do anything in that situation. In his autobiography his account of his twenty years in South Africa is vivid and full of incident, full of things he is doing. You might think that something big is happening, something that is going to change South Africa, but a lot of the struggle he is describing is personal and religious, and if you step back just a little you will see that the mahatma’s time in South Africa was a complete failure. He was forty-six when he gave up and went back to India. Five years older than you, Willie, and with nothing to show for twenty years of work. In India he was starting from scratch. He would have to think and think, then and later, about how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders. It might seem today that things were already happening, and that as the mahatma all he had to do in 1915 was to let himself be carried to the crest. It wasn’t like that. He made things happen. He created the wave. He was a mixture of thought and intuition. Thought, above all. He was a true revolutionary.”
And Willie said nothing.
She had taken him far away. She had given him the daily mental exercise of thinking himself back into more desperate places of the world he had seen or known. That had already become a habit of his mornings; and now, in an extension of this morning meditation, he found himself reconsidering his life in India and London, reconsidering Africa and his marriage, acknowledging everything in a new way, hiding nothing, submerging all the pathos of his nondescript past in an ennobling new ideal.
For the first time in his life he began to experience a kind of true pride. He felt himself, so to speak, taking up space when he walked in the streets; and he wondered whether this was how other people felt all the time, without effort, all the secure people he had met in London and Africa. Gradually, with this pride, there came to him an unexpected joy, which was like further reward, the joy of knowing that he rejected everything he saw. Sarojini had told him that the people he saw lived for pleasure alone. They ate and watched television and counted their money; they had been reduced to a terrible simplicity. He saw the unnaturalness of this simplicity; at the same time he felt the excitement of the new movements of his heart and mind; and he felt above everything around him.
Five months before, in the lovely, shocking, refreshing winter, as a refugee from Africa, with no true place of his own to go back to, it had all seemed welcoming and blessed. The buildings hadn’t changed; the people hadn’t changed—all he could say was that he had learned to spot the harassed, heavy, middle-aged poor women from the east, two frontiers away. He remembered that time, that memory of his own happiness, very clearly. He didn’t reject it. It told him how far he had come.
That happiness, existing not in the real Berlin but in a special bubble—Sarojini’s apartment, Sarojini’s money, Sarojini’s conversation—couldn’t have endured. Twenty years before he would have wanted to hold on to that good time, would have tried to do, in Berlin, the city at the end of a narrow air corridor, what he had later done in Africa. It would have ended worse than Africa. He might have become like the Indian he met one day, an educated man in his thirties, with gold-rimmed glasses, who had come with high hopes to Berlin and was now a shiny-faced, fawning tramp in ragged clothes, with no place to sleep, his mind no longer whole, his breath very bad, a broken arm in a sling black with grime, complaining of his torments at the hands of young thugs.
In those five months he had come far. There had never been a time like that for him, when he had been without immediate anxiety, when he had not had to act with anyone, and when as in a fairy story he and his sister had become adults without suffering too much harm. He felt that everything he had thought and worked out in those five months was true. They issued out of a new serenity. Everything he had felt before, all the seemingly real longings that had taken him to Africa, were false. He felt no