Chapter II: Part 2

Routledge reflected upon the furious emotions which had stormed his old friend in a ten minutes’ walk. From the furnaces of British hate, he had swept to the cold caverns of gloom wherein he had laid the wife of his youth. Only four months ago he had left Cardinegh hard, full-blooded, iron-gray. The dawn showed him now a bent, ashen, darting-eyed old man, of volatile but uncentered speech. The tragedy of it all was germinating in the faculties of the younger man. Moreover, with a thrilling freshness, the night and the return to old London friends had brought back his own memories.... “She has never forgotten you, Routledge!”... Nor had _he_ forgotten the pale, exquisite face of Noreen, large-eyed with listening under the lamp in Cheer Street. Her every change of expression recurred to him; and for each phase of the story he had related, there had been different ranges of sorrow and sympathy.

In the queer, sensitive mood, Routledge tried to put away his memories. Only a God was fit to mate with this moment’s conception of Noreen Cardinegh, as he stood with her father in the new day, already defiled by the sprawled army. He wished that he had not seen so much of war. Fate had put a volume of battles into the binding of his brain. In the very centres of his life, series upon series of the world’s late and horrible tableaux had been imprinted. Routledge was impressed with the queer thought that such pictures must dull the delicacy of a man and sear the surface of his soul, like lava over-running a vineyard of Italy.

“Will you go home after this little thing is over?” Jerry asked suddenly.

“Yes, and it won’t be long.”

“You wizard!--what do you mean?” Cardinegh muttered, with a start.

“I mean the present bubble is just about to be pricked.”

“I--at least, the boys--supposed this campaign to be but nicely on!” Cardinegh’s voice was a husky whisper, and his hand had gripped the sleeve of the other. “Tell me what you know!”

“Softly, Jerry!” The voice of Routledge was inaudible two feet from his lips. “It’s all rumor--indefinite, ungrippable, as if the clouds had whispered it--and yet there is something big behind it all. Down in Calcutta, the seats of the mighty are trembling. British India--take it from me--is too agitated by some discovery within, or revelation from without, to bother much further with a little native rebellion like this. And yet even this may have its relation to the big trouble. A native paper has dared to print this sentence--a good sentence, by the way: ‘Mother India is quivering with hatred for her white child, the British foundling!’ Would a Hindu journalist dare to print that without real or fancied backing? ‘Unauthoritative, but important if true,’ as the _Review_ says, is my own idea. It is this: Russian spies have insinuated themselves somewhere into the arcanum of British India; the Bear has lumbered off with information that is already pulling the English forces into defense--from bigger game than the Bhurpalese. If Russia is arming the Border States and has secured information of the fire-brand sort against England--the latter is a good deal like a shorn Samson just now--throwing so much power in little Bhurpal!... Something’s askew. There’s a rival in the north.... It’s all vague, vague, but big--big as Asia!... Listen to an amateur prophet, old Ironsides: if we live three years, we’ll see a collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts!”

They were back in the civilian camp. Cardinegh did not speak, but his face was mad with excitement, his hands ungovernable.

SECOND CHAPTER

THE BAFFLING INDIAN MYSTERY IS DISCUSSED BY FOUR MEN WHO SHOULD HAVE BEEN FIRST TO SOLVE IT

The Powers are held together with links not welded by hands. The strain upon the weaker links sets to quivering the entire cable of civilization. Certain sections of the system grind constantly against each other, and inevitably there comes a period when snapping is imminent. At such a time the two material forces draw apart for defense. Frequently peace is preserved by silent affronts of power; frequently by an easing of tension on either hand, a more comfortable adjustment of boundaries, and thick applications of the lubricant, diplomacy. The time is critical, however, and in either background the engines of war are assembled against the crisis.

Something had happened in India. It was retching for outlet at Calcutta, seething through Indian provinces. London and St. Petersburg were jerking with its startling galvanism. The correspondents afield in Bhurpal began to sense this mysterious friction, but could get no word nor line on the truth. Rumors were thick as _confetti_ in Mardi Gras. Rumors ran through all shades of dreaming and shapes of reason. One story was that China had wiped out the foreign concessions from Hong Kong to Vladivostok and had challenged the world to war; another that Russian armies were swarming over the Himalayas, and that all India stood ready to back the Russian Bear against the British Lion; that England would call upon Japan and the United States, and Russia demand the alliance of the French and Germans; in short, that there would be a merry manifestation of hell around the world.

Routledge tarried but one day with the civilian outfit. He had been gone but forty-eight hours, with Bulwer-Shinn’s cavalry, when the rousing mystery which he had intimated to Jerry Cardinegh in their brief night walk, began to be felt by the army and its followers. That which was known in the secret councils of Calcutta and London never reached the field, but the results did. The campaign came to an abrupt close. The hand behind history beckoned; and arteries of horse, guns, and infantry, running like lines of red ink over the map of Bhurpal, were bottled up into garrisons to _wait_. The petty insurrection in the hills, which had called the soldiers and scribes to action after a bleak stretch of peace, was as remotely forgotten as the vagaries of a fever past.

One after another the correspondents were recalled--uneasy, irritable, their work half-done and wholly lustreless. All their cables of the last days (messages that hinted some grave international lesion; the strained, dwarfed results of minds that searched the stars and the soil for truth) were either stopped in the sending or answered by a crisp word that nothing more of the sort was wanted. This was heart-breaking.

Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, and Talliaferro had fore-gathered on the veranda of the Bengal Hotel in Calcutta. They were awaiting ship for Madras, Bombay, and Home. It was ten days after the big social night in Bhurpal, and early in January, 1902. Trollope had promulgated a theory. It was a full-rigged, painstakingly-ballasted theory, involving hours of heavy work in a smutty, sweltering coach on the way down from Madirabad, and Trollope was a heavy man who drew heat--“the Blue Boar,” a few intimates dared to call him. The theory contained a discriminating opinion, weighed to a dram, on the cause of the sudden scatter of troops from field to garrison, and undertook to interpret the pregnant undertone of disorder which whispered across the empire. A cablegram from his paper, the _Examiner_, had just been delivered, and was spread out upon the table before the others. Trollope was breathing hard.

“Can’t use theory matter,” the dispatch read. “Campaign closed issue.”

Trollope looked up presently and found awaiting his eyes three wide, indulgent smiles. Trollope was so seldom disconcerted that he now furnished an enjoyable moment for the others.

“Cheer up, fat boy,” observed Finacune. “Your old man always was a ruffian. The _Word_ handed me the same thing when I undertook to explain to the boarding-schools of London what this reverse was all about, only the _Word_ did it in a refined, delicate way. You know I dreamed it all out that Russia had come to pay court to Mother India, and that there was a hitch about Tommy Atkins acting the best man----”

“It was the only decent thing I sent in from the campaign,” Trollope growled.

“They know more about it at Home than we do,” said Feeney, the saturnine, a confirmed wanderer, next to Cardinegh in years of service. He had searched the world for forty years to watch the crises of human events.

Finacune inquired with a trace of animation, “We’ve all four been recalled, haven’t we?”

The others disdained to answer, but Finacune went on airily. “We are experts--picked men--the choice of Europe to cover the turmoils of India and elsewhere. None stand beside us. Is this the truth or not?”

It was acclaimed that this was plucked from the original garland of truth.

“Now,” the _Word_ man asserted, “we find our cables, our expert and expensive cables, not cut, not filed for reference, not even trusted to the janitor’s basket, but, so far as we know, _burned unborn!_... We have received no explanation. We are not even told that we have done well or ill.”

“I was told to shut up and come home,” drawled Trollope.

“The same pellet in different coatings is being absorbed in the systems of three of us present,” Finacune added. “Listen. I’ve got a theory. England is menaced by her logical enemy from the North. Some brilliant _coup_ has been executed by the Russian spies, or else there has been treachery. I make no pretension of knowing just what has happened. Any way, it is big enough to make our native rebellion look like a flicker in a holocaust. The trouble is so big that it must be kept from the world, from the English people, from all but the Engine-room of England! We are muzzled, and our papers are muzzled. In a word, the crisis is so big that _the Press has rallied around the Throne_--to keep the matter dark!”

There was considerable comment after this. The atmosphere was charged with earnestness. The belief grew that the clear-headed little humorist, Finacune, had pricked the pith of the question. The situation furnished certain gorgeous playthings for discussion. The idea that the Czar’s secret service, either through the purchase of a traitor or some miraculous thievery, had secured information explosive enough to blow out the British underpinnings from India, amounted to a huge and awful conception in the English mind. Even the pale, listless Talliaferro, the stately _Commonwealth’s_ “Excalibur,” stirred restlessly.

There was sharp scattering of gravel along the driveway, and the four turned to see Jerry Cardinegh riding out on a gray gelding of splendid style and power. He sped by at a fast rack, bending forward in the saddle, his white, haggard face in vivid profile against the vine-hung wall to his right. His gloved left hand held the bridle-rein with the rigidity of an artificial member. His shoulders did not seem to fill the coat he wore; his body looked little and shrunken on the huge beast; his lips moved.... In the mind of each one of the four, queerly enough, was lastingly imprinted this flying glimpse of the well-loved dean as he swung out of the drive on to the Jasper Road.

“Speaking of wanting to know a thing,” observed Trollope, “I should like to know what is pulling down the old man.”

“We’ve all got to break,” said Feeney gloomily. “Jerry’s breaking the approved way like a good machine whose parts are of equal tensile strength.”

“I wonder if it is possible,” came from Finacune slowly, “for the dean to have a line on the mystery, and that it is so desperate--you know there are some situations so desperate--that if one looks them straight in the face he is never the same afterward.”

“Any international disturbance that could throw old Jerry Cardinegh off his feet, or off his feed, would have to concern Ireland,” observed Feeney.

Trollope took up the subject. “It was after that night that Routledge dropped in upon us in Bhurpal--that Jerry began really to tear down. They had a talk together after we turned in.”

“Who should know the real thing--if not that demon Routledge, who rides alone?” Feeney questioned.

“Gentlemen,” said Trollope, clapping his hands for a servant, “we sail to-night for Home. By the grace of the weird god of wars, we’ll be in London, at the Army and Navy Reception, within a month. Possibly then we shall be trusted with the secret which our papers dare not trust to the cable--the secret that is gnawing at the vitals of who shall say how many Powers? In the meantime, let us all drink to the man who wrote of England’s wars--save the deathless Feeney here--when we were just learning to read fairy-tales--drink to the man who just rode by!”

“May I add a line, Trollope?” Finacune asked, as the pegs were brought.

The “Blue Boar” nodded.

“When it comes time,” said Finacune, “for the man who just rode by to finish his last battle--which we all lose--may he pass out from the arms of the most beautiful woman in London--his daughter!”

They drank standing.

Old Feeney broke the silence which followed. They saw in an instant that he had something big to impart--and that there was joy in the telling.

“The Pan-Anglo Agency of stripped news which I have the honor to represent, sent me a little story this morning,” he declared, with the thin, cold smile which they all knew.

“Feeney, you dead planet, do you mean to say that you have got a ray of light left?” Finacune asked. The two were very hearty friends.

“The Press has rallied about the Throne, as you say, my emotional young friend,” Feeney went on blandly, “but the Throne in the interim has turned one of the smoothest tricks known to diplomacy--all in the dark, mind you--one of the deepest diplomatic inspirations ever sprung in the law and gospel of empire-building. Let us say that some one, by a bit of treachery, has thrown Afghanistan’s fighting power to the Russians, lifting it out of the English control. Also let us grant that Russia, confident of this bulk, is waving the fire-brand along the whole northern border of British India--plunging those sullen native states into rebellion--and telling them why! All lower India, people of the plains, will respond to the disorder. It has been a case of waiting for a full century--waiting for the exact moment for insurrection. India is the prize waiting people. They build for eternity. In a word, my sweet children of a battle or two, England faces a great war--with all India energized by Russia--a ten-to-one shot!”

Feeney sat back and smiled at the vine which had been the background for Jerry Cardinegh’s passing. The others squirmed impatiently.

“What does England do in a case like this?” old Feeney requested at length.... “O glorious England--O my England of wisdom and inspiration! Does England say, ‘Let us fight Russia if we must’?... No, my fellow-sufferers; England looks at the map of the world. The heads of her various top-departments in London draw together. I mean her Home, Colonial, and Foreign offices. One of those mute inglorious Gladstones finds an old petition that has been laughed at and thrust aside for months. It is from Japan. It is read and re-read aloud. The unsung Gladstone of the outfit makes a sizzling suggestion. Japan has asked for an Anglo-Japanese alliance. With a turn of a pen it is done. What does this mean, my brothers?”

The thoughtful Talliaferro deigned to speak: “Japan committed _harakiri_--that is, many of the young, impulsive flowers of the army and navy did--seven years ago, when Russia led the Triple Alliance and looted the trophies, including Port Arthur, from Japan’s victory over China. With England’s moral support in an alliance, Japan will start a war with Russia to get her trophies back. I’ve got an idea that Japan thinks she can whip Russia.”

Talliaferro talked so seldom that he was well listened to.

The ancient Feeney clapped his hands. “If you had the nerve to follow troops in action, that you have in world-politics, Talliaferro, you’d have us all whipped,” he said. “You’ve got it exactly. The insulation has long been worn off between Russia and Japan, specifically between Korea and Manchuria. Japan, looted of her spoils from the Chinese war, is one vast serpent’s tooth for Russia. With England’s moral support--I say _moral_ support--Japan will tackle Russia and sing anthems for the chance.”

“You don’t mean that such an alliance is signed?” Finacune asked excitedly, and Trollope was leaning forward.

“Exactly,” said Feeney quietly. “The Pan-Anglo wired me the story to-day, and the _Pioneer_ here will print it to-morrow morning. Japan will now make demands of Russia that will force a war. That will pull Russia up from England’s India borders. Some diplomacy, that alliance, my boys! England has jockeyed Russia out of her aggression; rendered helpless the idea of rebellion in India because Russian support is needed there; England has put half of Asia between her boundaries and the possibility of war! The absolute splendor of the whole matter is that England calls her unheard-of alliance with Japan--a movement for the preservation of Chinese and Korean integrity! I ask you in all truth and soberness--as Saint Paul said--isn’t this humor for the high and lonely gods?”

THIRD CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE RELATES HOW A MASTER CAME DOWN FROM THE GOODLY MOUNTAINS TO FIND HIS _CHELA_ IN THE BURNING PLAINS

Routledge parted from Bulwer-Shinn’s cavalry at Madirabad and reached Calcutta two days before the others, except Bingley, who was but a couple of hours behind him--just enough for the latter to miss the boat Routledge had taken to Bombay. The “Horse-killer” took himself mighty seriously in this just-miss matter, and was stirred core-deep. He wanted to have the first word in London as well as the last word in India. He had studied the matter of the mystery with his peculiar zeal, cabling his point of view in full. So rapidly had he moved down, however, that he missed a cable from the _Thames_, hushing further theories. It was with rage that he determined to railroad across India and regain the lost time, possibly catch a ship ahead of Routledge at Bombay. This was the man he feared at home and afield, in work and play.

Bingley must not be misunderstood. He was a very important war-man, a mental and physical athlete, afraid of few things--least of all, work. Such men are interesting, sometimes dangerous. Bingley was honest in material things; on occasion, hatefully so. He was the least loved of the English war-correspondents, and one of the most famous. He envied the genial love which the name of Routledge so generally inspired; envied the triumphs of the “mystic,” as Finacune had called him; copied the Routledge-method of riding frequently alone, but found it hopeless to do so and preserve the regard of his contemporaries. The careless manner with which Routledge achieved high results was altogether beyond Bingley, as well as the capacity of seeming to forget the big things he had done. It was necessary for Bingley to be visibly triumphant over his _coups_; indeed, penetratingly so. This failure of manner, and a certain genius for finding his level on the unpopular side of a question, challenged the dislike of his kind.

Routledge settled himself for the long voyage with much to think about and Carlyle’s “French Revolution”--already read on many seas. Ordinarily, a mystery such as he had left in India would have furnished material for deep contemplation, but he chose to put it away from him and to live in full the delights of a returning exile. Bombay was agog with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but Routledge did not give the subject more than one of his days out of the last Indian port. He missed nothing of the significance of this great move by England, which had so entranced Feeney, but when he undertook to delve for the first cause his faculties became lame and tired, and he had learned too well the therapeutics of sea-travel to continue an aimless grind. An accomplished traveller, he put aside all wastes of hurry and anxiety and allowed his days and nights to roll together without the slightest wear. Consequently, big volumes of tissue were renovated and rebound. With Routledge, it was not “To-morrow we will be at Port Said,” but a possible reflection to-day that “we are somewhere in the Red Sea.” Frequently, he read entire nights away; or dozed from midnight until dawn, wrapped in a rug on deck. His brain fell into a dreamy state of unproductiveness, until he could scarcely recall that it had ever been a rather imperious ruler of crises; a producer of piled words which developed, in war’s own pigments, the countless garish and ghastly films which his eye had caught. The month at sea smoothed the hard lines of service from his face, as it softened the calluses of his bridle-hand.

It was not until the dusk, when his boat steamed into the shipping before Marseilles, that the old click-click of his mental tension was resumed and the thought-lights burned strong again. He found then that much which had been vague and unreckonable at Calcutta was cleared and finished, as often so pleasantly happens after a season of _pralaya_, as the Hindus express the period of rest, whether it be sleep or death. Standing well forward on deck, with the brilliance of the city pricking the dark of the offing, it was borne to Routledge that his life at this period had reached a parting of the ways. The divergences stretched out before him clearly, as if his mind had arranged them subconsciously, while his material faculties had drowsed in the lull of far journeying. Thoughts began to rain upon him.

“Routledge, how are you and the world to hook up from now on?... You’ve played so far, just played, scattered your years all over the earth, with but little profit to yourself or to the world. If you should die to-night you would possibly have earned five lines in a thirty-volume encyclopædia: ‘Cosmo Routledge, American born, an English war-correspondent and traveller, rode with Tom, stood fire with Dick, and ran with Henry; undertook to study at first hand various native India affairs, and died of a fever at the edge of’--God knows what yellow desert or turbid river.”

He smiled and lit his pipe, musing on. “The point is, I’ll be dead long before the fever--if I keep up this world-tramp--dead to myself and to men--one of the great unbranded, crossing and recrossing his trail around and around the world.... Shall I sit down in London or New York, and double on my whole trail so far on paper--books, editorials, special articles, long dinners beginning at eight, an hour of billiards, a desk in some newspaper office--fat, fatuous, and fixed at fifty?... Which is better, a gaunt, hungry, storm-bitten wanderer, with his face forever at the fire-lit window-panes of civilization, or a creased and cravatted master of little ceremonies within? A citizen of ordered days and nights, or an exile with the windy planet forever roaring in his skull?”

They were warping his ship into dock, and the voices of France were thick in the night.

“Routledge, you’re evading the issue,” he muttered after a moment. “It isn’t that you must choose between one city and the wide world; nor between the desk or the saddle, a tent of skins or a compartment of brick. You can ride a camel in London or pack a folding-bed over the peaks to Llassa; you can be a tramp at home or an editor afield. It isn’t the world or not, Routledge, but--a woman or not!”

The flapping awning took up the matter at length. Routledge relit his pipe dexterously, sensing the very core of the harbor-breeze with his nostrils, and shutting it off.... He would cross France to-night; and dine in Paris to-morrow, breathe the ruffian winds of the Channel to-morrow night, and breakfast again in London.... His brain had put off the lethargy of Asia, indeed--quickened already to the tense stroke of Europe. He was vehemently animate. The rapid French talk on the pier below stirred him with the great import of massed life--as it might have stirred a boy from the fields entering the city of his visions. A few hours and then London!... “She has never forgotten you, Routledge.”...

Once he had seen the mother of Noreen--the woman who, for a little while, was the embodied heaven to Jerry Cardinegh; heaven in spirit to the old man now. A face of living pearl; the gilding and bronzing of autumnal wood-lands in her hair; great still eyes of mystery and mercy.... In a way not to be analyzed, the sight of her made Routledge love more Jerry Cardinegh’s Ireland. Tyrone was hallowed a little in conception--because it had been _her_ home.

In Paris, at the Seville, the next afternoon, a servant informed Routledge that a lady was waiting for him in the Orange Room. There was a lifting in his breast, a thrilling temperamental response. Some fragrant essence of home-coming which he had not thought to find in Paris swept over his senses.... She was sitting in the mellowed glows and shadows of the Seville’s famous parlor. The faintest scent of myrrh and sandal; Zuni potteries like globes of desert sunlight; golden tapestries from the house of Gobelin; fleeces of gold from Persian looms; the sheen of an orange full moon through rifted clouds of satin; spars of gilded daylight through the billowing laces at the casement; the stillness of Palestine; sunlight of centuries woven into every textile fabric--and the woman, Noreen, rising to meet him, a vivid classic of light and warmth.

“Routledge-san!”

“To-morrow, I expected to see you--in London,” he faltered.

“I have been living in Paris. I return to Cheer Street to-night--to make ready for father to-morrow afternoon.”

He was burning with excitement at the sight of her, and the red was deep in her cheeks. It was as if there had been wonderful psychic communions between them; and, meeting in the flesh at last, they were abashed, startled by the phenomenon.

“Mr. Bingley told me that you were to be in Paris to-day. He left for London last night. I was impatient to see you. Possibly I did not wait long enough for you to rest after your journey.”

Routledge did not answer. He was smiling in a strange, shy way, as few men smile after thirty. Moreover, he was holding fast to the hand so eagerly offered.

“Do forgive my staring at you,” he said at last. “I’ve been away a very long time. In India----”

“You may stare, Routledge-san. Men coming home from the wars may do as they will,” she laughed.

“Finding you here in Paris is immense, Miss Noreen. I was planning to keep the way open from Bookstalls to Cheer Street--to ride out with you possibly, watch you paint things, and have talks----”

“You’ll stay in London for a time, Routledge-san?”

“Yes, until you and Jerry appeal to the _Review_ to start a war to be rid of me.”

She did not need to tell him that she was glad. “Come, let’s go outside. It’s like an enchanted castle in here--like living over one of your past lives in all this yellow stillness.”

She could not have explained what made her say this. Routledge liked the idea, and put it away to be tried in the crucible of solitude. “Where did you leave father?” she asked when they were in the street.

“Away up in Bhurpal--two or three days before we were all called in.”

He dreaded the next question, but, understanding that it would trouble him, Noreen pushed into the heart of the subject without asking.

“Of course, he wouldn’t tell me, but I’m afraid he isn’t well. I seem to know when ill befalls any one dear to me.”

“It was a dull, hard-riding campaign, but he weathered it.”

“I feel him white and time-worn somehow, Routledge-san. It is his last time afield. He will need me always now--but we won’t talk of it.”

She led the way through the crowded streets--a cold, bright February afternoon, with the air cleanly crisp and much Parisian show and play about them. “I’ll take you to my studio, if you wish.... It is quiet and homey there. Most of my things are packed, but we can have tea.”

“I was planning to leave for London to-night,” he ventured.

“Of course--we’ll take the same boat. And to-morrow--to-morrow there will be things for a man to do in Cheer Street--getting ready for father.”

Both laughed. It seemed almost too joyous to Routledge.

“I can’t endure London--that is, I can’t live there when father is away,” she said presently. “It seems less lonely in Paris. London--certain days in London--seem to reek with pent tragedy. There is so much gray sorrow there; so much unuttered pain--so many lives that seem to mean nothing to the gods who give life. I suppose it is so everywhere, but London conceals it less.”

“Less than India?”

“Oh, but India has her philosophy. There is no philosophy in the curriculum of the East End.... I wish I could think about India as you do--calmly and without hate for the British ascendency there. At least, without showing my hatred. But it seems so scandalous and grotesque to me for a commercial people to dominate a spiritual people. What audacity for the English to suggest to the Hindus the way to conduct life and worship God! I am Jerry Cardinegh’s girl--when it comes to India and Ireland. It must be that which makes me hate London.”

“England is young; India old,” said Routledge. “Many times the old can learn from the young--how to live.”

“But not how to die--and yet India has had much practice in learning how to die at the hands of the British.... We mustn’t talk about it to-day! The word _famine_ rouses me into a savage. India famine; Irish famine; the perennial famine of the London East End!... Coming home from the wars, you must not be forced to talk about bitter things. I want to sit down and listen to you about _your_ India--not the Cardinegh India. We always see the black visage behind India, as behind Ireland. You see the enchantment of Indian inner life--and we the squalor of the doorways. Yes, I still read the _Review_.... Ah, Routledge-san, your interview with the English ‘missionary-and-clubman’ in Lucknow was a delicious conception; yet back of it all there is something of horror in its humor to me. Most of all because the ‘missionary-and-clubman,’ as I saw him, under your hand, would have perceived none of the humor! He would no doubt have called it a very excellent paper--yet every line contained an insinuation of his calamitous ignorance and his infant-soul! I must repeat--what audacity for the cumbering flesh of a matter-mad people, undertaking to teach _visionary_ India--how to look for God!”

Routledge invariably became restless when the values of his own work were discussed before him.

“By the way, Miss Noreen,” he said, “I left Bingley behind me in Calcutta----”

“He said so, but crossed India by rail and caught a ship before you at Bombay. Father and the others will be in London to-morrow. They left ship at Naples to be in time for the Army and Navy Reception to-morrow night.”

Routledge was a trifle bewildered as he followed Noreen up the stairway into the studio, and sat down by the window. The place was stripped of many things identified with her individuality, and yet it was all distinctly a part of her. Trunks and boxes were ready for the carrier, her portmanteau alone opened. Out of this she drew the tea-things, and the man watched with emotion. After the alien silence of the Orange Room and the turmoil of the Parisian streets, the studio was dear with nameless attractions. All the negatives of his mind, once crowded with pictures of Paris and civilization, had been sponged clean by India. The moments now were rushed with new impressions.... The stamp of fineness was in her dress, and to him a far-flinging import in all her words. The quick turn of her head and hand, all her movements, expressed that nice elastic finish which marks an individual from the herd. It was even as they had told him in India. Noreen Cardinegh had put on royalty in becoming a woman.

The man did not cease to be a trifle bewildered. He was charged again with the same inspiring temperament which compelled him to tell her the intimate story of Rawder, and to tell it with all his valor and tenderness. Impedimenta which the months had brought to his brain and heart were whipped away now before those same wondrous, listening eyes. Memories of her had always been the fairest architecture of his thoughts, but they were as castles in cloudland, lineaments half-lost, compared to this moment, with the living glory of Noreen Cardinegh sweeping into full possession of his life. All that had been before was dulled and undesirable; even himself, the man, Routledge, with whom he had lived so much alone.... In this splendid moment of expansion, it came to him--the world’s bright answer to his long quest for the reason of being.

* * * * *

“Routledge-san, I have wine and tea and biscuit, and you may smoke if you like.” She drew up a little table and chair for herself. “It will be an hour before the carrier comes for my trunks, and I want you to tell me if you have seen again--our bravest man. It’s long over a year since you left him in Hong Kong.”

“Miss Noreen----”

“I’d rather be Noreen to you.”

“Noreen, what is the force of Rawder’s bigness to you?” Routledge asked, after watching her several seconds.

“He serves blindly, constantly, among the dregs, and has mercy for all men but himself!” she said intensely. “The living spirit of the Christ seems to be in him, and nothing of sex or earthly desire. I have pictured him, since you told me the story, as one pure of soul as any of the prophets or martyrs. I care not for the range of his brain when he has a human heart like that!... I wish I could say all he suggests to me, but I mean--I think he is close to God!”

“Thank you,” said Routledge. “It is one of the finest things I know, to have you speak of him as ‘our bravest man’--to share him with me.... Yes, I have seen him again, and there is another story to tell, and I will tell it, as he told me:

“It began with his leaving Hong Kong. He was never so weary nor so faint-hearted as on one certain day. It was about the time I was with you for an evening in Cheer Street. He declares when that night came he went out on the water-front to his work with a ‘wicked rebellion’ in his heart. A night of rain and storm. He had rescued a fallen sailor from the Chinese, and was leading him to his own lodging when he was struck from behind and trampled. ‘I’m afraid they meant to kill me,’ he divulged, and added in apology that the lives of the Chinese are so dark and desperate on the water-front. His old Minday wound was reopened, and he awoke to feel that death was very close. You see, the police had found his body in the rain. He was drifting off into unconsciousness when a vision appeared.

“He had never touched India at that time in this life, but it was a bit of India that appeared in his vision, and it was all very true to him.... Nightfall and a little village street; an ancient Hindu holy man sitting in a doorway, head bowed, his lips moving with the Ineffable Name. Very clearly Rawder saw this and the rest, so that he would know the place when he saw it again--the sand, the silence, the river sweeping like a rusty sickle about the town, and his old master sitting in the doorway.

“This was the picture that came to him as he lay in a station of the Hong Kong Sihk-police, and close to death.... The Hindu holy man, so old that he seemed to be a companion of Death, looked up sorrowfully and said: ‘My son, I have come down from the goodly mountains for you. Just this way, you shall find me waiting. Make haste to come for me, my _chela_, for I am full of years, and already am I weary of these plains and so many men. There is work for us to do before we go back together to our goodly mountains.’

“The Sannyasi spoke in Tibetan, which Rawder had never heard before, but every word he understood as I have told you. ‘And how swiftly did I heal after that!’ he exclaimed to me, smiling. His pain left him and his wound closed magically. They told him he would die if he left his bed, but he finished his healing on the road to his river and his village. All was made easy for him, as our bravest man declares. There was a ship in the harbor, which needed a man to peel vegetables, and Rawder fitted in, remaining aboard port after port, until something prompted him to go ashore at Narsapur, which lies among the mouths of the great Godavari. One of these he followed up to the main stem, and journeyed, on foot for months and months, studying the natives and their language, doing what appeared to him among the dead and the living in the midst of famine and plague, and ‘_knowing no hunger nor thirst nor pain_.’ These are his words, Noreen.”

“He is like one of those mystics,” the woman said, “like Suso or St. Francis of Assisi--who would not reckon with physical pain.”

“Yes.... I did not remain long in America after leaving you in Cheer Street. In fact, I was back in India months before this last trouble arose in Bhurpal--with Rawder in India. It was at Sironcha, where the Godavari joins the Penganga, that I found him, and he told me all these things. Then for awhile I journeyed with him, and it was very good for me. Always he was helping--down at the very roots of the disorder of things. I thought of you very much. You were the only one I had told of Rawder. That’s why I was so glad to hear you say ‘our bravest man.’”

“And his master?”

“Yes.... It was far north of Sironcha, on the Penganga, and he had been hurrying, hurrying, for days. I was to leave him at Ahiri for the service in two days more. At nightfall, we came to the little village, with the Penganga sweeping about it like a rusty sickle. ‘It is the place--I know the place,’ he kept repeating.... Even I was not surprised, Noreen, to see the aged Sannyasi sitting in the doorway, his lips moving with the Ineffable Name.... And so our bravest man found the master he had earned; the old master who had come down from his lodge in the goodly mountains to take back the purest man-soul I have ever known.”

“Then you--then you will never see him again?” the woman cried.

“That is what is strange to me, Noreen. He said I should see him again in India this year. He said I would know the time and the place. They are journeying northward toward the hills on foot and very slowly. One might travel around the world, and, returning, find them only three or four latitudes northward from the place of parting. And so I left him very happy, learning Tibetan and Chinese, and the ancient wisdom, happily helping in the midst of the world’s direst poverty.”

“And you have no thought to return to India so far, Routledge-san?”

“No.”

The tea was perfect. The carrier came and took the trunks and boxes. They sat together in the stripped studio while the twilight hushed the distances. The street below lost its look of idling, and the figures moved quickly.... There were no lights. The man thrilled in the black hallway as the woman whispered an _adieu_ to her little Paris place; then shut the door, and, feeling for his hand, led him to the stairs.

FOURTH CHAPTER

ROUTLEDGE CONTEMPLATES THE PAST, IN THE MIDST OF A SHADOW FORECAST BY LARGE EVENTS

They dined at the Seville, took a night-train for Calais, and talked on the steamer’s deck in the Channel. It was a night of stars and cold gusts of wind. The lights of France died out behind. A ship appeared ahead like a faint, low-swinging star, loomed mightily, her great form pricked in light, and passed swiftly by, so near that they heard her crushing the seas, and the throb of her iron heart.... Noreen was saying:

“It’s so good not to have to travel alone. I have been so much alone. I seem to tell you things quite amazingly.... I must be intensely strange in some way, possibly psychic, because I dream so many things which remain vividly afterward.”

The picture she meant to put into words came clearly with Routledge listening.

“Once, when I was so little that I couldn’t talk plainly--so little that you might have balanced me in your hand--a woman came to the tiny room where I lay. It was in the midst of the night. Father was in Asia somewhere. I was awake, I think, because I heard the woman fumbling at the door. She was a big, hysterical thing and suddenly screamed that my mother was dead--then rushed away, leaving me alone in the dark!... It was at a lonely English country-house in winter. I remember the snow and the winds and the gray, tossing sky and the nights. I had to stay there alone until father came home. For more than a month I was in that great house, with naked, sighing trees all around--trees close to the walls of the house. They cut the wind into ribbons and made a constant moaning. And, oh, the nights were eternal! I was in a broad, cold room in the great, creaking house--and always I could hear hard-breathing from somewhere. Alone, I wore out all my fears there--until at last I had no fears, only dreams of the night that lived with me all through the day. I have never gone near that country-place since father came. How terrible he looked! It left me strange and different--so that I was never like a little child afterward.... Routledge-san, why do I tell you all these things? Not in years have I talked so much in one day.”

“Nor have I listened so raptly, Noreen.”

“I wouldn’t have tried to tell you so much--except that you are to be back in India within a year.... It has come to me, Routledge-san, that you are to go very quickly!”

There was a creak of a wicker-chair in the shadows of the engine-room air-shafts behind them. Noreen grasped his arm impulsively. It was not that she had said anything which the world might not hear, but her concentration had been intense, and the little story she had told had been so intimately personal to her that no woman, and only this man, had ever called it forth. There was quick cruelty in the thought of it being overheard by a stranger. In any case, the spell was broken. Routledge was irritated. The recall from the world of the woman, and the feeling of oneness with her which the strange little confidence had inspired, was pure unpleasantness.

“I’ll go to my state-room now,” she whispered. “There is only a little while to rest.... Good-night, Routledge-san. I’ll be abroad early.”

He knew that she would not have thought of her cabin yet, even though the hour was late, had it not been for the intrusion of the creaking chair. Routledge took her hand and spoke a brisk good-night. Returning to the deck-chair between the air-shafts, he sat down and arose again carefully. The sound was the same. He tested the chair thoroughly and found that in no possible way could the wind have caused the creak.... They had stood long within eight or nine feet of the chair. A gentleman would have given some notice that he was within hearing, or, better still, would have gone his way--unless asleep. This last was unlikely, because the deck was searched by a keen winter wind. In the smoking-room was an individual whose face had become familiar to Routledge since he had taken the Paris train at Marseilles the night before--a middle-aged man, strongly featured, wearing a white mustache. This traveller had also stopped at the Seville. He glanced up from a game of solitaire as Routledge entered. There were a bridge-party and one or two others in the apartment. Routledge chose a cigar very carefully, and managed to whisper to the attendant in a light, humorous way:

“Let me look at that cordial-flask a moment, and tell me how long that man at solitaire has been here.”

The other handed him the package and whispered, “Just about five minutes.”

Routledge purchased the cordial and passed out. It happened that he glanced into the smoking-room through a half-curtained window, and met the eyes of the White Mustache fully.... It was a little thing--scarcely a coincidence--for one to cross France by the same stages in twenty-four hours and break the journey at the same hotel in Paris. Moreover, because the stranger was not in the smoking-room fifteen minutes before did not establish the fact that it was his weight that had made the chair creak.... Routledge was disinclined to rest. The day had revolutionized his systems of being. He longed for daylight again, quite forgetting his usual patience with the natural passing of hours and events. The day itself had been unspeakably fine, but there was a disturbing reaction now and a premonitive shadow that would not be smoked nor reasoned out of mind.

This, on the night of his perfect day. Noreen Cardinegh had given him every moment of her time in Paris, not even saying good-by to her friends.... It was not the mystery in India; not the swift failing of Jerry Cardinegh, which his daughter felt, though she had not seen; not the White Mustache nor the creaking chair--these merely wove into a garment of nettles. The premonition was not even his own. It was Noreen Cardinegh’s, and had to do with his leaving her and hurrying back to India.... “It has come to me, Routledge-san, that you are to go very quickly!”... The great frieze coat was wet with Channel mists and Channel spray when the half-dawn developed the Dover pier, and the eyes of the wanderer were filled once more with the seven shades of English gray.... Noreen was out before the full day.

“Let’s take the earlier train for Charing Cross,” she said. “I believe we still have time. Our luggage is checked through, and we can breakfast _en route_.”

He brought his bag, and Noreen took his arm companionably as he appeared on the main-deck again.... She was all in gray like the morning, save for a touch of yellow ruching at her throat and her hair’s golden wonder-work.... Routledge turned on the pier at a step behind. It was the White Mustache in light-travelling order, hastening to make the early train.

A breakfast-table was between them. “Routledge-san,” she said, leaning toward him critically, “you don’t look the least bit tired, but I doubt if you’ve slept since I left you. Beside, your coat is all wet.”

“I did smell the Channel a bit,” he replied, thinking that a man who looked dull and worn in the presence of Noreen Cardinegh would be incapable of reflecting light of any kind. “I couldn’t? feel more fit and keep my self-control. Though I am not an Englishman, it thrills to see England again.” He glanced from his plate to her eyes and then out upon the winter fields, sweeping by the window like an endless magic carpet. “Some time, when there are no more wars,” he added, “we shall write an essay and call it, ‘Grape-fruit and Kentish Gardens.’”

They separated at Charing Cross, to meet again in the evening at the Army and Navy reception. Routledge repaired to his old lodgings in Bookstalls Road and sat down before his grate-fire in the midst of old trophies and treasures. Bookstalls was a crowded part of London, rushing with many small businesses, and convenient to vast tracts of unbroken undesirability. It was a gorge that boomed continual clamor. Even at night, when the protest from the cobble-stones should have sunk to its stillest, the neighboring fire-department was wont to burst open at intervals like the door of a cuckoo-clock and pour forth tons of clangorous polished metal. Whistles from the far river whipped the smoky air when the small factories were at peace; night-shifts of workmen kept the pavements continually animate. There was an iron-tongued guard in the belfry of Old Timothy’s Church that never let an hour go by without brutally hammering it flat, and then bisecting it; and on Sundays and Saints’ days, the same bell sent a continual crashing through the gorge with a hurting, tangible vibration, like a train in a subway.

Bookstalls had been decadent for decades. When grandfathers were little boys it had been a goodly place of residence, but small factories had long been smoking it out. Indeed, it sat in venerable decrepitude by the fires of its shops. Certain _habitués_ lived on, nor noted the progress of decay, more than an old rat perceives the rotting mould sink deeper into his confining walls, or the crumble of his domestic plasters.

Routledge in London was one of the _habitués_. The place was associated to him with dim beginnings--a store-room of sentiments and war-relics kept by the year. Before this fire he had written his first views of London for an American newspaper, and here he had brought various reminders of travel. To Bookstalls he returned from his first journey to India--returned with the old brown Mother’s mystic whisperings in his brain, her mystic winds filling the sails of his soul. Gazing at this same grate-fire, tranced as by the heart of crystal, he had sunk into his first meditations, murmuring the star-reaching OM--until the boy within him, crude with Europe, broke the spell in fright, lest his divided bodies join together no more. Those days he had drunk deep of the Vedas; and the Bhagavad Gita was one with him according to his light. Out of these he came to see and feel the great Wheel of Births and Deaths and Re-Births moving true and eternal in the cogs of Karma. And, having once sensed and discovered this, the little problems of the earth’s day and generation are but gentle calisthenics for the mind.

Routledge looked back upon those pure days wistfully now. It is given a man but once in this life to follow the Way. When manhood is fresh and sensitive, retaining all its delicate bloom and unhurt power; and when, full of a hunger that never falls below the diaphragm, the young man turns for Truth to the masters and sages--this is the time to choose between the world and the stars! This is the time that the world gives battle to detain the searching soul. “Look, yonder is a Joseph climbing to God!” cries the old Flesh-mother; and, gathering her minions of enchantment and her dragons of fear, she scorns the lower cities, all safely swarming to her tribute, to pluck at the skirts of the Heaven-called.... What red flowers of passion she strews before him on the rocky, upland way; what songs of conquest she summons from the lower groves; with what romances does she stir his rest, all fragrant-lipped and splendor-eyed; what a Zion she rears of cloud and clay to hold his eyes from the Heights--are not all these written, aye, burned, into the history of Man?

Who goes beyond? A valiant few.... If the enchantments fail to hold him, and if his clear eyes penetrate the illusions of sense; lo, the path grows steep and dark before him, and there are dragons in the way! The faith of the youth must be as Daniel’s now, which is tetanus for lions and palsy for every monster. He has not lingered with the lusts. Will he not falter before the fears?

The many tarry in the tinsel gardens of sense; the few turn back before the roar of the Furies; the One--but who can tell how the bay-tree blooms for him, where glory waits?...

The saddest part of all is, that those who are called and turn back, learn in the coolness of years how treacherous are the enchantments, and that never a dragon of the dark harmed a hair of Strongheart; but the way shines not so clear for a second journey, and the soul is hardened with skepticisms past responding to the Inner Voice. The man must be born again.