Dicky now felt that there was something to report to America in the story of Gandhi and his following of millions. For three days he was with the Little Man, morning and afternoon. Very sternly he had impressed upon himself the fatuousness of expecting anything like the old “miracle.” There was no need for that miracle now, Dicky informed himself gravely and repeatedly, for something of Pidge Musser ceased to be alive in his heart at no time, though much pain of yearning was connected with it and pity and human questionings. He had learned well by now that all really important experiences are spontaneous and can only steal into a mind that is emptied of anticipation and its own inferior pictures. But on the third day something came to him--as fruits from his dreary months of France. He had been speaking to Gandhi of the hideous directionless campaign days there. Suddenly, as he himself talked, the American Soldier in composite was unveiled before him--the game and grinning Yank, who had held fast in faith to but one thing under smoke and sun, against shock and night itself--his sense of Humor, the fun of the thing. Dicky _saw_ the Yank, now. That was all there was to it. In the dark room of France the picture had developed and the presence of Mohandas Gandhi now brought it out to the light. It was Dicky’s for all time, and his eyes closed with pain that his old friend John Higgins had missed it--the one thing that one needed to know, to keep one’s faith in America, and to gamble even to life itself that the new order of nobleman should one day arise with laughter. ... He walked the streets of Bombay afterward, and then wrote to Pidge late at night, though he was leaving for the north early in the morning. It seemed he could not wait to tell her. All the meanings of New York that he had caught as a New Yorker, in his own home and in the house of Miss Claes, as an exile in Asia and correspondent in France--fused into a sort of splendid synthesis at last. He saw ships coming from all Europe to New York Harbor--coming in through The Narrows bearing the emigrants of all Europe--passing under the Statue of Liberty--tiny seeds diffusing into the vast crucible of The States, running out from the meeting point of Manhattan on all the red lines of railroad, into all the green rivers, planting themselves in all parts, for the emerging of the New Race at last--the Laughing Men, the dense physical model of which he had seen in France. XLI UNDER THE MANGOES OF CAWNPORE