XLTHE 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 toSatyagrahaby 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 themilitary 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 criminallaws 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 thecharkain 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 resistthe 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 attainmentrightly 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.
Dickysawthe 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 JohnHiggins 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.