Part 17

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.

As he moved about and talked, he was vaguely conscious of watching the other two together. It was as if Pidge would want to hear of every gesture and detail. Miss Claes was less Indian here than in Harrow Street. There he had thought of her as belonging to the East; here she seemed of the West. Something of the composure he had noted on the tennis court had come to stay in Nagar’s eyes. As moments passed, Dicky knew that they contained deep vitalities of meaning that would appear in coming days.

It was as if his limitations were being stretched, but by consummate hands. There was repeatedly brought to him, from them, something that he refused to hear or dwell with: that he had done well, that he was deeply approved of in their sight; that there was much more to take place between them as a group, even though they were to stay in Asia, and he was leaving for The States.... Then all faces turned, and in the doorway stood the Little Man.

No one spoke, but to Richard Cobden it was one moment of his life that he thought of as religious. Mahatma-ji came in between them, and Dicky felt the old urge somehow to help with his hands; the sense, too, of all India thronging, whispering around them. For a moment the four had been standing in silence, when they heard the _sweep_ of bare slow feet in the hall, and now an old dark face was in the doorway, a smile serene as nothing else on earth but the Hills themselves--a dark wrinkled old face, and she came forward and stood very low and little in the midst of them--Gandhi’s comrade.

* * * * *

In San Francisco, waiting for the departure of his train east, a card was sent up to Cobden’s hotel room. It was from Chris Heidt, the managing editor of his former newspaper connection.

“Hello, Cobden. Just noticed you were off ship. What did you bring back?”

Dicky reflected. “The story of Amritsar,” he said finally.

“Amritsar, what’s that?”

“The first big story I ever ran across. I feel like one of Job’s servants, who said he alone remained to make a report.”

Mr. Heidt had been much on trains during the past few days, and had missed the fact, so far, that _The Public Square_ had begun to publish the story.

“Not going to bury it in a weekly, are you?”

“I have much more than _The Public Square_ could use in months. It really should get out into the broad market. The end of one world and the birth of another took place that Sunday in Amritsar--all in miniature, you understand----”

He spoke of Gandhi, whose name had scarcely been heard at this time in America, and touched upon the story of _maidan_.

“Sure,” said Mr. Heidt. “Sure, it’s a big yarn, but months ago. No way to substantiate it. You’re a little out of perspective, Cobden, seeing it all first hand that way.”

“I can substantiate it,” Dicky said queerly.

“I know, but the whole story’s a trouble-maker. Far as I can make out, this Gandhi is a sort of sanctimonious Lenine, and we’re not promoting any kind of Lenines just now. Red roughhouses all over the world, but we’re not advertising the fact. The best newspaper interests here and in England are letting that sort of thing die down. Everybody’s healthily intent on getting back to business right now. Make a corking fiction setting--your Amritsar--series of short stories that would do no harm.”

Thus Richard had his American perspective restored.

LIII

THE WHITE LIGHT AGAIN

DICKY was considerably subdued. India had permitted his ideas to romp at large. He had forgotten that, home again, these ideas must be brought down to an orderly trudge. America, as a whole, seemed one-pointedly trying to get back to work after the War, calling all protestors untimely and in bad taste. Dicky thought out the situation minutely and severely during the three full travel days to Chicago. At the end of each day he was somewhat exhausted from the big bonfires that had taken place within him--piles of rubbish, glamour and the like.

In Chicago he procured two numbers of _The Public Square_ preceding the current issue, and before his eyes was the manner in which Pidge had “sprung” the Amritsar story. He felt the magic of her working with him in an altogether new way. The latest number confessed, not without grace, that the story of Gandhi and Amritsar had aroused the more open-minded element of the American public, as nothing else since the War; but thanks to Chris Heidt, the returning correspondent watched the rising tide of public interest in his work, as a spectator unexpectant, instead of a performer who fancies he has the world by the tail. It dawned on him, however, that Chris Heidt hadn’t known quite all that was going on in America under the homely thunders of trade.

He reached New York in the early evening and went to Fiftieth Street at once. There he had dinner, and an hour of talk, before he rang up Mrs. Melton at the _Sennacherib_.

“Is this Mr. Cobden?” a voice asked presently.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Melton left word for you to go to 54 Harrow Street--to the parlor on the second floor, the card says.”

Mr. Cobden didn’t take out his own car that night. Perhaps he didn’t feel as if he could keep his mind on getting himself downtown. He sat back in the cushions of his mother’s limousine; and Conrad, whose career as Cobden coachman had changed to Cobden chauffeur nearly twenty years ago, handled the big box like a hearse.

“Sit tight, Dicky,” he breathed, and never once urged Conrad forward. In fact, Dicky didn’t speak, until it became necessary to show the way a little, for Harrow Street is tricky to find from Washington Square.

“Don’t wait--yes, you’d better wait, Conrad,” he called, crossing the walk to the door.

The outer door was unlatched. He hurried up one flight. The same curtain, the white light.

“Pidge----”