The Oriental smiled. “It is not the provocation that we deal with, but the losing of oneself in anger. Nothing remains to us but the fact that Amritsar lost its self-control.”
“You think the Little Man will be unhappy about what has happened, when he comes?”
“Mahatma-ji was arrested this morning at Kosi, served with an order not to enter Punjab, nor the district of Delhi, but to confine himself to the Bombay Presidency.”
Dicky studied his friend. He couldn’t help feeling if Nagar had been at the Hallgate Bridge—— Finally he spoke:
“I’m just a reporter, Nagar. I’m not granting that Gandhi knows it all or that the natives to-day are all right, and the English all wrong. Still, I can’t help wondering at what you ask of your people—as a reporter would ask, you understand. They turned the other cheek! They took the first volley and the second. I was there. No man has three cheeks. I saw it all in that minute between the second and third firing.”
Nagar’s hand pressed his and Dicky lowered his voice, though his tone had not been loud.
“Anything might have happened that instant had there been a bit of leadership,” he added. “The people wanted to talk to their father—the Deputy. You would have wept for their forbearance, or stupidity, as you like. Their dead were at their feet, the cries of the wounded in their ears, and still they weren’t maddened. They only wanted to show their faryad. If there had been the right Englishman on the spot—why, the crowd would have been allowed to go forward with its document. I’ve an idea that it was something dangerously like funk that caused that third volley, and that nobody will ever be so sorry for what happened to-day, as England herself. I call it human the way your people lost their heads.”
“Mahatma-ji’s ideal isn’t human, Richard. It is of the Soul. We shall suffer and India shall suffer—for to-day.”
“I’ve got a lot to learn about this man’s India. I can see that,” the American said queerly.