He had overtaken the nearest of the armored cars. He looked upon them strangely, their sleek integration. They had not been needed; India had died and been born again without them. Something similar had happened in himself. No casual reporter now—one living emotion, rather—one fire, one fury, a burning of unqualified pity in every cell that held his life.
The driver of his carriage hailed him. Cobden lifted his hand in return, but halted. Suddenly he realized that he didn’t want to go back to the Golden Temple Inn. The thing alive in him now was bigger than a story to be written, bigger than the finding of a free cable, which was not in India. He paid the driver and stemmed his way back against the people that thronged the lane. He knew now that he must keep his mouth shut in an altogether different way; that a new life, terrible in its potency, had seized upon him, was somehow being born in his flesh and brain. He must hold still—hold still.
“Sixteen hundred rounds in ten minutes,” an English voice reiterated.
Dicky’s head bowed under his helmet. He was slow to believe that the firing had lasted only ten minutes. It amazed him now that this was still a world of hot daylight. He looked back upon his coming through this lane as one does upon the last memory before a great sickness. He had to memorize and register again and again upon his faculties that he had alighted from his vehicle only fifteen minutes ago, and this was all one day, all one afternoon, all one quarter of an hour. In the interval there had been death and birth for India and for himself—a mysterious conception, at least.
“God forgive me for losing my head,” he muttered, for there was something in him that still counted losing one’s head as the first moral offense. He was thinking of the moment standing before Fyatt. He would move very quietly now. As he reclimbed the mound where the sepoy firing line had stood, it came to him that a man might lose his head for a moment, at least, to find his heart.
He let himself down from the mound to the bloody ground. There he found presently a man wedged under the bodies of two already dead. He dragged this man loose, only to find that he was apparently bleeding to death from a shattered knee. He unwound a turban from one of the dead men and wrapped the wound, knotting it tightly above the flow of blood. His own left hand was impeded by the sling. Presently, he freed it entirely, his personal scratches appearing ridiculous in this broad field of bloody men. Thus began his work. It was as if he had entered single-handed upon a task to alter the sewerage system of a city.
There were no English about, no police or native soldiers. Martial Law had done its part and gone to supper. The people flocking into the maidan with moanings and horror-stricken cries now were those looking for their own. From the farthest parts of Amritsar they were drawn, from many houses to which one or more did not report for the evening meal. Living men and women—hurrying, bending—hands reaching down, hands pressed to faces—the quick and the dead.
A while afterward he looked up to find that the sun had gone down. His knees were wet with blood. He felt the wet spreading heat upon his left shoulder. His wound had opened from exertion—a smile at that.
He had worked a little on battlefields before, but they weren’t like this. A persistent thought held him that this was the field of his own dead! He didn’t understand how his brain could deal with such weird stuff. He concluded that he was in a half-dream where thoughts appeared veritable that wouldn’t hold water when he fully waked.
Now he had extricated from the mass near the Hasali Gate the body of a trampled girl child. She was warm, possibly not dead. She smelled of the earth and tears.... His heart thumped, and pity like a warm breath surged through him—pity, which some one said was the pain of love—oh, yes, that was Miss Claes’ expression. He touched the girl’s long coarse black hair in the thick twilight.