Early one morning last week Mahatma Gandhi, wizened, sainted patron of Indian Independence, arose from his couch in the Sabarmarti Ashram, his settlement outside Ahmadabad, wrapped in cloth around his spidery loins, took the high road for Jalalpur, 150 miles away on the Gulf of Cambay in the centre of India's western seaboard. With him proceeded 79 followers— one Christian, two Moslems, the rest Hindus. It was a mission of profoundest significance to Indian Nationalists, for when, after 20 days, the little legion should arrive in Jalalpur, they planned to take pails of water*from the sea, extract the salt therefrom in direct defiance of the British government's Indian salt monopoly and tax. This symbolic act would inaugurate the Civil Disobedience campaign, long contemplated by Saint Gandhi as a new, potential means of protest against British rule (TIME, Jan. 13 et ante). Thereafter, countless adherents of Saint Gandhi would be expected to harass the British government with similar infractions of the law.
Before he left, the Mahatma bade goodbye to Mrs. Gandhi, a shriveled little middle-aged Hindu. Well-educated, she oversees the cooking and housekeeping at her husband's headquarters and ''college," lectures to Hindu women, promotes a "spinning campaign" whereby Hindu women of high and low degree are urged to spend some part of each day at their looms.
The Mahatma also bade goodbye to a six-foot sun-blackened, scantily-clad girl of 30, with a shaven pate, who is general supervisor of the headquarters, and would tend his tasks during his absence. Srimati Mira Bai he calls her, but her real name is Madeleine Slade. Once a freckled blonde, she is a daughter of the late Admiral Sir Edward Slade of the Royal Navy. She studied philosophy in several Continental schools, found nothing to inspire her until she read of the Mahatma's labor. Correspondence with him followed; in 1926 she went to India, cheerfully accepted the year's probation to which he subjected her. She slept on a splintered floor, cooked her own meagre food, spun her clothes from raw cotton. Having learned Hindu, taken a Hindu name, embraced the Hindu faith, she became tantamount to the Mahatma's private secretary, accompanied him on trips to the villages, supported his spindly frame when, though ill, he persisted in taking his ruminative walks. Madeleine Slade wished she too might have marched to Jalalpur last week, but, as she declared: "The Master does not believe in placing women, least of all English women, in the forefront of the battle."
The girl that Gandhi left behind him had plenty to do. In his Ashram ("college") on the Sabarmarti River, some 22 persons had been stricken with smallpox, three were already dead. What might ordinarily have been a crisis was overshadowed by the excitement attending the Mahatma's departure.