1.02.14. Book 2: Ch 14. A Woman or Some Such Thing

CHAPTER XIV THE loris still survives, and becomes more and more interesting. He has just now breakfasted, and is engaged in slowly sucking his fingers, much as a baby might. But he looks wiser far than any baby. Bala has offered to take care of him to-day "so that you may get on with your work," as she kindly explains. What useful things babies are when they grow up. Our forest house has four rooms-three bedrooms, and one, called by the masons "the had," is every­thing a room can be. It is there we gather in the evening when it is cool enough to require a fire; (cold it rarely is, we have open windows always, and sometimes it is hot, 92° and thereabouts, but the fire makes the hall such a welcoming cosy place that on the slightest pretext we have it, wood being of no consequence here). When the Ranger and his people were up it rained. They were in tents, and we could not happily think of them so uncomfortable and invited them in, quite against the rules of the house, but they are both nice, inoffensive, oldish men, and they camped thankfully in our little Prophet’s chamber, and pondered over the sentences on the wall, put there to refresh the tired-hearted who occasionally inhabit that room: "He comforteth them that are losing patience .... For as His majesty is, so also is His mercy." In the evening we sat round the fire and drew the Ranger and his foresters to tell us forest stories. Such stories do not feel worth writing down; but heard in that long brown room-for its walls are plastered with earth and sand worked into a kind of distemper-with the firelight flickering on the brown coils of the monkey swings thrown over the rafters, twisting fantastic shadows on the walls and the red-tiled roof and red-tiled floor, and touching with bright reflections the glass panes of the quaint little bookcases, full of a mixed multitude of books, and the bowls of jasmine on the tables which are curious shaped slabs cut straight from a forest tree, and the dresser with its blue china, and the fawn­-coloured tips of the sambur’s antlers which, as Tara observed when first they were put up, "do with the curly swings make the room into like part of the forest"-heard thus the stories were all alive and walked about by themselves.

It was a calm evening and the young moon glim­mered on a very still forest, so still that we could hear the forest noises coming through the open windows, the bark of the spotted deer which never fails to make us feel real children of the woodland, and the little almost similar call of a night-bird flying past. We forgot about bed, forgot the great world outside with its agitations and vexations, kingdom rising against kingdom, trouble chasing trouble’s heels, forgot everything but the lure of the primeval forest at our doors, where though death reigns, life is singularly care-free. Sometimes we see the big grey form of a sambur emerging slowly from the darkness of the wood above our house, out upon one of the little open places where the grass is yellowing; there the quiet thing will browse, as if no tiger ever were; if we exclaim, as the juvenile part of us seems unable to refrain from doing, there will be a quiet glance of enquiring eyes, a flicker of long ears, and then an imperceptible dissolving of grey into green. You do not see the sambur go. You only see him gone. The children led off that evening with a rollicky nonsense song sung to a mad tune which rises an octave higher with each repetition. Its equally mad words cheer our souls on the dullest day. Another which the children now produced is made up of the tale the Ranger himself told them, and I rather wondered how he would take the joke. The story tells how he and his six subordinates were out together in the forest "when suddenly from one of them proceeded a piercing scream,"

" ‘A tiger? Oh what did you do?‘ And he did smile and say, ‘Why, what do you expect we did?

We more or less ran away,’ " and the chorus prolongs the "more or less ran away" which always finally collapses in laughter.

I watched the old Ranger’s face, as they sang, but I need not have been anxious. Both he and his nice old forester beamed like grandfathers, not in the least seeing the point of the joke and so not being pricked by it. The laugh over, the forester observed gravely, "Doubtless it was the right thing to do; probably it not being a man-eater. Now with that species there is but one suitable course to pursue." And he told us that it is necessary to stand still till the instant the beast springs, then swerve aside, and he will plunge into the jungle and not return, for you at any rate, though he may for your companion, for a tiger never turns to spring again after a miss. It sounded easy enough, but unpleasant as an experience. And by way of corroboration, the forester told us of a man-eater who had eaten "a woman or some such thing" and was finally shot by an English­man. Two hunters went out that night, each made his machan (platform of boughs tied up among the branches of a tree wherein the hunter sits and watches for the tiger to return to his kill, or if a bait is fastened below for him to spring on it). Each had an unfortunate dog for bait. The first shot missed, and the tiger missed his spring and slunk off.

After a while he returned for the other dog, and was hit. Poor dogs and poor tiger. But man-eaters are impossible. "I myself have never been in such great danger from tigers. From monkeys, ah much," added the forester, and encouraged to proceed on what sounded an alluring path he told a blood-curdling tale. He was alone one day in the forest, when he heard the war-cry of the lion­-tailed monkeys; the fierce beasts were all but on him, grimacing and showing their sharp teeth. Once on him, a whole troop of them together, he knew he would be torn to shreds, he had no gun, only a knife, and it would be almost useless. So he stopped, picked up stones happily lying near, and hurled them at the creatures, who gave way for a minute, and he tore along the forest path towards safety. On they came again, and again he found stones to throw, three times they came on thus, and each time he repulsed them with stones, till at last with a wild spurt he got clear of the forest and was safe. But of all wise beasts a rogue elephant is wisest in his furies. A herd of elephants does no mischief. You may watch them graze, they won’t harm you, they will go away if they see you, frightened by the sight of a human. But a rogue (one turned out of the herd) he, poor beast, is too miserable to be frightened. He will attack, he will chase, he will watch his victim climb a tree, then go, fill his trunk with water. "Why?" exclaimed the children for whom this was almost too much. "To loosen the roots so that he maybe able to butt it down," was the astonishing answer.

"But if the tree is too big?"

"Then he will wait till the man comes down." This, the spectacle of the man up the tree and the elephant below, created a long diversion as every separate child wanted to tell what she would do if she were a man in similar circumstances. And then they having the field for the moment told their tales, of which they have a fair stock by this time.

They told of the monkey, the White Cap, one of King Solomon’s sort, who showed two of them the way home when they were far in the wood and were not sure of it; and of the tiger who dashed down the bank like a big cat, taking no notice of their two accals on the path, and of that other tiger who walked round their nurseries one night at Dohnavur, when they were asleep on the verandah, without even sniffing one of them (both tigers were seen later, one being in his own world went his ways in peace; the other poor beast was shot); and of the panther which came round our forest house one night, making a noise like a sawyer in a sawpit sawing timber. And of that other panther who stood long enough for their sittie, who was going down the wood one early morning, to see quite perfectly his beautiful markings and clear green eyes. And of the python our servant found and captured, it being sleepy after a meal of deer.

These things and many more they told, and the talk streamed on till at last we remembered to­morrow and went to bed. And all the time that little unintended phrase in the forester’s first story was running in and out of my head, "A woman or some such thing"; and when the talk ended and the children lay asleep, each in her scarlet blanket, sleeping the sleep of peace, those words took me by the hand and led me to strange places.

I saw again the temples to which they were to have belonged, those hateful temples with their huge towers and ancient tremendous masonry, their secret ways, their cruel ways, and the solid age-old feeling of Hindustan behind. What did it matter how many little woman-children those ways en­snared, those stone walls smothered? "A woman or some such thing," what mattered it what befell her? And yet in another way it mattered. Come between the tiger and his prey, even though she be only a woman or some such thing. Try to drag that morsel of prey away. Then see what will happen. And the Dohnavur nurseries, and many other places where hard fights are being fought, came to mind then, and I rejoiced as I remembered what the children mean to the Lord Who redeemed them, they are not "things" to Him. As it Was, and Is, but shall not ever Be The heart of the inhabitants shall be changed, and turned into another meaning. For evil shall be put out, and deceit shall be quenched. As for faith, it shall flourish, corruption shall be overcome, and the truth, which hath been so long without fruit, shall be declared.-’- 2Es 6:26-28.