Chapter V: Part 5

“Yes. To-night at dusk, Sekar stirred from his meditations and we spoke together long. I told him that you meant my whole race to me; that you were dearer to me than any human being I had ever known. I asked if he would permit you to travel with us a little longer. He shook his head. There is much for you still to do in the world. He said that you would begin to find your work as soon as you reached travelled-lines. I told him that your life was in danger where the English were many; that your life had been attempted in Madras, and that it was a heavy sorrow for me to part with you so soon. I asked him if your work in the world were absolute--if it would not be good for your soul to travel slowly to the Hills, doing what we found to do on the way. Sekar shook his head.... Ah, Routledge, my brother, there is to be another war for you. There will come a day in which you will know a great need for human aid, and it will not be given me to come to you--but another--a woman!”

Rawder’s voice trembled. Routledge never forgot the moment. The restless, writhing flame of the candle, straining as if for more vital air; little Rydamphur, out of the ken of the world, and death moving from hut to hut; the still, dreadful Indian night; the ancient mystic, tranced in meditation, so emaciated with years and asceticism that each added breath seemed a dispensation; the white face of Rawder, which had long since been graven with beautiful meanings for his friend; the eyes of Rawder, which had never been defiled by hate or rage or lust, so radiant with sorrow now; and the revelations on Rawder’s lips, which half the human family is still so young as to have called madness.

“He is right,” said Routledge. “It is the law. You have naught to do with human attachments on the way to the Hills. And I am to follow the fortunes of another war?”

“Such a war as never has been----”

“In Asia?”

“Yes. In the north--beyond the mountains. He did not say more, but you are soon to know. God pity you, Routledge! How gladly would I take the travail from you! You are to fall--not among the piled dead, not in the thundering centres of battle, but apart.... You are to live. He promised me that you would not die, and that another, a woman, would come to help you. I know you are to live, because it is written that once more in this life I am to take your hand.”

“Just once more?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you where?”

Rawder bowed his head. His fingers trembled upon his knee.

“In the Leper Valley,” he said.

“Must you still go to the Leper Valley?”

“It is there I am to meet that which you once called ‘The Dweller of the Threshold,’” Rawder said.

In the silence of a moment the men regarded each other. From the ancient Hindu came the majestic Name, intoned as from a sea-beaten cavern--deep, distant, portentous. The _chela_ bowed in spirit, closing his eyes. Routledge was lost to the world for an instant--hung breathless in space, as if the world were flinging back from him like a receding wave.

“I was hoping that Sekar would not always lead you through the slums and hells of the world, Rawder,” Routledge said at last. “You caught full in the face all the perfected venoms of a New England country town, even to the persecutions of your church. You had to learn Boston under the flare of the torch. The grisly humor of American troops was your portion in the cavalry, and godless Minday your first mission. Hong Kong gave you her loathsome water-front to sweep, and you were all but murdered there, as in Minday. India has led you into the midst of her plagues and famines. You have toiled in the forefront of her misery. No brow has been too degraded by disease for your hand to cool; no death has been so triumphant that you would not bend to cover it. I thought at the last you might taste just a morsel, perhaps, of the beauty and sweetness of things, before you were lost to us beyond the Hills.... Instead, you go to the Leper Valley.”

Rawder regarded him with a grateful smile, in which there was wonderment that his friend should have remembered all this, but he spoke with gentle remonstrance, “My little services have been for the least of men because they needed them most. It did not happen that way; it was intended so. From the beginning, the only men who would listen to me were those humbled by great pain, or lost in great darkness. I do not understand even now why I should have earned the boon of a Master to abide with me. Yet he has come--and I am the happiest of men. The Leper Valley--that is but a halt on heaven’s highway.... I am the happiest of men, Routledge, my brother, yet the mightiest pain of my life has fallen upon me----”

Rawder went to the door and stood silent for several moments; then turned back to the light, his face calmer.

“I have loved you strongly, Routledge. You have been to me--the representative man. I have never known the touch of a woman’s hand, nor the eye of a woman--but for you I have felt all the great love of a man for a man. To-night, before you came, Sekar told me that only once again in this life I am to see you. It is to be after my trial in the Leper Valley. After that, I am to put away all love for you in the flesh, since it binds me to the Wheel.... This is harder for me than many Mindays, harder than service through interminable famines, harder than blows and revilings from multitudes of men, harder than any trial in the Leper Valley. To think that you must descend again into battle--you who know so well the awful sin of war--that I should have a fore-knowledge of you being maimed in the body, and to be unable to go to you--ah, nothing that I must face in the Leper Valley can haunt and torture the soul of your friend like this.”

The half had never been told before. Routledge bowed before the great devotion of this simplest and holiest man the world had shown him. In a swift gesture Rawder’s hand had passed between the eyes of the correspondent and the candle-flame. Fragile, trembling, almost transparent, it was eloquent with a beauty Routledge had never noted before. Within himself great changes were enacting.

There was _power_ in that little Rydamphur hut, power from the hidden wells of creation. It was made clear to him what force had impelled Sekar to find his _chela_. There was karma still for the ancient Hindu to work out, since he dragged his weary, grave-hungering flesh down from the peace and purity of his mountains to the burning plains of men--to take back this whitest soul of the Occident.

“Rawder,” Routledge said slowly, reverently, “It has long been a big part of my understanding--what you mean to me. I once told a lady of you--of my bravest man--and this lady watches and listens for you across the world. That I go back into battle again is quite right and inevitable. I have not yet reached Mother Earth’s graduating class. The wound which you foretell is nothing. It is good that I am to see you once more--even in the Leper Valley--though it holds you longer than I thought from the rest you have earned. As for parting, you know better than I that the word has no meaning. You know better than I that the relations between master and disciple do not end with the body, nor the relations of friend and friend. There never has lived a pure great soul, who has not glimpsed what means the emancipation from the flesh, and discerned in his high moments such joys that the strength of his soul was sternly tried in the effort to live out his allotted days. If such glimpses were given to all men, the nations would suffer from a shock of suicide such as no war nor famine ever wrought.

“We will both go gladly to our work. I see my mission clearly to-night. It is to scoff at war before men; to show what a monstrous activity it is for _men_; to show how black is the magic of the ambitious few, who dare to make cannon-meat of God’s multitudes. I, the watcher of many services, who am supposed to bow before the battle-lines, and carve my career from their triumphs and defeats, shall laugh at their untimely and ridiculous manifestations. At the last, I shall paint war so red, so real, in all its ghastly, abortive reality, that the nations shall shudder--as at the towering crime on Calvary--shudder to the quick of their souls, and sin no more!”

The moment was exalted. Something vaster, nobler, than mere human consciousness expanded within Routledge.... He saw the pitiful pawns thronging to fill the legions of Cæsar, who stooped to learn the names of certain of his centurions. He saw that black plague, Napoleon, and the regiments herding for slaughter under his glaring, spike-pointed eye; great masses of God-loved men vying to die swiftly at a word from that iron-rimmed cavern of desolation, Napoleon’s mouth--the mouth which deigned to utter from time to time the names of chiefs he counted upon presently to murder. Cæsar and Napoleon, incarnates of devilish ambition, mastodons of licensed crime, towering epileptics both.... He hungered for the time when the world would learn to bottle such admirable concentrates of hell-poison before they shamed humanity by driving poor group-souled masses first mad and then into the ignoble death of war.

“It has been a high night to me, Rawder,” Routledge said. “I am proud to thank you for showing me my work. And I can see yours on and on--even to the Leper Valley.... Strange, Rawder, but there is a picture with it, in my mind--a picture that has always come to me in high, hard moments.... Nightfall--a land of hills and heat, and a dusty, winding highway. The Christ passes in the midst of a throng. He is weary, athirst, and hungering. The empty voices of the crowd bind His thoughts to misery. The pitiful ways of men have put a martyrdom of sadness in His heart. At length above the whispering of feet on the warm sand, above the Babel of the followers, comes to His ear alone a moan from the darkness. It thrills with agony. He leaves the highway. The throng understands. They pull at His garments and cry, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ Even the leper lying in the darkness warns Him, ‘Unclean!’ as is the law.... But the beautiful Christ bends with the touch of healing!...

“I shall come to find you in the Leper Valley, my bravest man. And you shall go on after that to the great peace that is ‘mortised and tenoned’ in the granite of the Hills!... But, Rawder, you shall look back out of the glorious amplitude beyond the Leper Valley to find at last that your friend is nearly ready. Perhaps you will come for him--even as Sekar came for you.”

With a quick intaking of breath, the material consciousness of the Hindu returned.

“It is the hour,” he said to his _chela_. “We travel in the night.”

Again the fleeting look of agony across the white face of Rawder, but Routledge gripped his shoulder, and spoke to Sekar:

“It is a little thing, but I have plenty of money, if you need it. Would you not travel--at least, out of the region of great heat--in the fire-carriages of the English? A fortnight’s journey each daylight?”

The Sannyasi answered: “The beloved of my disciple has earned many favors. It has been made clear to me that we must travel alone and on foot. I am very old, but there is still strength for the journey--or I should not have been sent.”

He stretched out his hand--it was like a charred branch--and Routledge bent his head for the blessing.

“You have chosen well, beloved of my _chela_. It is the shorter, steeper way you tread. This life you have dedicated to the service of men, and you are bound to the Wheel by the love of woman. Fulfil the duties all, and the way shall be quickened. Once more our paths shall meet--and there shall be four--in the Leper Valley!”

Rawder poured a cup of water upon the aged feet, dried them with a cloth, and drew the sandals firm.

“Night and morning I shall send you my blessing, Routledge, my brother,” he said, standing near the door. “Morning and evening, until we meet again in the Leper Valley, you shall know that there is a heart that thrills for the good of your life and your soul. Good-by.”

They passed out into the torrid night. Their white garments turned to gray; then dulled into shadows, northward on the dust-deep Indian road.

ELEVENTH CHAPTER

A HAND TOUCHES THE SLEEVE OF THE GREAT FRIEZE COAT IN THE WINTRY TWILIGHT ON THE BUND AT SHANGHAI

Routledge sat long in meditation after Rawder and his master had taken up their journey. Time passed unmeasured over his head until he was aroused by the guttering of a candle-wick. In quite an un-American fashion, he believed the prophetic utterances which the night had brought. The more a man knows, the more he will believe. The mark of a small man is ever his incapacity to accept that which he cannot hold in continual sight. Still, Routledge endured a reaction for the high moments of the recent hour. Sekar and Rawder and the power were gone from Rydamphur. He even felt abashed because of his outbursts to Rawder, so long had he been accustomed to the iron control of his emotions. It was not that he was sorry for what he had said, but torrential utterance leaves depletion. He did not feel the strength now to make men laugh at wars, nor to stay the tide of the world’s wars by painting the volcanic wrath of nations in all its futile and ferocious significance.

That he was to be hurt in the new war was in itself but a vague anxiety, dull of consideration except for its relation to the foretelling--that another was to come to help him!... He wondered if the wound would come from his enemies. Once before, a night in Madras, as he was entering a house of hiding a noose of leather dropped upon his shoulder. It was jerked tight with a sinister twang. Routledge had just escaped the garrote in the dark. He could not always escape; and yet he was not to die next time. Rawder said: ... “To fall wounded, apart from the battle-field, to lie helplessly regarding men and events from the fallen state, instead of face to face--this was but one of the tossing tragedies of cloud in his mind. Yet there was a radiant light in the midst of it all--only one woman in the world’s half-billion would come to him.”

Any suffering was cheap to prevent her coming--but he could not prevent! One cannot run from a vision or a prophecy. It is well to obey when one is ordered up into Nineveh. Even Sekar had cast him off, because he was a counter-attraction to the soul of Rawder. He could not forswear war--and so avoid the promised wound, which would enable her to find him--since he was not to meet the levelling stroke during a collision of troops, but somewhere apart. It was a chain of circumstances in which he was absolutely powerless--and she was coming to him!

First, it would mean that Jerry Cardinegh, the man he had preserved, was dead. If he were dead with his secret, Noreen would find him--Routledge--identify herself with the most loathed of outcasts, fleeing forever before the eyes and fingers of England. There was rebellion against this in every plane of the man’s consciousness. He could not suffer his love, nor hers, to be tested by such a tragedy. He would flee again from her.... But if old Jerry had remembered the truth at the last--if the fates had willed him to tell the monstrous truth--and the Hate of London were lifted from the name of Routledge, to become a heritage of Noreen Cardinegh--and then if she should come to him! He could not cover his eyes to the flash of radiance which this thought brought him.... He would have died to prevent such a thing from coming to pass. For more than a year, he had kept out of the ken of the world, to forestall any efforts on the part of the Cardineghs, to find him. He was worn to a shadow, hunted, harrowed, hated, lost to himself in disguises, ever apart from the gatherings of men and the decent offerings of life--all to prevent the very thing which, in thinking of now, lit every lamp of his being. Quite as readily would he have performed the treachery for which he suffered as return to the father of Noreen Cardinegh, saying: “I am tired, Jerry. Give me back my name.” But if, after all he had done to spare her from the truth, the fates ruled against him--_then_ he would not flee from her!

Hours passed. Every little while, through the piling cumulus of disorder, would flash the reality, and for the interval he ceased to breathe.... To think of looking up from some half-delirium and discovering her face! To feel the touch of her hand--this woman--attuned to respond to every vibration of his voice and brain and heart.... Sometimes he fell into a heresy of manhood and demanded of himself what significance had England, the world, compared with the rest of his days with Noreen Cardinegh, in the glory of their union which formed a trinity--man and woman and happiness....

He laughed bitterly at the starry distances. “It would be a fitting end for a man who is supposed to have betrayed the country he served--to allow a woman to share such fortunes as mine, and take up the trail of an outcast.”

Routledge rose to go to the Rest House, but reflected that it must be nearer dawn than midnight. He was curiously disinclined to seek his room at this hour. With his face to the doorway, he sank down upon the matting and rested his chin in his palms.... The touch of Rawder’s hand awoke him, and he stared in wonder at the _chela_, his own eyes stinging from the East. The figure of a woman was prone before him.

“Routledge, my brother, here is work for you. I found her far out on the road. She was crawling into Rydamphur, carrying the child. I could not leave her. She is close to death. Sekar waits for me, and so again, good-by.”

Rawder had turned with a quick hand-clasp, and hurried away in the dawn-light to his master. It was all over quickly and strangely--as some psychic visitation. Routledge was already weary of the pitiless day. The blazing temple of dawn had shone full upon his eyelids as he slept, and there was an ache deep in his brain from the light.... The woman raised her head from the ground waveringly, like a crushed serpent, and plucked at his garments. There was a still, white-lipped babe at her breast. Her voice was like dried sticks rubbing together. He held the cup of water to her lips.

“I am the widow of Madan Das, who is dead since the drouth,” she told him. “The white holy man carried me here, leaving the other on the road. This is my son--the son of Madan Das. There were two others, both girls, but they are dead since the drouth. Also the brother of my husband, who was a leper. My husband worked, but there has been no work since the drouth. First we sold the cow----”

“My good mother, don’t try to talk,” Routledge said, as he lifted her into the hut, but she could not understand. As soon as he had placed her upon the matting, she took up the tale, thinking that she must tell it all. Her face was like dusty paper; her lips dried and stretched apart. Her hair had fallen away in patches, and her throat was like an aged wrist.

“First we sold the cow,” she mumbled, trying to find him with her eyes, “then we sold the household things. After that we sold the doors and door-posts. Even after that the food was all gone, and my husband, whose name is Madan Das, gave his clothing to his brother, who is a leper, to sell in the village for food. A neighbor lent my husband a cotton cloth to put about his loins. The _chaukadari_ tax was due. Madan Das could not pay. We were starving, and one of the babes, a girl, was dead. The _tahsildar_” (a collector for the English) “came and took away from the second babe, who was in the doorway of our house, a little brass bowl for the tax. There was in the bowl some soup which my babe was eating--a little soup made of bark, flower-pods and wild berries.... Since then there has been no food. Madan Das is dead, and the two girls are dead, and the brother of Madan Das, who is a leper, died last night. The white holy man carried me here, leaving the other on the road. This is the son of Madan Das----”

Life was going out of her with the words, but she would not stop. Her heart was pounding like a frightened bird’s. The weight of them both was but that of a healthy child--an armful of dissolution.

“Listen, mother,” Routledge said. “Do not talk any more. I am going to the Rest House to get food for you and the son of Madan Das. Lie here and rest. I shall not be long.”

Even as he left her, she was repeating her story. He returned with a pitcher of hot tea, strong enough to color and make palatable the nourishment of half a can of condensed milk. He brought a servant with him, and a sheet to cover the woman. Routledge handed the child to the servant, and lifted the mother’s head to a cup. Afterward he cleansed her face and throat and arms with cool water, and bade her sleep.

“The little one is quite well, mother,” he told her softly. “All is well with you now. The English will be here to-day with much food, and you have only to rest. The child eats.”

“He is the son of Madan Das,” she mumbled, “and I am his mother.... Do not forget.”

She sank into a half-stupor. The servant had spooned a few drops into the babe’s mouth. Routledge took the child--a wee thing, light as a kitten, numbed from want, and too weak to cry. Its body had the feel of a glove, and the bones showed white under the dry brown skin, and protruded like the bones of a bat’s wing. The servant went to fetch a basin of water.

“Why must you, little seedling, learn the hunger-lesson so soon?” Routledge reflected whimsically. “You are lots too little to have done any wrong, and if your bit of a soul is stained with the sins of other lives, you are lots too little to know that you are being punished for them now.... I should have asked Sekar of what avail is the karmic imposition of hunger upon the body of a babe.”

He sponged and dried the little one, wrapped him in a cloth, and fed him again--just a few drops. The son of Madan Das choked and gurgled furthermore over a half-spoonful of water.

“Oh, you’re not nearly so far gone as your mother, my son. She was already starving before your inestimable fountains dried.... And so they took away your sister’s little brass bowl--and the soup made of bark and flower-pods and wild berries. The poor _tahsildar_ must have been very tired and hot that day.... And so your worthy uncle who was a leper sold the clothing of Madan Das, who borrowed a loin-cloth from a neighbor, and did not need that very long.... Curl up and sleep on a man’s arm, my wee Rajput.”

Between the two, Routledge passed the forenoon. At last, miles away across the dusty sun-shot plain eastward, a bullock-cart appeared, and long afterward behind it, faint as its shadow, another--and others. Almost imperceptibly, they moved forward on the twisting, burning road, like crippled insects; and the poles of the native-drivers raised from time to time like tortured antennæ. There was a murmur now within the huts of stricken Rydamphur. Routledge had sent his baggage west to the railroad and settled his account at the Rest House. He would leave with the coming of the famine relief. The child was better, but the woman could not rally. The nourishment lay dead within her. The bullock-carts merely moved in the retina of his eye. He was thinking deep, unbridled things in the stillness of high noon.

The great law of cause and effect had brought the answer to his whimsical question of a few hours before. Why did karma inflict starvation upon the child before the tablets had formed within him on which the lesson might be graven for his life’s direction? The son of Madan Das was but an instrument of punishment for the mother.... What wrong she must have done, according to Hindu doctrine, to him in one of the dim other lives--when she was forced to bring him into the world, the famine-world of India, forced to love him, to watch him waste with hunger, and to crawl with him in the night. Incomparable maternal tragedy. The sins of how many lives had she not expiated up yonder in the withered fields!

The woman’s arm flung itself out from her body, and lay in a checkered patch of sunlight. It made Routledge think of a dried and shrunken earth-worm which the morning heat had overtaken upon a wide pavement. Her eyelids were stretched apart now.

Sierras of tragedy are pictured in the eyes of the starving. Processes of decay are intricate and marvellous--like the impulses of growth and replenishing. There is no dissolution which so masterfully paints itself in the human eye as Hunger. The ball is lit with the expiration of the body, filled with a smoky glow of destroying tissue. The unutterable mysteries of consummation are windowed there. The body dies, member by member; all flesh save the binding fibres wastes away, and the hideous hectic story of it all is told in the widening, ever widening eyes--even to the glow of the burning-ghats--all is there.

And the mother’s eyes! She was already old in the hunger-lesson. The husband, Madan Das; the leper, his brother; the two little girls; the little brass bowl--all were gone, when this child ceased to feed upon the mother’s flesh. And still she crawled with the last of her body to the town--all for this little son of Madan Das, who slept the sleep of healing within reach of her arm.

Routledge gazed upon the great passion of motherhood. In truth, the little hut in Rydamphur had been to him a place of unfolding revelations. He had seen much of death in wars, but this war was so poignant, so intimate.... Why did the woman sin? Routledge’s tired brain forged its own answer on the vast Hindu plan of triple evolution. Countless changes had carried this creature, as he himself had been carried, up from a worm to a human. It is a long journey begun in darkness, and only through error, and the pains of error, does the soul-fragment learn to distinguish between the vile and the beautiful. In the possession of refining senses, and the travail of their conquering, the soul whitens and expands. Often the wild horses of the senses burst out of control of the charioteer of the soul; and for each rushing violence, the price must be paid in pangs of the body--until there are no longer lessons of the flesh to be learned, and the soul puts on its misery no more.... Routledge came up to blow, like a leviathan, from the deeps of reflection, and wondered at the feverish energy of his brain. “I shall be analyzing presently the properties which go into the crucible for the making of a prophet,” he declared.

The servant had brought a doctor, but it was mere formality. Routledge bent over the dying woman. Her heart filled the hut with its pounding. It ran swift and loud, like a ship’s screw, when the clutching Pacific rollers fall away. In that devouring heat, the chill settled.

“Do not forget.... He is the son of Madan Das, and I am his mother----”

“I shall not forget, good mother,” Routledge whispered. “A worthy man shall take care of him. This, first of all, shall I attend.”

“Madan Das was a worthy man----”

The rest was as the rattle of ripe seeds in a windblown pod.... Routledge turned his face from the final wrench. There was a foot-fall in the sand, and a shadow upon the threshold, but Routledge raised his hand for silence. The moment of all life in the flesh when silence is dearest is the _last_.... The child stirred and opened its eyes--roused, who can tell, by its own needs of a metaphysical sympathy? And what does it matter? The man covered in the sheet the poor body which the soul had spurned, and turned to feed the child again. The American was at the door.

“And have you been specializing in famine at first hand, Mr. Jasper?” Routledge inquired.

“Yes, and I see, sir, that you have been doing more.”

“The task came to me this morning. A little touch of motherhood makes the whole world kin, you know.... This baby seal is the son of Madan Das. He is sleepy, having ridden all night bareback--and the bones of his mount were sharp.”

“Allow me to say, rather from necessity than any notion of being pleasant,” Mr. Jasper observed slowly, “that I think you are a wonderful man.... I have found myself weak and cowardly and full of strange sickness. I am going back to the railway filled with a great dislike for myself. The things which I find to do here, and want to do, prove a physical impossibility. I want to leave a hundred pounds in Rydamphur. It is but a makeshift of a coward. It occurred to me to ask you how it would be best to leave the money, and where.”

“Don’t be disturbed, Mr. Jasper,” Routledge said, struck by the realness of the other’s gloom. “I know the feeling--know it well. A white man is not drilled in these matters. God, I have been ill, too! I am ill now. See the soaps and water-basins which I have served with my ministrations--and I am old in India. It is the weakness from hunger which makes the people a prey to all the atrocities of filth and disease. First famine, then plague.... A hundred pounds--that is good of you. I know a missionary who will thank God directly for it--all night on his knees--and he will not buy a can of butter for himself. I will lead you to him if you wish.”

They passed through the village. The English were coming with the bullock-carts, and the people, all those who could crawl out of their huts, were gathered in the blazing sunlight on the public threshing-floor. Mr. Jasper quickened his step and averted his face.... Routledge had been several days in Rydamphur, and a guest in most of the huts, but there were many upon the threshing-floor now (the old in agony, borne there by the young; loathsome human remnants moving upon the sand) that he had not seen before. It profited not to look deeply into that harrowing dream of hell, in the light of the most high sun, lest the spectacle remain in the brain, an indissoluble haunt.

“Yes, I know, Mr. Jasper,” Routledge muttered. “It is shocking as the bottom of the sea--with the waters drained off. It is the carnal mystery of a famine.”

* * * * *

There was but one thing left in Rydamphur for Routledge to do. It concerned the servant of the Rest House, whom he had found good, and the little son of Madan Das.

“This is to be your child,” he said to the man. “The mother is dead, and the others of the family lie dead in the country. I am leaving Rydamphur now, but by chance I shall come back. You shall attend the mother’s body--and take the child for your own. It is the wish of the very holy man who tarried here a few days. It was his _chela_ who carried the woman in from the country during the night. It is also my wish, and I leave you money. More money will be forthcoming in due time. First of all, I want you to buy a little brass bowl, which shall be the child’s own. Remember the name. He is the son of Madan Das. And now give me your name.”

It was done in order. An hour after, when all the village was attracted to the threshing-floor, and the bullock-carts were creaking in, and the sweating, harried Englishmen were pushing back the natives, lest they fall under the wheels, Mr. Jasper perceived the man who had so fascinated him set out, alone and without conveyance, along the sandy western road toward the railroad.

* * * * *

It was a night late in October when Routledge reached Calcutta, where he was forced to sink deeply into the native life to avoid recognition. With two months’ files of the _Pioneer_, he sat down to study the premonitive mutterings of the Russo-Japanese war. They were wide in aim, but deep with meaning for the man who had mastered the old game of war. The point which interested him most in regard to this inevitable fracture of the world’s peace was not brought out in the _Pioneer_. Just how much did the awful activity of one Tyrone patriot, Jerry Cardinegh, have to do with the ever bristling negotiations between Tokyo and St. Petersburg?... In the light of the present developments, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was one of the cleverest figments of diplomacy in the history of national craft. Japan was a fine tool, with a keen and tempered edge. It would take all the brute flesh that Russia could mass in Manchuria to blunt it. Decidedly, Russia would have none left to crumple the borders of British India. Meanwhile, England had nothing more serious to do than to collect her regular Indian tributes, attend her regular Indian famines, and to vent from time to time a world-wide whoop of encouragement for her little brown brothers, facing the Bear.

“That reminds me,” Routledge reflected with a start, “that all this is _my_ work. I took it from Jerry Cardinegh.”

He breathed hard, and perused again the long, weary story of negotiations, the preliminary conflict. It appeared that Russia recognized Japan’s peculiar interest in Korea, and called it reasonable for her to take charge of the affairs of the Korean court.... “By the way,” Routledge mused ironically, “the Anglo-Japanese alliance was hung on the fact that Korea was to be preserved an automatic unit. However, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was hung in haste.”... The Czar observed that he had a peculiar brotherly regard for Manchuria, and that Japan must bear in mind that her Korean business must remain for all time south of the Yalu. “Don’t cross that river,” said Nicholas.... Ominous courtesy, rejections, modifications, felicitations, and the thunder of riveting war-ships in each navy-yard of the respective Powers involved. Brute boy, Japan, at a white heat from Hakodate to Nagasaki; Russia sweetly ignoring the conflagration and sticking for Great Peter’s dream for a port in the Pacific.

And so it stood when Routledge closed his last _Pioneer_ in his Calcutta hiding-place, and embarked European steerage for Shanghai. Two days north of Hong Kong, the steamer ran into the first breath of winter, and Routledge drew out the great frieze coat to go ashore in the Paris of China. Far out on the Hankow road, he ensconced himself in a small German hostelry, and caught up with the negotiations through the successive editions of the _North China News_. Not a line anywhere regarding the life or death of Jerry Cardinegh.

Closer and closer, the Powers drew about to hear the final back-talk between Russia and Japan. The latter said that she would establish a neutral zone along the northern Korean frontier, if Russia would do likewise on the southern frontier of Manchuria. Some humorist in England observed that you cannot have a neutral zone without war; and the correspondents set out from England, via America, where they picked up the men from New York, Chicago, and Three Oaks--travelling west to the Far East. At this point, Routledge, with great secrecy, made possible through a solid friend in New York, secured credentials, under an assumed name, for free-lance work in the interests of the _World-News_. Thus passed the holidays. The first month of 1904 was remarkable for the unexampled tension created by Japan burning the cables for Russia’s last word.

Routledge thrilled in spite of himself. He felt that this was to be his last service and the biggest. What a farce were the negotiations, with Japan already a-tramp with soldiery and the great single-track railroad from St. Petersburg to Port Arthur groaning with troop-trains; with India locked tight in the strong white British hand for at least another decade; with England turned to watch her Asiatic agent spitted on the Czar’s rusty bayonets--what a farce, indeed, with Russia willing, and Japan determined, for war.

Late in January, and a snowy twilight. Routledge stood for a moment on the Bund in Shanghai. He was sailing that night for Chifu, and wondering as he stood in the falling dark, his face concealed in the high-collar, how fared Jerry Cardinegh in the crux of these great affairs. Was he dead--or dead in brain only? Of Noreen--thoughts of Noreen were always with him.

One of the launches of an Empress liner was leaving the Bund in a few minutes for the ship in the offing--her nose turned to Japan. Routledge was thinking that he would have to play the game alone now, if never before. He smiled at the thought of what the boys gathering at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo would do if he should turn up among them.... Suddenly he felt a man’s eyes fixed upon him from the right. He turned his head carelessly, and discovered a figure marvelously like Finacune’s stepping overside into the launch. It disappeared into the small cabin. Routledge turned his back to the launch with that degraded, shrunken sensation which concealment always incited.

“They would murder me,” he muttered absently. “I must swing it more than ever alone--from the edges and alone.”

A woman’s hand touched the sleeve of the great frieze coat, and Routledge jerked about in a startled way. Men and wars were obliterated like dry leaves in a flame.... The launch whistled a last time.

TWELFTH CHAPTER

JOHNNY BRODIE OF BOOKSTALLS IS INVITED TO CHEER STREET, AND BOLTS, PERCEIVING A CONSPIRACY FORMED AGAINST HIM

Jerry Cardinegh experienced a very swift and remarkable transition. All the red-blooded hatred with which he had executed his _coup_ in India was drained from the man sitting in London. His gigantic scheme accomplished, Cardinegh withered like a plant overturned in a furrow. Instead of facing the consequences with the same iron humor that he had faced the wars of his time--as he had planned for months, in the event of discovery--his great mad zeal had burned him out. He found himself old, run-down, pitiful, hungering for peace, when his young Messiah had come--praying for the imperial stimulus of English hatred in order to write a great book of the craft. In his weakness and in the powerful attraction of home and Noreen, Cardinegh had not analyzed the idea seized at random by Routledge. Later he was incapable. Always the young man had been strange in his ways and startling in his achievements. Jerry had sensed the crush of this thing which the other demanded for a stimulant. Vaguely, the old man pictured from time to time the “mystic of the wars” sunk and steeped somewhere in India, turning out stupendous narratives under the goad of secrecy and peril.

Even the swiftest physical changes are more or less imperceptible to the victim, whose body is gently numbed, and mind shadowed by a merciful cloud. The veteran felt his years, and talked much of their weight, but he alone was incapable of perceiving the extent of his ruin. And what desperate irony was there in the trick which Nature played upon him! His brain held fast to the exciting minutiæ of Plevna, and the elder services, but lost entirely his latest and crowning strategy to encompass British disaster. He had conceived and carried out a plan to force a Russo-Indian alliance against England--and had practically forgotten it. More than that, the fact that his work had been foiled by England’s counter-alliance with Japan seemed scarcely to touch his mind after his last talk with Routledge. Memory served him mightily from her treasures of old actions, but the record of his awful lone war and its dreams had been writ in water.

Cardinegh gradually grew more and more content as the silence from abroad endured and his own forces failed. Many Londoners came to pay him homage; and with a single glance, the visitors understood that it were wiser to talk of El Obeid and the Chinese Gordon rather than of the new century. So the old campaigner, busy with his callers, his pipes and Latakia mixtures, his whiskies, white and red, finally came to forget for weeks at a time that the honor of his days was not his own.

Only occasionally, between long periods of serenity, there would come a stirring tumult to his brain. At such times he was frightened and speechless. Nameless fears pulsated through him like the rise and fall of a tempest. Once when the old man thought he was alone, Noreen heard him mutter at the fireside: “He’s lost in India somewhere--working and brooding, the young devil,--but war will bring him out of his lair.”

He was as usual the next morning. Had Noreen not been altogether in the dark in regard to the specific charge against Routledge, she could have put this and other fragments together into a rough form of truth. The few who knew all, imparted nothing. To the rest, the name of Routledge was attached to a certain unspeakable atrocity, and was thus whispered wherever Englishmen roved and strived. The man’s mysterious figure had been in the London press for years. England makes much of her correspondents, and Routledge, the _Review_ man, had aroused comment from Auckland to Winnipeg--familiar comment, like the record of a general. A curse had fallen upon the name now, and it was none the less heinous because the reason, so far as the multitude was concerned, was a historical mystery. Articles like Finacune’s from the field in Bhurpal had given Englishmen everywhere an idea of the personality of this arch-enemy; and the fact that Routledge was still alive, and miraculously unpunished, was a covert challenge to the British around the world.... Noreen despaired of learning the truth. The merest mention of the subject harrowed and discountenanced her father, and netted no revelation whatsoever.

Hers were stern, hard-checked days, full of heart-hunger. It seemed to her sometimes as if her individuality must perish in the midst of this interminable system of agonies. That last hour in the carriage had left her thrilling, burning. She wished she had said even more to show her loyalty.... She thought of Routledge out on God’s great windy seas--always alone, always on deck in storms that drove others below; she thought of him moving in the hidden slums of India, native of the natives, eternally shadowed from his kind--alone, wasted, accursed.... Once--it was the same night that he had slipped from a noose in the house at Madras--she woke with a scream to find that it was only a dream--that he was being murdered. Yet she was terrified for days, as only one can be terrified whose brain is fine enough to respond to the immaterial currents, molding and weaving behind all scenes and things.

Often it came to her, “This is my battle. I must fight it cleanly and without a cry. It is hard for him and hard for me--as much as we can bear. Only Routledge-san and I can know how hard--and God, who measures our strength. But I shall see him again. I shall see him again. _I shall see him again._”

Beyond this, she could never go in coherent thinking. In calm moments, and without any warning, there would come to her just a glimpse _beyond_, but never by deliberately forcing her thoughts. What glimpses they were, winged, marvelous,--of a bewildering intensity past the handling of common faculties.... A great, strong-souled woman, fashioned with the beauty of angels, and inspired with a love of the kind that only the dreamers can know in spirit.... And she held fast to what was left of her father, loved him, nor allowed the vision of crossing the world to her lover to militate against the work of the hour.... As for Routledge degraded, Routledge-san doing a shameful thing--this was unthinkable, a masterpiece of evil, one of the world’s four-dimension errors, which held him outcast in a wilderness where her soul cried nightly to be.

Autumn of the following year, and still Jerry Cardinegh sat in the little rooms in Cheer Street, his daughter ministering.... Noreen made a pilgrimage to Bookstalls. It was a day reserved from summer, and she had waited until afternoon when her father napped. All things were made ready for his comfort when he awakened, and she had the hours. Her carriage turned into the rutty, cobble-paved road, narrow and eternally jammed. The upper front windows of the old house were closely curtained.... She had never been up there, though once she had asked to go.... Her father and others had told her of the wanderer’s trophy-room, which Routledge kept from year to year and occupied so seldom. How fared the master in this hour?...

The street boy who had been with Routledge that last morning was passing swiftly, carrying the wares of a pastry-cook upon a tray. He had the look of one who was trusted and prospering. She called and he ran forward, but halted in excitement.

“Why, you are the Boy!” she declared joyfully.

His answer was equally engaging: “Has the Man come back?”

“Won’t you come into the carriage with me--so we can talk about the Man?” she asked.

Talking about the Man was desirable but forbidden. Another party had wished to talk about the Man. It was but a moment after the Man had left him, in the carriage of this woman. A stranger had touched his arm, asked queer questions in a clumsy, laughing way, stood treat variously, and bored for information in the most startling and unexpected fashion, always laughing. Altogether that had been a forenoon which made him damp to remember. Night after night, in the little hall-bedroom, he had gone over every word which the stranger had extracted. He felt that the Man would have been proud of him, but there had been several narrow squeaks.... As for the Man, Johnny Brodie had built his future and his God-stuff about Him. It wasn’t altogether a matter of clothes and grub and a room of his own. There was something deeper and bigger than that.... And this woman--her chances were slim about getting anything out of him about the Man.

“I got these ’ere torts to carry?” he said. “Has the Man come back?”

“No, but we’ll talk about him--when you are through with your work.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about ’im.”

“Oh, but it’s enough that you know him--and are fond of him. How long will you be busy?”

“Till dark.”

“Oh, dear! But you will come to my house after that, won’t you, Boy? I’ll have a good supper for you--and some things to take away. You’ll be glad if you come.... Won’t you come, Boy?”

Five minutes later, Johnny stared at the receding carriage and at the money in his hand. He had promised to go to Cheer Street that evening when his work was done. How it came about, was one of those things which he must figure out in silence and darkness. Certainly he had not intended to go. Evidently she was one of the Man’s possessions, and what a way she had with her!... Everything about the Man was right. He was all that a man could and should be. More would be superfluous and distasteful.... It had looked as if the Man had wanted to be alone that morning, when this woman had borne him away in the carriage. Johnny had never quite forgiven her for that. Possibly the Man might have had more to say to him if she hadn’t come.... She wanted to go up into the Room, but the Man hadn’t allowed that....

“’E took me in, an’ not ’er!” he mused with sudden amazement.

The long-locked lodging--that Superlative Place!... Johnny had a pet dream. He was back on the stairs, and the Man came and carried him up into that place of kingliest attraction. Those were rooms like a man ought to have--shields, guns, knives, saddles, tufts of hair (certainly scalps), chain-shirts, and shirts with tattoo-marks all over; and there was one saddle, with mud still on the stirrups, sorrel hair on the cinch, and a horsy smell.... Johnny jerked himself out of his delectable memories.

“I’ll go,” he muttered; “but she needn’t think she’ll ’ear anything about ’im from me.”

* * * * *

Noreen returned to Cheer Street in the twilight, troubled by the thought that there was to be company in the evening. She had forgotten, and wanted the whole time with the boy.... He had passed the night in the lodgings with Routledge--the very hours which had made an outcast of her lover. What might the boy not have heard? At least he knew the Man--one soul in London who knew Routledge and did not seek to crush him.

Her father regarded her hungrily as she entered.

“You’ve been gone long, Noreen,” he said. “’Tis a queer thing that comes over a man with the years, deere. I was thinking this afternoon of going away for a year--the thought of it! It’s all gone from me. Old Jerry is off to the wars no more, unless they furnish portable pavilions for the women of the correspondents.”

She knew that his liveliness was unnatural, but so much of her work was mere service for the tragic effacement of a loved one, that she brightened responsively to his slightest mental activity. Dinner was nearly over when the door-bell rang. Noreen left her father at the table and admitted Johnny Brodie, leading him into the sitting-room.

He removed his cap carefully, uncovering a noble achievement of water, wrought against gritty odds, with a certain treasured pair of military brushes. The cap was carelessly stuck in his pocket. His shoes--but the blacking of Bookstalls and many other roads had the start of months and asserted itself before the drying fire above the recent veneer of the stranger brand. Johnny Brodie looked captured and uncomfortable, so that Noreen despaired to win him. Had he been older or younger, she could not have failed; but there he sat, a male creature all deformed by years and emotions, precocities and vacuities--a stained and handicapped little nobleman, all boy, and all to the good.

“We haven’t heard from the Man, either, Johnny,” she said. “We are terribly worried about him and awfully interested. I know he was very fond of you, and I hoped you could tell us something about him. Did you know him long?”

“Nope.” The boy wondered who else was included in the “we.”

“But that morning you seemed to have such a fine and complete understanding. Did you often spend a night with him?”

“Nope. We was fren’s, though. ’E’s the right sort. Gives me a bloomin’ Tommy’s harmy blanket to sleep in, and wen I goes to get into me boots--they’re filled wit bobs an’ tanners. I looks up, an’ ’e’s grinnin’--as if ’e didn’t know as to ’ow they got there.”

It was all replenishment to her veins. “And didn’t he go to sleep that night, Johnny?” she asked softly.

“’Ow should I know?” he demanded innocently.

“I thought maybe you’d know. He told me--that is, I know he had a visitor besides you that night.”