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.