at _The Public Square_, and did not come home for luncheon. She had
told John Higgins of her marriage but the subject was not mentioned
afterward. The old chief vanished for three days following the news,
and when he came back there was a new dignity on his part for Pidge
to cope with. She found her position a trifle uncentered. His old
stenographer took his letters, and he wrote his editorials on his own
machine as aforetime. John Higgins said little, but found flaws in her
judgments that had not appeared before. He no longer risked availing
himself of her entire equipment; this change being apparently on the
basis that he dare not get used to it all over again. He seemed to hold
the idea that it was only a question of days at most before a married
woman would forget place and town entirely and rush off to pick up
pieces of wool and thread for a nest.
Pidge had built so much of herself into her work that there was
emphatic pain in the new conditions. She needed the work more than
ever now, but _The Public Square_ was falling into sorry days and
ways. There was nothing to say but War, and if you didn’t like War,
didn’t see the divine uses of War and say so, you had better say
nothing. There was no field in the world at this time for a magazine of
dignified or any other kind of protest, and in the steady loss of money
week after week, the struggle became one of great simplicity--to stay
alive.
“Higgins is a rotten old knocker anyway,” said Rufus Melton. “This is a
time for Americans to stand together and not criticize the government.
He never did pay any real money for his stuff, but was always ready to
tell you where you fell down. They’re telling him a word or two now.”
So Pidge didn’t speak much of _The Public Square_ at home.
Rufus vibrated between a depression when his stuff wouldn’t come
through and an exaltation when it did. He was quite sincere in his
industry, but slept late in the morning. Pidge was up and away four
mornings out of five without waking him. Sometimes Rufe decided to eat
his “big meal of the day” in the middle of the afternoon, in which
case Pidge supped alone. He was slow to get his work started, so that
it was often evening before he got “all of himself working at once.”
Then he was apt to stay with it for several hours, in which case Pidge
could sleep if she got a chance. Occasionally he found that he could
dictate a bit of first draft and Pidge undertook at first to help him
in this way, but when she perceived that it didn’t occur to him, in the
flush of his evening powers, that she had worked all day and must work
to-morrow, she decided to stay off his night work.
“I can’t, Rufe,” she said one night on the way to bed. “It’s so
fascinating to practice napping in the hushes and rushes of your
machine.”
“You won’t take this stuff?”
“No.”
“You won’t?”
“It will interfere with your work session if you lose your temper. Of
course, we’ve got the whole upper floor to start something in, but we
must think of your story.”
“Whose work counts in this outfit?” he demanded.
“Yours, Rufe, by all means. A fine patriotic short story at any price.
But I have a job to look after, and I can’t give them a red-headed
somnambulist to-morrow. No, I’m going to sleep, but I do hope you get
the American flags waving all right in your story.”
“I’ll get you, Pan--for acting like this.”
“You’ve got me, dear, and don’t forget to have the hero come through
with, ‘My country right or wrong.’ No girl can resist that--or editor.
Good night.”
Rufe was rarely rough. He didn’t overtire or over-stimulate himself, so
that his temper could easily break corral; and at its worst this temper
wasn’t a man-eater. Rufe’s nervous system was cushioned in a fine layer
of healthy fat, and therefore didn’t flog itself to madness against
bare bone and sinew. He was merely involved in himself entirely, which
makes any man naïve.
Pidge wasn’t missing any of the petty dramas of her present
experience. When she came home the first time to find that he had
already had dinner, something flew out of her into space in a frantic
search for God. When she realized that he saw nothing but undisturbed
equity in the idea of using her for his own work purposes half
the night, when she was contracted to _The Public Square_ for the
days--another output of herself was loose in the solar system. When she
came to understand that the tens he was earning were mysteriously his
own, and that her ones were theirs--another day, at least, was spoiled
for her in the editorial rooms.
Rufe thought her extremely selfish. So had her father. “Two to one,”
she said. “They’ve got it on me. They’ve got it on all of us. This
is their world.”... She thought of all this bitterness and bickering
taking place in Nagar’s room, which Miss Claes had saved for weeks
for a sort of sanctuary of her own. Mostly she was hurt by the deadly
parallel of this life, with her life in Los Angeles and vicinity. To
cope with this American story-man, she was forced to draw out and
readjust and refurbish the old hateful mechanism that had formed within
her during the nineteen years with her father. She knew how. The
mechanism worked all right, but the sense of the hateful thing resuming
activity within her was far harder to bear than the racket of Rufe’s
typewriter when she was trying to sleep.
The fact that Rufe Melton was entirely cut off from the play of her
real powers; that he thought her ridiculous, and said so, when she gave
any notice of holding other than the standard American points of view
on politics and religion and social ethics; this was not so serious a
breach between them, as it would have been to a woman who had not come
into so startling a reaction as Pidge had, against the whole system of
knowing and not doing. All the knowledge that really mattered to Pidge
was that working doctrine which doesn’t announce or explain, but shows
itself in living the life. She was very sad, and continually sad, that
she had to work upon Rufe the iron of irony, the stab so subtle that it
astonishes before it hurts, and the self-control which disarms.
Sometimes Sundays or in unexpected periods of leisure they had moments
of actual delight together. This occasionally happened when food just
pleased him, or when an acceptance from a magazine arrived at a price
which he considered adequate. (Rufus never neglected the price of his
things, as an indication of his getting on.) He uncovered a real levity
at such times, and their talk didn’t walk merely, then; it danced.
“We’ll go up to Harlem,” he said one Sunday morning. “I used to live up
there in the colored settlement----”
Figuratively speaking, Pidge waved her hand before her own eyes to
shut out the critical negatives which always arose when Rufe told of
living somewhere. They went and stayed gay. When he turned from her
innocently to consult a policeman in Harlem, she checked the first and
last, “I told you so.” They found yams that day--yams freshly arrived
from Georgia, and coffee said to be parched and dripped according to
an ideal of New Orleans first families. These satisfied Rufus, and
still they stayed gay. Even his, “I could take you around to a lot of
queer dumps in this man’s town,” didn’t upset anything. Altogether that
day was memorable.... Once in desperate fatigue, when there were moving
dark spots before her eyes in every ray of daylight, Pidge cried to
Miss Claes:
“But he is lost to everything, entirely oblivious to everything but
himself and his work--his stories, his fame, his winning his way!”
“I know, Pidge, but the world is on top of him yet. He is fighting his
way up and out. Romance can’t be entirely satisfying, you know, when it
has ambition for a rival. You’ve told me something about the thrall of
a book in yourself--how engrossing it is.”
“That all goes out of me when I’m with him,” Pidge said suddenly. “I
never thought of it before, but all that old agony to produce another
book that I used to feel is gone. I seem to let him carry all that.”
“That helps for the present, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, and it isn’t all sordid--don’t think I mean that, Miss Claes.
Sometimes when he’s satisfied with his story, so that he can forget it,
we have such good times. He’s such a playboy, such a playmate. Some old
terrible longing comes over me when we are close like that, just to be
like one of the Mediterranean women, who know nothing but to replenish
the earth. But it doesn’t do to dwell on that,” Pidge finished with an
impressive quietness of tone. “One thing I learned rather well, before
it was too late.”
“What’s that, Pidge?”
“That this isn’t the time or place for us to bring a little baby into
the world.”
XXVI
THE HANGING SOCK
NAGAR was changed. On the day that Richard Cobden reached Ahmedabad,
he encountered one of the surprises of his life. It was like meeting
a man out in the freedom of the world, whom one had only known before
in prison. Two years in the East had sharpened Dicky’s eyes to note
something in Nagar’s face that he had been unable to detect before.
Dicky called it cleanliness and calm, but this brought up the old
difficulty which he never missed in his work of writing--that at best,
words only suggest, only intimate.
In America Nagar had looked dark; here he looked fair. There he had
moved in and out as one of the colored men; here he was one of the
elect. There he had lived in the midst of silences and mysterious
inhibitions, diminished by the garments of Western civilization; here
he was white-robed in the sunlight, like young Gautama in his father’s
garden. Of course, Dicky knew that the change was more substantial than
that of garb or place. He could only repeat that Nagar seemed free in
his own mind.
In the first few moments at the station in Ahmedabad, Dicky had himself
felt unwashed and unwholesome, as no man ever made him feel before.
His hand went up to his chin. Yes, he had shaved that morning, but
realizing it did not help much. It wasn’t the grime of travel that hurt
him, but the smear of his recent mental and emotional overturning, the
ugliness of all those days in the red room at Bombay, and the sense
of failure and loss he lived with constantly since the coming of the
letter from Pidge.
“... And the Little Man is actually here in Ahmedabad, and not a myth?”
Dicky had asked, as they drew out of the crowd at the station.
“Not only that, but you are to go to the _Ashrama_ now, if you will. He
is eager to have you come.”
“His house first?” Dicky asked.
“It is also the house in which I live,” said Nagar.
“You mean you wish to put me up in your quarters?”
“If you would not mind our great simplicity.”
“Thanks, I should like that,” said Dicky, “but I think it would be
better for me to follow the usual course of a foreigner and find hotel
quarters.”
The _Entresden_ was not crowded and Dicky obtained comfortable quarters
in a northeast room where the upholstering was covered in clean tan
linen, and the _punkahs_ showed signs of life immediately upon their
entrance. Nagar prepared to leave as soon as Dicky sat down in the air
crossing between two shaded windows.
“I will come for you this afternoon if you wish to go to the _Ashrama_
to-day,” he said. “It is some distance from the center of the city.”
“Sit down, Nagar; don’t hurry off.”
“I thought you would prefer to rest until after _tiffin_.”
“Stay and we’ll have it here. You’ll pour the tea like the old days in
Miss Claes’ room.”
Nagar’s face was in the shadows, but there was a soft shining as of
polished silver in or around his eyes. At times, shutting his eyes as
Nagar spoke, Dicky could almost believe he was back in the basement
at Harrow Street. The way Nagar said to him, “my friend,” was almost
Miss Claes herself. That was the poignant part of finding the Oriental
again; that he brought back Harrow Street--even moments under the white
light. The day would have been joyous but for the aching emptiness of
heart. Dicky asked tirelessly about Gandhi, especially since it gave
him such a chance to study the new Nagar.
“Mahatma-ji has burned away all waste,” Nagar said at length. “He
has narrowed himself down, body and mind, to an almost perfect
obedience--self-control. He measures action to all his words. The best
he knows, step by step, he performs.”
“Where did you hear of him first?”
“Here in India--of his work in South Africa. I went there to know him
better--followed the gleam, as you might say. I stayed four years. It
was he who encouraged me to go to America to study more of the spirit
of the West.”
“What’s Gandhi’s message to these people?”
“He believes that politics cannot be successfully divorced from
religion,” Nagar said. “His message always is toward the spiritualizing
of India’s political life and her institutions. The spiritual
predominance of India, which he idealizes as being the real destiny of
India, can only be effected by her rebecoming herself, by the return of
the Motherland into herself, by her ceasing to imitate all the ways of
western civilization.”
“But if she returns into herself, making her own goods, cutting herself
off from all institutions of the present government--England will be
done for here.”
Nagar bowed without the trace of a smile.
“I’ve heard that every turn of a spinning-wheel in India takes part of
a turn from a power loom in Manchester,” Dicky added.
Nagar further acquiesced.
“And that isn’t politics?... I think I’ll go in for religion, myself.”
* * * * *
“It is very good to have you here,” Nagar said later. “Mahatma-ji will
also be glad. He has asked much about you and believes that you may be
a means of making many in America understand. It is a saying with us
here that ‘to understand is to love.’”
“But I didn’t come here with any set idea, you know.”
“The work you will do for us in America will be the better for that.
The more reason and rationale you bring----”
“Evidently it’s easy for one to go off his head where Gandhi is,” Dicky
said.
“His effect on some is subtle and strong.”
“I’ll keep a stiff bridle arm. Say, Nagar, have you stopped to think
how I happen to be here to-day?”
“Tell me, please.”
“One hanging sock.”
“I do not understand.”
“One hanging sock. It was that which made me go out into the reception
room in the first place, that day you brought the story to _The Public
Square_. I heard the office boy say to J. H., ‘He keeps pulling up his
sock.’ I went out to see. So that’s what made me go to Harrow Street,
and meet Miss Claes and the rest and go to Africa, and come here. I
believe that’s what started the World War.”
Nagar laughed. “I always had such trouble in the early days with
American clothing. I would get one part working and another would give
way----”
“But, Nagar, what made it so imperative for you to have the two hundred
that day?”
“A ship was leaving within twenty-four hours for the Mediterranean to
connect with South African ports. Mahatma-ji was greatly in need of
funds to carry on his work.”
“I thought you were ill--possibly starving.”
“I was ill from strain--self-consciousness. It was one of the hardest
things I ever had to do--to stand up against America in the office of
_The Public Square_.”
“You certainly put it over. But what made you so silent in New York?
It’s an actual shock to find you chatty and human, like this.”
“Certain of us in India are trained differently from American ways. You
perhaps have read that in the Pythagorean schools, a period of silence
was enjoined among the young men. It was so in my training. We seek to
silence all opinions, all half-truths, all thinking, in fact, in order
to _Know_. We postulate, of course, a center of Spontaneous Knowledge,
or Genius, above the mind. To learn obedience to this, one takes a vow
of silence----”
“Ah, I remember! Pidge--Miss Musser--I mean Mrs. Melton, told me
something of the kind!”
XXVII
THE MAHATMA AND THE MIRACLE
COBDEN heard the voice before he saw the man. Standing in a darkened
hall of the bungalow, spoken of as the _Ashrama_, 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 the _Satyagrahi’s_
heart.”
“What is a _Satyagrahi_?” Cobden asked.
“One who is devoted and pledged to truth, to _Satyagraha_. I coined the
word, to express our purpose in South Africa. _Satyagraha_ is the use
of Love-force or Soul-force.”
Curiously, Dicky felt the cleanness of the house, the peace of it, the
humming of a _charka_ in 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
the _charka_, the faint 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 the negation
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 face actually
for the first time, and Gandhi was looking _into_ him. 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 responding to 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 our _Ashrama_,” 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 the _Ashrama_, 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 the _Entresden_
after 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--somewhere in 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.