And then, the other day in the garden, how easy my husband found it to tell me that he set me free! But can freedom—empty freedom—be given and taken so easily as all that? It is like setting a fish free in the sky—for how can I move or live outside the atmosphere of loving care which has always sustained me?
When I came to my room today, I saw only furniture—only the bedstead, only the looking-glass, only the clothes-rack—not the all-pervading heart which used to be there, over all. Instead of it there was freedom, only freedom, mere emptiness! A dried-up watercourse with all its rocks and pebbles laid bare. No feeling, only furniture!
When I had arrived at a state of utter bewilderment, wondering whether anything true was left in my life, and whereabouts it could be, I happened to meet Sandip again. Then life struck against life, and the sparks flew in the same old way. Here was truth—impetuous truth—which rushed in and overflowed all bounds, truth which was a thousand times truer than the Bara Rani with her maid, Thako and her silly songs, and all the rest of them who talked and laughed and wandered about …
“Fifty thousand!” Sandip had demanded.
“What is fifty thousand?” cried my intoxicated heart. “You shall have it!”
How to get it, where to get it, were minor points not worth troubling over. Look at me. Had I not risen, all in one moment, from my nothingness to a height above everything? So shall all things come at my beck and call. I shall get it, get it, get it—there cannot be any doubt.
Thus had I come away from Sandip the other day. Then as I looked about me, where was it—the tree of plenty? Oh, why does this outer world insult the heart so?
And yet get it I must; how, I do not care; for sin there cannot be. Sin taints only the weak; I with my Shakti am beyond its reach. Only a commoner can be a thief, the king conquers and takes his rightful spoil … I must find out where the treasury is; who takes the money in; who guards it.
I spent half the night standing in the outer verandah peering at the row of office buildings. But how to get that fifty thousand rupees out of the clutches of those iron bars? If by some mantra I could have made all those guards fall dead in their places, I would not have hesitated—so pitiless did I feel!
But while a whole gang of robbers seemed dancing a war-dance within the whirling brain of its Rani, the great house of the Rajas slept in peace. The gong of the watch sounded hour after hour, and the sky overhead placidly looked on.
At last I sent for Amulya.
“Money is wanted for the Cause,” I told him. “Can you not get it out of the treasury?”
“Why not?” said he, with his chest thrown out.
Alas! had I not said “Why not?” to Sandip just in the same way? The poor lad’s confidence could rouse no hopes in my mind.
“How will you do it?” I asked.
The wild plans he began to unfold would hardly bear repetition outside the pages of a penny dreadful.
“No, Amulya,” I said severely, “you must not be childish.”
“Very well, then,” he said, “let me bribe those watchmen.”
“Where is the money to come from?”
“I can loot the bazar,” he burst out, without blenching.
“Leave all that alone. I have my ornaments, they will serve.”
“But,” said Amulya, “it strikes me that the cashier cannot be bribed. Never mind, there is another and simpler way.”
“What is that?”
“Why need you hear it? It is quite simple.”
“Still, I should like to know.”
Amulya fumbled in the pocket of his tunic and pulled out, first a small edition of the Gita, which he placed on the table—and then a little pistol, which he showed me, but said nothing further.
Horror! It did not take him a moment to make up his mind to kill our good old cashier!23 To look at his frank, open face one would not have thought him capable of hurting a fly, but how different were the words which came from his mouth. It was clear that the cashier’s place in the world meant nothing real to him; it was a mere vacancy, lifeless, feelingless, with only stock phrases from the Gita—“Who kills the body kills naught!”
“Whatever do you mean, Amulya?” I exclaimed at length. “Don’t you know that the dear old man has got a wife and children and that he is …”
“Where are we to find men who have no wives and children?” he interrupted. “Look here, Maharani, the thing we call pity is, at bottom, only pity for ourselves. We cannot bear to wound our own tender instincts, and so we do not strike at all—pity indeed! The height of cowardice!”
To hear Sandip’s phrases in the mouth of this mere boy staggered me. So delightfully, lovably immature was he—of that age when the good may still be believed in as good, of that age when one really lives and grows. The Mother in me awoke.
For myself there was no longer good or bad—only death, beautiful alluring death. But to hear this stripling calmly talk of murdering an inoffensive old man as the right thing to do, made me shudder all over. The more clearly I saw that there was no sin in his heart, the more horrible appeared to me the sin of his words. I seemed to see the sin of the parents visited on the innocent child.
The sight of his great big eyes shining with faith and enthusiasm touched me to the quick. He was going, in his fascination, straight to the jaws of the python, from which, once in, there was no return. How was he to be saved? Why does not my country become, for once,
