single attempt at disguise or precaution, the Brownie walked out of her uncle’s house, and the old ex-devil-dancer guided her through the maze of streets which she had half forgotten, and along the highroad for three miles, and so to the bungalow where we used to live. I have often thought of that walk in the noontide heat. Did our God make of the very light a covering for her?
They reached the bungalow at last. But we were fifty miles away. The Brownie seems to have taken this news calmly, and as calmly the next announcement, that the Walkers chanced to be journeying in these parts, and were expected soon.
Now the beautiful planning of this was lost on the Brownie, but there is no need that it should be lost upon us. In all our fifteen years of life together, I only remember the Walkers once leaving their work for any private, personal reason (except illness). That once was in November 1903 when their relatives passed through Colombo on their way from Australia to England. They went to Colombo to meet them, spent a day or two there, and then returned to Dohnavur via our old home on the east, a roundabout, tiring journey; but they wanted to see the people, and revive in their hearts and minds something of that which they had been taught when we lived in the village by the palm wood where the Brownie had first heard of Christ.
Close upon the time those relatives left Australia the old ex-devil-dancer went to the Brownie’s town. The timing of the arrival of the Australian mail boat, of the Walkers’ boat as it brought them back to India, of the train which allowed them to go on at once by cart, of the bullock-cart (most notable, perhaps, for every sort of delay may occur where bullock-carts are in question), all fitted perfectly, arrival and departure dovetailing the one into the other with a precision those who have to arrange journeyings in the East will recognise as quite unusual. So all went well. The relatives who chased after the Brownie found they had the Iyer to face. Something restrained them from proceeding to violence, for they could easily have overpowered him, and carried her off again. Something? no, Someone; and that Someone gloriously namable, recognisable to those who know Him and are accustamed to His ways. How often we have seen the old story of Philip and the Ethiopian re-lived before our eyes. We have ceased to think of it as "wonderful," rather it is natural. It would be more wonderful if there were any failure or flaw in those plans that are silently planned for everyone of us. And yet looked at in a simple human way, it is wonderful: "Manoah said unto the angel of the Lord, What is Thy name that when Thy sayings come to pass we may do Thee honour? And the angel of the Lord said unto him, Why askest thou thus after My name seeing it is Wonderful? And the angel did wondrously, and Manoah and his wife looked on."
Thus did we look on, and thus was the Brownie succoured.
Counter Fire When this was done, they praised the Lord with psalms and thanksgiving, who had done so great things for Israel, and given them the victory. - 2Ma 10:38.