Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (7)

“This isn’t reward, this is your place; no other can hold down the job. You’ve done it for months. There wouldn’t have been any _Public Square_, if you hadn’t. I know all about the ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ story, and the editorial paragraphs and how you have kept up the reviews, and somehow got stories without money and without price. John Higgins told me everything. It isn’t giving you reward. It is only going on as you were, with some money to work with, and two or three good men to help, and a salary for yourself that will make up in a small way for the pittance you’ve been living on for years.”

“There mustn’t be any desk, Dicky,” she said queerly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’d be the laughing stock of New York, if I perched on a desk, calling myself the Editor.”

She halted, thinking of what Miss Claes had advised about her authorship of _The Lance of the Rivernais_.

“You’ll take it, Pidge?” he said with deadly calm.

“I’ll do what I can until you come back. It must be managed very silently. No announcements. I’ll be there as I was. I’ve been thinking a lot. _The Public Square_--I know how dear it is to you, Dicky. It is to me, too. It will be wonderful to have some money to work with. I know about Bothwell. He’s the right man for the advertising.”

“I left it open--for you to choose the one to help you when Bert Ames goes over to Washington.”

Her eyes turned to him directly now, searchingly. There seemed to be something intelligible for him in them, but he did not divine the meaning.

“That’ll all work out,” she said presently. “We mustn’t try to plan it all now.”

Her eyes filled with laughter.

“Oh, Dicky,” she said, “if I’d ever get self-conscious about feeling all the responsibilities of _The Public Square_ resting upon my shoulders--I’d muddle the whole business in a day!”

“They have rested on your shoulders, Pidge.”

“Yes, but I didn’t stop to think.... In another minute you’ll be able to see the ocean!”

They were silent. Then she pointed over the motor-man’s shoulder, and he saw a vast stretch of leveled azure, like sky ironed out smooth.

“And--you’re--going--across!” she said suddenly--“still after the Big Story that you’ve always been looking for. And oh, Dicky, I’ll go to see them when you’re gone--your mother and aunt and sister.”

“It did a lot for me to learn that you had called.”

“Dicky,” she said solemnly, “when they told me what you’d done in Paris----”

“Let’s not--Pidge.”

“And when I remembered that Sunday afternoon you took me to your house--and what a beast I was--oh, how that hurt! I’ve been so sorry and so grateful.”

* * * * *

He had seen Pidge with the baby in her arms. He had held the baby himself, in fact, while she got breakfast one morning, and their laughter had disturbed Mr. Adolph Musser, who felt that the world was no place for such laughter with his nerves in the condition they were.

“His back feels so funny,” Dicky had reported concerning the infant.

Pidge gave him a look, and went on timing the eggs. Mr. Musser’s egg had to lie three and one-half minutes in water that had ceased to boil.

“And his hair stays combed,” Dicky added.

He had held converse with Mr. Musser, which was an experience. Mrs. Rab Gaunt Hastings had gone her way after a series of such experiences, her fortune undivided. It had been said that the undivided nature of her departure was in a measure responsible for Mr. Musser’s nervous breakdown, though he explained it metaphysically. Since he could not be left in his weak state, it was arranged for him to return with Pidge to New York.

“I have known for many months that the field of my labors was to be amplified,” said Mr. Musser, with one of his sudden hopeful flashes. “My illness is but a cleansing in preparation. Always the wrecker before the builder. My throat, for instance----”

Pidge called at this point from the fig tree back of the bungalow. It was their last day.... For seven days they had walked the sunny silent mesas, traced the interminable canyons, and miles and miles of curving shore of the sea. To-night for him, the Valley train to San Francisco; to-morrow afternoon, the Pacific Mail steamer.... She had spoken of Rufus Melton for the first time.

“You think he was really married in France?” she asked.

“They frightened him into it,” Dicky said. “It seemed to me as if Rufe looked upon it as a way out--then found that they didn’t mean to let him escape, even then.”

There was no suffocating emotion about this talk. It was only in moments like this that he understood that he had earned something through the years. They had to go back to the bungalow for lunch with the elder and the child, who objected to each other. There was only a little while alone in the afternoon, because he had to be in Los Angeles for his train at six.

“I started things going among the agents in New York, for a serial,” he said at the last, “but you’ll have to decide. We want a corking long story, Pidge--one that has brain and brawn----”

Her face was turned away.

“Just the right one should be lying around somewhere,” he added.

“I’ll look,” she said.

She would have gone into the city with him, but he objected: “You would have to come back alone!”

Their real parting was on the Palisades, and there were few words about it.

“It’s work, now,” he said. “We go opposite ways for the same job--the Story of the Age.”

“And after that--New York,” she answered.

They stood in the superb sunlight at the edge of the escarpment. Hundreds of feet below was the old abandoned bathhouse, and the three white lines of surf pressing into the land, like tireless fingers of a modeler upon the clay. To the left was the portal of the Canyon, to the right the fallow lands with feathery brushes of eucalyptus against the sky.

“We’re all meshed yet, Dicky--meshed in wantings and struggles, all tracked up with recent experiences. We can’t see each other clearly yet----”

He was looking into her face in half profile. Quietly it had dawned upon him that he couldn’t have spared a single one of the hard days of the past five years, not a single one of the black patches, even. They were the dark rooms in which this present striking film had been developed.

“We can’t--what?” he said strangely.

She was speaking, but still he didn’t hear, for that moment in the superb sunlight, he saw Pidge Musser as he had never seen her before.

XL

THE YANK DEVELOPED

DICKY reached Calcutta toward the end of March, 1919, and had no difficulty in learning that the Little Man would be in Bombay within a week. Where Gandhi was at any given time in the Indian Empire these days was the most public of all facts. It was as if one entered a house and asked the children where their mother was. Both the native and English press were full of his sayings and doings, though he was seen and heard, of course, from different angles. The Rowlatt Bills had just been passed, and Dicky painstakingly looked into the nature of these.

He heard that Gandhi was ill; that he scarcely could stand, in fact; but that he was speaking to great throngs every day. A few days ago he had talked to thousands on the Beach at Madras. Since then he had traveled to Trichinopoly, to Tuticorin, to Negapatam where he had addressed a monster gathering in the Nazir gardens, pledging the people to _Satyagraha_ by thousands, and warning them with terrible warnings before they pledged, that the step they took meant self-suffering; that they must not use violence against the Government in thought or deed.

Dicky crossed to Bombay immediately, hoping to find Nagar there. On the train a young officer of the military who had come from Singapore on the same ship with him, met an elderly friend of the civil service. They talked in Dicky’s presence.

“But why don’t they arrest the fanatic?” the soldier asked.

The elderly departmental officer smiled. “That’s what they all ask at first,” he said.

“But, if he’s preaching sedition----”

“He is also preaching nonviolence. British Government hasn’t a better friend in India at the present hour than this same little barrister. The people are upset over the Rowlatt Bills, and Gandhi is calming them down. Arrest him, I think not!... We have much to thank Gandhi for. He helped along enlistments, and now he preaches nonviolence. It’s all religion with him. He’s a political saint. The thousands follow him like a Messiah. Pretty safe sort of thing, to have a Messiah around advising the multitudes to turn their other cheek. Not that we’ve slapped one, you know.”

In the sweltering core of the native city, Dicky found the house which Gandhi used as headquarters while in Bombay. Here a letter awaited him from Nagar, written at Lahore, advising him to look to Mahatma-ji for counsel; and hoping that they would soon be together. In his room Dicky sent out for an armful of recent newspapers and publications, determined to get the situation further in hand.

... No question about India being a bit stunned over the passage of the Rowlatt Bills two weeks before. These measures provided that the ordinary criminal laws should be supplemented, and certain emergency powers added by the Government to deal with anarchical and revolutionary movements. The shock to native India lay in the fact that she had been led to expect that the measures adopted during the War would be mitigated, rather than intensified at this time. And Mahatma-ji was on the war path of the Soul.

Gandhi reached Bombay on April third. He was followed by a great crowd from the railroad station to the house of his host. Dicky, who had watched from a distance the emerging of the Indian idol from his third-class coach, wondered if he were ever again to get the Little Man alone in a room as in Ahmedabad. He hadn’t been in the hotel an hour, however, before he received a message to accompany bearer to Gandhi’s headquarters.

The native led him through the crowd without difficulty, and to an inner room where Mahatma-ji sat alone, both hands extended. Dicky sat down on the empty cushion before him.

“It is good to see you again, Mr. Cobden.... I regret that I was not in Bombay when you arrived; especially since it happened that Nagarjuna was needed in the north at this time, but we cannot think first of our own affairs. I am expected in Lahore on the tenth, but doubtless you will start for there or for Amritsar, which is very near, before that. Nagarjuna is now in Amritsar.”

“I will wait and travel with you, if you permit,” Dicky began.

The other smiled.

“My way of travel is not yours, I am afraid. It might be interesting enough for just one journey, but I question the judgment of it. To be seen too much with me is to become persona non grata to the English. This would prove a detriment to the work you are to do. Remember that you are an American, and that basically the American spirit is above partisanship.”

Gandhi was slightly changed. The wasted body was even lower on its cushions. The look of intense weariness was still apparent, but the look of fearlessness was enhanced. Dicky heard the humming of the _charka_ in the next room as before. The fragrance returned to his nostrils. The old feeling stole over him of eagerness to do something for the physical welfare of the man before him, something to make the mere enduring of life easier.

“Physicians tell me that I should be very quiet,” Gandhi explained with a smile. “It is true that I was unable to keep all my appointments to speak on the other side of India, but in the main I am very active. The human body may be made to do what is required of it, after a fashion.... Yes, there are many changes. Our position is rapidly becoming one of direct opposition to Government. We were slow to realize these things.... Our movement depends for its success entirely upon perfect self-possession, self-restraint, absolute adherence to truth and unlimited capacity for self-suffering. In this manner only may we dare to oppose the Rowlatt legislation, and resist the spirit of terrorism which lies behind it, and of which it is the most glaring symptom.”

Dicky’s reaction was queer. He understood the point about the Government daring to leave this man at large, but didn’t Government see deeper than this placid mask? Of all keepers of the peace, Gandhi was apparently master; but in the fearlessness of the eyes that gazed on him now, Dicky fancied for a moment, at least, that he saw what British Government did not. The Little Man suddenly appeared to him as the living embodiment of the Enemy to all existing Governments, utterly terrible in stillness and poise. At the same time, Dicky didn’t lose for a moment his feeling of pity for the wasted figure before him, that tenderness which he could not even have explained to an American.

“... I see you have been faithfully at work, Mr. Cobden,” the Little Man was saying now. “Some time I would have you tell me of your days on the French fields--what you found there after India--whatever you care to speak of experiences which evidently have brought you forward in kindness and understanding and peace----”

“I am glad you find----” Dicky began in an embarrassed tone.

“It is well for me to tell you, but that is sufficient,” Gandhi added. “These are our affairs, not yours----”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand that.”

“We have a saying that one who is coming forward in attainment must not delay his progress by pausing to contemplate or analyze himself. One’s attainment rightly is the joy and affair of every other being but that one.”

Dicky now felt that there was something to report to America in the story of Gandhi and his following of millions. For three days he was with the Little Man, morning and afternoon. Very sternly he had impressed upon himself the fatuousness of expecting anything like the old “miracle.” There was no need for that miracle now, Dicky informed himself gravely and repeatedly, for something of Pidge Musser ceased to be alive in his heart at no time, though much pain of yearning was connected with it and pity and human questionings. He had learned well by now that all really important experiences are spontaneous and can only steal into a mind that is emptied of anticipation and its own inferior pictures.

But on the third day something came to him--as fruits from his dreary months of France. He had been speaking to Gandhi of the hideous directionless campaign days there. Suddenly, as he himself talked, the American Soldier in composite was unveiled before him--the game and grinning Yank, who had held fast in faith to but one thing under smoke and sun, against shock and night itself--his sense of Humor, the fun of the thing.

Dicky _saw_ the Yank, now. That was all there was to it. In the dark room of France the picture had developed and the presence of Mohandas Gandhi now brought it out to the light. It was Dicky’s for all time, and his eyes closed with pain that his old friend John Higgins had missed it--the one thing that one needed to know, to keep one’s faith in America, and to gamble even to life itself that the new order of nobleman should one day arise with laughter.

... He walked the streets of Bombay afterward, and then wrote to Pidge late at night, though he was leaving for the north early in the morning. It seemed he could not wait to tell her. All the meanings of New York that he had caught as a New Yorker, in his own home and in the house of Miss Claes, as an exile in Asia and correspondent in France--fused into a sort of splendid synthesis at last.

He saw ships coming from all Europe to New York Harbor--coming in through The Narrows bearing the emigrants of all Europe--passing under the Statue of Liberty--tiny seeds diffusing into the vast crucible of The States, running out from the meeting point of Manhattan on all the red lines of railroad, into all the green rivers, planting themselves in all parts, for the emerging of the New Race at last--the Laughing Men, the dense physical model of which he had seen in France.

XLI

UNDER THE MANGOES OF CAWNPORE

“NO haste, but no delay.” Gandhi had used the very words in suggesting that it would be well for Dicky to join Nagar in the north. The American telegraphed that he would reach Amritsar on the evening of the ninth, and made his way northward leisurely, stopping over in Cawnpore, for a full day. It was in Cawnpore, toward midday, after a two hours’ ramble in white dust and the killing colorless heat, that Dicky halted in the shade of a little grove of mangoes. He took off his helmet and mopped his brow with a piece of silk already damp. In the shade, at a slight distance (his left foot twisted into the ground), sat an ascetic who kept on with his muttering, not turning the way of the American.

The look of an iron statue suggested itself. There were ashes, and worse, in the holy man’s hair, and in one empty eye socket. The hands were held out in space--twisted, seared hands, but so moveless that Dicky thought of the iron statue again. The wrists were thick and very strong. Cobden squinted his eyes back toward the pitiless Indian street, and then he perceived the Hindu’s face turned to him. A single vivid eye held him, as by the scruff of the neck. The voice was deep and resonant as from one who had learned to breathe, a rare art. The words in English were quietly spoken:

“It is written, my son, that you are to come to the end of your search within six days.”

Dicky edged closer, and asked courteously: “Do you really get it that way?”

“So it reads in the crystals. To one who truly reads, the tale is one--whether read in the crystals or the stars.”

The holy man lifted from between his thighs a handful of stained and rusty stones.

“You will go to a wall,” he added studiously. “You will enter through the gate of the wall----”

“What wall, father?”

“Who knows? I see the wall. The end comes within six days, and there is tumult.”

“The end of my life?”

“There seems no surety of that, but it is possible.”

The deep voice of the _hathayogin_ went on: “The crystals foretell, but the wisdom and daring of man forestall. Had you not come to this tree, there would be no hope. As it is, you may come again to-morrow at this time.”

“I’m afraid not, father. Whatever wall it is, I shall be one day nearer it, to-morrow.”

Few would have noted the faint film of pallor under Dicky Cobden’s tan. As white men go, he knew something about the Indian holy men. The more he learned, the more he respected certain rare types. There is a saying in India that the real mystic never begs. Dicky determined to learn the quality of the man before him, for he arose now to depart without offering a present in money.

“Perhaps, father, from this meeting, I shall be wiser to face the fate that awaits me at the wall.”

“You should be wise enough to take one day from your journey.”

“I cannot take what is not altogether my own,” the American laughed. “I am saying good-by now.”

He walked slowly out of the shade of the trees. With each step, his blood chilled a little, in spite of noon heat. He thought of _The Public Square_, of Pidge Musser at the desk there, of Harrow Street. Death had to come some time, but life wasn’t boring him just now. The sunlight of the open stretch stung his eyes with great weariness. The deep voice called from behind:

“Stay, my pupil!”

Dicky halted and returned, looking down into the apparently guileless and desireless eye. “Alms for the temple in Cawnpore,” the lips intone.

“By all means, father,” the other said, no visible change upon his face, as he placed in the palm of the beggar several bits of silver from his purse. In the burning day again, he lifted a tired smile to the sun. No true mystic, perhaps, but what had this man seen in the crystals?

XLII

LALA RELU RAM

NAGAR took him by the hand at the railway station in Amritsar on the evening of the ninth of April, 1919. The need for many words seemed past; there was quiet gladness. Dicky took up his quarters in the _Golden Temple Inn_. Under the lights at the entrance, as he passed in with Nagar, groups of Mohammedans and Hindus stood together, with self-conscious but eager shows of mutual friendship, and the American rubbed his eyes.

If there was one thing in India that could be counted upon like Government itself, it was the mutual hatred of these two great divisions of native life. Dicky had heard in recent days much of the swift breaking down of these barriers, under the influence of Mahatma-ji, but he had seen no example of it working out like this under the lights of the Inn.

“But what do the English think when they see the Hindu and Moslem _kowtowing_ to each other--as at the door below when we came in?” Dicky inquired.

“The Deputy Commissioner, the highest English civilian of Amritsar, looked upon a similar spectacle to-day,” Nagar said. “I did not hear him, but he is reported to have remarked, ‘There’s going to be a row here,’ and drank much cold soda water.”

“What is your work here, Nagar?”

“I have been working among the students at the college of Lahore, and now here in Amritsar, working with the young men and women.”

“Preaching Gandhi’s sort of peace?”

“Yes,” said Nagar.

“I still wonder that the English don’t ‘get’ the Little Man, Nagar.”

“The Government regards him as harmless because he speaks of Soul-force. It deals with precedents; Mahatma-ji with ideals----”

“You think the Government will arrest him sooner or later?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Won’t that stop or hurt the work?”

“I remember,” said Nagar, “hearing the school children in New York sing, ‘John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his Soul goes marching on.’ A spiritual beginning never stops. Mahatma-ji has already brought his few spiritual principles into matter, into action.”

“Tunnel,” said Dicky.

“Night and day Mahatma-ji has been preparing his entire people to stand quiet and hateless; no matter what happens to him,” Nagar went on with a smile. “He tells them that in the event of his imprisonment, or even of his martyrdom, they would only wound his spirit, by answering the shedding of blood with blood----”

They talked late. For fully an hour after Nagar left, Dicky sat by the open window, smoking to keep the insects away. Tobacco did not entirely quench the stale tired smell of the town. Even after he put out the light, sleepless hours passed, so it was late in the forenoon when he awoke, hearing cries in the street below. He crossed to the window.

“_Hindu Mussultmanki jai!_” a voice cried. This he took to mean a native impulse to promote Hindu and Moslem unity, or something of the sort. Also he heard the cry repeatedly, “_Mahatma Gandhiki jai!_” Also Gandhi’s name associated with the names of “Kitchlew and Satyapal,” native leaders in Amritsar, of whom Nagar had spoken last night. Presently there was a knock at his door. A serious but friendly young Hindu in student’s garb bowed, entered and walked to the center of the room, saying in careful English:

“From Nagarjuna I have come to be at the service of Cobden Sahib for the full day.”

“Thank you. Is Nagar busy?”

The student bowed again and proceeded: “My name is Lala Relu Ram and I am glad to come and make you acquainted with the disposition of the city.”

The shouts were raised again outside.

“What’s in the air?” Dicky asked.

This was too much for Lala Relu Ram.

“I mean the shouts below--is this another holiday?”

“My people are gravely disturbed. Doctors Kitchlew and Satyapal have been sent for by the Deputy Commissioner Sahib. It is feared for them by my people.”

“What have they been doing?”

“In the terms of public speech they have cried out--also against the Rowlatt Bills, and for the amity of all peoples in Amritsar, Dr. Kitchlew being a Mohammedan and Dr. Satyapal a Hindu, which is anomalous.”

Dicky was still unshaven, and there were some notes he wished to put down.

“I’ll be ready to go out with you in an hour or less,” he said. “Would you not like to go down and get a line on what is going on?”

The student confessed that he would, but plainly the American idiom “get a line on” fascinated him. He paused to inquire, and Dicky explained.

“That is very good,” the student observed. “We are taught that the language of the future is to be made of most flexible symbols. I will get a line upon what is in the air and return.”

He was back within a half hour saying that the worst had happened. Doctors Kitchlew and Satyapal had been arrested under the Defense of India Act, ordered to write farewell letters to their families, and been driven out of town, their destination unknown.

“My people are gathering to go to the bungalow of the Deputy Commissioner with a _faryad_ (petition) that will remonstrate very firmly,” the Hindu boy said.

“We had better be there, don’t you think, when the doings begin?” Dicky inquired.

“Doings?”

“When the performance is pulled off.”

“Ah, _tamasha_!”

“I think so,” said Dicky.

They heard the slamming of boarded shop windows in all the native streets. The word for suspension of trade had gone abroad. The two pressed through gathering groups all making their way in one direction.

They had passed through a stretch of bazaars and before them now was a carriage bridge over the railroad right of way. On the bridge, they were packed tightly in the throng by the railings on either side. In a moment, the crowd in front halted and surged back. Lala Relu Ram gripped his arm queerly. Now they heard voices far ahead--angry voices in English--demanding the people to disperse. The van of the crowd had been confronted by a police and military piquet, but the pressing forward did not cease.

“My people are refusing to be stopped. They claim the right to make their plea,” the student whispered.

Dicky was sinking himself into the purpose of the populace. As ever from his training, he sought to clear his mind of preconception and self-interest--so that the events might write upon a clean surface. Just now a shot was heard; a bullet sang overhead--then a volley. It was not until that moment that he remembered the dusty twisted ascetic in the mango grove at Cawnpore. But that was only two days ago, and where was the wall?

* * * * *

He found himself in the very quick of the Indian people--under the cuticle of India herself. India the timid, the terrible; India talking of Soul-force; India running with its _faryad_ to the ranking English representative of Amritsar; explaining her griefs and her hurts to herself and to the English, seeing neither the humor of her plight on one side, nor its grimness on the other; India led about on a string which she might have broken with the flick of a finger.

That was what India had always seemed most like to Dicky Cobden--_hathis_, the elephant, gentlest and strongest of creatures. For many generations she had been banged about by the shouts and blows of the white _mahout_, who was not in the cult of elephant lore, never a native of her habitat. He had made her stand around according to his own ideas--India, the great female elephant, full of tremors and flutterings; of vast strange delicacies and uncomputable powers.... Now she was leaving her white _mahout_ to follow about a little black man with an invisible string.

“_Mahatma Gandhiki jai! Gandhi Maharajiki rai!_”

Dicky heard the voice raised now in the lull that followed the first volley.... A little black man with an invisible string, called Soul-force.

One with the crowd, he felt its galvanic jerk of ugliness pass through himself. The murmur of protest that now arose from the open mouths was like something from himself--as if his mouth, too, were open with sound. A bearded native in soiled white garments turned suddenly and pressed him back. This man had felt a stone under his bare foot and he was making room to reach down to pick it up. Dicky saw his fingers stretch toward the muck. He understood. Here was one of the primal impulses of the human body in a stress of fear and hate. Far ahead, the English officers roared commands for the natives to go back. The voices of native leaders standing with the English, also implored the people to disperse. But the people had their _faryad_. They wanted talk. Also there were dead and wounded on the earth before the eyes of the front ranks. Another volley sounded.

Instead of being driven back by the second pelting of shots, the native crowd crushed its way across the bridge. In the opening on the other side, it halted, now in the Civil Lines, no longer jammed by the narrow rails of the bridge. The throng had not yet become insensate; no individual had seized the office of leadership. This was the instant of all to Dicky Cobden, the turning point. The native gathering might still have been reasoned with, as it stood leaderless, looking upon its own dead; but instead of reason, came the third volley from the soldiers and police, the prod of the ankus that turned the elephant _musth_.

The shuddering of revolt that the people felt passed through Richard Cobden as well--whipped up in his own breast. Then he was carried forward with the mob. Nothing gentle or yielding about the bodies now, a rough, bruising, muscular mass pushed from behind by incredible power.

Dicky glanced about to look for Lala Relu Ram, and that instant was whacked to the ground, a slug from the pistol of one of the troopers, gouging his left shoulder. He arose to one knee, still turned back, a laugh on his lips, looking for the student.

And now a most extraordinary shock was meted out to the son of the trowel makers. A running native with gray, patchy face, completely carried away by mob impulse, halted, stood above the kneeling white man, struck him in the face with both hands, emptying his mouth at the same time. Some of the natives immediately behind, without questioning but that Dicky was one of the English, now tramped over his body as they ran. Though fallen, he still preserved a final waver of consciousness--face down, head covered in his arms. Finally he was caught by the arm and jerked to the side.

It was Lala Relu Ram who had pulled him out of the crowd and looked down into a face covered with blood and mud, and a welt or two. The only white about that face now was the lips which smiled and repeated a word which the Hindu student had never heard in all his linguistic studies of the East and West.

XLIII

_HATHIS_ LAMENTS

DICKY really came to back in an apothecary shop on the way to the Golden Temple, where Lala Relu Ram had carried him. The filth of that face that had opened upon him as he looked up from his knee--a shudder about that, something he would never be able to tell. It had been uglier to take than the blows. As moments dragged on, he fell to wishing Nagar would come. A curious wonder played incessantly in his mind about the twisted ascetic under the mango trees in Cawnpore, but where was the wall? The crystal gazer had repeated that the thing which was to befall would be within a wall.

“... The bullet didn’t think enough of you to stay, Mr. Cobden,” the young English surgeon said after examination. “It merely bit out a chunk of muscle and went its way. Since there is no cavity for it to drain into, it means nothing but a stitch or two, and a clean bandage. But you’ve been considerably mashed about the face. There’s going to be a strain on your drainage system for a few days to carry off dead tissue.”

He was taken to his room at the Inn, much bandaged, and Lala Relu Ram sat by his bedside, his face often turned to the open window that looked out over the street.

“I’m all right--don’t stay,” Dicky urged, as he began to understand the sacrifice of the student in remaining with him instead of following the mob.

“Nagarjuna did not say for one hour, or for half of one day, but for the full day,” Lala Relu Ram declared, “and who knows but that I too might have disobeyed the orders of Mahatma-ji and become violent?”

Dicky hadn’t much of a grin left, but such as it was, he was free to let it work under the folds of gauze. He sent the student below on one pretext after another, knowing that the young man was exhausting himself from strain to hear all that had happened.

“It is more terrible than we supposed,” the student reported, as the long day ended. “Enraged by their dead and wounded, and being prevented from carrying their request to the Deputy Commissioner, my people have burned buildings, bank buildings--the National, the Chartered, the Alliance banks----”

“That’s hitting them where they live,” said Mr. Cobden, impelled to Americanisms as never before.

“Sir?” said Lala Relu Ram, bending forward on the scent of the idiom.

“A Government bank is an English nerve center, Lala Ram,” Dicky said.

The student was thoughtful, and then resumed: “It is with sorrow that I have to confess that my people have forgotten themselves in the case of Mr. Stewart and Mr. Scott of the National Bank and Mr. Thomason of the Alliance Bank----”

“Hurt?” said Dicky.

“Dead,” said the student, with a dramatic pause. “And that is not all. Miss Sherwood was most brutally assaulted, and outside the city a railway guard named Robinson, and a havildar in charge of the Electric, named Rowlands, were beaten to death where they live, and the station goods yard burnt----”

Dicky’s eyes squinted under the cloths. “And what of your own people?” he managed to ask.

“Oh, many have been killed!”

This was an item that did not require the enumeration of details. _Hathis_ had gone _musth_, but not for long. _Hathis_ was horrified at the awfulness of the thing she had done. _Hathis_ was back in her pickets again, not realizing her own hurts, anticipating a clubbing on the toes, and in the immortal way of _hathis_, half suspecting that a clubbing was deserved.

“I’d like to doze a little,” said Dicky.

The student rose, but lingered.

“Would Cobden Sahib permit me to ask one question?”

“Why, of course, shoot--I mean--ask it.”

“It is about that moment when you fell,” said Lala Relu Ram. “Rather, it was when I reached you, and had driven off my people who thought you were one of the English----”

“Yes.”

“You were partly out of the body--unconscious. Yet your eyes were open and you were speaking some word that I have never heard--several times, as you would speak the Holy Name in devotion, with breathing.”

“What was that name?” Dicky inquired, pulling the bandage down farther over his eyes.

“It is not one which I have ever heard in my speech or yours--that is why I ask. It was like this, ‘Pid-gee--Pid-gee.’”

Dicky laughed.

“That is--the fact is, that’s right curious,” he said. “I must have been ‘out of the body,’ as you say. That--that is a little expression we use in childhood!”

* * * * *

As Nagar stood under the light that evening, Dicky saw that his eyes, too, were burning with strange sorrow. Lala Relu Ram bowed himself out, walking backward. When they were alone, Nagar came to the bedside, drawing a chair, and his hand found the American’s.

“We have not done well in Amritsar to-day.”

“I don’t think you understand it quite,” Dicky said. “I was there this noon, at the place they call the Hallgate Bridge----”

“There was violence,” said Nagar.

“There were three volleys----”

The Oriental smiled. “It is not the provocation that we deal with, but the losing of oneself in anger. Nothing remains to us but the fact that Amritsar lost its self-control.”

“You think the Little Man will be unhappy about what has happened, when he comes?”

“Mahatma-ji was arrested this morning at Kosi, served with an order not to enter Punjab, nor the district of Delhi, but to confine himself to the Bombay Presidency.”

Dicky studied his friend. He couldn’t help feeling if Nagar had been at the Hallgate Bridge---- Finally he spoke:

“I’m just a reporter, Nagar. I’m not granting that Gandhi knows it all or that the natives to-day are all right, and the English all wrong. Still, I can’t help wondering at what you ask of your people--as a reporter would ask, you understand. They turned the other cheek! They took the first volley and the second. I was there. No man has three cheeks. I saw it all in that minute between the second and third firing.”

Nagar’s hand pressed his and Dicky lowered his voice, though his tone had not been loud.

“Anything might have happened that instant had there been a bit of leadership,” he added. “The people wanted to talk to their father--the Deputy. You would have wept for their forbearance, or stupidity, as you like. Their dead were at their feet, the cries of the wounded in their ears, and still they weren’t maddened. They only wanted to show their _faryad_. If there had been the right Englishman on the spot--why, the crowd would have been allowed to go forward with its document. I’ve an idea that it was something dangerously like funk that caused that third volley, and that nobody will ever be so sorry for what happened to-day, as England herself. I call it human the way your people lost their heads.”

“Mahatma-ji’s ideal isn’t human, Richard. It is of the Soul. We shall suffer and India shall suffer--for to-day.”

“I’ve got a lot to learn about this man’s India. I can see that,” the American said queerly.

XLIV

THE SLATE AND THE SPONGE

PIDGE was choosing a serial for _The Public Square_. The choice lay now between two manuscripts on the desk before her eyes. One was by a maker of the “new” American literature, named Carver, who had dared to perform the work in one sustained, slow movement, bound to ward off excessive popularity, a thing of drabs and tans and grays, but earnest, even in its hopelessness. It consistently portrayed a cross section of life, a fine piece of human observation, but altogether unlit with intuition.

The other book was a novel of New York, by a woman whose name was entirely unheard of. This manuscript had been refused several times as a serial in the past year, and several times as a book prospect. The letters of refusal from the different editors were also on Pidge Musser’s desk. One said, “This book is too much of a gamble for an unknown name.” The united opinion of all professional readers was that this story was unquestionably an augur for the future of the novelist, rather than a compelling announcement of her arrival.

In her own heart, Pidge believed that the woman’s story would interest more readers than Carver’s. Also, _The Public Square_ would be saved considerable money in taking the woman’s story, for Carver stood out for rather a high price for his first American serial rights.

“It isn’t the freedom of ignorance,” she said at last, about the lower-priced book, “but it isn’t the freedom of knowledge, either. ‘A man is crippled while he’s learning technic.’... No, I can’t take the chance!”

So the novel by the unknown woman went back to Harrow Street with its refusals, and found a resting place in the drawer under the mirror that waved; and only Miss Claes and the author, herself, knew who was hurt.

* * * * *

Mr. Adolph Musser, in New York with his daughter, began to have callers. The two small upper rooms in Harrow Street were not adapted for callers, even in the adaptable Village. Especially this was so because an adopted male child of one year was rooted and ramifying in the place. One of the ramifications was a female lodger and one-time nurse who looked after the child while Pidge was away at the office. Mr. Musser, during his first week in New York, before he found an apartment in the Sixties, had pronounced this woman too heavy-footed to live with.

Though Pidge had received an important increase of salary, dating from the first of this year of 1919, she did not find herself in a greatly improved condition when the additional expenses of nurse and her father’s separate maintenance were considered. However, something happened which she had not foreseen. Mr. Adolph Musser became rapidly self-supporting. According to his predictions, New York proved to be suffering from a “biological hunger and thirst” for his very sort of metaphysic. Los Angeles had been sated. One had merely to move from temple to temple in Los Angeles. Cultists of all colors were there; light-bringers from all lands. Mr. Musser, according to predictions, found New York a virgin oil field and he was not long in getting his derricks up.

Late in May there was a letter from Richard Cobden, mailed at Bombay in early April. Though it was written to Pidge personally she saw in it Dicky’s first real work, his first actual grasp and retention of essentials, to her idea. It opened to her, also, the lineaments of the Big Story they had talked so much about. She read the letter through twice on the day it arrived, and that night took it home to read to Miss Claes, who came to the upper room in the latter part of the evening, as she had come to hear _The Lance of the Rivernais_, over five years ago. Their faces were close together, and Pidge read low and rapidly:

I have been with Gandhi several times in the past three days, and
early to-morrow I start north for Amritsar to join Nagar. I hadn’t
thought of writing this until just now, on my way to bed, and the
subject of the Little Man suddenly filled me. I feel an unadulterated
American to-night, and there may be an advantage, at least an angle,
in a study of Gandhi from that point.... He is very ill, can scarcely
stand, but more than ever full of his kind of light and power. In
the last three days with him, I have come to understand _you_ as
never before--and America and the American soldier. I have found
out, Pidge, what you mean by stating and living the fact, that it
isn’t how much one knows that counts, but how much one does. Gandhi
is a doer. I used to hear in church something about the Spirit being
made flesh, and now I’ve got an inkling of what that means. Gandhi’s
genius doesn’t dream. _It does._ The sun shines on all India, but
Gandhi has become a lens. The rays focalize through him. The ground
burns under his feet.... He is called a bigot, a fanatic, a living
Blue Law, and it is all true, Pidge. He is drawn in black and white.
He has no half-tones, no twilights, no afterglows. He is devoid of
atmosphere as the moon. His lines of light and shadow are never blent
or diffused. He is vivid noon where his light strikes, densest night
where light ends.... It is not that he loathes the West, but that he
knows the East. He has become a specialist, as Nagar says repeatedly.
He has withdrawn his attention from the world to India, Herself. He
has brought in his eyes from the future, to the Now. He sees the next
step which India must take, and leaves to the dreamers of the world
to point out the glories and the penalties. He stands in the road in
front of India to-day, like a man before a runaway horse----

Dicky had ended the letter suddenly, saying he was sleepy, but had more to say later. The two women talked low, because of _another_ in the room. This other was not to be disturbed. They stood over him now. He would not have approved at all of their gayety and know-it-all manner, had he been awake. His lids were down, however; the black curving lashes reposed in their hollows; the world, which was the big horse he must some time ride, was away minding its own business.

“I’m glad to hear this much before I go----” Miss Claes stopped and took both of Pidge’s hands.

“Before you go--where?”

“This little slate of Harrow Street is all written over. It is to be rubbed out now, Pidge. My part is finished here--I don’t know how well, but it’s finished. I am leaving New York.”

“Why, that--that seems--insupportable!... Why, I thought anything could happen but that--to my New York!”

“Only you are to know, dear,” Miss Claes said moments afterward. “Yes, it is India----”

“To Nagar--you are to be with him--the Hills!”

“Don’t, Pidge. It isn’t for words----”

“Forgive me----”

“These are terrible days for India. It means work--work--tests for every one’s courage. Little Harrow Street is still and steady, compared.... But this is dear to me--the thought that I go ahead to make ready for you another place to come----”

“My upper room,” said Pidge softly. “My upper room.”

XLV

AMRITSAR, APRIL 13, 1919

TOWARD the end of the afternoon of Sunday, the 13th, Richard Cobden ordered a carriage. He was still bandaged about the head, his left arm in a sling. This was his first descent from the room since his hurts on the 10th, and meanwhile General Fyatt had taken control of the city, bringing in troops from nearby stations. Dicky had met Fyatt in France, and was on his way now to pay his respects to the General at his Headquarters in the Ram Bagh. He was getting it very clearly just now that if it were observed that he had any sort of affiliation with the natives, he would promptly be placed out of reach of all Punjabi events, even as a spectator.

The American was personally and intensely interested in Nagar and Gandhi, but still he did not feel that he had taken sides in the least. He looked upon Gandhi’s work as visionary, and the work of the British in India as substantial, and the more likely to endure. He had seen Nagar but a moment or two each day since the 10th, and had kept in touch with developments through the English sources.

The air was still furiously hot, though it was after four in the afternoon. The streets were crowded, this being the day of the _Baisaki_ fair, and thousands were in from the country. Dicky heard the roar of a ’plane over the city, and craned out of the window of his half-closed carriage for a glance at its flight. The pilot was making circles over a point at a little distance ahead--a low peculiar hovering.

Dicky inquired of his driver the meaning, and was told that the ’plane appeared to be hanging over the great crowd assembled in the Jallianwalla Bagh--that thousands of the visitors attending the fair were there, listening to the speakers, as well as many townsfolk.

“But didn’t the General give orders for no public assemblies?”

The driver had not heard. Dicky reflected that the ’plane didn’t appear to be there for the amusement of a crowd--no circus ’plane, but an effective bit of government property, rather, with an air of business. It rose now and vanished over the city.

The carriage continued on the way to the Ram Bagh, until it was halted for the passage of troops in the street. A half-hundred Gurkhas and Baluchees, two motor cars with English officers and civilians, the whole outfit trailed by a pair of armored cars, and moving in the direction where the government ’plane had hovered.

“Where are they going?” Dicky asked of his driver.

The man was not sure, but suggested the Jallianwalla Bagh.

“What is that place?”

“It is a _maidan_,” the man said, “a big open square, a public place.”

“Public square,” Dicky muttered. “Turn in short after the armored cars,” he commanded the driver. “Follow close.”

“Ram Bagh is not so.”

It is a difficult proceeding, requiring formalities, to alter one’s orders in Asia.

“Listen. I am changing my purpose. Not Ram Bagh, but Jallianwalla. Turn in after the soldiers--now!”

The driver obeyed, but was hurt and murmuring.

To Dicky, that afternoon, Amritsar was a place of heated and offensive stenches. As they passed through hot and narrow streets, certain of these odors startled his comprehension, because they were so subtly vindictive. The thought occurred to him, as he watched the naked children playing in the wet shadows, of what a correspondent had remarked in Cawnpore: that it was hard to tell whether the streets soiled the children, or the children soiled the streets. The movement forward was very slow, and Dicky bent to inquire at length if they were still moving toward Jallianwalla Bagh.

“Yes, it is very near,” said the driver, churning at the lines with both hands.

The American did not let himself think further. He fell into his old queer absorption; the reporter of his makeup taking him over. He shut out Amritsar from mind; the Native Idea, the English Idea, and his own that hovered between. He was just a stranger in a half-closed carriage looking out from under a bandaged brow. He heard the flies in the air. He did not seem to have any mental guard to shut out that distracting buzz--flies winging across the vapors of filth. They came to a narrow lane, a _kucha_, the driver called it. The armored cars ahead were having difficulty in this constricted place. Finally they halted and Dicky heard a British soldier on the nearest turret call out that the cars could proceed no further.

His own carriage was of course blocked. The _kucha_ appeared less than eight feet wide. He was still lame, and had not intended to do much walking about in the furious heat, but beyond the armored cars he had glimpsed the Gurkhas filing forward and the officers stepping out of their machines. He let himself to the ground, ordered the driver to wait, and followed the soldiers through the wet trampled lane.

A minute later he was in the broken ranks of the Gurkhas--little muttering men with big sprawly hands holding fast to their rifles, fingers running loosely over breech and stock and barrel. The halt had come because there was a sudden rise to the ground--a mound of earth closing the lane, and running at angles to each side. The soldiers were ordered up and deployed along the mound; equally divided to the right and left.

Now Richard Cobden, in the midst of the officers and civilians who had occupied the two motor cars, also gained the eminence with some pains; and at this point he saw the man he had started out to find that afternoon--General Fyatt, a significant picture, indeed, here in Amritsar, who had been but a small obscure exhibit in the broad gallery of France.

Fyatt didn’t see him, and the American looked over the vast assembly of natives in the burning light. On a raised frame toward the center, a Sikh speaker stood. Dicky could hear his words, but did not understand. He saw, however, that the coming of the soldiers had interrupted the tenor of the speech and that many of the people were frightened and drawing away. An English officer beside him, after listening a moment, spoke with an ironical laugh:

“_We have nothing to fear. Sarkar is our father and our mother. Government would not injure its children_----”