“Mahatma-ji has made himself free from the rack of sex and the drum of the senses—enough to realize his great work for others, for India. We who follow him wish to do the same. We understand that we have not the great gift for India, until we are free; that is, only a man who has freed himself from his own desires can help greatly to free others, or his country. We are not free agents so long as we are on the rack of sex. We cannot hate ourselves off that rack; in fact, we must learn to love more, not less, to escape.”
“Tunnel,” Dicky said. “No man educated on the Hudson can get that sort of thing. Have a heart, Nagar.”
“It is my poor telling——”
Dicky smiled and smoked: “I can’t see how he’d have anything left to give the world,” he added—“a man who got on top of himself that way.”
The thing that Dicky had found in the same room with the Little Man wasn’t happiness, but it was better than the deadness he had known; good to feel the tissues of his heart alive again, not a leaden lump.
Again the next day, he went to sit with Mahatma-ji, but nothing happened, though he remained two hours. On one side he had come to doubt the whole business; on the other he had been naïve enough half to believe that all he had to do was to enter the presence of the Indian leader to get this living thing back in his heart, this pain that had the breath of life in it. Two days afterward, however, while he was deeply involved with Gandhi’s explanation of Satyagraha, taking notes so that he could put down the other’s words almost exactly, the sense of Pidge Musser’s presence and plight was suddenly with him again, renewed within him, the pity of it almost more than he could endure.
There were hours also when Dicky could believe almost anything at the Ashrama, where he was permitted to sit with the native students (Gandhi often halting his speech in Hindi or Guzerati, to talk English for the American’s benefit). And occasionally during long evening talks with Nagar, on the banks of the Sabarmati or under the muffle-winged punkahs in the Entresden room, Dicky’s mind had sudden extensions of range. Still he had a vague foreboding that he would not be able to hold all this hopeful stuff when he was away from India, for slowly and surely he was being pressed to depart.
“America needs your loyalty now,” Nagar said. “We will send for you to come when the curtain rises here. The drama of India is not being played now, but the Play is written. This that you have heard, so far, is only a rehearsal of minor parts.”
In June, a letter came from The Public Square, pressing its correspondent to return to France, or at least to some of the points where the American troops were gathering.