XLIIIHATHISLAMENTS
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 faceoften 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. Stewartand 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.Hathishad gonemusth, but not for long.Hathiswas horrified at the awfulness of the thing she had done.Hathiswas back in her pickets again, not realizing her own hurts, anticipating a clubbing on the toes, and in the immortal way ofhathis, 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 theirfaryad. 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 nobodywill 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.