WITHIN FOUR WALLS by Lucy E. Guinness

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 11, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 15.

WITHIN FOUR WALLS.

By Lucy E. Guinness

[A Missionary's Story.]

MISS SPENCE, of the London Missionary Society at Benares, had taken me one morning to see some of her zenana pupils. We went to several houses, all alike in principle, though richer or poorer in contents—men's apartments in front, the women's in the most secluded part of the house—mother-in-law, young wives, daughters, and children shut up within four walls.

"Do you never go out?" I asked them. "No." "Would you not like to go?" "Yes." "Surely you must have been sometimes?" "Once I went down the Ganges to bathe," a pretty young wife told us.

"She went in purdah," explained the older woman, "went in a shut-up palki-gari* early, very early, in the morning before it was light. She was back before the sun rose. No one saw her."

We looked around at the court-yard, at its mud floor and walls, its irregular doors leading into a few small rooms. The place seems quite a poor one; the rooms are low and dark, almost unfurnished—no rugs or carpets, chairs or tables, pictures, sofas, ornaments—nothing but rough, unpapered walls, cooking utensils, and a bed or two. Here these half dozen women spend their lives—the old mother, the blind girl, the two young daughters-in-law with their children—grind and eat, bathe and sleep, sit together and gossip. The neighbors who have called in to listen to the Miss Sahiba live in just such another place next door, within four walls.

We were waiting here for Ranee—waiting for her to dress—for her, at least, and her husband. It had been an unexpected triumph. We had called in to see her, had climbed the narrow stairs to her tiny bedroom (furnished with nothing but a bed), and had found pretty Ranee dressed in a simple, half-transparent sari, and beaming with delight at our visit. She is the only woman in this Brahman house, a house as poor as it is proud, and spends her life in cooking and doing what small housework is wanted in the narrow quarters she, her husband, and her husband's two brothers occupy. The father-in-law lives elsewhere usually, but is very fond of Ranee, and had actually told Miss Spence one day that he would allow her to visit the mission house sometime; but the promise was a dead letter, excuses being promptly made whenever fulfilment was proposed.

To-day, however, we pressed the husband—a slight, weak-looking creature, but devoted to his wife, whom he calls Ranee (queen) in compliment—to carry out the promise, and by dint of long persuasion had succeeded.

"She will not see a man?" he queried anxiously. "No, no; there is no man at the zenana house." "She must not be seen from the street." "You shall come with her, Kashi. You shall see her safely shut up in the carriage, and close all the windows yourself." "Well," he conceded at last, after a long hesitation and discussion, "come back in fifteen minutes and we will be prepared." Fifty minutes or more had passed on other visits, and now we came back to the narrow alley, in through the short passage to the hot little back yard, with its ruinous mud walls, through a breach in which a bit of the next-door yard is visible. "Ranee!" A sound of shuffling upstairs. No one answers.

"Ranee!" A pause. Presently the husband appears on the small balcony. "I am putting on my clothes," he remarks.

"We have waited more than fifteen minutes, Kashi." "Ah, Miss Sahiba, we possess no clocks."

Ranee's brilliant face looks smilingly over the light railing. They have both bathed and oiled themselves, and rearranged their hair with special attention. She is dressed in two delicate muslin saris, one over the other, each gayer than the one beneath, and daintily bordered with black. Over all she wears a soft pink chaddah. After some more delay the husband comes downstairs. "I have put on my best clothes," he remarks affably.

It is easy to smile approval, and rather difficult not to laugh at the odd figure he presents, with his naked brown feet and legs surmounted by the usual bunch of white stuff, the dhoti, worn by the Hindu gentleman, plus a sky-blue shirt and European waistcoat, whose striped cloth front and cotton back are surmounted by yards of fine white muslin loosely twisted like a lady's scarf about his neck. The anxious face of the young Brahman appears above the whole. "You are sure, Miss Sahiba, that she will not see a man?"

Not till we are seated in the palki-gari with every shutter closed, his younger brother inside with us and Ranee, and he himself upon the box, is Kashi satisfied, if then. The jolting roads jar the carriage shutters an inch or so apart as we drive, and Ranee glances shyly out; but the brother, a lad of twelve or fourteen, hastily shuts them up. Her momentary vision of the great world is over. How that graceful Indian woman, in her jewelry and muslins, her lips dyed scarlet with the betel she was chewing, her brilliant dark eyes flashing with delight, enjoyed that dull drive in the hot darkness of the palki-gari and the few minutes allowed her in the mission house!

The ladies dared not offer afternoon tea. To eat with us would have broken her caste; to suggest such a thing would have been a faux pas. The husband was on tenter-hooks lest some man should appear, and in about five minutes hurried her away back into the covered trap, and across town to the little side way, where she lives within four walls, cooking every morning in her tiny kitchen, waiting on her men-folk, cleaning up the little house, looking forward daily to the missionary girl's visits, trying hard to learn to read, and praying for a son.

"I pray to all the gods, and now since you have come I pray to Jesus also," she would say. "But the gods can not hear you. You should pray to Jesus only." Ranee looks up with her soft, wistful eyes—the message is so new.

An elephant, almost life size, was painted on the lower wall of the last house we went to, a large, commodious, rambling place, with a half dozen men lounging in one of the court-yards in the midday siesta, and apparently no women anywhere. On a sort of lower roof, open to the hot sky, we found at last the two girls we had come to see, young, gentle-mannered creatures, who could not speak a word of English, and had not been visited much yet. We sat down on the baked-mud ruins of some old cooking places; Miss Spence brought out a primer, and the two girls pressed close to us with solemn, interested faces. Soon they were patiently attempting to spell out syllables and understand the pictures and meaning of the page, lost in a painful struggle with the mysteries of print.

The younger, a shrewd, thin child of perhaps thirteen, not married yet, strange to say, was the sharper of the two. Her companion, a placid-looking young wife, gazed with hopeless eyes upon the primer, and seemed to take in little of what was said of Christ, tho she evidently liked to have us there. Puzzling out the letters, her brown finger on the page, her dark young head bent earnestly over the task, she sat in front of me, her knees pressing unconsciously against mine, her little sister-in-law, equally intent beside her, making a table of my lap. We could not stay long with them; the glaring heat of the afternoon sun warned us that time was passing.

It was so hard to go, so hard to look at those young faces, with their questioning, sad eyes, seeing them thus for the first and only time, unable to express to them the blessed truth of which one's heart was full, never to see them again until the great day.

"I have hardly ever visited these girls," said Miss Spence, in explanation of their evident ignorance and anxiety to learn. "There are so many houses! We can not visit any of our zenanas oftener than once a week, and we can not undertake to visit all the homes to which we are invited."

We rose to leave. The two girls watched us, looking sad and puzzled. "Come back soon," said the little one. Soon! Shall we ever go back? We said good-by, and left them there in the women's quarters, finding our way downstairs through the rambling Hindu house till we came to the painted elephant at the entrance.

I looked back. They were standing, silhouetted against the hot Indian sky, wistfully gazing over the parapet of the roof into the inner court-yard, across which we had passed. I shall never forget those faces, the dumb pleading of the eyes that followed us, the pathos of their ignorance, and of their willingness to learn. Within those four walls we left them waiting, waiting for Christ—for you.