stenches. As they passed through hot and narrow streets, certain of
these odors startled his comprehension, because they were so subtly
vindictive. The thought occurred to him, as he watched the naked
children playing in the wet shadows, of what a correspondent had
remarked in Cawnpore: that it was hard to tell whether the streets
soiled the children, or the children soiled the streets. The movement
forward was very slow, and Dicky bent to inquire at length if they were
still moving toward Jallianwalla Bagh.
“Yes, it is very near,” said the driver, churning at the lines with
both hands.
The American did not let himself think further. He fell into his old
queer absorption; the reporter of his makeup taking him over. He shut
out Amritsar from mind; the Native Idea, the English Idea, and his own
that hovered between. He was just a stranger in a half-closed carriage
looking out from under a bandaged brow. He heard the flies in the air.
He did not seem to have any mental guard to shut out that distracting
buzz--flies winging across the vapors of filth. They came to a narrow
lane, a _kucha_, the driver called it. The armored cars ahead were
having difficulty in this constricted place. Finally they halted and
Dicky heard a British soldier on the nearest turret call out that the
cars could proceed no further.
His own carriage was of course blocked. The _kucha_ appeared less than
eight feet wide. He was still lame, and had not intended to do much
walking about in the furious heat, but beyond the armored cars he had
glimpsed the Gurkhas filing forward and the officers stepping out of
their machines. He let himself to the ground, ordered the driver to
wait, and followed the soldiers through the wet trampled lane.
A minute later he was in the broken ranks of the Gurkhas--little
muttering men with big sprawly hands holding fast to their rifles,
fingers running loosely over breech and stock and barrel. The halt had
come because there was a sudden rise to the ground--a mound of earth
closing the lane, and running at angles to each side. The soldiers were
ordered up and deployed along the mound; equally divided to the right
and left.
Now Richard Cobden, in the midst of the officers and civilians who
had occupied the two motor cars, also gained the eminence with some
pains; and at this point he saw the man he had started out to find
that afternoon--General Fyatt, a significant picture, indeed, here in
Amritsar, who had been but a small obscure exhibit in the broad gallery
of France.
Fyatt didn’t see him, and the American looked over the vast assembly
of natives in the burning light. On a raised frame toward the center, a
Sikh speaker stood. Dicky could hear his words, but did not understand.
He saw, however, that the coming of the soldiers had interrupted the
tenor of the speech and that many of the people were frightened and
drawing away. An English officer beside him, after listening a moment,
spoke with an ironical laugh:
“_We have nothing to fear. Sarkar is our father and our mother.
Government would not injure its children_----”
Dicky realized that the young officer had quoted a translation of words
the Sikh speaker had just spoken to the people--from twelve to fifteen
thousand in the _maidan_, he reckoned. All faces were now turned to the
soldiers--waves of faces. It was as if the color of a tree had changed
by a steady pressure of wind that showed the under side of all the
leaves. A nervous laugh from the young Englishman who had interpreted;
then from General Fyatt, the low single sentence:
“You may give the order.”
“Fire!” the young officer called to his Gurkhas.
To Richard Cobden it was quite incredible, but another officer on the
far side of the lane repeated the command, and the line of leveled
rifles spurted on either side. Dicky winced at the crashes. He had been
in the firing pits many times, but one can never remember how these
concussions close by hurt one’s head and spine.... Of course, they were
firing blanks. This was Martial Law. The people had been ordered not
to assemble and they had disobeyed--twelve thousand of them, or more.
General Fyatt had undertaken to impress upon them that his word was
Law, Martial Law. Of course, this was also the English answer to April
10th, at the Hallgate Bridge. A bit uncouth to stampede a big crowd
like this.
Surely Fyatt couldn’t have realized what this firing of blanks would
mean.
They were trampling themselves to death already. This wasn’t English
humor. It was more like the fool who yells, “Fire!” in a packed theater.
The great open place was walled. There were no broad exits. The several
narrow vents had locked of themselves by the pressing of bodies against
them. “Why,” Dicky thought, with a wrench and shiver at the sight of
the monster throng in the process of constricting itself, “why, this is
a womb of death!”
Cries were sustained at the end of this April holiday--cries of battle
and accident and pestilence, the cries from a great ship going down.
Dicky thought of a pot beginning to boil. He thought of a yard of
leaves suddenly caught in a swirling wind. He thought of all the old
stale similes used and over-used since bloodshed began, and his mind
sank back in the hollow of hopelessness. It couldn’t be told, but his
faculties tried again and again, even though his heart sobbed with the
people.
A great square of colored cloths in the sunlight--from twelve to
fifteen thousand human beings listening to a man who cried out
against violence, who cried out that _Sarkar_ couldn’t hurt his
children--suddenly being ground in the great crush of Fear, being
sprayed with rifle fire--blanks, of course--but to a result almost as
deadly, for the people were destroying each other. They didn’t mean to,
but they were trampling each other to death. Thus his mind viewed and
reviewed--all this in a matter of seconds.
Now Mr. Cobden saw something he didn’t understand. Down in the _maidan_
on the ground, not fifty feet away--a giant Sikh in white turban,
running forward with raised hands, like a messenger--a close-up
possibly for Dicky’s eyes alone--suddenly halted, spun and slapped
limply to the ground with a curving fling. A glorious fall, if it had
been a bit of acting--the fall a man makes when a bullet hits him.
But Dicky was quite possessed with the idea that the soldiers were
firing blanks.
At this point, an English officer roared at his Gurkhas, who apparently
had been firing high. His words were in vernacular, but the American
saw the little dark men shorten their range.
Thus it dawned upon him slowly, as if he were a very stupid man, that
Fyatt was punishing Amritsar indeed--in fact, that the General was
making a day of it. Also at the same time it dawned upon him that the
public square was walled. He had seen the wall before, partly formed
of buildings, but it hadn’t properly registered in connection with the
words of the twisted ascetic of Cawnpore.
Now he knew also that the several narrow throats of the walled square,
none so wide as the _kucha_ through which he had entered, had become
points of intensified death, because the great throng had divided to
crush itself against these impossible apertures. The English officers
appeared to be directing the fire of the soldiers toward these points
where the maddened masses were most dense.
Almost directly across the square the wall was low, less than six feet.
Hundreds were jammed against it, but their bodies were so locked by the
pressure from behind that no one could climb or be pushed over into
safety.
The Gurkhas looked like monkey men. They stamped queerly as they
pumped. They were being told what to do and were in a great
concentration to obey exactly. They emptied their magazines, each man
taking his own time, and halted to fill them again, carefully avoiding
with their fingers the burning metal of the barrels, as they refilled
and fired.
An English civilian, an elderly man, face livid, bumped Cobden’s
wounded shoulder, as he lurched past, muttering:
“My God! I can’t watch this.”
Another Englishman followed him, venting an hysterical laughter--both
faces Dicky had seen in one of the motor cars. For an instant it seemed
the only sane action left in the world--to rush out into the lane the
way he had come, as these Englishmen were doing, to cover face and
ears, to rush forth, to continue to the ends of India and the uttermost
parts of the earth.
Dicky started to follow, but turned back.... No, he wouldn’t rush off
to be sick. This was the wall that he was to come to. It was something
else.... What was it? Oh, yes, it was the Big Story that he had been
pacing up and down the world to find.... Of course, it would be like
this. He would find himself in the midst of it, without knowing at
first.
He ducked forward under the rifles of three _sepoys_ to reach the
staff. He couldn’t go away without paying his respects to the General.
Was not this what he had started out for to-day? He stumbled over a
soldier on his knees--a Baluchee, vomiting with all his might. He saw
Fyatt a few paces forward--Fyatt, grizzled, square-shouldered, behind
a field glass. A mocking laugh rose in Richard Cobden’s heart. A man
didn’t need a field glass to cover the _maidan_. One could see the
faces; one could see the fallen; one could see the writhing cords of
human bodies. Oh, no, one didn’t need a field glass. One could see
the thousands on the _maidan_ now--as one up-turned face, the face of
a child betrayed, but unable to believe. Fyatt merely chose this way
to cover his own face. His back looked stiff and blocky as he swung
slowly around behind the glasses. His shoulders and neck didn’t move.
He turned from the hips, Dicky perceived, as he touched the General’s
sleeve.
XLVI
THE HOOKED MAN
A NOTE of unison had come to the great cry from the people at this
moment--one note that tugged at the white man’s soul--the deadly hurt
of a child.... General Fyatt was not tall for a soldier, with square
lines of figure; square of chin and temple and shoulder and elbow,
pivoting on his hips. But there were two remarkable curves in the
ensemble, the sidewise curve of the hooked nose and the bow of his
booted legs. Now as the American stood by, a new key presented itself
to the man--that hooked smile. It opened other hooks--hook of the
eye-corner, as well as the corner of the mouth and the bent nose, hook
of the fingers on the field glass. The face turned to him--a white welt
from the glasses on the bridge of the nose.
Dicky felt the horrible slowness over everything--that somehow there
was not in this man’s volition the power to order the firing to cease.
No recognition showed in Fyatt’s eyes. He stared. It was like the
man who had stared at him on the docks in Bombay, when he heard that
America had entered the War.
“Well, sir!”
Dicky felt rebuked. Then came to his ears again the terrible drowning
cry of the children, and he saw Fyatt differently--not as England; at
least, not all of England--a black crooked finger operating merely--the
face of England turned away.
“I only wanted to ask----” Dicky stopped and raised his voice above the
tumult of shots and voices. “Cobden of New York--saw you in France!”
It was utterly ridiculous to yell one’s identity. He had forgotten that
his face might look different under a bandage. The field glass that had
been partly raised again was whipped down. The hooks tightened.
“Ah, Cobden. Heard you were in town. Busy, you know!”
“I see!” the American yelled back. He felt like a maniac. “I see! I
merely wanted to ask, General, if you had gone mad--or have I?”
* * * * *
A young officer ran between them reporting that the ammunition was
running out.
“Sixteen hundred and fifty rounds, sir. Mainly used up. Some of the men
finished----”
“Ease them off back to the armored cars. Let the others finish
firing--fire low.”
“Not much wasted--only at first, sir!”
Fyatt turned to Cobden, shouting staccato sentences: “Didn’t catch what
you said. Teaching Amritsar a lesson! Plover says we ought to take a
thousand for one! Teach them to assault women----”
“Isn’t the lesson taught?” This time Dicky didn’t yell.
“They haven’t dispersed yet.”
“Dead men can’t disperse, General. The rest can’t get out----”
Dicky walked away. He had looked again at the _maidan_. Everything was
overturned. The thousands were prone or kneeling.... If one steel rifle
bullet plows through sixteen inches of oak--how many human bodies will
it plow through? How many will 1650 steel bullets?... No shots wasted
since the first minute or two. They couldn’t be all down--wounded or
done for. Suddenly Dicky realized that many of the people were now
praying. He was back at the head of the lane, moving in circles like a
man who has been beaten on the head.... A black-coated Englishman with
a clergy’s vest, grasped him by the arm, peering into his face--eyes
gone utterly daft. He shook Dicky’s arm and pushed it from him; then
ran to a soldier near by and peered again.
“Tell it to the General,” Dicky called absurdly, but his words weren’t
heard.
Now he saw one of the elder civilians who had escaped a few moments
before, coming back. This person scrambled upon the mound from the lane
side and inquired of the earth and sky:
“I say--can’t he stop?”
“He’s dispersing the people,” Dicky answered.
The firing was desultory now. He heard orders for it to cease entirely.
“We might need a cartridge or two in the streets going back----” a
voice behind him said.
“We’ve got the armored cars----” another answered.
Then Richard Cobden happened to look at the west and found the sun
still high in the sky. This struck him as altogether peculiar.
XLVII
IN THE WARM DARK
COBDEN found himself in the lane, turned away from the _maidan_, 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, the
_sepoys_ were 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 the _kucha_, 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 his makeup 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 the _maidan_ had 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 the _Golden 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 the
_sepoy_ firing 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 freed it
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 the
_maidan_ with 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, which some 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 the _Ashrama_--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 the _maidan_. 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 the
_maidan_ were 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. _Sarkar_ had fired upon them to-day. _Sarkar_ would
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 the
_maidan_. No English came that night--but the pariah dogs 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.
XLVIII
“INDIA’S MESSENGER”
COBDEN walked back from the _maidan_ through the streets of Amritsar
in the dawn. He did not feel like a foreigner. That which had happened
during the night had furnished him with what rarely comes to a white
man--the Indian point of view. He was in the Indian fabric for the
moment, at least; no longer a spectator from the West. He did not
hate England, not even the crooked finger that had mismanaged for
England. He knew something right now that he might not be able even to
remember--more sorrow than anger.
As he approached the Golden Temple, near which was the Inn, Nagar
appeared in the street, and they walked together in silence. As he
tottered a little, Nagar’s arm swung around him and Dicky said:
“Don’t. I’m very dirty.”
Now that the light was coming on, they saw people hurrying to the
Jallianwalla Bagh.
In the room, Dicky said:
“Make a lot of tea, Nagar. Sorry you won’t join me in a little drink
from the flask.”
A moment later, he said:
“I think after all, you’ll have to help me get off this shirt. I’m a
rubbed-in mess of blood and dirt.”
Nagar perceived that the body of the American trembled full-length;
also that his clothing was soaked with blood from the wounded shoulder,
as well as from stains received from handling others.
“... Some of them crawled about in the dark!” Dicky was saying. “A
woman sat there moaning through the whole night. The pariahs came--I
heard them lapping, lapping. From the windows of the houses around the
Bagh came the cries of the women who dared not disobey the curfew....
Why, that ten minutes of firing was longer than whole years I lived as
a schoolboy, but the ten hours since dark--that passed, Nagar, like
a man walking by a house, not a lame man.... I saw your India, oh,
yes. The gentlest-tempered crowd I ever moved through, but something
dangerous and deadly in its pain and grief. God help us--when you wake
up----”
Nagar helped him. Dicky bathed his neck and face and hair copiously
with one hand, and then washed the left arm. With Nagar’s help the
wound was packed with clean lint. Dicky drank hot tea, filling his
goblet several times and shivering, though the heat of the night was
still in the room. Finally he sat down in his bathrobe by the open
window and lit a cigarette. The sunlight had found the gold of the
Temple dome.