"Surely. But mercy is not treason. It would be treason to the cause to let me live. I failed. I let the secret out. I must die. That is the law. If they let me live, the next one who failed would quote the precedent, and within a century or so a new law of compromise would have crept in. Our secrets would be all out, and the world would use our knowledge to destroy itself. No. They show their mercy by making use of me, instead of merely throwing my dead carcass to the alligators."
"If you will tell me your real name I will tell them at Johns Hopkins about your death, and perhaps they will inscribe your record on some roll of martyrs," I suggested.
I think that idea tempted him, for his eyes brightened and grew strangely softer for a moment. He was about to speak, but at that moment the door opened again, and things began to occur that drove all thought of Johns Hopkins from our minds.
About a dozen women entered this time. They did not trouble to tie the Mahatma, but they bound me as the Philistines did Samson, and then threw a silken bag over my head by way of blindfold. The bag would have been perfectly effective if I had not caught it in my teeth as they drew it over my shoulders. It did not take long to bite a hole in it, nor much longer to move my head about until I had the hole in front of my right eye, after which I was able to see fairly well where they were leading me.
Women of most lands are less generous than men to any one in their power. Men would have been satisfied to let me follow them along or march in front of them, provided I went fast enough to suit them, but those vixens hardly treated me as human. Perhaps they thought that unless they beat, shoved, prodded and kicked me all the way along those corridors and up the gilded stairs I might forget who held the upper hand for the moment; but I think not. I think it was simply sex-venom—the half-involuntary vengeance that the under-dog inflicts on the other when positions are reversed. When India's women finally break purdah and enter politics openly, we shall see more cruelty and savagery, for that reason, than either the French or Russian terrors had to show.
I was bruised and actually bleeding in a dozen places when they hustled me down a corridor at last, and crowded me into a narrow anteroom, where the two harridans who had handled me hardest had the worst of it. I gave them what in elephant stables is known as the "squeeze," crushing them to right and left against projecting walls; whereat they screamed, and I heard the reproving voice of the Mahatma just behind me:
"Violence is the folly of beasts. Patience and strength are one!"
But they were not sticking pins into his ribs and thighs to humiliate and discourage him. He was being led by either hand, and cooed to softly in the sort of way that members of the Dorcas Guild would treat a bishop. It was easy enough for him to feel magnanimous. I managed to tread hard on one foot, and to squeeze two more women as they shoved me through a door into a vast audience hall, and the half-suppressed screams were music in my ears. I don't see why a woman who uses pins on a prisoner should be any more immune than a man from violent retaliation.
When they had shut the door they stripped the silk bag off over my head and holding me by the arms, four on either side, dragged me to the middle of a hall that was at least as large as Carnegie Hall in New York, and two or three thousand times as sumptuous.
I stood on a strip of carpet six feet wide, facing a throne that faced the door I had entered by. The throne was under a canopy, and formed the center of a horseshoe ring of gilded chairs, on every one of which sat a heavily veiled woman. Except that they were marvelously dressed in all the colors of the rainbow and so heavily jeweled that they flashed like the morning dew, there was nothing to identify any of the women except one. She was Yasmini. And she sat on the throne in the center, unveiled, unjeweled, and content to outshine all of them without any kind of artificial aid.