Chapter LIII: The White Light Again 315 (8)

Dicky realized that the young officer had quoted a translation of words the Sikh speaker had just spoken to the people--from twelve to fifteen thousand in the _maidan_, he reckoned. All faces were now turned to the soldiers--waves of faces. It was as if the color of a tree had changed by a steady pressure of wind that showed the under side of all the leaves. A nervous laugh from the young Englishman who had interpreted; then from General Fyatt, the low single sentence:

“You may give the order.”

“Fire!” the young officer called to his Gurkhas.

To Richard Cobden it was quite incredible, but another officer on the far side of the lane repeated the command, and the line of leveled rifles spurted on either side. Dicky winced at the crashes. He had been in the firing pits many times, but one can never remember how these concussions close by hurt one’s head and spine.... Of course, they were firing blanks. This was Martial Law. The people had been ordered not to assemble and they had disobeyed--twelve thousand of them, or more. General Fyatt had undertaken to impress upon them that his word was Law, Martial Law. Of course, this was also the English answer to April 10th, at the Hallgate Bridge. A bit uncouth to stampede a big crowd like this.

Surely Fyatt couldn’t have realized what this firing of blanks would mean.

They were trampling themselves to death already. This wasn’t English humor. It was more like the fool who yells, “Fire!” in a packed theater.

The great open place was walled. There were no broad exits. The several narrow vents had locked of themselves by the pressing of bodies against them. “Why,” Dicky thought, with a wrench and shiver at the sight of the monster throng in the process of constricting itself, “why, this is a womb of death!”

Cries were sustained at the end of this April holiday--cries of battle and accident and pestilence, the cries from a great ship going down.

Dicky thought of a pot beginning to boil. He thought of a yard of leaves suddenly caught in a swirling wind. He thought of all the old stale similes used and over-used since bloodshed began, and his mind sank back in the hollow of hopelessness. It couldn’t be told, but his faculties tried again and again, even though his heart sobbed with the people.

A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight--from twelve to fifteen thousand human beings listening to a man who cried out against violence, who cried out that _Sarkar_ couldn’t hurt his children--suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being sprayed with rifle fire--blanks, of course--but to a result almost as deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to, but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and reviewed--all this in a matter of seconds.

Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. Down in the _maidan_ on the ground, not fifty feet away--a giant Sikh in white turban, running forward with raised hands, like a messenger--a close-up possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone--suddenly halted, spun and slapped limply to the ground with a curving fling. A glorious fall, if it had been a bit of acting--the fall a man makes when a bullet hits him.

But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the soldiers were firing blanks.

At this point, an English officer roared at his Gurkhas, who apparently had been firing high. His words were in vernacular, but the American saw the little dark men shorten their range.

Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a very stupid man, that Fyatt was punishing Amritsar indeed--in fact, that the General was making a day of it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, partly formed of buildings, but it hadn’t properly registered in connection with the words of the twisted ascetic of Cawnpore.

Now he knew also that the several narrow throats of the walled square, none so wide as the _kucha_ through which he had entered, had become points of intensified death, because the great throng had divided to crush itself against these impossible apertures. The English officers appeared to be directing the fire of the soldiers toward these points where the maddened masses were most dense.

Almost directly across the square the wall was low, less than six feet. Hundreds were jammed against it, but their bodies were so locked by the pressure from behind that no one could climb or be pushed over into safety.

The Gurkhas looked like monkey men. They stamped queerly as they pumped. They were being told what to do and were in a great concentration to obey exactly. They emptied their magazines, each man taking his own time, and halted to fill them again, carefully avoiding with their fingers the burning metal of the barrels, as they refilled and fired.

An English civilian, an elderly man, face livid, bumped Cobden’s wounded shoulder, as he lurched past, muttering:

“My God! I can’t watch this.”

Another Englishman followed him, venting an hysterical laughter--both faces Dicky had seen in one of the motor cars. For an instant it seemed the only sane action left in the world--to rush out into the lane the way he had come, as these Englishmen were doing, to cover face and ears, to rush forth, to continue to the ends of India and the uttermost parts of the earth.

Dicky started to follow, but turned back.... No, he wouldn’t rush off to be sick. This was the wall that he was to come to. It was something else.... What was it? Oh, yes, it was the Big Story that he had been pacing up and down the world to find.... Of course, it would be like this. He would find himself in the midst of it, without knowing at first.

He ducked forward under the rifles of three _sepoys_ to reach the staff. He couldn’t go away without paying his respects to the General. Was not this what he had started out for to-day? He stumbled over a soldier on his knees--a Baluchee, vomiting with all his might. He saw Fyatt a few paces forward--Fyatt, grizzled, square-shouldered, behind a field glass. A mocking laugh rose in Richard Cobden’s heart. A man didn’t need a field glass to cover the _maidan_. One could see the faces; one could see the fallen; one could see the writhing cords of human bodies. Oh, no, one didn’t need a field glass. One could see the thousands on the _maidan_ now--as one up-turned face, the face of a child betrayed, but unable to believe. Fyatt merely chose this way to cover his own face. His back looked stiff and blocky as he swung slowly around behind the glasses. His shoulders and neck didn’t move. He turned from the hips, Dicky perceived, as he touched the General’s sleeve.

XLVI

THE HOOKED MAN

A NOTE of unison had come to the great cry from the people at this moment--one note that tugged at the white man’s soul--the deadly hurt of a child.... General Fyatt was not tall for a soldier, with square lines of figure; square of chin and temple and shoulder and elbow, pivoting on his hips. But there were two remarkable curves in the ensemble, the sidewise curve of the hooked nose and the bow of his booted legs. Now as the American stood by, a new key presented itself to the man--that hooked smile. It opened other hooks--hook of the eye-corner, as well as the corner of the mouth and the bent nose, hook of the fingers on the field glass. The face turned to him--a white welt from the glasses on the bridge of the nose.

Dicky felt the horrible slowness over everything--that somehow there was not in this man’s volition the power to order the firing to cease. No recognition showed in Fyatt’s eyes. He stared. It was like the man who had stared at him on the docks in Bombay, when he heard that America had entered the War.

“Well, sir!”

Dicky felt rebuked. Then came to his ears again the terrible drowning cry of the children, and he saw Fyatt differently--not as England; at least, not all of England--a black crooked finger operating merely--the face of England turned away.

“I only wanted to ask----” Dicky stopped and raised his voice above the tumult of shots and voices. “Cobden of New York--saw you in France!”

It was utterly ridiculous to yell one’s identity. He had forgotten that his face might look different under a bandage. The field glass that had been partly raised again was whipped down. The hooks tightened.

“Ah, Cobden. Heard you were in town. Busy, you know!”

“I see!” the American yelled back. He felt like a maniac. “I see! I merely wanted to ask, General, if you had gone mad--or have I?”

* * * * *

A young officer ran between them reporting that the ammunition was running out.

“Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds, sir. Mainly used up. Some of the men finished----”

“Ease them off back to the armored cars. Let the others finish firing--fire low.”

“Not much wasted--only at first, sir!”

Fyatt turned to Cobden, shouting staccato sentences: “Didn’t catch what you said. Teaching Amritsar a lesson! Plover says we ought to take a thousand for one! Teach them to assault women----”

“Isn’t the lesson taught?” This time Dicky didn’t yell.

“They haven’t dispersed yet.”

“Dead men can’t disperse, General. The rest can’t get out----”

Dicky walked away. He had looked again at the _maidan_. Everything was overturned. The thousands were prone or kneeling.... If one steel rifle bullet plows through sixteen inches of oak--how many human bodies will it plow through? How many will 1650 steel bullets?... No shots wasted since the first minute or two. They couldn’t be all down--wounded or done for. Suddenly Dicky realized that many of the people were now praying. He was back at the head of the lane, moving in circles like a man who has been beaten on the head.... A black-coated Englishman with a clergy’s vest, grasped him by the arm, peering into his face--eyes gone utterly daft. He shook Dicky’s arm and pushed it from him; then ran to a soldier near by and peered again.

“Tell it to the General,” Dicky called absurdly, but his words weren’t heard.

Now he saw one of the elder civilians who had escaped a few moments before, coming back. This person scrambled upon the mound from the lane side and inquired of the earth and sky:

“I say--can’t he stop?”

“He’s dispersing the people,” Dicky answered.

The firing was desultory now. He heard orders for it to cease entirely.

“We might need a cartridge or two in the streets going back----” a voice behind him said.

“We’ve got the armored cars----” another answered.

Then Richard Cobden happened to look at the west and found the sun still high in the sky. This struck him as altogether peculiar.

XLVII

IN THE WARM DARK

COBDEN found himself in the lane, turned away from the _maidan_, his hands lifted and clenched. From behind still came the sounds of a ship going down--all but down, the firing ceased. In front of him, the _sepoys_ were running low as if to escape. It made him think of ball players leaving the field in the summer dusk after a game, running through the crowd to the clubhouse. The armored cars were backing out before him.

“... Of course,” he kept telling himself, “it had to come this way--end of the old story, the beginning of the story of the age. This isn’t an English-Indian story. It’s a story of all the world.”

Only natives were about him--ashen-lipped, muttering, frightened, dazed. He continued through the _kucha_, following the armored cars. He must get to the hotel. He had something to write, copy to file. But this delusion did not carry him far, before its absurdity struck home. The outer world would never hear of this story, until it leaked through by letter or word of mouth. The cables had been tight before. They would be drum-tight now.

Vaguely and dully he realized that all things were changed for him for all time. The reporter in his makeup that had blithely set out for Jallianwalla Bagh was done for, all aloofness of the spectator gone--the little poise of ego which had carried him so well and so long, so far as associations with men went, up and down the world until this hour--that ego poise was leveled and smeared. Amritsar’s public square--the massacre in the _maidan_ had cloven him, and into the opening all India had rushed. The face of the hooked man came back to him--hard unto silliness, the English stare against the sinking city.

He had overtaken the nearest of the armored cars. He looked upon them strangely, their sleek integration. They had not been needed; India had died and been born again without them. Something similar had happened in himself. No casual reporter now--one living emotion, rather--one fire, one fury, a burning of unqualified pity in every cell that held his life.

The driver of his carriage hailed him. Cobden lifted his hand in return, but halted. Suddenly he realized that he didn’t want to go back to the _Golden Temple Inn_. The thing alive in him now was bigger than a story to be written, bigger than the finding of a free cable, which was not in India. He paid the driver and stemmed his way back against the people that thronged the lane. He knew now that he must keep his mouth shut in an altogether different way; that a new life, terrible in its potency, had seized upon him, was somehow being born in his flesh and brain. He must hold still--hold still.

“Sixteen hundred rounds in ten minutes,” an English voice reiterated.

Dicky’s head bowed under his helmet. He was slow to believe that the firing had lasted only ten minutes. It amazed him now that this was still a world of hot daylight. He looked back upon his coming through this lane as one does upon the last memory before a great sickness. He had to memorize and register again and again upon his faculties that he had alighted from his vehicle only fifteen minutes ago, and this was all one day, all one afternoon, all one quarter of an hour. In the interval there had been death and birth for India and for himself--a mysterious conception, at least.

“God forgive me for losing my head,” he muttered, for there was something in him that still counted losing one’s head as the first moral offense. He was thinking of the moment standing before Fyatt. He would move very quietly now. As he reclimbed the mound where the _sepoy_ firing line had stood, it came to him that a man might lose his head for a moment, at least, to find his heart.

He let himself down from the mound to the bloody ground. There he found presently a man wedged under the bodies of two already dead. He dragged this man loose, only to find that he was apparently bleeding to death from a shattered knee. He unwound a turban from one of the dead men and wrapped the wound, knotting it tightly above the flow of blood. His own left hand was impeded by the sling. Presently, he freed it entirely, his personal scratches appearing ridiculous in this broad field of bloody men. Thus began his work. It was as if he had entered single-handed upon a task to alter the sewerage system of a city.

There were no English about, no police or native soldiers. Martial Law had done its part and gone to supper. The people flocking into the _maidan_ with moanings and horror-stricken cries now were those looking for their own. From the farthest parts of Amritsar they were drawn, from many houses to which one or more did not report for the evening meal. Living men and women--hurrying, bending--hands reaching down, hands pressed to faces--the quick and the dead.

A while afterward he looked up to find that the sun had gone down. His knees were wet with blood. He felt the wet spreading heat upon his left shoulder. His wound had opened from exertion--a smile at that.

He had worked a little on battlefields before, but they weren’t like this. A persistent thought held him that this was the field of his own dead! He didn’t understand how his brain could deal with such weird stuff. He concluded that he was in a half-dream where thoughts appeared veritable that wouldn’t hold water when he fully waked.

Now he had extricated from the mass near the Hasali Gate the body of a trampled girl child. She was warm, possibly not dead. She smelled of the earth and tears.... His heart thumped, and pity like a warm breath surged through him--pity, which some one said was the pain of love--oh, yes, that was Miss Claes’ expression. He touched the girl’s long coarse black hair in the thick twilight.

His lips formed with explanations and thoughts as he worked--the things he would tell Pidge, the way he would tell these things to Pidge. He placed the unconscious one down at the feet of a native doctor who was binding wounds, but often raising his eyes to heaven in prayer that the soldiers might not come back.

Dicky stood up in the warm dark, lifted his helmet and mopped his forehead with his grimy right hand. He could actually smell what horses smelled (as he remembered in France and Arabia) when they snorted and ran aside.... The dead would never end--hundreds of dead--public square covered with dead. And what was pulling at his brain--something trying to gain admittance? He had it now. Pidge Musser was close again; close as she had come in the _Ashrama_--not weeping, horrified, not in the least dismayed or hopeless by all these lifeless ones on the ground, but the spirit of swift-handed helpfulness, utterly in accord with him in thought and purpose, no words being necessary. So this was why he had been standing in the dark with uncovered head, rubbing his hand over his brow--that her closeness might come through to him! Not so weird, after all, that he should know this, standing upon the soaked turf of the _maidan_. Things of this kind had often happened to soldiers on the battlefields of France.

Was this what it was all about then--the separation, the struggling--at last to become connected to her this way, though across the world? He mustn’t study it too closely. He had a warning that he would spoil it, unless he kept on heartily with the work. So he continued separating the wounded, but every little while when his hands were free he would stop and uncover his head to the moist warmth of the evening. Would she come nearer and nearer through the years?... And these were her dead and her dying, and she had blessed the little Hindu girl with coarse black hair. He smiled at the absurdity of his thoughts.

Now it was full dark and the cries of the living women across the _maidan_ were raised in agony because they must leave the Bagh before the curfew sounded. Hundreds were still searching. They had not found their own, but it was close to eight o’clock and this--the dead on the field--was what had come of breaking Martial Law to-day. It did not matter that lives might still be saved if the wounded could be taken out from the dead. _Sarkar_ had fired upon them to-day. _Sarkar_ would come with more death, if they disobeyed. Husbands dragged away the women whose faces turned back.

Richard Cobden stayed on. He had the sense of not being alone. Moreover, there was much to do. There were voices to answer. He heard cries and callings from the windows of the houses that overlooked the _maidan_. No English came that night--but the pariah dogs from all the city and outskirts. They moved like ghouls in the shadows. There were mysteries everywhere--white vapors from the ground. He saw and felt the unutterable; became rich for future years in that one night with the fruits of sadness.

XLVIII

“INDIA’S MESSENGER”

COBDEN walked back from the _maidan_ through the streets of Amritsar in the dawn. He did not feel like a foreigner. That which had happened during the night had furnished him with what rarely comes to a white man--the Indian point of view. He was in the Indian fabric for the moment, at least; no longer a spectator from the West. He did not hate England, not even the crooked finger that had mismanaged for England. He knew something right now that he might not be able even to remember--more sorrow than anger.

As he approached the Golden Temple, near which was the Inn, Nagar appeared in the street, and they walked together in silence. As he tottered a little, Nagar’s arm swung around him and Dicky said:

“Don’t. I’m very dirty.”

Now that the light was coming on, they saw people hurrying to the Jallianwalla Bagh.

In the room, Dicky said:

“Make a lot of tea, Nagar. Sorry you won’t join me in a little drink from the flask.”

A moment later, he said:

“I think after all, you’ll have to help me get off this shirt. I’m a rubbed-in mess of blood and dirt.”

Nagar perceived that the body of the American trembled full-length; also that his clothing was soaked with blood from the wounded shoulder, as well as from stains received from handling others.

“... Some of them crawled about in the dark!” Dicky was saying. “A woman sat there moaning through the whole night. The pariahs came--I heard them lapping, lapping. From the windows of the houses around the Bagh came the cries of the women who dared not disobey the curfew.... Why, that ten minutes of firing was longer than whole years I lived as a schoolboy, but the ten hours since dark--that passed, Nagar, like a man walking by a house, not a lame man.... I saw your India, oh, yes. The gentlest-tempered crowd I ever moved through, but something dangerous and deadly in its pain and grief. God help us--when you wake up----”

Nagar helped him. Dicky bathed his neck and face and hair copiously with one hand, and then washed the left arm. With Nagar’s help the wound was packed with clean lint. Dicky drank hot tea, filling his goblet several times and shivering, though the heat of the night was still in the room. Finally he sat down in his bathrobe by the open window and lit a cigarette. The sunlight had found the gold of the Temple dome.

“... I actually forgot myself,” Dicky repeated. “When an American forgets himself, Nagar, you can be sure a big show is being pulled off.... I’ve smoked too much, talked too much. I am going to lie down for a little--until breakfast.... Bed! Think of having a bed, in Amritsar. A bed with sheets.... Out there so many were lying on the ground. Oh, I say, Nagar, where will they put them all?”

The Hindu’s cool, slim fingers reached over and touched his hand. He didn’t speak, just kept his hand still, and Dicky found it easier to stop talking, because of that hand; easier to endure the furious forces of activity in his brain. Finally Nagar spoke:

“I had to stay with the students. They wanted to go to the _maidan_. That would not have been well, but it was well for you to be there--to forget yourself there through the hours. It will come forth from you for years--not as the voice of an American, but as a citizen of the world. You have prepared long; last night India found you prepared, and dared to show you something of herself. Miss Claes would be very glad to be here with us this morning.”

Dicky’s mind fumbled with the idea that he had not only come closer into the Indian heart, but into Nagar’s as well.

“You might sleep a little until breakfast. I shall not leave you until after that. You are very tired and spent, but you will not be injured from last night. When a man forgets himself, as you say, he is strangely replenished.”

But Dicky did not sleep. They breakfasted early and Nagar arose, saying:

“... In the days that you remain in Amritsar finishing your work (for last night will mean more and more to you as the days go on) you and I shall not be much together. What you see in Amritsar--you must watch without feeling or partisanship. One cannot tell--you may see strange things. Remember, always remember, that you are American; that as an American you have no enemies, and belong to the world. In the fusion of all Europe, which America is, to form a new type of nobility, remember that no country has furnished a nobler ingredient--than England. And forgive my many words, Richard, if I ask you to remember this also: that anything which might happen to me here in Amritsar in the days you remain, must never make you forget that you have a message to carry to America.”

“I don’t understand, Nagar.”

“It is difficult to say. I can only repeat: Anything which might happen to me in this city must not arouse in you a personal or partisan effort to help me. We must be strangers--unless I come to you alone. The English are beside themselves; they know not what they do. You must have no feelings about me--to betray you. Go further into the English. Forget me--except as a part of your own source of kindness and strength.”

Nagar was gone. As Dicky conned all this, he began to wonder if he would see his friend again. All the days before this in Amritsar, he had been waiting for things to get quiet so that he and Nagar might really begin to get together.... “India’s messenger,” he muttered, as he fell asleep.

XLIX

PIDGE TRIES GRAMERCY PARK

THE second part of Dicky Cobden’s letter about Gandhi written after his three interviews in Bombay, reached Pidge fully a fortnight after the first. Of course, it interested her, as it could no one else.

... From several angles I placed before Mahatma-ji, the concept of
dreamers of all countries--the dream of the mating of the East and
West, that the New Race is to be born of this mating; that globe
means globe, and a world citizen must belong to all; that as Goethe
says, “above the nations is Humanity.” This thing, you understand,
has attracted me merely as a concept, not with the dreamer’s fire at
all. Short work Gandhi made of the mating of the East and West. The
damsel, New India, is not ready for marriage. She is not clean. She
has not found herself, therefore has not herself to give. (These are
not his words, but the idea.) She must become free, before she has
anything to bestow. She is just a perfumed body, which the West has
already desecrated and begun to despise--merely an offering now, not
a wife. What Gandhi arrays himself against to-day is the fact that
India has already fallen under the lure of the West. She has felt the
fascination of his big toys, the glamour of his mighty works. The
Little Man has made me see that a woman who “falls for” a man, can
never become the man-maker which a wife must be, maker of her husband
as well as child. Queer, how it came to me that way first, before
I saw the man’s side of it--the great thing you have done, pushing
me back, forever pushing me back into myself, until that day when I
shall be able to _stand_, not “fall for” you. I am learning--learning
so slowly what I bargained for that night at the Punjabi Fireplace.
“... Go back into your house!” Gandhi cries to India. (Not his words,
you know; merely my picture of him.) “Fast and pray. That is safe.
Fast and pray and spin! Pray to the hum of the _charka_. Forget your
lover. Find yourself. You are the East, the inner. Already you have
been lured by his brutal boyish games. You have flattered him, but
already he despises you. What does he bring now, but a bloody carcass
to your hearth, saying, ‘Arise. Gut and skin.’”... Mahatma-ji is on
the ground. Now, To-day, seeing but one step--the next step--crying,
“Go Back!” This is the most extraordinary part to me, that his very
limitations appear to be in use!

In early July, Pidge made her first move since coming to New York. The spirit had gone out of the house in Harrow Street for her, with Miss Claes’ departure. She sent the boy-baby up into the country and took a room at the _Sennacherib_ in Gramercy Park, a step of which Rufe Melton strongly approved:

“You were getting stale down there, Pan,” he said, one night when he came to dine. “The Village is all right for a novelty, but real New York hasn’t time for that sort of thing. I see you’re running Carver’s novel in the _P. S._ What did you get in on that for? Did he give it to you?”

“Rather not. It cost real money.”

“A hang-over from John Higgins’ desk?”

“No, we took it after--after----”

“Carver could never have slipped that over on you, Pan,” he broke in, “if you had lived uptown. But no, you never would listen to me, that a thing isn’t great because it’s nasty----”

“You think it isn’t a successful serial?”

“Not a chance----”

There was truth in what he said. The new novel was rapidly unreeling in generous installments, without much gratifying noise from the readers.

Rufe confided that he was doing a long story, and that Redge Walters was very much interested in it as a serial prospect.

“What’s it on?” she asked.

“Business,” said Rufe. “Shipping--grain--iron--packing-houses. Everybody’s panting for business since the War.”

“Sounds American.”

“Epic of the Great Lakes, Pan. Never knew what I was about, till now----”

She was thinking of Amritsar--of the first Amritsar mail recently in from Richard Cobden, posted at Pondicherry, French India--of _hathis_ and her new _mahout_--of British bulletins, native documents, and Dicky’s own straight story of April 10th and 13th. It had been difficult for Pidge not to become too excited by all this. For the first time Dicky’s work had carried her off her feet. That had been days ago, and she had not altogether trusted her fiercely fresh enthusiasm, but it didn’t subside, and at the present minute, the epic of the Great Lakes sounded to her like a forlorn side show. Moreover, Dicky’s Amritsar story, about to be printed in _The Public Square_, took away most of the disappointment in that Carver’s novel hadn’t proved a powerful stimulus to circulation.

“Its capital is Chicago,” Rufe further divulged about his book. “Funny how you have to get away from there to see that big town. All the years I lived in Chi--never got next to her, as I have since I came to New York.... Yes, it’s booming along. Haven’t been really right until just now, since I was gassed.”

“I’m glad, Rufe.”

“It’s got a _mahatma_ in it,” Rufe chuckled.

“A what?”

“What’s the matter with you, Pan?”

“That word--from you!”

“You look as if you’d seen the Dweller----”

“The what, Rufe?”

He chuckled again. “Didn’t know I’ve been going in for the occult, did you? Say Pan, there’s one fine thing about you. I never feel as if you could be disappointed in your Rufie.”

“Why is that?” She was entirely off his trend.

“You haven’t started to expect anything of me.... Oh, yes, had to have a _mahatma_ in the story. It’s the new thing. Everybody’s got one since the War. Not enough to go round.... This _mahatma_ of mine in Chi is wise to the stock exchange. It’s his tip, you know, that the whole tale turns on. Reader never thinks of it--until it’s pulled.”

“Where did you get your model?”

He laughed again. “Right in the family, Pan. Been going to hear Adolphus. Say, you never did appreciate your father. Bad habit of yours, Pan, honest to God--to lose respect for a man just because you live with him.”

Pidge was in a whirl. Her hands dropped down to the seat of her chair on either side and gripped hard. The world looked about as big to her as Delaware; Amritsar and New York signaling to each other.

“Heard him this afternoon--in the ballroom of the _Pershing_--swell crowd out,” Rufe pursued. “Talked on Lytton’s _Zanoni_. I’m going to read that book. And didn’t Adolph put it over to the damsels and dowagers! Just what I need for my white _mahatma_. Where does the old man get all that? It’s a wonder you haven’t gotten in on your father’s stuff, Pan.”

She wanted Miss Claes as never before. This was too much for one small person to hold. When she really listened again, Rufe was asking to go upstairs with her to see her room.

“It’s just a common room. What’s the use?”

“Little afraid to see me alone, eh, Pan?”

“Not afraid--only what’s the use?”

“You might see it different----”

“I might have once, Rufe----”

“Say, Pan----”

“Yes?”

“Does Mrs. Melton want to be free?”

Her hands dropped to the seat of her chair again. She saw the new want in his eyes and something else--the old captive thing.

There were two possible answers to his question, and it took every minute of her twenty-five years, and all that had gone before, to choose. This is what she said:

“Mrs. Melton will never be free!”

“What--what do you mean?”

“Ask your _mahatma_, Rufe.”

L

DICKY’S IDEA WORKS

PIDGE felt the hugeness of life around her at last. Doors were being opened as never before. She saw as clearly as if Rufe Melton had confessed to her, that it was he who wanted to be free. She could grant this well enough; having been forced to it, in effect, from the beginning. He would doubtless come again soon, making it plain that he wanted her to agree to divorce. The point was that certain barriers and limitations in her own life were suddenly lifted. It was as if she had emerged from a city, to the shore of the sea, and before her eyes was an unbroken horizon line.

The abrupt extension frightened her. The story of Amritsar now unfolding for her from the Indian mail--in its hatelessness, in its devotion to truth and unsentimental love for the people--unveiled for her eyes a _man_--not Gandhi, not Nagar, but Richard Cobden, himself. The few sentences he had inserted in his letter about Gandhi, “--the great thing you have done, pushing me back, forever pushing me back into myself, until the day when I shall be able to _stand_, not fall for you!”--in these words there was for Pidge an invincible call.

She had searched the language for another expression to convey what that little slangy verb “to fall for” meant. It was one of her treasures. When one “fell for” a person or thing--one couldn’t stand for the same. One was captive, not co-worker. Here was the difference between infatuation and romance. Dicky had found it out. There was expressed in his letter more than she had dreamed as possible; and this time words thrilled her furiously, because she believed they had become working knowledge, before it had occurred to him to express the idea. She saw this knowledge working out in his studies of Gandhi. He did not “fall for” the Little Man. He did not rush into eulogy; he sought to understand. In a word, he stood for Gandhi. But now that Dicky was ready to stand for her, she was ready to fall, and all her horizons were being pushed back to give her room.

... She was very weary. She had not known it before. _The Public Square_ thrived. It was strong pulsed with new life. For the first time in her experience she sensed from the magazine’s field, following the issue of the first Amritsar story--silence, the perfect tribute, the instantaneous readjustment of all other journals; then crowded mails, the answer from people everywhere. Something about Gandhi touched hundreds of people to the point of saying so, in a letter to _The Public Square_.

Yes, she was weary. She had held grimly to the post. She wanted to turn it over to Dicky Cobden now.... It had been like this once before--on the night of Somebody’s Shoulder. She had wanted to give him what he wanted that night--the tiredest and most hopeless girl in New York. Only that night it had been--for what he had. Now it was for what he was.

John Higgins lost his bearings in the city traffic. A copy of the issue containing the first section of the Amritsar story was in the old editor’s hand when he fell in the street. She was with him for several hours, until the end. He looked at her long and strangely--eyes more “run-out” than ever. He did not seem to hear her words, but if she remained in silence too long, a little frown gathered on his forehead, and his hand would pull at hers. He had waited for the big story. Once he said:

“I wish Dicky would come,” and that brought Pidge’s slow tears.

* * * * *

The next day a solicitor called at the office and Pidge still felt squally. She couldn’t grasp what he was saying. She thought it had something to do with a secret society that was going to attend an absurd matter, known as “obsequies.” She was deluged in words.

“... Be perfectly calm, Mrs. Melton,” the solicitor said at last. “This isn’t exactly bad news, but I’ve known lasting injury from the one, as well as the other----”

“Please--what are you talking about?”

“Your legacy----”

“My--I don’t----”

“From the late John Higgins----”

“But it was only last night!”

“The late John Higgins, nevertheless. The demise----”

“And what about it?”

“That he has left you--this paper in my hand being the memorandum--his interest in _The Public Square_----”

“Me----”

“A half-interest in the ownership, to be exact----”

Pidge glanced around the room. The man was sitting. The first and terrible obstacle of life was to remove him, or escape from him.

“What have I to do?”

“Just sign----”

But he was still sitting, after she had signed. He wanted to be sociable.... She was on the car going home. She hopped off at Eighth Street, and was turned into Harrow, before she realized that she didn’t live there any more but in Gramercy Park.... Curving Harrow Street was quiet and calling. She went in to the curve and stood before the old green front. A sign on the door announced “Rooms, Permanent and Transient.”... “What kind of rooms are transient rooms?” she thought. The curb and doorstep thronged with memories. “Oh, Dicky, it’s too much,” she whispered at last. “Come soon, and prop me up!”

LI

“WE LOOK UPON WOMEN AS SACRED”

“_DO you people want peace or war? If you wish for war the Government is prepared for it, and if you want peace, then obey my orders and open all your shops; else, I will shoot. For me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same. I am a military man and I will go straight. Neither shall I move to the right, nor to the left. Speak up, if you want war. In case there is to be peace, my order is to open all shops at once. Obey orders. I do not wish to have anything else. I have served in the military for over thirty years. I understand the Indian sepoy and the Sikh people very well. You must inform me of the budmashes. I will shoot them. Obey my orders and open shops. Speak up if you want war._”

General Fyatt was talking to a large company of Amritsar’s native representatives, lawyers, merchants, doctors, in the _kotwali_, the day after the massacre.

The Deputy Commissioner added: “You have committed a bad act in killing the English. The revenge will be taken upon you and upon your children.”

The large company of natives listened. Not one spoke of the Jallianwalla Bagh, or of the dead which still lay there. Richard Cobden reasoned with himself; neither did he speak. Out of all the burn of feelings and the great waste of ineffectual thoughts, it was dawning upon him that in their own good time, the dead of Amritsar’s public square would speak for themselves.

In the days that followed Dicky worked quietly, worked from the standpoint of the English almost entirely. He “exposed” himself like a film to the aftermath of the tragedy. He went after facts and statements. It was never to be ascertained, the number of killed and injured. The English granted about three hundred dead; the natives claimed five times that, even more. He was much at Headquarters; and confined himself altogether to the Civil Lines. Through Lala Relu Ram, he received certain secret reports from the native point of view, and guarded these little tissues assiduously. A cigarette case contained them all.

He went each day to the Crawling Lane, as one doing a city beat for a newspaper would call at city hall or recorders’ court. This was the place where Miss Sherwood was assaulted by the natives, on the 10th. It was narrow and thickly populated, with double-story buildings on either side, and numerous blind alleys shooting out of the lane.

The crawling order remained in force for eight days. Although General Fyatt called it “going on all fours,” and it had been called the “hand and knee order” by the press, the process consisted in the persons lying flat on their bellies and crawling like reptiles. Any lifting of the knees or bending thereof brought the rifle butts of the soldiers and police on the native backs.

“But, General,” Dicky said cheerfully, “people are forced to crawl through there or go without food and medicine--people who have never seen Miss Sherwood, much less taken part in the assault.”

“She was beaten,” General Fyatt declared. “We look upon women as sacred.”

“Ah,” said the American.

In the Crawling Lane and elsewhere were erected _tikitis_ for flogging. These were triangles of wood, upon which the hands could be suspended and tied. A general order was issued for all the native population of Amritsar, a city of one hundred and sixty thousand, to _salam_ to English in the streets. Those who did not _salam_ were arrested, often flogged. Many of the people were so terrified, that they dared not sit down anywhere outside of their own houses, lest one of the English appear suddenly and not find them standing and in position to _salam_.

During the late days of April, Richard Cobden did not see Nagar, though occasional brief messages reached him from his friend through the students. One of these was a suggestion, which Dicky followed, to send off whatever mail he had ready, in care of one of the young men who was leaving for Pondicherry, French India. Finally there was the episode of the tennis court, in the Civil Lines. Dicky drew up to the crowd.

A set of doubles or singles was not in progress. This was a game of triangle--a _tikiti_ in the center of the court; a naked native strung up and being whipped. Dicky had seen about enough of this, and was ready to turn back, when something of the carriage of the native’s head arrested his eye, and started a peculiar sinking in his heart.

The bare back was toward him, but the face turned sidewise revealed the profile of Nagar. His hands were strapped high toward the top of the great frame formed in the shape of the letter A. Nagar had been stripped to the loincloth, his head bare, his white robes and turban cloth flung upon the turf. The stripes were being put on by one of the native police. The whip was a rigid canelike affair, but longer than a walking-stick. A detachment of native soldiers was drawn up on one side, police on the other. Two young officers of the military, one of whom Dicky knew, were in charge of the affair.

Dicky had halted, hand to mouth. Each stroke blinded his eyes; his body became, for an instant after it, like a house in flames with every curtain tightly drawn. Then he would see the sunlight before the next stroke, and the naked man with bleeding back. He had direct need to turn his back upon this thing--the old nausea. It never occurred to him that this was his own great test, greater than Nagar’s, for such tests of the human heart do not come announced; but out of all past experience, one thing stood in the midst of a rocking universe--that if he did anything in this red blindness, he would do worse than nothing.

He walked away, his elbows jerking up as another stroke fell. The thing that saved him was already accomplished. The turning of his back was all that was required, apparently, since in this instant he got a life and death grip on the word _Messenger_. Was he Nagar’s friend or India’s messenger?

Then he knew just one furious smearing doubt. What of human loyalty--to stand by and allow this thing to go on? He was answered in his mind from Nagar’s own words, “Mahatma-ji’s ideal isn’t human, Richard. It is of the Soul.” Action of a foreigner in behalf of a native would only intensify the English fears and the native’s plight. To rush in was John Higgins’ code. Evidently there was another.

He walked around to meet Nagar face to face. Ten feet away, he stood until Nagar’s eyes came up to his. Had Nagar’s hand been free to lift and command _Silence_, his lips free to speak, the word could not have been more fiercely impressed. Indeed, the word _Silence_ seemed to have been shot into the American’s consciousness.

A blow fell. Nagar’s eyes closed; his lips stretched out as if struck by an invisible hand. Then under the trailing eyelids, Dicky saw a look of inexpressible gratitude and relief--the barest beginning of a smile. Nagar had found him fit to trust. It was another moment of real life, that moment of the look, another instant of essential recognition.

* * * * *

“Oh, I say, Cobden--have you seen a ghost?”

It was Langoyer, one of the young English officers, who spoke. He was leaning upon his cane, to flick a cigarette stub off the court with his boot. Langoyer paid no attention to the flogging. The men attended to that, you know. One had to stand by--as one would wait for his horse to drink.

Dicky was now being lashed to the quick himself. He had seen clearly--but a sort of hideous night had settled upon him again. He had to watch his temper.

“How many does this man get, Langoyer?” he managed to ask.

“Thirty.”

“What for?”

“He knows more of the sedition of Kitchlew and Satyapal than he’ll tell.”

The figure had gone limp on the triangle.

“Fainted,” gasped Richard Cobden.

The whipping stopped. A tin bucket of water was brought and dashed upon Nagar’s face and shoulders. A moan came from him because he was not quite conscious. Then the knees drew up and his feet felt for the ground.

The lieutenant stepped forward taking Nagar’s ear in his right hand and calling aloud:

“Will you tell the truth now of Kitchlew’s plot against Government?”

Nagar looked at him without hatred. He tried to speak twice before the words came:

“I have already told the truth----”

“How many stripes have been given?” Langoyer asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“Finish the thirty, then take him to _kotwali_. A few days more will make him tell all right.”

The American remained. One--two--three--four.

The hands were unstrapped. The robe was cast about the shoulders. Nagar could stand. Dicky left the officers and followed his friend and the native policemen to the station, feeling like a pariah’s whelp.

LII

THE OLD FACE

DICKY reflected that there were two ways of looking at a person or a thing, a fact proven several times in his experience. There had been a moment in the presence of Gandhi, after many minutes of talk, when the face, that had been dull and unattractive as a camel driver’s, had suddenly appeared to him with memorable, essential significance. It had been so with Miss Claes: also the moment when he had really seen Pidge, as they stood together on the Palisades of Santa Monica. Recently he had caught an immortal something in the look from Nagar on the rack.

He did not see Nagar again in Amritsar, but up to mid-May the students reported that his friend was still imprisoned. The sound of those falling strokes was slow to die out of the corridors of Dicky’s memory. They awoke him in the night. It was far easier, however, to recall the splendor of gameness in the way Nagar had taken his beating. This satisfied every American instinct; and even above this, was the mystery of compassion for the English, in Nagar’s face. Here was a man on a tennis court in a remote Punjabi town, hardly heard-of in this war-racked world, plainly putting over the thing he had marveled at, as a small boy in Sunday school: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Apparently the same majestic composure. Life held many things; yet Richard Cobden couldn’t be sure altogether, that he had not outraged the spirit of friendship in failing to register his protest of word and deed. Of course, the consequences might have been disastrous, but, at least, a certain man-to-man loyalty would have been satisfied.

If further tortures were inflicted upon Nagar, Dicky was not informed. The Amritsar story was no longer on the outside; it was in Richard Cobden’s brain and heart. He wrote some of it and his letters were forwarded, but still he conned and brooded. Having held still through the whipping of Nagar, he found it easier to stand in the midst of current events without losing his head, or letting emotion or opinion have right of way.

Late in May, a student brought word that Nagar was free and had gone south. This was all that Dicky had been waiting for. Crawling, salaming, flogging, imprisonment and forced testimony had long since become to him a full and bitter cup. At the station, as he waited for his train, a student, edging near, managed to whisper two words:

“_Ashrama_, Ahmedabad.”

The American’s head bowed slightly. He had meant to go to Ahmedabad anyway.

He was not met at the station there, but a servant at the _Entresden_ told him to go at once to the _Ashrama_. He obeyed, and found himself listening for the voice of Mahatma-ji, as he entered, but his eyes searched the shadows of the hall for Nagar, a kind of breathless pain about it all.

As the door of an inner room opened, at last, and the native who conducted him drew back, Dicky saw a woman standing in the dimness. Her face, turned toward him, was a mere blur of darkness, but there was a leap toward her in Richard Cobden’s breast. Then he stood before her, in a daze of joy, one hand in hers, one upon her shoulder.

“It happened very quickly in New York,” she told him. “A letter saying that I was coming could hardly have reached you before the steamer that brought me----”

“But, Miss Claes--New York! What are we to do--no Harrow Street?”

“You will know what to do,” she said. “And about the things that were in your rooms. I had them carefully boxed and sent to your mother, who was well when I left. Also your aunt and sister.”

He took from his pocket the old dark key to the “parlor” door. She bent and touched it.

“Keep it, Richard,” she said, “until I send you another.”

* * * * *

“And Nagar----” he began at length.

“He is here.”

“And well? I could get so little word.”

“Nagar has been hurt, but is healing. Look----”

Dicky turned to find his friend standing behind them at the door. He had felt a presence there, but thought it was the native who had brought him. Nagar’s eyes looked very large in the wasted face.

“Oh, yes, all is well with me,” he said. “I have been sorry to leave you so much alone in the north.... Yes,” he added, “it was harder for you than for me--the test that day on the tennis court. You were brave, my friend. I knew all was well--when the instant passed and you remained silent.”

“How do you mean--all was well?”

“I knew that the message of India would get to America--since you did not spoil it by defending me.”

Nagar turned to Miss Claes, adding:

“I saw the fury and fright rise in his eyes, and all the impulses of ethics of the West--then silence over all. It was as if we were cemented----”

Dicky remembered that last word afterward.