XXVIITHE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE
COBDEN heard the voice before he saw the man. Standing in a darkened hall of the bungalow, spoken of as theAshrama, the voice of one speaking English in easy cultured tones reached his ears. When the door opened, he saw several native young men sitting upon the floor and a wasted Hindu figure in the center—a little man in a thin turban more like a skullcap; a homespun loincloth, his bare feet beneath him upon a mat of coarse cloth, a rough pillow at his back. The young men about him had risen, but the central figure merely lifted and extended the hand.
“Mr. Cobden from America,” Gandhi said. “Nagarjuna has made us eager to welcome you.”
Even Nagar withdrew, but one of the boys returned bringing a chair.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll try sitting on the floor, too,” Dicky told the latter. “I’d feel perched with Mr. Gandhi sitting below.”
The Mahatma smiled. “I quite appreciate,” he said. “I hope you will find in India the same kindness that you gave Nagarjuna in New York.”
Dicky had expected power; he found composure.His idea of power was perhaps in part a hang-over from a boyish ideal of a certain American financial executive. Nothing of that in this room; rather he was conscious of Gandhi’s frailness and smallness. This presence called forth impulses to be tender, to lower one’s voice, to hurry to bring anything wanted. He was shocked a little at the twisted, battered look of the features. The lips looked pulpy in parts and did not rest together evenly. The smile was curiously slow—tentative, like one in whom understanding dawns. Back of the iron-rimmed spectacles and tired eyes, so inured to pain, was the essence of fearlessness. This was the first commanding characteristic to the American.
“... Fear,” Gandhi was saying, “fear of death makes us devoid both of valor and religion. There is no place for fear in theSatyagrahi’sheart.”
“What is aSatyagrahi?” Cobden asked.
“One who is devoted and pledged to truth, toSatyagraha. I coined the word, to express our purpose in South Africa.Satyagrahais the use of Love-force or Soul-force.”
Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the peace of it, the humming of acharkain the next room, a symbol of that peace. He felt Gandhi’s face growing upon him out of the shadow, a face that had been dried cleanly by many suns, the features fashioned by a life of direct, unpredatory thinking—the face of a man incapable, even in thought, of hitting below the belt. And now, there was to go with the hum of thecharka, thefaint fragrance of dried fruit in the air, or that sweetness one breathes in the altitudes where the sun is shining upon the great conifers.
“The world has talked much of the omnipotence of God,” Mahatma-ji went on. “India, at last, is preparing to put her faith to test. Passive resistance has been called the weapon of the weak; if this is so, the Soul is weaker than the flesh. Passive resistance calls upon its devotees to endure great suffering, even martyrdom and death. Those who believe it is too difficult to carry out do not trust the Soul. They are not moved by true courage.”
There was no pose nor show, no straining for force, rarely an adjective or simile, no shadings of sense—a direct approach, inevitably direct. Dicky felt suddenly hopeless of ever understanding such directness. For the first time in his life, he realized that all his training to live and to write was less than straight. He had been taught half-tones, shadows to accentuate lights. Here was directness.
Gandhi resumed: “It is the sacred principle of love which moves mountains. To us is the responsibility of living out this sacred law; we are not concerned with results.”
“No such thing then as righteous anger?” Dicky asked.
“There is not for us. Anger is the misuse of force. Anger in thought is an enemy to clear thinking, to understanding. To understand is to love. Anger in action tends to become violence, and violence is thenegation of spiritual force. In fact, only those who eschew violence can avail themselves of their real powers. Only those who realize that there is something in man which is superior to the brute nature in him, and that the latter always yields to it, can effectively apply this force, which is to violence, and therefore to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. For the exercise of the purest Soul-force, prolonged training of the individual Soul is an absolute necessity.”
Just now Dicky was contending with the feeling that he was in the presence of an evangelist or healer. He had difficulty for the moment in recalling that Gandhi was world-trained; a lawyer of London’s careful making; an opponent of governments in South Africa; a man found powerful enough in his own person to be reckoned with by the established laws of men of high place.
“We have many things to ask of England,” Gandhi said, “and she has promised us her attention, as soon as her present difficulties give her freedom of heart and hand to attend our wants here. To press our wants now, or to force our desires upon England in her crisis in Europe, would be taking an unfair advantage. So this is a time for us in India to cleanse and prepare ourselves for future action, sacrifice if necessary——”
At one moment Gandhi’s face was dull and unattractive as a camel driver’s; again it shone with a high clear calm, like the ideal most of us have of a saint or a priest. Now the instant came, as the words stopped, that Dicky seemed to be looking into the Indian faceactually for the first time, and Gandhi was lookingintohim. The American was uncentered for a second or two, as he had once felt in the quick sag of an airplane in a bit of rough going.
It began to become clear to the caller that there were only a few constantly vibrating themes in this man’s talk: the necessity for nonviolence; the control of self, essential before the control of others can be contemplated; the establishment of altruism as a basis for all political activity; the return of India into her own destiny of a handicraft civilization, which involved the making and using of her own goods and the turning of her back upon the “monster of a mechanical civilization”; freedom of speech, devotion to truth, fearlessness, always that.
Dicky now actually contemplated the look of unearthly calm in the eyes of the man before him. Was it fanaticism—this fearlessness which Gandhi put into practice? Was there a soul-calm back of the human nervous system, a central calm that a man could reach and abide in, that made anything negligible that men might do to the body? Was there something really that Miss Claes and Nagar and this man talked about—something that went on and on, that loved one’s enemies, that loved one’s love, no matter what this life effected to keep them apart? Was it worth going after, since every ordinary viewpoint seemed changed in those who had touched it?... Surely India was getting him going—he, Dicky Cobden, of the family of trowel makers! In amazement, he realized that he was respondingto some stimulus like the finest wine—that if he didn’t get out of here soon, he would fall to telling his troubles like a man who has had too many drinks.
Gandhi was speaking of his workers and devotees here in Ahmedabad; the manner of their life together:
“So in ourAshrama,” he explained, “every child is taught to understand political institutions and to know how his country is vibrating with new emotions, with new aspirations, with new life.... As for men and women living and working together in theAshrama, they must live the celibate life whether married or unmarried. Marriage brings a woman close together with a man, and they become friends in a special sense, never to be parted in this life or in the lives to come; but I do not think that into that place of life, our lusts should necessarily enter.”
Dicky had scrambled to his feet from the floor.
“I won’t take your time any more just now,” he mumbled haltingly.
Mahatma-ji watched him with a look of gentlest understanding.
Dicky backed out. He was in the street alone.... The young men had not restrained him in the slightest. They had seemed to understand that he must be alone. Even Nagar had only walked at his side a moment in the hall, to say that he would come to theEntresdenafter dinner.... He was alone in the outskirts of the city with the miracle. Somewhere among Gandhi’s sentences about men and women, it had happened—somewherein there, when he had spoken about—yes, that was it, “about friends in a special sense!...”
A pariah dog yelped, running out of a doorway, almost banging into his knees. He was in a narrow street, and had to step upon a doorsill, while two men passed dragging at a cart. He saw their bare ribs and salt-whitened loin cloths. The sun was still high; the stillness and heat almost fetid in the byways. He passed a native market place by the river, and out of all the moving multicolored crowd, he remembered only one parasol of jade green, though he did not see the face beneath.
His American-trained mind scoffed against the thing that had happened, but his heart held on serenely.... What did this little world-warrior with the battered mouth know about love and living with a woman? What did he know about lusts that he spoke so freely of? Did he ever give three years of his life to the one battle—not to hate the woman he loved most under heaven? Or was that particular battle so far back in his experience that he merely spoke of it as one skirmish in the great campaign of fifty years, called Life?
Alone at dinner at theEntresden, Dicky conned every word the Little Man had spoken about the young married people who worked together in theAshrama, of the celibacy they vowed themselves to, of their becoming through marriage “friends in a special sense—for this and all lives.” Yes, Gandhi talked as if it were a foregone conclusion that there were other lives....
He wasn’t tasting his dinner.... He came up fromthe deeps of reflection to realize a waiter was coming toward him, as if in answer to a signal. He also discovered that he had been sitting over his filled plate with one hand lifted—the thumb and fingers brushing together, as if he were close toher, and it was a bit of her dress or a wisp of her hair between his fingers. His mind could scoff all it pleased, for his heart held serenely to the miracle, and this was the miracle: that Pidge Musser, married or not married, was back alive in his heart; and such a melting pity for her plight had come to him as he sat before the Little Man, that he, the hardheaded, had to rise abruptly from the interview and rush away, lest he fall to weeping and explaining all.