XLVIIIN THE WARM DARK
COBDEN found himself in the lane, turned away from themaidan, 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, thesepoyswere 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 thekucha, 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 hismakeup 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 themaidanhad 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 theGolden 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 thesepoyfiring 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 freedit 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 themaidanwith 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, whichsome 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 theAshrama—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 themaidan. 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 themaidanwere 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.Sarkarhad fired upon them to-day.Sarkarwould 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 themaidan. No English came that night—but the pariahdogs 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.