Routledge Rides Alone

TENTH EDITION

ROUTLEDGE STARTED AT HER VOICE AND THE TOUCH OF HER HAND

Page [196]

ROUTLEDGE
RIDES ALONE

By WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT

With Frontispiece in Colors
By MARTIN JUSTICE

A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York

Copyright, 1910
By J. B. Lippincott Company
Published March, 1910

TO THE LADY OF COURAGE
WHOM I MARRIED

Contents

Routledge Rides Alone

PROLOGUE
IN CHEER STREET, LONDON

Jerry Cardinegh, dean of the British word-painters of war, was just home from China, where he had caught the Allies in the act of relieving Peking. It had been a goodly and enticing service, both to watch and to portray, calling out much of glorious color and tension and peril, and not enough slaughter to chill the world’s appreciation. Cardinegh sat by the fire in his little house in Cheer Street, London, and was ministered to by his daughter, Noreen, a heavenly dispensation which the old campaigner believed he had earned. A dinner together, just the two, truly a feast after lean months crossing the mountains of separation. Then whiskey, glasses, soda, pipes, tobacco, papers of the afternoon—all served by the dearest of hands. The gray, hard veteran lived, indeed, the maiden filling his eyes.

Twenty he had left her, and she was twenty still, but the added fraction of an inch made her look very tall, and startled him. There was a mysterious bloom under the luminous pallor of her skin; fathoms more added to the depth of her eyes, and a suggestion of volume to her voice. Nature and heritage had retouched the girlish lips in color and curve, widened the tender Irish eyes, added glow and amplitude to the red-gold hair.... There had only been two women in the world for Jerry Cardinegh, and the other was a memory—the mother.

“And who do you suppose is coming to-night, deere?” he asked. There was a silver lining of the Tyrone tongue to all that Jerry said, but it was so subtle and elusive as wholly to defy English letters, save possibly that one word “deere” which he rolled fondly for Noreen, and here and there in the structure of a sentence.

“Some of your war-men to relieve Peking again to-night? Who, father?”

“Just one. The best and weirdest of them all. He’s on the way home to the States. You met him in Tokyo five years since—after the Japanese had whipped China, and the Triple Alliance had stepped in to gobble the trophies.”

The girl stirred the fire in the grate thoughtfully for an instant, then started up in a glad, impatient way. “Routledge-san?”

“The same. Now, that’s queer—after five years—I mean, the Japanese title of address—‘Routledge-san.’”

“That’s what I used to call him, and I always think of him so. I think of him a great deal. His work in the Review makes me. He is one of very few whom I could welcome gladly—this first home-night with you, father.” She spoke with the old fearless candor that Cardinegh loved.

“So you think of Routledge a great deal? And why, deere?”

“He sees deeply. His work is illuminating to me. Sometimes I think of him sitting back of his work and smiling because he knows so much that he dares not set down. I think Routledge-san loves Asia—as you, as we—love Ireland, father.”

“You could not think about a better man, Noreen,” said Cardinegh. “And so he knows a lot that he doesn’t write for the Review? Well, maybe so.... He talks quite as well as he writes—when the spell is on him. I don’t know a man who can clear a mind of all save what he’s tossing into it—like Routledge. And the words seem to twist and work their way deep like burrs—when he leans forward with an idea.”

Noreen smiled. “And why has he not been back to London in all these years?”

“You have said it—because he loves Asia.”

“But he has not been back to America?”

“Routledge is quite as much at home in London as in Philadelphia, his native city. He has worked for the American press as well as for the English. You see, he needed us because England has something doing more or less all the time in the field. In fact, since Japan took the Chinese Port Arthur in ’94, there has been plenty for one man to do in following American and British arms—Cuba, South Africa, the Philippine Archipelago, and now China again. But I have met him off and on around the world. They are good men of our tribe, Noreen, strong, brave, and wise men, but Routledge, of them all, has warped his craft deepest into my slip, so to speak. I love the lad.”

She was moving about among the shadows of the sitting-room—a touch of her hand here and there, unconscious preparation, probably, for the guest, and a queer tension in her eyes. It was nine, and a gusty winter night, when Cardinegh admitted the world-wanderer and took his great frieze coat. Noreen watched from the far end of the hall. Routledge spoke low and laughingly, and caught the elder man by the hand and shoulder. A sense of exhilaration in full sweep dilated the veins of the girl, and with it, too, was a certain chill of dread, some nameless portent—a blend of joy, and its price in pain, all in that first glimpse. It was like the prelude of a song, or the prologue of a story, which contains an element of each emotion in the appeal of the whole....

“And this is Noreen—the little Noreen whom I once dared to call my Japanese sweetheart. Why, it’s water out of the rock to see you again, Miss Noreen!... Jerry, the years have been consummate artists here in Cheer Street while we’ve been away growing old.”

Noreen heard herself saying, “I have felt close to you a great many times, Routledge-san,—all wrapped up, as in a blanket, in those fat Review columns under your name.”

“’Tis true,” said Cardinegh. “We’re all flawful imitations beside you, son.”

“I was thinking how good, how ripping good, ‘Routledge-san’ sounds again,” the guest declared. “It’s like a song of home heard from a passing ship.”

Before the fire, the two correspondents unshipped once more under the guns of the Taku forts, for the listening girl, and followed the Pei-ho, that roiled drain of a bitter land, up to the Tientsin wall.

“Routledge deserted us that day—went back to his own countrymen—the American column,” said the father.

Jerry wanted the story told for Noreen, and his memories challenged and animated Routledge. “Yes, I wanted to see my boys again,” he acknowledged. “I had one good look at them in Cuba, under Lawton, who was killed a year or so later, under my eyes, on the banks of the Maraquina River in Luzon. The Philippines was a rapid, pretty service, but a service of detachments. I was eager to see how the boys worked in numbers. The American troops are nervous, you know, a little too highly evolved to be atoms. They live for a higher game in their country—commerce and inventions. Some time the nation will rise even to a better growth than that—I mean, to the spiritual evolution.

“The boys were mostly ill in China, thin-blooded from the tropical Philippines. The column was full of fever, coughing and cursing a little. They shook in the chill damps of the nights up Tientsin way.... Poor chaps, but it was good to hear them talk, before the gray old walls of Tientsin—that night when the world was hanging to the cable-ends for the flash, ‘battle.’ I rode along the huddled column and heard Texas, Indiana, Nob Hill and the Bronx, Halsted Street and Back Bay—all from the shadows on the ground, that breathed tired oaths and shivered in the drive of the fine, chilled rain.”

Jerry took up the picture excitedly: “Do you remember when the spray of sparks shook out from behind the wall?—the party in charge of the fireworks was trying the night to see if it were dark enough. Then followed a succession of booming crashes. It was as if the plain was drawn tight as a drum-head, and they dropped comets on it.... The Chinos got the Russian range about that time, and left open sores in the snaky Slav line. And I want to know, Routledge, did you hear the high-pitched scream from the Japanese when they snatched the glory of the lead?... Ah, we’ll hear from those brown dwarfs again!”

“I think so,” said Routledge. “They ran forward like hounds, snapped at each other and gave tongue like a pack closing in for the kill. Yes, I remember, and then the fire broke out behind the wall in the native city, and the sky took on the red—the red of an Indian blanket! It shone red on the faces of the boys from the States.... Miss Noreen, you listen large-eyed as Desdemona.”

“Tell me more about your boys,” she whispered.

“The trumpet screeched ‘forward,’ and the column quickened into life,” Routledge explained, “sprang like magic into formation and swept past, panting, laughing, shouting in the rain. God, pity them! They were good boys—good boys, all. I wish they had all come back with their dreams all turned true.... They didn’t know what was ahead, except they had seen the blind gray stones of the wall through the dusk at the end of the day’s march. They didn’t know what the fight was about, but they ran to break the wall, gladly, against the rock of centuries—into fire and steel and the yellow hate from all the hells. It meant nothing to them after the wall was broken. That’s the queer, ugly part of it. The man in the ranks always gets the worst end—and so pitifully often doesn’t even have a sentiment to enthuse over. He’s apt to fall in a fight against as good friends as he has anywhere on this spinning planet, and what meaning has the change of national boundaries to his mother?” Routledge was thoughtful for a moment....

“It seems hard to use grown-ups like that—men, white men, with spines at right-angles from the snake’s, and a touch of eternity in their insides somewhere. Poor devils, getting the worst of it—that’s always the way!... I watched the tail of the column swaying by—watched the last fragments blotted up in the rain and the night. Already, in a red mist on the Tientsin Wall the dance of death had begun.”

Noreen’s eyes were filled with mysteries and mistiness. As in his work, Routledge now suggested to her volumes unsaid. Her heart sensed the great wealth of the man. She felt an inner expansion. Pity was almost a passion in his face; and there was hate, too—hate for the manipulations of the rulers of the earth, which drove forward that poor column cursing and coughing in the rain. She saw it all—as if she had been at his side that night—the fire-lit field running with the reddest blood of earth. And across the world she seemed to see the faces of the maids and mothers of these boys—faces straining toward them, all white with tragedy. And more, she seemed to see for an instant the Face of the high God, averted from His images, because they were obsessed in that profane hour by the insane devils of war.... The profile of Routledge fascinated her. He had spoken lightly—as he was accustomed to speak before men to whom war was a career—but the aroused girl saw in his eyes, tightly drawn against the lamp-light, a mystic’s rebellion against the inhumanity of material power. About his eyes and graven entire upon the tropically embrowned face was a look impossible to the men her life had known.

“I was tangled up in a reserve of Russian infantry afterward,” Routledge concluded. “Jerry, you’ve heard the Russians sing?”

“Aye, at Plevna and before, son.”

“It’s a thing worth living long to hear—wild and mournful as a Siberian winter.... This reserve roared its song as it bored into Tientsin—a song of snow-bound hills and ice-bound hearts—poor muzhiks! And a British battery, tons of charging steel and brass, thundered the bass!”

So between them, the two correspondents covered the story of that one fight in the night—on the way to lift the lid from the legations at Peking. A messenger from the Witness office at this point brought certain cable copies for Cardinegh to comment upon for an editorial paragraph or two. He went into his study.

“Routledge-san, do you mind if I ask you to talk more?”

Noreen edged her chair closer like a little girl anticipating a story.

“Such listening as yours,” he laughed, “would make a Napoleon disclose his plans for the next morning’s battle. It would bring out the best of any man’s tales. Ask me anything that I know and it is yours.”

“Always when the other correspondents come here to Cheer Street—and nearly all of them call to see father—I have made them all tell me about the bravest deed—the bravest man—they have ever seen or known in all their services. I think I know them all but yours.”

“And what do you think my bravest man will be like, you collector of heroisms?”

“That’s just the point, Routledge-san. I think yours won’t be a man of merely brute courage. That’s why I am so anxious to hear.”

“In this case I am like one of the messengers to Job—I alone remain to tell you. I have never told any one, but sometimes it occurs to me to write the story of Rawder for the few who care to understand. He is my property, Miss Noreen, a humble martyr with a mighty soul like Saint Paul’s.

“He is a man born to suffer, as all the great are, who crucify themselves in various ways to lessen the sufferings of commoner men. I have never felt the same about any other man. There is something quite miraculous about our relation. Accidentally, as it appears, I have met him somewhere every second year for a double decade—the last time in Hong Kong this trip home. I surely shall see him again? Does it sound foolish to you—this idea of being destined to meet a certain some one from time to time somewhere—until the End?”

“No. I want to hear it all, just as it comes to you, with all your thoughts about it—please. Father will be busy for a half-hour in his study. I think I shall understand.”

Routledge leaned back with a cigarette, which with him was only an occasional indulgence. “As I say, I meet him every second year in my wanderings, and I am always healed from the jangle of the world and world-politics after a day with Rawder,” he resumed, watching her. “He had a strangely unattractive face as a boy—slow with that dullness which sometimes goes with the deaf, and a moist, diffused pallor that suggests epilepsy. His original home was away up in a New England village, restricted as a mortise-box in its thought and heart. The Rawders were a large, brief family—six or seven children—the whole in harrowing poverty. Certain of the littler ones were hare-lipped; all were the fright of other children. I never liked New England.... I can see yet the gray, unpainted house of the Rawders, high on a barren hill against the gray, bitter sky—rags in the broken window-panes; voices in the house that you could not forget, yet loathed to remember.... All died in a year except this boy who became my friend. All met the Reaper without pomp or heraldry, the funerals overlapping, so that the village was dazed, and the name of Rawder stands to-day for Old Mortality at his worst. So there was left only this one, a strange, wordless type of Failure in the eyes of the village.

“He was a little older than I—but a sort of slave of mine. I see it now. I had everything that good family and parental wisdom could bless a boy with, and he had nothing. That I pitied him seemed to warm his soul with gratitude. He expected so little and was willing to give so much. I wish I had understood better then.... He aspired to the ministry, but his ordination was long denied him. He was second in his class after years of study in a theological school, earned with incredible penury, but his trial sermon or something about him shocked the community. I know now that it was a wider, gentler piety. About this time I had come in from my first trip around the world. Unable to get a church, he asked for a foreign mission, the smallest mission in the loneliest, most dreadful land. His answer was a whisper through the assembly of preachers, challenging his sanity. Forgive them, as he did, Miss Noreen. I could not have fully understood the features of his tragedy, but I remember that when I parted from him that time, there was a vague desolation in my heart. I could not forget the deep, troubled eyes nor the heavy homely face, all scourged with harshness from a babe, a veritable magnet of evil fortunes.

“Back from England again, I encountered him in Boston under the banners and torches of the Salvation Army. He was thinner, deeper-eyed, richer-voiced, and all animate with love for his race. For the first time I felt the real spell of the man. It was something in his eyes, I think—something that you see in the eyes of a little child that is dying without pain.”

“Visions,” she whispered.

“Yes, that is the word. Some God-touched thing about the man in the streets of Boston. But I am making my story long, Miss Noreen. I did not know that I had all these details. It has become rather an intimate fancy of mine—this story.”

“Please tell me all. I think it is to be the story of a great victory.”

“Yes, the years to come will end it so.... Two years ago, I was riding with Tarrant’s cavalry in southern Luzon when I discovered Rawder among the troopers. It was in the midst of a blistering march of twelve hours from San Pedro Macati to Indang, without a halt for coffee or bacon. He did not see me, and I could not get to him until the column broke formation. What he must have suffered climbing Fool’s Hill as a regular cavalry recruit! There was a fight in the afternoon, and the column was badly jumbled. Every fourth man stayed behind with three horses and his own. The rest advanced, dismounted, into action. Rawder was with the fighting force. I caught a glimpse of him during the early stress of things. There was just as much iron in his jaw as in Tarrant’s, whose valor had vibrated across the Pacific. Even so, I heard a non-commissioned officer abuse him like a cur—God knows why, unless it was because Rawder did not shoot to kill. That night when we entered Indang, I could not find him. He was not in the formation next morning. Tarrant rode on without him. Apparently, I was the only one who cared. I think he was regarded much the same in the cavalry as he was by the Methodist conference and before the committee on foreign missions.

“The next week Tarrant’s column struck war—a bit of real war. I found all that archipelago-service interesting, hit-and-run campaigning, with all the human interest of bigger lines. We were caught on a sunken jungle-trail and fired upon from three sides. Small in numbers, but that fight was of the sort which makes the mess-talk of English regiments for decades, and their flag decorations. I never saw a bit of action at closer range. It was even shown to me—the peculiar way men open their mouths when struck about the belt. I heard souls speak as they passed—strange, befuddled utterances, from brains and lips running down, but full of meaning—sayings of great and memorable meaning. I saw Tarrant stand for thirty seconds under the first volleys, dismayed in the yellow glare. There is no sight for a soldier so terrible as a glimpse of havoc in the face of his chief, but he righted quickly enough. For the moment the men tried to cover themselves in the soiled short straws of their religion.

“It was a voice in the jungle that had startled Tarrant. I tell you the whole story, Miss Noreen, because of that voice in the jungle. The natives were led by a white man, who wore the khaki of an American soldier. It was this white leadership which had herded Tarrant’s column for slaughter in that hot sink of the jungle. The cry of ‘Rawder! Rawder!’ went up from the American command. Something in the voice troubled me—just for a second—with the fear that Rawder might have run mad at the last.... Listen, I think there is no hate in the world so baleful and destructive as that aroused by a deserter who leads the enemy against his own people. And this man led a black force of Malays!... The natives retired finally, and the white man with them. An Indiana soldier was dying in the sun when all was still. I heard him say wearily, ‘Gawd, if I could only have killed Rawder, hell would have been a cinch for me!’

“That’s how they hated him that day. The story of Rawder, the deserter, went around the world. It had the eternal grip of interest of a scapegoat who turns into a fire-brand. Manila sent column after column of infantry into the Indang country and down below to the Camarines, but the renegade was not to be captured just yet.

“I continued to ride with Tarrant for awhile after that. He found action when there was any; moreover, I felt that the real story of Rawder had not been written. He was big to me, and I could not believe the voice from the jungle was his. Tarrant was ordered with his troop and two others, dismounted, to Minday, a little island south of Luzon, which Nature has punished in various ways. I remember the empty, sun-blinded inlet, as our little transport stirred the sand. Not a banco or casco came out to meet us. We were in the midst of a people who put up no front for peace. There is a Spanish tradition that each male native of Minday is possessed of seven devils and the leaders ten.

“‘Best fighting men on the islands—these Mindayans,’ Tarrant told me. ‘The price of life here is to kill first, to kill all the time, snakes and men.’ That night I wandered about the deserted port in the Crusoe silence. At the edge of the town, I was ‘put out’ by the route of flashing stars—a blow on the head from behind.

“Oddly enough, Miss Noreen, the natives let me live. In the morning I awoke in a bungalow and discovered Rawder sitting in the doorway.

“His queerly-cut eyelids were drawn together by the intensity of light. Outside, the sunlight waved in pure white flame. It was the vividest time of the day, of the hottest time of the year, in the fieriest island of the globe. Minday is insidious. You can breathe and walk outside, but if you don’t get under cover when your scalp warns you with its prickling, you will likely be buried at eventide by the wild dogs of Minday. Or, possibly, if your vitality is immense, the sun will spare your life, but fry the contents of your brain-pan, which is rather worse than losing an arm.

“Rawder did not note that I was awake. He was exchanging ideas with a young Mindayan whose skin was the color of the dead wet oak leaves which floor the woods at home in the spring. It appears that this stained one had been in Luzon and learned eighteen or twenty words of English. Through these, and the signs which clasp the world, Rawder was amassing Mindayan for the purpose of—administering Methodism to the natives.

“I had been unconscious for many hours. I could not rise, and my brain seemed to be working on a little boy’s shift. For ages, it seemed, I watched the hand and lip converse, too weak to call, to ask why I lived—my skull filled with sick-room wonderings. Rawder labored on with the language, calm, gentle, homely unto pain. He was leaner, stronger, than before; untanned, but the pasty pallor was gone from his face. Years had outgrown the heritage of physical disorder. I had always noted how his thoughts formed, slowly, thoroughly, without adornment, but each thought straining his limitations to the roof of his brain. If an action were involved in any of Rawder’s thoughts, he carried out that action, as good hounds run—to the death. I saw now that wonderful look about him, that Heaven-warmed something which distinguishes a man who has great work to do in the world. Perhaps I alone could see it. They say God never sends a great soul among men without some one to recognize it. It may be that the honor is mine in the case of Rawder. Stricken as I was, I could not help noting his endurance of concentration. This, as you know, is the gift only of mystics. He was driving the monkey-mind of the Mindayan interpreter to the beds of torture with it.... He saw, at last, that my eyes were open, and came to me, kneeling down to take my hand. The native seized the moment to escape.

“It transpired I was in the real village, two miles back from the port. The Mindayans had brought me with several American soldiers who had wandered the night before over the edge of camp, to furnish a bright torture-entertainment in the town-plaza. Rawder had saved my life, but the others had gone out in unmentionable ways.

“‘I was awake when they brought you in,’ he said. ‘These people have not rallied to me very strongly yet, or I could have saved the boys who were captured.... But you—I begged for your life through the interpreter, saying that you were a great teacher and not a soldier, showing them the difference in your garments—and your face.’

“Perhaps you can picture, Miss Noreen, his struggle with the natives, while I had lain unconscious that night.... I explained to him that Tarrant’s command took him for a deserter and a renegade, whose leadership had made fiends of the Tagals. He stared out in the open for a long time without speaking. He was not whipped nor enraged, as a lesser man would be. I think I shall always remember his words:

“‘I seem to fail so many times and in so many ways before getting started in my real work, Mr. Routledge. The soldiers are not to blame. They could not understand me; and yet my purpose was so simple. I should not have told them that I meant to be a missionary in Asia when my enlistment was through. It confused them. Some time all will understand. Some time I shall do well and not fail.’

“‘But how did you get away from the command?’ I asked.

“‘I do not know,’ he answered. ‘During the fight I fell from the heat and a slight wound. I awoke alone, concealed my arms in the jungle, and tried to follow the troop. I must have mistaken the trail, because I never saw the American outfit again. Three days of night travel brought me close to the big native coast town of Triacnakato, where I fell in with a party of Mindayans, there on a trading voyage——’

“‘Tell me, Rawder,’ I interrupted, ‘why you joined the cavalry in the first place.’

“‘Asia called to me. Always, in those last days in Boston I heard Asia call me to work. I had no money to reach the Pacific nor to cross it, so I was enlisted with a regiment ordered to service here. I had heard of certain soldiers doing good work among their fellows in the old English regiments, and thought that until I was free again I might be a help in the troop. White men do not seem to listen to me, Mr. Routledge.’

“Thus he talked, Miss Noreen. Do you like him a little bit—my great man, Rawder?”

The girl regarded him hesitatingly for a moment, as if to reply was not easy. “I like him so well,” she answered at last, “that I wish it were my destiny to meet him every little while up the years, as you do. Tell me all.”

“And so he had started in to teach the words of John Wesley, and others, to these Mindayans whom Spain had left to themselves on account of their ferocity. God knows why the Mindayans gave him a Messiah’s chance to learn their language and explain his message, but they let him live. And now I must tell you about another moment or two of battle. There has been far too much war already for your frightened eyes, but this is short and about my bravest man.

“As we talked, there was a sharp crack of a Krag carbine. I could not rise, but crawled to the doorway. The Mindayans had formed in the plaza for action. Tarrant was coming with his squadron of cavalry to settle for the murders of the night before, and the naked Mindayans essayed to meet him in the open—as the Tagals of Luzon had never dared to do. It was all on in a moment. Out of the jungle came the boys from the States—queer, quick lines, blowing their bubbles of white smoke, dropping down to fire and running forward in skirmish, answering the trumpet-talk as running metal answers to the grooves of a mold. In the blazing open—in a light so intense that it was pain to look through it—the forces met. Mindayans, with guns dating from Magellan; the Americans with their swift, animate Krags; a squadron of white men, three skeleton troops picked from forty States, stacked against a thousand-odd glistening blacks all enthused to die. Hell’s forbidden chambers were emptied that hour, Miss Noreen. I hated war then—but have hated it since far more.

“They met—before my eyes they met—and the dead flew out of the lines like chaff, and were trampled like chaff by the toilers. Hand-to-hand at last; shiny black of flesh against the dull green-brown of khaki; the jungle alive with reserves exchanging poisoned salads of metal; science against primal lust; seasoned courage against fanaticism; yellow sky above, yellow sand beneath; blood-letting between, and the eternal jungle on every hand. It was a battle to haunt and debase a watcher’s brain.

“I did not know Tarrant’s prowess until that day. One man might falter in his command, but the lines were rigid as steel. His trumpeter interpreted every movement of the commander’s lips. I pawed the matting of the hut, but could not lift the anchorage of my hips. Rawder stood above me, watching, the lines of his sweating face weaving with sorrow. The thing was growing upon me—what the end of the fight would mean to him—but his sad face was clean of all fear. Years ago, when I was a boy and loved physical courage, I should have worshipped that clean look of his. Tears in his eyes for the men who had brutalized him!...

“There is always a last minute to a fight, Miss Noreen,—when each force puts forth its final flicker of courage, and the lesser zeal is killed. The last drain of gameness wins the battle, when strength and strategy are gone. It wins for spiders and boys and armies. Tarrant had it.... When it was all over, the men of Rawder’s troop saw him in the doorway and rushed forward.

“‘Mr. Routledge,’ he said softly, ‘they are coming for me. The boys have spoiled my mission here.’

“His hand touched my forehead. The ghastly illness left me.... I don’t believe in telling a lady a story which one would refrain from telling his fellow war-scribes, Miss Noreen, but believe me, you have impelled it with perfect listening——”

“His hand touched your forehead,” she repeated.

“Yes, and there was something about the touch that a dealer in war-stuff could not very well enlarge upon in print. At one moment I was but the shell of a man—and the next I could rise.

“Rawder’s old troop was running forward to finish him—Tarrant in the lead. I tried to make them hear—these white men, as they rushed in, full of the hang-over hell of a fight. But they would not hear me. The men saw only the crown of a great day—to kill the deserter who had led the Tagals against them in Luzon—Rawder, the renegade, whom they believed stood also behind the deaths of last night and this day. To kill him after whipping the Mindayans would call down the glory of the Pantheon.... Rawder stepped back, smiling, empty of hand. I managed to trip Tarrant and yell the story in his ears as he fell. A top-sergeant went by me with a native-knife.... The fluids were running from the man who had saved me, before Tarrant or I could intervene, but the rest were stopped.

“Hours afterward, in the night, he regained consciousness. At least, consciousness wavered in his eyes, and I bent to hear, ‘I am not yet to die.’...

“And it was true, Miss Noreen, in spite of a fearful wound—but that is all healed.... Tarrant was relieved from Minday. Back in Manila, we learned that the real renegade of lower Luzon had been captured alive by volunteer infantry. His name is Devlin, and he is since notorious in Luzon story. Through Tarrant, whom I saturated with the substance of Rawder’s character, my bravest man was discharged for disability.... A month ago, I left him on the Hong Kong water-front. He had found night-work among the sailors—saving them from the human vultures who prey upon poor Jack-ashore-with-money-in-his-pocket—hard, evil-judged work, but the only kind that Rawder knows so far. Many a drugged or drunken sailor has awakened on board his own ship with a tithe of his earnings and a whole skin left, to wonder vaguely in after voyages who was his strange-voiced, gentle-handed protector—the last he remembered in Hong Kong.... Rawder told me I should find him in India next—said that he was called to the heart of India by a dream. He is to find his teacher.... Is it beyond belief to you, Miss Noreen, that there is a great meaning in this Indian shadow which has fallen upon my bravest man? I have known Hindus who could look beyond the flesh of men—despised by their own race—and discover souls of stirring evolution and inspiring purity.”

Jerry Cardinegh entered. Noreen caught her breath quickly, as if suddenly awakened from a dream.

“I feel that some time I shall see your bravest man, Routledge-san,” she whispered.

FIRST CHAPTER
MOTHER INDIA IS SAID TO BE QUIVERING WITH HATRED FOR HER WHITE CHILD, THE BRITISH FOUNDLING

The dusk was stretching out over the windy hills. There had been a skirmish that day in upper India. Two British columns which had campaigned for months apart telescoped with frightful sounds of gladness. Her Majesty’s foot-soldiers, already tightly knotted about their supper-fires, hooted the cavalrymen who were still struggling with halter-shanks, picket-lines, and mounts that pounded the turf and nickered sky-high for the feed-wagons to come in. Every puff of wind bore a new smell—coffee, camels, leather, gun-reek, cigarettes, saddle-blankets, and nameless others. To-morrow there would be a mile square of hill-pasture so tainted by man and beast that a native-bullock would starve before cropping there until the season of torrents soaked it sweet again.

The civilian correspondents grouped together for mess. There was Bingley of the Thames, respected but not loved, and rather better known as the “Horse-killer”—a young man of Napoleonic ambition and Cowperish gloom. There was Finacune of the Word, who made a florid romance of war-stuff, garnished his battle-fields with palms and ancient temples, and would no more forget his moonlight than the estimate of the number slain. Finacune made a red-blooded wooer out of the British army, and a brown, full-breasted she-devil out of the enemy. His story of the campaign was a courtship of these two, and it read like “A Passion in the Desert,” for which the Word paid him well and loved him mightily. Finacune had another inimitable peculiarity. He possessed one of those slight, natty figures which even civilized clothes cannot spoil; and he could emerge from thirty days in the field, dapper and sartorially fit as from a morning’s fox-hunt.

Then there were Feeney and Trollope and Talliaferro, who carry trays and announce carriages in this narrative, though high priests of the press and Londoners of mark.

The point of the gathering was old Jerry Cardinegh, of the Witness, by profession dean of the cult of the British word-painters of war, but a Tyrone patriot, bone and brain and passion. Just now, old Jerry was taking a dry smoke, two ounces of Scotch, commanding his servants to beat a bull-cheek into tenderloin, and adorning the part of master of ceremonies. Cardinegh wore easily a triple fame: first, and always first, for the quality of his work; second, for having seen more of war (twenty-seven campaigns since he messed with the Chinese Gordon, to this night in Bhurpal) than any other man on the planet; and third for being the father of Noreen Cardinegh, absolutely the loveliest young woman manifesting at the present time in London. The old man’s tenderness of heart for Ireland and for all that Ireland had done and failed, was known in part among the scribes and Pharisees. It had been an endless matter of humor among his compatriots. Just now Finacune remembered the stock question and launched it:

“Jerry, if England and Ireland went to war, which would be your home-office—London Witness or Dublin Contemporary?”

Cardinegh had never answered twice the same. “Neither,” he declared lightly now, extracting a can of kippered herring from Finacune’s saddle-bags, “but a captain’s tent, during such times as I wasn’t leading the Irish to glory. Have you an opener? I need a relish to cut this whiskey.”

“The old war-horse isn’t always humorous,” remarked Bingley, who was sitting apart. Bingley always sat apart, lest somebody should see his black book of notes or borrow his provisions.

Trollope turned to Finacune with a whisper. “The dean is looking ill. Have you noticed?”

Finacune nodded.

“It would be a heller if this little affair in the hills should prove the old man’s last campaign,” Trollope drawled softly.

Another figure emerged from the dusk, and Jerry Cardinegh leaped with a roar into the arms of an agile giant in a great frieze coat. For a moment it appeared as if the two were in deadly conflict. Pup-tents were unpinned, supper-kits scattered, native servants crawled off as from a duel of man-eaters, and the saintly camels lifted their heads in fresh dismay. It was a good, a relishable greeting, and the proper way for men who love each other to meet after prolonged absence.

“Arise, my children, and kow-tow to Routledge, your spiritual father!” Cardinegh commanded at last.

All but Bingley obeyed.

“Get up, you young scut,” Jerry called ominously, “or go feed with the camels.”

“I haven’t the honor of knowing the gentleman,” Bingley said without rising.

“Better read your history some more,” the dean observed, turning his back upon the young lion of the Thames. “Gentlemen,” he resumed with an oratorical pause, “behold the man whom the Gods formed for a war-correspondent—or a spy, as you like—and they tempered him in hell’s fire and holy water—the Gods. Gentlemen, this is Routledge, who knows India better than any of you know London, and he’s an American. This is Routledge, who rides alone, who stays afield in times of peace promoting wars for us—and more wars. I say, Routledge, when were you home last?”

“Sit down, you ‘damaged archangel,’” Routledge said laughingly. “I sat before your fireside in Cheer Street, London, little more than a year ago.”

Hearing the name of the newcomer, the “Horse-killer” was not slow to gain his feet. He came forward hastily, the sullenness gone from his face, giving place to a mixture of envy and admiration. He stared long and intently at the gaunt profile of Routledge. Finacune saw the look and interpreted it for his own pleasure in these words: “And so you are Routledge, the, just now, so-called greatest of all. Well, I am Bingley of the Thames. I have surpassed all the others in this campaign, and some time I shall measure wit and grit with you. Meanwhile, you are worth cultivating.” And truly enough the first words of the “Horse-killer” as he extended his hand were:

“I am Bingley of the Thames, Mr. Routledge.”

“I have both seen and heard of your work, and admired it, Mr. Bingley,” Routledge responded cordially. “It is good to know you.”

“And I have heard of you, too,” Bingley replied, to the delight of the others.

Routledge embraced several old friends, but to most he was known less in person than by reputation. He had a tendency to laugh at the Powers in the act of making war, a tendency to make the world see that war was a hang-over from the days when men ate their flesh hot from the kill, not from the fire. Veiled under all his work, and often expressed openly in a stinging line, was his conviction that war was a ghastly imposition upon the men in the ranks. This was considered by the rest as a mere mental dissipation of a truly great worker.

A certain aloofness added to the mystery and enchantment of the man. In the field, he would attach himself to some far-ranging column out for dirty work, choosing his command from an intimate knowledge of the leader and the men; to which was added a conception of India, her topography, strategies, fighters, and her methods of thought and action which could hardly be paralleled—outside of the secret service—in any British mind.

The Review invariably kept a second man at the heart of things to cover the routine, so that Routledge could follow his inclinations for hard-riding and bring in his wondrous tales of far chances, night attacks, the enemy at first hand, the faces and valor of the few who hearkened to the swish of the Reaper, the scream from inert flesh as the spirit flees away—the humor, the horror, the hell of the clash.

It is an axiom of the craft that in a platoon fighting for its life there is all the grip of human interest that appals in the collision of fifty-mile battle-fronts; and Routledge played the lesser game to the seeds. It was said of him that he could crawl into the soldier’s brain and watch the machinery falter in full blast and break down. Always you felt, as you read him, that he had a great pity for the ranker, and a great hate for the system that used him.

Where the Terrible was involved, there was a jolting energy in the descriptive powers of Routledge. Even the type which bore his messages from the field to the streets of London seemed sometimes vivid, crackling characters snapped hot from the reeking centres of war. He could make his first lines stand out in the thick Review columns like a desert sunset.

At the end of a campaign, instead of seeking the seductions of hero-worshipping London, Routledge would drift, possibly disguised, into some Indian hot-bed, there to study language, occultism, Borgian poisons, or Cleopatran perfumes. Tales of his ways and his work took the place of his presence at home in times of peace. Some traveller coming in from afar would relate how Routledge had smiled through a six-day water-famine; how Routledge had missed the native knives which find so often the source of human fountains in the dark. It was whispered, and accredited, that the Brahmins called him One; that they remembered him as great and distinguished and of sacerdotal caste in some former incarnation, and were loyal still. This is an honor so great that there are not five score men in all the occident who adequately can appreciate it. Mother India is sensitive to the warming currents of a great man, even though he be a derelict in the world.

Routledge had made the English-speaking world utter his name familiarly and to look for the same in public prints. For this reason, Finacune, with his typewriter on his lap, an American poncho spread upon the turf beneath him, his back against a stone, and a lantern at his elbow, rained a column upon his machine. Finishing the work with a half-smile, he hooted aloud:

“Oh, Routledge—see what comes o’ riding alone! In a month or six weeks, God loving the mails, the Word will publish: ‘The civilian mess was joined to-night by that young roving planet, Cosmo Routledge, who in present and former campaigns has driven straight to the source of exclusive information and pulled the hole in after him.’ Then, for a stick or two, I have discussed the great frieze coat,” Finacune added whimsically, “described the prophet’s brow, the slender hands of swift eloquence, and the sad, ineffable eyes of Routledge, born of America, a correspondent for the British, a citizen of the world, at home in India, and mystic of the wars.”

“Just add,” Cardinegh remarked meltingly, “that his heart beats for Ireland.”

That was a marvellous night. Big natures throbbed in rhythm. Whiskey as it sometimes will—the devil of it—brought out the brave and true and tender of human speech. Routledge told a bit of the story of the great frieze coat.... They were moments of trampling violence in the narrative; instants of torrid romance—to which the wearer had been a witness or a listener....

“Ah, they made cloth in those days,” old Jerry sighed. “Would you look under the collar of it for the name of the old Belfast maker?”

“It’s there, sure enough,” said Routledge, “as Tyrone is water-marked in the great Cardinegh scroll.”

Jerry did not answer for a moment. His face looked singularly white in the dark.

“The dean went back to Ireland just before we came out here this trip,” growled old Feeney, of the Pan-Anglo News Service. “It seems he couldn’t start an insurrection there, so he rushed back to the Witness office and haunted the cable-editor’s room until the Bhurpalese took pity on him and began shooting at Tommies.”

Hours passed with talk and laughter, liquor and song. It was strictly a night session of the inner section of war-painters; and in spirit the high priests of elder service trooped back to listen among the low-hanging Indian stars.... It was knee-deep in the morning hours when Routledge and Cardinegh drew apart at last. They walked out between the snoring lines, whispering:

“Jerry, what has this narrow-gauge campaign done to you? Fever or famine? You look drawn and blown and bleached.”

“I am going into the lair after this,” Cardinegh said. “The boys won’t believe it, but this is absolutely my last fling at the field. I am going home to Noreen, son, and London and the Witness may go to hell.”

There was unnatural venom in the old man’s words. His tightened hands stirred restlessly; his eyes, seen in the flare of a match as he lit a cigarette, were unquiet, alive with some torture of tension. Routledge gripped the vehement arm.

“You are oxidizing a bit too much tissue, old war-horse,” he said quietly. “You’ll want to go into the meadows for a while when you get back—but you won’t stay there. This stuff—the smell of it, as now in the dawn-dew, and the muttering formations presently”—Routledge waved his arm over the bivouac—“things like this won’t let you run long in the pasture. When the war-headings begin to grow on the front pages of the Witness, and the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand grows and blackens into a mailed fist gripping a dagger—why, you’ll be at the lane-fence nickering for harness.”

“Routledge, don’t go over all that rot again,” said the old man. “It isn’t that I’m out of strength, but I’m too full of hate to go on. I’ve always hated this smug English people, and I’m not mellowing with years. I feel it hotter and hotter—sometimes I feel it like a running incandescence inside. It leaves my brain charred and noxious—that’s the way it seems to me.... Yet, I have been one of England’s first aggrandizers. I have rejoiced in print at her victories. I have cheered with the low-browed mob, ‘God save the Queen!’ I have borne the brunt of her wars—the son of my father!”

Routledge was disturbed, but he chuckled softly. “One would think you were still a fire-brand of the Fenians, Jerry.”

“I know to whom I am talking,” was whispered queerly. “The Fenians are not dead yet—not all the Fenians.”

“When did you hear from Miss Noreen last?”

“Oh, it’s a fortnight. We ought to get mail at Madirabad.... I must write. My God, I must write!... Don’t mind me if I ramble a bit, Routledge. I drank rather plenty to welcome you back. Whiskey sizzles along my spine rather faster than once upon a time.... And you haven’t seen Noreen for——?”

“For over a year,” Routledge said.

“And you haven’t heard that they call her the most beautiful woman in London?”

“Yes, Jerry. I heard it from General Falconer at Bombay; from the Sewards in Simla; from Bleakley, who came back to Hong Kong after a year’s leave with a made-over liver and a child-wife. But then I knew it, Jerry—yes, I knew it.”

“But she burst into bloom astonishingly after you left us. She has never forgotten you, Routledge.... She is like the Irish girl who gave her to me.”

“Come on to bed, Jerry. We drive like carrion-birds across the world wherever there is blood spilt upon the ground. We’re not fit for a woman to remember.”

“The woman who gave Noreen to me—could remember and wait, son!... Ah, God, the red hells I have passed through!”

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

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

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

“Yes, and it won’t be long.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “Blue Boar” nodded.

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

They drank standing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talliaferro talked so seldom that he was well listened to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Routledge-san!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Both laughed. It seemed almost too joyous to Routledge.

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

“Less than India?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Miss Noreen——”

“I’d rather be Noreen to you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And his master?”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nor have I listened so raptly, Noreen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Routledge sat in his old leathern chair and looked back a little sorrowfully upon the boy of twelve years ago, all clean from the dust of the world’s trails, uncalloused by war, sensitive to the spirit, stirring in the chrysalis of flesh, all lit with star-stuff!... If only he had known Noreen Cardinegh then!... He could look deeply within. He did not love the manner of man he saw in himself—a wanderer striding over the East; sitting down often for a year, in the places white men choose most ardently to avoid, and devoting himself (who dared look back wistfully now upon those beginnings of spiritual life) to the reddest ructions of Matter—war, red war.

He shook his head bitterly, rose, and went to the window, looking down upon thronging Bookstalls with unseeing eyes. Out of it all came this at last:

“No, Routledge-san, you have given your reddest blood and whitest fire to old Mother Asia. Would it be fair and clean of you to yoke the remnant—and such an earthy remnant—with the lofty purity of Noreen Cardinegh?”

Long he stood there in the depths of thinking, until startled by the softly uttered name:

“Routledge-san.”

He was sure his own lips had not formed the syllables. He wondered if it had winged across the city from Cheer Street.... His glance fell to the road. Below, and a little to the right he perceived the White Mustache. Routledge seized his hat and descended quickly, but the stranger was gone. For a half-hour he tried to trap the other into a meeting, but in vain. It was after mid-day and raining. He had intended to go to the Review office, but the old leathern chair and the friendly lodging lured him back. To-morrow would do for the Review. To-night, the Army and Navy reception. Everybody he knew would be there.... She had asked him to come to Cheer Street, but he could not bring himself to break in upon old Jerry’s home-coming. He stirred the fire and fell to musing again in the glow.

FIFTH CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STEPS OUT SPIRITEDLY IN THE FOG TO FIND HIS FRIENDS AND ENCOUNTERS THE HATE OF LONDON

Routledge left his lodgings a little before nine that night, and breasted the February fog in his great frieze coat. He was minded to hail a cab when he wearied of walking, but the time and distance were put behind with a glow and a gradually quickening pace. It was a good four miles from Bookstalls to Trafalgar Square and the Armory where the Army and Navy reception was held. He skirted Hyde Park, now in the zenith of its season, and glimpsed Piccadilly again. Its full electric bloom was a ghastly sheen in the fog. London, the old and blackened brick Mammoth, was sweet to him, even now vaporing in her night-sweat.... He had thought of these shops, clubs, lights, smells, and monuments in the long, heaven-clear Indian nights. Afar in the Himalayas, where the old Earth-mother strains hungrily toward the stars (as does the soul of man who broods in those austere heights), he had thought hard upon these stirring pavements and yearned for them in red moments of memory. In the rice-lands of Rangoon; in the cotton country Bombayward; in the bazaars of Lahore; overlooking the plains from Simla; in the under-world of Calcutta, and the house-tops of Benares—he had mapped these streets in reflection and colored certain land-marks with desire.