the greatest period of all. In my last letter to the Mahatma, written just as I was leaving India, I put it this way—and you will pardon me if I read my words. “Of course,” I said, “you have been sad, wellnigh overborne by the tragedies of recent months, but you must never feel that this involves any breakdown of your life work. Human nature cannot bear too much, it cracks under too great a strain, and the strain in this case was as terrific as it was sudden. But your teaching remained as true and your leadership as sound as ever. Single-handed you saved the situation and brought victory out of what seemed for the moment to be defeat. I count these last months to be the crown and climax of your unparalleled career. You were never so great as in these last dark hours.” I wrote those words, and I have read them to you now, in token, first, of my conviction that it was the influence of Gandhi through the discipline of thirty years gone by that prevented the spread of the conflagration, so that less than five per cent of the Indian people were involved in the riots and, less than ten per cent of India’s territory, and through those dreadful days, through the vast range of Indian life. Moslems and Hindus lived peacefully side by side. And secondly, my belief that it was by Gandhi’s own personal presence and influence at those places where the fire was burning the fiercest, that it was straightway extinguished! When I was in Delhi, tension was everywhere in the air, but everybody agreed. Moslem and Hindu alike, men great and men humble, that it was the presence of Gandhi that had brought peace to that great city which a few days before had witnessed the massacre of thousands of people in the public streets. Gandhi came to Delhi, thus stricken, bleeding and frightened, and as Jesus calmed the storm on the sea of Galilee, so Gandhi calmed and ended this storm of hate and madness.
And now he is dead. When his last breath had passed from his body, the newspapers tell us that his granddaughter, in whose arms he died, came to the reporters and said. “Bapu” (a word meaning “little father”), “Bapu is finished.” As I read that pathetic phrase, I thought instantly of the last words of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament, when he said upon the cross, “It is finished.” But as little in the case of Gandhi as in the case of Jesus is it really finished, for as Jesus came to his own only after the fell moment of his death and has lived serene and potent in the hearts of unnumbered millions to our own time, so Gandhi will live and assert his magic influence upon the souls and hearts of men forever. For us, however, it is finished. That ineffable presence, that sweetest of all smiles, those eyes that had depths of beauty like visions of the eternal, that infinite tenderness and grace, that lovely hospitality of friendship, it is all gone with the frail and feeble body that fell beneath the shot of the assassin’s pistol.
On Friday when the news suddenly and terribly came to me, I was seized by such an unexpected convulsion of emotion that I was frightened. And all that day I wept for Gandhi in my heart. On Saturday, yesterday, I could think of nothing but the great funeral pyre, and the blazing flame, and the soul of Gandhi liberated into eternal light. And now today, after I have read the dramatic account of the burning of Gandhi’s body, I feel, beautifully and serenely, a kind of calm, the calm that follows after death, and the secret of which is to be found in that sense of possession of precious things which can never be taken away. Instinctively this morning I went to the shelves of my library, and there I found what I was seeking, something near, and intimate, and very close, in tribute to my friend. A little sonnet written years ago by George Santayana, the great poet and philosopher:
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