Chapter IV: Part 4

“To me it’s a gift of the gods! Hold on, Jerry, until I bring back the Book--hold on and sit tight!”

Cardinegh left the lodging and Bookstalls, bewildered by his new possession of days. The strain that had kept him afoot until the end; that had stiffened his body and faculties for the end itself; carrying him step by step from the Khyber Hills, through the Bhurpal campaign (the days in which he had watched the results of the fire he had started); the strain that had roused his personal craft to baffle and disarm those men of uncanny keenness at Naples, and pulled him up for a last rally in London--was lifted now, and with it relaxed the substance of his brain and body. Doubtless, he would have preserved his acumen upstanding, and an unsnapped nerve, to bid Noreen farewell and make his confession at the War-Office to-day--but there was no need!

The old man walked along mumbling, forgetting the while to hail a cab. The miracle of it all, though it did not appeal to him, was that he had lost his ruling, destroying hatred for England. Cheer Street and Noreen--the blessedness of her hand to help him; her touch so like her mother’s upon his brow; the eyes of her mother across the table--months of life, of rest, of Home and Noreen!... These were his thoughts. There was no room for world-politics, for war, for passion. Even the thing which Routledge had done hovered in the background. It was a piece of inhuman valor, almost too big to hold fast to. Routledge was identified in his brain now with the stirring braveries of days long gone; with other sunlights in which men met the shock of things in full manhood; it was of another, of a ruddier, world to old Jerry’s eyes to-day.... In a remote way, he felt that once _he_ might have revelled in the hate of London. Perhaps it was one of the things peculiar to the middle distances of manhood--as far from the comprehension of the elders as of the children. That there was an element of sacrifice in the action of Routledge was not entirely lost to Cardinegh, but he put it away among the misty glories of memory--days when manhood was in its zenith of light and power. It was not of the present; it had nothing to do with the numbness and the swift, painless softening of to-day.

“Noreen!” he called, at the front door in Cheer Street.

A servant told him that Noreen had been away for an hour.... With a startled look, the servant drew a chair close to the fire for the old man, poured a grog for him, set his smoking things to hand, and backed staring out of the room.... Hours afterward, Noreen found him there--the glass, the pipes, the daily papers untouched. His smile was like something which the wind had blown awry. His eyes were depleted of fire, of fury. Even the starry worship which her presence had reflected in them yesterday was dimmed--as were the mighty images of the wars in his brain.... He roused at the sight of her, started to speak of Routledge, halted, reflected, then drank.

“Hold a match to my pipe, child. It was your mother’s way. You’ve been gone the long while, deere.”

She obeyed. The majesty of pain was upon her face as she hurried away. Locked in her own room, long afterward, she heard him humming quaveringly an old Irish folk-song--lost from her brain a dozen years.

EIGHTH CHAPTER

THE SUPERLATIVE WOMAN EMPTIES HER HEART OF ITS TREASURES FOR THE OUTCAST, AND THEY PART AT CHARING CROSS

After taking the hand of Jerry Cardinegh at the stairs, Routledge returned to his room, smiling a trifle bitterly.

“That was certainly a fragile underpinning to rear a great lie upon,” he mused. “I couldn’t have made old Jerry swallow that a year ago.... But there’s good humor in the idea--the book of Routledge energized by the dynamos of British hate--a book of wars from a man who rather likes to promote the ranking rottenness of war.... But the name of Cardinegh cannot go down just yet with that of Colonel Hammond, and the Lotus Expedition; with treachery.... Living God, how that sweet girl haunts me!... I must put her away--far back among the cold, closed things. It isn’t fair to use her as a trellis for thought-vines like mine. She is just psychic enough to know, without words----”

He thought presently of what Rawder had told him about returning to India this year; also of Noreen’s amendment--that he was to go very quickly. How far off it had seemed yesterday!... Routledge was standing at the window. Though his active mind was filled with sadder, finer matters, a process of unconscious cerebration was alert for the White Mustache in the street below. This certain secret agent was not in sight, but there was not a single individual of the throng who _might not_ be identified with that silent, fameless department--the men who had kept the secret of Shubar Khan in spite of Colonel Hammond’s regiment, which knew all.... London was running with its sordid morning business--grinding by in the gray morn and the rain.

“London,” he exclaimed softly, marvelling at the great thing which had befallen him, “the keyboard of the planet! How the Excellent Operator hungers to turn the full voltage on me now!”

Routledge was hard-hit, and made no pretenses to himself otherwise. He did not want to go back to India to-day. The thing he had managed to pray for--the Hate of London--was a crippling horror. It tore down the inner life of him. He felt already the encompassing loneliness of an expatriate; worse, he felt against him the gigantic massed soul of the English. It peopled the shadows of the room and the street and his brain, filling him with weakness and faltering. It was not that the idea of death hung to the flanks of his being. He could laugh at death with a sterling principle. Rather, it was that all that had bound him to life was dead--work and play and light. He was chained to a corpse--the hate of London. It was an infectious corrosion which broke his own spirit, as no physical dread had ever done; yet, stricken as he was, he felt himself torn in the counter-attraction of two great passions--between his sweetest woman and his bravest man.... A light rapping at his inner door startled him. It was the Bookstalls boy.

“Kin I come out now, Mister?”

With a gasp of relief, Routledge turned to the door; but, on the way, his eyes fell upon the two worn, fallen-in shoes, set so evenly before the fire.

“Bless you, lad--just a minute,” he said.

He gathered up all the change his pockets had held, big and little pieces of silver, and dropped them softly into the shoes, now stiffly dried,--then opened the door. The small, draggled chap emerged briskly, took in his host from head to foot with a quick, approving look, then glanced out of the window to locate himself. It was all coming back to him apparently.

“I was sleepin’ in yer street-stairs,” he explained, as if to get it straight in his own mind. “Then I didn’t know nothink till I ’eerd woices.”

“What’s your name, little soul?”

“Johnny Brodie.”

“Did the voices bother you, Johnny?” Routledge asked.

“Naw. I was too warm. Nothink like woices never bothers when you’re warm. Is them your stairs? Nobody never come up them stairs late afore.”

“Have you slept there often, Johnny?”

“Not wery,” the boy said nervously.

He had given Routledge a start for a moment. It was not past the White Mustache to have used a lad of this size, but, once used, the lad would never have spoken of “woices.” Besides, he had slept on the stairs before. Johnny was looking about the walls with covert appreciation. Guns, saddles, and soldier-pictures appealed to him. They were proper man-things.

“How long have you been in Bookstalls, and around here?”

“Allus.”

“But haven’t you any place to sleep?”

“Lots.” It wasn’t said with humorous intent. Johnny Brodie was struggling with his shoes.

Routledge regarded him with joy.

“Lor-gordy,” muttered Johnny, in an awed voice. “Wishermay die if you ain’t tipped over a bank in me boots!... Mine?”

Routledge nodded.

“Well, I’m chivvied! I ’ont be safe nowheres wit all this.”

“Johnny, are all your places to sleep like my stairs? I mean, haven’t you any regular place?”

The boy gave him a quick glance and decided that this was not the time for lies.

“Lor-gordy--them stairs ain’t bad--on’y wen it’s wery cold. Naw, I ain’t got nothink reg’lar.”

“There’s a bit of a room just your size, Johnny, in the back-hall,” the man said. “I’m going away again to-day, and these rooms will be locked up for a long time, but I’ll be back, I think. If I were to fix it with the good landlady for you to have that little room--and I’ll give you a regular army blanket like the soldiers have, to curl up in when it’s cold, and a little cot, and all the things you need--would you use it every night?”

“Lor’! Say, Mister, honest?”

He nodded. “Run along then, Johnny, and get a good breakfast, and I’ll have it arranged when you get back.”

Routledge came to an agreement with the woman of the house; carried from his own rooms blankets, soap, towels, pictures, a pair of military brushes, an unused pocket-knife, a package of candles, and many other little things to the wee box of a room in the hall, taking much pleasure in the outfitting.... He had not yet brought his own baggage from Charing Cross, and was glad now. London had become to him like a plague quarantine, a smothering menace. He would leave London to-day, and Noreen Cardinegh, without daring to see her again. His every movement, he realized, was watched. Even to take her hand for a moment would reflect evil upon her. The White Mustache, or one of his kind, would observe, and a lasting record would be made. He paced the floor swiftly, murdering the biggest thing in his life.

... He could go to Rawder. There was healing in that. Perhaps the old Sannyasi would take him for the _chela_ of his _chela_. He could hide in England’s India, which only a few of the secret service knew so well as he.... Could he put all the wars and illusions of matter away, drink of the ancient wisdom, wander beneficently until the end, with two holy men, in the midst of God’s humblest poor? Could he put behind him all that was supreme and lovely of his life this hour, sink it in the graveyard of his past with other dead desires?

It was just a rush of vague, vain thoughts. Had he been pure as the boy, twelve years ago, and wise as the man now, _and if he had never known Noreen Cardinegh_, possibly then the old Sannyasi might say, “Be the disciple of my disciple; and, free from all the illusions of the flesh, journey with us up into the silence of the goodly mountains.”...

But this life would never know freedom from that thrilling, beautiful memory. He could sacrifice a union with Noreen Cardinegh, but never renounce her from the high place of his heart. She was wedded to the source and centre of his life, and no asceticism could shrive her from him. He might put half the planet’s curve between, but the bride the world had formed for him would be the eternal crying voice in the wilderness; and until they were mated in this or another life, the Wheel of Births and Deaths would never whirl him free from love, the loftiest of all illusions. Though he sat in a temple upon the roof of the world, holding his thoughts among the stars until the _kusa grass_ beneath him was blown like dust away, and his body petrified upon the naked rock, the last breath from the ruin would stir his lips to the name of the world’s bright gift to him--Noreen.

Johnny Brodie returned. Routledge took him by the hand and led him into the midst of his possessions.... It was quite a happy time, with the old landlady looking on, and a mysterious fund in her pocket for Johnny stockings, and Brodie trousers and even dinners, when old Bookstalls was remiss in her duty. Finally, at the last moment, Routledge dropped his hand upon the boy’s shoulder. The face was turned up clear, the eyes unblinking. The man was no longer afraid.

“Johnny,” he said, “the best fellows in this world are those who are strong enough to hold their tongues at the right time. Nobody must know about this little room--_nobody_. To you, I’m just a decent stranger who has gone away. If anybody asks who or where or how or why about me--you don’t know. This is all yours. Sleep tight, and say nothing. If you need anything that you can’t get yourself, go to the landlady. Be clean about what you do everywhere--I don’t mean in the room, Johnny, but everywhere, in the street, too. Not clean about your hands and face--that’s good--but mostly about what you think. I may come back some time, and I may not, but you’ll be fixed here as long as you need. Think of it, Johnny Brodie--remember this well: always if something hits you from inside that a thing isn’t good to do, don’t hurry about doing it. Think it over. If you wouldn’t do it when the person you like best in the world is watching, it isn’t a good thing to do alone.”

Routledge locked his lodgings. With the boy attached to one hand and his bag in the other, he went down into the street, and just at that moment a carriage opened at the curb, and Noreen Cardinegh stepped out. Routledge took the outstretched hand, but there was a warm flood of pain widening within him, as blood from an opened wound....

The rain-coat hung about her like a delicate harmony, its hood covering her hair; and its high-rolling collar, bound with scarlet, thin as a thread but vivid as an oriflamme, concealed her throat. That lustrous, perfect oval face in the rain. It was luminous from within like a pearl, and had _its_ scarlet-edging in the curving, exquisite lips, strange with inner vividness. Never had she been so wondrous to him as he felt the superb zest of life beneath the pearl-gray glove that moment in grimy Bookstalls. A conception of womanhood that widened the limitations of any man!... He lifted his glance from the pavement, where it had been held for an instant by the glittering point of her boot, and found the great eyes upon him--pools of splendor which held his temple, white as truth, golden sunlight on its dome; and, far within, a dim, mystic sanctuary where Mother Earth had built a shrine for him.

“Thank God you have not gone, Routledge-san!” she said in a low way. “Tell me--ah, but I know--you would have gone without a word to me.... You think it is right?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you punish me this way, Routledge-san?... Do you think I mind what London cares or thinks? Do you think London could force me to believe ill of you?... I must talk with you! May we not go up into your rooms, out of the crowd and the rain? The little boy may come.”

There was not a window commanding the street which might not have held the White Mustache that moment; not a single passer-by who might not have been one of his kind.

“I have turned in my--that is, I have given up my room,” he faltered.

“I must talk with you. Come into my carriage. That will be the better way. The little boy----”

She caught the look of hostility in the street-waif’s eyes. She was taking the man away. There was another look, the meaning of which she did not miss. Routledge bent down to him.

“Good-by, little soul,” he said. “I’ll find you in some doorway again some time--maybe in the doorway to fame. Be a good little fellow always. Don’t get tired of being clean, and some time you’ll be mighty glad.”

The boy watched the carriage move slowly away among the truckage--until a stranger put a hand upon his shoulder.

* * * * *

For many seconds neither spoke; then it was Noreen.

“What is this big thing you are doing, Routledge-san?”

“I cannot tell--even you.”

“Yes, but you need not have hurt me so. You were going away without a word to me--and I am so proud to have been for you--against the others.”

“Noreen, you must believe that it is not good for you to be seen with me now. Every movement I make is known; everyone in the slightest communication with me is under suspicion. Your loyalty--I cannot even speak of steadily, it is so big and dear--and because it is so, I shudder to drag you into these forlorn fortunes of mine. It is in the power of these people to make you very miserable while I am gone--and that is anguish to me, nothing less.”

“You think of me--think of me always, and a little social matter which concerns me!” she exclaimed. “I care nothing for it--oh, please believe that. Last night you left the Armory, not knowing what had befallen you. This morning you know all. Could you have done unconsciously--anything to turn the Hate of London upon you?... It is not in reason. I believe it is just and right for me to know what my father told you in the night--but you will not tell me----”

“This thing is mine to carry--to carry alone. Last night I laughed. To-day I find that it is not a thing to laugh at. The Hate of London,”--Routledge carved out the words slowly and clearly, in spite of the resistance of his whole humanity--“I have brought upon myself.”

“Not with dishonor!”

He was silent.

“Not with dishonor, Routledge-san!” she whispered triumphantly, peering into his eyes. “You could not convey a falsehood to me, not even to shield another--not even if you uttered the words of the lie. Your eyes would tell the truth to me!”

Rain splashed upon the windows of the carriage. The face so near him in the gloom was like the vision of a master-artist, too perfect for the poor human hand. The pressure of her shoulder; the fragrance of her presence; the voice of her which stirred within him the primal mystery of other lives--against such he fought for strength.... It was not passion in the red meaning of the word, but a love that made the railway gates at Charing Cross his portals to living death.

“Think what you will,” he commanded, after a moment. “God knows, I do not want you to think me devilish, but you must be silent to others about me.... You will make me suffer more than you know--if you stand against London for me--when I am gone. It was a magnificent life labor of your father’s which purchased for you--your place in London.... Noreen Cardinegh, I shall leave the carriage as we approach Charing Cross; and in the name of God, do nothing to further attract my infamy to your name!”

“We will say no more about that,” she answered quietly. “I shall avoid every man and woman in London who would dare to speak of infamy and Routledge-san in one breath, but if they seek me out!... But I have other things to say. You must go, and I must stay. Before you go, I shall tell you what you have done for Noreen Cardinegh, and what you mean to her--to me.... You are my bravest man, Routledge-san.... When I was but a little girl my father told me of you. I have heard all the men speak of you. Yours would have been the greatest of all welcomes at the Armory last night--save for this terrible mystery. I saw the way that little boy looked up at you this morning. I know what he thought--for the same thoughts were mine in Japan when I was but a little older. And your work has been deep and important to me--a personal, illuminating service. It has made me see the vanity of piled stones, the futility of possessions. In looking the way you pointed--I have found that real life is not food and metal----”

The tension was eased for a moment. Routledge laughed softly. “Why, I am but a dealer in war-stuff--the most godless of all matter, Noreen,” he said.

“A dealer in war-stuff--to make the world see the horrible farce of it! Oh, don’t think I have failed to see the import of your work, or failed to contrast it with the ponderous egotism of certain other English war-correspondents, who build their careers upon wars--with their dull studies of tactics, their heavy handling of strategies--so comically like a child panting with heavy stones. Do you think that I did not see, in spite of your brilliant description how the Japanese caught and held the van at Tientsin, the real picture of your whole story--that of a cruel, ruthless nation of insensate boys--running to jaw instead of mind?”

Routledge was startled by the expression of a thought which the _Review_ would not intentionally have published, less obviously than in a charade. There was nothing of vanity in the matter, but her words became dear to memory--rifts in that dreadful parting hour. Certainly there was deep gladness for the woman in the telling:

“They speak of you losing yourself in India for months and months. Do you think I have missed all that you have found, Routledge-san, when you were lost to men? I know something of what India means to you, her submission and her famines, and the hundreds of little Warren Hastings’ trooping over her, from Lahore to Pondicherry, brooding of pounds and power! Why, to me you have placed it clear as Carlyle with his reverberating thunders of fifty years ago. Here is England, sitting dull-eyed among her flesh-pots, and yonder is India--drained. You did not say it in direct words, Routledge-san, but you made me see the provinces of India scattered about like the shells of insects in a spider’s web, and this London--the darkened lair of the watching eyes.... Oh, I have seen all that you mean, Routledge-san, but more--the bigger, finer things than national relations.... You have gone into the silent places to meditate, and to me you have brought back the images of the silence--big, chaste things, like our bravest man. There is good and there is hope in the world which holds such men and such things--and because of you I have kept my optimism. I seem to have a perfect torrent of talk, but I have been so much alone to think--and you are going away. I want you to know that you and the things you have brought to me are bigger--than London and the world.... When I speak with you--I seem to have known you always.... And then you are going away--with a burden in your heart, which no act of yours put there.... Why is it, Routledge-san, that one’s bravest man must suffer such deluges of evil?”

“Noreen, you are resistless,” he murmured. “It is life----”

She pressed her face to the pane, tried thoughtlessly to brush away the blurring rain on the outside. With a quick, savage return of pain, she realized how near they were to Charing Cross.

“I haven’t told you--all that I mean yet, Routledge-san!” she whispered feverishly. “You met some adversary last night and conquered. You are weak and hurt--but you have won.... I cannot quite understand, but the sentence ringing in my brain is this: ‘The young grain is springing on the field of Waterloo.’... I met my adversary in the night--and I have won, too. When I think of you--it rushes over me like a tidal wave--to fight London and the world for you; but I have my work here. It must be done cleanly and without a cry. My father needs me. The best is gone from him already--and I must treasure the rest; but it will not be always.... And when my work is finished in Cheer Street, Routledge-san, I shall cross the world to find you!”

He felt it hard to breathe in the desolation. A desire full-formed and upstanding, in spite of the mockery of it, vanquished him for a moment. It was to keep on with her--riding, journeying, sailing--with her, through the gates of Charing Cross, to Southampton, New York, San Francisco, Yokohama, Nagasaki, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta--up the Ganges to its source in the Hills, and there among the mystic people of his heart, to dwell with her, adoring in the stillness of starlight, in the morning glow.

“I shall be nameless, and a wanderer----”

“And my bravest man!... This is not unwomanly, Routledge-san. This is farewell. The girl is torn from me--and the woman speaks her heart.... No one but you could understand. Always I have been strange.... I cannot leave it unsaid. I shall come to find you when I am free! It is not--not that I shall ask you to marry me. It is not that--but to be with you! I think--I think that you are so noble that my being a woman would not complicate.... Routledge-san! It is Charing Cross!”

Swiftly she drew tiny scissors from a pocket-case, snipped from her temple a lock of hair, tied it with a strand of its own, and thrust it into his hand.

It was light, living, warm like a bird in his palm. Her last words intoned through his dreams for many days:

“Remember, I am Noreen Cardinegh--who believes in you always--before all men--for all time. And I, too, must be brave and enduring until my work is done--and I may cross the world to find you!”

... He was standing at the curb before the great station. The carriage had turned away. There came to him out of the throng--a cry, not to his ears, but straight to his breast, a cry wild with desolation, which his heart answered....

He purchased his ticket, and rechecked his baggage, and then passed through the gates to the gray, smoky yards. From the deck of his steamer at Southampton that night he caught a last glimpse of the White Mustache, a satisfied smile on the keen, hard face. In a cold, distant fashion, Routledge marvelled that he was allowed to leave England alive.

NINTH CHAPTER

MR. JASPER IS INFORMED THAT MOTHER INDIA CAUSED NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT, AND THAT FAMINES ARE NOT WITHOUT VIRTUE

“J. J. Jasper, Syracuse, New York,” was being inscribed in the hotel registers along the travelled-lines around the world. Mr. Jasper was making no haste. “I have been rushed all my life until now,” he explained. He was a sincere, hard-thinking, little man of fifty, who had manufactured road-carts for thirty years, and had succeeded remarkably well in emancipating himself from business--a high-ranged achievement for only the few Americans.

Mr. Jasper was interested in India long before he touched Bombay, going east. This happened because his sister was a member of a theosophical class back in Syracuse. He had heard of “dreamy India” for many years, of Madras and the Ganges, of _yogis_ and astral bodies, of esoteric sections and H.P.B., of Sinnett, Olcott, Besant, masters, famines, of _karma_, _devachan_, _pralaya_, of metempsychosis and the Great White Lodge of the Himalayas.... “Go to Madras, James,” his sister had told him. “By all means, go to Madras. Our headquarters and our libraries of occult literature are there. It may be that our president and founder, Mr. Olcott, will meet you personally, or Annie Besant, the most noted woman in the world. Don’t call it ‘Bes_ant_’, like the author, but as if it were spelled ‘_Bes_sant.’ There are reasons, James, _esoteric reasons_.”

And so Mr. Jasper went to Madras. He took the hand of white-bearded Olcott,[A] a rounded man, who had not lost interest in the New York bar or press simply because he was president and founder of a great body of generally refined men and women who have the temerity to believe that buying cheap and selling dear is not the supreme glory of man. Also Mr. Jasper pronounced it “_Bes_sant,” for esoteric reasons, but he did not meet the most noted woman in the world, since she had taken her annual flight to London.

In the midst of all his seeing and smelling and brooding among the coast cities of India, Mr. Jasper was impressed with the dire poverty of certain districts. The heart of the man was wrung, and his brain filled with the Everlasting Why. At the house of a missionary in Nizagari, he ascertained certain facts. The Hindus of the town were hungry. They came to the missionary, men and wives and babes, and begged most pitifully for food.

“If we could only eat food once in two days, we would ask no more!” they cried.

“God, this is famine--the famine of the Bible!” exclaimed the American.

“Ah, no,” replied the missionary. “You must allow me to correct you. There is no _recognized_ famine in Nizagari.”

“If this is not famine--what does the word mean?”

“Go to the central provinces,” the missionary said wearily. “Famine is declared there.”

Mr. Jasper thought long that night. He recalled being left once, when he was a much younger man, in New York city over night without money. The metropolis was a city of strangers to him then, but, as now, a city of pure and plenteous water, free lunches, and benches to sit upon. Moreover, it was a summer night; and yet before mail-time in the morning, Mr. Jasper felt that his cosmos had dropped into chaos.... “I will arise and go to the Central Provinces,” he declared. After many weary days, he alighted from his train in the hot, fetid city of Nagpur.

“Famine,” they told him--he thought he saw famine in the eyes of the English--“yes, there is famine northward, but the government has taken it in hand. You see, when a famine is officially declared it doesn’t last long....”

Mr. Jasper hurried northward, lest it be over before he reached there. He wanted to see the conditions which would cause the Anglo-Indians officially to recognize famine. Finally, it was borne upon him that he must leave the railway to discover the reality, and he made his way eastward, for a long day’s journey, by bullock-cart and sedan-chair, across a burning, forsaken land to the town of Rydamphur--too little and too far for the English yet to have heard its cry. Least of villages, Rydamphur, a still, sterile, Christless place, sprawled upon a saffron desert. He paid his coolies at the edge of the village, and they pointed out the Rest House among the huts.

The place was dead as a dream creation. There was something febrile, unnatural in the late afternoon sunlight. The houses looked withered and ready to fall in that dead-gold light. He passed a darkened doorway and was stabbed by the spur of horrid understanding--a blast of unutterable fetor.... He ran for a step or two, horrified as if he had trodden upon the dead in the dark. His brain was filled with muttering: “This is famine! This is famine!”... Mr. Jasper turned shortly, and saw emerging from the darkened hut--a white man in native dress. It was a face incapable of tan, and fixed with a sorrow too deep for tears--a wild, tragic sorrow, vivid in the fever-wide eyes....

It was all nightmarish and inchoate. Thus he entered the oven of bricks called the Rest House, and bathed, changed, and gasped, while the snoring punkahs whipped him with hot, sterilizing breaths.... Dinner that evening at eight. Mr. Jasper sat down to a table with a gaunt, embrowned stranger in white linen--a wasted giant, with a head and figure of singular command; eyes that were weary and restless, but very wise and very kind. So sun-darkened was the face that Mr. Jasper thought at first his companion must be a native of high caste; especially since he ate no meat and sparingly of the rest. The dinner was meagre, but a feast compared to what was expected in the nucleus of a famine district.

“I didn’t suppose such a variety of food could be procured here,” Mr. Jasper observed.

“There has been plenty of food to be had for money, until the last day or two,” the stranger replied.

“And the natives have no money?”

Mr. Jasper realized that the question was inane, but his eagerness was great to draw the man before him into conversation. There was a distinguished look in the man’s face which promised much. He proved by no means disinclined to talk; indeed, seemed urged by a strange zeal for conversation that night, as one who has been in prison, or somewhere long and far from his kind.

“I came here, not out of vulgar curiosity, but striving to understand,” Mr. Jasper said.

“And how do you like our great brown Mother India?”

“She does not feed her children.”

“That is true. Mother India must come back to the table of the world and learn how things are served by the younger peoples--the sharper-eyed, quicker-handed peoples. You have heard the story, no doubt, that India had once great and profitable industries. Her commercial systems were founded upon mutual service, not upon competition. Then the East India company and England came. ‘Mother India, you are quite absurd,’ said England, and she took away all the mutual benefit industries, and reorganized them again in the true English way. ‘We shall show you how, Mother India,’ she said. India must have been inept, because England never gave them back.”

Both men were smiling. “Then you think India famines are the result of British rule?” the man from Syracuse observed.

“If I told you that, it would be right for me to explain why I think so. That would take some time, and the night is very hot.”

“I came to Rydamphur to learn the truth. Somehow, I believe I shall succeed--if you will tell me what you can, sir.” The stranger’s eyes brightened.

“Discussing the matter seriously, it is well to begin with Macaulay’s sentence. ‘The heaviest of all yokes is the yoke of a stranger.’”

“You are not an Englishman?” Mr. Jasper asked.

“No, but does that signify? Many English have spoken the truth. Edmund Burke said, ‘The Tartar invasion was mischievous, but it is our protection which destroys India.’ The English historian, Montgomery Martin, wrote that so constant a drain as England’s upon India would impoverish England herself if she were subjected to it. And here reflect that the wage of the laborer, when he gets work, averages but twopence a day. J. I. Sunderland observes, ‘The British have _given_ India railways, jute-mills, tea plantations, and many things else.... The profits go to the British.’ Mr. Sunderland, no doubt, remarks elsewhere about the opium industry. Herbert Spencer declares that it was an arrogant assumption upon the part of the British to accept as a fact that India exists for England. He also characterizes England’s relations to India as a ‘cunning despotism which uses native soldiers to maintain and extend native subjection.’”

“But we in America,” said Mr. Jasper--“I refer to those who have not looked deeply into the question--even our president, Mr. Roosevelt--have regarded English rule in India as a vast and beneficent system.”

“Ah, yes,” responded the stranger, with a queer smile; “as you say, those who have not looked deeply into the question, regard it so. There was another American president, Mr. Lincoln, who declared that no man is good enough to govern another man.... But there are errors of judgment all around the world, and errors of ignorance which make for cruelty. English agents will come here to poor little Rydamphur presently with rice and millet, and when the rains start, the periodic famine officially will be declared over for another year, and the people of this district will arise to the normal condition of forty millions of India--that of slow starvation.”

“But why don’t the Hindus emigrate?”

“Mother India cannot afford to give her children passage money,” the stranger declared quickly. “She is sending a few, the pith and promise of her young men, to America and elsewhere to learn from the younger peoples how to take care of herself in commercial matters, in the hope of reviving her industries in centuries to come. But the ordinary low-castes, _the fuel of the famines_, would have to starve a little extra in good times to save from their earnings the price to cross one of our North River ferries. They would die long before they hoarded the fare from Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island.”

Mr. Jasper’s eyes kindled at the references. “But why do the Hindus not fight?” he asked.

“India has no arms.”

“But even our little South and Central American States get arms and fight right merrily with them.”

“India is poorer than the little South and Central American States--so poor that it requires a white man years to conceive the meaning of her poverty.” The speaker leaned forward and added in a slow, bitter way: “Forty millions in India are hungry to-night: forty millions are never otherwise than hungry--they pass from the womb to the burning-ghats, never having known a moment of repletion: yet England drains India of one hundred million dollars a year. Listen; in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century ten millions in India died of famine. In the same period England vampirized this land of the hungry of twenty-five hundred millions of dollars. This is one of the tragic facts of the world.

“Here’s another: in the nineteenth century England compelled India to maintain five times as many troops as were needed for her own defense or her own _subjection_--in other words, forced India to furnish troops for British conquests outside of India!... Would you mind, sir, if I uttered a sentence that has never been uttered before?”

Mr. Jasper laughed a little nervously.

“It was India that whipped Napoleon.”

“There’s some shock to that statement. Tell me how.”

“In the fifty-seven years between the battles of Plassey and Waterloo, England looted a billion in pounds sterling--five thousand million dollars--from the conquered Indian people. This was the price India paid for bondage, for ruined industries and periodic famines. This was the period of England’s military expansion. The army that crushed Napoleon was fed and clothed and armed by Indian tributes.”

Neither spoke for a moment, and the stranger added with an impressiveness that Mr. Jasper never forgot: “It is rather stirring to remember that this old India was highly civilized, in a rich meaning of the expression, ripe in arts, letters, and incomparable philosophies, when the ancestors of the English were painted savages. India was the leader of Asiatic civilization, and perhaps the richest country in the world, when England broke in upon her. What is old India now? Hearken to the souls passing in little Rydamphur to-night!”

“But what, in God’s name, can be done?” Mr. Jasper demanded.

“When England begins to treat India as she would be forced to treat a colony of white men, aggressive as Americans, for instance, India will begin to discover her gray of morning.”

“But England won’t do that until India becomes a militant people.”

“No, I’m afraid not. England still has much of her imperialistic arrogance.... A little while ago, one of the ablest of the native editors, an old man, was banished from the country for six years because he published an article in his paper pointing out his country’s misfortunes. This aged editor was a Murahti, and during his trial called for a Murahti jury. On the contrary, the jury was made of English and Parsees. The prisoner did not know a word of the court’s proceedings until an interpreter informed him of his banishment. Another young Hindu nobleman was recently banished for life because he took part in public speeches. The English judge who sentenced this young man declared that there was no reason for one Hindu addressing a gathering of Hindus, since the latter had no votes. I call that a rather interesting political homily.”

“It is chief among outrages,” declared Mr. Jasper.

The other regarded him intently a moment, as if deliberating whether it were wise to go a bit farther. He studied the deep and honest interest in the perspiring face, and caught up the question afresh:

“India, the best of India, has lost from her blood that which makes for war and commercial conquests. She is the longest suffering of all the nations. She asks only for peace. Those great playthings of the more material powers--navies, soldiery, colonies, armament--she cannot appreciate, cannot understand. India is not cowardly. You would not call an old man a coward because he rebukes with a smile a young brute who has struck him. Old mystic India prefers to starve rather than to outrage her philosophy with war. She has even adjusted her philosophy to the spectacle of her children starving, rather than to descend to the outgrown ugliness of physical warfare. It has been work of mine to study the nations somewhat, and I have come to think of them as human beings at different ages.... Look at young Japan--the sixteen-year-old among the powers! A brown-skinned, black-eyed boy, cruel, unlit from within, formidable, and itching to use again the strength he has once felt. To the boy-brain, supremacy at war is the highest victory the world can give. Japan has the health of a boy, heals like an earth-worm, and blazes with pride in the possession of his first weapons. Like the boy again, he is blind to the intrinsic rights of women. Shamelessly, he casts his women out over the seven seas to fill the brothels of every port--breeds human cattle to feed the world’s lusts, and knows no prick of pride--but watch him run hot-breathed to the rifle-pits if so much as a bit of humor from an outside nation stirs the restless chip upon his shoulder! Brute boy, Japan, the trophies of conquests are as yet but incidents to him. The soldier is in highest manifestation; the expansionist not yet weaned. He fights for the great glory of the fight--mad with the direct and awful lust of standing in the midst of the fallen....

“America?... Yes, I am an American. America is thirty-five, as I see her, and her passion is for the symbol of conquest, Dollars. America is self-tranced by looking into money, as those who gaze at crystal. The dollar-toxin riots in her veins. All the corrosion of the cursed Hebraic propensity for the concrete, appears to be the heritage of America. She is amassing as men never amassed before. She is lean from garnering, so terrifically beset with multiples and divisors that she has not even learned the material usages of money--how to spend gracefully. One night an American is a profligate prince; the next day a scheming, ravening, fish-blooded money-changer to pay for it. So busy is America collecting the symbols of possession, that she has little time to turn her thoughts to war, though she has by no means yet lost her physical condition. Having whipped England once, and purged herself with an internecine struggle, America now believes that she has only to drop her ticker, her groceries, and her paper continents, snatch up the rifle and cartridge-belt--to whip the world. Just a case of necessity, you know, and Grants and Lees and Lincolns will arise; labor turn into militia, and the land a sounding-board of trampling invincibles. But war is not the real expression of America in this young century. Financial precedence over one’s neighbor, vulgar outward flaunts of opulence, lights, noise, glitter, show--these are the forms of expression in vogue--concrete evidences of a more or less concrete accumulation. The excesses of America are momentary in contrast to the steady glut-glut of big-belted Europe. Of her glory I do not speak, of her humor, her inventions. It is this low present propensity--that is hard to bear. So rich still are America’s national resources that she has found no need of an India yet. May she put on wisdom and sweetness while the evil days come not--God bless her!...

“Look at England--fat and fifty, overfed, short of breath, thickening in girth, deepening in brain. England building her ships to fatten in peace; talking much of war to keep the peace, but far beyond the zest and stir of trumpets. England, entered upon her inevitable period of physical decadence, boasting of conquests, like a middle-aged man with rheum in his eye, the clog of senility under his waist-coat, stiffness in his joints, and the red lights of apoplexy bright upon his throat--who throws out his chest among his sons and pants that he is ‘better than ever, e’gad!’ England, sensuous in the home, crowding her houses like a squirrel’s nest in the frosts; an animated stomach, already cultivating and condimenting her fitful but necessary appetites; wise and crafty in the world, but purblind to her own perversions and lying in the rot of them.... England, who will not put away boyish things and look to God!... She is draining India as Rome drained Gaul, as Spain drained Mexico, and accelerating the bestiality which spells _ruin_--with the spoils.... What a sweet and perfect retaliation if Gaul could only have seen the monstrous offspring of the Cæsars; if the Aztecs had only endured to see what befell Spain after the _Noche Triste_; if India--but did not India point out in her philosophy the wages of national, vampirism--before Cortez and before the Cæsars?

“Then, if I am not wearying you, we might look at Russia, sundering in the pangs of wretched age. Mad, lesioned, its body a parliament of pains, its brain vaporing of past glories in its present ghastliness of disintegration.

“And India, I see a difference here. All men as all nations must suffer. Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.... I think of India as an old widow who has given away her possessions to a litter of Gonerils and Absaloms--put away all the vanities of conquest and material possessions--a poor old widow with gaunt breasts and palsied hands, who asks only a seat in the chimney-corner, and crumbs from the table of the world!... She has still kept a smile of kindliness for the world, as she sits in the gloom, her soul lifting to the stars....

“After all, famine blinds us, because we are here in the midst of it. It is hard to restrain one’s rebellion in the midst of Rydamphur’s dead, when one thinks that the Englishman spends for intoxicating drinks annually two-and-one-half-times what the Hindu individual spends for food, drink, fuel, clothing, medicine, recreation, education, and religion. It horrifies us little to think that at home they are spending on roaring Broadway, this very night, in dines and wines and steins, and kindred vanities and viciousness, enough to keep a million native mothers in milk for their babes a fortnight. If we could sit away up in the Hills so that all the world were in its proper relation and perspective, we might perceive something sanitive and less sodden in starvation, something less pestilential than the death of drink and gluttony. You know the soul burns bright at the end of much fasting.”

The tall stranger had spoken mildly in the main, as if discussing matters of food before him. Only occasionally he leaned forward, his eyes lit with prophecy or rebellion. Mr. Jasper felt the animation of the other’s presence most remarkably. He had never met such a man, and said so with boyish impulsiveness.

The other regarded him with genuine gratitude. “I was afraid that I had spoken too freely. One is inclined to be fluent in the thing he knows well. I do not mean to say that I know India, but only that I have studied India long. She has many facets, and at best one’s views are but one’s own.”

Mr. Jasper offered his card.

“I thank you,” said the stranger. “I am not carrying cards just now. My name matters little to any one, but I wish you a very good night.”

The Syracuse manufacturer went to his room and sat in the dark under the punkahs, staring out the window and studying what he had heard. The saffron desert was ghostly gray under the brilliant low-hanging stars, and all objects were black and blotchy upon it. It made him think of paintings of Egyptian nights--paintings hung he could not remember where. He was troubled because the stranger withheld his name. Here was a man with whom he would have rejoiced to travel, to know better and better. The thought which recurred strongest out of all that he had heard was: “_All men, as all nations, must suffer._ Europe and America are learning to suffer through their excesses; India through her privations, a cleaner, holier way.”

The drone of the punkah-leathers ruffled his very good nerves at last, and Mr. Jasper went out to walk. In a little hut at the far end of the street, to which he was attracted by candle-light and the voices of white men, he perceived three figures through the open doorway. One was an ancient Hindu, sitting with bowed head upon the matting. The second was a white man in native dress, whom he had seen emerging from the hut of horrors in the afternoon--the face incapable of tan and vivid with tragic sorrow. The third was the sun-darkened young giant who had left him earlier in the evening, who had spoken of India and of her famines, and discussed the Powers as familiarly as one might discuss his partners or rivals in business. Quite inadvertently, Mr. Jasper heard the name which had been withheld from him by its owner--the name of Routledge.... The next day he mentioned this name to the Englishman of the Famine Relief, who had brought provisions to little Rydamphur. He discovered that it was a name to uncover devils.

TENTH CHAPTER

A SINGULAR POWER IS MANIFEST IN THE LITTLE HUT AT RYDAMPHUR, AND ROUTLEDGE PERCEIVES HIS WORK IN ANOTHER WAR

Leaving the Rest House, Routledge walked in the mingled gray and shadow to the hut of the candle-light, where Mr. Jasper afterward saw him. He entered softly. The aged Hindu sat cross-legged upon a mat of rice straw, his eyelids closed as if by effort, his lips and entire chest moving with the Name. This was Sekar, the master who had come down from the goodly mountains for his _chela_--the bravest man. Rawder was lying full-length upon the floor, his head raised over an open book, upon which the light shone. He held up his hand to Routledge, and a glad smile formed on the deep-lined, pallid face.

“Sit down in the cool of the doorway, and let us talk, my good friend. What has the day brought you?”

Routledge obeyed, amused at “the cool of the doorway.” The night breeze was but a withering breath from the hot sand.

“The day has brought sundry brown babes, and I have dutifully squeezed a milky rag into their open mouths. Also, I bought the last rice which the Chunder person who keeps the Rest House will sell at any price, and passed it out to the edges of the hunger. The morning will bring us more dead. What a gruesome monotony it is--dying, dying, dying--and they make so little noise about it. Also, I was so oppressed with famine that I found a good, unobtrusive American and crowded him with facts for an hour--a countryman of ours, Rawder.”

“A countryman of ours,” Rawder repeated softly. “It is long since I have heard the sound of a thought like that. I am not to see my country again, good brother.”

“Then, has Sekar told you what you are to do?”

“Yes. We travel to-night northward. The English will be here to-morrow with grain, so that our work is done in Rydamphur. You will stay here until to-morrow, as you said, and then return westward to the railroad, when the English come.”

“Are you permitted to tell me all that he said?” Routledge asked.