XLIILALA 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 theGolden 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 Moslemkowtowingto 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 afaryad(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 itsfaryadto the ranking English representativeof 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 whitemahout, 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 whitemahoutto 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 humanbody 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 theirfaryad. 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 elephantmusth.
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.