Page:The Independent Hindustan Volume I Number 4.djvu/6



" . . . Sentenced . . . to be hanged by the neck till you are dead."

The prisoner in the dock, a young Hindu of twenty-three, gazed idly out over the courtroom as the English judge-commissioner uttered these words. Already the mind of the youth was far away. He was thinking of those glorious days and nights three years before when he first was moved by the thought that his country might be free—when he dreamed the dreams that Englishmen such as those who now sentenced him had dreamed in times gone by. Then there flashed into his mind a picture of that black day two months before when the secret service men had come to his rooms in Calcutta and taken him away. He saw over again the swift, unrelenting progress of his case until the hour when he stood before the three English commissioners, the oldest of whom had just uttered sentence of degrading death upon him.

He looked down to the courtroom. Upon the faces of the Hindu clerks he saw a vain pity. Upon the faces of the Europeans he read only the stony-heartedness assumed always by those who must do their fellows to death by law. He wondered at it all, hardly realising what it meant, for knowing he had to die he was already remote from these men. Then suddenly he realised the judge was asking him if he had anything to say.

He turned away from the judges and looked out upon the courtroom. Something in his large dark eyes, some passionate emotion that suddenly flashed in his face held the crowd. He was hardly more than a boy, but in that moment something came to him that made him glad. And in a swift clear voice he called—"Bande Mataram!" Then he looked at the people there long and deeply. Men remembered that look afterwards when Gurdit Singh was only a name and a memory.

A veiled lady near the door bent her head. The Lahore reporter jotted down this phrase and then drew a pencil through it: "He looked like a beautiful boy challenging the blind world with a phrase."

What was the hangman to do with youth—golden youth, the joy of the world? Why does he so often take youth for his prey? Gurdit Singh did not ask this question as he stood upon the trap and gazed out upon the vast silent crowd of Hindus come to witness his death, to be impressed and awed by it, to be brought to submission by the grim sight. Perfect silence. One could not hear the moving of a foot in all that vast crowd. Did they think? Some did. And others, boys almost, felt with the intensity of a boy's nature, only felt, the awesomeness of prearranged death.

Suddenly the ceremony came to a point. The executioner fitted the black cap over the head of Gurdit Singh. He now opened his lips and from them, clear and strong, so that the farthest ear could hear, came the cry, "Bande Mataram!" (Hail Motherland!)

There was a crash. The slender body swung and contorted in the air, grotesquely twisting hither and yon, the last desperate protest of the  life force against strangulation. A great groan went up from the crowd. The more sensitive turned away their eyes. Some ran as if a yaksha were after them, ran from that dreadful sight of broken youth. Others endured until they could see Gurdit Singh calmly and idly swinging — no longer alive — only a pendulum of dead flesh now, a boy with a broken neck at the end of a rope. That brain was sodden now, the light quenched in it, the mysterious ray withdrawn. The poor body was broken and ruined because a light in his brain annoyed men who were sensitive to light.

That night Sir Ashton Parke, the senior of the three judges, was somewhat more silent than usual. His little girl, rosy-cheeked even after five years in India, climbed on his lap and playfully pulled his beard. "What is the matter with you, Papa?" she whispered, her arms around his neck, "why don't you play with me?"

He put her gently down. "Just let me off this time." he begged, kissing her. At that moment, happily, she saw the cat and ran after it.

Sir Ashton gazed into the fire. He still saw the Hindu youth standing before him. . . . listening to the grave words of death. It had been hard to condemn him, but the Empire stood before one's private feelings. •

"I have helped serve the Empire," he said in answer to Gurdit Singh's questioning look.

"What's that about the Empire, Papa?" asked little Ethel suddenly.

"Nothing, dear, nothing! I was just thinking aloud." said her father, as he took the candle and went to bed.

Gurdit Singh was in his bed too. In the murderer's graveyard he lay in a bed of burning quicklime. The judge lay between white sheets and slept, but Gurdit Singh's broken body lay in its flaming bed. Slowly the powerful chemical crawled into brain and bone now utterly destroyed—he was useless to the Empire and it had killed him. Ah pity, pity that the golden boys must die so that the Empires be saved.

The sun rose on the morning after that death, but Gurdit Singh who had come so mysteriously

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