From the unreal lead me to the real.
From the darkness lead me to light.
From death lead me to immortality.
His teacher was a tall ascetic Marathi, who was not a Christian. He sat immobile upon a low bamboo chair, wearing garments of cotton cloth, a hatlike turban on his head, his legs apart, his feet turned out and his dark hands resting exactly upon his white-clad knees. His wrinkled face was grave, his little black eyes were narrowed as he listened.
David looked up from a long passage he had been reading aloud from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, translated into Marathi. He smiled faintly at the dark attentive face.
“Forgive me that I read so long from the scriptures of my own religion.”
The Marathi shook his head. “And why should you say this, Sahib?” he replied. “It is a religion, it is good, you do not demand that I eat your bread and drink your wine, and while I listen I can fix my mind yonder.”
He nodded toward the Sanskrit prayer, framed upon the wall.
“All religions are good,” he declared.
At what point, David inquired of himself, should he challenge this frequent declaration, to which he had thus far replied only with silence? Silence implied acceptance, and he could not and must not accept the easy Indian attitude toward all religions. Any religion was better than none, so far he could agree with the Marathi teacher, but he longed to explain to this kind and proud man that the fruits of western Christianity were surely better than others. He had become convinced of it during this year in India, although when he left home, last year, he would have denied it because it was what his father said.
They had remained unreconciled, although as his duty and because his mother was dead he wrote to his father twice a month and received in return a monthly letter. But in spirit they were far apart. For his father had persisted in his monstrous wrath, and he had made the place he had planned as a memorial into a factory. Instead of young men learning of God, men and women, ignorant and uncouth, crowded into the big rooms at machines and made precision instruments for the MacArd industries. At the foot of the hill along the railroad hundreds of small houses were built, and there was a railroad stop for shipping. Dr. Barton, bitterly disappointed, had ignored the whole change after two stormy hours of argument with MacArd himself. The climax had come, as he told David, when with courage given him, he believed, from God, he had told the old tycoon the truth.
“You thought you were serving God by building a monument, Mr. MacArd. When He asked not for a monument but for your son, you grew angry. Do you think even you can be angry with God, Mr. MacArd?”
To which MacArd had replied, his eyebrows and beard bristling red, “I always make my own terms, Barton, and I’ll do it with God himself — if there is a God!”
For whatever impulse toward religion had risen in his father’s heart after his mother’s death, David knew had died down. Stony soil, perhaps, wherein the seed could not grow! He himself refused to feel guilty, or to believe that had he obeyed his father the seed would have grown. Sooner or later the MacArd Memorial would have become something else, anyway, if not a factory then some sort of a tool for the MacArd interests.
And as he had separated himself from his father his own growth had been hastened — that, too, he knew. The powerful shadow was thousands of miles away, and he was honest enough to wonder sometimes if his call to India, which had seemed to come so simply and clearly from God that day on the hillside above the Hudson River, had been partly because even then he wanted to go far away. If so, the call was no less valid, for God worked in mysterious ways. His faith had grown deeper while it became more reasonable, and the very atmosphere of India made faith reasonable. Religion was vital in the air, and sometimes, he thought, the only vitality. His task and his challenge was to make his own religion the most vital of all.
Meanwhile, life was pleasant. The mission house was large and cool, and white-clad servants flitted through the shadows of the drawn bamboo curtains, bringing hot tea and small English sweet biscuits just at the hours when he began to feel fatigue. There was even an English society and the Governor gave parties to which he was always invited, and there was English service on Sunday in the Cathedral. His senior missionary, Robert Fordham, did not encourage his joining too often in the festivities of the English people in Poona, but it was necessary to remain on good terms with the Governor, for sometimes favors must be asked. Missionaries must be loyal to Government, Mr. Fordham said solemnly, for only the protection of Empire made it possible for them to come and go as they wished about the countryside. Indeed, Robert Fordham often disagreed with young and rebellious Indians when they complained that India should be free, and at times he rebuked them with real severity, declaring that India was infinitely better off under the British than it had been when it was torn between the regional rulers who in the old days had oppressed the people while they destroyed each other with Oriental savagery.
It was true, David supposed, and yet something in the dark and passionate eyes of young Indians made him doubt the wisdom of the older missionary, under whose direction he was.
The morning hours passed, the sun rose high, and the compound which had looked so cool and green in the early morning, now glistened with heat.
He was aware suddenly of being hungry and he closed the book. “I must not keep you beyond your hour,” he said to his teacher. “I forget how the time passes.”
“For me time is nothing,” the Marathi replied. “I have sat here watching you. You do not tell me what your thoughts are.”
David gave his ready smile. “They are scarcely thoughts, not worth telling. I put off real thinking, perhaps because I do not know yet what I ought to think. I feel I know India less and not more as time goes on.”
The Marathi laughed. “When you can think in our language, you will know us. Give yourself another year.”
He rose, and David rose with him. They parted as usual, and the Marathi went away, his full white trousers swinging about him.
David put his books together and went to his room, next to his study, to prepare for the noon meal. The mission house was a large square bungalow, encircled with a deep arched veranda to keep the heat of the sun from penetrating into the rooms. A wide hall divided the house, and at one end was his study and next it his bedroom. Both rooms were big and the bare floors, the bamboo furniture and the high ceilings gave them an air of coolness.
When he had washed he went down the hall to the dining room, where Mrs. Fordham was already seated at one end of the oval dining table, ladling soup into flat English soup plates.
“Sit down, Mr. MacArd,” she said with brisk good humor. “We won’t wait for Mr. Fordham.” She bent her head, her mouse-brown hair always disheveled, and gabbled a swift grace.
“For what we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful. Amen. Shall you get over to Bible Class this afternoon, Mr. MacArd?”
“I think not,” David replied.
“It’s a bad example, you know,” she said with her cheerful sharpness.
“I am sorry for that,” he said.
He was accustomed to these fencing bouts with Mrs. Fordham and he carried them through with humor. As soon as Mr. Fordham came she would stop, and the meal would proceed kindly. Mr. Fordham was a large man, shrewd and tolerant from long living in a hot climate. He came in now, his heavy body bulging in a suit of wrinkled white linen, and sat down at the opposite end of the table from his wife.