A SERMON IN THE ABBEY. BY MAJOR ARDERN BEAMAN, D.S.O. HONOURABLE and Right Honourable Conscientious Objectors had debated the Bill with a whining fly-blown sentimentality, with a puerile narrowness of comprehension, and, above all, with a hyper-sensitiveness for the enemies of Britain that was not a little nauseating. Therefore, seeking spiritual recreation, I strolled across into the historic twilight of the Abbey. Here at least, amid the master spirits who had held their own lives as less than nothing in the cause they served, and bigly covered the face of the wide earth, I felt there brooded still an exalting spaciousness. Gratefully I took my seat under Chatham's immemorial gesture; and as the sun, streaming through the southern rose, emblazoned those monuments with antique and splendid jewelry, smooth tones of a Colonial Prelate came to my ears. the "When the verdict of Posterity comes to be pronounced," he declaimed in a voice that rose and swelled along that western aisle where the Unknown Warrior rests, "it will record that, high among the Prophets, only less than the Christ himself, stands Mahatma Gandhi." My eyes fell on the medallion of a hardy sea-captain set in a marble scape of Oriental palm. Gandhi...! Time and space faded out, and in spirit I floated away back to an unforgettable Indian scene. My squadron was camped in the dusty mango top of Phagwara, because of a sudden and bloody outburst of racial hatred in that District. The parakeets were coming home in their hundreds; the little long-tailed monkeys made a great chatter and commotion in the upper branches; and the last sun-rays, driving between the mango boles, turned all they touched to blood, as the Signal Dafadar ran to meet Dickie and me, strolling homeward with our guns under our arms. "Haste, Sahib ! Cheluan Police Post is sending S.O.S.!" "Take message, Dickie," I said, putting the receiver to my ear. A perturbed voice spoke in Punjabi at the other end of the line. "Congress Volunteers have looted shops here and beaten several shopkeepers to death for not observing Mahatma Gandhi's order to close all shops to-day. Having become drunk with looted spirits, they fired the houses of all such as would not deny the British Raj. I went forth with my six constables, but we were driven back by numbers. Now lay over the East like an obsesthey attack the Post with gunfire and fire-torches. We are but seven men, two wounded, and if help comes not soon There was a sharp crackle in the instrument, followed by cold silence. "They've cut the line," groaned Dickie; then seizing me by the arm, "Seven poor loyal devils of native Police against that howling mob. Hurry, Major, oh, for God's sake, hurry, or we'll be too late!" While the trumpet blared out the alarm, and the big fox-bats scuffled out of the branches overhead, and the sudden dark became speckled with moving lights that gave part glimpses of gleaming eyes and bearded faces, and Dickie, flashing orilux in hand, strode back and forth between the neighing horses exhorting all to impossible haste, another memory, a memory grimly humorous, flitted into my mind. A few months before I had returned to India after many years' absence on business connected with a gentleman called William. sion. Everybody answered at once and together. He's an insane idealist; he's the Messiah; he's a harebrained saint; he's a dangerous imbecile; he's the saviour of civilisation; he's a damned traitor. 66 Would you like to meet him?" asked my sentimental friend Fenmann, of a great newspaper, a little later at Simla. "Rather!" I said, always eager to form first-hand opinions. Gandhi was paying a triumphal visit to the summer capital. He was to be entertained in the grounds of the President of the local Congress Committee, to which function Fenmann and I were the only Europeans invited. On the day the excitement, which had long been growing, rose to fever - heat. All the Indian population of Simla was in a ferment of racial, religious, and political emotion, and we felt rather curious as to how we, members of the hated domination, would be received in this neo-national gathering. As the hour approached, we jostled along in the surging crowd of Hindus and Muslims, noticing that most of the former wore the red sash of the Congress Volunteers, and most of the latter the green sash of the Khilafat Volunteers, which, if names and emblems mean anything, meant that the wearers were pledged by the profoundest oaths to wreck the British Both parties held aloft But the same it was. He Raj. to be able to cast a hypnotic spell over whole assemblies. But I saw only a spare, ugly little man, with prominent ears, several front teeth missing, and not too fragrant breath, whose charm lay in his kindly humour and in a childlike simplicity of manner. numbers of brightly - gilded ism, by which he was reputed standards, from which floated, in gaudy colours, their respective ensigns. An air of holiday excitement pervaded the masses-an air which, it seemed to me, was at the same time self-conscious and hysterical, as of schoolboys doing some forbidden thing. At the gate of the house where the reception was being held was stationed a band of young children under the command of a wild-eyed, crazy-looking youth, at whose word they raised every now and then the cry 66 Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Victory to the holy Gandhi!" The children looked tired, and their cry was languid. We ascended a steep slope and entered the garden. Sitting cross-legged on a carpet was Gandhi, while in a semicircle round his carpet, and stretching far away on every side till it overflowed the furthest limits of the garden and straggled raggedly down the khud-edge, sat in the same posture a great heterogeneous multitude, gazing in adoration and striving to catch every word that fell from the Mahatma's lips. "Can you squat?" Gandhi asked courteously, rising to receive us, whereupon we sat down on the carpet beside him. He talked on many subjects in easy pleasant English, often with a playful gaiety, and always with a captivating charm of manner. I had heard much of his divine personality, of his miraculous powers of magnet VOL. CCXV.-NO. MCCCIV. While he spoke to Fenmann I looked around the immense gathering. Each new arrival prostrated himself with profound reverence, touching the earth with his forehead before taking his place among the crowd. Muslims made this deep obeisance to the Hindu Mahatma. Nearest to the carpet sat the personages of greatest local importance : Lajpat Rai, the vehement Panjab leader; Pandit Malavaiya, the Hindu reformer; the moulvis and priests of the mosques and temples; the office-bearers of the Congress and Khilafat Committees. A torrent of silver coin was jingling into a sheet near by, to swell the Swaraj Fund. Presently the Mahatma began to ask and to answer questions, while the multitude listened in rapt attention. "We might be back two thousand years at the Sermon on the Mount," whispered Fenmann. "We might superficially," I thought. But though no profound theologian, it has seemed to me that the kingdom of the New Testament is one infinitely removed from racial, religious, and political com2 L promises, crafts, stratagems,and uneasy form or other, the war alliances. has left in almost every human heart. I was conscious, looking on that scene, of a strange sense of unreality. I felt, intuitively, that this apparent Hindu-Muslim unity was superficial, artificial, transient; that the old, age-rooted antipathy was, at bottom, blazing as fiercely as ever. As my gaze wandered round, I noticed with amused surprise that the majority of the Mahatma's disciples here assembled, whose faces shone with such devotional fervour, who were prostrating themselves with such abject gestures of adoration, and who were so freely subscribing to the Swaraj Fund, were employees in the various Government offices-loyal hard-working clerks, whose principal care in life was to draw their monthly pay, and, if possible, to get it increased. Yet this was a non-co-operation meeting, the very essence of which was wreckage of the British Government. The thing, then, was not wholly political, but anomalous, sentimental, and religious, a curious sort of nebulous and Gilbertian phantasy-and yet in a way moving, since religion is indissolubly blended with even the most trivial acts of the Indian's daily life; and the sentiment, which in some inarticulate way must have been stirring each individual there, was the thought that this meeting openly expressed that heartache of disillusionment and shattered hope which, in some "Isn't he wonderful? "whispered Fenmann. "In the whole course of History no man, during his lifetime, has captivated the imagination and won the heartfelt devotion of so vast a host of people, and of peoples so infinitely diverse in race, in education, in thought, and in religion.” He is certainly, I admitted to myself, the organ of that indefinable post-war heartache which has its roots in origins partly neurological, partly economic; in wholesale disbandments, unemployment, failure of the harvest; in the bruised minds of raw-nerved hungry men. "Ask him,” I said, “to state briefly what his programme is." With engaging candour Mr Gandhi immediately enunciated his three points : 1. Deprival of O'Dwyer's and Dyer's pensions. 2. Withdrawal of British Empire from Muslim lands of Shat-el-Arab. 3. Complete Dominion Home Rule. It all sounded very plausible. But when one has passed through the fire of that semiinfernal chaos that was the front areas of the line, one is apt to see things stripped of romance and colour, stark and bare against the background of eternity. In this stern light Gandhi's first point showed sordidly threadbare as an inflammatory catch-word; the second, as a political device to enlist Islam under his banner; the third, the kernel of his programme, nothing more or less than that very thing which the Reforms had been set up to bring about-those Reforms which Gandhi himself was so assiduously trying to wreck. While I cogitated these matters, one of the Muslim priests, a loud and notorious non-cooperator of wide influence who thundered daily against the British Raj from the pulpit of his mosque, edged up and whispered in my ear, "You are in the Government service, Sahib. I only get forty rupees a month from my mosque. Could you get me a Government billet?" The tragedy of India is that you don't know whether to laugh or cry. 66 Yes," Gandhi was saying simply, "my creed is Love. The creed of the New Testament and of Tolstoi." I confess I had been curious to meet Gandhi. But now, considering the deeds-not the words of the men who surrounded him as fraternal lieutenants, and, it was said, not infrequently used him for their ends, it came very clearly to me that this engaging little Hindu, with the name of Love and of Christ on his lips, who craved pathologically, at any cost, for the limelight, was in reality nothing more than a political mountebank. If living on milk and religiously saying certain prayers constituted a saint; if doubling the prayers and halving the An impatient jingle of spurs outside my tent brought me back to the present. "Squadron present and correct, sir," said Dickie, saluting. We clattered out on to a faint ribbon of road under the void of the hard-gleaming stars. That march of eleven miles to Cheluan, although we covered it, in the darkness, with creditable speed, seemed very long indeed. The infinite shadowland of spectral scrub and formless shapes seemed all alive with furtive, slinking things. Floating uncannily bodiless in the gloom, there blazed every now and then green moons of animal eyes; and the ghoulish cry of jackals filled the night with demoniac despair. I had the idea, spurring on my horse, that the spirit of evil was abroad, cowering from the wrath to come. Dickie, I think, felt something of this too, for he hardly spoke till we reached the foot of the slope that rises slowly up to the ridge before Cheluan. Then he suddenly pulled up his horse on its haunches. 66 'Good lord, Major, what's that?" Over the crest of the ridge, and moving down at great speed towards us, we saw what at first looked like a big ragged spark, and quickly took on the aspect of a quivering pillar of |