DICKY reflected that there were two ways of looking at a person or a thing, a fact proven several times in his experience. There had been a moment in the presence of Gandhi, after many minutes of talk, when the face, that had been dull and unattractive as a camel driver’s, had suddenly appeared to him with memorable, essential significance. It had been so with Miss Claes: also the moment when he had really seen Pidge, as they stood together on the Palisades of Santa Monica. Recently he had caught an immortal something in the look from Nagar on the rack.
He did not see Nagar again in Amritsar, but up to mid-May the students reported that his friend was still imprisoned. The sound of those falling strokes was slow to die out of the corridors of Dicky’s memory. They awoke him in the night. It was far easier, however, to recall the splendor of gameness in the way Nagar had taken his beating. This satisfied every American instinct; and even above this, was the mystery of compassion for the English, in Nagar’s face. Here was a man on a tennis court in a remote Punjabi town, hardly heard-of in this war-racked world, plainly putting over the thing he had marveled at, as a small boy in Sunday school: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Apparently the same majestic composure. Life held many things; yet Richard Cobden couldn’t be sure altogether, that he had not outraged the spirit of friendship in failing to register his protest of word and deed. Of course, the consequences might have been disastrous, but, at least, a certain man-to-man loyalty would have been satisfied.
If further tortures were inflicted upon Nagar, Dicky was not informed. The Amritsar story was no longer on the outside; it was in Richard Cobden’s brain and heart. He wrote some of it and his letters were forwarded, but still he conned and brooded. Having held still through the whipping of Nagar, he found it easier to stand in the midst of current events without losing his head, or letting emotion or opinion have right of way.
Late in May, a student brought word that Nagar was free and had gone south. This was all that Dicky had been waiting for. Crawling, salaming, flogging, imprisonment and forced testimony had long since become to him a full and bitter cup. At the station, as he waited for his train, a student, edging near, managed to whisper two words:
“Ashrama, Ahmedabad.”
The American’s head bowed slightly. He had meant to go to Ahmedabad anyway.
He was not met at the station there, but a servant at the Entresden told him to go at once to the Ashrama. He obeyed, and found himself listening for the voice of Mahatma-ji, as he entered, but his eyes searched the shadows of the hall for Nagar, a kind of breathless pain about it all.
As the door of an inner room opened, at last, and the native who conducted him drew back, Dicky saw a woman standing in the dimness. Her face, turned toward him, was a mere blur of darkness, but there was a leap toward her in Richard Cobden’s breast. Then he stood before her, in a daze of joy, one hand in hers, one upon her shoulder.
“It happened very quickly in New York,” she told him. “A letter saying that I was coming could hardly have reached you before the steamer that brought me——”