“He’s dispersing the people,” Dicky answered.
The firing was desultory now. He heard orders for it to cease entirely.
“We might need a cartridge or two in the streets going back——” a voice behind him said.
“We’ve got the armored cars——” another answered.
Then Richard Cobden happened to look at the west and found the sun still high in the sky. This struck him as altogether peculiar.
XLVII
IN THE WARM DARK
COBDEN found himself in the lane, turned away from the maidan, his hands lifted and clenched. From behind still came the sounds of a ship going down—all but down, the firing ceased. In front of him, the sepoys were running low as if to escape. It made him think of ball players leaving the field in the summer dusk after a game, running through the crowd to the clubhouse. The armored cars were backing out before him.
“... Of course,” he kept telling himself, “it had to come this way—end of the old story, the beginning of the story of the age. This isn’t an English-Indian story. It’s a story of all the world.”
Only natives were about him—ashen-lipped, muttering, frightened, dazed. He continued through the kucha, following the armored cars. He must get to the hotel. He had something to write, copy to file. But this delusion did not carry him far, before its absurdity struck home. The outer world would never hear of this story, until it leaked through by letter or word of mouth. The cables had been tight before. They would be drum-tight now.
Vaguely and dully he realized that all things were changed for him for all time. The reporter in his makeup that had blithely set out for Jallianwalla Bagh was done for, all aloofness of the spectator gone—the little poise of ego which had carried him so well and so long, so far as associations with men went, up and down the world until this hour—that ego poise was leveled and smeared. Amritsar’s public square—the massacre in the maidan had cloven him, and into the opening all India had rushed. The face of the hooked man came back to him—hard unto silliness, the English stare against the sinking city.