The devotion given nationally to Gandhi and finally even internationally is well known, but I found the same homage paid to local persons who in their measure were also leaders because of their selflessness. Thus I remember a certain Indian village where I had been invited to visit in the home of a family of some modern education, though not much, and some means, though not wealth. The house was mud-walled and the roof was of thatch. Inside were several rooms, however, the floors smooth and polished with the usual mixture of cow dung and water. The active master of the house was not the head of the family, but a younger brother. This I discovered when I arrived, for before we entered the house, my host led me to a curious sort of cage standing well above the ground on four posts. Inside the cage, made of wire netting, I saw to my amazement an aging man, lying on his back, his head supported by a pillow.
“My eldest brother,” my host explained. “He has had a stroke of paralysis, and though we beg him to live in the house, he chooses to live out here so that he may be ready to listen to the villagers when they come to him.”
My host spoke fair English, but the elder brother spoke none, and we could only exchange greetings and look at each other with friendliness. What I saw was an intelligent, thin, pain-sharpened face, whose eyes were at once wise and piercing. The body was quite helpless, but it was scrupulously clean and the cotton garments were snow-white. We exchanged a few remarks, and then a group of villagers approached, not to see me but to talk with the elder brother, and so my host led me into the house to meet his young wife and children.
All during my stay I watched that cage, and seldom indeed did I see it except surrounded by people, and never, as long as daylight lasted, without at least one man squatting on the ground, talking earnestly and then listening. My host said,
“My brother has always been our wise man. Now he is our saint.”
My host, I observed, had his own place, too, in the village life, for twice while we were eating our luncheon that day he rose from his corner of the room and went out, to answer a shout, apparently from a neighbor. When he came back he made the same explanation.
“I was called to kill a dangerous snake.”
The luncheon was plain country fare, lentils, rice, spinach boiled very much, condiments. Before we ate, an old cousin brought in a brass ewer of water and a clean homespun towel for us to cleanse our hands with, a necessary preliminary to eating with the fingers. Chopsticks I had used all my life and preferred them to knife and fork, but after I had got used to eating with my right hand, I liked it as well. After all, what is so clean as one’s own right hand, washed? And from babyhood the Indian children are taught that the right hand is for clean services, such as eating, and the left hand may perform the more lowly tasks.
Another cleanliness was that our food was served on fresh green banana leaves instead of plates. Well-cooked rice piled on a broad green leaf is a pleasant sight and stimulates the appetite. In any household where caste was observed the food was placed on such leaves or in dishes of fresh pottery, broken after we had finished with them. My host fulfilled the requirements of his caste by eating in the opposite corner of the room, and sitting on the floor with his back to us. By now I had learned to overcome my first feeling about a distance such as this. It was simply a private devotion to a religious feeling and not inhospitality.
Religion is ever-present in Indian life, in its best as well as in its worst aspects, for there, as elsewhere, fanaticism reaches into evil. I liked the simple acceptance of religious motive, however, and the perfect freedom to behave as one’s religion moved the soul. Thus in my first Indian family, an intellectual and fairly well-to-do one, while I sat and talked with my hostess in her living room an Indian gentleman came in without speaking to us and moved gracefully to the far end of the room, his bare feet silent upon the floor. There he knelt, his head bowed, and so remained for perhaps a quarter of an hour. When I glanced at him curiously my hostess said in a manner entirely casuaclass="underline"
“It is my husband’s eldest brother. He comes here during the day at his prayer times, since his own home is at some distance from his place of business.”
When the prayer was over the brother went away again, and it was not until later that I met him, and then it was outside of prayer hours.
My life has been too crowded with travels and many people for me to put it all within the covers of one book, however, and indeed all my books have not been enough to tell the things I would like to tell. Years after I left India I wrote Come, My Beloved against its background. Strange, the Americans, except for a few, have not understood the real meaning of that book, but the Indian readers understand. We have not lived long enough, perhaps, to know universally that the price of achievement, whatever the goal, is an absolute. In my book I chose three Christian missionaries to prove it, for of all the people that I have ever known the missionary is, in his way, the most dedicated, the most single-hearted. He believes that God is the One, the Father of mankind and that all men are brothers. At least the Christian says he so believes and so he preaches. Then why has he failed to change the world in spite of his sacrifices? Alas, they have not been enough, and he has not been willing to pay the full price for faith. He pays only part, unable to accept utterly the full meaning of his creed. I see the same refusal here in my own country, over and over again, and not only among Christians. But the people of India know what it is to be willing to pay the last full measure of the cost of an idealism. They understand, and to them my book is not a puzzlement.
To China I returned with all that I had accumulated of knowledge and experience, and I stayed awhile, sorting over these treasures and pondering upon my own future. In Nanking again, a stone’s throw from the Nationalist government, I still saw no change for the better, no vision, no understanding of the real problems to be solved, and the people were increasingly sullen. The Communists were soon to be locked in the far Northwest, the Long March taking place in 1935, but the war lords were still not conquered, not all bought and bargained with, and Japan was ominous indeed. All this and more — bad news from my child across the sea, and in my house the deepening difference, finally made up my mind. I would leave China, if not forever, nevertheless as the country of my youthful heart and childhood life. I would go back to the land of my ancestors and make another life. The decision brought me closer than I had ever been to those ancestors. Once they, too, had left the known to go across the sea to the unknown. In my case there was a reversal — I had grown up alien and made a strange land mine, and now I was to return to the land of my ancestors. The uprooting was the same, whatever the direction.
Before I left I went once more to Peking, simply to see it, simply to impress upon my memory the last scenes of what had been the heart of my childhood China. It was not a private return, for by that time too many people knew me and there were invitations I could not refuse. I do not remember them now — what I do remember is the blind musician I met one twilight evening in a lonely street. I was walking just for pleasure when I heard the melody of an accomplished hand upon the two-stringed Chinese violin, and there against the light of the hutung was the figure of a big man in a long grey cotton robe. His massive head was high, his dark eyes wide-open but blind, as I could see when he came near. He held his violin across his breast, and as he played upon two strings with his bow he strode along, too absorbed to feel my presence. I have never forgotten that man, nor his melody.