Higgins. “He understands that his desk is there for him as long as he
wants it, but he doesn’t encourage any one to believe he’ll use it
again. I told him he could do Washington, and leave Bert Ames on the
desk for the present, but he only shook his head.”
“I saw it coming,” said Pidge. “Oh, I’ve seen it for a long time. There
was never anything I could do to help him. I never can really help when
I want to.”
He felt she was thinking of Melton. She was, but she was thinking of
Fanny Gallup, too.
“He has no relatives,” Dicky went on, “but it’s arranged for his income
to keep up; anything he wants to do for the magazine----”
He saw her look of sadness.
“John Higgins is so helpless,” she said softly.
“We’ve taken on young Bothwell for the advertising, and given him a
little fund to work with,” Dicky reported. “Bothwell isn’t a plunger,
steady sort of genius in his game. The idea isn’t to plunge in any
department--just to work softly and slowly and steadily, giving
everybody his money’s worth. Also, if a story or article just suits, we
mustn’t let the price stand in the way any longer.”
She nodded wonderingly.
“Bert Ames has two or three good ideas to work out at the desk before
he leaves for Washington.”
“But who after that?”
“_Sit tight, Dicky._”
... He coughed. “It isn’t like the desk in the old sense. We have
talked about that. Pidge, I’m wabbling a bit, but the desk is yours.”
They were sitting in the windy front seats. She appeared to be looking
into the back of the motor-man’s neck.
“When you get back,” he added.
Her eyes did not move.
“This isn’t reward, this is your place; no other can hold down the
job. You’ve done it for months. There wouldn’t have been any _Public
Square_, if you hadn’t. I know all about the ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’
story, and the editorial paragraphs and how you have kept up the
reviews, and somehow got stories without money and without price. John
Higgins told me everything. It isn’t giving you reward. It is only
going on as you were, with some money to work with, and two or three
good men to help, and a salary for yourself that will make up in a
small way for the pittance you’ve been living on for years.”
“There mustn’t be any desk, Dicky,” she said queerly.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’d be the laughing stock of New York, if I perched on a desk,
calling myself the Editor.”
She halted, thinking of what Miss Claes had advised about her
authorship of _The Lance of the Rivernais_.
“You’ll take it, Pidge?” he said with deadly calm.
“I’ll do what I can until you come back. It must be managed very
silently. No announcements. I’ll be there as I was. I’ve been thinking
a lot. _The Public Square_--I know how dear it is to you, Dicky. It is
to me, too. It will be wonderful to have some money to work with. I
know about Bothwell. He’s the right man for the advertising.”
“I left it open--for you to choose the one to help you when Bert Ames
goes over to Washington.”
Her eyes turned to him directly now, searchingly. There seemed to be
something intelligible for him in them, but he did not divine the
meaning.
“That’ll all work out,” she said presently. “We mustn’t try to plan it
all now.”
Her eyes filled with laughter.
“Oh, Dicky,” she said, “if I’d ever get self-conscious about feeling
all the responsibilities of _The Public Square_ resting upon my
shoulders--I’d muddle the whole business in a day!”
“They have rested on your shoulders, Pidge.”
“Yes, but I didn’t stop to think.... In another minute you’ll be able
to see the ocean!”
They were silent. Then she pointed over the motor-man’s shoulder, and
he saw a vast stretch of leveled azure, like sky ironed out smooth.
“And--you’re--going--across!” she said suddenly--“still after the Big
Story that you’ve always been looking for. And oh, Dicky, I’ll go to
see them when you’re gone--your mother and aunt and sister.”
“It did a lot for me to learn that you had called.”
“Dicky,” she said solemnly, “when they told me what you’d done in
Paris----”
“Let’s not--Pidge.”
“And when I remembered that Sunday afternoon you took me to your
house--and what a beast I was--oh, how that hurt! I’ve been so sorry
and so grateful.”
* * * * *
He had seen Pidge with the baby in her arms. He had held the baby
himself, in fact, while she got breakfast one morning, and their
laughter had disturbed Mr. Adolph Musser, who felt that the world was
no place for such laughter with his nerves in the condition they were.
“His back feels so funny,” Dicky had reported concerning the infant.
Pidge gave him a look, and went on timing the eggs. Mr. Musser’s egg
had to lie three and one-half minutes in water that had ceased to boil.
“And his hair stays combed,” Dicky added.
He had held converse with Mr. Musser, which was an experience. Mrs. Rab
Gaunt Hastings had gone her way after a series of such experiences,
her fortune undivided. It had been said that the undivided nature of
her departure was in a measure responsible for Mr. Musser’s nervous
breakdown, though he explained it metaphysically. Since he could not be
left in his weak state, it was arranged for him to return with Pidge to
New York.
“I have known for many months that the field of my labors was to be
amplified,” said Mr. Musser, with one of his sudden hopeful flashes.
“My illness is but a cleansing in preparation. Always the wrecker
before the builder. My throat, for instance----”
Pidge called at this point from the fig tree back of the bungalow. It
was their last day.... For seven days they had walked the sunny silent
mesas, traced the interminable canyons, and miles and miles of curving
shore of the sea. To-night for him, the Valley train to San Francisco;
to-morrow afternoon, the Pacific Mail steamer.... She had spoken of
Rufus Melton for the first time.
“You think he was really married in France?” she asked.
“They frightened him into it,” Dicky said. “It seemed to me as if Rufe
looked upon it as a way out--then found that they didn’t mean to let
him escape, even then.”
There was no suffocating emotion about this talk. It was only in
moments like this that he understood that he had earned something
through the years. They had to go back to the bungalow for lunch with
the elder and the child, who objected to each other. There was only
a little while alone in the afternoon, because he had to be in Los
Angeles for his train at six.
“I started things going among the agents in New York, for a serial,” he
said at the last, “but you’ll have to decide. We want a corking long
story, Pidge--one that has brain and brawn----”
Her face was turned away.
“Just the right one should be lying around somewhere,” he added.
“I’ll look,” she said.
She would have gone into the city with him, but he objected: “You would
have to come back alone!”
Their real parting was on the Palisades, and there were few words about
it.
“It’s work, now,” he said. “We go opposite ways for the same job--the
Story of the Age.”
“And after that--New York,” she answered.
They stood in the superb sunlight at the edge of the escarpment.
Hundreds of feet below was the old abandoned bathhouse, and the three
white lines of surf pressing into the land, like tireless fingers of a
modeler upon the clay. To the left was the portal of the Canyon, to the
right the fallow lands with feathery brushes of eucalyptus against the
sky.
“We’re all meshed yet, Dicky--meshed in wantings and struggles, all
tracked up with recent experiences. We can’t see each other clearly
yet----”
He was looking into her face in half profile. Quietly it had dawned
upon him that he couldn’t have spared a single one of the hard days
of the past five years, not a single one of the black patches, even.
They were the dark rooms in which this present striking film had been
developed.
“We can’t--what?” he said strangely.
She was speaking, but still he didn’t hear, for that moment in the
superb sunlight, he saw Pidge Musser as he had never seen her before.
XL
THE 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
to _Satyagraha_ by 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 the military 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 criminal laws 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 the
_charka_ in 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 resist the 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
attainment rightly 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.
Dicky _saw_ the 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 John Higgins 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.
XLI
UNDER THE MANGOES OF CAWNPORE
“NO haste, but no delay.” Gandhi had used the very words in suggesting
that it would be well for Dicky to join Nagar in the north. The
American telegraphed that he would reach Amritsar on the evening of the
ninth, and made his way northward leisurely, stopping over in Cawnpore,
for a full day. It was in Cawnpore, toward midday, after a two hours’
ramble in white dust and the killing colorless heat, that Dicky halted
in the shade of a little grove of mangoes. He took off his helmet and
mopped his brow with a piece of silk already damp. In the shade, at a
slight distance (his left foot twisted into the ground), sat an ascetic
who kept on with his muttering, not turning the way of the American.
The look of an iron statue suggested itself. There were ashes, and
worse, in the holy man’s hair, and in one empty eye socket. The hands
were held out in space--twisted, seared hands, but so moveless that
Dicky thought of the iron statue again. The wrists were thick and
very strong. Cobden squinted his eyes back toward the pitiless Indian
street, and then he perceived the Hindu’s face turned to him. A single
vivid eye held him, as by the scruff of the neck. The voice was deep
and resonant as from one who had learned to breathe, a rare art. The
words in English were quietly spoken:
“It is written, my son, that you are to come to the end of your search
within six days.”
Dicky edged closer, and asked courteously: “Do you really get it that
way?”
“So it reads in the crystals. To one who truly reads, the tale is
one--whether read in the crystals or the stars.”
The holy man lifted from between his thighs a handful of stained and
rusty stones.
“You will go to a wall,” he added studiously. “You will enter through
the gate of the wall----”
“What wall, father?”
“Who knows? I see the wall. The end comes within six days, and there is
tumult.”
“The end of my life?”
“There seems no surety of that, but it is possible.”
The deep voice of the _hathayogin_ went on: “The crystals foretell, but
the wisdom and daring of man forestall. Had you not come to this tree,
there would be no hope. As it is, you may come again to-morrow at this
time.”
“I’m afraid not, father. Whatever wall it is, I shall be one day nearer
it, to-morrow.”
Few would have noted the faint film of pallor under Dicky Cobden’s tan.
As white men go, he knew something about the Indian holy men. The more
he learned, the more he respected certain rare types. There is a saying
in India that the real mystic never begs. Dicky determined to learn
the quality of the man before him, for he arose now to depart without
offering a present in money.
“Perhaps, father, from this meeting, I shall be wiser to face the fate
that awaits me at the wall.”
“You should be wise enough to take one day from your journey.”
“I cannot take what is not altogether my own,” the American laughed. “I
am saying good-by now.”
He walked slowly out of the shade of the trees. With each step, his
blood chilled a little, in spite of noon heat. He thought of _The
Public Square_, of Pidge Musser at the desk there, of Harrow Street.
Death had to come some time, but life wasn’t boring him just now. The
sunlight of the open stretch stung his eyes with great weariness. The
deep voice called from behind:
“Stay, my pupil!”
Dicky halted and returned, looking down into the apparently guileless
and desireless eye. “Alms for the temple in Cawnpore,” the lips intone.
“By all means, father,” the other said, no visible change upon his
face, as he placed in the palm of the beggar several bits of silver
from his purse. In the burning day again, he lifted a tired smile to
the sun. No true mystic, perhaps, but what had this man seen in the
crystals?
XLII
LALA 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 the
_Golden 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 Moslem
_kowtowing_ to 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?”