John Wesley, Jr. Part 23

With the others J.W. set out for an advantageous observation point, on the wall of the fort which stands on the tongue of land between the two streams. On the way J.W. a.s.sured himself that if Calcutta seemed without religion, here was more than enough of it to redress the balances. In the throng was a holy man whose upraised arm had been held aloft until it had atrophied, and would never more swing by his side. And yonder another holy one sat in the sand, with a circle of little fires burning close about him. The seeker after he knew not what who made his search while lying on a bed of spikes was here. And once a procession pa.s.sed, two hundred men, all holy after the fashion of Hindu holiness, all utterly naked, with camels and elephants moving in their train. As if to show how these were counted men of special sanct.i.ty, the people fell on their faces to the ground beside them as they pa.s.sed, and kissed their shadows on the sand.

The point of vantage reached, J.W.'s bewildered eyes could scarce make his brain believe what they saw. He was standing on a broad wall, thirty feet above the water, and perhaps a hundred feet back from it. Up and down the stream was an endless solid ma.s.s of heads. J.W. looked for some break in the crowd, some thinning out of its packed bodies, but as far as he could see there was no break, no end. Government officials had estimated the number of pilgrims at two millions!

A signal must have been given, or an hour had come--J.W. could not tell which--but somehow the people knew that now was the opportunity to enter the water and gain cleansing from all sin. A mighty, resistless movement carried the human stream to meet the river. Inevitably the weaker individuals were swept along helpless, and those who fell arose no more.

Horrified, J.W. stood looking down on the slow, irresistible movement of the writhing bodies, and he saw a woman drop. A British police officer, standing in an angle of the wall beneath, ordered a native policeman to get the woman out But the native, seeing the crush and unwilling to risk himself for so slight a cause, waited until his superior turned away to another point of peril, and then, s.n.a.t.c.hing the red-banded police turban from his head, was lost in the general ma.s.s.

The woman? Trampled to death, and twenty other men and women with her, in sight of the stunned watchers on the wall, who were compelled to see these lives crushed out, powerless to help by so much as a finger's weight.

What was it all for? J.W. asked his companions on the wall. And they said that the word went out at certain times and the people flocked to this Mela. They came to wash in the sacred waters at the propitious moment. Nothing else mattered; not the inescapable pollution of the rivers, not the weariness and hunger and many distresses of the way. It was a chance, so the wise ones declared, to be rid of sin. Certainly it might not avail, but who would not venture if mayhap there might be cleansing of soul in the waters of Mother Ganges?

On another day J.W. came to a temple, not a great towering shrine, but a third-rate sort of place, a sacred cow temple. Here was a family which had journeyed four hundred miles to worship before the idols of this temple. They offered rice to one idol, flowers to another, holy water from the river to a third. No one might know what inner urge had driven them here. The priest, slow to heed them, at length deigned to dip his finger in a little paint and with it he smeared the caste mark on the foreheads of the worshipers. It was heartless, empty formality.

J.W. watched the woman particularly. Her face was an unrelieved sadness; she had fulfilled the prescribed rites, in the appointed place, but there was no surcease from the endless round of dull misery which she knew was her ordained lot. Thought J.W.: "I suppose this is a sort of joining the church, an initiation or something of that sort. Not much like what happened when I joined the church in Delafield. Everybody was glad there; here n.o.body is glad, not even the priest."

At Cawnpore J.W. was able to combine business with his missionary inquiries. Here he found great woollen and cotton mills, not unlike those of America, except that in these mills women and children were working long hours, seven days a week, for a miserable wage. It was heathenism plus commercialism; that is to say, a double heathenism. For when business is not tempered by the Christian spirit, it is as pagan as any cow temple.

In these mills was a possible market for certain sorts of c.u.mmings goods, as J.W. learned in the business quarter of the city. He wanted more opportunity to see how the goods he dealt in could be used, and, having by now learned the path of least resistance, he appealed to a missionary. It was specially fortunate that he did, for the missionary introduced him to the secretary of the largest mills in the city, an Indian Christian with a history.

Now, this is a hint at the story of--well, let us call him Abraham. His own is another Bible name, of more humble a.s.sociations, but he deserves to be called Abraham. Thirty years ago a missionary first evangelized and then baptized some two hundred villagers--outcasts, untouchables, social lepers. Being newly become Christians, they deposed their old village G.o.d. The landlord beat them and berated them, but they were done with the idol. Now, that was no easy adventure of faith, and those who thus adventured could not hope for material gain. They were more despised than ever.

Yet inevitably they began to rise in the human scale. The missionary found one of them a young man of parts. Him he took and taught to read, to write, to know the Scriptures. He began to be an exhorter; then a local preacher; and at last he joined the Conference as a Methodist itinerant at six dollars a month. Now this boy was the father of Abraham.

As a preacher he opened village schools, and taught the children their letters, his own boy among them. Abraham learned quickly. A place was found for him in a mission boarding school. Thence he moved on and up to Lucknow Christian College. It was this man who escorted J.W. through the great mills of which he was an executive. He had a salary of two hundred dollars a month. If his father had been an American village preacher at twelve hundred dollars a year, Abraham's salary, relatively, would need to be twenty or thirty thousand dollars.

Abraham was the superintendent of a Sunday school in Cawnpore. He was giving himself to all sorts of betterment work which would lessen the misery of the poor. He had a seat in the city council. A hostel for boys was one of his enterprises. Here was a man doing his utmost to Christianize the industry in which thousands of his country men spent their lives; a second-generation Christian, and a man who must be reckoned with, no longer spurned and despised as a casteless n.o.body.

J.W. followed Abraham about the mills with growing admiration. Inside the walls, light, orderly paths, flowers, cleanliness. Outside the gate, to step across the road was to walk a thousand years into the past, among the smells and the ageless noises of the bazaar, with its chaffering and cheating, its primitive crudities, and its changeless wares. Certainly, a Cawnpore mill is not the ideal industrial commonwealth, but without men like Abraham to alleviate its grimness the coming of larger opportunities through work like this might well lay a heavier burden on men's lives than the primitive and costly toil which it has displaced.

There was just time for a visit to Lucknow, a city which to the British is the historic place of mutiny and siege; to American Methodists a place both of history and of present-day advance. J.W. worshiped in the great Hindustani Methodist church, the busy home of many activities. In the congregation were many students, girls from Isabella Thoburn College, and boys from Lucknow Christian College. Lifelong Methodist as he was, J.W. quickly recognized, even amid these new surroundings, the familiar aspects of a Methodist church on its busy day. The crowding congregations were enough to stir one's blood. A n.o.ble organ sounded out the call to worship and led the choir and people in the service of praise. There was a Sunday school in full operation, and an Epworth League Chapter, completely organized and active. His guide confided to J.W. that this church had yet another point of resemblance to the great churches at home; it was quite accustomed to sending a committee to Conference, to tell the bishop whom it wanted for preacher next year!

J.W. was not quite satisfied. The days of his wanderings must soon be over, but before he left India he wanted to see the missionary in actual contact with the immemorial paganism of the villages, for he had discovered that the village is India. How was the Christian message meeting all the dreary emptinesses and limitations of village life?

Once more he appealed to his missionary guide; this latest one, the last of the five men to whom Pastor Drury had written before J.W. had set out on his travels. Could he show his visitor a little of missionary work in village environment?

"Surely. Nothing easier," the district superintendent said. "We'll jump into my Ford--great thing for India, the Ford; and still greater for us missionaries--and we'll go a-villaging."

The village of their quest once reached, the Ford drew up before a neat brick house built around three sides of a courtyard, with verandas on the court side. This was no usual mud hut, but a house, and a parsonage withal. Here lived the Indian village preacher and his family. The preacher's wife was neatly dressed and capable; the children clean and well-mannered. The room had its table, and on the table books. That meant nothing to J.W., but the superintendent gave him to understand that a table with books in an Indian village house was comparable in its rarity to a small-town American home with a pipe organ and a butler!

The lunch of native food seemed delicious, if it was "hot," to J.W.'s healthy appet.i.te, and if he had not seen over how tiny a fire it had been prepared he would have credited the smiling housewife with a lavishly equipped kitchen.

People began to drop in. It was somewhat disconcerting to the visitor, to see these callers squatting on their heels, talking one to another, but watching him continually out of the corners of their eyes. One of them, the chaudrie, headman of the village, being introduced to J.W., told him, the superintendent acting as interpreter, how the boys' school flourished, and how he and other Christians had gone yesterday on an evangelizing visit to another village, not yet Christian, but sure to ask for a teacher soon.

The preacher, in a rather precise, clipped English, asked J.W. if he cared to walk about the village. "We could go to the _mohulla_ [ward], where most of our Christians live. They will be most glad to welcome you."

The way led through dirty, narrow streets, or, rather, let us say, through the s.p.a.ces between dwellings, to the low-caste quarter. Here were people of the bottom stratum of Indian life, yet it was a Christian community in the making. The little school was in session--a group of fifteen or twenty boys and girls with their teacher. It was all very crude, but the children read their lessons for the visitor, and did sums on the board, and sang a hymn which the pastor had composed, and recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third psalm.

"These," said the pastor, "are the children of a people which for a thousand years has not known how to read or write. Yet see how they learn."

"Yes," the superintendent agreed, "but that isn't the best of it, as you know. They are untouchables now, but even caste, which is stronger than death, yields to education. Once these boys and girls have an education they cannot be ignored or kept down. They will find a place in the social order."

"I can see that," J.W. said, thinking of Abraham. "But education is not a missionary monopoly, is it? If these children were educated by Hindus, would not the resulting rise in their condition come just the same?"

"It would, perhaps," the missionary answered, "but your 'if' is too big.

For the low caste and the out-caste people there is no education unless it is Christian education. We have a monopoly, though not of our choosing. The educated Hindu will not do this work under any circ.u.mstances. It has been tried, with all the prestige of the government, which is no small matter in India, and nothing comes of it.

Not long ago the government proposed a wonderful scheme for the education of the 'depressed cla.s.ses.' The money was provided, and the equipment as well. There were plenty of Hindus, that is, non-Christians, who were indebted to the government for their education. They were invited to take positions in the new schools. But no; not for any money or any other inducement would these teachers go near. And there you are.

I know of no way out for the great ma.s.ses of India except as the gospel opens the door."

"Is there no attempt of any sort on the part of Indians who are not Christians? Surely, some of them are enlightened enough to see the need, and to rise above caste." J.W. suspected he was asking a question which had but one answer.

"Yes, there is such an effort occasionally," the superintendent admitted. "The Arya Samaj movement makes an attempt once in a while, but it always fails. If a few are bold enough to disregard caste, they are never enough to do anything that counts. The effort is scarcely more than a gesture, and even so it would not have been made but for the activities of the missionaries."

And so ended J.W.'s Indian studies. Before many days he was retracing his way--Calcutta, Singapore, Hongkong, Shanghai, Yokohama. And then on a day he found himself aboard a liner whose prow turned eastward from j.a.pan's great port, and his heart was flying a homeward-bound pennant the like of which never trailed from any masthead.

THIS EXPERIMENT TEACHETH--?

For the first day or so out from j.a.pan J.W. behaved himself as does any ordinary American in similar case; all the sensations of the journey were swallowed up in the depths of his longings to be home. The voyage so slow; the Pacific so wide!

But shortly he resigned himself to the pervading restfulness of shipboard, and began to make acquaintances. Of them all one only has any interest for us--Miss Helen Morel, late of Manila. Her place was next to his at the table. Like J.W., she was traveling alone, and before they had been on board twenty-four hours they had discovered that both were Methodists; he, from Delafield in the Middle West, she from Pennsylvania. J.W. found, altogether to his surprise, that she listened with flattering attention while he talked. For J.W. is no braggart, nor is he overmuch given to self-admiration; we know him better than that.

But it was pleasant, none the less, on good days to walk up and down the long decks, and on other days to sit in comfortable deck chairs, with nothing to do but talk.

Miss Morel, being a teacher going home after three years of steady, close work in a Manila high school, was ready to talk of anything but school work. She found herself immensely interested in J.W.'s experiences. He had told her of the double life, so to say, which he had led; preaching the good news of better tools, and studying the work of other men and women, as truly salesmen as himself, who preached a more arresting and insistent gospel.

"I'm glad to meet some one who knows about missions at first hand," Miss Morel began one morning, as they stepped out on the promenade deck for their const.i.tutional. "You know, I think people at home don't understand at all. They are so absorbed with their little parish affairs that they can't appreciate this wonderful work that is being done so far from home."

J.W. agreed, though not without mental reservations. He knew how true it was that many of the home folks did not rightly value mission work, but he was not so sure about their "little parish affairs." He watched to see if Miss Morel meant to expand that idea.

But she evidently had thought at once of something else. Said she, "Sometimes I think that if the gossip about missionaries and missions which is so general in the Orient gets back home, as it surely does in one way or another, it must have a certain influence on what people think about the work."

"Oh, that," said J.W., with no little scorn. "That stuff is always ignorant or malicious, and I doubt if it gets very far with church people. Of course it may with outsiders. I've heard it, any amount of it; you can't miss it if you travel in the East And there's just enough excuse for it to make it a particularly vicious sort of slander. You could say as much about the churches at home, and a case here and there would not be lacking to furnish proof."

"Certainly," said the teacher. "And yet missions are so wonderful; so much more worth while than anything that is being done at home, don't you think?"

There it was again. "I'm afraid I don't follow you, Miss Morel," J.W.

said, with a puzzled air. "Do you mean that the churches at home are not onto their job, if you'll excuse the phrase?"

His companion laughed as she answered, "Maybe not quite as strong as that. But they are doing the same old thing in the same old way. Going to church and home again, to Sunday school and home again, to young people's meeting and home again. But out here," and her hand swung in a half circle as though she meant to include the whole Pacific basin, "out here men and women are doing such splendid pioneer work, in all sorts of fascinating ways."

"True enough," J.W. a.s.sented. "I've seen that, all right. But the home church isn't so dead as you might think. Just before I left Delafield to go to Saint Louis, for instance, a new work for the foreign-speaking people of our town was being started, with the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension backing up the local workers. They were planning to make a great church center for all these people, and I hear that it is getting a good start."

"Oh, yes, I can well believe that, Mr. Farwell," Miss Morel hastened to say. "I think work for the immigrant is so very interesting, don't you?

But, of course, that's not quite what I meant. The usual dull things that churches do, you know."

"Well, take another instance that I happen to remember," J.W. had a touch of the sort of feeling he used to delight in at Cartwright, when he was gathering his material for a debate. "My first summer after leaving college, a few of us in First Church got busy studying our own town. We found two of the general church boards ready to help us with facts and methods. The Home Missions people gave us one sort of help, and another board, with the longest name of them all, the Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals, showed us how to go about an investigation of the town's undesirable citizens and their influence. It is in that sort of business for all of us, you know."