“Oh, it isn’t that!”
“What is it, Pan?” he demanded in the tone of the head of a household. “Get it off your mind—don’t keep anything from me.”
That started her to laughing. “It’s noth-nothing, Rufe. I’m all right now,” she said brokenly. “I’m only hurt because I haven’t done it better——”
“What?”
“Us.”
“Forget it,” he said. “I never hold a grudge.”
XXXI
TWO LETTERS FROM INDIA
LATER in July, Miss Claes received letters from Dicky Cobden and Nagar. Each, it appeared, had been mainly interested in writing about the other. She read Dicky’s first:
... I think I’ve seen the Man you wrote of, but I’m more interested in our own Nagar—altogether different in his native dress. I never knew how civilized clothes could slow up a man’s looks. If a white man in New York were as good-looking as Nagar is here, the movie folk would kidnap him, if necessary, for the screen.... Things look differently over here. Sitting in this plain house of the one they call Mahatma-ji, I seem to understand things that would appear absurd in New York.... Nagar has opened up. He talks freely and laughs. He is human, and his American years show in fine light. Try to think how startling all this was to one coming up from Bombay, expecting the old sphinx of your basement and halls.... I find myself frequently at the Ashrama—a houseful of saints—young men and women devoted to the Mahatma-ji, like Nagar, and who apparently have taken vows covering self-sacrifices unlimited. Gandhi is a bit of old brass with a mustache; terribly battered, only fifty they say, but he shows the wear of greater years. I seemed to feel that he had been frozen, that he had been whipped, that he had been burned. Some of his teeth are gone.... He tells us that you can’t fight back and expect to get anywhere. He says to answer a hurt with a hurt is to prepare for hurt again. He says you never can understand your enemy by hating him. He says that India can only triumph by returning into herself. Imagine such unearthly affairs from a barrister educated in Middle Temple, London! And Nagar appears to understand all this.... I haven’t the organs to believe much. My training hasn’t prepared me easily to accept miracles—more later, when I cool down. But Nagar is great to me in himself. I think I find him more interesting, even than Gandhi. Sometimes he seems to contain Gandhi. But it would smash everything I have to work with, if I gave either one of them my entire belief. Yet I dread the thought of going away....
The letter from Nagar was then read slowly twice, and the smile on the face of Miss Claes gradually lost itself in a blur of white, as if twilight had crept into the basement room.